Fighting to the End

by C Christine Fair

  The modern tribal system is laid out in Article 246 (“Tribal Areas”) of the current (1973) Constitution of Pakistan. Article 246 defines the tribal areas as including parts of Balochistan and what is now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa as well as the former princely states of Amb, Chitral, Dir, and Swat. These territories are further divided into the Provincially Administered Tribal Areas (PATA) of then-NWFP and Balochistan and the FATA. The PATA include districts of Chitral, Dir, and Swat, parts of Malakand, tribal areas adjoining the district of Mansehra, and the former princely state of Amb. The FATA include the seven agencies of Bajour, Orakzai, Mohmand, Khyber, Kurram, and North and South Waziristan as well as Tribal Areas adjoining Peshawar, Kohat, Bannu, and Dera Ismael Khan.

  The system enshrined in the constitution is designed to continue the colonial practice of containing the unruly tribals rather than to extend to them the rights and privileges of Pakistanis living in the settled areas (Ali 1999). Whereas the administration of the PATA of the NWFP (KP) and Balochistan takes place at the provincial level, administration of the FATA remains the responsibility of the federal government acting through the Governor of the NWFP (KP), who is appointed by the president of Pakistan (Khan 2005). The tension, since independence, in Afghanistan–Pakistan relations makes it unlikely that the federal government will relinquish control over the FATA in the foreseeable future.

  Until recently, every Pakistani regime has maintained that the FCR has “stood the test of time and pressure of destabilising forces generated by various elements in FATA as a result of having a long unmanned border with Afghanistan” (Ali 1999, 185–186). But Pakistan’s judicial system has challenged the FCR on numerous occasions. Supreme Court Justice A. R. Cornelius denounced the FCR as “obnoxious to all recognized modern principles governing the dispensation of justice” in a ruling in the case of Sumunder v. State (PLD 1954 FC 228) (Khan 2004). Following the promulgation of the 1956 constitution, the FCR was frequently challenged as repugnant to fundamental rights, with successive superior court judgments declaring provisions of the law inconsistent with fundamental rights and therefore void, such as Dosso v. State (PLD 1957 Quetta 9), Toti Khan v. DM Sibi (PLD 1957 Quetta 1), Abdul Akbar Khan v. DM Peshawar (PLD 1957 Peshawar100), Abdul Baqi v. Superintendent, Central Prisons, Machh (PLD 1957 Karachi 694), Khair Muhammad Khan v. Government of WP (PLD 1956 Lahore 668), and Malik Muhammad Usman v. State (PLD 1965 Lahore 229). But there has been no serious legal challenge to the FCR since the abrogation of the 1956 Constitution, despite the legislation’s incompatibility with international human rights principles and Pakistan’s current constitution (Khan 2004). The system endures today, even though it is “increasingly out of step with the reformist trends in the country at large” (White 2008, 228).

  While analysts often attribute the FCR’s endurance to the military’s quest for strategic depth, this assessment is not entirely fair. Musharraf did consider integrating the FATA into Pakistan’s ordinary governance structures by extending the geographical scope of some version of the Local Governance Ordinance of 2001 as well as of the Political Parties Act of 2002. But these reforms stalled despite the growing consensus that such change was needed (Shah 2012).

  In the years since 9/11, Pakistan’s security forces have been engaged in various military operations in the FATA as well as in the settled areas of the NWFP. In interviews conducted in August 2010, military personnel in Swat and South and North Waziristan expressed an acute interest in “mainstreaming” the FATA. They feared that without a serious effort to extend the full writ of Pakistani law to the FATA, the area would never be pacified. The army’s traditional method of managing its frontier—treating it as a security cordon to establish strategic depth in Afghanistan—has yielded an ironic set of outcomes: Pakistan has become a soft, penetrated state “where aliens of all stripes and colour could enter at will, seek refuge and indulge in unlawful activities” (Haq et al. 2005, 66).

