Fighting to the End

by C Christine Fair

  In recent years, some analysts and policymakers have suggested that should the United States offer Pakistan a conditions-based civilian nuclear deal for Pakistan, the United States could at least position itself to see whether change is possible in Pakistan (Cohen 2013; Fair 2010b; Kimball 2010; Riedel 2012). Is it possible that Pakistan would abandon its nuclear jihad for such a deal? It is difficult to say. Given Pakistan’s performance in the global War on Terror, there would be little appetite among American policymakers for such an innovation, and it would face stiff opposition from entrenched interest groups opposed to nuclear proliferation generally and Pakistan in particular. Former Pakistani ambassador to the United States Husain Haqqani agrees. In April 2013, he wrote to me and explained that he pursued a political solution whereby Pakistan secured nuclear legitimacy in return for shutting down jihad. However, Haqqani found no interest in the Pakistan Army, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), or the American administration.1

  What if Pakistan represents that rare case of a purely greedy state (Glaser 2010), which is revisionist because it wants to increase its prestige or spread its political ideology or religion, even when doing so is not strictly speaking needed to preserve the state’s security or, worse, when doing so puts at risk the integrity or even viability of the state? The current and past US policy approaches to Pakistan have assumed that Pakistan is a state that is motivated largely by security concerns that can be satisfied with some territorial concession and thus capable of abandoning its revisionism with the appropriate allurements. But what if Pakistan is a purely greedy state as the evidence I present intimates? If so, then any policy of appeasement may in fact aggravate the problems that Pakistan poses to regional and international security. If Pakistan is a purely greedy state, driven by ideological motives, then appeasement is in fact the more dangerous course of policy prescription.

  This is exactly the conclusion that I hope readers will draw from my work here. Pakistan may have legitimate security concerns, but at the root of its revisionism is not security but rather deep ideological commitments that predate the independence of the state. This suggests that those who are interested in Pakistan and its destabilizing impact on regional and international security must thus adopt an attitude of sober realism about the possible futures for Pakistan and the region it threatens. In the absence of evidence that any existing approach can persuade Pakistan to abandon its most dangerous policies, it is time to accept the likely fact that Pakistan will continue to pursue policies that undermine American interests in the region. For India, the implications of this conclusion are stark: the Pakistan Army will continue to seek to weaken India by any means possible, even though such means are inherently risky. In the army’s eyes, any other course would spell true defeat. The United States and its partners should seriously consider what it means to contain the threats that emanate from Pakistan, if not Pakistan itself. And no matter which choices the United States considers, Pakistan will no doubt deliberate its options as it comes into increasing conflict with the international community.

  APPENDIX

  Map A.1 Afghanistan-Pakistan Border. Source: Used with permission from the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/afghanistan.html

  Map A.2 Afghanistan-Pakistan: Central Border Area. Source: Used with permission from the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/middle_east_and_asia/txu-oclc-308991615-afghan_pakistan_2008.jpg

  Map A.3 Kashmir region. Source: Used with permission from the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/middle_east_and_asia/kashmir_disputed_2003.jpg

  Map A.4 Pakistan, showing border areas with Afghanistan and India. Source: Used with permission from the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/middle_east_and_asia/txu-pclmaps-oclc-607860461-pakistan_rel-2009.jpg

  Map A.5 Afghanistan administrative divisions. Source: Used with permission from the Perry-Castañeda Library Map Collection, http://www.lib.utexas.edu/maps/middle_east_and_asia/txu-oclc-309296021-afghanistan_admin_2008.jpg

  NOTES

  Chapter 1

  1. Whereas some scholars may use the term revisionist with respect to the territorial status quo, I use it in a more general sense to denote a state’s desire not only to change borders but also to alter political orders.

  2. For a more nuanced comparison of India and Pakistan’s conventional military balance and capabilities, see Tellis (1997) and Gill (2005). India’s conventional superiority would begin to confer advantages only as the length of the conflict stretched out into weeks. In a short war along the Indo-Pakistan border, India and Pakistan would be relatively well-matched–one more reason why Pakistan is keen to ensure that any war between the two countries remains limited. As India continues to modernize, however, it may well disturb this relative balance of forces.

  3. Like many databases, the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies is not always clear about what sorts of attacks are tallied and what criteria are used to code different kinds of violence. These numbers are taken from two of their annual reports from 2008 and 2011. In 2011, they reported 7,107 killed; in 2010, 10,003; in 2009, 12,632; in 2008, 7,997; in 2007, 3,448; in 2006, 907; and in 2005, 216, for a total of 42,310. The University of Maryland’s (2012) Global Terrorism Database (GTD) provides a far lower figure: it records 6,443 deaths between 2001 and 2010 caused by violent acts that were “aimed at attaining a political, economic, religious, or social goal.” GTD surely undercounts given the sources from which it codes its incidents, and thus this number represents a low estimate of actual fatalities due to political violence (National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism 2012).

