Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [119]
Incidents such as the terrorist attack on the military headquarters in Rawalpindi are not a precedent, because this was a suicide attack – whereas if you want to steal a nuclear weapon, you obviously don’t just have to get in, you have to get out again, carrying it.
The greatest danger may be not Pakistani realities but US fears. That is to say, the risk that the US might launch a strike on Pakistan’s nuclear deterrent prematurely, thereby precipitating precisely the scenario that the US fears – since such an attack would so radicalize the army and destabilize the state as to run a really serious risk of bringing about mutiny and state collapse.
Another danger is that the growth of India’s nuclear forces will leave Pakistan in a position where it feels that it has no alternative but to seek new technology on the international black market. Such a move, if discovered – as it certainly would be sooner or later – would bring about the collapse of relations with the US and the imposition of Western sanctions, risking economic collapse, an increase in radicalization, and possibly revolution.
Finally, there is the ultimate nightmare scenario (other of course than a nuclear exchange between India and Pakistan) of a successful attack on a US target using a weapon of mass destruction. If the aftermath of 9/11 is anything to go by, the effects of such an attack would be temporarily at least to deprive the US establishment of its collective wits, and remove any restraint in US strategy.
Even if such an attack turned out to have no Pakistani origins, Pakistan’s possession of nuclear weapons would undoubtedly place Pakistan squarely in America’s gun-sights. Very likely, this is precisely what the perpetrators of such an attack would be hoping – since a US attack on Pakistan would be the shortest road to victory for Al Qaeda and its allies that could be imagined, other than a US invasion of Saudi Arabia.
The most dangerous moment in my visits to Pakistan since 9/11 came in August/September 2008, when on two occasions US forces entered Pakistan’s tribal areas on the ground in order to raid suspected Taleban and Al Qaeda bases. On the second occasion, Pakistani soldiers fired in the air to turn the Americans back. On 19 September 2008 the chief of the army staff, General Kayani, flew to meet the US chief of the joint staffs, Admiral Mike Mullen, on the US aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, and in the words of a senior Pakistani general ‘gave him the toughest possible warning’ about what would happen if this were repeated.
Pakistani officers from captain to lt-general have told me that the entry of US ground forces into Pakistan in pursuit of the Taleban and Al Qaeda is by far the most dangerous scenario as far as both Pakistani – US relations and the unity of the army are concerned. As one retired general explained, drone attacks on Pakistani territory, though the ordinary officers and soldiers find them humiliating, are not a critical issue because they cannot do anything about them.
US ground forces inside Pakistan are a different matter, because the soldiers can do something about them. They can fight. And if they don’t fight, they will feel utterly humiliated, before their wives, mothers, children. It would be a matter of honour, which as you know is a tremendous thing in our society. These men have sworn an oath to defend Pakistani soil. So they would fight. And if the generals told them not to fight, many of them would mutiny, starting with the Frontier Corps.
At this point, not just Islamist radicals but every malcontent in the country would join the mutineers, and the disintegration of Pakistan would come a giant leap closer.
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Politics
Men