By Patricia Lee Sharpe
President George W. Bush and Pakistani Prime Minister Gilani are holding talks in Washington, a visit which has significant substantive and symbolic implications, according to the Pakistani press. The Americans want to capture Osama bin Laden and destroy Al Qaeda elements operating in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan. The Pakistanis want to preserve the appearance of sovereignty in their wild northwest while securing as much foreign aid as possible. Aid-for-action-on-the-frontier bribes are publically announced as focused on $115 million in food aid, but it is hard to believe that Gilani isn’t bargaining for plenty of military aid as well. The Pakistani military’s list of quid-pro-quo needs is always very long. In fact, members of Pakistan’s ruling elite have never shown much interest in the well-being of the less successful (despite the pillar of Islam which calls for charity), but inflation is hurting and if ordinary people in this hugely populous country can’t afford food, the political consequences to the unstable “odd couple” PPP-Muslim League coalition government could be dire. The affordability of chapatis aside, if the Army isn’t satisfied, its willingness to countenance the return to civilian rule may be short-lived.
As usual lots of buzz words about extremists and militants and terrorists are being thrown about in Washington, just now, but they aren’t very helpful, so let’s step back a little.
Deconstruction is a trendy concept as well as a highly technical term for literary theorists, but it’s also a useful policy-making tool. When political issues get too complicated, it’s helpful to break them down into little parts and see which have some potential for deeper understanding or useful action. Now that PM Gilani is making his first official visit to Washington, a visit which is apparently coinciding with the killing of an important al Qaeda figure by a U.S. drone sent without Pakistani permission into Pakistani territory, it makes sense to break these emotionally-charged security issues down into three categories. What are the bed rock actual demands that Washington should be making? What needs to be on the reasonable wish list for the relatively near future? What should we not be meddling in, however tempting?
And, oh yes, the far off dream, the fourth category, that which would largely de-muddle all the rest.
Where's the Line?
So let’s get that visionary part of the to-do list out of the way first. It has to do with the dubious legitimacy and, I might add, the mile-by-mile geo-social unrealism of the Durand Line that more or less forms the boundary between Pakistan and Afghanistan. By now, even non-specialists who pay attention to this part of the world may know that the boundary is a line of convenience drawn up by the British during the colonial period. Not only did it recognize that the Brits could in no way control what lay beyond it, although they wanted to, it provided British India with a kind of buffer zone to the south of it, a political no-man’s- land known now as the Federally Administered Territories or F.A.T.A. The relationship between British colonial authorities and tribal leaders was an essentially feudal truce, an always wary you-leave-us-alone- and-we’ll-leave-you-alone situation. Whether or not an agreement over this boundary was properly signed and ratified by all concerned parties in 1893 is a subject of intense dispute, but when Pakistan was created in 1947, the new country inherited the Durand Line, whose de facto recognition, for all its imperfections, has always since been preferable to opening the can-of-worms issue of where the boundary should actually be. That issue is now, willy-nilly, on the table, with some Taliban elements even claiming that there should be a Pashtunistan that incorporates large parts of Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan into a modern revival of the ancient state of Khurasan. Other Talibs are closer to Al Qaeda. They do not recognize any boundaries anywhere in the Muslim world. All has to be reclaimed for a unified purified Muslim theocracy.
So who has sovereignty over what?
Unhappily, the urgent big issues between Pakistan and the U.S. converge on this murky territory, which is also very mountainous, because Osama bin Laden, the self-appointed reformer of Muslim society who masterminded the 9/11 attacks, has taken refuge and is rebuilding his al Qaeda there. I strongly suspect that many if not all tribal leaders who offered hospitality to the beleaguered bin Laden after the fall of the Taliban regime in Kabul, had no idea of what they were getting themselves in for. They had to know he was a wanted man. But I do not think they wanted an end to their autonomy. I doubt if they wanted Arab outsiders to reshape their tribal mores any more than they they have ever wanted non-tribals from elsewhere in Pakistan to interfere in their affairs. As a woman, I don’t have any sympathy for tribal patriarchalism, but I feel some sympathy for them. I don’t think the traditional leaders of the F.A.T.A. were ready for the ruthlessness of the Talibanized Sunni reformers aka militants or extremists who tend to murder those who get in their way. However the war on terror ends, the tribal areas will have been transformed, I think. They will have lost much of their custom-protecting isolation.
