by Shuja Nawaz
Poor coordination of information and prohibition against sharing accurate information about the Salala attack with Pakistani liaison officers also came under criticism from the Pakistani military. The Clark investigation report also accepted at face value unverified reports from Afghan Border Police sources that ‘insurgents have been wearing PAKMIL uniforms to move freely across the border’. This despite the fact that the investigating team was unable ‘to safely travel to the villages on either side of the Afghanistan–Pakistan border that were near the area of the incident’. The investigating report referred in part to capture of ‘multiple sets of salwar kameez (traditional style dress) made from PAKMIL uniforms’. This the Pakistani military dismissed as ‘an unconvincing attempt to cover the US/ISAF attacks by giving a misleading impression that Pakistani soldiers on Volcano and Boulder posts may well have been mistaken by US/ISAF to be anyone else’. In any case, the personnel from 7 AK Regiment of the regular army would not have been wearing traditional salwar-kameez uniforms that are normally associated with the FC. They were in regular Pakistan Army combat uniforms. 22 The possibility remains that the Salala attack was retributive in nature by US commanders who had long served in Afghanistan and lost men to actions they associated with Pakistan-backed Afghan Taliban. If so, there should have been evidence presented of prior infiltration from Pakistan in that region. There was none in the Clark report.
Beginning of the End of the Alliance
In many ways, Salala marked the beginning of the end of the Pakistani alliance with the US that had been revived after 9/11. Pakistani Army Chief Gen. Kayani, a quiet man not given to histrionics, issued a very strong command to his troops following Salala, echoing some of the anger and the calls for correction of coordination and cooperation between Pakistan and US/ISAF forces.
In a Command Communique on the ‘Acts of Aggression by NATO/ISAF ’ in both English and Urdu signed by him in the traditional Islamic-green ink used by Pakistani military and civil leaders, Kayani first praised the soldiers of 7 AK Regiment for doing whatever they could against the US/ISAF attack on Salala. He absolved the Pakistan Air Force since the ‘breakdown of communications with the affected posts’ prevented the air force from being engaged. Then he ordered that his Command Communique be read out at all regimental durbars (formal gatherings) and posted on regimental information boards:
I want to re-emphasize and leave no ambiguity in the Rules of Engagement for everyone, down the chain of command, especially the Unit/Sub Unit Commanders. When under attack, you have the full liberty of action to respond employing all capabilities available at your disposal. This would require no clearance at any level. Army will continue to provide the resources as required, on the ground.
Under the pall of Salala, both the civil and military exchanges between Pakistan and the US continued, but in fits and starts. The White House resisted making an apology despite suggestions, among others, from the US embassy in Islamabad. But the damage had been done. US assistance to Pakistan began a steady decline from the heights of 2010. The cumulative damage to the relationship of the Raymond Davis incident, the attack on Abbottabad, the Memogate scandal and then Salala was added on to the institutional memories on both sides of the fractured Afghan border. US military commanders who had grown up fighting the war in Afghanistan through multiple deployments and lost comrades at different levels to Taliban attacks blamed Pakistan for abetting or condoning Afghan Taliban activity and providing them safe haven in Pakistani territory. There was little direct communication or coordination at tactical levels on the border between Pakistani and US/ISAF officers or soldiers. There were no joint border patrols or posts. The BCCs were few and far between, and as the Clark Report showed, the BCCs were open to manipulation of information.
The mistrust between the US and Pakistan was deep, and a symptom of the real underlying disconnect between their different regional strategies and objectives, especially as they related to Afghanistan. At the command level, American officers, who had access to detailed intelligence of contacts between Pakistani intelligence and some Afghan Taliban groups, such as the Haqqanis, were inherently suspicious of Pakistani actions and intent. Pakistan did little to allay these concerns. There was also little communication or trust between Afghanistan and Pakistan. And there was little that the US could do to mend the broken relationship with Pakistan at that stage in its war in Afghanistan. At best, the US could patch things up to tide itself over to the exit plan envisaged by President Obama.
It took some effort, especially on the part of Foreign Minister Khar and her colleagues, with some understanding on the part of the army chief. On the US side, Secretary Clinton chose to take the responsibility. On 3 July, she sealed the deal after speaking with Khar on the telephone.
I once again reiterated our deepest regrets for the tragic incident in Salala last November. I offered our sincere condolences to the families of the Pakistani soldiers who lost their lives. Foreign Minister Khar and I acknowledged the mistakes that resulted in the loss of Pakistani military lives. We are sorry for the losses suffered by the Pakistani military. We are committed to working closely with Pakistan and Afghanistan to prevent this from ever happening again.
As I told the former prime minister of Pakistan days after the Salala incident, America respects Pakistan’s sovereignty and is committed to working together in pursuit of shared objectives on the basis of mutual interests and mutual respect.
