The
Afghan Triangle: Kashmir, India, Pakistan
Graham
Usher
(Graham
Usher is a writer and journalist based in Pakistan
and a contributing editor of Middle
East Report.)
The
Association of Parents of Disappeared
Persons protesting in Srinagar, Indian-administered
Kashmir. (Faheem Qadri) |
The
Pakistani army’s operation in the Swat Valley
in northwest Pakistan is the most sustained in
five years of selective counterinsurgency against
the local Taliban. The toll already is immense:
1.9 million internally displaced, including
tens of thousands housed in tents on parched
plains; 15,000 soldiers battling 5,000 guerrillas;
and more than a thousand dead, mainly militants
according to available counts but also soldiers
and of course civilians.
The
war has not been confined to Swat. In revenge
for losses there, the Pakistan Taliban has unleashed
a torrent of attacks in Peshawar, Lahore, Islamabad
and other cities, killing scores. “You know it’s
serious this time: the scale of the army’s campaign
confirms it. You fear the war is at your door,”
said Sajjad Ali from Mardan, a city adjacent
to Swat.
The
war is the fruit of a failed peace process, denounced
by the United States as an “abdication” that
had allowed the Taliban to within 60 miles of
Islamabad. In February, the provincial government
had proffered a localized form of Islamic law
in Swat in return for the Taliban disarming and
recognizing “the writ of the state.” The insurgents
observed their commitments only in the breach,
which included the slaughter of their opponents.
In May the army “reinvaded” Swat.
Pakistanis
historically have been hostile to campaigns against
the Taliban, casting them as “America’s war.”
But not this time: The army, the civilian government
and most Pakistanis, including the largest opposition
party, support the Swat offensive. “The atrocities
of the Swat Taliban galvanized public opinion,”
says Maleeha Lodhi, a former ambassador to the
US. “It produced a coincidence of military resolve,
political consensus and strong public support.
And because the US was not seen as calling the
shots in any pronounced way, this helped the
government pursue a very aggressive policy.”
The
public support manifests as a spontaneous, generous
solidarity. In cities like Mardan, Peshawar and
Swabi, people have literally opened their homes
to the refugees. In vast tent cities near the
banks of the Indus, volunteers deliver food,
clothes, utensils and shelter. The relief work,
involving all parts of Pakistani civil society,
is led by the Islamic charities.
One
such charity is Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD). Last December
the Pakistani government banned JuD and arrested
its amir, Hafiz Saeed, following the JuD’s designation
as a terrorist group by the United Nations. Saeed
founded Lashkar-e-Tayaba (LeT), the Pakistani
jihadi group that India alleges was behind the
attack in Mumbai in November 2008. In Pakistan,
it is widely assumed that JuD and LeT are one
and the same organization. On June 2, the Lahore
High Court ordered Saeed’s release on the grounds
that the state had supplied “insufficient” evidence
to warrant his detention. India responded by
saying that the decision raised “serious doubts
over Pakistan’s sincerity in acting with determination
against terrorist groups and individuals operating
from its territory.” India has since conditioned
any return to peace negotiations with Pakistan
on the latter taking action against LeT and other
jihadi groups.
For
the Obama administration—which has cast Taliban
and al-Qaeda “sanctuaries” in Pakistani tribal
areas bordering Afghanistan as the “single greatest
threat” to America—the enigma is whether Pakistan’s
military establishment is friend or foe in America’s
war against Islamic militancy. “I’ve rarely seen
in my years in Washington an issue so hotly disputed
internally by experts and intelligence officials,”
ceded Richard Holbrooke, President Obama’s point
man for “Af-Pak,” when asked that question in
February.
The
dispute in Washington about how to perceive the
Pakistani army runs along two colliding tracks.
Track one says the army is a friend. Even before
Swat, the Pakistani army had lost 1,000 men to
Taliban and al-Qaeda guerillas in the tribal
areas. Pakistan’s premier military intelligence
agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI),
had “rendered” more than 600 al-Qaeda suspects
into CIA hands, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed,
alleged mastermind behind the September 11, 2001
attacks. Currently the Pakistani army is fighting
the Taliban not only in Swat but also the tribal
areas of Bajaur, Orakzai, Mohmand, Khyber and
South Waziristan.
