This Is Not Our War: New Pakistani Leadership Tells US
By Abdus Sattar Ghazali
28 March,
2008
Countercurrents.org
Alarmed at the expected shift towards a negotiated and peaceful handling of the problem of militancy in Pakistan's tribal areas along the border with Afghanistan, two senior US officials hurriedly dashed to Islamabad on March 24, hours after Makhdoom Yusuf Raza Gilani was chosen Prime Minister by the newly elected parliament.
The Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte and Assistant Secretary Richard Boucher held separate meetings with President Pervez Musharraf, Prime Minister Gilani, Co-Chairman of the Pakistan Peoples Party Asif Ali Zardari (whose nominee is the Prime Minister) and Mian Nawaz Sharif, the former Prime Minister and leader of a major coalition party in the coalition government of Pakistan.
John Negroponte, believed to be the architect of much talked about power-sharing deal struck between Late Benazir Bhutto and President Musharraf which is believed to be still intact, also called on army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani and met prominent civil society leaders at a dinner.
The Negroponte's talks in Islamabad came amid persistent reports that the new government would seek a negotiated settlement to resolve the current unrest in the tribal territories that resulted in the deterioration of security situation in the country with frequent suicide bomb attacks.
Prime Minister Gilani told Negroponte that the new parliament will assess the policy to fight 'terrorism.' He said parliament was a sovereign body and all important policy matters and decisions on important national issues would be taken through parliament. Nawaz Sharif told the American envoys that there was ''no longer a one-man show in Pakistan'' and that the new parliament - elected in February polls that dealt a crushing defeat to Musharraf's allies - would decide after exhaustive debate how Pakistan should approach extremism.
He held Musharraf's U.S.-backed policies responsible for the wave of suicide bombings and argued the security of Pakistan must not be sacrificed to protect other countries. ''It is unacceptable that while giving peace to the world we make our own country a killing field.'' ''If America wants to see itself clean of terrorism, we also want our villages and towns not to be bombed,'' he said, alluding to recent air strikes near the Afghan border apparently carried out by U.S.
This is what Nawaz Sharif told the New York Times recently. "We will deal with them sensibly. When you have a problem in your family, you don't kill your own family, you sit and talk. Britain got the Ireland problem solution. So what's the harm in negotiations?" He has also asked the United States to come up with a clear definition of the global war on terrorism.
Not surprisingly, tribal leaders told Negroponte that the US administration should stop seeking military solution to militancy in the tribal areas and suggested adopting traditional means of Jirga to end the resistance. "There is a difference between terrorism and reaction to what a community considered injustice," he was told.
The Bush administration views the tribal areas as a sanctuary for Taliban forces which cross the border into Afghanistan to fight American and NATO forces, as well as a base for Al Qaeda to plot new terrorist attacks in the United States and Europe.
Pakistanis, however, have come to see the tribal areas as something entirely different: a once peaceful region where a group of militants have turned their wrath on the rest of the country as punishment for the American alliance.
Many civilians were among the 274 people killed since the beginning of the year, but the dead also included young soldiers and policemen. A bomb explosion on March 15 at an Italian restaurant favored by foreigners in Islamabad wounded four FBI agents and underscored for Pakistanis yet again the American involvement.
In January, Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, and Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the C.I.A. director reached a quiet understanding with Pakistan's military leaders to intensify secret strikes against 'suspected terrorists' by pilotless aircraft in Pakistan, according to the New York Times. Among other things, the new arrangements allowed an increase in the number and scope of patrols and strikes by armed Predator surveillance aircraft launched from a secret base in Pakistan. Instead of having to confirm the identity of a suspected militant leader before attacking, this shift allowed American operators to strike convoys of vehicles that bear the characteristics of Qaeda or Taliban leaders on the run.
The new, rules of engagement may have their biggest impact at a secret CIA base in Pakistan whose existence was previously kept secret to avoid embarrassing President Musharraf politically, the New York Times said. The base in Pakistan is home to a handful of Predators — unmanned aircraft that are controlled from the United States.
Pakistan has deployed more than 80,000 troops along the Afghanistan border -- more than twice as many as NATO did -- and lost as many as around 1,000 soldiers, more than the casualties of the entire coalition put together. The US has offered $400 million aid to train the Frontier Corps, a paramilitary force to replace the Army to patrol the border with Afghanistan.
