Teresita C. Schaffer, a former senior State Department official specializing in South Asia, says that while the U. S. and Afghanistan are primarily concerned about the Taliban crossing the border into Pakistan, Pakistan is more concerned with ending domestic terrorism caused by suicide attacks. and the seizure of the country’s internal territories by insurgents. Although the U. S. has recently criticized Pakistan’s efforts to prevent the Taliban from crossing the border into Afghanistan, Schaffer says the scenario is a bit bigger when the military reports directly to President Pervez Musharraf.
Since Pakistan’s parliamentary elections last February, there has been a rift between the United States and Pakistan. The U. S. is heavily involved in the Taliban coming and going across the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The Pakistani government appears to allow the local population to engage with militants in peripheral spaces and seems too sensitive to U. S. concerns. Do the two countries have other priorities lately?
In a sense, the overall goals coincide, but the priorities do not. You’re right, the most sensible U. S. precedent is necessarily the border: preventing the Taliban in Afghanistan, where of course we have troops, from finding safe haven in Pakistan; preventing their movement back and forth across this border. For the Pakistani government, the top priority along the Afghan border and in this area is to end suicide attacks in Pakistan. They are facing an internal insurrection. And they would like to see the broad pacification of tribal spaces that the United States talks about. They would like to see a bigger border matrix, but what they need most is an end to suicide attacks and the phenomenon of insurgents seizing swaths of territory inside Pakistan.
And have the agreements reached through the Pakistani government with the militants worked?I have read articles in the Pakistani press indicating that it works in some areas and not in others.
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Let’s take a step back. About two years ago, Pakistan’s government reached what appeared to be an agreement in South Waziristan, one of the tribal agencies, that allowed the army to end its presence and under which local tribal leaders were to look for someone who was neither Afghan nor Pakistani. This agreement had no enforcement mechanism and didn’t work very well in the end.
Why did the government of President Pervez Musharraf, which implemented that deal, go that route? Well, their effort to take greater control of the tribal areas by military means had also not worked very well. So in the time of the Musharraf government, they tried military means and they tried negotiation, and neither one worked out terribly well. There’s all kinds of deep reasons why this might be so, including the fact that the traditional tribal leaders, in many cases, are no longer there, so it’s hard to find the person who can enforce an agreement. So when you fast-forward to the new elected government, you’ve got a history in which the previous efforts of the government of Pakistan to impose greater control were not very successful.
The elected government did one thing that may actually have been smart, but probably wasn’t enough, which was to put the negotiations in the hands of the secular party—the Awami National Party—that had just won the provincial elections in the area that we’re talking about. At the same time, the army has been working separately to try to regain control of areas inside the settled areas of Pakistan that have been seized by insurgents. So you’ve got three things going on at once: You’ve got a military effort; you’ve got a negotiation; and you have a government in Islamabad which is very much preoccupied with the challenge of staying in power, and for which this is the only policy issue that they’ve done any work on, but it’s not their top top priority because their top priority is maintaining the government.
And I’m guessing at least one component of the government will get rid of the president, right?
That introduces another complication. And maybe this is the right time to talk about who is the government in Pakistan and how do the different parts of it relate to one another. You’ve got in Pakistan, at the moment, four major political actors. Two of them are the principle personalities in the government that emerged from the election: Asif Zardari—who is the principal personality in the Pakistan Peoples Party and who chose the prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gillani; Nawaz Sharif—who is the principal personality in the Pakistan Muslim League-N. Neither of those men is actually in elective office at the moment. The third major political actor is President Musharraf, who is still in the president’s office, but who no longer controls the machinery of government. A year ago, if there was a big demonstration coming, he could order thousands of people kept in jail. He can’t do that now. But he still has some forty-odd followers in the parliament. And he is still trying to work out arrangements with Zardari’s party—so far not successfully, but there’s been enough going on that it’s been one of the factors that has kept the coalition unstable.
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The fourth political actor is, of course, General Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani, the head of the army. Now, of these four major political actors, three of them want to change their situation. The first two, Zardari and Sharif, would like to govern by themselves instead of with each other. Musharraf would like to have his own power back. It is a pretty good definition of instability when you have a government composed of people who don’t trust each other and would prefer not to have to work together, and when you have an army that wants not to have to make a choice among different leaders, that would prefer to take a holiday from politics, but that has an institutional history of intervening in politics. That’s not what the army wants to do, but of course every officer in the army knows that it has happened at various times in the past.
Who runs the army? The president, yes?
