G Parthasarathy
[dropcap]B[/dropcap]y not appointing as Army chief an officer with a proven track record of fighting the Taliban, the Pakistani Prime Minister has demonstrated that he is unwilling to bite the bullet
Superseding six serving officers, Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto who never tired of boasting how he had got the better of Indira Gandhi in Simla, had appointed the obsequious General Zia-ul Haq as Pakistan’s Army chief. Describing this appointment as her husband’s greatest mistake, Begum Nusrat Bhutto told me in 1982 that he had been carried away by Gen Zia’s professions of eternal loyalty. There was even an occasion when, the Quran in hand, Gen Zia swore before Zulfiqar Bhutto: “You are the saviour of Pakistan and we owe it to you to be totally loyal to you”. Barely a year later, on July 5, 1977, Gen Zia ousted Zulfiqar Bhutto in a military coup staged by the Army’s infamous Rawalpindi-based 111 Brigade. On April 4, 1979, Gen Zia had the person he described as the “saviour of Pakistan” hanged, after a farcical trial.Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is a product of Gen Zia’s military rule, enjoying a meteoric rise under the patronage of his military Governor of Punjab, General Ghulam Jilani Khan. It was a period when Gen Zia was bent on destabilising India’s Punjab province. Mr Sharif’s fondness for contacts with ‘Khalistanis’, like the Washington, DC-based Ganga Singh Dhillon continued even through his second term. When Benazir Bhutto was voted to power in 1988, Mr Sharif made common cause with the Zia-appointed President Ghulam Ishaq Khan, Army chief General Aslam Beg and ISI chief Asad Durrani. Benazir Bhutto was ousted and Mr Sharif’s Muslim League was swept to power in 1991. His ISI chief, a fundamentalist member of the Tablighi Jamaat, General Javed Nasir staged the 1993 Mumbai bomb blasts, with assistance from Dawood Ibrahim. Mr Sharif was sacked shortly thereafter by President Ghulam Ishaq Khan, but restored to office by the Supreme Court. When the Army chief, General Asif Nawaz, with whom he had serious differences, died in mysterious circumstances, Mr Sharif superseded three senior officials to appoint the soft spoken General Waheed Kakkar as the new Army chief. Gen Kakkar sent Mr Sharif packing from office soon thereafter.
Mr Sharif learnt nothing from this experience. He unceremoniously forced the resignation of his Army chief General Jehangir Karamat after he was re-elected in 1997, only to appoint a Mohajir, General Pervez Musharraf as his Army chief, believing the latter could be kept in check. Mr Sharif superseded a highly rated Pashtun, Lieutenant General Ali Kuli Khan. Believing that the nuclear tests of 1998 had given him unparalleled popularity and power, and disregarding the fact that he was ruling a bankrupt country, Mr Sharif encouraged and participated in Gen Musharraf’s Kargil misadventure. When the misadventure became a fiasco, and he was forced to rush to the Clinton White House for a bail out, Mr Sharif threw the entire blame on Gen Musharraf for the international disgrace and disrepute his country faced, following the Kargil misadventure. Growing mutual distrust and animosity between Mr Sharif and Gen Musharraf led to the coup of October 12, 1999, with the Prime Minister being incarcerated and later bailed out by the Saudis.
Mr Sharif and the Army establishment share much in common. Both have a proven track record of proximity to Mullah Omar and the Afghan Taliban. Both have close links with Hafiz Saeed and the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba. Mr Sharif also has close links with extremist anti-Shia groups like the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. But, Mr Sharif is averse to ceding almost total powers to the Army, and playing second fiddle on national security and foreign policy issues, like President Asif Ali Zardari was compelled to do, by an assertive General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani. These are the considerations that motivated Mr Sharif in appointing Lieutenant General Raheel Sharif as Gen Kayani’s successor. Mr Sharif bypassed Lieutenant General Haroon Aslam, who was regarded by commentators within Pakistan as an “average officer” and kicked Gen Kayani’s protégé Lieutenant General Rashid Mahmud upstairs, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee. Gen Raheel Sharif has a reasonable career profile, but is not regarded as likely to set the Indus on fire, by innovation and drive.
What clinched Gen Raheel Sharif’s appointment was evidently his close relationship with Lieutenant General (retired) Abdul Qader Baloch, who is Minister for Tribal Affairs and a confidant of Prime Minister Sharif. If Mr Sharif was really interested in having an Army chief who would deal effectively with the threat posed by religious extremism, spearheaded by the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, he should have appointed, as most observers agree, Lieutenant General Tariq Khan who was the next in line for promotion. Gen Khan is a Pashtun armoured corps officer, credited with restoring the shattered morale of the Frontier Constabulary after it was mauled by the TTP. It seems that Mr Sharif still believes that he can buy peace with the TTP, which well-informed observers consider unrealistic and dangerous. Mr Sharif appears to fight shy of appointing Pashtun officers, with distinguished family connections, to the post of Army chief.
As Director General of Military Training, Gen Sharif is known to have stressed the importance of shifting attention, for the present, from an exclusively India-centric approach to focusing on internal challenges. He, however, lacks both the stature and the resolve necessary for ending support either for the Afghan Taliban or anti-India jihadi outfits like the Lashkar-e-Tayyeba. He also has a political boss who has an affinity for jihadi groups, for use both in India and Afghanistan. While the Pakistani Army may remain prepared to take on the TTP, it will not do so under Prime Minister Sharif’s leadership, unless the internal security situation deteriorates significantly and destabilises the Punjab Province. Moreover, as the security situation deteriorates along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, there will be increasing allegations holding Afghanistan and India responsible for the activities of groups like the TTP.
The onset of winter is likely to make infiltration across the mountains of Kashmir difficult. But New Delhi should plan on the assumption that when the snow melts in June 2014, there will a resumption of infiltration and violence. The intervening months give us time to think out a strategy to effectively deal with Pakistan-sponsored terrorism and bring to justice the perpetrators of 26/11. We will hopefully avoid shedding tears for Pakistan being a ‘victim of terrorism’ as we did at Havana, and not de-link dialogue from action on terrorism, as we did at Sharm el Sheikh. India’s South Block mandarins are, however, not alone in being obsessed with ‘uninterrupted and uninterruptable’ dialogue with Pakistan. The senior-most American military official, Admiral Mike Mullen, had 26 meetings with Gen Kayani in the mistaken belief that he could charm the latter into ending support for terrorism. He retired a disillusioned man, bitter with Pakistani duplicity, calling the Haqqani network a “veritable arm” of the ISI.
Courtesy : The Pioneer
