Nawaz’s foreign policy gladiator

The political leaders of Pakistan seem to believe that an inordinate display of public emotion can atone for their lack of honesty on drone strikes. The myths have to be discarded and the truth has to be told. Only then will it be possible to formulate a credible policy, which entails a balanced evaluation of present realities and past experience. The nettle the PML-N government will have to grasp is that the Predator attacks will continue indefinitely and, for the first quarter of its five-year term, the major area of operations will be Pakistan’s tribal regions and neighbouring Afghanistan.

This was made abundantly clear by President Obama when, in his speech at the American National Defence University on May 23, he said, “In the Afghan theatre, we must – and will – continue to support our troops until the transition is complete at the end of 2014. And that means we will continue to take strikes against high-value Al-Qaeda targets, but also on forces that are massing to support attacks on the coalition forces. But by the end of 2014, we will no longer have the same need for force protection, and the progress we’ve made against core Al-Qaeda will reduce the need for unmanned strikes.”

Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has the unenviable task of confronting formidable challenges. The mutually reinforcing combination of a comatose economy, the power crisis and the unceasing terrorist outrages are sapping the country’s lifeblood. Empty rhetorical outbursts on drones will, therefore, only add to the new government’s problems because there is nothing it can do to end the strikes. But unfortunately Nawaz Sharif’s overenthusiastic foreign policy team is not helping out. After the May 11 elections, even before the commencement of his unprecedented third prime ministerial term, one of his minions called in the deputy head of the US embassy in Islamabad and lodged a stern protest on a drone attack that had occurred a day earlier.

An excessively cautious European ambassador, who even thinks before laughing at a joke, discarded his usual reticence and observed that the American diplomat must have been “tickled pink” at the novelty of being summoned by a senior functionary of a political party which, till then, had no official standing. He then added, “Mr Sharif’s foreign policy aide will have to be a little more professional. Haste is never a good thing. Wasn’t it Alexander Pope who once said, ‘fools rush in where angels fear to tread?’ Furthermore, the PML-N official did not even know that it was Waliur Rehman who had been successfully targeted and killed in the drone attack because of a tipoff provided to American intelligence by the Hakeemullah Mehsud faction of the TTP. The assumption, therefore, that the Taliban withdrew their offer of negotiations because of the strike is a load of undiluted nonsense.”

In his maiden address to the National Assembly, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif indulged in the usual diatribe about drones but two days later there was another attack. The age-old saying that empty vessels make the most noise proved depressingly true yet again. The futility of overreacting was, however, completely lost on the prime minister’s spirited special assistant for foreign affairs, Tariq Fatemi, who wasted no time in reading the riot act to the American charge d’affaires. The gladiator, armed only with a cardboard sword, thought he had slain the ogre.

This was certainly unusual because there have been more than 350 drone attacks since 2004 and protests are routinely disposed off at the foreign secretary’s level. But the newly appointed special assistant, a retired diplomat, was probably eager to win his spurs early in the day. The foreign office’s press release on the demarche referred to him as the special assistant and minister of state for foreign affairs.

The wife of a top-ranking former ambassador commented with disarming innocence: “I never saw Tariq in the televised oath-taking of the federal cabinet. Is this no longer a requirement?” The press handout was later posted on the ministry’s website but without the title of ‘minister of state’. The damage, however, was already done and the foreign office succeeded effortlessly in making the special assistant vulnerable to ridicule.
Diplomacy is all about nuances and well-thought-through initiatives. Its hallmark is finesse, which, if abandoned, can have serious repercussions. A major English newspaper of Pakistan carried a front-page report on June 14 that Sartaj Aziz, the prime minister’s adviser on foreign affairs, had sharply disagreed with the summoning of the US charge d’affaires at the political level as that could undermine the PML-N’s efforts to build a harmonious equation with the Obama administration.

The report goes into some detail about the burgeoning tensions between two talented individuals, both of whom are relative lightweights inasmuch as neither has a political constituency. One is a former finance and foreign minister of Pakistan and the other a retired bureaucrat. The standoff between the two has generated avoidable embarrassment for the new government.

Sartaj Aziz is a realist and understands that excessive reaction on drone strikes can have hugely negative consequences for the country which is chronically dependent on external assistance, mostly from the US, for economic life support. This is in line with The New York Times assessment that: “…the perilous state of Pakistan’s economy means that he (Nawaz Sharif) may require American support for a bailout by the International Monetary Fund – one that economists believe will be necessary in the coming months.”

But the silver lining is that the number of drone strikes have fallen sharply and are likely to decrease further, as indicated by President Obama, after the completion of US troop withdrawals from Afghanistan by the end of next year. The pattern of attacks over the last nine years is instructive. The drone operations started with the consent of the Pakistan government on June 18, 2004, but there were only ten strikes till December 31, 2007. After this there was a steady increase till it peaked at 97 in 2010 which became known as “the year of the drones.” From then on there was a downward trend with 53 hits in 2011 which fell further to 32 in 2012 and, dropped to merely 14 in the first six months of this year.

The inescapable truth that emerges from these statistics is that drone strikes are directly proportional to the level of perceived or actual threat from the terrorist groups ensconced in the tribal areas of Pakistan. The attacks will only come to an end if the government takes military action against these treacherous outfits and compels them to come to the negotiating table on its own terms.

These are the facts and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif has to tread carefully. Lies have been told too often and no one believes them anymore. Seldom in the short but eventful history of Pakistan has the truth been as disfigured as it has on the drone issue. It is no longer possible to deny that the attacks have occurred with the connivance of the Musharraf regime and, later, with the approval of the PPP-led coalition.

The new government was not involved and is therefore in a better position to negotiate mutually acceptable terms of engagement with the US during the coming visit of Secretary of State John Kerry. The talks are important and have to be deftly conducted for which the prime minister needs to restrain his overzealous special assistant on foreign affairs.

The writer is the publisher of Criterion Quarterly. Email: iftimurshed@ gmail.com