Zardari moves on links with militants
http://www.thenational.ae/article/20090712/FOREIGN/707119898/1135
Isambard Wilkinson, Foreign Correspondent
Last Updated: July 12. 2009 12:02AM UAE / July 11. 2009 8:02PM GMT
ISLAMABAD // A claim made by President Asif Zardari last week that Pakistani security forces will end a decades-old strategic alliance with militants has been strongly challenged by analysts.
To the delight of his US ally, Mr Zardari has attempted to force a “strategic shift” in Pakistan’s covert military doctrine by saying that security forces will hunt down their former jihadist proxies.
Mr Zardari said he would launch operations against militant leaders until now considered by the military to be “strategic assets” that have been used against Pakistan’s archrival, India, and for projecting Pakistani influence in Afghanistan.
The Indian government believes links between Pakistan authorities and Islamabad Islamic militant groups such as Lashkar-i-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed remain intact and the prime minister, Manmohan Singh, has accused elements within Pakistan’s security apparatus of aiding them to conduct a commando attack on Mumbai last November.
Last week, Mr Zardari reinforced his message when speaking of former military rulers who forged strong links with militants. He said he would “banish dictators’ strategic partners, in the form of militants and religious extremists”.
“I don’t think anybody in the establishment supports them anymore. I think everybody has become more wise than this. It is politically incorrect to use this format of interaction. Now everybody talks of dialogue,” he said in a recent interview.
Then the president told a meeting of former senior civil servants in Islamabad that it was time to be honest about their deployment. “The terrorists of today were the heroes of yesteryears until 9/11 occurred and they began to haunt us as well.”
He added that these groups emerged not because of government weakness “because they were deliberately created and nurtured as a policy to achieve some short-term tactical objectives”.
Najam Sethi, a leading Pakistani political analyst and the editor of the broadly pro-ruling Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), was optimistic about Mr Zardari’s ambitious drive to assert a civilian-led policy on the all-powerful military.
“President Zardari has a lot of guts. He has also had the courage to speak up on normalising relations with India. Three factors are compelling a rethink in the military establishment about the demerits of the Taliban as future assets in Afghanistan,” said Mr Sethi.
He said that the three factors were: an American intent to stay for the “long haul” in Afghanistan; the recent troop surge in Helmand and intensification of US drone attacks in the border, tribal area of Waziristan; and Mr Zardari’s friendship with the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, whom the Pakistani military establishment had previously viewed as an “Indian asset”.
Last weekend, the Pakistani army chief Gen Ashfaq Kiyani made an unprecedented statement announcing that the “immediate internal threat” of Taliban militancy was greater than any “external threat” – military-speak for India.
The military launched an operation in Swat valley and two neighbouring districts over two months ago when Taliban fighters advanced to within 100km of Islamabad. They had flouted a peace deal that had allowed for Sharia law to be implemented in the Malakand division in North West Frontier Province.
The army claims to have killed more than 1,700 militants in the area and has now begun preliminary operations against the head of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, in the tribal area of South Waziristan.
Washington, which is pumping billions of dollars of civilian and military aid into Pakistan in return for counter-terrorism operations, has been working hard to defuse tension between Islamabad and New Delhi following the terrorist attacks on Mumbai last year that were blamed on Pakistani terrorists.-However, several military analysts and retired senior officers pointed out that there were immediate indicators that could be used to assess the strength of Mr Zardari’s claims.
One retired lieutenant-general, who did not want to be named, said there was no as yet serious move to wrap up jihadi groups operating in Indian-held Kashmir.
He also said the army continued to use the centuries-old policy of using tribal militants against other militants.
“But the policy is not a risk-free one as the ‘good’ Taliban have so often turned ‘bad’ and sometimes several times, as in the case of Baitullah Mehsud and neighbouring commander Maulvi Nazir,” he added.
Unusually for a Pakistani president, Mr Zardari said Pakistan had no interest in Afghanistan, where the Pakistani establishment wishes to retain influence through the Taliban to promote a non-hostile government in Kabul.
He said, without irony: “What the US does in Afghanistan is its own business, it is a sovereign state.” Asked whether he will act against Sirajuddin Haqqani, a major Afghan Taliban commander with links to the Pakistani military who is based in the Pakistani tribal area of North Waziristan, he replied: “Our operation is across the board, any miscreant, anybody who uses Pakistani soil against ourselves or against anybody else is unacceptable.”
Mr Zardari, the widower of the assassinated prime minister Benazir Bhutto, has riled many of the military establishment’s old guard with his remarks.
In an interview with The National, the retired head of the Pakistani army, Gen Aslam Beg, said: “Who is Mr Zardari to take away Pakistan’s strategic assets? That is for the people of Pakistan to decide. He is not even elected.”
Gen Beg contended that there were two types of militant. “There are the freedom fighters in Afghanistan and Kashmir and there are the so-called militants which the Pakistan army is now fighting in Swat and the tribal areas who were created by foreign involvement,” Mr Beg said.
“The military has been engaged with the militants for years – in the ’80s they were also hand-in-glove with the CIA. How can you disengage when such links exist between the Pakistan armed forces and the militants?” he added.
Farhatullah Babar, a presidential spokesman and senior member of the PPP, preferred to underscore Pakistan’s historic links with militants rather than dwell on the president’s remarks being construed as an admission that modern Pakistan has been a “jihadi factory”.
“What President Zardari has been saying is that the extremists and jihadis were financed, armed and helped by the international community in their quest to drive the Soviet Union out of Afghanistan in the decade of the ’80s,” said Mr Babar.
“Remember the meeting of half a dozen turbaned leading Afghan -jihad leaders sitting across from President [Ronald] Reagan in the White House and the US president hailing them as the ‘moral equivalents of George Washington’,” he added.
