29 Nov. - 5 Dec. 2001
Issue No.562
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 29 Nov. - 5 Dec. 2001 Issue No.562 |
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Pakistan's balance sheet
The current crisis has turned the international media spotlight on Pakistan, mainly portraying it as a bulwark of Western support in a mostly hostile region. But, as Iffat Malik reports, the external impression belies a maelstrom of domestic debate and dissent
International interest in Afghanistan these days is huge: the UN, the EU, America, Russia, Britain, France, even Australia -- all are preoccupied with events in what is one of the world's poorest countries. But perhaps nowhere is there as much interest as in Afghanistan's southern neighbour, Pakistan.
The reasons are obvious. Pakistan shares the longest and most accessible border with Afghanistan. The people of Pakistan's North-Western Frontier Province (NWFP) and Baluchistan provinces have ethnic, cultural and linguistic ties with those of Afghanistan. More than two million Afghan refugees are resident in Pakistan -- many for over two decades. Moreover, history shows that Pakistan cannot remain immune to what happens in Afghanistan: it will inevitably have to deal with some kind of fallout.
So how are Pakistanis -- the ordinary public and the government -- reacting to the latest dramatic developments in Afghanistan? The brief answer to this question would be that they are unhappy. Pakistanis -- government and public -- are not happy about the Northern Alliance's growing power in Afghanistan. They consider the international pay-off they have received for their cooperation in the campaign against the triumvirate of terrorism, the Taliban, and Al-Qa'eda to be insufficient. And, as for the Pakistani public, they are especially unhappy about the plight of Pakistani fighters trapped in Afghanistan, just as much as they resent their government's perceived capitulations to American demands in the absence of any significant reciprocal consideration on the part of the United States.
There is little love lost between the Northern Alliance (NA) and Pakistan. As supporters and backers of their long-time enemy, the Taliban, Pakistanis are hated by the Northern Alliance. On the other hand, the Northern Alliance constitutes a coalition of disparate interests backed by Pakistan's competitors for geopolitical influence in Afghanistan -- Iran, Russia, the Central Asian Republics and India. Little wonder then that as the Northern Alliance has taken control of more and more territory in Afghanistan, Pakistan's alarm has increased.
President Pervez Musharraf has tried to halt the Northern Alliance's seemingly clear march to overall power by urging the international community to form a broad-based government in Afghanistan. In recent talks among top Iranian, British and EU diplomats, this was the common refrain from Islamabad.
Musharraf will have been reassured to hear his calls for a broad-based government echoed by his foreign visitors, but he is well aware that what really counts in Afghanistan is not so much what the international community thinks as the reality of military superiority and ground possession.
Put simply, whoever holds the most of these will have the biggest say in the country's future set-up. And, at the moment, that party is the Northern Alliance.
Foreign dignitaries are still making their way to Islamabad, but they now appear in fewer numbers than before and bear fewer gifts.
President Musharraf continues to insist that the country will benefit economically -- as well as politically and diplomatically -- from his decision to cooperate in the 'war against terror', but ordinary Pakistanis are a lot more sceptical. Musharraf's decision was never popular, but the difficult circumstances in which he was forced to make this decision, coupled with the promise of massive international assistance, has somewhat defused public opposition. Whereas public expectations were that Pakistan's debts would be written off, that it would receive aid in similar quantities to what it got in the last Afghan war, and that it would succeed in carving for itself greater market access, much of this has failed to materialise.
Pakistanis are busily making cost-benefit analyses. Everyone is posing the question, "What has Pakistan achieved?" They weigh up the emergence of Northern Alliance rule in Afghanistan against the material benefits they have received, and appear pessimistic about the resulting balance. President Musharraf is vigorously waving a new carrot -- the possibility of contracts for Pakistani companies once the international reconstruction effort in Afghanistan gets under way. But this dangling promise remains too far in the future to arouse much excitement for the time being. Public opinion remains unimpressed and the consensus is emerging that Pakistan has lost out.
There has been a big qualitative change in public opinion in Pakistan, with specific regard to the humanitarian crisis in Afghanistan. Of course, people were always disturbed by reports of Afghan civilian casualties, but following the Taliban's collapse they are far more so. TV pictures of executed Taliban lying in Kabul's gutters and of anti- Taliban lynchings shocked the world. However, Pakistanis now have a more pertinent reason for being shocked and alarmed.
The Northern Alliance is making a clear distinction between Afghan and foreign Taliban. While the former are being allowed to defect or surrender, the latter are being shown no mercy by the conquering forces. Alliance leaders have announced that their surrender is unacceptable -- in other words, they will be killed. US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has also effectively given the green light for their slaughter.
The majority of foreign Taliban come from three sources: the Arab world, Chechnya and Pakistan. Hence Pakistani alarm.
Accurate figures are not available, but the number of Pakistani fighters trapped in places like Kunduz and Kandahar or in Northern Alliance custody, runs into several hundred at the very least. The Tehreek-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat Muhammadi, a pro-Taliban jihadi group, took several thousand volunteers over in only the past few weeks. Two thousand of them remain unaccounted for.
Pakistanis are worried that they could meet the same fate as 520 Pakistani Taliban who apparently surrendered in a school in Mazar- i-Sharif only for General Dostum's forces to kill all of them.
President Musharraf is coming under a lot of domestic pressure to save the Pakistani fighters from such a fate. Even mainstream political parties have urged him to do something. He has responded by urging the Northern Alliance and its international backers to show restraint and respect the norms of war, i.e. that POWs should be treated in a humanitarian way. Musharraf knows that more massacres of Pakistani fighters will cause great anger at home, at a time when maintaining public order is at the top of his agenda.
On Thursday 22 November Pakistan ordered the Taliban embassy in Islamabad to close. Although this was a step that the Musharraf government would have had to take sooner or later, its timing appears to have been misjudged, coming just hours after US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher stated that he could see no reason for the embassy to remain open. The subsequent statement by Pakistani Foreign Office spokesman Aziz Khan announcing its closure led ordinary Pakistanis to conclude that the government was once again bowing to American dictates. Much as President Musharraf strives to convince his people that the decisions he is taking are best for Pakistan, they increasingly believe that he is an American stooge.
Not everyone in Pakistan, however, is pessimistic. There are some analysts who share Musharraf's view that Pakistan could emerge from this crisis a winner. Their reasons for thinking so, however, are based on a brand of opposition to religious fundamentalism which considers the government's abandonment of the Taliban to be the first step in dealing with the menace of religious extremism that has plagued Pakistan for many years. They believe that the government should follow through by disarming and clamping down on all militant religious groups in the country and stopping its support of jihadi groups operating in Indian Kashmir. They believe that this would help propel Pakistan firmly in the orbit of liberal and moderate Islam. For these people, the loss of militant Pakistani volunteers in Afghanistan is a boon, not a loss.
There are also some who see no cause to be alarmed by the rise to power of the Northern Alliance. They argue that the reasons why Afghanistan has historically been so important for Pakistan -- to provide 'strategic depth' against India, and to prevent secessionist tendencies among Pakistani Pashtuns -- are no longer relevant. They further argue that, being a land- locked country, it is in Afghanistan's interests, much more than Pakistan's, for the two countries to have good relations.
However, these are minority views. Most people still think along more conventional lines: there is a hostile government across the border, Pakistanis are being killed, Pakistan itself has once again been used by the West for negligible returns -- and they are not happy.
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