The US has also suggested to enlist tribal leaders in the border areas of Pakistan in the fight against Al-Qaida and the Taliban. The proposal is modeled in part on a similar effort by American forces in Anbar Province of Iraq where American commanders have worked with Sunni sheiks to turn locals against the militant group. Many experts point out that the experiment as it played-out in Iraq had produced disastrous results in El Salvador where it further polarized the populace and turned the people against the US efforts. Tellingly, Negroponte is widely seen as the man who organized right-wing death squads within El Salvador to wipe out dissident groups there while he was ambassador to Honduras from 1981-1985. During his tenure, the US-backed Honduran military committed 185 murders and Negroponte suppressed the embassy's own 1982 report on human rights abuses.
Many Pakistani political analysts argue that the US failures in Afghanistan could not be attributed to Pakistan. Pakistan may be a pivotal nation in terms of its support to the coalition efforts in Afghanistan, but any successes or failures within Afghanistan are mainly the responsibility of the coalition partners themselves. If there is a need to do more, then each partner country needs to do more, not just Pakistan.
Challenging the often repeated accusation of not doing enough, the former governor of the North West Frontier Province, Lt Gen (r) Aurakzai aptly remarked that either NATO (US forces are part of NATO in Afghanistan) is trying to hide its own weaknesses by levelling allegations against Pakistan or is refusing to admit the facts. He questioned: "Why did the coalition come to Afghanistan? To find Al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, Mullah Omar and the Taliban; or for democracy, reconstruction and development, and [to] leave a stable Afghanistan which wouldn't be vulnerable to terrorists. Tell me, which one of those objectives has been achieved? I went to Kabul … and they are all living in a big bunker with no control over Afghanistan. There is no law and order. The insurgency has become far worse…Is that success?"
Not astonishingly, General Aurakzai lost his job after these blunt remarks.
Pakistan's political scenario has been changed after the February 18 elections in which Musharraf's Muslim League-Q party was routed and Benazir Bhutto's People's Party and Nawaz Sharif's Pakistan Muslim League-N emerged as the largest victors. The election results are widely seen as a repudiation of President Musharraf's eight year's autocratic rule as well as Bush Administration which has staunchly backed Musharraf for more than six years as its best bet in the campaign against the militants in Pakistan.
With a very vocal parliament, it will be difficult for President Musharraf and Army Chief General Kayani to yield to all US demands. This is the reason that Nawaz Sharif told Negroponte bluntly Pakistan is no longer a one-man show and the new parliament will decide policy about how to deal with extremism. The last parliament, elected after the 2002 massively rigged elections, was so docile that in its Defense Committee report for the last four years the only mention of the 'fight against terrorism' was about a resolution by the committee in 2007 criticizing the United States for threatening to link the amount of aid to Pakistan to the performance of the army.
Not surprisingly, the Pakistani media is reflecting this popular sentiment. The News, the English-language daily of Pakistan's biggest media conglomerate, published a scathing editorial headlined Hands off please, Uncle Sam: "For most citizens, the indications that Washington is eager to enforce its own writ in parts of the country or dictate policy decisions are highly distressing. This is particularly so as it is obvious that US-led policies in the Middle East have contributed to the growth of hatred for the country and those it supports. Inside Pakistan, that includes President Pervez Musharraf. The spate of terrorist attacks that have taken place, and indeed continue in an unceasing wave, indicate an urgent need to alter strategies and devise policies to save people from the wrath of the killers."
Similar views were expressed by another leading newspaper Dawn: Pakistan needs little prodding from outside to fight terrorism today…..The Americans must know that Pakistanis, too, have borne the brunt of their right or wrong policies. Unless Islamabad fights terrorism as its own battle and as the elected government deems fit, raining bombs on tribal areas will not root out the problem but compound it, especially if innocent civilians keep falling victim to such strikes. The American strategy has failed in Afghanistan and Iraq; it will not work in Pakistan.
Another leading newspaper the Nation commented: "For Pakistan the best course is to tackle the situation with persuasion and for the US to beat a quick retreat from the Afghan arena. Otherwise if it continued to follow a hard line approach, the pervasive anti-US sentiments would get even more entrenched….It is quite clear that the military operations and Pentagon Predator missile attacks on Pakistan's soil, perhaps in complicity with Islamabad, have roused anger against the government and intense hatred of the US not only among the inhabitants of the tribal areas, but also in the rest of the country."
In the past, President (General) Musharraf, who was also Chief of Army Staff till November 28, 2007, was able to implement an unpopular policy of Pakistan army's operations in FATA and Swat but the new political leadership has to respond to the aspirations of the people who see the army operations quite differently. This was the message strongly conveyed to Negroponte by the political leadership emerging in the aftermath of last month's elections.
Abdus Sattar Ghazali is the Executive Editor of the online magazine American Muslim Perspective: www.amperspective.com email: asghazali@gmail.com
