Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen went a little off the reservation this week, openly saying what everyone in the national security establishment knows to be true: Pakistan’s Internal-Services Intelligence directorate – the ISI – is deeply in bed with the same network of jihadists that provoked a 20-hour firefight in Kabul last week. The Haqqani network is tolerated for three reasons in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Area: 1) Because they only attack Afghan and Coalition targets, 2) because Pakistan believes that the Taliban and their Haqqani allies will give them leverage in Afghanistan after the US withdraws, and 3) because launching an army sweep of the FATA will be both too costly in lives, and too emotionally wrenching to the fragile Pakistani body politic.
Reason #1 is little more than the toleration of bloody murder so long that no one you care about gets hurt, but as statecraft it makes a kind of sense: Why hurl yourself against a powerful potential adversary that means you no harm? At least, not yet.
Reason #3 is probably true, but if so the Pakistani establishment has no one to blame but themselves.The ISI has used the violent instincts of their pastoral rustics to what they believe is good effect both in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan and in the Indian-contested Kashmir region, but the genie of violent extremism has proven easier to uncork than bottle back up, and Pakistan continues to suffer terrorist attacks on its own soil by disaffected jihadists only a little way removed from their state-sponsored brothers.
Reason #2 deserves a little closer inspection:
Afghanistan is a multi-ethnic state, with the Pashtun population as its biggest constituency. The Taliban and Haqqani also are predominantly Pashtun, which is also one of Pakistan’s major ethnic groups. Pakistan’s military thinks that a hostile regime in Afghanistan would threaten it with a possible war on two fronts, with traditional enemy India to the east and Afghanistan to the west, so backing Pashtun forces are its best insurance policy.
Afghanistan’s other ethnic groups, such as Uzbeks and Tajiks, are associated with the former “Northern Alliance,” which Pakistan believes to be in the pay of India and to have dominated Kabul since 2001, though President Hamid Karzai is a Pashtun.
“The policy is India-centric. The fear is a two-front war,” said Asad Munir, a retired brigadier who had served as the ISI chief in the tribal area. “Pakistan wants a government that is dominated by Pashtuns, but not an extremist government.”
Pakistan’s suspicions of the U.S. have been fueled by the fact that Washington has cut Islamabad out of tentative negotiations it has held with representatives of the insurgent leadership, including talks this year in Qatar and Germany with a man considered close to Taliban founder Mullah Omar and reportedly also to Ibrahim Haqqani, brother of Jalaluddin.
“America has started a reconciliation process in Afghanistan but they want Pakistan to fight,” said Aftab Sherpao, a former Pakistani interior minister. “They want peace over there and war here.”
Analysts say there is little the United States can do to wean Pakistan from its ties to the Haqqani network.
Pakistan has engaged in four wars with India since the fall of the Raj. All of them were initiated by Pakistan, with the possible exception of the war in 1971 - a simmering inter-ethnic conflict whose open hostilities commenced after Pakistan launched a pre-emptive attack against Indian forces. The Indians were supporting the democratic secession of East Pakistan, and attempting to end a series of brutal atrocities committed by Pakistan’s army. In all four conflicts, Pakistan army suffered humiliating defeats or withdrawals, and in 1971 was required to sign instruments of surrender for members of its army stuck in the newly founded country of Bangladesh.
The Pakistani army, despite its inevitable impotence in the face of a virtually limitless pool of Indian draftees, remains the state’s principal institution. It permeates every level of Pakistani society. It has India as an enemy because it has chosen India as an enemy: No objective or rational reason lays behind this choice, Pakistan quite literally has nothing that India wants and, suffering from its own impoverished masses and its own turbulent ethnic dysfunctions, a great deal that it does not. The Indian threat is chimerical.
But armies need enemies, even if those enemies are nuclear armed and conventionally superior. Even if, as in the present case, the choice of a foe leads a country to commit itself to evermore damaging policies that poison internal security, further impoverish an economy deeply dependent on foreign largesse and which gravely damage international relations. Nor is there time, having formed an alliance with the Taliban and its proxies, for the Pashtun-dominated Pakistani army to make alliances with the Pashtun-led Afghan government.
