Daily Times

In an attempt to answer the question why the terrorists attacked the Pakistan Naval Station (PNS) Mehran, we had noted last week: “The Pakistani security establishment has no intention to correct its course and perhaps the politicians cannot sway it either. But they could at least be on record to have warned the Pakistani people that the jihadist objective is not Mehran or Manawan — they are going for the Pakistani state.” We also noted that the series of unfortunate events befalling this hapless nation seems to have no end.

Alas, yet another tragedy has been added to this list. The peerless investigative reporter, Syed Saleem Shahzad was slain in cold blood earlier this week. He was Pakistan bureau chief of Asia Times Online and the author of Inside Al-Qaeda and the Taliban: Beyond Bin Laden and 9/11. His book was released a week before this murder most foul. Both his recent Asia Times article about the PNS Mehran attack and his book had riled up many and perhaps were too much for a jumpy and angry establishment. According to Human Rights Watch (HRW), Saleem had complained of being threatened by the ISI before his disappearance. He reportedly died of torture. RIP Syed Saleem Shahzad, in your death you have flayed the façade of the course correction being sold to the world.

There is little doubt that old habits, especially the ones that have been institutionalised, die hard. The institutional paradigm of the Pakistani deep state to keep using jihadist proxies to pursue its policies vis-à-vis Afghanistan and India is not about to change, no matter what the cost to Pakistan. As far as the security establishment goes, this adventurism is literally etched in stone: a milestone at the end of the obstacle course in the Special Services Group (SSG) Centre at Cherat, once listed in kilometres the distances to Jerusalem, Delhi and Kabul. The cadres thus educated — and the jihadists they in turn trained — may not be so easy to de-programme even if there were a will to so do, which appears nonexistent.

The first use of the Molotov cocktail of jihadism and Pakistani ultra-nationalism was, of course, in the first Kashmir war of 1947-48, with the tribal proxies deployed against the ‘infidels’. However, the Pakistani nationalism found little resonance on the western frontier and had to be buttressed with pan-Islamist jihadism, if Afghan president Daud Khan’s Pashtunistan card was to be neutralised. The state-sponsored display of the pan-Islamist sloganeering to muster financial and political support started in the early 1970s during the Z A Bhutto era. The first Afghan jihadists were imported and then housed and trained in Peshawar during the ZAB days, when no USSR or USA had yet intruded into Afghanistan. But it was not until General Ziaul Haq’s coup that the pan-Islamist militancy was codified as an instrument of national security doctrine. Renaming the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) base Drigh Road as the PAF base Faisal — full two years before the Soviets rolled into Afghanistan and one year before the Iranian revolution — suggests that the compact with Arab Wahabiism was underway well before any geopolitical irritants had risen in the region. With the arrival of Khomeini and Brezhnev on the regional scene, Zia’s jihadism was unleashed with a vengeance and the militant hordes started roaming free in the neighbourhood and inside Pakistan.

Zia and his military’s policy was to keep the pot simmering in Afghanistan but not to let it boil to avoid a direct Soviet retaliation. Afghanistan was to provide them with the so-called strategic depth but the Pashtun areas of Pakistan were to give them a strategic buffer against the jihadist blowback. In a cool and calculated manner the militant jihadism was to be deployed only outside Pakistan in a controlled manner. And while Arabisation and Wahabiisation of Pakistan was tolerable and indeed desirable, the idea was to not let the jihadist pot at home boil either. The jihadist militancy was tolerated and encouraged as long as it served the purpose of neutralising any political threats at home, whether from the political left or the right-wing Shiite. As far as the top brass goes, they more or less subscribed to a very practical nine-to-five model of jihadism, with perhaps the weekends off as well.

While this pragmatic approach to jihadism worked rather well for almost two decades, the jihadist contagion continued to spread through Pakistani society in general and the services in particular, with both radicalising rapidly. Buoyed with ‘victory’ over the Soviet Union, the Pakistani establishment ignored the prodromal symptoms of the plague that was devouring what they, themselves, described as Jinnah’s Pakistan. This complacency was an outcome of both commission and omission: many among the civil and military bureaucracy were regular participants of the jihadist ‘study circles’ while others were simply not bothered by this penchant for jihadism, as long as the target remained Pakistan’s neighbours. If not completely congruent, thus far, the objectives of the jihadist outfits sired by the deep state were at least not at loggerheads with the parent entity.

However, with 9/11 and the subsequent US action in Afghanistan, a wrench was thrown in this symbiotic relationship between the Pakistani establishment and its jihadist assets. While some of the militant proxies reconciled to the nine-to-five model of jihadism, most either did not have an off switch or had no use for it. Similarly, officers and cadres indoctrinated on many obstacle courses with plaques zeroing-in on the ‘infidel’ capitals were unwilling or unable to let go of their born-againism. Over the decades, the framers of the jihadist proxy warfare thesis have forgotten that calculation and pragmatism are not really hallmarks of zealots. This is where the deep state’s formula of sorting the jihadists into the good, the bad and the ugly fails.

The post-9/11 alignment of Pakistan, however reluctantly, with the rest of the world remains unpalatable to even the really good and pliable jihadists. They see it as changing of goalposts in midgame, not just by the US but also by those who had set these posts in the first place and hence the attack on PNS Mehran. No American-Indo-Zionist hand was involved in this assault and the powers that be know it well. But to acknowledge that the chickens have come home to roost would require a serious course correction, of which the deep state is not desirous and the political class not capable. And the North Waziristan offensive, purportedly on the anvil, may just show that to restore the symbiosis, the establishment really wants the Americans, not the jihadists, off its back.

(Concluded)

The writer can be reached at mazdaki@me.com