These days, Pakistani media and most politicians are unanimous: for Pakistan war on terror is the other people’s war. It fights for American interests rather than its own. Outcast voices of liberal intellectuals, who claim that having joined the war for foreign interests, Pakistan now fights for its own ones, get all the louder against that background. In spite of outward discrepancies, both standpoints are justified, although (as it usually happens) the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
If the USA and the NATO hadn’t invade Afghanistan, by now Taliban would’ve surely controlled a good deal of Pakistan (including Peshawar) if not the whole of it. Given the unpleasant fact of Pakistani nuclear capacity, this outcome may hardly be considered positive by anyone but the Taliban itself. By 2001 Taliban controlled 90 % of Afghani territory. Having assassinated the Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud two days before Sept 11, 2001, Al Qaeda militants have nearly achieved the Taliban dominion over Afghanistan. Lack of a distinct border between Afghanistan and Pakistan would’ve surely made the latter vanish at all. Taliban penetration into the Pashto zone of Pakistan and further could’ve actually become a matter of the nearest future.
Neither should we forget that Taliban itself emerged exactly in Pakistan. The rumors of Taliban appearance in Pakistan as a consequence to the NATO occupation of Afghanistan are either deliberate falsifications, or honest delusions of politicians, who barely know the history of their own country. On Dec 14, 1998 Pakistani-based Daily Jang (published since 1939 and featuring a circulation of 800.000 copies) wrote about the first death sentence that Taliban court passed at the Orakzai tribal area in Pakistan. Here are few more facts that no one in modern Pakistan is particularly fond of being reminded about:
— In 1993–94 Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM) movement emerged in the Pakistani province of Malakand. It has taken the pro-Taliban stand during the War in Afghanistan;
— Pursuing the extensive agenda of occupying Pakistan, they’ve sent a notorious warlord Siraj-u-din Haqqani to Waziristan (Pakistani province bordering Afghanistan) in order to establish Shariah rule there. This man still lives in Pakistan and prospers;
— In 1998–99 Shahbaz Sharif, Chief Minister of Punjab province, repeatedly accused Taliban Afghani government of supporting terrorists — including the detestable individuals like Riaz Basra, who had masterminded the acts of terrorism in Punjab. Those accusations were grounded upon the intelligence data. Religious violence in Pakistan reached its climax exactly in the 90s. Mosques and other Shiite sacred objects were attacked. Today’s religious terrorism in Pakistan (including the wide-spread martyr-terrorist attacks) is the doing of the utmost orthodox Sunni movement Deobandi, which has led a vendetta against Pakistani Shiites. “Talibanization” of Pakistan had started long before the NATO occupied Afghanistan and — whether Pakistani people like it or not — it is their own home-bred product.
For justice’ sake we have to denote that Americans aren’t that clean in that regard either. When the Taliban emerged in Afghanistan in the beginning of the 90s, some oil consortiums of America attempted to bring the country to order with their help. When the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan, total war between the rival gangs has broken out there.
Yet, it is Pakistan itself who made the greatest contribution to the increased Taliban influence in the country, striving to confine the Iranian impact on Afghanistan. India funded the Northern Alliance, which opposed the Taliban (funded by Saudi Arabia in its turn and also trying to diminish Iranian leverage).
The U.S.-backed Ahmad Shah Massoud and Abdul Rashid Dostum have never belonged to Taliban and neither have Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and Ismail Khan. It’s clear that Americans have attempted to establish cooperation with various paramilitary alignments of Afghanistan trying to set them against the USSR (and not without a success). Pakistan, though, attempted to take advantage of someone else’s “triumph” and turn Afghanistan into a puppet-state as of beneficiary’s right. Zia ul-Haq has even dubbed Afghanistan the fifth state of Pakistan.
