Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [236]
There were a bizarre few months in 1994 and 1995 during which the Pakistani Intelligence Bureau (responsible to the Interior Minister) and the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence, responsible to the military) were supporting the Taleban and Hekmatyar against each other; but by 1996 Pakistan was fully committed to the Taleban, and Pakistani arms supplies, military advisers, training and Islamist volunteers played an important part in their subsequent victorious campaigns.
The Pakistani security services also encouraged some of their old Pathan allies in the war against the Soviets to join the Taleban – notably the formidable Jalaluddin Haqqani and his clan along the Afghan border with Pakistani Waziristan, who continue as of 2010 to play a key part in fighting against Western forces and the Kabul government and to enjoy close ties to the Pakistani military. According to Western intelligence sources, the ISI encouraged and helped the Haqqani group to carry out a destructive attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul in July 2008. Nonetheless, as Mullah Zaeef’s memoir also makes clear, the Taleban leadership never fully trusted Pakistani governments and the Pakistani military, and since 2001 there has been in some Taleban circles active hatred of the Pakistani military because of the way in which they sided with the US after 9/11.
The reasons for the Pakistani security establishment’s support for the Taleban are not complicated, and as far as the high command are concerned stem from strategic calculations and not Islamist ideology (which is not to say of course that the strategy has been a wise one). Lowerlevel operatives, however, engaged since the 1980s in helping the Afghan Islamist groups on the ground undoubtedly developed their own strong local allegiances.
The strategic root of support for the Taleban is witnessed by the fact that the initiator of the strategy, General Babar, was a minister in Benazir Bhutto’s PPP government, and that Pakistan’s approach continued unchanged under governments with very different attitudes to Islamism. Certainly General Musharraf, a convinced Westernizing modernizer, can by no stretch of the imagination be accused of ideological sympathy for the Taleban.
Musharraf, however, did for most of his career share in the basic reason for Pakistan’s Afghan strategy, which is fear of encirclement by India, and of India using Afghanistan as a base to support ethnic revolt within Pakistan. This fear is exaggerated, but is held with absolute conviction by almost all the Pakistani soldiers with whom I have spoken, and indeed by most of the population in northern Pakistan. In the words of Major-General Athar Abbas, head of military public relations in 2009 (and one of the most intelligent senior officers in the army):
We are concerned by an Indian over-involvement in Afghanistan. We see it as an encirclement move. What happens tomorrow if the American trainers are replaced by Indian trainers? The leadership in Afghanistan is completely dominated by an India-friendly Northern Alliance. The Northern Alliance’s affiliation with India makes us very uncomfortable because we see in it a future two-front war scenario.3
In consequence, Pakistani governments and military leaderships have believed that Pakistan must have a friendly government ruling in Kabul or, failing that, at least friendly forces controlling the Pathan areas