by Shuja Nawaz
The US needs to weave a fresh strategy for the region, with a better and more active policy framework for bringing the countries of Greater South Asia together. Apart from introducing stability and growth for the countries of the region and reducing the possibility of intra-regional conflicts, it could help create a larger market than China for American and European goods and services and open up its market for Pakistani exports at more reasonable tariff rates. In the process, it could provide in an integrated South Asian market, a global counterweight to the rapid rise of China as the dominant power in Asia. After all, for the first time in modern history, it has close relations with Afghanistan, Pakistan and India. It can and should be able to maintain a balance between them and assist actively in bringing them together rather than sit passively on the sidelines of their wasteful regional conflicts. It also needs to reopen ties to Iran and Central Asia and knit them back into the fabric of traditional South Asia, a natural and historically connected region of the world, home to great empires. The absence of conflict in the region would also create conditions for domestic and foreign investments in social and scientific sectors.
The US must avoid dividing the Muslim World into Arabs and non-Arabs or Shia and Sunni. And increasingly, it must speak to and for the people of the countries that it befriends, so it is not seen as beholden to or linked with despots and ruling bigots. Washington must come back to being that Shining City on the Hill that most Americans aspire to create and most non-Americans see when they conjure up the American Dream. Not the profit-seeking fickle ‘friend’ of dictators that the poor and dispossessed people of the Third World often see in action in their countries.
It is against this background that I undertook to write this new book, as a follow-up to Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army, and the Wars Within, when I stepped aside in 2014 as the founding director of the South Asia Center of the Atlantic Council in Washington DC. My aim was to help focus attention on key events and personalities over 2008–19 and to use them to illustrate the challenges facing both the US and Pakistan, as well as the opportunities that await their people. I have used first-hand interviews, archival research and contemporaneous notes from conversations with key players in the region and in the US over this period to recount recent history as well as shed light on background events that influenced it.
In some ways, this book is a follow-up to my earlier Crossed Swords, since continuing wars in the region and the powerful role of the military remain key parts of the narrative. Without understanding these key ingredients, we cannot understand the potential solutions. With the removal of Benazir Bhutto and Pervez Musharraf from the political scene, the focus shifted not just on their political successors but also on the military chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, and his director general of the Inter-Services Intelligence (DG-ISI), Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, and their successors. The extraordinary effect of these military leaders on the Pakistan Army as well as on the US–Pakistan relationship helps us understand the deeper issues in this misalliance as well as the persistent civil–military divide inside Pakistan.
This book starts by tracing the sorry end of the military rule of Gen. Pervez Musharraf and his controlled democracy that had been supported by the US, since it needed Musharraf ’s help in invading Afghanistan. Simultaneously, it sheds light on some of the background machinations inside Pakistan and the involvement of the US and the UK in the rehabilitation of Pakistani political leaders, such as Benazir Bhutto and Mian Muhammad Nawaz Sharif, in order to bring them back to Pakistan. It then delves into the internal battles raging inside Pakistan and the gradual deterioration of the US–Pakistan relationship during the two terms of President Barack Obama, while focusing on the massive changes that have occurred in the Pakistani Army, a key institution of Pakistan today. I chose to spend more time looking at the watershed year of 2011 when the US–Pakistan relationship began careening out of control. That single, most horrible year captures the essence of the disconnect between these so-called ‘allies’.
During the period 2008–18, the US chose to continue to deal with the powerful Pakistani military as its preferred and main interlocutor, despite the emergence of a fledgling democracy in Pakistan. Meanwhile, both Pakistan and the Pakistani military were undergoing rapid and deep-seated changes, in response to the conflicts raging on its eastern and western borders, along with the rise of Islamist and ethnic militancy and terrorism inside the Pakistani heartland. Today the Pakistan military is better equipped for irregular warfare than at any time in its history, even while it retains its advanced nuclear weaponry.
America failed Pakistan by relying too much on its military partners in Pakistan and mollycoddling the corrupt civilian leadership. It also failed the Pakistani people by ignoring them in the main—as much as Pakistani leaders, civil and military, failed to recognize the centrality of their own youthful and highly urbanized population to the future strength and stability of their country. The arrival of President Donald Trump in 2017 brought with it a new muscular US foreign policy and a short-sighted view of regional relationships. Hence, the US risks losing not just the war in Afghanistan and peace in South Asia, but also losing Pakistan as a potential friend in stabilizing the Middle East. All the more reason to understand how things reached this pass.
The election of a political maverick, Imran Khan, as prime minister, with a broad national base for his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf Party (PTI), offers an opportunity to recast the system of government inside Pakistan as an Islamic welfare state. But, his strength in the national assembly will be countered by the composition of the senate that is still dominated by recalcitrant opposition parties. And the shadow and suspicions of the military looms large over the civilian government despite their apparent entente. This mistrust can only be removed by active and frank discussions amongst the two, and good governance by the civilians, which will inoculate them against the military’s interference. How the new government handles relations with militant Islamists will shape domestic and external views of Pakistan and its ability to operate effectively on the regional and global stage. Prime Minister Khan has been viewed with suspicion by the West for his own Islamist tendencies and rhetoric, as well as his ties to the military establishment. He brought to government a reputation for probity, and, unlike other politicians, appeared to be free of the taint of corruption. How he conducts his government will shape his ability to create a Big Tent coalition of political forces in Pakistan that can lay the foundation for a viable and flourishing polity and economy, and eventually as a counter-weight to the military.