  The previous civilian government, led by the beleaguered Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), has made important changes to the governance system in the FATA. First, on April 19, 2010, Pakistani president Asif Ali Zardari signed into law a constitutional amendment stipulating that the NWFP would henceforth be known as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. While this name change signaled a possible shift in how the state viewed the province, the new name also displays Islamabad’s wariness of Pakhtun aspirations. After all, Pakhtun nationalists had long called for an independent Pakhtunistan. For this reason, the province could not be named Pakhtunistan; “Khyber” was added to dampen the fears of non-Pakthuns who feared Pakhtun political domination of the province (Adeney 2012). And in August 2011, Zardari signed decrees amending the Frontier Crimes Regulation and extending the Political Parties Order of 2002 to the tribal areas (Shah 2012). The amendments to the FCR granted FATA residents the right to bail and established an appellate tribunal, which is meant to curtail the expansive powers of the political agents by creating a system for appealing judgments.

  One of the most interesting aspects of these reforms is that they were sold as a part of Pakistan’s military struggle against militants in the region; in fact, it is inconceivable that such changes could go forward without the explicit approval of the Pakistan Army. Maqbool Wazir, writing in Hilal, explains that “military operations do not deal with the root causes of the militancy. Fortunately, there is widespread recognition of the need for FATA reforms across the political parties of the country [all have] unanimously agreed that legal and political reforms are the sole solution to the ongoing militancy in FATA. Political reforms should be part of the war strategy” (Wazir 2011, 10). At the time of writing, it remains too early to tell whether these decrees mark the start of meaningful reform or whether Zardari’s efforts will go the way of Musharraf’s. Either way, it appears that the drive to bring the FATA into the mainstream constitutional order will be driven by the same dictates that for so long kept them out: the demands of security.

  Implications: Is the Past Prologue for Afghanistan and the Frontier?

  The threat from the western frontier and beyond long concerned British officials during the Raj. In an effort to contend with those threats, the British alternated between aggressive forward policies and indirect management approaches associated with the close border policy. The Pakistan Army adopted this aspect of British strategic culture and adapted British instruments to prosecute these varied policies. Like the British Army in India, the Pakistan Army has pursued aggressive forward policies that have involved direct intervention in Afghanistan as well as policies that more closely resemble that of the close border policy, whereby the army focuses its attention on its own territory. While initially Pakistani apprehensions about Afghanistan were exacerbated by the Soviet Union, over time India displaced the Soviet Union as a source of insecurity. Pakistan has long worried that if India had a base in Afghanistan it could work on its own or with Afghans to disturb Pakistan’s western border.

  It is important to understand Pakistan’s current options in Afghanistan within the historical framework presented here. Since 9/11, it has become apparent that Pakistan, despite its continued denials, long ago resumed its support for Islamist proxies such as Mullah Omar’s Afghan Taliban and networks such as that run by Jalaluddin Haqqani (Mullen 2011; Rassler and Brown 2011). Pakistan’s continued investment in these proxies ostensibly stems from the army’s desire to restrict the ability of India to operate in Afghanistan. However, while Pakistani military personnel are wont to accuse India of any number of nefarious activities, ranging from support for Baloch insurgents and terrorists in FATA to bombing targets deep within Pakistan, they also deny that Pakistan seeks strategic depth.

  These denials have persuaded some analysts that Pakistani thinking on this issue has evolved. Most notably, Shuja Nawaz, citing Pakistan’s former army chief Kayani, with whom he enjoys close ties, wrote that Kayani “sees Afghanistan offering Pakistan a different kind of ‘strategic depth’: through its stability rather than as a client state or a haven for Pakistan
i forces should India successfully invade Pakistan” (Nawaz 2010, 16). Nawaz cites Kayani as saying that “we want to have strategic depth in Afghanistan, but that does not imply controlling it. … If we have a peaceful, stable and friendly Afghanistan, automatically we will have our strategic depth because our western border will be secure, and we will not be looking at two fronts” (16). Nawaz believes that Kayani’s statement represents a “major shift in strategic thinking inside army headquarters in Pakistan from a view that was born in the minds of [its] military leadership in the late 1980s and has continued to be cited erroneously as a core tenet of Pakistan’s military strategy” (ibid.).

  Unfortunately, Nawaz’s assessment is inconsistent with the various meanings of strategic depth, whether one considers its history since its introduction in the eighteenth century or its modern incarnations in post-Partition Pakistan. Even if one accepts Kayani’s claims at face value—despite the abundant evidence to the contrary, including Pakistan’s ongoing support for Islamist militants in Afghanistan—what he articulated is not a new notion of strategic depth. In fact, the aforementioned quote is a restatement of the hoary close border policy, which focuses resources inward but which does not involve simply letting Afghanistan pursue its own course free of Pakistani influence. Rather, Kayani is suggesting that Pakistan would prefer to move away from the resource-intensive forward policy it has pursued since 1947 and toward a more conservative approach. Thus, even if Kayani is speaking honestly, his words suggest merely that he endorses different tactics for pursuing strategic depth rather than wishing to abandon that goal.

