By DILIP HIRO
The United States and Pakistan are by now a classic
example of a dysfunctional nuclear family (with an emphasis on “nuclear”).
While the two governments and their peoples become more suspicious and
resentful of each other with every passing month, Washington and Islamabad are
still locked in an awkward post-9/11 embrace that, at this juncture, neither
can afford to let go of.
Washington is keeping Pakistan, with its collapsing economy and bloated
military, afloat but also cripplingly dependent on its handouts and
U.S.-sanctioned International Monetary Fund loans. Meanwhile, CIA drones
unilaterally strike its tribal borderlands. Islamabad returns the favor. It holds
Washington hostage over its Afghan War from which the Pentagon won’t be able to
exit in an orderly fashion without its help. By blocking U.S. and NATO supply
routes into Afghanistan (after a U.S. cross-border air strike had killed 24 Pakistani soldiers)
from November 2011 until last July, Islamabad managed to ratchet up the cost of the war while underscoring its
indispensability to the Obama administration.
At the heart of this acerbic relationship, however, is Pakistan’s
arsenal of 110 nuclear bombs which, if the country were to disintegrate, could
fall into the hands of Islamist militants, possibly from inside its own
security establishment. As Barack Obama confided to his aides, this
remains his worst foreign-policy nightmare, despite the decision of the U.S.
Army to train a commando unit to
retrieve Pakistan’s nukes, should extremists seize some of them or materials to
produce a “dirty bomb” themselves.
Two Publics, Differing Opinions
Pakistan’s military high command fears the Pentagon’s contingency plans
to seize its nukes. Following the clandestine strike by U.S. SEALs that killed
Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad in May 2011, it loaded elements of its nuclear
arsenal onto trucks, which rumbled around the country to frustrate any possible
American attempt to grab its most prized possessions. When Senator John
Kerry arrived in Islamabad to calm
frayed nerves following Bin Laden’s assassination, high Pakistani officials
insisted on a written U.S. promise not to raid their nuclear arsenal. He
snubbed the demand.
Since then mutual distrust between the two nominal allies–a relationship
encapsulated by some in the term “AmPak”–has only intensified. Last month, for
instance, Pakistan became the sole Muslim
country to officially call on the Obama administration to ban the anti-Islamic
14-minute video clip “Innocence of Muslims,” which depicts the Prophet Muhammad
as a womanizer, religious fraud, and pedophile.
While offering a bounty of $100,000 for the killing of Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, an Egyptian-American
Christian producer of the movie, Pakistan’s Railways Minister Ghulam Ahmad
Bilour called on al-Qaeda and the
Pakistani Taliban to be “partners in this noble deed.” Prime Minister Raja
Ashraf distanced his government from Bilour’s incitement to murder, a criminal
offense under Pakistani law, but did not dismiss him from the cabinet. The U.S.
State Department strongly condemned Bilour’s move.
Pakistan also stood out as the only Muslim state whose government declared a public holiday, “Love the Prophet Muhammad
Day,” to encourage its people to demonstrate against the offending movie. The
U.S. Embassy’s strategy of disarming criticism with TV and newspaper ads
showing President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton condemning “the
content and the message” of the film failed to discourage protesters. In fact,
the demonstrations in major Pakistani cities turned so violent that 23 protesters
were killed, the highest figure worldwide.
Taking advantage of the government’s stance,
proscribed jihadist organizations made a defiant show of their continued
existence. In Lahore, the capital of Punjab, the country’s largest province,
activists from the banned Lashkar-e Taiba (Army of the Pure), whose leader
Hafiz Saeed is the target of a $10 million bounty by Washington, led
protesters toward the American consulate where perimeter defenses had been
breached earlier in the week. In Islamabad, activists from the Sipah-e-Sahaba
(Soldiers of the Prophet’s Companions), an outlawed Sunni faction,
clashed with the police for hours in the course of a march to the heavily
guarded diplomatic enclave.
These outlawed organizations continue to operate with impunity in an
environment that has grown rabidly anti-American. A June 2012 survey by the
Washington-based Pew Research Center (PRC) found that 74% of Pakistanis
consider the United States an enemy. By contrast, only 12% believe that U.S.
aid helps solve problems in their country in a situation in which 89% describe
their nation’s economic situation as “bad.”
