Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [239]
Musharraf himself stated his administration’s approach as follows:
Al Qaeda has to be defeated militarily, period. They are foreigners who have no right to be in Pakistan. With the militant Taleban, it is more complicated. They are local people who are not so easily recognized, and they have local roots. So we have to deal with them militarily when necessary, but we also need to wean the population away from them by political means and through social and economic development, and negotiate so as to draw away more moderate elements. This is not an easy job. We may be double-crossed. We may fail. But we have no choice but to pursue this course because we cannot use military means against the whole population ... After all, previously I was the only one saying about Afghanistan too that the West needed a political strategy there to wean away some parts of the Taleban from the terrorists. Now Western leaders also accept this.7
In the wake of 9/11, Musharraf’s administration did therefore take strong action against Al Qaeda operatives in the heartland of Pakistan, arresting hundreds, including some of the group’s leaders, together with Pakistani sympathizers. This was later to help destroy Musharraf’s administration, when the Supreme Court demanded an account of what had happened to some of these ‘disappeared’ people (the general assumption in Pakistan being that many had been illegally handed over to the US and were being held at US bases in Afghanistan).
For almost three years the Musharraf government avoided taking strong action against Al Qaeda and the Taleban in Pakistan’s tribal areas along the Afghan border. One reason was the strategic calculation of the Pakistani security establishment concerning future Pakistani influence in Afghanistan. The view of important parts of the army and the political establishment is that a Taleban-ruled Afghanistan, though problematic in many ways, would still be vastly preferable to one dominated by Afghanistan’s non-Pathan nationalities, in alliance with India.
On the other hand, such an outcome is in the view of the Pakistani establishment clearly not worth risking the existence of Pakistan by provoking a US attack on Pakistan; so while the leadership of the Afghan Taleban has enjoyed a measure of shelter in Pakistan (especially in northern Balochistan and the city of Quetta, where several of them are credibly reported to be based), Pakistan has not actually supported the Afghan Taleban, in the way that Pakistan, the US, Britain, Saudi Arabia and other countries supported the Afghan Mujahidin against the Soviets. This is obvious from the Taleban’s lack of sophisticated weaponry and training. Indeed, even in June 2010, according to a briefing by the British military which I attended, they were still far behind the Iraqi insurgents even in the construction of Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs).
This evidence strongly contradicts a report of Matt Waldman of June 2010 alleging close Pakistani military assistance at the highest level to the Afghan Taleban (a report based on exclusively Afghan sources and containing some highly improbable anecdotes, including a personal meeting between President Zardari and Taleban leaders in which he pledged Pakistani support). It should also be a reminder of how much more the Pakistani military could do to help the Afghan Taleban (and other anti-Western groups) if the relationship between Pakistan and the US were to collapse completely.8
The Musharraf administration adopted a strategy of trying to placate the Americans by encouraging local tribesmen to