| | Pakistan cannot play both sides forever Telegraph
08/28/2010
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avid Cameron was right to take the country to task for its role in terrorism, argues Michael Burleigh.
The Wikileaks revelations about murderous collusion between Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency and the Afghan Taliban have underlined the central role that country plays in the sponsorship of terrorism. This is despite the US disbursing $1 billion a year to enable the Pakistanis to fight it. In this respect, it would seem that enemies like Iran or Syria are a secondary problem.
And the collusion goes far beyond corrupt and dozy Pakistani border guards turning a blind eye to the Taliban launching cross-border raids on coalition troops in Afghanistan. It also means ISI involvement in planning the insurgents' operations, as well as even more murky links alleged between ISI figures and mysterious "Arabs". That's the preferred synonym, by the way, for members of al-Qaeda, who are embedded with the Haqqani and Hekmatyar networks, which the ISI once sponsored to fight the Soviet invasion.
Let's not forget, too, that Pakistani weddings seem to be the preferred excuse for British jihadists – as well as for the likes of would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad – to visit the many terrorist training camps there.
Although Pakistani collusion with terrorists is a deplorable fact of life for Western forces fighting the Afghan Taliban, we have a simultaneous dependence on Pakistan's tacit collusion in aerial drone strikes on al-Qaeda and Taliban leaders. This has ensured that it was David Cameron, speaking in Bangalore on his trip to India, who criticised Pakistan's "export of terror", rather than Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. He was right to do so.
Pakistan is the world's most dangerous source of international terrorism, responsible for 70 per cent of conspiracies to bring murder and mayhem to Britain, not forgetting serial atrocities perpetrated in India. Whereas Saudi Arabia has finally got a grip on its indigenous jihadists (after blithely allowing them to slaughter people elsewhere), Pakistan's weak democracy and powerful military – within which the ISI nestles like a parasite – seem powerless to grip a problem which threatens not only its neighbours, but through a large diaspora, Western domestic security, too.
The conventional wisdom is that this problem only dates back to the 1980s, when the ISI was co‑opted into a broader Western (and Saudi) campaign to encourage Islamic resistance against the atheist Soviets in Afghanistan. That idea enables many Leftists to spout cheap theories that the CIA was responsible for creating al‑Qaeda, a movement whose origins in fact lie in the domestic politics of Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Others, such as the Indian journalist Sadand Dhume, argue that the problem stems from Pakistan having Islam inscribed in its identity, from the green crescent flag to former prime minister Zulfikar Bhutto's advertisement of "an Islamic Bomb". Pan-Islamism is in the country's DNA, they argue, in ways that are simply not true of other Muslim states such as Indonesia, Morocco, Tunisia or Turkey. Without Islam, the self-styled "Land of the Pure" is an unjustifiable congeries of regions cobbled from the wreckage Mountbatten left in British India.
Whatever the truth, Pakistan is host to a bewildering array of terrorist movements. They include Baluchi and Punjabi separatists, Kashmiri irredentists (who would like to annex Indian Kashmir); the Afghan Taliban, whose leadership around Mullah Omar is believed to be in Quetta; remnant al-Qaeda, presumed to be in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas; and the Pakistani Taliban, whose intention is to convert Pakistan into a strictly Islamist state.
The Pakistani state has consistently indulged those groups which ostensibly conform to its strategic interests, notably in Afghanistan and Kashmir. The familiar excuse is that these are "freedom fighters" rather than terrorists. That is why although Lashkar-e-Taiba is widely known to have been responsible for the atrocity in Mumbai, it continues to operate inside Pakistan, allegedly as a religious charitable organisation, while sundry terrorists have either escaped from custody or dodged the executioner after being convicted. The perceived closeness to India of the Karzai regime in Kabul explains the favour Pakistan shows towards the Afghan Taliban. This is partly a reflection of Pashtun solidarity, but also of a longer-term aim of strengthening its defences for any major confrontation with India.
One imagines that the spooks of the ISI thought they were being outrageously Machiavellian in their multiple dealings with terrorists they construed as freedom fighters. They would not be alone. Of course, terrorism has had a baleful impact on Pakistan itself. While from 2003 to 2008, some 13,185 Pakistanis were killed by terrorists, the figure for 2009 was 11,585, victims of 723 major incidents. The state itself has come under direct attack, including the murder of Benazir Bhutto in December 2007 and an assault on the army headquarters in Rawalpindi after the military belatedly acted against indigenous Taliban with selective rigour.
Two questions present themselves. Are enough conditions being attached to that $1 billion a year that the West disburses on Islamabad? And what contingency planning is there should the feeble, nuclear-armed, Pakistani state succumb to the incubuses its own elites have played such a deplorable role in creating?
Michael Burleigh is the author of 'Blood and Rage: A Cultural History of Terrorism'
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