During the Pakistani-Indian War in 1971 the USSR openly sided India, which is why the Pakistani participation in the anti-Soviet resistance of Taliban had a distinct odor of revengeful satisfaction. Once, fundamentalists dubbing America “The Great Satan” called the USSR the same. Yet uncovered wounds of the war of 1971 made Pakistan resist the emergence of a Moscow-controlled puppet regime in Afghanistan. Islamabad couldn’t risk fetching itself between the hammer and the anvil — the USSR on one side and India on the other. Being guided by this logic after the April Revolution of 1978, Pakistan made its mind to oppose Afghanistan. Pakistan was the first to fund and render military support to Afghani terrorist underground.
In 1976, after being ousted from Afghanistan, Burhanuddin Rabbani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar received the asylum and even the official refugee status in Pakistan. In July of 1979 the USA allotted a trifle amount of half a million dollars to support Mujahidin cause — Pakistani President Zia ul-Haq has gone as far as labeling it a scoff. Only by the middle of the 80s he managed to talk Reagan’s administration into the full-scale participation in the war against the USSR and its Afghani allies. Thus, it wasn’t the USA that pulled Pakistan into supporting the Islamic fundamentalists but the other way round. Albeit China, Arab states and Iran (apart from the USA) also supported Mujahidin at the moment, today’s Pakistan (resented with its strategic ally) accuses Americans of its own straits and state instability caused by religious wars.
Religious zealots have used Pakistan for promoting their political agenda for a long time. As far back as in 1984 Pakistani top brass created the terrorist organization Laszkar-e-Toiba, which supported Afghani Mujahidin in their fight against the USSR. During the armed conflict with India in 1999, tribe members were included into the armed forces and this was also practiced in 1971, during the War in Bangladesh. These “volunteers” have broken out of control of Pakistani military command as far back as during the Kashmir jihad.
Having sworn an oath to exterminate the infidels, they robbed and murdered Muslims with an equal zeal, barely distinguishing friends from foes. We may draw certain parallels between them and the Taliban movement. Once created by the Pakistani military and intelligence, they had long ago broke out of control and acted on their own.
Today Pakistan accuses the USA of pulling them into the post-Soviet chaos of the War in Afghanistan. Pakistani-American relationship is obviously going through some troubled times now. Pakistan simultaneously lays the blame for unjustified and ill-timed withdrawal from Afghanistan (as they believe it to be) and complications, caused by American presence, onto America. Official Islamabad believes that the very moment Yankees leave Afghanistan, the issue of terrorism will disappear as if by magic. Yet, such standpoint hardly corresponds with the stance of Sufi Muhammad, leader of the aforementioned terrorist organization TNSM, who frankly proclaims establishing the Shariah rule in Pakistan through the use of military force to be his goal.
“Ungrateful” Pakistani, who got addicted to the needle of American financial and military aid keep claiming that they wage the war on terrorism for the sake of America. In fact, though, they cunningly take advantage of American opportunities to wage their own war against Islamic fundamentalists, who had burst out of control after being born by Pakistan itself. The monster, that Pakistani army and intelligence had created to use against the USSR and India, started to devour its father. Pakistan might’ve been left to deal with the matter on its own, if not for three circumstances of extreme importance that prevent it:
1. Jihad organizations enjoy utter freedom of actions and support in Pakistan, which is why we may allegedly tie almost any act of terrorism in any part of the world to the semi-legal Islamic underground of Pakistan.
2. Afghani heroin threatens our national security.
3. Pakistan is a nuclear power. Occupation of a Pakistani nuclear arsenal by some Mujahidin detachment may echo with disastrous consequences all over the globe.
The very moment the NATO withdraws its troops, Afghanistan and Pakistan will become a whole. Until the participants of this sophisticated process believe this war to be someone else’s one, the cancer of Islamic extremism will keep eating into Pakistan (and not just it) all the deeper and its metastases will spread all the wider. Today Pakistan frankly seeks for new sponsors. The United States were a fine partner, but they demanded the fulfillment of the allied liabilities in exchange for the financial aid. Now Islamabad hopes China to be less demanding.
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