PAK-US relations: The Long War

[Rafael]

Pak-US relations: The Long War
Brig (R) Samson Sharaf


A few days back, I had the occasion to meet Professor Walter Russell Mead, a US scholar and opinion maker, who was on a fact-finding mission to Pakistan. I met him after he had already interacted with some think tanks and important people from Pakistan; some critical and others apologists.

Knowing that he is the Henry A. Kissinger Senior Fellow for US Foreign Policy at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) and also linked to the evangelical church, I was particularly keen to find out how the religious right affected the US policymaking. If he is to be believed, it actually does; but I doubt his contention in view of the Kennan Telegram and Tonkin reports. In my and many respected opinions, it is the Military-Industrial Complex and its think tanks that beef up a case.

As it turned out, his chief intellectual interests involves the rise and development of a liberal, capitalist world order based on the economic, societal, and military power of the United States and its closest allies prominently the UK. He also theorises to seek a stable Southern Asia (South, East and Central) with India playing the major role from East Africa to Malacca, albeit containing the rise of China. During discussions, it became amply clear that the US occupation of Afghanistan is a mere stepping stone for greater geopolitical designs in what may turn out, in his own words, to be a ‘long war’.

He was of the view that Pakistan’s security perspective framed around a hostile and overbearing India was faulty and in conflict with the US perspective of a stable and prosperous Asia led by India. He suggested that Pakistan ought to forget all issues with India and instead focus on a supportive role in the region with it (India) in the lead and become a prosperous country, rather then be doomed economically, as it presently is.

But this view is not new to Pakistanis. I recall having met Michael Krepon of the Henry Stimson Centre in 1995 and 2001 advocating risk reduction and confidence building measures with India. I asked him that if Pakistan was to agree to all the US suggestions, would Washington guarantee the Kashmiri people their freedom. He was quiet for some time and then said “No”. The same can also be said of ex-President Clinton’s visit to Pakistan to deliver a sermon to the nation besieged by military dictatorships, inept politicians and Harvard trained bureaucracy. He refused to intervene on behalf of the Kashmiri people.

Ashley J. Tellis once wrote that India and Pakistan exist on the extremes of divides and went on to qualify his thesis with historic predispositions and facts. Now a naturalised American and an expert advisor on the region, he qualifies India as a peace-loving and caring country to lead Asia and chooses to forget his thesis that propelled him to fame. In one capacity or the other, he remains a bigwig of the region and moulds opinions. So when I read and hear one American opinion and policy maker after another being particularly dismissive of Pakistan and its abilities, I wonder what keeps them thinking in such a manner.

Are their pre-emptive policies really a solution or an isolationist syndrome built around oceanic insulation and immense military power?

One, Pakistan has not been able to produce the likes of Tellis and Khalilzad, who have managed to penetrate the core of policymakers and shaping opinions. Our scholars and expats of ability invariably choose to adapt to the perspectives of their adopted land and become apologists. They hardly frame opinions. Pakistan’s lobbyists, though highly paid are ineffective.

Secondly, Pak-US relations have surged intermittently during times of the so-called strategic alliances. If Ayub Khan’s letter to a US Admiral, in 1955, that spam the cyberspace nowadays is to be taken as a measure, not much has changes since. Each time, Pakistan has acted as a US dependency and then exercised its ‘flexible conscience’ on selective basis. As a reward, the US has been compliant in looking the other way, while Pakistan shored its security against India. But this time it is different. While Pakistan continues to do the donkey’s work, it gets no respite and leverage.

As I gathered from the meeting and many opinionated research papers from USA, the issue of Afghanistan is fast becoming peripheral. The US will not withdraw from Afghanistan, nor will the pressure on Pakistan from across the Durand Line and world over abate. This confirms earlier circumspection about the US objectives in Afghanistan not to arrest OBL and dismantle Al-Qaeda, but to occupy the pivot of three Asias for geo-strategic gains and world domination. Though the apparent logic and hindrance in this policy may be Pakistan’s fixation with India, it actually boils down to the growing strategic partnership between Pakistan and China. This is what makes the present crises ‘A Long War’.

As a face saving threat, it appears that this reasoning spares USA the indignity of another Vietnam type retreat. It shifts the perspective to a global game of the US-led economic domination that will make another ideology collapse. “You see, it was ultimately the economics that won the war against a communist ideology. Pakistan’s competition with India is asymmetrical and Pakistan will soon collapse economically,” is what Dr Mead was quick to assert. Built on Paul Kennedy’s thesis of The Rise and Fall of Great Empires, the US has time on its side for things to happen. For Pakistan, it is the final phase of the battle for its integrity in face of a dysfunctional economy that gives rise to internal conflicts.

In my meeting with Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi on Monday last, I mostly remained a silent listener. The only point I made was that if Pakistan was indeed so vulnerable, why the government was allowing Pakistan’s economy to collapse so easily? He gave no answer; but this is a subject I amply dilated in a series of five articles I wrote in TheNation on economic manipulation.

My parting words to Dr Mead were that Pakistan or no Pakistan, in the final analysis, it is the people of the region who will win. I asked him to read the Forgotten Social Dimension of Strategy by Michel Howard and take a fresh look at his thesis of Asian domination.

As for Pakistan, we need to make a blessing out of the current flooding tragedy and not waste a penny of the aid that comes Pakistan’s way to hedge our flagging rupee and jump start a reconstruction programme that actually benefits the common man and not offshore dollar accounts. This reconstruction programme unlike the ERRA should set the pace for a healthy development activity built around domestic industries and expertise to boost local economies. Concurrently, the entire country should gear towards a national austerity programme.