Kashmiri
children watching cricket near an excavation
site in Budgam, near Srinagar, Indian-administered
Kashmir. (Faheem Qadri) |
Track
two says the army-ISI combination is a foe. It
allows Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar and
his Shura council free run in Pakistan’s Balochistan
province from where they direct the insurgency
in Afghanistan. It shelters Afghan Taliban commanders
like Jalaluddin and Sirjuddin Haqqani in North
Waziristan. And it supplies money, arms and training
to jihadi groups fighting the Indian army in
Indian-occupied Kashmir, including the “banned”
LeT.
The
two tracks collide because both, in part, are
true. The army is combating the Pakistan Taliban
and its jihadi allies in Swat and elsewhere,
seeing their spread as a danger to Pakistan’s
integrity as a state. One hundred and twenty
thousand soldiers have been mobilized to fight
them. But 250,000 remain rooted on the eastern
border facing the Indian army, and primed by
organizational formation, weaponry, ideology
and ethos to a vision that defines India, not
the Taliban or al-Qaeda, as the “strategic enemy.”
That vision must change if Pakistan is to defeat
the enemy at home.
Jockeying
for Kashmir
For
the last 61 years the fight has been fought,
mostly, in and for Indian-occupied Kashmir (IoK):
the territory Delhi and Islamabad have contested
since the 1947 partition cleaved them into two
states—and Kashmir into “Pakistani” and “Indian”
parts. Sometimes (1947, 1965, 1971, 1999) the
war has been hot. More often it has been waged
via Pakistani proxies against a standing Indian
military. Since 1989, it has been channeled through
a low-intensity, Pakistan-backed separatist-Islamist
insurgency that has killed 50,000 people and
incurred an Indian military occupation three
times the size of America’s in Iraq and three
times as lethal.
Of
all the jihadi groups the ISI nurtured in IoK,
the LeT was the deadliest, but there were others.
Their collective purpose was to “bleed India”
until Delhi surrendered IoK to Islamabad. Pre-9/11,
the collaboration was overt. LeT and other jihadi
groups recruited fighters throughout Pakistan,
but particularly from southern Punjab. They launched
hundreds of guerilla attacks on Indian soldiers
and civilians and fought alongside the Pakistani
army in the 1999 invasion of Kargil, the last
time the two armies went head to head inside
Indian Kashmir.
In
December 2001, India charged LeT with attacking
its parliament in Delhi, bringing the two countries
to the brink of nuclear war. Under American pressure,
General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s then-military
dictator, banned the LeT and other jihadi groups.
Moves against the militants in 2002 seemed like
bluffs at the time. In fact, they were the beginning
of a slow change. Steered by Washington, Islamabad
and Delhi went from nuclear brinkmanship to a
truce across the armistice line in Kashmir. In
2004, Musharraf began a peace process or “composite
dialogue” with India predicated on the oath “not
to permit any territory under Pakistan’s control
to be used to support terrorism in any manner.”
What had commenced as a feint by Pakistan’s military
establishment was hardening into policy.
The
ISI demobilized thousands of jihadi fighters
in Pakistani-occupied Kashmir (PoK). Some of
their camps were moved inland, including, ironically,
to the Swat Valley. Six army divisions (about
80,000 to 100,000 men) were repositioned from
the eastern border with India to the western
border with Afghanistan, where the army was becoming
embroiled in its first clashes with the Pakistan
Taliban. Under the command of General Ashfaq
Kayani (now army chief of staff), the ISI was
reformed, with the more Indo-phobic and jihadi
officers purged. Guerilla infiltration into IoK
slowed to a trickle.
Some
of the army’s senior officers believed that because
both Pakistan and India had become nuclear powers,
hot war was no longer an option. More importantly,
many generals were convinced that the army would
not be able to preserve its preeminent position
in the Pakistani state or defend its enormous
corporate interests in the economy without sustained
growth which would require peace with India.
