Author: T.C.A. Rangachari
Publication: Tehelka
Date: June 4, 2011
URL: http://indiatoday.intoday.in/site/story/t-c-a-rangachari-reviews-bruce-riedel-book-deadly-embrace-pakistan-america-and-the-future-of-global-jihad/1/138746.html
Introduction: Why the future of global jihad will depend entirely on Pakistan
Pakistan is a world of make-believe. For six
decades, successive US administrations have convinced themselves that Pakistan
is a great friend, and as the second largest Muslim country, and more recently
as one with nuclear weapons, it remains important to ensure its security,
developmental and other interests. Pakistan, it has chosen to believe, is
an indispensable ally-first in the great enterprise to defeat international
communism and now global terror. To assure Pakistan's fidelity, its agenda
has to be heeded and satisfaction guaranteed. For its part, Pakistan has convinced
itself that the US needs it more than it needs the US and it can continue
to demand US military and economic assistance even while it pursues its own
rather than a mutually agreed upon agenda.
Pakistan is also a land of strange denouements.
Osama bin Laden, a creation of the cia and the isi, met his end at their hands.
Benazir Bhutto, under whose watch emerged the Taliban and other fundamentalist
organisations, was eliminated by those very forces. Nawaz Sharif who picked
Musharraf to be the coas in the belief that he would not have the ethnic base
of a Punjabi was deposed by that very Mohajir. Musharraf, who decorated Ilyas
Kashmiri personally for the "valour" of beheading an Indian soldier,
became the target of an assassination plot, masterminded by that same hero.
The Army orchestrates a high-decibel public campaign against drone attacks
even as the drones take off from Pakistani air bases to attack targets, in
identifying which Pakistani intelligence has been instrumental. And mother
of all ironies, the Prime Minister of the ppp-led government terms as "national
assetsââ‚� the Army and the isi
whom "Shaheed" Benazir Bhutto held responsible for fuelling extremism
in Pakistan and for being in cahoots with bin Laden and others who wished
to see her dead.
Bruce Riedel, a senior fellow at the Brookings
Institution, has been around too long in this line of business-he worked at
the White House over the last 20 years advising four presidents on Pakistan-to
be taken in entirely by the make-believe; nor does he miss out on the ironies
that history has rewarded Pakistan with. He served on the Obama campaign team.
Most recently, in 2009, he chaired the strategic review of the situation in
Pakistan and Afghanistan for the Obama administration. His earlier book, The
Search for al Qaeda (2008), analysed the ideology and leadership of al Qaeda
This one is a well-informed analysis of global jihad with, in his own words,
Pakistan as the epicentre.
There is much in the book that would resonate
with the Indian reader because it authoritatively validates much of what India
has been saying in the last 20 years about the role and involvement of Pakistan
in fomenting terrorism in India. Indeed, he provides additional information
and references to validate the Indian complaint of the isi initiating, training,
funding and providing other assistance to terrorists. Also, that the US was
aware of all this much before it was prepared to acknowledge it in public.
But then the US was unwilling to deal with Pakistan with anything but kid
gloves even when it came to know of the connections between the isi and bin
Laden. Riedel notes, "To me and others in the White House, the connections
were already clear in 1998."
The outpourings of indignation in the aftermath
of the killing of bin Laden cannot obscure-for the knowledgeable-the precedent
of the hunt for Abu Zubaydah 10 years earlier. The US had then pressed the
isi to track and arrest him for his role in the millennium plots which involved
simultaneous, multiple attacks in the US, India, Jordan and Yemen. The US
believed Zubaydah was in Peshawar and openly operating for the al Qaeda. Zubaydah
was also helping the isi recruit and vet Kashmiri militants and sending them
to al Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan. Musharraf had just taken over,
post-coup, and this was the first substantive item on the US's agenda with
him. The then dg isi claimed they did not know where Zubaydah was. The then
US Ambassador to Pakistan, William Milam, noted, "the isi just turned
a blind eye to his activities, even though everyone knew where he was."
"Musharraf paid no heed." He was caught six months after 9/11 in
a let safe house in Faisalabad.
Pakistan's opposition to India's role in Afghanistan
was not unknown to the US nor what Riedel calls its "selective counter-terrorism".
Post 9/11, it was an agonised Musharraf who reluctantly gave in to the US
demands for support for its Afghan operation. But he laid down conditions:
India must have no role in the Afghan war or in the government that would
follow the Taliban; while Pakistan would assist in capturing al Qaeda operatives
who fled into Pakistan, Pakistani citizens meaning let and other Punjabi groups,
would be off limits in any move to counter terrorism.
Today's inescapable reality, Riedel says,
is that the jihad is a truly global phenomenon. Pakistan is the epicentre,
and the future of the movement will depend more on Pakistan than on any other
country. The solution? "The US must engage reliably with the Pakistani
people, support their democratic process and address their legitimate security
concerns." That brings us to the resolution of the Kashmir issue: Pakistan
would thereafter become a "normal" state shedding its obsession
with India: the military would lose the rationale for its disproportionate
role; genuine civilian rule could emerge; arms race with India would get reduced;
risk of a nuclear war would be eliminated. But even a satisfactory resolution
of the Kashmir issue would only "discourage" (Riedel's word) Pakistan
from making an alliance with the let, Taliban and al Qaeda. Even if this is
enough for the US, would it be so considered by India?
Last October, the then Pakistan Foreign Minister,
Shah Mahmood Qureshi, said in Washington that nearly 30,000 Pakistani civilians
and 7,000 law enforcement officials have lost their lives in terrorist acts,
the latest of which, in mid May, claimed nearly hundred lives in Charsadda
in the Frontier. Ten years ago, in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Musharraf
asked himself whether the Taliban was worth sacrificing for Pakistan and decided
it wasn't. Is Pakistan ready to pay that supreme price for Kashmir?
