Pakistan: A Hard Country Read Free Page B

option of the US
    attacking Pakistan with ground forces in order to force it to put pressure on the Afghan Taleban simply does not exist – as both the Pentagon and the Pakistani military have long understood. Deeply unsatisfying though this has been for the West, the only means of influencing Pakistan has been through economic incentives and the threat of their withdrawal. Economic sanctions are not real y a credible threat, because the economic col apse of Pakistan would play straight into the hands of the Taleban and Al Qaeda.
    Pakistan’s relationship with India has been central to Pakistan’s behaviour since 9/11 – as of course it has been ever since partition and independence in 1947. Fear of India has both encouraged and limited Pakistani help to the US in Afghanistan. This fear is exaggerated, but not irrational, and neither are most of the policies which result from it. On the one hand, fear of a US – Indian al iance against Pakistan seems to have been a genuine factor in Musharraf’s decision to help the US after 9/11, and was certainly used by him to convince the military and – initial y – many ordinary Pakistanis of the necessity of this help. On the other hand, fear of India has been both a reason and an excuse for Pakistan not to redeploy more troops from the eastern border with India to fight against the Taleban in the west.
    Lastly, the Pakistani establishment long cherished the hope that it could use Pakistani help against the Taleban to bargain for US
    pressure on India to reach a settlement with Pakistan over Kashmir.
    This hope has faded with the refusal (compounded of unwil ingness and inability) of both the Bush and the Obama administrations to play such a role; but this refusal, and America’s ‘tilt towards India’, have added greatly to longstanding Pakistani feelings of betrayal by the US.
    Pakistan’s help to the West against the Afghan Taleban would, however, have been limited in any case both by strategic calculation and mass sentiment. In terms of mass sentiment, the overwhelming majority of Pakistanis – including the communities from which most Pakistani soldiers are drawn – see the Afghan Taleban as engaged in a legitimate war of resistance against foreign occupation, analogous to the Mujahidin war against Soviet occupation in the 1980s.
    In terms of strategy, the Pakistani establishment’s approach to Afghanistan has long been driven by a mixture of fear and ambition.
    The fear is above al of Afghanistan, under the rule of the non-Pashtun nationalities, becoming an Indian client state, leading to India’s strategic encirclement of Pakistan. This fear has been increased by a wel -founded belief that India is supporting Pakistan’s Baloch nationalist rebels via Afghanistan, and by what seems by contrast to be a purely paranoid conviction that India is also supporting the Pakistani Taleban.
    The greater part of the Pakistani establishment therefore believes that it needs to maintain close relations with the Afghan Taleban, since they are Pakistan’s only potential al ies in Afghanistan. In recent years, belief in the need for a relationship with the Taleban has been strengthened by the growing conviction that the West is going to fail in Afghanistan, and wil eventual y withdraw, leaving anarchy and civil war behind – just as occurred after the Soviet withdrawal and the fal of the Communist regime from 1989 – 92. In the resulting civil war, it is believed, every regional state wil have its own al ies – and so must Pakistan.
    Incidental y, it is worth pointing out that even entirely secular members of the Pakistani establishment do not see the Afghan Taleban as moral y worse than the Taleban’s old enemies in the Afghan Northern Al iance leaders, with whom the West has in effect been al ied since 2001. Their atrocities and rapes in the 1990s helped cement Pathan support for the Taleban. They massacred Taleban prisoners and looted Western aid after the overthrow of the