Eyeless in Gaza

The prime minister’s visit to the foreign office, despite the media hype, was a non-event. Front-page newspaper photographs and television footage showed him sitting grim-faced at the head of a long rectangular table flanked on his right by the adviser on national security and foreign affairs and on his left by his special assistant on foreign policy. These visuals demonstrated that the foreign office is unacceptably top heavy, which does not bode well for coherent policy formulation.

“Too many cooks spoil the broth”, said an analyst who does not believe in mincing words. He then lamented, “Through the mysterious dispensations of providence, Nawaz Sharif has been inflicted on us for the third time and to top it all he has also made himself the foreign minister. So what took him more than six weeks since being sworn in to visit the infernal foreign office?”

At the ministry, the prime minister was given a briefing by Foreign Secretary Jalil Abbas Jilani who outlined the major regional and global challenges confronting Pakistan. This was a formidable task because Nawaz Sharif is known to have an extremely limited attention span. However, despite this, Jilani ploughed through the cumbersome mass of background material which he distilled into a finer essence and concentrated mainly on Islamabad’s accident-prone equation with Afghanistan, India and the US.

Prime Minister Nawaz’s reaction was refreshingly unexpected. For once he spoke cogently and with confidence. He left no doubt that cooperation – and not confrontation – would be the centrepiece of Pakistan’s relationship with its immediate neighbours. The major determinant of the country’s external initiatives would henceforth be economic. Concepts such as strategic depth in Afghanistan or stoking a low-intensity conflict in Indian occupied Kashmir were things of the past and would never be resorted to again.

The problem is that Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is a dreamer and finds it difficult to factor in the ground realities and the immediate challenges that they pose. He strives to reach the distant ivory towers of peace and harmony but does not realise that along the way there are treacherously steep mountains that have to be climbed and dark valleys that have to be passed through. The foremost threat to Pakistan’s security and the prospects of regional stabilisation is terrorism.

But the government is still dithering about taking on the terrorist outfits that are sapping the country’s life blood. The suicide attack on the ISI complex in Sukkur on Wednesday yet again demonstrates the consequences of inaction. Those fortunate enough to survive such outrages become refugees in their own country. The dimension of the problem can be gauged from the figures released by the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, which shows that as of June this year the number of registered internally displayed persons had soared to 1.5 million in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Fata alone.

Till such time that Islamabad formulates and then implements a counter terrorism policy, regional harmony and cooperation will be as illusory as a mirage in the desert. It is a shame that all the immediate neighbours of Pakistan including China have, at one time or the other, had grievances that Islamabad had turned a blind eye towards, or had even fostered, terrorist groups ensconced in the tribal regions that were out to destabilise their respective countries. This was the one complaint that the Chinese leadership had against Pakistan during talks with PM Nawaz in Beijing earlier this month.

An aspect of the same problem is that the PML-N leader never tires of boasting that he has transformed Pakistan into a nuclear power. He is naive enough to actually believe that the country has become an impregnable fortress of Islam and will never again be vulnerable to external aggression. But the danger that Pakistan faces is from the enemy within – from terrorist outfits that have killed more than 40,000 civilians and an estimated 5,000 military personnel.

The army chief, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, is a realist. He is convinced that the war against terrorism is Pakistan’s war and has stated on three separate occasions in the last 13 months that the gravest treat to the country’s security is internal. But the civilian leadership continues to delude itself into believing that the Al-Qaeda-mentored Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) can be persuaded to agree to a peace settlement through negotiations.

The government seems to be unaware that last year, as reported by The Frontier Post on March 21, 2012, a video was released in several jihadist forums in which Omar Khalid Khorasani, one of the most dreaded of the TTP commanders, swore that his group would never abandon jihad till it achieved the four objectives of: (i) toppling the Pakistan government; (ii) replacing the constitution with the shariah; (iii) seizing the country’s nuclear arsenal; and (iv) “establishing a caliphate across the world.”

Khorasani’s words are much more than the outpourings of a demented mind – they are in line with the poisonous ideology shared by all terrorist outfits in the country. These purveyors of death and destruction have proliferated from the jagged mountains of the tribal areas to the bleeding megacity of Karachi. The statistics compiled by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan show that 1,726 people have been killed in the port city through various forms of terrorist violence in the first six months of this year

On March 16, 2012, the Al-Qaeda chief, Ayman al-Zawahiri circulated a video in Arabic with Urdu subtitles urging the people of Pakistan to “take a lead from your brothers in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syria” and overthrow the “treasonous” Pakistan Army and the “bribe-taking” government. His vision is of a totalitarian caliphate under an Arab from Egypt or Saudi Arabia who will control Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and determine when and where they are to be used.

Pakistan’s strategic assets are undoubtedly secure and it is impossible for Al-Qaeda or any of its affiliates to get anywhere near the country’s nuclear weapons. But the international community views things differently. Till such time that the extremist groups entrenched on Pakistan’s soil are eliminated, US drone strikes will continue regardless of any amount of grandstanding by the country’s political leadership.

This is what Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif will have to reckon with in the context of Pakistan-US relations. The truth has to be told as to what Islamabad’s actual stance is. In a recent article, Pakistan’s former envoy to the UN, Hussain Haroon, cited the Wall Street Journal comment which described as “flimsy rationale” the US government’s plea that it “interprets the Pakistani lack of response to a monthly memo informing them of the general locations of the planned drone strikes as tacit consent for the programme.”

Terrorism is the major impediment in the way of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s vision of establishing regional peace and harmony. But Pakistan alone cannot be blamed for destabilising its neighbours through non-state actors. India and Afghanistan are no less culpable. In 2011, long before he became US defence secretary, Chuck Hagel said in a speech at the Oklahoma University, “India has over the years financed problems for Pakistan from Afghanistan.”

These are things of the past and the countries of the region have to realise that the hopes of the future cannot be built from the wounds of yesteryear. New governments are already in place in Islamabad, Beijing and Tehran. Next year elections will be held in Afghanistan and India and it is uncertain what type of leadership will emerge in these countries. This is what Prime Minister Nawaz will have to factor in as he crafts his new regional policy.

The first step that Pakistan must take in its own interest is military action against those terrorist groups that refuse to renounce violence. These outfits cannot withstand the armed might of the state. But without political support the military is helpless and can do nothing. This is not forthcoming and, in a sense, the army is like a blinded Samson among the Philistines – it is eyeless in Gaza.

The writer is a former ambassador and the publisher of Criterion Quarterly. Email: iftimurshed@gmail.com