  Furthermore, it is my view that the enduring threats emanating from Afghanistan do not augur well for Pakistan’s ability to revert to a close border policy. In fact, it would be hard to argue that Pakistan is not unnerved by the growth of India’s influence in Afghanistan over the past 10 years. Moreover, in this same period India has sustained steady economic growth and concomitant defense modernization. Equally important, Pakistan’s military and citizenry believe that when the United States leaves Afghanistan it will hand the keys over to India. Brig. (Retd.) Usman Saeed (2012), writing in Hilal, captures this view:

  India has largely succeeded in convincing US and allies of her ability to fill the power vacuum [in Afghanistan] while Russia and China are unlikely to be US choice to fill the space despite the fact that both may be keen play positive role in rebuilding Afghanistan. … Indian’s [sic] recent change in posture from confrontation to reconciliation with Pakistan in no way indicates her abandonment of policy of cultural, political and economic domination of the region backed by superior military capability. … Her … infrastructure projects as well as modernisation and indoctrination of Afghan Army to undertake combat operations at the operational and tactical level with assistance of Indian Military Command will become dilemma to our sovereignty (15).

  One can question some of Saeed’s assertions (e.g., concerning Indian training of the Afghan Army), but, given that his view is more common than the position taken by Kayani, we should be skeptical of Pakistani claims to prefer a closed border policy vis-à-vis Afghanistan.

  Where we may expect slow but steady changes—provided that there is not another exogenous shock like the events of 9/11—is in the legal status of FATA and the reform, if not repeal, of the FCR. As noted already, military personnel have long since become averse to the FCR, even if they are at a loss about how to reform it. During my interviews with Pakistani military officials in February 2004, I learned that the army had been attempting, with some success, to undermine the FCR but had no alternative to put in its place. Thus, the worst of all options currently prevails: the FCR no longer serves its original purpose of ensuring law and order, but transitioning to a new system will be a lengthy process. With an active insurgency in the FATA and other Pakhtun areas, there is an appetite for immediate, temporary fixes rather than long-term solutions (Cheema and Nuri 2005; Haq et al. 2005; University of Peshawar, Area Study Centre 2004). Despite growing political and even public support for FCR reform, the army and its equities will dictate the fate of FATA and its second-class citizens.

  CHAPTER 6

  India under the Pakistan Army’s Gaze

  India and Pakistan have fought numerous wars (in 1947–1948, 1965, 1971, and 1999) and have endured numerous crises (in 1987, 1990, and 2001–2002, among others) that have brought them to the brink of war (Chari et al. 2001; Ganguly 2001). Both countries accuse the other of supporting terrorist and insurgent movements within their respective states: Pakistan accuses India of supporting Baloch, Pakhtun, and Sindhi nationalists as well as terrorist campaigns throughout Pakistan; India accuses Pakistan of supporting ethno-nationalist and religious-nationalist insurgencies in the Punjab, Kashmir, and the restive northeast as well as many Islamist terrorist attacks throughout India. In this chapter I do not intend to rehearse the scholarly literature on these wars and crises but rather to exposit how Pakistan’s defense literature depicts India in the retelling of the two countries’ various conflicts. Of course, doing so requires providing at least a thumbnail sketch of these conflicts so that the important points of divergence in Pakistani accounts can be made clear.

  Several dominant themes and narrative tropes consistently recur across the decades of defense literature examined during the course of this research, some of which have been hinted at in previous chapters. The first is the persistent claim that India does not accept either Pakistan or the two-nation theory on which Pakistan was founded. Second, and related to the first, is India’s supposed aspirations to regional hegemony and the belief that Pakistan alone stands between India and this goal. This is not a new phenomenon: Pakistani defense writers began articulating the idea of an Indian hegemon in the early 1960s, if not earlier. But recent events, such as the US–Indian civilian nuclear deal and other forms of defense and technical cooperation, provide an ex post facto legitimization of this argument. An important and related theme is the assertion that India began every war between India and Pakistan. As I argued in Chapter 4, this claim is important both to sustaining the narrative of Pakistani victimization by Indian aggression and justifying Pakistan’s wars with India as defensive jihad. A fourth, and at first blush somewhat perplexing, theme is that India is not the power that it or others increasingly see it to be. Sometimes India’s strength is downplayed because it is Hindu; at other times India is denigrated because its causes are not just. Finally, India is posited as the root of Pakistan’s domestic insecurity. This allows Pakistan’s military to retain a conventional, India-focused orientation even while it grapples with an array of internal security challenges that would ordinarily be the responsibility of police or other law enforcement organizations.