The issue then, is less Pakistan’s national survival, than the survival of the Pakistani army, at least in its current form. By getting in bed with the Haqqanis in an alignment against a non-existent Indian threat, the army and the ISI have chosen to get atop the tiger. Now it can’t quite figure a way to get off, leaving us all to watch the spectacle of a country repeatedly laboring to wound itself, and unable to change its course.
Lex: “It has India as an enemy because it has chosen India as an enemy: No objective or rational reason lays behind this choice, Pakistan quite literally has nothing that India wants and, suffering from its own impoverished masses and its own turbulent ethnic dysfunctions, a great deal that it does not. The Indian threat is chimerical.”
Lex, ever hear of Kashmir? Remember, Pakistan and India were one country not so long ago….the lines were drawn apart and it separated after a bloody war with the loss of over a million lives. That’s hardly “nothing”. There is a tremendous amount of bad blood, horrific crimes against humanity on both sides and the issue of Kashmir has never been settled to Pakistan’s satisfaction (they want the Kashmiris to have a vote as to whom they belong to, and that vote would obviously swing Pakistan’s way due to the nature of the population there).
And remember, India is hardly a baby seal…they were the ones who set off the first public nuclear demo on the eleventh of May 1998 in the Pokhran desert, with three nukes followed by two more a couple of days later. Then Pakistan followed up with a public nuke test of their own a couple of weeks later.
Regarding India’s nuclear tests. You have to remember that India shares a border with China, and has fought a war with them. In order to have any sense of national security India needed to either come under another power’s nuclear umbrella or develop their own retaliatory capability. For several good reasons they chose the latter.
The idea of non-proliferation is a fool’s errand. The best we can hope for is to slow things down.
I haven’t forgotten Kashmir, Liz. I have merely discarded it as a plausible 21st century casus belli. The crucial distinction being that India has all of Kashmir that it wants, while Pakistan claims to want all of it.
How much blood and treasure have been expended over a few ten square miles of mountains and valleys, however beautiful? And how much more will have to be spent, facing the inevitable conclusion that the correlation of forces will always be against them? You cannot go to war with 1.6 billion people, moreover 1.6 billion that are rapidly modernizing and growing their economy. It’s a fools quest.
For parochial reasons having more to do with their place in society, I believe that if Kashmir did not exist, the Pakistani army would have to invent it.
Lex, all you say is undoubtedly true on one analytical level, but unfortunately not all people (in the sense of the national collective, that is) think in terms of lawyerly, gimlet-eyed, “80 cents on the dollar” logical calculations of diminishing rates of return, etc. The politics of firmly-held ideology and/or religion drives people in ways often incomprehensible to the western-trained sectarian legalistic/MBA trained ways of assessment of risk-reward ratios, etc. LBJ thought he could bribe Ho Chi Minh as “just another politician” with the economics of a promised US financially-backed TVA-like system for the MeKong Delta. Uncle Ho, being the Communist ideologue that he was didn’t give a tinker’s damn about the “betterment of his people” thru cheap electrical power. Like all good Nationalists/Statists, he was after total power and control and the desire to kick the “colonialists” out. If it took the deaths and/or impoverishment of 90% of his own countrymen as long as he and his minions were left firmly at the top of the heap when it was all over, so be it. Some individuals and/or groups of people simply cannot be “reasoned” with. And the sooner we accept that fact of life as a major objective reality, the better.
I agree Lex. Kashmir is a non-issue except to the Paks who do, indeed, want all of it. That desire, I think has more to do with past humiliations Jenna’s failed state has suffered at Indias hands than anything else. The Paks gain little, if anything, strategically with all of Kashmir.
I dia would like for the Paks to stay in their sty and behave. The Paks are just looking for an excuse for a rematch.
That rematch will have the same outcome as the previous rounds. The corelation of forces has always been against the Paks, and will remain that way.
