Daily Times

Pakistan on the Brink: The Future of America, Pakistan and Afghanistan

Author: Ahmed Rashid

Hardcover: 256 pages

Publisher: Viking, 2012

Just as the transition of military responsibility, including special operations such as the controversial night raids, from the United States and allied forces to the Afghan security forces accelerates, a new book dealing with the Pak-Afghan region and US policy therein, hit the stands last month. Ahmed Rashid has come out with Pakistan on the Brink: the Future of America, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Rashid describes the book as the third in his trilogy on “the wars in Afghanistan, and on political developments in Pakistan and Central Asia, framed by the US administrations that have tried to tackle these issues.” While the predominant focus of Rashid’s first and arguably, the best book was the Taliban and its rule over the turn-of-the-twentieth-century Afghanistan, the present work purports to take a holistic view of that region. He states that this volume “resembles a book of essays, each dealing with a different aspect of the same problem, discussing the processes that have led to the present impasse.” The book is divided into nine chapters: four addressing Pakistan, three focusing on Afghanistan and two tackling the US and broader policy implications.

The last chapter of the book opens with a quote from Professor Stephen Walt: “One of the things that gets in the way of conducting good national security policy is a reluctance to call things by their right names and state plainly what is really happening. If you keep describing difficult situations in misleading or inaccurate ways, plenty of people will draw the wrong conclusions about them and will continue to support policies that don’t make a lot of sense.” One expects that in a book that claims to be a policy recommendation of sorts this fine advice would have been adhered to but that does not appear to be the case.

Ahmed Rashid had made his mark by describing the Afghan Taliban to the world. He tends to continue seeing — and defining — things from that perspective. On multiple occasions, he mentions the Punjabi Taliban and India-oriented Punjabi jihadists but appears to convey that somehow these groups have been an auxiliary to the Pashtun Taliban or late converts to the cause. He does emphasise that the Lashkar-e-Tayyaba and its ties with al Qaeda are an imminent threat but states that the Punjabi jihadists are merely joining the “Pashtun tribesmen who had formed the original core of the Pakistani Taliban”. He seems to suggest that somehow the interaction between the Punjabi jihadists and the Pashtun/Afghan Taliban might be a new phenomenon, especially the former’s use of training camps in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). Rashid takes pains to posit this, including recent talk that the Afghan Taliban leaders have ‘matured’ and have nothing to do with global jihadism, especially against India.

Interestingly, Rashid had described in his first book the Afghan Taliban allowing Osama bin Laden and Pakistani Harkat-ul-Ansar to run the terrorist training camps al Badr, and Waleed and Muawiyah, respectively, on Afghan soil. He states that many Afghan Taliban leaders now disown al Qaeda and wish to get out of the ISI’s embrace too but does not critically examine if the tactic is similar to their ISI handlers, who had dumped several al Qaeda bigwigs post-9/11 but clung on firmly to the Afghan and assorted Pakistani Taliban, and quite likely OBL too.

The flaw in Rashid’s narrative to identify the Punjab-based jihadism as the driver of the global terror — antedating Taliban and al-Qaeda — perhaps has roots in his subpar analysis of Pakistan’s lopsided civil-military relations, favouring the army. He consistently blames the civilians to have brought this upon themselves and Pakistan. Rashid laments that the civilian leadership has not provided an alternative to that of the Army-peddled India-centric national security state paradigm. He notes, “The military consumes between 25 and 30 percent of the budget. It is able to secure those state resources because the political elite is supine and corrupt, parliament does not insist on accountability, and the army retains control of foreign policy, national security, and the nuclear arsenal.” Rashid’s comment, “An institution (Army) that had once been a byword for accountability now seemed to lack it altogether”, might make Anatol Lieven blush!

Despite Rashid’s quest for the civilian counter-narrative, the single most important Pakistani civilian voice against jihadist terrorism, i.e. Benazir Bhutto and her assassination find less than a two-page mention in the book. Rashid is remiss to the extent of almost obfuscating the mortal dangers faced by Pakistan’s secular politicians while those like Imran Khan (whom he describes as ‘right-wing’) and assorted jihadists are free to assemble. A chapter, ‘Sliver of hope: Counterinsurgency in Swat’ is dedicated to what the Army got right but does not mention how and why things in Swat became so messy and bloody to begin with. He is spot-on in highlighting that Swat’s geo-strategic importance, with proximity to both Afghanistan and Kashmir, and out of the US drones’ ambit, made it an ideal sanctuary for the jihadists. Nevertheless, he overlooks the systematic empowerment of the Taliban elements in Swat by the Pakistani state apparatchiks. He makes no mention of the tremendous sacrifices of the Pashtun political leadership, especially from the Awami National Party, who were massacred while the Army practically allowed the Taliban and foreign jihadists like Tahir Yuldeshev and perhaps OBL, to ease into Swat.

On the Afghan side, Rashid is similarly critical of Hamid Karzai’s governance to the extent that he even sees elections as an unnecessary distraction. But he neither proposes a tangible alternative to the electoral model nor treats the root cause of insurgency, i.e. the persistent Pakistani support for the Afghan Taliban in an exhaustive manner. Despite a constant subtext that practically names Pakistan as the engine for insurgency in Afghanistan, Rashid’s account is sorely skimpy on solutions to this interference. He correctly blames the US military for virtually overlooking gaining intelligence on the Taliban and their support system on the Pakistani side until about 2006, but fails to propose anything substantial to stem such foreign interference.

Perhaps Rashid’s harshest criticism was saved for Barack Obama, whom he had met and advised. He calls Obama a ‘disappointment’. Observing that declaring a withdrawal date simultaneously with the troops surge was fraught with risks and potential failure, he notes: “The Obama formula for Afghanistan failed to do several things: encourage Pakistan to change its policy of harbouring the Taliban, build up indigenous Afghan economy, start talks with the Taliban parallel to the military surge and persuade Karzai to improve governance and end corruption.”

The book lacks any serious policy prescription on how exactly to ‘encourage’ Pakistan to change not only its policy of harbouring the Afghan Taliban but what Rashid calls the new al Qaeda, i.e. Lashkar-e-Tayyaba. The importance of draining the swamp cannot be lost on Rashid — a former guerilla himself. He describes himself as an optimist but Rashid’s talk-to-Taliban mantra has an aura of rather melancholic resignation. He writes, “The crises in Afghanistan and Pakistan are evidently going to be sacrificed at the altar of the US debt. In that case, the faster the US talks to the Taliban and works out a peaceful settlement that will allow the troops to depart in good order, the better it will be, both for the US and for the region.” One wonders if war fatigue affects writers too or did Rashid fall victim to what Professor Walt had warned about.

Rashid had set the bar extremely high with his first book. Unfortunately, Pakistan on the Brink, like Descent into Chaos and Jihad: the Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia before it, may end up disappointing the serious and casual reader both. For the keen Pak-Afghan watchers there is remarkably little, if any, new information presented in this book while for an ordinary reader it might come across as amorphous — an inherent flaw perhaps difficult to avoid with essay collection-type books. The reader is left with an impression that the author has repackaged some of his previously published works.

However, for someone eager to pursue the leads provided, this book may serve as a good starting point.

The reviewer can be reached at mazdaki@me.com or via Twitter @mazdaki