  4. Pakistan’s army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, began emphasizing water as a source of conflict between India and Pakistan only as recently as 2010 (see, e.g., Almeida 2010). For the most part, Pakistan has not framed its dispute with India over Kashmir in terms of water security even though scholars of hydro-politics fear that the dispute may well evolve as such in the future. Pakistan may not have done so because the Indus Water Treaty of 1960 has more or less functioned to resolve conflicts over the Indus waters. However, that treaty has come under considerable strain in recent years (Uprety and Salmon 2011; Wirsing 2007).

  5. Pakistan may well exemplify what political scientist Charles L. Glaser (2010, 5) calls “a greedy state,” which he defines as “fundamentally dissatisfied with the status quo, desiring additional territory even when it is not required for security. These nonsecurity goals result in a fundamental conflict of interests that makes competition the only strategy with which a greedy state can achieve its goals.” In the case of Pakistan, it seeks not only to change the territorial status quo but also to deny India’s rise in South Asia and beyond and insists upon being treated as India’s equal.

  6. The terms Pashtun, Pakhtun, and Pathan generally refer to the same ethnic group of Pashto-speaking peoples.

  7. Islamism refers to movements and ideologies that draw on “Islamic referents—terms, symbols and events taken from the Islamic tradition—in order to articulate a distinctly political agenda (hence the expression ‘political Islam,’ which is usually seen as synonymous with Islamism). … Islamism. … is a form of instrumentalization of Islam by individuals, groups and organizations that pursue political objectives” (Denoeux 2002, 61).

  8. Nasr (2001, 3) articulates the process of Islamization as ensconcing “Islamic norms, symbols and rhetoric in the public sphere, and in the process, it has had a notable impact on politics, policy making, law and social relations.”

  Chapter 2

  1. This chapter draws from and synthesizes my previously published work (Fair 2004a, 2004b, 2004c, 2009a, 2011a, 2011b).

  2. I want to emphasize at the outset that I approach this puzzle principally as a scholar of South Asian languages and civilizations who is trained to take texts as objects of study as well as the contexts of their production and consumpti
on. I am aware that this project may be germane to ongoing debates among scholars of international relations; however, it is not my intent to inveigh upon these arguments directly. In undertaking this effort, I expect that my scholarly contribution will be largely empirical and aimed narrowly at explaining why Pakistan’s army behaves as it does.

  3. Whereas some scholars may use the term revisionist with respect to the territorial status quo, I use this term in a more general sense to denote a state’s desire not only to change borders but also to alter political orders.

  4. An enduring rivalry is characterized as “conflicts between two or more states [that] last more than two decades with several militarized inter-state disputes punctuating the relationship” (Paul 2005, 3).

  5. The first nonproliferation provision to affect Pakistan was Section 101 of the Arms Export Control Act, which was itself an expanded version of Section 669 of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961. “This provision forbids aid to countries that acquire nuclear enrichment facilities that are not under the inspection and safeguards system of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA). The Carter Administration, in April 1979, invoked Section 669 and suspended aid to Pakistan after intelligence information confirmed that Pakistan was building a secret uranium enrichment facility” (Cronin 1996, n.p.).

  6. This concept is detailed in Chapter 8. Existential deterrence was introduced by McGeorge Bundy and implies that under the conditions of opacity and uncertainty Pakistan and India make their mutual deterrence calculation not upon “relative capabilities and strategic doctrines” but rather “on the shared realization that each side is nuclear-capable, and thus any outbreak of conflict might lead to a nuclear war” (Kumar 2007, 240–241).

  7. Game rationality derives from the work of Thomas Schelling (1960) and posits that there is an ahistorical and acultural, universal strategic calculus that guides a rational player’s decision-making based on available information. Game rationality implies that multiple actors would make the same decision using this universal cost-benefit calculus and the same information to attain a stated objective.

  8. A debate is ongoing over which theory of international relations—realism, classical realism, neoclassical realism, modern realism, and so on—best addresses the question of why revisionist states are revisionist. However, much of this debate is fought on epistemological and methodological grounds. Curiously, scholars in this literature generally do not attempt to explain why a state remains revisionist (see different arguments advanced by Glaser 2010; Jervis 1999; Mearsheimer 2001; Rynning and Ringsmose 2008; Schweller 1994; Taliaferro 2000–01; Waltz 1979).

  9. Zionts (2006) notes that some scholars such as Davidson (2002) attempt to identify the preferences of domestic and external factors as necessary but insufficient conditions for revisionism, which ultimately materialize when international opportunity structures arise. However, he also notes that neoclassical realism lacks “an explanation of revisionisms’ persistence. Though this may seem unnecessary under the intuition that revisionism ends simply when the conditions for its origins disappear, the world is not so symmetrical” (632).

  10. One anonymous reviewer objected to the use of the terms reasonable and unreasonable revisionism because the reviewer thought that it implied some normative judgment. Zionts (2006) is making this assessment based not on a normative evaluation of the goal to be achieved but rather on the feasibility of achieving this goal within a threshold of acceptable costs.

  11. Between October 1999 and August 2008, Musharraf served first as the chief executive and later as the president of Pakistan. Under political pressure, he retired his uniform when he resigned as the chief of army staff in November 2007. However, he remained president until fresh presidential elections were held in August 2008. It was constitutionally illegal for Musharraf to hold both posts of president and army chief, and doing so was a violation of the oath he took when he became an officer in the army.