India presents one thing – a reason for the Pakistani Army to exist. Without “The Indian Threat”, the Pakistani military would be a lot smaller, and its officer corps significantly lower on the social greasy pole.
The problem is that Pakistan has nuclear weapons. Which makes them a serious danger, not an annoyance. If there is any potential for militant extremists to get nukes, India and the United States will have to go in hard and fast. Ugly, but not as ugly as seeing New Delhi and New York vaporized.
Where’s Colonel Kurtz when you need him?
“I guess he picked the right five people.”
“Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen went a little off the reservation this week…”
After watching and reading the testimony, I do not believe that Adm. Mullen went off the reservation. Rather, he was sent as the man best able to deliver that truth that none else could say. In his last testimony before Congress, in one of his last acts in uniform, as a man with no likelihood (or desire, one imagines) of returning to Pakistan for “high level talks”, he was the guy that could lay bare the truth.
No, his testimony was planned, his role was carefully staged. Panetta followed up with oblique remarks that will allow him to return for his own high level talks. Secty. Clinton has rightly danced around the issue. But Mullen, in a last speech, could say what needed saying. And not before time.
+1 Also see Dust’s comment below.
There are legitimate strategic interests that benefit Pakistan (not just the army).
The rich Gulf Arab states are vulnerable to Iran. An extremely hardline sunni Afghanistan with thousands of willing jihadis would cause Iran to focus more attention eastward. As the Gulf Arabs cannot operate directly in Afghanistan they must funnel resources through Pakistan. The resources will come with some amount of government aid and associated NGO activity – sponsorship of madrassa, mosques and so on. Pakistan is a poor country much in need of that foreign aid and support.
Not entirely off topic, however, after Mullen’s recent most politically correct assertation that the demise of don’t ask don’t tell won’t effect readiness. After SNT’s rotation to the sandbox as a MEDEVAC PLT Ldr and his experiences described to me with dealing with mixed gender troop strength, the addition of open sexual orientation to the formula makes it twice as difficult. Mullen’s comments were un-adulterated bullshit that readiness isn’t impacted. I can only conclude he is now a political operator. Or he is lying to himself.
The services are well and truly screwed. I used to tell boys who didn’t know what they wanted to do with themselves to spend a hitch in one of the services. It always solidified thinking and provided many other benefits that couldn’t be bought for love nor money anywhere else.
No more. I tell them to stay away.
“I can only conclude he is now a political operator”
Almost all flag and general officers are. When you get the star, you become a politician, or you advance no higher. Hippies used to say “never trust anyone over thirty“. A pretty good analogue would be “never trust anyone over O-6“.
Well, that makes me feel better already.
That said, I knew a few G.O./Flag types (G.O.s in limited my circle) that were straight shooters but none that made it to 4 stars that didn’t go over to the dark side. One outstanding LTGEN I remember got hung out to dry because he didn’t play the game. He was my Division C.G. when a LT: Initials WFU. We’d have followed him into the Hexen Kessel that would have been the Fulda Gap.
I also tell the boys, if you have your heart set on it, do your 20 and GTFO. As much as it breaks my heart, it isn’t worth it anymore IMHO.
Very much agree, Dust. My 1st Cousin ret as a Lt. Gen (Vice CDR of PACAF) and had a very up & down career along the way (despite despite winning the DSC in WII with 4 ME kills leading a cas P-47 squadron and winning what was then the most prestigious air-race in the world–the Bendix–in an F-100C in 1955 as an O-6 @age 32–and being the CO of the first Wing in the entire AF to take delivery of the first operational F-100Cs fresh off the assembly-line (they didn’t hand out the AF’s first “Century Series” fighter to just anyone) so I had a first-hand view of the tortures-of-the-damned fine officers go thru in trying to stay out of the political gamesmanship end of it. The fact that, although making O-6 at age 32 (at an age when most would kill to make O-4 “below the zone”) it took him 12 years to get his first star says it all. And his second was even harder. He went to be DCO, HQ AF, as a TAC guy under the then USAF Chiefof Staff “3-fingered” Jack Ryan who had been CinC SAC. “OIL & WATER!” lol. My cousin left as the only person in history NOT to make O-8 out of that assignment and had to escape to the friendly confines of the old fighter ADC (Air Defense Command) community to get his second star at Richards-Gebaur (“Dicky-Goober”)
As a former MA who personally enforced DADT and enlisted before it came into play but also handled and saw the violence and intolerance of our services towards homosexuality, my thoughts on Mullen were a couple:
1) Why’s it gotta be the navy pushing for the homosexualization of the services first? Isn’t our reputation bad enough in this department? Can’t the Air Force go first on this one?
