Pakistan's Taliban Problem And our Pakistan problem. by Reuel Marc Gerecht

Weekly Standard

AFTER THE SEPTEMBER 11 ATTACK, a sharp anti-Pakistani sentiment rippled through the U.S. government. Even in the Department of State and the Central Intelligence Agency, where Pakistan's staunchest supporters have usually been found, foreign service officers, operatives, and analysts voiced a feeling of betrayal. "The Paks have totally let us down," remarked a former senior intelligence official who'd been fond of Islamabad for twenty years.

Though U.S.-Pakistani relations were strained for a decade--by Islamabad's nuclear weapons program, its separatist, holy war in India-controlled Kashmir, its support for the Taliban, protector of Osama bin Laden, and more--Washington's longstanding diplomatic, intelligence, and military ties with Islamabad braked the growing doubts about Pakistan's pro-American credentials. So, too, the attractive character of elite Pakistani officials. Compared with their haughty Indian and chaotic Afghan neighbors, Pakistani VIPs are often wittier, warmer, and more knowledgeable about the insider gossip of U.S. politics. American diplomats and spooks often have a good deal of fun with their Westernized Pakistani counterparts. As one congressional staffer, who frequently visits south-central Asia, succinctly put it, "I like 'em; the Indians are jerks." But a week after the World Trade Center and Pentagon bombings, India would've beat out its neighbor in any popularity contest in Washington.

Now, Pakistan has a second chance, thanks to its nimble leader General Pervez Musharraf, and thanks to entrenched American bureaucratic habits and Washington's uneasiness about a protracted war in Afghanistan, an ethnic smorgasbord of a land defined by mountains, deserts, landmines, and undisciplined, highly fractious, roughneck peasants. The American strategy for dealing with bin Laden and his spiritual twin, the Taliban chieftain Mullah Omar, consists of limited military aid to the anti-Taliban, anti-Pakistani Northern Alliance; calibrated, small-scale, slowly escalating military operations; CIA covert action aimed at switching allegiances among the Taliban's Pashtun ethnic power-base; public appeals to the "moderate Taliban" to abandon bin Laden and Mullah Omar; a call for the United Nations to assume a "post-Taliban" nation-building role in Afghanistan; and direct financial subventions to Islamabad and drastically reduced textile tariffs for Pakistani goods exported to the United States. This strategy is designed, in part, to assuage Musharraf's concerns and enlist Pakistan as a cooperative and stable partner in America's "war on terrorism."

The specter of a nuclear-armed Pakistan descending into an Islamic revolution, which isn't a far-fetched possibility, encourages Washington to acquiesce further to Pakistan's preferences for fear that Musharraf is the last wall against the fundamentalist hordes.

Unfortunately, this Pakistan-centered approach is likely to do the opposite of what Ambassador Richard Haass, Secretary of State Colin Powell's special Afghan coordinator, intends. Not only could we conceivably lose the war in Afghanistan through a Pakistan-centered strategy--if bin Laden, Mullah Omar, and the Taliban power structure are still alive and kicking in six months, we will have probably lost the battle in the eyes of the Middle East's ordinary Muslims, let alone the region's suicide-seeking holy warriors--we could witness Pakistan become even more of a place d'armes for Islamic radicalism. A quick run through Pakistani history should show how risky are the assumptions and policy that the Bush administration has so far put into motion.

CREATED ON AUGUST 15, 1947, from the northern, primarily Muslim provinces of British India, Pakistan isn't really a nation-state. It is a geographic expression of an age-old Islamic ideal: Muslims should not, if at all possible, live under non-Muslim rule. Living under the all-mighty British was unpleasant for many--though by no means all--subcontinent Muslims. Living under the far more numerous Hindus, whom the Muslim Mogul dynasty had dominated for centuries before the arrival of the English, was worse. For the English-educated Muslim elite, it was intolerable, and they enthusiastically laid the idea of a Western nation-state over the religious imperative of a Muslim-ruled polity. Gandhi's Indian democracy was going to be Hindu, so a Muslim "Land of the Pure"--the literal meaning of Pakistan--was essential to protect and nurture the faithful.

