Mayhem in Pakistan: An all too familiar tale

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Sumit Ganguly | 28 Dec 2007
Ganguly
On December 24, 2007, the New York Times unveiled an account that told of how millions of dollars of American assistance earmarked for counterterrorism efforts in Pakistan had been diverted for the production of weaponry for use against India. The story has added to the growing unhappiness in Washington DC with the Pakistani military’s lackluster counterterrorism efforts. However, for long time observers of South Asian politics this sordid tale should hold few surprises. Pakistani civilian, and especially, military regimes have been effectively playing this game of bait and switch since the early 1950s. In turn, a range of administrations, both Democratic and Republican alike, have been willingly and unwittingly duped into providing military assistance to Pakistan for questionable ends. The history of this tale can be traced to the early 1950s. In the aftermath of the partition of the subcontinent, the Pakistani politico-military establishment deftly persuaded a naïve Eisenhower administration that it would serve as a bulwark against Communist expansionism in Asia. The Pakistani leadership, of course, had little or no misgivings about Communist expansion. Their principal security concerns were twofold: at one level they were interested in simply balancing a much more powerful adversary, India; at another, they were also keen on wresting the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir through force. Immediately, in the aftermath of partition, taking advantage of a tribal rebellion in the state, they had already embarked upon an unsuccessful attempt to militarily seize the entire state but had not been successful in that endeavour. After some deliberation, the administration, which was almost completely unschooled in the complex regional politics of the subcontinent, and also unremittingly committed to containing Soviet and Communist designs, gave in to the Pakistani blandishments and signed a military pact in 1954. Faced with a significant political outcry from India, and in an attempt to assuage Indian opinion, President Eisenhower wrote a letter to Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru offering to provide India similar assistance. Nehru, committed to an enunciated policy of nonalignment, politely but firmly, rebuffed Eisenhower’s offer. Also, in a most prescient fashion, Nehru predicted that these weapons would not be used to contain Communist expansion but instead would be used against India. Nehru’s prophecy was to come true shortly after his death in 1964. In September 1965 Pakistan chose to attack India in Kashmir using US-supplied tanks and aircraft. To the credit of the Johnson administration, it did impose an arms embargo on Pakistan. However, in an act of false even-handedness it also imposed similar sanctions on India, the clear-cut victim of Pakistani aggression. In the wake of the 1965 war, the United States focused its attention away from South Asia as it became increasingly involved in the prosecution of the Vietnam war. After a long hiatus of disengagement from the subcontinent, the Reagan administration once again chose to work with the scrofulous military regime of General Zia-ul-Haq in the aftermath of the Soviet invasion and occupation of Afghanistan. Once again, the bulk of the weaponry that General Zia sought and obtained, despite anemic Congressional questioning and oversight, had little or nothing to do with the prosecution of the covert war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Instead, much of it, especially F-16 combat aircraft, was acquired with the express purpose for use against India. The Indian political and diplomatic establishments protested vigorously to the United States, sought to reassure the Zia regime of its interest in assuaging Pakistan’s security dilemma and suggested alternative strategies for inducing a Soviet withdrawal. Their pleas were met with dismissal both in Washington DC and in Islamabad, and a significant arms transfer process to Pakistan was set in motion. In the aftermath of the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan, both journalistic and scholarly accounts have provided glimpses of the Pakistani military establishment’s complicity in the systematic diversion of military and economic assistance intended for the Afghan mujahideen. It is doubtful, given the level of secrecy that cloaks these matters, that a full accounting of the degree and extent of the malfeasances will ever surface. Suffice to say that even based upon Pakistani revelations significant sums were skimmed and with full official sanction. Accordingly, one is forced to wonder how differently the prosecution of the war might have evolved had the intended aid reached the mujahideen who so bravely took on the Soviet occupiers. Given this history of skullduggery, it is hardly surprising that once again the Musharraf regime stands accused of having pilfered funds that were intended for one purpose and used for another. Despite an abject failure to militarily defeat India in three wars since 1947-48, the Pakistani military establishment remains fixated on that illusory goal. Both the abject military defeat of 1971 which contributed to the break-up of the Pakistani state and the creation of Bangladesh, and the eventual climb down from the heights of Kargil in 1999 are attributed, not to flawed military strategies and organisational failures. Instead the disaster of 1971 is largely blamed on the putative perfidy of the Bengali-speaking population of then East Pakistan and the military defeat at Indian hands in Kargil to the putative meddling of the Clinton administration and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s supposed failure of nerve. These convenient rationalisations bolster the military establishments continued preoccupation with the pursuit of seemingly imaginative but ultimately flawed strategies to defeat an increasingly militarily powerful, economically robust and politically self-confident India. There is little hope in the foreseeable future, that the Pakistani military, left to its own devices, will mend its ways. Of course, Benazir Bhutto’s tragic assassination may force the military to focus its attention on matters of internal security and limit its preoccupation with India, at least for the foreseeable future. However, after the exigencies that her demise have unleashed have passed, they will, in all likelihood, revert to form. The roots of this malaise, alas are far too deep for any one event, however tragic, to correct. As the U.S. Congress considers yet another appropriations bill for Pakistan, the time is right to carefully ponder the infelicitous history of the Pakistani military’s many past and recent misdeeds. An American strategy that explicitly holds the military accountable for its choices and actions offers the best possible hope for changing its long-standing errant ways.

Sumit Ganguly is a Professor of Political Science and Director of Research of the Center on American and Global Security at Indiana University, Bloomington. 

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