In today’s phone call, Foreign Minister Khar and I talked about the importance of taking coordinated action against terrorists who threaten Pakistan, the US, and the region; of supporting Afghanistan’s security, stability, and efforts towards reconciliation; and of continuing to work together to advance the many other shared interests we have, from increasing trade and investment to strengthening our people-to-people ties. Our countries should have a relationship that is enduring, strategic, and carefully defined, and that enhances the security and prosperity of both our nations and the region. 23
An important announcement though for many, these may have just been empty words.
Kayani had wanted to retrieve a bad situation arising out of Salala. Closing the GLOC was a minor victory for him. But his transactional relationship with the Americans was not to produce full fruit. He failed to launch a much-promised clearing operation against the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban in the borderlands. He was in a constant tussle with the civilian government that wished to have its own relationship with the Americans, whom they saw as their own political insurance against a military takeover. Yet, the Pakistani politicians were unable to assert civil supremacy or back it up with good governance.
On his part, Gen. Mattis had anticipated that Pakistan might use the shutdown of the GLOC as a strategic move of some kind. He appreciated the fact that Kayani had kept the ALOC open even while the GLOC was suspended. But Mattis saw Kayani’s move as ‘a mistake with [the civilian] leadership adding fuel to the fire. They then lost control.’ He maintained that ‘we were vulnerable on the logistics lines, so we put together the Northern Distribution Network . . . I don’t think they realized that we’d put the Northern Distribution Network together and tested it over the preceding year . . . just out of concern for this sort of action.’ 24 The overflights to Afghanistan, after the initial invasion in 2001, were just that. No landings in Pakistan. So the Pakistani public was not aware of them. (By 2018, Pakistani military commanders were referring to over 2 million such flights since 2001.)
ISAF commander Gen. Allen, who had a high regard for Gen. Kayani, calling him ‘one of the greatest strategic thinkers I’ve ever seen’ [perhaps in a surfeit of fulsome praise], also spoke about the alternative to Pakistan as a means of supplying the war in Afghanistan.
We spun up perhaps one of the greatest airlifts in the wake of the Berlin Airlift. I had about sixty days of supplies in all the critical components that I needed. I had them not because of Pakistan but if Iran got shut down and we lost air space control. I needed to be able to fight six
ty days. This airlift was so big and so huge that by the time Pakistan opened the ground line of communications, I had over 100 days of supplies. They’d not only failed at starving me out, they weren’t really influencing the nature of the campaign. 25
True, but at what cost? The US airlift was hugely expensive, as explained below.
What Pakistan failed to take into account was that the US had the money and was prepared to pay for setting up and using a Northern Distribution Network to bring supplies into Afghanistan rather than cave in to Pakistani demands. It had in fact begun using that transportation system in previous years. US Transportation Command had begun investigating a network of ships, rail and other surface means of transportation of supplies from Europe to Northern Afghanistan.
In 2009, fuel and non-lethal cargo began shipping along the NDN and eventually military equipment also began to flow on these routes. The complexity of the routes and the purposefully wide range of countries involved made the cost of transportation over these new routes more expensive and the time to traverse them generally longer than what was observed over the PAKGLOC, but these routes provided a critical fallback position in case of a loss in access to the Pakistan routes. The extra time and costs (which were approximately double what the costs for cargo on the PAKGLOC) incurred to use the NDN were accepted as a necessary cost of doing business to make sure that the coalition did not leave thousands of deployed troops without a logistics network to support them in the case of a falling out with Pakistan. By March 2010, the Commander of USTRANSCOM reported to Congress that while the PAKGLOC remained the primary route (50%), 30% of supplies were now flowing on the NDN with approximately 20% flowing by air.
. . . While the PAKGLOC was closed, coalition forces shifted their supply lines to the NDN to the maximum extent possible and by February 2012, 85% of fuel flowing into the theater was traversing the NDN along with a much larger share of other cargo. This shift and expansion led to costs of approximately $100 million per month along the NDN during the closure as opposed to around $17 million before it. However, those costs were dwarfed by the approximately five times the cost per pound that it would cost to shift all that cargo to airlift. 26
As Secretary Clinton stated when she announced her apology to Pakistan over Salala:
Foreign Minister Khar has informed me that the ground supply lines (GLOC) into Afghanistan are opening. Pakistan will continue not to charge any transit fee [emphasis added] in the larger interest of peace and security in Afghanistan and the region. This is a tangible demonstration of Pakistan’s support for a secure, peaceful, and prosperous Afghanistan and our shared objectives in the region. This will also help the United States and ISAF conduct the planned drawdown at a much lower cost. This is critically important to the men and women who are fighting terrorism and extremism in Afghanistan. Foreign Minister Khar has informed me that, consistent with current practice, no lethal equipment will transit the GLOC into Afghanistan except for equipping the ANSF. 27
The US had meanwhile begun withholding payment of CSF to Pakistan, especially for the period when the GLOC was blocked.