2) What the HECK is he talking about?
3) Realizing that DADT if anything allowed homosexually oriented people to serve in the military – whereas previously they were outright banned – and realizing we all have to keep stuff to ourselves under the UCMJ (i.e. certain political leanings, we aren’t allowed to commit adultery, yadda yadda) I saw the gay community as actually having more rights than many of us – and now – still even more.
Realizing that the vast majority of gay activists simply by statistical numbers do not have a desire to serve in the military – nor do they understand it – I’d rather have let a simple course in sampling and probability statistics tell us the DOD handling of this topic and the processes to arrive at the decision was invalid to begin with.
I would have rather let the US Marines act as voice on this one as they are the one branch of service collectively in my limited experience that was most serious about the job they signed up to do.
There are all sorts of anomalies and exceptions to the rule(s) which would point to this policy being okay (including the number of openly-closeted lesbian Chiefs I served under who were more manly than I was), but when you’re trying to build a collective, cohesive fighting force, the fewer variables the better. That’s just my thoughts.
I’d be worried. The Pakistanis have us beat hollow in Threatening Stomping and Aggressive Head Shakes. Not to mention Spiffy Head Gear. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1vIWoiDk5Fg
And India may be losing its edge: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVPl8-1HKj8&NR=1
I realize that we saddled up to Pakistan because India was in the Soviets’ pockets, but we still got the short end of the stick in that deal.
Hamid Gull, though ostensibly “retired” is still very much in charge of the ISI.
He hates America and all it stands for.
The ISI and Pakistan are NOT our allies or our friends.
“Nuke the sight from orbit. It’s the only way to be sure”…
I don’t know what they brief Navy Captains on but your political commentary and insight could put the mainstream media out of business permanently – except – your public has to be a bit more intelligent than the mainstream media aims for.
Good as always Lex.
I don’t have a solution, but I think it helps to understand the underlying causes of the problem. Pakistan is a “created” country, as are many parts of former colonial empires, which do not necessarily follow the “facts on the ground,” which in the Middle East and much of South Asia, remains more a tribal question than anything nationalistic.
It goes back to the Durand Line, which is the “poorly marked border that cuts through the Pashtun tribal areas, dividing ethnic Pashtuns on both sides…” otherwise known as the current border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. It was negotiated “truce” line, between the Afghan king and the British Raj in 1893. It’s a pretty sure bet that the Brits never really thought it would be a permanent arrangement, and it’s equally obvious that the Pashtuns didn’t believe that either.
Currently, Pakistan is 15.42% Pashtun, while Afghanistan is 42% Pastun, (by population) but Pakistan is over 6 times more populous than Afghanistan. And the Haqqani Network and the Taliban are also overwhelmingly Pashtun, as are the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), which lies along that border with Afghanistan.
During their independence from Britain, and subsequent partition of India and Pakistan in 1948, although there was a huge migration and slaughter of both Muslims and Hindus from the territories, there still remains over 88 million Muslims in India, (13.4% of the population), so Islamist terrorism remains one of India’s largest security concerns, (along with, you know, sharing a disputed border with China, and well as, I don’t know, that whole nuclear proliferation thing).
One of the most positive developments for US foreign policy over the past 10-20 years has been the realization that India and the US share many common strategic interests and concerns. The fact that US and Indian militaries (especially the Navy) are so close is very encouraging, and although it makes the Pakistanis very nervous…