Pakistan’s enemy within

Who bought ranches and prime real estate from the profits made in the F-16 deal…? Where did Admiral Mansoor ul-Haq get the funds to build his palatial house…? In fact, the military is responsible for spending huge amounts to ensure the security of Pakistan at the cost of human development. It’s about time the same law applied to all….”

Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif took the first step in applying that law when he dismissed Chief of Naval Staff Admiral Mansoor ul-Haq in the middle of April. The charge in the Pakistani press: the naval chief was supposed to have been involved in kickbacks on the sale of French Agosta 90-B submarines to Pakistan.

Two weeks later, that was followed by the announcement that the Council for Defence and National Security would go because it had outlived its `utility’. Having already clipped the wings of the President by scrapping the Eighth Amendment (which allows an elected government to be dismissed), Sharif was striking another blow for Pakistan’s nascent, fragile democratic institutions.

Sharif’s bold moves — by any standard of course meant that the festering, suppurating sores in the nation’s polity were being reopened in full public glare. Earlier, on April 9, a senior pilot of the Pakistan Air Force (PAF), Sq Ldr Mohammed Farooq, had been arrested by the US Drug Enforcing Agency for smuggling 2 kg of top quality heroin, worth Rs 8 crore, into the US. The heroin had been loaded on to a PAF transport aircraft (Boeing 707), piloted by Sq Ldr Farooq, who was ostensibly on a mission to collect spare parts for F-16 fighter aircraft.

Even as the PAF was shame-facedly admitting that “the act of an individual had damaged not only the image of the PAF but also that of Pakistan,” Farooq’s accomplice, Sq Ldr Qasim Bhatti, was picked up in Karachi. Air Chief Marshal Abbas Khattak’s future, according to the Pakistani press, suddenly looked shaky.

Sharif’s landslide majority, defence analysts say, has of course given him the mandate to begin cleansing the stables of the Pakistani defence establishment. They point out, however, that Sharif is nobody’s fool: the cleansing process so far hasn’t touched the Army, the most powerful arm of the troika (the other two are the President and the Prime Minister). They believe that he will move slowly once the economy begins to look better and once the situation in Afghanistan, in which the Army and the ISI have played no small role, settles down one way or another.

Even a simplistic reading of independent Pakistan’s history tells us that an elected government can never be comfortable with the Army’s covert and overt use of power. The Army believes it is the keeper of the nation’s foreign and security policy that a vindication of this policy is its support for the jehad the ISI has launched over the past seven years in Kashmir.

Having lost three wars to India, the Army has been instrumental in forging the concept of `strategic depth’ in Afghanistan vis-a-vis India. Small wonder the Taliban student militia was forged in the fire of the Islamic madarsas and branded by the ISI-Army duo. (See box).

Interestingly, Sharif has refrained from making any public statements on the conflict in Afghanistan; most of the talking is done by Capt. Gohar Ayub Khan, son of the more famous President and said to be a representative of the Army in Sharif’s Cabinet.

Obviously, then, Pakistan-watchers here need to continue to watch out for the smallest detail that may indicate what the Army thinks about the just-started dialogue between the governments of India and Pakistan. One measure of how far Sharif can go in contributing towards its success, will be the reaction of the Army to each excruciating step in the dialogue: how will Kashmir be discussed, what will be the exact coordinates of its placement on the front/backburner, how will the other working groups link up, where will Siachen fit in…most important, will the Army-ISI give a commitment to stop the support and training it provides for terrorists in Kashmir?

Still, the ISI-Army duo is finding itself internationally exposed today like never before in recent years: in the ’80s it fought the war against Communism in Afghanistan for the US and was lauded for its effort.

Unfortunately, the fall-out was more than severe: drug-trafficking and arms-running, especially in the areas around Peshawar, became commonplace. They bred their own warlords. When the Taliban was sent off to fight a jehad in Afghanistan in 1995 and suffered their first reverses last week — the ISI-Army had unwittingly completed the vicious circle.As the anti-Taliban alliance continues to hold ground, stories on the linkages between the ISI-Army nexus and the Taliban are tumbling out into the pages of Western newspapers: how the Taliban was being armed, funded and controlled by Pakistan’s ISI. How thousands of Pakistani troops, in disguise, were fighting alongside the Pashtoon militia. When the Taliban lost men in the fighting at Charikar, Jabal os-Seraj, Bagram, etc., these were replaced by armed men flown in by the Pakistanis.

The climax came when on May 29, four top officers of the ISI, including Azad Beg, brother of Pakistan’s former army chief Mirza Aslam Beg, were killed when a Taliban helicopter they were travelling in crashed in bad weather at Sholagarah, near Mazar-i-Sharif. Pakistan’s Jang, quoting Teheran radio, said “the personnel were playing a significant role in the ongoing Taliban offensive in northern Afghanistan”.

It is now believed that Pakistan’s ambassador to Afghanistan, Aziz Khan — along with Taliban’s foreign minister Mullah Mohammed Ghows — has been kidnapped by the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance and is being held captive at the Uzbek-Afghan border town of Haeratan. The Pakistan High Commission in New Delhi has denied the story, but sources from Tashkent insist otherwise.

As the ding-dong battle for Afghanistan continues, the next few days will show who’s speaking the truth.The Army-ISI viewpoint

The following are excerpts from an April issue of Hilal, a weekly brought out by Pakistan’s Armed Forces and the PR wing of the ISI:

On Track 2 diplomacy between India and Pakistan:

This sick group considers that the only cure of its disease is to submit to the nefarious designs of India, ignoring the Hindu mentality and pervert nature of Indian communalism….

This group of perverts, conveniently forgetting the 60,000 martyrs, more than two-lakh maimed and thousands of gang-raped Kashmiri women, wants to accept the third option of independent Kashmir, the Line of Control as the permanent international border and Siachen for Kashmir.

On India-Pakistan friendship:

Can they forget the gory past and extend a hand of friendship to the criminals of humanity who should be tried in court for committing unspeakable war crimes? Can they ignore what they read in history books, heard from their elders who migrated from India and make friends with Hindus, trust Hindus who never accepted Pakistan as a separate Muslim State?