The intensity of Pakistan's Islamic identity has been increasing ever since. It has been the primary force sustaining Pakistani pride and hope through the post-colonial mess. Through a succession of aborted, corrupt democratic governments and equally corrupt military dictatorships. Through an enormous population explosion and a massive emigration of the country's most intrepid citizens to the West. Through the failed wars with India and the successful Pakistani-supported Afghan fight against the Soviet Red Army, which left millions of Afghan refugees ensconced south of the increasingly meaningless border, forever changing the frontier's population, politics, and culture. Through the ever-more-brutal anti-Hindu Muslim-separatist struggle in Kashmir, which further solidified the ties between militants and the ordinary faithful in Pakistan. And through increasing Sunni-Shiite sectarian violence, which has further reinforced hard-core Sunni politics throughout the country, and often turns Karachi, Pakistan's sweating monster city, into a shooting gallery.

For over twenty years, Pakistan has been supporting an array of militant Islamic groups inside Afghanistan. During the Soviet-Afghan War (1980-89), Pakistan's dictator, Zia al-Haqq, made Gulbuddin Hikmatyar, a fire-breathing Islamic militant, Islamabad's favorite Afghan guerrilla leader. In 1995, the Western-educated prime minister, Benazir Bhutto (Salman Rushdie's not-so-fictional "Miss Iron Pants"), and her right-hand man, General Nasirullah Babar, abandoned Hikmatyar for the intellectually more primitive, though no less militant, Taliban (literally "the students"), who'd sprung in late 1994 from the hundreds of religious schools, the madrassas, located on both sides of the Pakistani-Afghan border.

Tactical and commercial considerations--the Taliban, unlike Hikmatyar, proved successful at guaranteeing the safety and profitability of Pakistan's trans-Afghan truck-borne trade--appealed to Pakistan's realpoliticians and businessmen. At the same time, the Taliban's transcendent fundamentalist faith, like the radicalism of Hikmatyar, offered the possibility that Pakistan's influence wouldn't be blocked by Afghanistan's myriad ethnic and tribal parochialisms. Religious identity politics, which the Soviet-Afghan war and Zia al-Haqq kicked into overdrive, enlarged the common ground between Islamic militants in Afghanistan and in Pakistan's military and intelligence services and political parties. The shared zealous faith was profitably manifested in massive cross-border smuggling and drug-running that tied the daily livelihood and retirement plans of Pakistani officialdom in the Northwest Frontier Province to the health and wealth of the young Pashtun warriors of the Taliban.

Now what Secretary of State Powell and Ambassador Haass are suggesting is that General Musharraf can and will stand athwart his country's history and yell, "Stop!" Musharraf, who recently described the United States as "the lesser of two evils" (the other evil, by the way, wasn't bin Laden, but the possibility that Pakistan could get caught in a war between the United States and the Saudi militant), is most unlikely to be so foolish, even if he is so ideologically inclined.

He probably knows, even if Christiane Amanpour of CNN does not, that bin Laden is immensely popular in Pakistan, as he is throughout the Middle East. The general is very much aware of the facts on the ground: There are over 8,000 officially registered religious schools in Pakistan. According to Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid, the author of "Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil & Fundamentalism in Central Asia," there are over 25,000 unregistered ones. In 1971, Rashid informs us, there were only 900 madrassas in all. The most famous religious school in Pakistan, the Dar al-Ulum Haqqania of the delightfully witty, hard-core fundamentalist Samiul Haq, had in 1999 over 15,000 applicants for only 400 spots. The intellectual cradle of the Taliban's leadership, the Haqqania has periodically deployed its students across the border as reserve soldiers for major Taliban offensives.

Many of these schools are partially funded by Saudi charitable and missionary institutions. They are the most durable products of the Great Sunni Counterattack against the Shiite Iranian revolution in 1979. Fearful of Iranian "radicalism," the Saudis sent funds and missionaries to support their own "conservative" Wahhabi fundamentalism throughout the Muslim world. The Saudi-Pakistani nexus, originally a bulwark against Shiite and Soviet adventurism, has nurtured a new and lethal generation of anti-American true believers. It is the fundamentalists--not the highly Westernized Pakistani elite, who still attend schools with proper English names--who likely have a lock-grip on the Pakistani mind.

Confronted with the religious reality of his own country, Musharraf, who is already being teased by the fundamentalists as "Bisharaf" ("The Dishonorable One"), will probably engage in what has worked well in the past, especially with Americans: the Pakistani two-step. He'll move toward both the Americans and the fundamentalists, promising them irreconcilable things. He will be a party to the U.S. war effort, at least for now, and he will continue to aid Islamic militants in Afghanistan (who will now be renamed the new, "moderate" Taliban) and Kashmir.

