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The Pakistani army has been reporting heavy clashes between its troops and Taliban fighters. The battles are part of a ground offensive in the volatile tribal region of South Waziristan. The US has been providing military assistance, a fact many in the Pakistani military are not prepared to admit openly. The World’s Jeb Sharp looks at the complicated motivations of Pakistan’s armed forces in this conflict.
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- Jeb Sharp’s ‘How We Got There’ podcast
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MARCO WERMAN: As we just heard, Pakistan’s military seems to take a selective approach when it comes to cracking down on militants inside the country’s border. Given the rash of attacks in recent weeks, some mind it hard to understand why the military would hold back at all but historians say there is a reason and it’s rooted in Pakistan’s past. The World’s Jeb Sharp takes a look back.
JEB SHARP: The nation of Pakistan was born in August 1947, carved out of India at India’s moment of independence from the British. Mohammed Ali Jinnah was Pakistan’s founder and first leader.
MOHAMMED ALI JINNAH: It is in Pakistan. It is with feelings of greatest happiness and emotion that I send you my greetings. All this specific things, the birthday of the independence and sovereign state of Pakistan.
SHARP: The idea was to give India’s Muslims more political power by providing them with a homeland of their own but thee was trouble right from the beginning, over a beautiful mountainous region both sides wanted, Kashmir. Pakistani’s felt they got a raw deal, according to Arif Jamal, he’s the author of “Shadow War – The Untold Story of Jihad in Kashmir.”
ARIF JAMAL: Pakistani’s feel that the British were unfair dividing their empire. They gave some Muslim majority parts to India and if they had not given those Muslim majority parts to India in Punjab, India would not have ready access to Kashmir and Kashmir would have gone to Pakistan.
SHARP: The two countries went to war over Kashmir almost immediately but Pakistan was never a match for its much larger neighbor. It lost that first war. A second in 1965 ended in a stalemate. Then in 1971, Pakistan lost half its territory when Bengali separatists seceded from Pakistan with the help of India. East Pakistan became Bangladesh. Historian Ayesha Jalal of Tufts University says that loss only magnified Pakistan’s sense of weakness.
AYESHA JALAL: India is more than four times Pakistan’s size, it is a huge, huge presence and they have a very conflicted history. I mean you are aware that there are now more Muslims in India than there are in Pakistan and Pakistan has managed to lose the majority of its population in ’71, again with the help of India so those are the narratives that really cause bitterness. Jalal says a sense of inferiority and insecurity has long driven Pakistani military policies. Pakistan’s fear of India led it to develop nuclear weapons and it motivated Pakistan’s alliance with the United States during the Cold War. That fear also skewed the balance of power inside Pakistan, making the military strong and civilian institutions weak. Shuja Nawaz is the author of “Crossed Swords –Pakistan, its Army and the Wars Within.”
SHUJA NAWAZ: This beginning at the war at the birth of Pakistan, essentially laid the seeds for the military to stat taking decisions and to get into conflict with civilian rulers who they thought were not making firm decisions or providing the kind of leadership that the country needed.
SHARP: The Cold War also reinforced military dominance. The United States poured money into Pakistan to ward against Soviet influence in the region. When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the CIA and Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, backed the Afghan Muja Hadeen in their so-called Jihad against the Soviet occupiers. The Americans were driven by anti-Soviet worries but Pakistan, led by the Islamist general Zia-ul Haq, was still obsessed with India, according to Arif Jamal.
JAMAL: When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan and the Americans decided to wage a Jihad against the Soviets in Afghanistan, General Zia-ul Haq was very happy. He joined the Afghan Jihad because he wanted to wage a Jihad in Kashmir. So to convince his fellow generals and Islamists, he said that if he allied himself with the Americans, he would get the resources for preparing a Jihad in Kashmir.
SHARP: That policy of promoting Jihad as a tool of foreign policy came back to bite Pakistan when the United States pulled out of Afghanistan in 1989 after the Soviet withdrawal. Again, Shuja Nawaz.
SHUJA NAWAZ: The United States left in a precipitated matter. Pakistan was not prepared for the after effects. It inherited what was later to be called the Kaleshnikov culture. Lots of weapons, people ready to use them and a growing number of international Jihadists who had gathered to fight the good fight using Pakistan as a base and who made it their home. This is where Al Qaeda was born, eventually and Pakistan is now reaping that whirlwind.
AYESHA JALAL: We know that Al Qaeda emerged out of the war against the Soviets.
SHARP: Again, historian Ayesha Jalal.
JALAL: We also know that the Pakistani ISI in conjunction with the American CIA nurtured a complex web of militants who are known as Muja Hadeen, to fight the Soviets and that infrastructure survived. It was never dismantled. If anything it grew and became a state within a state so it really nurtured a very complex critical economy of war which it became very difficult to disassociate from.
SHARP: And Pakistan supported the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan in the 1990’s but after the attacks of 9/11, Pakistan official joined the United States in its war against Al Qaeda and the Taliban. And yet, Pakistan is selective in its targets, going after some militant groups on Pakistani soil but keeping others around for the long simmering rivalry with India. Ayesha Jalal says if you want to solve Pakistan’s crisis, you have to understand that mentality. Even now, as these groups attack their own government, there’s concern the military won’t go after all of them. Jalal says the stakes are huge.
JALAL: I think it’s a battle for Pakistan, the final battle if you like, it’s that serious. If this battle is lost, then I’m afraid it won’t be long before the state as presently constituted will come undone.
SHARP: For The World, I’m Jeb Sharp.
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