Daily Times

A day after the new Pakistani Prime Minister Mian Muhammad Nawaz Sharif took oath, a missile strike believed to have been fired from a United States drone killed seven militants in the Shawal area of the North Waziristan Agency (NWA). The target was a Taliban commander Bahadur Khan alias Muttaqi (no relation to former Taliban minister Mullah Amir Khan Muttaqi), who along with six others was killed as they planned to cross into Afghanistan, apparently to launch attacks against the Afghan and US forces there.

The Pakistani response to the death of the mid-level Taliban operative was rather forceful with Mr Sharif saying, “The drone attacks must stop. We have protested many a time. This is simply unacceptable.” The irate remarks came after the US Chargé d’Affaires, the Deputy Ambassador Richard Hoagland was summoned by the Foreign Office to lodge a ‘strong protest’ along with the customary verbiage about the perceived “violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty and territorial integrity”. Mr Sharif’s principal political rival the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaaf (PTI) has filed a resolution against the drone strikes in the National Assembly. This recent drone strike, second within a week, and the Pakistani response to it suggest two things: firstly, Pakistan and the US remain at loggerheads as far as Afghanistan goes and secondly, if Mr Sharif does not hasten to clearly spell out his vision regarding the road to peace in Afghanistan he runs the risk of being held hostage by the PTI’s rigid anti-US rhetoric.

Mr Sharif’s message last week to the Pakistani diplomats abroad was a whole lot of fluff and little or no actionable items. On Afghanistan, he pledged “that a policy of an Afghan-led, Afghan-owned process of peace and reconciliation will be pursued.” This is not much different from the outgoing Pakistan People’s Party’s (PPP) mantra adopted verbatim from the security establishment to which it had abdicated the country’s national security and foreign policies, especially in the second half of its rule. Mr Sharif will have to do much better than the wishy-washy bureaucratese about advancing trade ties and solving all issues through diplomacy in consonance with the national interest. Other than alluding to a nebulous ‘consensus’ on the national interest, Mr Sharif did not specify what it was. His cautious approach early in his stint is understandable but if Mr Sharif does not delineate his idea of the national interest, chances are that the usual suspects who have had a chokehold on formulating such definitions will do it for him.

It might not be too long before the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) finds in its lap issues like the Kerry-Lugar-Berman Act, which were used to set the national security narrative against the PPP. The Urdu media and the PTI would set the narrative dial to ultra-right as and when the situation arises. The PTI’s chief minister in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pervez Khattak, has already been calling for the federal government to shoot down the drones in accordance with a high court decision. Mr Khattak’s call would be abjectly puerile were it not for its potential to set Pakistan on a collision course with the US. The PML-N’s political coffer is flush with the public mandate. Mr Sharif should put his political capital to good use before issues of performance and governance — inevitable for any incumbent — start chipping away at it.

A start would have been to nominate an elected representative as the country’s foreign minister instead of hanging on to the portfolio himself. But it obviously will have to be Mr Sharif himself to decide what foreign policy objectives are to be prosecuted, whether a foreign minister is formally in place or not. Mr Sharif could at least try to extricate the national security narrative from the ideologically anchored, jingoistic, zero-sum paradigm championed by the deep state that remains gung ho about ‘strategic depth’. Alternately, following in the footsteps of the PPP, Mr Sharif can relinquish this responsibility to the military and remain at harmony with them but run the risk of serious friction with the rest of the world.

Despite much hullaballoo about an ostensible course correction by the security establishment and a speech or two by General Pervez Kayani, the military and/or its appendages continue to support the Afghan insurgent groups. General Kayani’s departure later this year will not change anything. It was not accidental that all the al Qaeda bigwigs, including Osama bin Laden, were netted in major Pakistani cities and its operational commanders killed by drone strikes in FATA. The tremendous overlap between al Qaeda and the Afghan insurgent groups like the Jalaluddin Haqqani terrorist network (HQN) allowed the latter to pass on, indirectly and directly, the protection and patronage it received from elements in the Pakistani state, to al Qaeda. The Pakistani establishment continues to calculate that the HQN and Mullah Omar’s Quetta Shura Taliban will deliver it a seat at the negotiating table in Kabul, if not the Afghan capital, when ‘the Yanks cut and run’ in 2014. Another calculation they make is that the HQN will remain focused on Afghanistan. But the historical evidence suggests otherwise. Not only the HQN’s ideological vision focuses beyond Afghanistan but also the terror group had served effectively as an incubator of the al Qaeda proper as well as a slew of other transnational jihadists. It is no surprise then that an overwhelming majority of the suicide bombers either on their way to Afghanistan or London have had a training sojourn in the HQN campuses in NWA.

Mr Sharif had stated once that there must be reason why the world points its finger towards Pakistan (whenever there is a terrorist attack). At an All Parties Conference in 2011 he had reportedly asked the then DG ISI General Ahmed Shuja Pasha for an explanation regarding the US allegations saying, “Where there is smoke there is fire.” Mr Sharif is clearly upset at the recent drone strikes. But he should also take this opportunity to find out if there is indeed a fire. Two terrorist attacks in Kabul earlier this week beg some introspection by Mr Sharif. He ought to know that an Afghan-led, Afghan-owned peace process is not possible without Pakistan respecting the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Afghanistan. Absent a candid inquiry by Mr Sharif into what exactly is happening in the FATA, especially NWA, the world may not consider him to be a credible partner on the road to peace in Afghanistan. Hopefully he proves that he can be relied upon.

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