Musharraf was the leading proponent of this new
thinking. In 2004, he authorized Khurshid Kasuri,
the civilian foreign minister at the time, to
open “back-channel” negotiations with India on
a possible settlement for Kashmir, one that would
in essence give Islamabad an honorable exit from
what had become an unwinnable war.
Over
the next three years a deal took shape: Demilitarization
would neutralize the two Kashmirs, open borders
would unite them, and a form of self-government
or autonomy would partly satisfy the Kashmiri
aspiration to self-determination. The army agreed
to the nucleus of this draft agreement with the
proviso that the Kashmiris vote on it. “This
was to allow the army to give up historic positions
without appearing to,” said Hasan Rizvi Ashkari,
a military historian.
The
back channel ran aground in the storm that wrecked
Musharraf after his illegal sacking of Chief
Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry in March 2007. Many
fear that the attacks in Mumbai may have sunk
prospects for a Kashmir agreement forever. But
the progress of the discussions had suggested
that the military was open to a resolution and
had taken steps in that direction. “When the
Kashmir camps were initially dispersed, the boys
[fighters] were told that it was just a temporary
measure because of 9/11,” a senior jihadi leader
told the BBC in 2008. “Then the arrests and disappearances
started. The boys realized fundamental changes
were underway and quietly slipped away beyond
the control of the Pakistani authorities.” This
is what happened in the Swat Valley where jihadi
cells joined forces and lent enormous firepower
to local Islamist groups demanding shari‘a law.
The pattern was repeated in the southern Punjab
and Islamabad.
Police
paramilitaries in downtown Srinagar during
a city shutdown called by separatists.
(Liz Harris) |
Deprived
of support from their old (state) godfathers,
the “youngest and most radicalized members” were
drawn to new groups, says historian Ahmed Rashid.
They “joined up with al-Qaeda and the Pakistan
and Afghan Taliban in the tribal areas on the
border with Afghanistan. They embraced the global
jihad to fight US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq,
and later attacked the Pakistan government.”
Rashid believes this al-Qaeda, Taliban and jihadi
nexus is the motor driving much of the violence
that has rocked Pakistan, Afghanistan and India
in recent years, including Mumbai, the assassination
of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in December
2007, and the recent wave of attacks in Pakistani
cities.
In
other words, after 2004 many LeT and other jihadi
cadres ceased focusing their militancy exclusively
on India or Kashmir. They fragmented and morphed
into multiple cells with ties to al-Qaeda and
other Pakistani Sunni sectarian groups, sometimes
acting in alliance, sometimes autonomously, but
together having an outreach that included Afghanistan,
Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Kashmir, Iraq, Europe
and beyond. The ISI was loath to cut ties with
groups over which it did maintain some sway,
like the old LeT-JuD nexus. Nor was the ISI inclined
to abandon entirely the proxy war strategy in
IoK before a settlement had been reached. “If
we did that, Kashmir would go cold and India
would bury it forever,” said a senior army general
in 2005.
IoK
has warmed. In 2008 there were 41 militant infractions
across the armistice line, double the 2007 total.
The upward curve has continued in 2009, with
several skirmishes between the two armies. For
the first time since 2004, LeT cadres have publicly
surfaced in the southern Punjab, proselytizing
for jihad. Seminaries and schools are acting
as recruiting centers, with the traffic in students
moving in both directions between the Punjab
and the tribal areas. Funerals in both provinces
eulogize “martyrs” in Kashmir and Afghanistan.
None
of this could happen without the knowledge of
the ISI. Militant activity increased in the twilight
between the end of Musharraf’s military rule
and Pakistan’s new civilian government. Yet the
new militancy seems to have little to do with
the mass demonstrations for independence that
shook IoK in the summer of 2008, or with insurgent
violence there, which remains low. It has more
to do with Afghanistan or, more precisely, with
India in Afghanistan.
India’s
Regional Dominance
Pakistan
has been worried by India’s widening footprint
in Afghanistan since the Bonn conference in November
2001, where Afghan factions came together to
determine their country’s post-Taliban future.
