Author: K Subrahmanyam
Publication: The Times of India
Date: May 22, 2009
URL: http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/Opinion/Editorial/TOP-ARTICLE--Wages-Of-Incoherence/articleshow/4561298.cms
Introduction: US must read the real nature
of the threat from Pakistan
US secretary of state Hillary Clinton has
astonished the world with her rare candour. She has described US policy towards
Pakistan in the last 30 years as incoherent. She has bemoaned that, after
accepting Pakistan's support in the Afghanistan war in the 1980s, the US imposed
all kinds of sanctions on it. True, US policy was incoherent. But Clinton
should be cautioned against accepting an incoherent explanation for it and
overlooking what led to US sanctions. It would also help if the US came clean
on the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) relationship with notorious proliferator
A Q Khan.
According to former Dutch prime minister Rudd
Lubbers, this relationship dated back to 1975. The CIA had intervened twice
with Dutch authorities to let Khan go when he was detained by them. The US's
role in Pakistan's nuclear proliferation was not exactly a passive one. The
Pressler amendment was not meant to discourage Pakistan's nuclear weapons
build-up but to outmanoeuvre the proposed Glenn-Cranston amendment imposing
a 20 per cent limit on uranium enrichment. The Reagan administration enabled
Pakistan to go up to building a weapon. The tacit agreement was that it would
stop short of testing.
The Pakistanis broke that understanding and
got their weapon tested by the Chinese at their Lop Nor site on May 26, 1990.
This has been disclosed in a book, The Nuclear Express, by two US scientists,
Thomas Reed and Danny Stillman, associated with Lawrence Livermore and Los
Alamos nuclear establishments. In the third week of May 1990, a US delegation
headed by Robert Gates, currently defence secretary, rushed to Islamabad presumably
to persuade Pakistan not to test. It failed. George Bush Sr was left with
no alternative but to invoke the Pressler amendment. Clinton, therefore, need
not feel guilty about the sanctions. Rather, it would do her and the world
a lot of good if the US came clean on the events of 1990.
That doesn't mean other aspects of US policy
were not incoherent. The US helped promote the worst form of Wahhabi extremism
among the mujahideen. It is now paying the price since Wahhabi conditioning
spawned al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI)
learnt the tricks it is displaying visa-vis the US from CIA trainers. In the
years to follow, the CIA could not correctly assess what its former pupils
would be up to. Even after the Taliban's extremism became known, Bill Clinton's
assistant secretary of state Robin Raphael tried to negotiate with it. Hillary
Clinton would dismiss that as part of incoherent policy. But many who were
responsible for it are still around her in the present administration.
No doubt Barack Obama's policy has a certain
coherence. It recognises the Taliban/al-Qaeda and their Wahhabi extremism
as the enemy and no longer talks about the war on terror overlooking the fact
terrorism was a strategy to spread an extremist cult. It also recognises the
ISI's links with some extremist organisations. Clinton has spoken of Pakistan's
government and civil society abdicating their responsibility to fight extremists
posing an existential threat to them, and of Pakistan in its present state
posing a mortal threat to the US. Yet she now talks approvingly of action
against the Taliban by Pakistan's army and democratically elected government.
Has she noticed that Pakistan's national assembly has not yet been able to
pass a resolution by consensus endorsing army operations against the Taliban?
A coherent policy would depend on assessing
the nature of the threat Pakistan's situation poses to US and international
security. The threat is not merely the Taliban and al-Qaeda, It is an extremist
cult under which hundreds of thousands of children from age seven upwards
are being robotised to become suicide bombers and cannon fodder in hundreds
of madrassas. This did not happen in Iraq, Iran or Saudi Arabia. Even as the
army, government and some sections of civil society in Pakistan have fallen
in line with the US demand to fight the Taliban and al-Qaeda, significant
sections of the population still view this as an American war. There is no
evidence of the beginning of any ideological transformation against Wahhabi
extremism.
Policy incoherence arose from the US's inability
to understand that Pakistan was a religious ideological state and had a conflict
of interest with the US on that account. While both parties in pursuit of
tactical gains tried out an opportunistic alliance, Pakistan emerged the gainer.
Nuclear weapons made it immune to international punitive action. Plus it had
an expansionist ideological cult from which the US now feels a threat.
While the US is trying to use Pakistan's army
and state apparatus to fight the most organised expression of the extremist
cult in the form of the Taliban and al-Qaeda, the ideology pervading the madrassas
remains untouched. No doubt a programme for building schools and reforming
education exists on paper. If the US is not to make the mistake of leaving
Pakistan once the anti-Taliban/al-Qaeda campaigns end, it must recognise that
there is a fundamental ideological conflict with the prevalent extremist cult.
There has to be a de-jihadisation of Pakistan and Afghanistan, just as once
there was de-Nazification in Europe.