The writer is a retired brigadier and a political economist.

 

[lionheart007]

today pakistan is so radicalized it can't see the reality you are living in the world of illution i got one article in dawn new ,read it. and atleast except it


well we know this already don't we

http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/...te-already-480
Is it too late already?

THERE was a time when political analysts described Pakistanis as being moderate in their religious beliefs and practices.

It was the Islam of the Sufis and the saints rather than the orthodox view that had greater appeal. That is why, observers pointed out, religious parties in Pakistan had never won more than five per cent of the popular vote in general elections. Gen Musharraf is alleged to have manipulated the 2002 elections to help the MMA win a respectable presence in some assemblies.

Can one say the same thing about the mindset of the youth in Pakistan today? There are three examples that have come to my notice of late that I find disturbing. It appears the process of the religious radicalisation of Pakistanis is now a fait accompli. There is a story on the news website of Asia Times Online, a successor to the prestigious Hong Kong-based Asia Times magazine that ceased publication in 1997. According to Syed Saleem Shahzad, atonline.com’scorrespondent in Pakistan, several hundred students, members of the Islami Jamiat-i-Tulaba in Karachi, have left for Waziristan to join Al Qaeda training camps in Fata. If true, this is food for thought.

Yet another example of extremism came through an email I received in response to my write-up on Education and bigotry (July 14) from a person describing himself as a retired naval officer who does not wish to be named here.

He had this to say, “The most worrisome part of our current education system may perhaps be this. As member of the faculty at Pakistan Navy’s premier institute, over a period I observed (much to my horror), the upcoming generation of officers imbued with a fanatical desire to go to war with India. Not only that, these officers are intolerant in mundane academic discussions, some even feel elated when acts of violence take place against minorities. This then is the trend that seems to be gathering momentum….”
Click here to enlarge
Another indication I received of our youth’s thinking was several months ago from Pervez Hoodbhoy, associated with the physics department at the Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad. One of our most rational and sensible academics, Hoodbhoy found himself facing an angry ‘mob’ of young students in a university auditorium after a lecture he gave on one of the issues that confront Pakistan today. Hoodbhoy’s pacifist views on the nuclear bomb and India-Pakistan friendship are well-known and unpopular with the apostles of war. They do not go down well with a huge chunk of the youth on campuses it appears.

Although all this is worrying, it is not surprising. We could see it coming given the direction education, politics and strategic planning has taken in Pakistan. Gen Ziaul Haq with his Islamisation policy is held to be the main culprit. But the roots of this phenomenon go back deeper into the past. It was no coincidence that politics, education, strategic planning and religion were closely coordinated by an establishment that controlled Pakistan’s national life.

Once Pakistan was born, the Jamaat-i-Islami, the major representative of the religious right, switched sides. From a major opponent of the concept of Pakistan it moved into the country to become a major player here. And how did it do it? By championing the cause of theocracy and more importantly by projecting the spectre of an Islamic revolution backed by the Muslim masses. Maulana Maududi, the founder of the Jamaat, received wholehearted backing from the West, especially the US. Islam was seen by an America under the spell of McCarthyism as a powerful weapon to be used against another spectre — that of the Red revolution.

How did the political leadership in Pakistan react to this so-called threat? It went on the defensive, believing that the people were religious minded and would support the party that stood for Islam. Political leaders lacked the confidence to follow the path of moderate Islam of the pre-1947 years. Besides, Jinnah, the leader who had led the struggle for Pakistan, died in 1948. In the pre-partition years, the Muslim League did not face a challenge from the religious right on the definition of an Islamic state.

Hence all crucial political decisions in Pakistan after 1948 were the outcome of a government “remorselessly haunted by political nightmares”. The Objectives Resolution of 1949, the inept handling by the administration of the anti-Ahmadi agitation in Lahore in 1953, President Ayub Khan’s backtracking on his decision to call Pakistan a republic without ‘Islamic’ being prefixed to it, Z.A. Bhutto’s move to declare the Ahmadis non-Muslims. The list could go on.

What about the third player — the army? It co-opted the religious right. As Dr Mubashir Hasan reminded me once, the army had adopted a typically Islamic battle cry from the start. It was not Gen Ziaul Haq’s innovation. Religion, it is believed, came in handy to promote the security agencies’ aims in Kashmir and later in Afghanistan. India’s hard-line stance proved to be helpful.

One may well ask, how does all this impact on the youth? The three forces — the army, political governments lacking confidence if not popular support and the religious right have throughout Pakistan’s history been the key decision-makers with the weight of each shifting from time to time as happens in a game of musical chairs.

Different actors have played the role of front man at different times. In one respect they have acted in unison. It has suited each of them to exploit the youth. This has been done by installing a curriculum of hatred in the education system that teaches students to regard non-Muslims as enemies, India as an irreconcilable foe, and a government that does not pay lip service to the virtues of theocracy as un-Islamic.

But here comes the snag. The three actors have never been comfortable bedfellows. Now that the endgame has begun it has turned into a three-cornered fight. They are now locked in an open war as each tries to woo the youth. But it may already be too late.

 

[lionheart007]

[/COLOR]you will be a fool if you murder a guy who is going to kill him self(suicide).

i think pakistan already started committing suicide