He will continue the long Pakistani tradition, which has become the standard modus operandi for Muslim rulers throughout the Middle East, of co-opting and adopting fundamentalist aspirations and methods. With one hand, Musharraf will, if pushed, beat the fundamentalists on the street and briefly lock up their leaders. With the other, he will assuage them and solidify his rule by not really rocking the boat. He may have removed senior pro-Taliban military and intelligence officials; but the increasingly fundamentalist rank and file of these institutions, who truly embody their ethos, remain unharassed, if not nourished. And in his heart, Musharraf may well not want to rock the boat. The slow-motion "Talibanization" of Pakistan will continue even as Washington and Islamabad solemnly reaffirm their mutual commitment to the war against terrorism, or jointly proclaim, sometime in the future, victory over bin Laden's al Qaeda, which for years has had a Kashmir-focused liaison relationship with the Pakistani military and intelligence services.

FORTUNATELY, THE UNITED STATES doesn't have to get stuck in this "pro-Pakistani" tar pit. A war is always a work in progress, and comments by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld about increasing military support to the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance may finally be translated into deliveries of Russian and Uzbek Soviet-era tanks and helicopters, which are essential for any successful anti-Taliban war effort. The increased tactical bombing in coordination with the Alliance offers the hope that Washington (or at least the Pentagon) is beginning to understand that an anti-Taliban victory among the Pashtuns is very unlikely unless preceded by a clear-cut military victory of the Northern Alliance in Kabul, Mazar-e-Sharif, Herat, and the strategic linchpin city of the northwest, Sheberghan.

If the months pass and bin Laden and Mullah Omar remain alive, and the Pashtun power base behind the Taliban doesn't fracture, the Bush administration will more acutely understand that the State Department's desire to devise in advance a "post-Taliban" game plan works against the more important military and strategic objective of actually waging a real ground war. Which means, first and foremost, the annihilation of the Taliban's fighting forces, effectively ending the Taliban state. We should not be surprised to have so far seen few Pashtun defections to the Northern Alliance or to Musharraf's "new" Pakistan. The Taliban hard core are numerous--the ideological elixir of Mullah Omar and bin Laden is seductive, and true believers don't switch sides in difficult times. And, more important, the U.S. war against terrorism in Afghanistan isn't yet serious, at least from the Afghan perspective. We know this to be true just by listening to the Taliban spokesmen. Their announced casualty figures, which are probably exaggerated, have remained quite low--hundreds here and there.

Make a comparison: When the Israelis invaded Lebanon in 1982, Yasser Arafat and the Red Crescent quite quickly claimed that the Israeli army had killed hundreds of thousands, indeed, had slaughtered more Palestinians than were actually living in Lebanon. In the enormous exaggerations was a painful truth: Israel had broken the back of the PLO through conventional war. Calibrated U.S. bombing runs that have left all of the Taliban front lines essentially intact aren't the terrifying onslaught we let loose on the Iraqis in the Gulf War. The Taliban surely know this. And the official American anxiety about waging war during the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, which gets immediately relayed via CNN, doesn't exactly make the holy-warrior crowd quake since they, like all Muslims, don't expect Muslims, let alone Western infidels, to slacken their fighting during the month.

If we really intend to intimidate, much less destroy, the Taliban, how can it be that they still routinely wage offensive operations against the Northern Alliance? Does the condign vengeance for 6,000 dead Americans now rest with the "formerly" pro-Taliban Pakistani intelligence and the omnicompetent CIA trying to find some covert way of getting Pashtun Afghans to switch sides?

Americans may not like thinking about vengeance--though this wasn't a problem for our fathers and grandfathers after Pearl Harbor--but this isn't true for the denizens of the Middle East. The capacity to inflict intiqam, vengeance, is there an essential element of power and dominion. If we do not scorch all those in the Middle East who gave aid to al Qaeda, we will mercilessly belittle ourselves before men who have an acute sense of the jugular. The Clinton administration repeatedly made the cardinal error of thinking others saw America as it wanted them to see America, of defining crime and punishment by oh-so-civilized modern standards. Madeleine Albright sounded tough so, by God, we were. Bin Laden nearly sank the USS Cole in the port of Aden in October 2000, and the administration solemnly promised, with clenched teeth, to track down those responsible, but did nothing.

