Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [110]
Kashmir is not a specifically military obsession. It is very widely shared in Punjab, and to a lesser extent in the NWFP and FATA, from which many volunteers for the Kashmir struggle have been drawn ever since 1947, but far less in Karachi, Sindh and Balochistan. This belief has been kept alive in part by the belief (which is true but – as in so many such cases – irrelevant) that democracy and the past resolutions of the UN are on Pakistan’s side; and by anger at Indian atrocities against Indian Muslims, both in Kashmir and more widely.
In both the Pakistani and the Indian militaries, the commitment to fight for Kashmir has been reinforced over the years by the sacrifices made there: some 13,000 dead on both sides in the wars of 1947 and 1965, together with around 1,000 dead in the Kargil battle of 1999, and some 2,400 (mostly from frostbite and accidents) in the twenty-five years of the struggle for the Siachen. That is without counting the thousands of civilian dead in 1947, and the 50,000 (according to Indian official figures) or more than 100,000 (according to Kashmiri groups) civilians, militants and Indian security personnel killed or missing in the Kashmiri insurgency which began in 1988.
Washington’s growing alliance with India since 2001, and abandonment of the previous US stance on the need for a plebiscite on Kashmir’s fate, has therefore caused intense anger in the Pakistani military. The military’s obsession with India and Kashmir is not in origin Islamist, but Pakistani Muslim nationalist. With rare exceptions, this has been true even of those senior officers most closely involved in backing Islamist extremist groups to fight against India, like former ISI chief Lt-General Hamid Gul.
Most have used the Islamists as weapons against India without sharing their ideology. Similarly, the deep hostility of men like Gul or former chief of staff General Aslam Beg to the US comes from anger at perceived US domination and subjugation of the Muslim world, not from radical Islam – a feeling to be found among many entirely secular and liberal figures in institutions such as Al Jazeera, for example.
That does not necessarily make their hostility to India any the less dangerous though. I had a rather hair-raising glimpse of the underlying attitudes of some ISI officers in 2008 when I asked a senior ISI public relations official (and seconded officer) to tell me who he thought were the most interesting analysts and think-tanks in Islamabad. He recommended that I see Syed Zaid Hamid, who runs an analytical centre called ‘Brasstacks’ (after the huge Indian military exercise of 1987, seen in Pakistan as a prelude to Indian invasion).
Mr Hamid also presents a programme on national security issues on the News One television channel. He fought in Afghanistan in the 1980s with the Afghan Mujahidin, and, though he told me that he had never been an ISI officer, there can be no doubt that he was close to that organization. He described the ISI as ‘the intellectual core and centre of gravity of the army. Without the ISI, the army is just an elephant without eyes and ears’ (this phrase caused extreme annoyance among some military friends to whom I repeated it).
Mr Hamid described himself to me as ‘a Pakistani neo-con’, and there really is something neo-conservative about his mixture of considerable intelligence, great fluency in presenting his ideas and geopolitical fanaticism and recklessness. Like some neo-cons of my acquaintance in Washington, his favourite word seemed to be ‘ruthless’. Despite his background, he had a geekish air about him, and spoke with nervous intensity.
On the Taleban, he echoed the Pakistani security establishment in general (at least when they are speaking off the record), emphasizing the difference between