Abstract
Can Pakistan find a way out of violent instability? How severe are the problems of this strategically crucial country, and how much of a threat do they pose beyond Pakistan's borders? Has Pakistan become an ungovernable failed state?
Hilary Synnott draws on his experience of Pakistan to argue that any strategy for addressing the country's problems requires a nuanced understanding of its turbulent history, the failings of successive governments and the weaknesses of core institutions. He sheds light on the role of Pakistan's army and its intelligence service in the power-play of domestic politics, and looks at how the army has used religion and the issue of Kashmir to maintain its own influence, often with disastrous consequences for the security of Pakistan and the wider world. Synnott rigorously analyses developments in Pakistan's volatile tribal regions, little understood in the West despite their profound implications for regional and international security, and examines the role of past events – especially since 11 September 2001 – in generating the animosity that many Pakistanis feel towards the West today.
Where does Pakistan go from here? Emphasising that there are no easy answers, Synnott explores how concerned outsiders might finally succeed in building durable relationships with Pakistan, and help to stabilise a country that has struggled with disordered politics and chronic insecurity since independence in 1947.
About 200 miles southwest of the city of Quetta in the desert province of Baluchistan, close to Pakistan's border with Afghanistan and Iran, is a small airfield at a place called Shamsi. For many years the airfield was used by wealthy sheikhs from the Gulf and Saudi Arabia to conduct falconry expeditions to hunt the Houbara bustard, a harmless desert bird that features on international lists of endangered species. The sheikhs paid handsome sums to the Pakistani authorities for the privilege of endangering it further although, like so many of Pakistan's financial transactions at that time, details were difficult to find in the annual budget.
After September 2001, when Pakistan had been declared an ally of the US in a collective effort to combat terrorism, Arab revenue for the use of the airfield was replaced by US funding to compensate Pakistan for its military support. In early 2009, The Times reported that, according to satellite imagery, Shamsi was the launch pad for attacks by US Predator drones on Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).Footnote1 A few months earlier, the Pakistani president, prime minister and parliament had roundly condemned US drone attacks as violations of Pakistani sovereignty, calling for them to be halted immediately. The Pakistani government denied that any US forces were based in Pakistan.
Whatever the truth about the use of Shamsi, there was no doubt that, having authorised another drone strike to take place just three days after his inauguration, President Barack Obama was determined that these attacks should continue.Footnote2 Some two months later, launching a new US strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Obama urged Congress to approve a sizeable package of new, non-military aid that would go some way towards balancing the approximately $10 billion in overt funding that the US had supplied Pakistan for primarily military purposes over the previous seven years.
These brief facts give an indication of the profound difficulties in forging relations with Pakistan. Although Pakistan is an ally, the US has felt it necessary to launch attacks in its sovereign territory, at least one of which, in September 2008, involved the use of ground forces. The US welcomed Pakistan's elections in February 2008 as a return to democracy, but continued the attacks despite condemnation from Pakistan's democratic institutions. Meanwhile, a dramatic surge of violent extremism from within Pakistan, distinct from and largely independent of al-Qaeda, threatened the state itself. And even moderate Pakistanis declare that their country is ‘fighting Washington's war’.
On the face of it, therefore, US strategy has involved contradictions that are not only intellectually uncomfortable, but which may have been positively counterproductive.
There can be no doubt that the widespread violence within the country makes it ‘Pakistan's war’ as well. But the growth of this violence and the formerly rare practice of suicide bombing also suggests that part of the problem lies in the perception, and the reality, of successive Pakistani governments' support for US military operations. The army, which has traditionally assumed the role of ‘guardian of the nation’, as witnessed most recently in General Pervez Musharraf's military coup ten years ago, has been conducting a violent campaign against its countrymen for more than five years. It claims in the process to have suffered more losses and casualties than all the Coalition forces in Afghanistan combined.Footnote3 The failure of its repeated efforts to quash outbursts of violence in the tribal regions, and the collapse of several peace agreements, have been a severe humiliation for Pakistan's military. The sustainability of its renewed efforts to pacify Swat and Waziristan that began in mid 2009 will thus be an important test of its effectiveness.
At the same time, Pakistan has experienced an acute economic crisis, so much so that President Asif Ali Zardari was forced in 2008 to renege on a post-inaugural pledge and seek financial support from the International Monetary Fund (IMF). The combined effects of the depreciation of Pakistan's currency and the country's dependence on oil and food imports hit ordinary people hard. In 2009, prospects for the large proportion of the population who live at or below the poverty line looked bleaker than at any time since the country split in two after the India–Pakistan War of 1971.