The president is the commander-in-chief, but on a day-to-day basis it is General Kiyani who leads the army. Kiyani controls promotions and appointments.
Now, does it outline the policy to be followed with activists, etc. ?
In all likelihood, he does. I know he has made a great effort to consult with the government in general. But I don’t know that that consultation extends to specific policies, particularly at a time when the government is very much preoccupied with just staying in power.
Hence it is rather that this whole machinery of government is stuck on the question of who deserves to be a judge. I mean, that turns out to be the problem, doesn’t it?
That’s the challenge. And that is the challenge, because it was the crisis of the justice formula that led to the protest movement, which culminated in the elections. Without the judge’s question, without Musharraf seeking to remove the leader of justice, and eventually to remove him in an emergency, the election would have been very different from what it actually seemed. And one of the things that the coalition was intended to agree on was that it would bring back the fired judges. Unfortunately, they did not agree on all the main points and Mr. Zardari has some thoughts on the return of the former judges.
And his anxieties are what? That they would say he can’t run for office because he was in jail for corruption?
That they can revive the corruption charges against him, which were annulled by the National Reconciliation Order at the time of the return of his wife, Benazir Bhutto, to Pakistan.
And Sharif needs the judges reinstated, but doesn’t he have the strength to do it himself?
There are disputes over what is legally required to reinstate them. According to one opinion, this can be done by decree, since his removal was illegal. According to another view, Parliament can pass an ordinary law to achieve this. There is a third opinion: they consider that this requires constitutional action, in which case they will not have the votes in the upper space of Parliament. But all these technical problems could probably be solved if the parties agreed on precisely what needed to happen.
President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan is talking tough about sending Afghan troops into Pakistan because of the cross-border problems. What does the United States want to happen?
What the United States needs is preferably to end the insurgency in Afghanistan – and, indeed, to end any aid to that insurgency from territory controlled by Pakistan. Karzai’s was reckless and immoderate. And it was irritating, for both Pakistan and Afghanistan, for other reasons. The other day there was a firefight near the border, in which US forces, who said they were attacked on the Pakistani side of the border, fired on and destroyed a border post on the Pakistani side. The Pakistanis, understandably, reacted with great fury. It must be understood that at the time of the elections, almost all political parties in Pakistan were making a political effort denouncing the United States and announcing that Pakistan deserves to live its own life and not allow its policies to be dictated by the United States. United. The attack on the outpost would have provoked a nationalist reaction under any circumstances, but it is even more potent under the current circumstances. So, faced with this nationalist reaction from Pakistan, Karzai said: “Okay, if they take action against us, we will invade them. » So this suddenly puts us in a Pakistani-Afghan context. Pakistan and Afghanistan have had poor relations for more than part of a century. It’s not a surprise. The new Pakistani government had attempted to have a honeymoon with President Karzai. This progression turns out to have ended the honeymoon in a hurry. I don’t think there is a genuine danger of a territorial war between Pakistan and Afghanistan. But this shows how emotions are very combined in both aspects. And how the concept that we can control things with an open-air army flies in the face of very strong nationalist sentiment on both counts.
Is the U.S. military talking to the Pakistan military on a regular basis? Or are these talks in limbo?
No, there are many discussions between the U. S. and the Pakistani military. And there is also a tripartite mechanism through which the three armies (American, Afghan, and Pakistani) must coordinate with each other. But the genuine danger is this: in Pakistan, there is a government distracted by the very complex factor of staying in power. In Afghanistan, NATO forces are facing an increasingly vocal insurgency. And the demands of this effort in Afghanistan have already led to shooting incidents, and there is a clear threat that it could happen again. And with the scenario in Pakistan as volatile as it is, any such incident can escalate in a way that makes it more difficult for the U. S. the kind you need from Pakistan, and that will weaken relations around the world.
The other danger for the U. S. is that if the insurgency continues in Pakistan – and I don’t mean the border issue, I mean the internal insurgency in Pakistan – parts of Pakistan will simply withdraw. Pakistan becomes a less governed country. This doesn’t happen overnight. But the trends are somewhat worrying in this regard. And if that happens, it will be much more complicated to manage the situation on the other side of the border, as the chances of finalizing that border will be even more limited. In other words, you can’t fix Afghanistan without stabilizing Pakistan at the same time.
What are the chances of the Pakistani army returning to power?
I don’t think that’s what they should do now. If General Kiyani had his ideas, he would take a political vacation for the time being. I know that the Pakistani army doesn’t need to be in a position where it has, which government will it support?But you know, this happened earlier in Pakistan’s history. In fact, I hope this doesn’t happen again.