All this history makes you wonder why anyone would want to be Prime Minister of Pakistan today. Mr. Gilani has serious problems and he needs help, which he is obviously going to get, because he is a smooth-talking Pakistani gentleman and he will say the right things, macho to macho, to good old boy George Bush. There’s only one way he could spoil his chances. He can’t let on that the military and many other Pakistanis still think that the greatest existential threat to modern Pakistan isn’t the Islamic revolution. It’s India, they think, which is why Pakistan is hoping for some upgraded F-16s as well as all that nice food.
Who Are These Guys?
So here is where I want to do some of that nasty deconstruction, focused on what the U.S. wants. In dealing with people in those restive tribal areas, distinctions must be made. There are the traditional tribals, who are Muslim and conservative, but not necessarily Taliban. They are interested mainly in keeping control over their traditional lands. Next, there are the aggressive Taliban-type religious leaders and their converts, mostly Pashtun, who are both Pakistani and Afghan, which suggests that their ambitions are confined largely to a reconquest of Afghanistan plus a conversion of Pakistan into their kind of Islamic state. Finally, there are bin Laden and his al Qaeda followers, who include Arab and non-Arab foreigners, which is to say non-Pakistanis, since Al Qaeda recruits throughout the Muslim world. Al Qaeda’s ambitions presume operations world-wide. Needless to say, at any one moment in any one place, these tribal, Taliban and al Qaeda elements may or may not be cooperating with one another, which offers interesting political possibilities for those who are willing to give up the simple “terrorist” label. It may be that the Pakistani military makes it rather hard for U.S. operatives to play games on the ground, but intelligent policy-making on the basis of these complex realities might make that frustration less than crippling.
Now let’s break down what it means to be Taliban even further. As we all know, there are streams of thought that converge into a strict modernist version of Islam that claims to be a recovery of the real original Islam. It’s strongly puritanical, patriarchal and authoritarian and it tends to be a missionary movement. The next refinement concerns that missionary impulse. It’s perfectly natural for a fervent believer to try to persuade or even shame family members and neighbors into practicing this severe form of the religion. The next stage involves the use of intimidation or violence to force people to practice this way or that. At this stage political power is needed and the resulting laws will foster the new approach to Islam. The final stage carries the missionary impulse across national boundaries by persuasion, intimidation or violence.
It's Not Our Fight
If Muslims choose a salafist path for themselves and try, peacefully, to convince others that it’s the only correct way to be a Muslim, there can be no valid objection, even if one loathes that version of Islam. If such practitioners gradually become a majority and legally gain control of a government, it’s hard to see how the resulting legal “reforms” can be objected to, however distasteful they may be to observers, assuming they are implemented without resort to club-wielding goon squads.
I have many Muslim friends who would hate living under such a regime, whose lives would be destroyed if the Taliban ruled in Islamabad, but it is not up to the United States to save them from such regression. Ah ha, you say, how does an unarmed person resist someone who is armed to the teeth? You don’t, most likely. When someone threatens to bash your head in, you will wear the burkha.