Since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, a number of important books have tried to explain decision making in Washington DC (including insider accounts by Bob Woodward and former officials of the Bush and Obama administrations), and the role of the US military and intelligence services. Among others, Steve Coll’s penetrating Directorate S,5 a follow-up to his seminal Ghost Wars,6 focused on the Pakistani ISI, but also showed how the war was badly conducted on the ground, and included other micro-level examinations of the losing war inside Afghanistan. Bob Woodward’s books on the Obama and Trump presidencies provide an insight into decision making in the White House.
But, the US–Pakistan relationship and especially the massive changes that occurred inside the Pakistani military and civil society during this period have not been adequately explained or understood from the perspective of those who were involved in making key decisions on both sides of this sensitive bilateral relationship. I had an opportunity to observe all this from my perch at the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center, and interacted with US, NATO, UK, Afghan and Pakistani civil and military officials, politicians and civil society groups, as an observer, adviser and commentator. Hence this book.
For those who know me, this will not be news: I belong to an old military family and a warrior clan, the Janjua Rajputs, and take pride in my heritage. I respect all those who wear the uniform for their desire and willingness to serve and protect their homeland agains
t all enemies. But I do not support the military as a substitute for civil government. Nor do I favour the politicization of the military, in Pakistan and the US, both. At the same time, I take seriously my responsibility, as an observer and commentator, to cast light on the strengths and weaknesses of the militaries in both countries, and the political systems that they serve, so that they can be improved. It is important that informed observers continue to tell truth to power in Pakistan and not be seen as traitors. Constructive criticism will help Pakistan improve itself, so its narrative can be based on verifiable reality.
In 2008, I began working on the events that led to The Battle for Pakistan as a Pakistani citizens and ended it as an American. I wrote this as much as an American as a Pakistani. Dedicated to the well-being of both countries. My hope is that that this book will help spark a fresh debate in Washington and Islamabad about what is possible to make the dream of Pakistan a reality and make this relationship a long-lasting one so that they are not condemned to re-live their mistakes. America must not abandon the region again, nor write off Pakistan. For its part, Pakistan needs to build trust and more open economic relationships with its neighbours. Mark Twain is said to have famously quipped: ‘History does not repeat itself but it sometimes rhymes.’ I pray that this recent history of the US–Pakistan relationship can help bring both my homelands together.
Shuja Nawaz
Alexandria, VA
1
The Revenge of Democracy?
‘Democracy substitutes election by the incompetent many for appointment by the corrupt few.’
—George Bernard Shaw, Maxims for Revolutionists
Ambitious Pakistani politicians have made frequent pilgrimages to Washington DC thinking that the path to government in Islamabad goes through this ‘City of Magnificent Intentions’. 1 In recent decades, ancillary pilgrimages meandered through Saudi Arabia, China and the UK too. As President Pervez Musharraf ’s political orbit turned to its perigee, Nawaz Sharif headed from his exile in Saudi Arabia to London under an elaborate scheme for national reconciliation, a fig leaf for the transfer of power that was becoming inevitable. The aim was to absolve his major political opponents, former prime ministers Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto, of all legal cases against them or previous convictions under his rule, to allow them to return to Pakistani politics. Musharraf had begun digging a political hole for himself by taking on civil society and the legal community. He refused to recognize the political realities of the opposition to his long stay in power. Meanwhile, the Opposition had begun coalescing. In London, a coalition of sorts was cobbled together by Sharif and other political leaders, including Benazir Bhutto, under the rubric of a Charter of Democracy, an impressively long document that encompassed all the issues that they could collectively agree upon and that they hoped would prevent a recrudescence of military dictatorship in Pakistan and preserve their own fiefdoms. 2 The Charter made many promises to the people of Pakistan for improving governance, providing, in effect, benchmarks for a report card on the performance of whichever political party inherited power after Musharraf ’s departure.
But, Pakistan, like many other struggling former states once governed by colonial Britain, suffers from the same disease of empty rhetoric and unfilled promises, arising out of the degradation of public institutions and absence of good governance. The talk by the political class was of democracy. Its actions veered towards autocracy, kleptocracy and dictatorship, both civil and military. Governments tended to accumulate whatever power they could, and if they were military governments, they had little faith in the speed and efficacy of the democratic process. Almost as a rule, civilian governments that succeeded military ones tended to acquire all the coercive powers of the state of the regimes they upended, and resorted to non-democratic means to retain and consolidate their control. All the instruments of power that they decried in military rule, such as misuse of intelligence agencies and coercion, were employed to pressure and constrain opponents. Over time, civilian successor governments began to resemble their autocratic predecessors. But their rhetoric relied heavily on the lexicon of democracy.
