Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [6]
Lastly, the Pakistani establishment long cherished the hope that it could use Pakistani help against the Taleban to bargain for US pressure on India to reach a settlement with Pakistan over Kashmir. This hope has faded with the refusal (compounded of unwillingness and inability) of both the Bush and the Obama administrations to play such a role; but this refusal, and America’s ‘tilt towards India’, have added greatly to longstanding Pakistani feelings of betrayal by the US.
Pakistan’s help to the West against the Afghan Taleban would, however, have been limited in any case both by strategic calculation and mass sentiment. In terms of mass sentiment, the overwhelming majority of Pakistanis – including the communities from which most Pakistani soldiers are drawn – see the Afghan Taleban as engaged in a legitimate war of resistance against foreign occupation, analogous to the Mujahidin war against Soviet occupation in the 1980s.
In terms of strategy, the Pakistani establishment’s approach to Afghanistan has long been driven by a mixture of fear and ambition. The fear is above all of Afghanistan, under the rule of the non-Pashtun nationalities, becoming an Indian client state, leading to India’s strategic encirclement of Pakistan. This fear has been increased by a well-founded belief that India is supporting Pakistan’s Baloch nationalist rebels via Afghanistan, and by what seems by contrast to be a purely paranoid conviction that India is also supporting the Pakistani Taleban.
The greater part of the Pakistani establishment therefore believes that it needs to maintain close relations with the Afghan Taleban, since they are Pakistan’s only potential allies in Afghanistan. In recent years, belief in the need for a relationship with the Taleban has been strengthened by the growing conviction that the West is going to fail in Afghanistan, and will eventually withdraw, leaving anarchy and civil war behind – just as occurred after the Soviet withdrawal and the fall of the Communist regime from 1989 – 92. In the resulting civil war, it is believed, every regional state will have its own allies – and so must Pakistan.
Incidentally, it is worth pointing out that even entirely secular members of the Pakistani establishment do not see the Afghan Taleban as morally worse than the Taleban’s old enemies in the Afghan Northern Alliance leaders, with whom the West has in effect been allied since 2001. Their atrocities and rapes in the 1990s helped cement Pathan support for the Taleban. They massacred Taleban prisoners and looted Western aid after the overthrow of the Taleban in 2001, and their role in the heroin trade has helped destroy any hope of the West curtailing that trade since 9/11.
Equally, it is important to note that in the great majority of cases, both in the elites and in the mass of the population, this sympathy or support for the Afghan Taleban does not imply ideological approval, or any desire that Pakistan should experience a Taleban-style revolution – any more than support for the Mujahidin in the 1980s implied much liking for them.
Hence, too, the great difference in Pakistani attitudes to the Afghan and to the Pakistani Taleban. There was never a chance that the Pakistani establishment and army were going to let the Pakistani Taleban conquer Pakistan. The long delay in fighting them seriously was because they were not generally regarded as a serious