The American public’s view of Pakistan is equally bleak. February polls
by Gallup and Fox News indicated that 81% of Americans
had an unfavorable view of that country; just 15% held a contrary view, the
lowest figure of the post-9/11 period (with only the remaining “axis of evil”
states of Iran and North Korea faring worse).
Clashing Views on the War on Terror
Most Americans consider Pakistan an especially unreliable ally in
Washington’s war on terror. That it provided safe haven to bin Laden for 10
years before his violent death in 2011 reinforced this perception. Bin Laden’s
successor, Ayman Zawahiri, is widely believed to be hiding in Pakistan. So,
too, are Mullah Muhammad Omar and other leaders of the Afghan Taliban.
It beggars belief that this array of Washington’s enemies can continue
to function inside the country without the knowledge of its powerful Inter-Services
Intelligence directorate (ISI) which reputedly has nearly 100,000 employees and
informers. Even if serving ISI officers are not in cahoots with the Afghan
Taliban, many retired ISI officers clearly are.
The rationale for this, top Pakistani officials say privately, is that
the Afghan Taliban and the allied Haqqani Network are not attacking targets in
Pakistan and so pose no threat to the state. In practice, these
political-military entities are being sustained by Islamabad as future
surrogates in a post-American Afghanistan. Their task is to ensure a
pro-Islamabad government in Kabul, immune to offers of large-scale economic aid
from India, the regional superpower. In short, it all boils down to Washington
and Islamabad pursuing clashing aims in war-ravaged Afghanistan and in Pakistan
as well.
The Pakistani government’s multifaceted stance toward Washington has
wide public support. Popular hostility toward the U.S. stems from several
interrelated factors. Above all, most Pakistanis view the war on terror from a
radically differently perspective than Americans. Since its primary targets
have been the predominantly Muslim countries of Afghanistan and Iraq, they
equate it with an American crusade against Islam.
While U.S. pundits and politicians invariably cite the $24 billion in assistance and
military aid Washington has given Islamabad in the post-9/11 period, Pakistanis
stress the heavy price they have paid for participating in the Washington-led
war. “No country and no people have suffered more in the epic struggle against
terrorism than Pakistan,” said President Asif Ali
Zardari at the United Nations General Assembly last month.
His government argues that, as a result of joining the war on terror,
Pakistan has suffered a loss of $68 billion over the past decade.
A widely disseminated statistic at home, it includes estimated losses due to a
decline in foreign investments and adverse effects on trade, tourism, and
businesses. Islamabad attributes all this to the insecurity caused by the
terrorist acts of local jihadists in response to its participation in
Washington’s war. Then there are the roughly 4,000 Pakistani military
fatalities suffered during post-9/11 operations against terror groups and other
homegrown militants–significantly higher than all allied troops
killed in Afghanistan. Some 35,000 civilians have also died or suffered
injuries in the process.
Drones Fuel Popular Rage
During a September address to the Asia Society in
New York, Foreign Minister Hinna Rabbani Khar was asked for an explanation of
the rampant anti-American sentiment in her country. She replied with a single
word: “drones.” At any given time, CIA drones, buzzing like wasps and armed
with Hellfire missiles, circle round the clock over
an area in Pakistan’s tribal zone, their high-resolution cameras recording movements below. This
fills people on the ground with unending terror, being unable to guess when
and where the missiles will be fired.
A June Pew Research Center survey shows that 97% of
Pakistanis familiar with the drone attacks held a negative view of them. “Those
who are familiar with the drone campaign also overwhelmingly (94%) believe the
attacks kill too many innocent people,” states its report. “Nearly
three-quarters (74%) say they are not necessary to defend Pakistan from extremist
organizations.” (In stark contrast, a February Washington Post-ABC News poll found that 83% of
Americans–and 73% of liberal Democrats–support Obama’s drone onslaught.)