If people in the settled areas and cities of Pakistan do not want this kind of regime in power in Islamabad, they need to start taking concerted action. Taliban-like Islam is not only in an expansive missionary phase, it is in a coercive phase, which means lines need to be drawn within Pakistan, by Pakistanis. Civilians wishing to practice a non-Taliban Islam will need to be protected by law and by a law enforcement apparatus, which may or may not be available. Many men in the Pakistani army and the protective services are sympathetic to an authoritarian salafist Islam. So, who will push back, when the self-appointed Pakistani morality police start driving women out of schools and into windowless houses, not only in the Northwest Frontier Province, but also in Punjab and Sind? This is not something foreigners can help with. It’s an intra-Islam conflict. American policy makers cannot demand that Pakistan crush all Taliban-like believers or native-born salafists in Pakistan, so long as they operate only within Pakistan.
The Fatal Step
However, when the Taliban invade another country from bases in Pakistan, the rules change. The same is true when Pakistan harbors foreigners who plan and/or facilitate terrorist attacks in other countries. At that point, the claim to inviolable borders collapses. Either you are a party to the aggression or you must stop it. If you cannot stop it, international law does not prohibit those affected from retaliating.
I have long believed that the real inhibitor to attacks on sanctuaries in Pakistan wasn’t international law so much as public relations. In a post-colonial country like Pakistan nationalism is strong. Even when drones have not killed civilians, non-Taliban Pakistanis have reacted angrily to U.S. violations of their borders, which is why Mr. Gilani mentions this problem so often. Astute observers of the scene in the tribal areas assert that the Taliban are emboldened by such nationalism. They believe they can act with impunity because even those who hate salafism will support them in the face of foreign aggression. In addition, there has been considerable resistance on the part of American policy makers to considering a serious invasion of Pakistani territory. The terrain is too formidable. The resistance will be fierce. More troops are needed, and they aren't available, just now. So the Taliban and al Qaeda have been relatively safe in their tribal sanctuaries. Attacks across the border into Afghanistan have increased.
Counters to Nationalism
Things may be changing. Of the two presidential candidates, John McCain has always been belligerent, but Barack Obama has made it increasingly clear that he also believes that such sanctuaries are not inviolable. However, according to some reports, al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban are not "alarmed."
They reason that, should coalition forces seriously enter into Pakistan (they have in the past sent unmanned Predator drones on raids into Pakistan), the reaction in Pakistan, even among liberals, would be so fierce that the Pakistani army would not dare to follow up with action of its own. This would leave the militants with a free hand to launch operations inside Afghanistan. .
Once I would have agreed with this analysis. Now I am not so sure. Things have changed since the Army confronted the mullahs of the Red Mosque in Islamabad. Many Pakistanis were critical of that operation. But the Taliban are now so powerful that they are an increasing threat to settled areas of Pakistan. Their allies control the once tolerant valley of Swat. They are wiping out the Shia in the northern panhandle. They have seized power from traditional sheiks in the tribal areas. They are a threat to the city of Peshawar. In short, they have to be stopped and soon before the rest of Pakistan is transformed into a talibanized society, if that matters to the larger, non-Taliban society. So the real question isn’t whether Pakistanis in the settled areas will support such an effort. It’s whether the army, or the ISI, which helped to create the Taliban as a military force during the first Afghan war, will be willing to move decisively against them. As to the public, success will be greeted with relief. Failure will be condemned as foreign interference.
Fine Print and Body Language
But any move against the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the tribal areas would need to be undertaken in all sober seriousness. It won’t be easy. Failure would be a disaster. These are matters that Mr. Bush and Mr. Gilani need to work out very very carefully. Early on, there was talk that Mr. Gilani would ask for a year to get the new civilian government functioning smoothly. But Americans are impatient, and events in Pakistan are likely to force him to take strong action much sooner than that.
Meanwhile, when it's time for the wrap up statements at the end of this visit, observers will need to examine the wording carefully. Mr. Gilani needs to preserve the appearance of independence, of distance between Washington and Islamabad, which there certainly is. Even as he and the impatient Mr. Bush pretend to be great friends and allies with almost identical interests, what Pakistan wants and what Washington wants are not the same. Mr. Bush and his successors may discover that Mr. Gilani and General Kayani will deliver no more than General Musharraf did.