Daily Times

At the conclusion of Russian Defence Minister General Sergei Shoygu’s one-day visit to Islamabad, his Pakistani counterpart, Khwaja Muhammad Asif, said that after the US and NATO withdrawal from Afghanistan, security in that country would be perilous and “Pakistan wants Russian engagement in the Afghan peace process.” One could not help but think of an old Afghan adage: “Har keh dana kunad, kunad nadaan, wa laik ba’ad az kharabi-e-bisyar” (what the sage does the stupid may do too except after much destruction). After destroying generations of Afghans — and Pakistanis — in the jihadist venture against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, the Pakistanis want Russia’s help there! This, however, would not be the first time that Pakistan has tried to rope in Russia. During General Pervez Musharraf’s military rule, his director general of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Lieutenant General Mahmud Ahmed, travelled to Moscow in September 2000 and met the chief of the Russian federal security service, Nikolai Patrushev.

Pakistan is playing up its Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) connection as well as India’s cosying up to the US to reach out to Russia. The Russians, however, are not as gullible as the US and nothing came out of that ex-DG ISI’s 2000 visit. A ‘milestone’ military cooperation agreement has been signed between Russia and Pakistan this month but the fine print indicates that the deal for the MI-35 (Hind E) combat transport helicopters, which Pakistan covets, has only been ‘politically approved’. The thrust of the SCO meeting this past September was peace and stability in Afghanistan. It is unlikely that Russia would go out of its way to accommodate Pakistan especially when the latter has little to show in terms of helping bring peace in Afghanistan. Afghan officials have already blamed this past Sunday’s deadly bombing in Yahya Khel, Paktika, on the Haqqani terrorist network. The barbaric attack that inflicted over 60 fatalities at a volleyball game indicates that, despite the Pakistani military’s claims to the contrary, Haqqani network operatives have escaped Operation Zarb-e-Azb in North Waziristan unscathed and with their lethal operational capabilities intact.

Pakistan’s Chief of Army Staff (COAS), General Raheel Sharif, recently concluded a tour of the US. General Sharif seems to have said all the right things to all the right people there. He even made a rather hard hitting speech at the Pakistan embassy in Washington DC saying, “I would like to openly say that this (Operation Zarb-e-Azb) is against all hues and colours, and it is without any exception, whether it is Haqqani network or Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan or anything.” The Haqqanis were to wreak havoc in Paktika just two days later. Some Pakistani analysts nonetheless dubbed the army chief’s US visit as a paradigm shift in relations between the two countries. As Yogi Berra would have said, it was like déjà vu all over again!

After the South Waziristan operation in late 2009, when the then COAS General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani visited the US in March 2010, his visit was presented as the next best thing after sliced bread. Before that, of course, there was the ‘enlightened moderate’ dictator General Pervez Musharraf who presented as the real jihadist-hunter to the US and the west. While the Afghans and regional powers had no doubt about Musharraf and Kayani’s duplicitous policies, it took the US a good 10 years to figure out that they were being played by the Pakistani establishment. A lot was said about the personal friendship between General Kayani and Admiral Mike Mullen till Mullen, in his testimony, described the Haqqani network as the “ISI’s veritable arm”. Interestingly, despite all the fanfare about Pakistan being the foremost US ally in the war on terror, almost all al Qaeda ringleaders apprehended from Pakistan were nabbed on the information gathered by the US agencies on their own. The Pakistani agencies only assisted when presented with incontrovertible evidence about these terrorists. On the other hand, Musharraf is on the record to have tried to set the US on a wild goose chase by claiming that Osama bin Laden was either dead or not in Pakistan.

Unfortunately, this duplicity notwithstanding, successive US administrations have continued to deal directly with the Pakistani military brass over the heads of the civilian leadership. General Sharif’s recent visit is no exception either. The Pakistani security establishment’s modus operandi remains unchanged: discredit the politicians and elected governments at home using an establishment-friendly media and religious-political parties, and then present itself as the ultimate arbiter at home as well of national security and foreign policies.

The additional pitch the security establishment makes to the US is that somehow its concerns regarding the Afghan-Indian relationship are genuine and, just like it wants the US to induce a breakthrough in Kashmir, it wants it to lean on Afghanistan to shun India. What the US must realise is that, while a solution to the Kashmir issue is desirable, it remains the Pakistani security establishment’s economic raison d’être. Prime Minister (PM) Nawaz Sharif’s peace overtures to India were scuttled by having the country’s top diplomat in India meet the Kashmiri separatist leaders. That one move has plunged Pak-India relations to the point where even an informal meeting between the two countries’ PMs at the SAARC conference this week seems unlikely.

Viewing its Afghan policy through the Pakistani establishment’s lens has had disastrous consequences for the US. The newly approved regimen of a combat enabler role for the roughly 10,000 US troops remaining in Afghanistan will bear little fruit unless Pakistan gives up Mullah Omar and his ilk. The US can no longer turn a blind eye to these terror sanctuaries. A narrow window of opportunity exists, perhaps through Nowruz — the Afghan New Year in March 2015 — through which Pakistan can prove the bona fides of its claims that it does not harbour the enemies of Afghanistan. Any more attacks like the butchery in Paktika and even the affable Afghan president, Mr Ashraf Ghani, will be forced to take a hard line just like his predecessor, Mr Hamid Karzai.

Though PM Sharif and his team have apparently ceded foreign and national security policy to the military establishment, they should still try to get their act together lest they want to implore another superpower 30 years down the road to help out in Afghanistan. The US, on its part, may take General Sharif’s proclamations at face value but the ultimate proof of Pakistan’s foreign policy pudding on his watch will remain in the eating.

PS: Pakistan’s defence minister has now declared that Washington is not a “reliable friend”; the aforementioned Persian adage may play out again sooner than one thought.

The writer can be reached at mazdaki@me.com and he tweets @mazdaki