Engaging with Pakistan: It's a case of smoke and mirrors

The Concise Oxford English Dictionary defines the word ‘schizophrenic’ as that ‘characterized by mutually contradictory or inconsistent elements’ and ‘schizophrenia’ as ‘withdrawal from reality into fantasy and delusion’. A person can be diagnosed as schizophrenic, but a State with all its institutions, military and political structures, its press and civil society? Or is it a case of smoke and mirrors? Pakistan has presented to the world several images, most of them contradictory and inconsistent, leading to apprehensions and reactions that are themselves often contradictory.

Let me at the outset offer a disclaimer: I am an outsider to the world of Pakistan watchers and commentators, dependent on reports in the media from Pakistan, India and the world. I am also a citizen of a neighbouring yet hostile country, but am unaffected by the hostility as I have no nostalgia for a country towards which reactions of my fellow citizens are complex and contradictory. It is in this spirit that I have dared to comment on what appears to me the possibility of a looming and seemingly intractable threat to the well-being of my country, its citizens and its ambitions and aspirations.

Recently, the Pakistani press reported that Pakistani Finance Minister Hafeez Shaikh had said that his country was on the verge of ‘bankruptcy’, that it might not be possible for the State to pay salaries to its employees next month. In any other country, this would have been headline news, and there would have been widespread alarm. However, this was Pakistan, and the news was reported in a newspaper as an almost routine statement.

That Pakistan is facing a multitude of challenges cannot be denied: home-grown terrorism, the involvement of the country in the Af-Pak war, the floods and, of course, the stuttering economy. For a nascent democracy the challenges are indeed formidable. Add to this witches’ cauldron the separate and ambiguous role of the military, which after several decades in power, appears to retain an existence distinct from the State, and its severe paranoia about India, the desire not only for political and military parity with India, a State several times its size, but also a desire, as pointed out by Ahmed Rashid, a well-known Pakistani writer and journalist, to be recognised as a regional power. This is where the smoke begins to appear — a bankrupt regional power? Is it conceivable? Apparently it is, if the country is Pakistan. And, more stunningly, this appears to be accepted by many in the world.

Several months earlier, there was a concerted outcry that Pakistan was failing as a State and that this would lead to chaos not only in the State itself with its terrorist groups and nuclear weapons, but also in the region, indeed, in the world as a whole. This was at the time that the US, in a rabbit-in-the headlights situation in its messy war in Afghanistan, was seeking to pass a bill in its Congress transferring huge amounts of money to Pakistan, both to the economy and the military, in the forlorn hope that this would make the Pakistanis more friendly to them and more willing to back-stop them in Afghanistan. Stephen Cohen, an American scholar who has tried perhaps the hardest to understand Pakistan, has memorably likened that State to a man who holds a gun to his own head if he is not helped — with money, arms and other forms of support. Pakistan did not fail, of course, and not because millions of dollars had been poured in by the US and Pakistan’s other allies. And it did not make the US any more popular in Pakistan nor did the Pakistani army substantially support the flailing US efforts in Afghanistan. Here is where the mirrors come in.

The Pakistanis, after much talk of sovereignty and national pride etc, accepted the US largesse; much of the money went to the Pakistani army to bolster its support for the US troops in Afghanistan, who were fighting the Taliban and al Qaida, who used bases in Pakistan to launch their sallies against the US troops and who were supported by the Pakistani army, which had been paid by the US to help it fight the…the mirror-effect is dizzying. Add to this that the US sees the Pakistani army as a part of the solution of the war in Afghanistan, and possibly in post-NATO withdrawal Afghanistan as well.

Yet it would seem that the US is fighting a proxy war with that very Army. The US munificence could not possibly be funding the entire army and its operations and the country, the Pakistani Finance Minister has said, is about to face bankruptcy. So where is the Pakistani army getting its resources from? It has received promises of a soft loan of about US $250 million from the Chinese for two nuclear reactors and is in the process of purchasing from its all-weather friend other military hardware such as high-altitude anti- ballistic missile systems. According to a Pakistani defence analyst, the Chinese HQ-9/ 2000 is being considered “as no other supplier will sell these types of missiles to Pakistan.” Yet the Pakistani Ambassador to the US is “imploring” the world to help Pakistan deal with the very real catastrophe of floods and Pakistan’s President is asking the international financial institutions to write off the country’s outstanding debt. The missiles could not be for free, or could they?

Trying to look through the smoke and mirrors, one can only conclude that there are two States — one a poor developing country, a nascent democracy, trying to cope with floods, terrorism and violence which claims victims almost every other day, stunned by the immensity of its problems and its fragile economy and reportedly believing that friendly relations with India can only help its development and prosperity, and the other, a well-funded army with regional, if not global, ambitions and an agenda that includes a visceral hatred of India and does not appear to take the problems facing the first as its own. To be fair, they have been helping with floods, but almost like a foreign entity. Relief material delivered by the army is marked “Gift of the Army/Corps Commander”.

Should this be of concern to us? I am one of those who support the Prime Minister’s belief that we have to engage with Pakistan in our own interest. But which Pakistan?

Ambassador Arundhati Ghose is a Former Permanent Representative to the UN

Courtsey: The Tribune, 28 September 2010

http://www.tribuneindia.com/2010/20100928/edit.htm#4

(Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the views of the editorial committee or the centre for land warfare studies)