  12. Johnston (1995b) is adamant that strategic culture must offer up an ordered set of preferences rather than simply a menu of options for two reasons. First, it is possible that there would be enough variation in a state’s menu of preferences that they would overlap with those of other states. Second, he believes that insisting upon a ranked order of preference should more easily give way to explicit predictions about state behavior than simply a menu of unranked options (Johnston 1995b, 47–48).

  13. There have been several unsuccessful coups, however. The first was the so-called Rawalpindi Conspiracy of 1949 led by Maj. Gen. Akbar Khan and left-wing activists against the government of Liaqat Ali Khan. (Khan conceived of the tribal invasion of Kashmir which precipitated by the 1947–48 war.) The second occurred in 1980, when Maj. Gen. Tajammul Hussain Malik led a plot to assassinate Zia-ul-Haq. The third occurred in 1995, when Maj. Gen. Zahirul Islam Abassi (an Islamist) led an unsuccessful coup against Benazir Bhutto along with several Islamist militants.

  14. This section draws from Fair (2014).

  15. Cohen (1984) reported that at the time of his research in the late 1970s and early 1980s there were about 15,000 applicants for the same number of slots (54).

  16. According to Rahman:

  The new sepoy continues his military training as best he can and towards the end of four years service he has the option of staying on for a full fifteen years pensionable service or of going on to the reserve for eleven years. … The normal career pattern of a member of the other ranks ensures that a bright and hardworking young man can rise in the ranks to a havildar and, if sufficiently qualified, can become a Junior Commissioned Officer. At each state he has to pass tests or courses: sepoy to lance naik, lance naik to naik, and naik to havildar. … Junior Commissioned Officers rise from the ranks and they command platoons, some thirty men in an infantry battalion. They are selected after they have qualified technically and have shown that they have the requisite educational background. In battalions where there are different class compositions they have to await a vacancy in their class. Normally a man reaches the rank of Junior Commissioned Officer after some twenty years of service, which means he is bordering on forty years of age. … (1976, 66–68).

  Once officers pass through the PMA, which takes two years, they complete their baccalaureate. The officer then completes other basic courses before joining his regiment. He must pass exams to be promoted from the rank of lieutenant to captain and again to rise to the rank of major. The most ambitious officers may be selected for the staff college in Quetta; fewer still will proceed to do the War Course at the National Defence College, which only a “small band of officers” complete (71–72).

  17. Col. John H. Gill, comments on an earlier draft of this volume, March 2013. See also Cohen (1984) and Schofield (2011).

  18. I have personally experienced such treatment. Prior to May 2011, I received professional treatment from the Pakistan Army, which facilitated my travel to South Waziristan in July 2010 and granted me access to numerous senior Pakistani military and intelligence officials. The military and intelligence agencies also provided me with several volumes of the Pakistan Army Green Book. These same agencies became nonplussed when they concluded that, despite having provided me with “special access,” I “treated them unfairly” in my writings. Securing a visa since then has been inordinately difficult.

  19. In my experience, Pakistan Army officers—much more so than US army personnel—are extremely deferential to senior leadership even after retirement. It is rare to see junior officers disagreeing with their seniors even when these senior officers have long left the force. Necessarily, this deference stifles debate when junior officers have a different point of view and their seniors are present.

  20. South Asia Foreign Area Officers in the US Army such as Gill suspect that this may well have to do with a “fear of embarrassment” should accurate assessments of the army’s performance be made public (Gill review of this manuscript, March 2013). Gill is most certainly correct. When civilians have authored critical evaluations o
f military performance, the army seeks to suppress these reports. For example, the Hamoodur Rehman Commission Report into the causes and consequences of the 1971 war was kept from the public until 2001. The most recent report from the government-formed commission to understand the circumstances allowing bin Laden to live in the army town for years and the failure of the military to respond to the US unilateral raid on his sanctuary was made public only when it was leaked to Al Jazeera. The report was scathing of the military and the ISI although it ultimately concluded that the military and intelligence agencies were incompetent rather than complicit.

  Chapter 3

  1. While the partition of Bengal was also marked by ethnic cleansing and communal violence, it was significantly less intense than what occurred in the Punjab (Brass 2003).

  2. The Congress was founded in Bombay (now Mumbai) in December 1885 by a group of roughly 70 male members of the westernized Indian elite, and in its early years the party made no effort to become more inclusive. Instead, the Congress focused on the “expansion of [the] elective principle in the legislative councils and greater Indianization of the administration. On the economic front, [it] developed a powerful critique of the whole gamut of colonial policies—the high land-revenue demand contributing to famines, the drain of wealth leading to general impoverishment and the use of indentured labour …” (Bose and Jalal 2004, 94).

  3. Jinnah was the leader of the Muslim League from 1913 until Pakistan’s independence on August 14, 1947. He became Pakistan’s first governor general from August 14, 1947, until his death on September 11, 1948.