The Afghan Taliban was purged from any interim
government headed by Hamid Karzai, and replaced
by forces loyal to the Northern Alliance (NA).
The NA had opposed the Taliban regime before
9/11 and fought with US troops to topple it.
India, Iran and Russia were its main sponsors;
Pakistan and Saudi Arabia supported the Taliban.
Neither the Taliban nor Islamabad was invited
to Bonn. “This was our original sin,” said Lakdar
Brahimi, the UN’s envoy in Afghanistan, who chaired
the conference.
India
remains one of Karzai’s few champions. And Afghanistan
is seen to be very much within Delhi’s sphere
of regional influence. India has four consulates
and has given the Afghan government $1.2 billion
in aid: a huge investment for a country that
is 99 percent Muslim and with which India
shares no border. Delhi has built the new national
parliament in Kabul, runs the Afghan electricity
and satellite systems and has helped train its
army and intelligence forces, the latter staffed
by many ex-NA commanders.
India’s
most ambitious Afghan project is a new highway,
routed across the western border to the Iranian
port of Chabahar, that circumvents landlocked
Afghanistan’s need to use Pakistani ports to
the Gulf; Islamabad deems these trade and energy
corridors vital to its economic future. For the
Pakistan army, the highway’s importance is clear:
India seeks to consolidate an alliance with Iran
in western Afghanistan to counter Pakistan’s
influence in eastern Afghanistan. This is a continuation
of the pre-9/11 war in a post-9/11 infrastructure,
with India, Iran and the Karzai government on
the one side, and Pakistan and the Afghan Taliban
on the other. “The army feels under siege,” says
Ayesha Siddiqa, a military analyst.
In
2004, the Bush administration tilted US South
Asia policy toward Delhi, lured by the size of
India’s markets and its potential role as a strategic
“counterweight” to China, Pakistan’s closest
regional ally. In 2008, the US signed an agreement
that allows India to buy civilian atomic technology,
including nuclear fuel, from American firms,
even though Delhi is not a signatory to the non-proliferation
treaty. Pakistan was granted no such privilege;
on the contrary, it is denounced as a rogue for
developing the bomb by stealth and for the proliferation
activities of its former top nuclear scientist,
A. Q. Khan. Some in Congress want aid to Pakistan
tied to US access to Khan for questioning.
For
all the fabled “chemistry” between Bush and Musharraf,
since 9/11 Washington has treated Islamabad as
a gun for hire, providing certain weaponry and
around $2 billion a year in exchange for
securing supply lines for US and NATO forces
in Afghanistan and for fighting the Taliban and
al-Qaeda in the tribal areas. By cooperating
in these ways, the army may have hoped that its
interests would be taken into account in the
post-invasion reconstruction. Yet unlike Iran
or India—and despite the services or sacrifices
rendered—Islamabad was given no say in the formation
of the Afghan government or in its nascent military
forces. This strengthened Pakistani perceptions
that Musharraf and his army were mercenaries
fighting “America’s war.” The Taliban, by contrast,
were deemed Afghan or at least Pashtun nationalists
resisting a foreign, colonial and anti-Muslim
occupation.
These
realities help explain the army’s selective counterinsurgency
in the tribal areas. In Bajaur, Mahmond and to
a lesser extent South Waziristan, the army has
often been ruthless in campaigns against the
Pakistan Taliban. This is partly revenge for
the killing of Pakistani soldiers. But there
is also the perception (and, the army insists,
evidence) that “Pakistan’s enemies” are fomenting
the militancy. A commander in Bajaur says many
of those captured or killed by the army are Afghans,
including Tajiks or Uzbeks, while the tribal
areas are almost exclusively Pashtun. The inference
is obvious. Some “insurgents” are “agents” working
for Afghan intelligence and/or India.
In
North Waziristan, on the other hand, the preferred
policy is to negotiate ceasefires with tribal
militants who openly provide fighters and arms
to Afghan Taliban commanders like the Haqqanis.
Unlike the Pakistan Taliban, these tribal militants
do not attack the Pakistani army other than to
avenge US drone attacks. “They’re our people;
they’re not our enemies,” says an ISI officer.