Other than some face-saving, Pakistan failed to gain any leverage from the closing of the GLOC, despite US difficulties in activating the NDN, and in the face of Russian influence in Central Asia that was forcing the closure of their airbase in Manas. Pakistan failed to renegotiate the terms for the use of both the ALOC and the GLOC, an inexplicable failure on the part of both its military and the government. The ALOC remained free of overflight charges, even though it was the only way for the US to bring to bear its air power from bases in Diego Garcia and the Gulf. Much later, perhaps too late in the game, in 2018, Pakistani military officers took to mentioning the nearly 2 million overflights in support of the US war effort in Afghanistan. At the commercial charge for such overflights, US aircraft traversing nearly 500 nautical miles of Pakistani airspace would have a value of some $1.3 billion. Not that the US Congress or administration would have willingly handed over this payment ex post. But, it could have been a bargaining chip, one that the Pakistani leadership never deployed.
The ‘Good Soldiers’
Beyond the economics and weaponry of the war, there was a human element. Despite the atmosphere of mistrust that pervaded the relationship among Afghan, American and Pakistani commanders, there were some who had forged personal relationships of trust and deep respect. Theirs were not relationships based on expediency or caricature of the ‘other’.
As Salala unfolded, the pain of the unfortunate loss of allied lives was reflected in a series of email exchanges between two senior American and Pakistani officers who had served together and established a level of trust that was not common. The American officer wrote to his Pakistani counterpart about Salala:
I feel compelled to tell you how heartsick I am at the loss of soldiers that I respect, made even worse because this loss was by our own hand. This is the antithesis of everything I have been trying to do for Pakistan since 2005. My mission was to help you and yours, not cause harm . . .
I still carry the burden from the June 2008 and the September 2010 incidents. We should have learned more and insisted on implementing the lessons learned to preclude fratricide ever again. I am being told that Pakistan cleared the fires, but if we did not know where the border posts were, we should have.
His Pakistani friend responded with details about the failures that accumulated during the Salala attack, summing it up thus: ‘All liaison systems failed. All communications broke down. This has become a pattern. A Coalition patrol [was] influenced and misled by Afghan Intelligence.’ This Pakistani general personally refused to participate in any inquiry into Salala ‘since I am certain it would lead to nothing. No procedural, operational, or coordinative measures will be taken; just as I am certain that these incidents will continue and we [the Pakistanis] will always be blamed.’ He feared that ‘the relationship will be governed more by those who never really wanted this to work. This war can easily be won and the US can even now exit with honour. I hope this is understood since that can only happen with Pak–US military cooperation and no other way.’ He blamed the asymmetrical relationship between the US and Pakistan. In other words, this was a true misalliance, a marriage between unequal partners.
His American counterpart blamed the growing perception on the US side of the
ISI relationship with militant groups intent on killing our soldiers on the Afghan side of the border . . . The help guys like you need and deserve is watered down to meaningless crap because of the chilling effect of our perceptions . . . But I make the distinction between those in the intelligence world and the good soldiers manning the line and doing their duty as they know it. I respect them, because I see myself doing the same thing. 28
The abiding question was whether the ‘good soldiers’ would triumph over those who were ensnared by expediency or be compromised by their dependence on the other side. The reality was that Pakistan and the US lost political space in the process, and this was exacerbated by the internal struggles on both sides. Pakistan in particular faced a worsening of the communication and coordination between the politicians and the soldiers.
7
Mismanaging the Civil–Military Relationship
Pakistan meanwhile headed into a political mess, with growing distrust between the civil and the military and declining US interest in Pakistan’s needs or role in the region. The domestic security situation was deteriorating, with a rise in terrorist attacks. The powerful military was loath to give the civilians the driver’s wheel, particularly when it came to traversing the terrain of security and foreign policy. This made it harder for the Americans to influence events in the country, except via the military. Internally, the Zardari government had managed to make some critical changes in Pakistan’s political systems, including the devolution of powers from the presidency to the prime minister and shedding ministries from the federal government to the provinces. On paper, it managed to restore Pakistan to some semblance
of the federal system envisaged in the 1973 and earlier constitutions. It achieved a major success in the completion of the work of the National Finance Commission after eighteen years of trying to apportion federal revenues among the provinces. Even the mighty Punjab shed some of its share to the other less economically advantaged provinces. However, it failed to properly prepare for this devolution, and acrimony and chaos ensued as the provinces were unable to cope with their new responsibilities.
Against this background, the country headed to fresh elections. This was a landmark for Pakistan. The first potentially peaceful transfer of power from one elected government to another was a major political milestone. The electorate had meanwhile weighed the tenure of the PPP and the provincial governments carefully. As had the military. Yet the latter carefully avoided getting involved in the process except to provide security, as needed.