Does it now, after September 11, really seem inhuman to suggest that at a minimum the Clinton administration should have napalmed the Taliban front lines for a month as a token repayment for the attack on a U.S. warship? And isn't the Bush administration now in danger of following in the same footsteps? As the war against terrorism drags on and becomes the protracted battle that the administration keeps warning us about, will we become more or less inclined to use awe-inspiring military force--the coin of the realm in the Middle East?

The State Department fears a "power vacuum" in Afghanistan, yet it is exactly a power vacuum for which we should strive. We want Kabul, Mazar-e-Sharif, Sheberghan, and Herat--the four key points of northern Afghanistan--to fall as quickly as possible so that we can clearly signal to the Afghan Pashtuns that a price must be paid for the Taliban's mistakes. They must know that the geopolitical world is changing rapidly and irreversibly, that the peoples behind the Northern Alliance--the Tajiks, Uzbeks, and Shiite Hazara, who together constitute a majority of Afghanistan's population--will successfully assert on the battlefield, and in any national assembly of elders, the so-called loya jirga, that Taliban supremacy is over. We don't want to treat the Pashtuns as if they were a monolith. We want to play on the Pashtuns' historical divisions, between the Ghilzai and the Durrani, and among the numerous other Pashtun divisions that match the complex, varied geography of their Afghan homeland. In war, we absolutely want to play divide and conquer, especially in a disunited land. Divided, the Pashtuns are much more likely to betray bin Laden. When the Taliban are crushed and the United States isn't operating under the gun, we can try to glue together all the Afghan peoples.

WE ABSOLUTELY DON'T WANT again to default to the Pakistanis, as we did in 1989 at the end of the Soviet-Afghan war, responsibility for the Afghan mess. We mustn't allow the Pashtun Pakistanis of the Northwest Frontier Province, who have become so intimately intertwined with the Taliban, to reestablish through any reconstituted and renamed Taliban alliance military control of the Pashtun regions of Afghanistan. We can't shut down, nor can Musharraf, the hundreds of religious schools that dot the Pakistani-Afghan frontier. But we can try to limit their influence by denying them an Afghan government through which madrassa-trained fundamentalist Pashtuns can again establish a mafia of likeminded zealots.

If the United States can demonstrate with speed and force its determination to punish brutally its enemies and reward its friends (through U.S. air power, ground troops, military aid, and financial subventions), Washington and those Afghans allied to it have a chance of gaining sufficient anti-Taliban Pashtun support to complicate greatly, if not thwart, the inevitable Pakistani effort, launched from the religious schools and Pakistan's religiously based political parties, to reestablish the Taliban social and political order north of the border. If that order returns, so, too, will the guerrilla and terrorist training camps for the holy warriors in Kashmir. So, too, will in all probability the training camps of al Qaeda, which U.S. air attacks cannot permanently eliminate (mud-brick houses are, so-to-speak, bomb-proof). Even if bin Laden and Mullah Omar are dead--and their passing will be real progress--the essential geopolitical building blocks of radical Islamic terrorism will remain. And this time round, the holy warriors will be fueled by the not unjustified impression that they triumphed over America.

Sooner rather than later, Washington needs to wean itself from its Pakistani dependency. We can't help Pakistan, which is a country full of America's friends, by wishfully hoping that Musharraf is a closet Atat rk. Even if he were, circumstances would still be decisively against him. We will help neither Pakistan nor Afghanistan by indulging Pakistani preferences among the Afghans. They have been and will remain irreconcilable with our own. If we allow ourselves to be blackmailed because of our fear of chaos in a nuclear-armed Muslim country, then we will surely get blackmailed repeatedly. Even our Pakistani friends would be hard pressed not to take us to the cleaners again and again.

The Talibanization of Pakistan will stop only when the Taliban in Afghanistan have been extirpated. Even if the Unites States starts to aid seriously the Taliban's Afghan foes, this battle may not be quick (though it will likely be pretty quick). But the battle may be endless if we castrate the all-important military campaign while we wait for a post-Taliban government to jell. The United States must have a victory sooner, not later, in Afghanistan. Our enemies in the Middle East must see that we are dead serious about eradicating in Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Middle East those who have drawn American blood. If bin Laden, Mullah Omar, and their Taliban cohorts are still alive come next spring, producing videocassettes trenchantly dissecting our weakness and the immorality of our Muslim "allies," then we will have hell to pay. No sane Muslim in the Middle East will then want to ally himself with the United States. No non-Muslim, either.

Reuel Marc Gerecht is director of the Middle East Initiative of the Project for the New American Century and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute.

-- Anonymous, October 29, 2001