A
Pakistani analyst—who declined attribution—says
these dual policies explain the enigma of the
Pakistan army. It will act against those who
threaten the state, such as the Taliban in Swat
and al-Qaeda-linked militants elsewhere. But
it will not act against those who, like the Afghan
Taliban, seek only a haven from which to fight
American and NATO troops in Afghanistan. In fact,
“The ISI has retained its links to the Afghan
Taliban because it wants to use them as a bargaining
chip in Afghanistan,” says the analyst. “The
Pakistan army wants to have a bigger say in whatever
new regional dispensation America is planning.
The view within the army and ISI is if the Afghan
Taliban is abandoned, this would strengthen the
Afghan government, as well as India in Afghanistan,
at Pakistan’s expense.”
A
Fork in the Road
Prior
to his election, Barack Obama was clear on the
link between peace in Kashmir and war in Afghanistan.
“If Pakistan can look towards to the east with
confidence, it will be less likely to believe
its interests are best advanced through cooperation
with the Taliban,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs in
2007. Ensconced in the Oval Office, the president
now dismisses Islamabad’s focus on Delhi as paranoia.
“The obsession with India as a mortal threat
to Pakistan is misguided [because] their biggest
threat right now comes internally,” he said in
April 2009.
The
shift seals a “new” American policy toward Pakistan
that marks more continuity than change with Bush’s
second term. Under Obama, US drone attacks into
the tribal areas—inaugurated by Bush—have continued
and may be extended to other areas of Pakistan.
Whatever good will Obama hoped to generate through
increases in civilian aid has been wiped out
by the increase in Pakistani deaths by American
rockets.
The
Pakistan aid bill before Congress, although promising
a “deeper, broader, long-term engagement with
the [Pakistani] people,” could be as conditional
as anything tendered by Bush. Military aid is
not to be tied only to fighting the Taliban and
al-Qaeda but may require Pakistan’s pledge not
to support “any person or group that conducts
violence, sabotage or other activities meant
to instill fear or terror in India.” Some members
of Congress want aid to Pakistan linked to moving
troops from the eastern border with India to
the western border with Afghanistan.
American
policy towards Kashmir also reveals India’s widening
influence in Washington. In an intensive lobbying
effort, Delhi made clear to Obama that his envoy
would be shunned if any link were made between
Kashmir and Af-Pak. It worked. In a trip to Islamabad
in April, Holbrooke refused to even say “Kashmir.”
And while in Delhi, he was effusive about India’s
“critical role” in the region without which “we
cannot settle Afghanistan and many other world
problems.” The implication was that Kashmir,
clearly, is not among them.
This
Indian-American axis presents Islamabad with
a fork in the road. One way goes back. The ISI
again could try to bleed India via surrogates
in Afghanistan and Kashmir in the hope that its
regional concerns will be addressed, above all
a final status for Kashmir and recognition of
its western border with Afghanistan. But such
a strategy would likely fail; pursuing foreign
policy objectives through guerilla violence rarely
worked in the past. It simply creates conditions
of friction that al-Qaeda, the Taliban and jihadi
groups can exploit to keep 80 percent of
Pakistan’s military manpower and hardware pinned
down on India rather than on them or the tribal
areas. Mumbai and the Taliban’s conquest of Swat
are two examples of just how useful a diversion
this can be.
The
alternative is to go forward and insist that
Kashmir, Afghanistan and Islamic militancy are
regional problems requiring regional solutions.
India is right to insist that Pakistan go after
those nationals and groups implicated in Mumbai
and other attacks in India with the same vigor
as it is currently going after the Pakistan Taliban
in Swat. But equally Delhi must recommence serious
negotiations to resolve Kashmir and other outstanding
water and land disputes with Islamabad.
On
such bases Pakistan and India could come together
to agree to terms for coexistence in a neutral
and neutralized Afghanistan. For economic, energy
and geopolitical reasons, both nations have an
interest in their roads crossing in Kabul. But
the road must start in Kashmir.