  In this chapter, I provide a brief overview of the numerous crises and wars the two states have weathered. I next provide an exposition of the narrative tropes just detailed, mobilizing the defense literature as its primary evidentiary base. I conclude with with a reflection on how the Pakistan Army has constructed India as the enemy and what implications this image of India has for the Pakistan Army’s strategic culture and its planning for the Indian threat.

  Multiple Crises and Four Wars

  India and Pakistan came to brink of war at least three times: during the Brasstacks Crisis of 1986–1987; during the Compound Crisis of 1990; and during the Twin Peaks Crisis of 2001–2002. The Brasstacks Crisis began to unfold with the launch of a yearlong Indian military exercise, named Operation Brasstacks. It was unprecedented in scale and scope and was undertaken against the backdrop of several complicating factors. First, India and Pakistan had been exchanging fire in Siachen since 1984, when India seized undemarcated territory on the high-altitude Himalayan glacier south of the Chinese border. Second, both countries were experiencing domestic unrest at the time of the exercise. India was embroiled in a bloody insurgency waged by Sikh separatists in the Punjab. India accused Pakistan of supporting the insurgents, who were seeking a separate Sikh state to be named either Sikhistan
or Khalistan. Pakistan, for its part, accused India of supporting ethnic militants in Sindh. Third, at that time the United States was deeply involved in South Asia, where it was working with Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and others to eject the Soviet Union from Afghanistan. Pakistan understood the Indian exercise as an expression of the capability to deter Pakistani adventurism in Punjab, if not a prelude to war, and responded with important mobilizations of its own forces in the Pakistani Punjab. Pakistan was no doubt on tenterhooks: in 1982, 1984, and mid-1985, Pakistan had feared that India or Israel was planning to strike its nuclear facilities (Chari et al. 2001). The acute phase of the crisis lasted three months in early 1987.

  While the confrontation itself was not overtly nuclear, shortly after its denouement, Abdul Qadeer Khan (a notorious personality in Pakistan’s nuclear program who was later linked to an extensive nuclear black market operation) told Kuldip Nayar, a prominent Indian journalist, that Pakistan, if pressed, could develop a nuclear weapon. Because the message was sent after the confrontation ended, it did not directly influence key decisions in India, and officials there claim that they discounted the comments because of the way the message was delivered. India’s dismissals are curious, however, since “Pakistan had begun nuclear signaling of one sort or another as early as 1984” (Chari et al. 2001, 67). While it did not escalate to war, Brasstacks “helped accelerate India’s and Pakistan’s nuclear programs” by convincing both states of the need for a nuclear deterrent (39).

  The second major scuffle, which some analysts refer to as the Compound Crisis of 1990, took place amid the breakup of the Soviet Union and America’s process of disengagement from South Asia. In the early months of 1990, India and Pakistan seemed to be preparing for war, with each accusing the other of supporting insurgent activity. In August 1989, India had introduced first paramilitary and then military forces into Kashmir and Punjab to counter what India believed to be Pakistan-backed ethnic insurgencies in those states. In December of the same year Pakistan began the largest ever military exercise in the Punjab. Known as Zarb-e-Momin, it was a response to India’s Brasstacks Operation. As the number of military forces in the border area mounted, India continued to criticize Pakistan for supporting the militants in Kashmir, while Pakistan expressed its outrage over India’s crackdown there, renewed its calls for a plebiscite, and denied that it was providing anything but political and diplomatic support to militants in India. Both Indian and Pakistani forces deployed along the border were on high alert. New Delhi and Islamabad participated in a flurry of diplomatic exchanges in an attempt to defuse the crisis, and the US ambassadors to both capitals became involved in trying to prevent an all-out war. In mid-May, Washington dispatched a high-level delegation led by Deputy National Security Advisor Bob Gates (Chari et al. 2001).