Benazir Bhutto arrived in Washington DC in September 2007, connecting with her ‘Washington family’ of retired officials and Pakistanis in exile who provided her financial, political and logistical support. Among the many former officials who flocked to her support were Judge William Webster, a former attorney general, and director of the CIA. She also had a small but effective group of expatriate Pakistanis and Pakistani Americans who provided her continuous information and support within the Beltway. Her friend and former official lobbyist for the government of Pakistan, Mark Siegel, used his knowledge of the Hill to link her with key members of the Congress. The media loved her, seeing her as a modern Muslim woman who lived comfortably in her two worlds and spoke the language of the West with ease. She was also well regarded on Capitol Hill, especially as a counterpoint to President Musharraf who was losing his lustre as a teammate of President George W. Bush in the Global War on Terror. There, she had a very crowded and sympathetic audience on 26 September 2007, as she declared her intention to return to Pakistan in October. Terming Pakistan a ‘petri dish of the international extremist movement’, she suggested that fighting the Taliban and Al-Qaeda ‘requires a national effort that can only flow from legitimate elections’. 3 The malleable nature of Pakistan’s legal system was evident a few days later as the Supreme Court allowed President Musharraf to run for re-election despite holding the dual offices of army chief and president of the country.
Behind the scenes, efforts had been under way for some time on clearing the way for a return to a new formula for political ‘co-habitation’ between Musharraf and the political leaders whom he had summarily turfed out of Pakistan.
Prompted by Musharraf, jointly and separately, the UK and the US pushed for a return to some semblance of representative democracy in Pakistan. On Musharraf ’s team, the main interlocutor was Tariq Aziz, a civilian bureaucrat and ex-college mate of Musharraf at the Forman Christian College in Lahore. Aziz had earned his trust as a key adviser and as secretary to the National Security Council (NSC), and had even supplanted some of Musharraf ’s military confidantes in political decision making on behalf of the president. Others included his Chief of Staff Lt. Gen. Hamid Javed, 4 DG-ISI Lt. Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, a Musharraf favourite who had successfully investigated an assassination attempt against Musharraf, and Maj. Gen. Syed Ehtisham Zamir, 5 a Kayani deputy at the ISI who kept tabs on domestic political issues and reportedly even helped in rigging elections. Kayani had earlier served as a deputy military secretary to Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, and this was considered a plus in using him as a conduit for the exchange of views. Once Kayani took over as army chief, the new DG-ISI, Lt. Gen. Nadeem Taj, a relative of Musharraf ’s wife, took over his function as an interlocutor on the deal Musharraf was negotiating with Bhutto for a National Reconciliation Ordinance.
On the American side, Richard Boucher, the assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asian Affairs since February 2006, was the point man for the Pakistani transition, with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice entering the discussions, as needed and, in the words of then Amb. Anne W. Patterson, ‘to close the deal’. 6 In the UK, Mark Lyall Grant, a former UK High Commissioner to Islamabad with a family history linked to the area that is now Pakistan, played a key role in his new position as DG for Political Affairs at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. 7 He received help from fellow Trinity College graduate, Adam Thomson, later High Commissioner to Islamabad. 8 Boucher and Grant sometimes shared ideas, as needed, to coordinate their efforts in persuading Musharraf as well as the exiled Pakistani political leaders to reach a negotiated settlement on the political future of Pakistan.
Boucher met with Bhutto in different locations around the world. He recalled that her spouse, Asif Ali Zardari, was spending most of his time in New York City and therefore did not participate in the meetings held in Dubai and London. Boucher u
sed to meet Bhutto roughly every month, and in between would travel to Islamabad to meet Tariq Aziz, often at the home of the Deputy Chief of Mission of the US embassy, Gerald Feierstein, the same DCM who later called Tariq Aziz to protest the ‘thuggish implementation’ of the emergency laws by Musharraf. 9
Aziz had conveyed to Boucher that Musharraf and Bhutto were in touch with each other, but wanted the US to ‘guarantee the outcome’. Secretary Rice did not approve of this formulation. She thought ‘guarantee’ was too strong a word. She suggested replacing ‘guarantee’ with ‘witnessed’ as a substitute. Boucher spent most of 2007 talking to Musharraf and Bhutto in search of the outcome that the US could comfortably sign on to as a witness. His sense from those exchanges and visits to Pakistan was that the military was getting tired of running things. He discerned that Bhutto seemed to favour an arrangement that would allow her to govern, even if Musharraf was titular president. But neither of them trusted the other. Musharraf also evinced an obligation to his ‘King’s Party’, the Pakistan Muslim League (Quaid-e-Azam Group) or PML-Q, that had given him political support and legitimacy during his reign. As a result, no clear or explicit understanding emerged between Musharraf and Bhutto.