A recent anti-drone “march” by a nine-mile long
motorcade from Islamabad to the border of the South Waziristan tribal agency
was led by Imran Khan, head of the Movement for Justice political party. Joined
by protesters from the U.S. and Britain, it was a
dramatic reminder of the depth of popular feeling against the drones. By
refraining from forcibly entering South Waziristan in defiance of an official
ban, Khan stayed within the law. And by so doing, he enhanced his already
impressive 70% approval rating and improved the
chances of his party–committed to ending Islamabad’s participation in
Washington’s war on terror–to achieve a breakthrough in the upcoming
parliamentary election.
Unlike in Yemen, where the government has authorized the Obama
administration to stage drone attacks, Pakistani leaders, who implicitly
accepted such strikes before the Pentagon’s gross violation of their country’s
sovereignty in the bin Laden killing, no longer do so. “The use of unilateral
strikes on Pakistan territory is illegal,” said Foreign Minister Khar.
Her government, she explained, needed to rally popular backing for its campaign
to quash armed militant groups, and the drones make that impossible. “As the
drones fly over the territory of Pakistan, it becomes an American war and the
whole logic of this being our fight, in our own interest, is immediately put
aside and again it is a war imposed on us.”
Underlying the deployment of a drone, helicopter, or jet fighter to hit
a target in a foreign country is an updated version of the Vietnam-era doctrine
of “hot pursuit,” which ignores the basic concept of national sovereignty.
Pakistani leaders fear that if they do not protest Washington’s continued use
of drones for “targeted killings” of Pakistan-based individuals selected in the White House, their arch-rival India
will follow suit. It will hit the camps in Pakistan allegedly training
terrorists to destabilize Indian Kashmir. That is one of the ongoing nightmares
of Pakistan’s senior generals.
The Nuclear Conundrum
Since India would be the prime target of any nuclear-armed extremists,
the Indian government dreads the prospect of Pakistan’s nukes falling into such
hands far more than President Obama. The alarm of both Delhi and Washington is
well justified, particularly because Pakistan’s arsenal is growingfaster than any on Earth —
and the latest versions of nukes it’s producing are smaller and so easier to
hijack.
Over the past five years, Pakistani extremists have staged a series of
attacks on sensitive military installations, including nuclear facilities. In
November 2007, for example, they attacked Sargodha airbase where
nuclear-capable F-16 jet aircraft are stationed. The following month a suicide
bomber targeted a Pakistani Air Force base believed to hold nuclear weapons at
Kamra, 37 miles northwest of Islamabad. In August 2008, a group of suicide
bombers blew up the gates to a weapons complex at the Wah cantonment containing
a nuclear warhead assembly plant, leaving 63 people dead. A further assault on
Kamra took place in October 2009 and yet another last August, this time
by eight suicide bombers belonging to the
Pakistani Taliban.
Given Pakistan’s dependence on a continuing supply of U.S.-made advanced
weaponry–essential to withstand any onslaught by India in a conventional war–its
government has had to continually reassure Washington that the security of its
nuclear arsenal is foolproof. Its leaders have repeatedly assured their
American counterparts that the hemispheres containing nuclear fuel and the
triggers for activating the weapons are stored separately under tight guard.
This has failed to allay the anxieties of successive American presidents. What
disconcerts the U.S. is that, despite contributing hundreds of millions of
dollars to underwrite programs to help Pakistan secure its nuclear arms,
it does not know where many of these
parts are stored.
This is not going to change. The military planners in Islamabad correctly
surmise that Delhi and Washington would like to turn Pakistan into a
non-nuclear power. At present, they see their nuclear arsenal as the only
effective deterrent they have against an Indian aggression which, in their
view, they experienced in 1965. “We developed
all these nukes to use against India,” said an unnamed senior Pakistani
military officer recently quoted in the
London-based Sunday Times Magazine. “Now they turn out to be very
useful in dealing with the U.S.”
In short, Pakistan’s military high command has come to view its nuclear
arsenal as an effective deterrent not only against its traditional adversary,
India, but also its nominal ally in Washington. If such thinking solidifies as
the country’s military doctrine in the years following the Pentagon’s
withdrawal from Afghanistan, then Pakistan may finally find itself removed from
Washington’s list of non-NATO allies, ending the dysfunctional nuclear family
of international politics. What that would mean in global terms is anyone’s
guess.
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