Brave new world or the past revisited?

By Ayaz Amir

If there’s a cross on which Pakistan has found itself frequently crucified, it is the one carrying the legend ’strategic’. What follies have we not committed in the pursuit of strategic goals? Even our present preoccupation with terrorism is a product of our strategic labours in times past (hopefully, never to return).

So when a fresh batch of graduates out of higher strategy school speak of a ’strategic dialogue’ with the United States — our principal ally and, often, the cause of our biggest headaches — there is reason to be wary.

We have been here before, travelled down this route many times, our obsessive insecurity driving us time and again into American arms, each time to be left high and dry when the initial enthusiasm, or necessity, had passed. But we never seem to learn and each time begin our quest for the holy grail — of permanence in our American connection — as if there were never any heartbreaks before.

Barely six months ago the US viewed Pakistan through sceptical, even distrustful, eyes. The army had yet to go into South Waziristan and the phrase Quetta Shura was on the lips of every half-baked security analyst across the Atlantic. South Waziristan, the unspoken acceptance of drone strikes and greater cooperation with the CIA in nabbing shadowy Taliban figures in Pakistan changed all this. American faces now light up at the mention of Pakistan, no smile more beaming than on the face of Gen David Petraeus.

As part of this mood swing, the Americans have taken to lionizing Pakistan’s army commander, Gen Ashfaq Kayani, who is very much the flavour of the moment, just as — frightening thought — Pervez Musharraf was once upon a time. It is sobering to remember that when Musharraf signed on with the US post-Sept 11, conceding far more than anyone in the Bush administration was expecting, no leader on earth was more feted than him.

So we should try and keep things in perspective. The Americans may be gushing over us now but that’s only because we are crucial, perhaps indispensable, for the success of their mission in Afghanistan. Or even for a face-saving exit from that quagmire. There are two fronts to this war, the one in Pakistan being by far the most important.

The ’strategic dialogue’ is thus not pegged to any abstract love for Pakistan. It arises from the grim necessity of the war in Afghanistan. We should be under no illusions about the window of opportunity that this dialogue offers. This window will remain open and serviceable only up to the moment when the Americans begin withdrawing from Afghanistan. To assume otherwise, and give way to misplaced euphoria — something at which we are rather good — is to court the ways of folly and set ourselves up for another ‘betrayal’ at American hands.

The wish-list Pakistan has carried to Washington has Kayani’s thumbprint all over it. It has not been lost on anyone that in the driving seat as far as our delegation is concerned sits not the foreign minister or anyone else but him. It would also not have been lost on anyone that the brief prepared by our side for the talks was put together not in the prime minister’s office or anywhere else but in General Headquarters, with key federal secretaries in attendance and Kayani, not the prime minister, presiding.

Kayani is a smart man, very articulate and extremely good at putting his point of view across (his presentation at Nato Hqs in Brussels has been widely talked about). But what is this we are hearing about the shopping list prepared under his aegis? Which world are we living in? Which planet does GHQ still inhabit?

We have just a year and a half, not eternity, to get what we want from the US. It behoves us ill to ask the US to help restart our composite dialogue with India. If India is playing hard-to-get on this count, we should be able to keep our cool and wait for India’s attitude to change. Even if the composite dialogue doesn’t get going for the next two years, the glaciers will not melt and the Himalayas will not march down to the seas.

We should be mature enough to understand a few things clearly. America is not going to ask India to talk Kashmir with us. It is not going to solve our water problems with India. It is not going to give us the kind of nuclear deal it has concluded with India.

To go by the hype generated in official quarters, it almost appeared as if we were expecting a string of nuclear power plants from the US. And what happens? Hillary Clinton announces a gift of 125 million dollars to set up thermal power plants. A colder splash of water on the fires of our misplaced ardour could not have been poured. What Burke said of England in the context of America’s war of independence: “Light lie the dust on the ashes of English pride” — we can use to define our predicament: light lie the dust on the embers of our strategic relationship.

Sooner or later we will have to discover the reasons for this talent for selling ourselves cheap. We have always behaved thus in our dealings with the US, assuming obligations unthinkingly, never asking for the right price and then moaning about betrayal and the like when the Americans, taking us at our word, leave us with very little.

Mobarak got Egypt’s American debt (7 billion dollars, and this was in 1991) written off when he joined America’s first Gulf war. The Turks asked for 25 billion dollars to allow American troops territorial passage prior to the Iraq war in 2003. That the US refused is beside the point. The Turks did not allow themselves to be taken for granted. We settle for peanuts and call it a ’strategic relationship’.

Kayani, as I have said, is a smart man. But there is too much of India and Afghanistan in his world-view. More than with the US, we need to be conducting a strategic dialogue with ourselves. Why can’t we rid ourselves of the fixation of managing things in Afghanistan? We can’t manage ourselves, yet we want to fix the neighbourhood. Managing Afghanistan may be a worthy ambition. But it is poor compensation for mismanaging Pakistan.

GHQ is aghast at the thought of the Indians training the Afghan army. In Kayani’s phrase, even when trainers depart, they leave their mindset behind. Given the vehemence of our position on this point, maybe the Americans give us ground on this. And we will hail it as a major victory. But we should be playing for higher stakes instead of tilting at windmills.

We should have been gunning for something tangible. We are a debtor nation, strapped for cash. It is money we should have been asking for. In concrete terms, a writing off of all our debt. A one-point agenda, clearly stated and firmly put, without all the mumbo-jumbo of a ’strategic relationship’. Water, energy, India and Afghanistan were best left out of our wish list, more an exercise in fantasy than anything to do with the real world.

This government is too scatterbrained and too preoccupied with other problems to have been able to get things right and concentrate on the essentials of this ’strategic dialogue’ right. The vacuum created by its ineptitude was filled by a GHQ pluming itself on the laurels won in Swat and FATA. But for all its slickness under Kayani, GHQ, alas, remains trapped in the morass of its old conceits and prejudices.

So the old questions remain: how to emerge from the darkness into the light? How to manage Pakistan’s affairs better? Most important of all: whence will come the liberation of the Pakistani mind? One thing is for sure: not from GHQ.

Afterthought: the army had denounced the Kerry-Lugar Bill. What’s so great about the ’strategic dialogue’?