The West was Conned by Pakistan & Osama bin Laden

For years, US intelligence officials have complained that Pakistan has been playing a “double game”: co-operating with some elements of Western counter-terrorism efforts, while stopping short of decisive action against the jihadist movement. History helps understand just why that game was played.

After Gen Zia-ul-Haq’s mysterious death in 1988, Pakistan developed what Hussain Haqqani, now his country’s ambassador to the United States, has called “military rule by other means”. The scholar Hasan Askari Rizvi has shown that the new system revolved around the army’s collegium of commanders, who emerged as the pre-eminent institution of state.

The ISI played a key role in this set-up. Since independence in 1948, Pakistan’s covert services have had an unusually important role, faced as the country was with a conventionally superior adversary to its east. In 1947-48, tribal insurgents backed by Pakistani military officers came close to seizing all of Kashmir. Later, in 1965, a more structured version of the enterprise was attempted, using Pakistani military formations. Pakistani intelligence strategists hoped this campaign – which Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, described as an “informal war” – would open up religious and ethnic fissures, leading to the disintegration of their gargantuan adversary.

Pakistan also sought to undermine ethnic-Pashtun nationalism, which Afghanistan used to lay claim to its north-west. It cultivated Islamists exiled by Afghan Gen Muhammad Daoud Khan’s secular-nationalist regime, and in July 1975, even financed an attempted coup against Daoud Khan by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the future Mujahideen leader.

Much of this doctrine was learnt in US military schools, where Pakistani officers studied the lessons of guerrilla warfare. But where America sought to prevent such wars, the scholar Stephen Cohen has pointed out, Pakistan studied these “in terms of launching a people’s war against India”.

Pakistan was thus ideally placed to aid the anti-communist jihad in Afghanistan, and the welter of groups it spawned to fight this campaign ended up becoming allies. In the wake of 9/11, though, it was forced to change course: the former president Musharraf has, in his memoirs, recalled being told that Pakistan would have to side with the United States, or risk being bombed back into the Stone Age.

So, what is it that Pakistan’s army now wants? In 2008, when he took charge in what was a de facto coup by Pakistan’s generals against their own commander-in-chief, Gen Pervez Kayani, the chief of army staff, was tasked with restoring the institution’s political position, which in turn meant restoring order. His efforts brought Pakistan into conflict with America’s geopolitical aims.

First, Gen Kayani sought to project influence in Afghanistan, hoping that the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, as the Taliban calls itself, would act as an ally against jihadists operating against Pakistan. Figures like the Afghan jihadist leader Jalaluddin Haqqani, the ISI hoped, would temper the Pakistani jihadist coalition, called the Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan, in return for power. However, the Haqqani network was the most trenchant of the West’s adversaries in Afghanistan, and the Tehreek-i-Taliban leader Muhammad Illyas Kashmiri, whom Pakistan fears confronting, is linked to al-Qaeda. Last year, the former Canadian diplomat Chris Alexander asserted that “without Pakistani military support, all signs are the Islamic Emirate’s combat units would collapse”.

Second, Gen Kayani took a hardline posture on Pakistan’s traditional rival, India – a concession to domestic jihadists, who he hoped would again turn their attentions outwards. In 2008, America was reported to have confronted Pakistan’s army with evidence that the ISI was involved in an attack on the Indian diplomatic mission in Kabul. Later that year, it is now known from the testimony of the Pakistani-American jihadist David Headley, the ISI facilitated the carnage in Mumbai, providing training and support for the perpetrators.

Key perpetrators of the operation, like its overall commander Sajid Mir and military architect Muhammad Muzammil Bhat, are still at large – and were not even named by Pakistani investigators before Mr Headley’s revelations became public.

In recent years, though, the anti-India Lashkar-e-Taiba has also become a threat to the West. Experts like Steven Tankel have shown that its infrastructure has supported jihadist operations in Europe, Afghanistan and even Iraq. Its leader, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, who is wanted for his role in the Mumbai attack, told a prayer congregation in the city of Lahore on Monday that bin Laden “was a great person who awakened the Muslim world”. Not surprisingly, the ISI has been blocking the CIA’s efforts to stamp out the Lashkar – leading to the recent showdown over Raymond Davis, a US intelligence official held in Pakistan earlier this year.

Finally, Gen Kayani sought to heal the rupture between Pakistan’s army and jihadist allies like the Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammad, and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi – one of the legacies of President Musharraf’s last years in office.

Musharraf’s decision to rein in the jihadists was a response to intense pressures from within the military. Lt Gen Moinuddin Haider, interior minister under Musharraf, was among a group of establishment figures who had 
come to realise that Pakistan’s patronage of jihadists, though tactically expedient, deterred investors and meant real costs to the country’s economy. But while Musharraf cracked down on jihadists, notably by scaling back operations in Jammu and Kashmir, he failed to build an institutional consensus around these ideas – and, as his legitimacy eroded, he proved unable to make a decisive break with the past.

Bin Laden’s likely successors – the Egyptian jihad veteran Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda’s poet-warrior Abu Yahya al-Libi and organisational genius Saif-al-Adel – are all in Pakistan. Gen Kayani has made clear that he has no intention of moving troops into North Waziristan, where Muhammad Illyas Kashmiri’s camps are training jihadists to target the West, and have demonstrated no will to go after al-Qaeda elsewhere.

For decades, Western governments have sought, in essence, to bribe Pakistan into a strategic alliance. Gen Kayani has made clear that Pakistan sees things very differently: the West’s war against terror, in his view, has mired his country in an existence-threatening crisis, which the army wants out of. That is a choice neither the West, nor Pakistan’s citizens, the principal victims of the jihadists on its soil, 
can afford.

There are few good options from here: Pakistan and the West are entering a new and profoundly perilous stage in their relationship. Bin Laden’s killing might be the end of one phase of the war on terror, but it is profoundly unlikely to be the beginning of peace.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/pakistan/8491149/Pakistan-and-Osama-bin-Laden-How-the-West-was-conned.html