Daily Times

The NATO summit at Chicago is done and over with. But sabre rattling between Pakistan and the United States continues at the governmental level, in policy circles and, of course, the op-ed pages. Some really interesting pieces have appeared in the Pakistani press, which if the situation were not so grave might be amusing. A coterie of former military officers and diplomats has been leading the charge. In one English paper, a former diplomat who had served at the UN had virtually war-gamed a US-Pakistan military altercation and concluded, “If, during such a crisis, Pakistan’s strategic command believes that the US military strike is aimed to capture or destroy its nuclear and delivery capabilities, it may feel compelled to use rather than lose these capabilities.” Coming from a career diplomat these words sounded particularly ominous. Continued haggling over the Salala apology and the NATO supply lines, drawing allegations of price gouging from Leon Panetta and the sham trial and sentencing of Dr Shakil Afridi under the notoriously tainted Frontier Crimes Regulation have been perceived in the US as Pakistan’s attempts to further rub it in.

I wrote a couple of weeks ago that the NATO summit in Chicago has exposed — quite brutally and rather humiliatingly — the extent of leverage that Pakistan thought it had over the US and that when push comes to shove the northern route can be used for a NATO pullout as well. After all the USSR had used the same route. As the NATO chief Anders Fogh Rasmussen said earlier this week, his organisation has reached agreement on reverse transit from Afghanistan with Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan, giving NATO “a range of new options and the robust and flexible transport network.” Just as Pakistan’s blockade of the NATO supplies going into Afghanistan was not a showstopper, it may not be able to impede or profit from the NATO withdrawal.

Unlike that retired Pakistani diplomat, most in the US take Pakistani nuclear capability seriously enough to provoke no adventurism on the part of Pakistan. But what is of prime concern to the US thought leaders and policy makers is that despite the US pronouncing al Qaeda dead or mortally wounded, its fraternal groups are very much alive and well inside Pakistan. It is in this context that Pakistan and its nuclear weapons remain a primary concern for the rest of the world. On May 22, 2012, the Asian Studies Centre of the Washington, DC-based Heritage Foundation held a panel discussion titled “Untangling the Web of Pakistani Terrorist Groups and their Links to al-Qaeda”. The event was hosted by Walter Lohman and had Bruce Riedel (author and Fellow Brookings Institution), Lisa Curtis (Fellow Heritage Foundation) and Bill Roggio (Fellow and editor The Long War Journal) as panelists. The discussion (video available at the Heritage Foundation website) provided a valuable insight into some of the apprehensions the US continues to have regarding Pakistan.

The panel was unanimous in its view that as the host of more terrorist organisations than any other country on earth, Pakistan is the epicentre of the ‘global jihad’. Combining this with the fact that it is also the country with the fastest growing nuclear arsenal in the world, the situation becomes more than just alarming. To understand the central theme of the discussion, i.e. the ‘web’ of Pakistani terrorist groups, the panel used the questions how and why Osama bin Laden was able to hide in Pakistan undetected for years.

The data recovered from bin Laden’s Abbottabad hideout is a crucial link in establishing just how interconnected the network of terrorist organisations is in Pakistan, and their alignment with al Qaeda. While only a fraction of the 6,000 documents recovered in Abbottabad were declassified, and there was no ‘smoking gun’ found in any of the documents, it is clear that the extensive links between other organisations in Pakistan played a key role in keeping bin Laden safe, his location secret and his operations ongoing. Moreover, OBL’s links to Lashkar-e-Tayyaba, Mullah Omar and Ilyas Kashmiri, among others, suggest at least an indirect connection to the ISI that is worrying to the US. The panel unanimously believed that the Pakistani civilian leadership knew nothing of OBL’s whereabouts but for the military brass it would have been as easy as asking an aide to get his address.

The panelists disagreed on how exactly to bring Pakistan back from the brink. Bill Roggio stated quite bluntly that nothing short of adding Pakistan to the State Sponsor of Terrorism (SST) list would do because engagement and appeasement have failed. He also suggested deporting Pakistani (agents) and restricting new visas to Pakistanis. Lisa Curtis put forward the proposition that the Pakistani perception that these groups help to blunt India’s advantage in the region is blocking the Pakistani resolve to deal with them decisively. However, she suggested that the US must send a clear message that ongoing patronage of the terrorist groups is unacceptable, especially as these groups are literally feeding new cadres and leaders to al Qaeda.

Bruce Riedel’s view was that once a country is put on the SST list, it is not only incredibly difficult to take it off that but the leverage against such states becomes rather limited. However, Riedel suggested something that has not been talked about before, at least publicly. He recommended taking direct action against those ISI officers who are found to be in cahoots with the terrorists. He went on to add that it should be made clear that, “We are going after those people, we are gonna go after their assets, we are gonna go after where their kids go to school, we are gonna make sure that their wives can’t go shopping in London or Georgetown anymore, and if they are bad enough, we are gonna go after them with a Predator (drone).”

There is an increasing awareness in the US that the terrorist groups based in Pakistan and more specifically in Punjab have global jihadist ambitions and are virtually the new al Qaeda. While the Pakistani patronage of the original al Qaeda may or may not be proven, there is plenty that ties the Punjabi jihadists to the Pakistani state apparatus. Unless the Pakistani security establishment is willing to cut these groups loose, more than just sabre rattling may lie ahead. However, given the recent slew of jingoistic opinion pieces and personal threats to the rare voices of sanity like Asma Jahangir, it appears that course-correction is not a priority for Pakistan.

The writer can be reached at mazdaki@me.com. He tweets at http://twitter.com/mazdaki