Nor have the democratic elections of early 2008 and the subsequent election of Zardari to the presidency facilitated the management of Pakistan's many challenges, despite his clear majority in the national and provincial assemblies. On the contrary, the president's deep unpopularity within the country as a whole extended to his own party after he replaced Benazir Bhutto's key advisers with his own largely unknown team. His main political rival Nawaz Sharif, furious over Zardari's refusal to honour, among others, his pledges to undo the constitutional changes instituted by Musharraf, proved unwilling to tackle Pakistan's difficulties in coalition with the president's party, even when the country was experiencing multiple crises, and seemed determined instead to bring the new president down.
What, amid all the uncertainty, denials and obfuscations, has really been happening in Pakistan? How did it come to this? Has the country become ungovernable, a failed state? Do the challenges to the state's authority emanating from the tribal areas suggest a descent into violent anarchy that will make the country a refuge and breeding ground for the very forces that the US-led Coalition has been combating in the region since 2001?
This book does not presume to give definitive answers to each of these questions. It seeks, rather, to provide material with which to inform judgements, both about the significance of events that have occurred and that might occur in future, and about policies that might be pursued by countries that wish Pakistan and its people well.
Pakistan's present is inextricably linked to its history, relatively brief as it is. The country's relationship with democracy has been deformed by repeated interventions in national politics by the army which, while being presented as attempts to forestall disaster, have strengthened the army's own institutional position and increased its influence in non-military affairs. The flawed governance of successive civilian administrations has had its own undermining effects, as have some of the actions of outsiders in Pakistan and its region. Current problems have roots too in the difficulties Pakistan has had in forging a common national identity among diverse ethnic and linguistic groups, notably in the tribal regions.
This book surveys Pakistan's troubled recent history and examines the implications of its fraught internal dynamics for the wider world. It seems clear that the challenges that face Pakistan could, if left unchecked, pose severe risks to the inter ests of the West and others. Managing and reducing these risks will require far more effort, investment and sensitivity than has hitherto been shown, either by Pakistan's governments or by the country's friends and allies. Events since the beginning of the Afghanistan campaign in 2001 and, especially, since Pakistan's military began operations in the tribal areas in 2004 have shown – if it were not already obvious – that the challenges cannot by dealt with by military means alone and, indeed, that military approaches have too often made matters worse. The objective can no longer be limited to simple containment or temporary stabilisation.
The book argues that Pakistan's structural and historical weaknesses are such that nothing short of a transformation of the country's body politic and institutions will be necessary. The need for this transformation, which can only be brought about by Pakistan itself, is increasingly recognised within the country. Such change ought to be achievable: the depredations of the past decades have not entirely eroded the functional elements of the country's infrastructure and habits – Pakistan is not yet a failed state. But a transformation towards durable stability will take time and much care to achieve. And it will require a great deal of external help, of a kind that takes account of the country's cultural and economic diversity and the legitimate interests of its many ethnic groupings. Above all, this external help must not be imposed upon the Pakistani people against their will, and it must focus at least as much on non-military as on military matters.
In a country with great needs but limited absorptive capacity, it would be foolish to expect rapid results or, indeed, to expect changes to mirror the ideals and ideologies of outsiders. But progress will be immeasurably aided to the extent that the actions of outsiders are guided less by their own short-term interests than by consideration for the long-term good of all involved. The transformation of Pakistan requires a transformation of Pakistanis' attitudes towards those who call themselves friends, from suspicion towards trust. If this were to come about, much else could follow.
Notes
Jeremy Page, ‘Google Earth Reveals Secret History of US Base in Pakistan’, The Times, 19 February 2009.
Richard A. Oppel, ‘Strikes in Pakistan Underline Obama's Options’, New York Times, 23 January 2009.
For fatality figures, see for example ‘US and Coalition Casualties: Afghanistan’, CNN.com, http://edition.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2004/oef.casualties/, which cites 1,238 International Security Assistance Force deaths by July 2008. A Pakistani army source puts Pakistani army losses up to October 2008 at 1,400: ‘Exclusive Dispatch: Pakistan's Hidden War’, Independent, 23 October 2008, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/pakistans-hiddenwar-969784.html.