Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [237]
This fear has been kept alive by the support of the Kabul government and India – albeit very limited – for Baloch rebels in Pakistan; and by the Karzai administration’s refusal to recognize the ‘Durand Line’ between Afghanistan and Pakistan. Hence the absurd but passionately held belief among many Pakistanis that India is the principal force behind the Pakistani Taleban. In the 1990s there was also a belief among Pakistani strategists that Afghanistan could become a corridor for the expansion of Pakistani trade and influence in former Soviet Central Asia. Today, however, this hope is held only by Pakistani Islamists.
Despite the Taleban’s striking military successes, it was obvious to more intelligent Pakistani officials as early as 1998 that its Afghan strategy was going badly wrong. This was above all because of the entry on to the scene of Osama bin Laden and Al Qaeda. Forced to leave their former refuge in Sudan, they had returned to Afghanistan, where they had fought against the Soviets and Communists and forged close links with local Pathan Islamists.
Al Qaeda ingratiated themselves with the Taleban partly though ideological affinity (and the prestige which Arab origins have long possessed in this part of the world); partly through money; and partly because they came to serve as shock troops for the Taleban in their campaigns in northern Afghanistan, where many of their Pathan troops were unwilling to fight.
On 7 August 1998 Al Qaeda carried out bomb attacks against the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar-es-Salaam, killing more than 200 people. In response, the Clinton administration ordered cruise missile attacks on Al Qaeda bases in Afghanistan, passing across Pakistani territory. In the following years, both the Nawaz Sharif and Musharraf governments asked the Taleban to expel Al Qaeda and seek better relations with the US. Pakistani officials whom I have interviewed have also claimed credit for the Taleban’s drastic reduction of heroin production in Afghanistan in 2000 – 2001, aimed at persuading the West to recognize the Taleban’s rule.
These Pakistani moves, however, were not backed by real pressure (for example by withdrawing Pakistani military assistance or restricting Afghanistan’s vital trade through Pakistan). The bankruptcy of Pakistan’s policy, and the greater influence of Al Qaeda, were drastically revealed when in March 2001 the Taleban destroyed the great Buddhist statues at Bamian, despite a strong personal appeal by Musharraf.
Nonetheless, the Musharraf administration could still see no alternative to Taleban rule in Afghanistan that would be favourable to Pakistan, and Pakistan was therefore still linked to the Taleban when, on 11 September 2001, as a Pakistani general said to me, ‘the roof fell in on us’. Musharraf’s statement that US Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage threatened to ‘bomb Pakistan back to the Stone Age’ if Pakistan failed to co-operate in the US attack on Afghanistan seems to have been greatly exaggerated; but if the language was more diplomatic than that reported by Musharraf, the threat from the US to Pakistan in the immediate wake of 9/11 was undeniable.4 Given the mood in America and in the Bush administration at that time, hesitation by Pakistan would indeed have been very dangerous for the country.
With the agreement of the rest of the Pakistani High Command, Musharraf therefore agreed to help the US by establishing two US air bases in Pakistan to support the campaign against the Taleban in Afghanistan; supplying US forces in Afghanistan through Pakistan; arresting Al Qaeda members in Pakistan; and blocking Taleban forces from retreating from Afghanistan into Pakistan. The first two promises were substantially kept, but the third only to a very limited extent.
Musharraf was apparently able to extract from Washington one major