Pakistan-USA relationship for dummies.. US foreign journal reports...
What has Pakistan done to help the United States since September 11?
Pakistan has become a major staging area for the war in Afghanistan, and Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, a general who came to power in a 1999 coup, has become a key U.S. ally. Pakistan has given overflight rights to the United States and Britain for their warplanes, let U.S. forces use two Pakistani airfields, shared intelligence about suspected terrorists, and cooperated with the FBI to capture suspected al-Qaeda and Taliban fugitives in northern Pakistan—including al-Qaeda operations chief Abu Zubaydah.
Are U.S. troops fighting in Pakistan?
Yes. In the spring of 2002, U.S. officials concluded that al-Qaeda holdouts who’d fled Afghanistan were regrouping in the lawless tribal border regions of western Pakistan. U.S. soldiers have joined Pakistani troops on raids in these areas, and the FBI is also contributing both information and agents. Still, U.S. officials worry that the Pakistani military is not doing enough on its own, despite U.S. offers to provide intelligence, helicopters, Special Operations troops, and conventional military units. Experts say Pakistan remains reluctant to pursue terrorists on its territory because it fears an internal political backlash and does not want to launch large-scale military operations while most of its troops are deployed in an ongoing border standoff with India. But U.S. officials were pleased to see Pakistan intensify its hunt for al-Qaeda holdouts in June 2002, when ten Pakistani troops were killed in a firefight.
Could India-Pakistan tensions complicate the war on terrorism?
Yes. U.S. officials have had to work to tamp down the two sides’ conflict over Kashmir. A major flare-up there could divert Pakistani troops from the ongoing hunt for al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters hiding near Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan—and raise fears of a nuclear war on the subcontinent. To further complicate matters, India has accused the United States of hypocrisy for allying with a Pakistani government that India says has done little to sever its own ties to Islamist terrorism. India-Pakistan tensions spiked in December 2001, after Kashmiri terrorists killed nine in an attack on India’s parliament, and again in May 2002, after Kashmiri terrorists killed 31 (including soldiers’ wives and children) in an attack on an Indian army base. About a million troops are massed along the India-Pakistan border.
Has Pakistan supported terrorism?
Yes. Pakistan’s intelligence services—known as the Interservices Intelligence, or ISI—have provided covert but well-documented support to terrorist groups fighting against India in the disputed territory of Kashmir, including Jaish-e-Muhammad, which has been linked to both the December 2001 attack on the Indian parliament and the February 2002 kidnapping and murder of the Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. Until recently, Pakistan was also an ally of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, which harbored Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda terrorist network. In many parts of Pakistan, bin Laden remains a hero.
Did Pakistan support the Taliban?
Yes. With its long-standing conflict with India, to its east, Pakistan sought a friendly regime to its west, in Afghanistan. The Taliban, which Pakistan helped create and train, fit the bill. Many within the ISI and the army continue to share the Taliban’s extremist religious ideology and worldview.
How did Pakistan come to support the Taliban?
When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Pakistan’s leader, General Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, supported Afghanistan’s mujahedeen (holy warriors) against the Soviets. Zia often promoted a hard-line form of political Islam, and with backing from Saudi Arabia, Zia’s Pakistan built scores of new madrasas (religious seminaries) near the Afghan border to teach Pakistanis and Afghan refugees to wage a jihad (holy struggle) against the Soviets. The Taliban are a product of the conservative and political Islam taught in the Pakistani madrasas. The Taliban came to power in Afghanistan in 1996 after the civil war that followed the Soviets’ 1989 withdrawal. By backing the Taliban, Pakistan also hoped to defuse a domestic issue of potential ethnic separatism; the world’s 20 million Pashtuns are roughly split between Pakistan and Afghanistan and comprise the core ethnic group of the Taliban.
Did Pakistan ever support al-Qaeda?
Apparently. James Risen and Judith Miller of The New York Times reported in October 2001 that ISI has had an “indirect but longstanding” relationship with al-Qaeda and has used al-Qaeda camps in Afghanistan to train operatives for terrorist attacks against India. ISI’s reported use of al-Qaeda camps first came to light in 1998, when U.S. cruise missiles struck suspected al-Qaeda terrorist camps in Afghanistan in reprisal for the terrorist bombings of two American embassies in East Africa. The casualties of the U.S. reprisal reportedly included members of a Kashmiri militant group supported by Pakistan who were training in the al-Qaeda camps. U.S. intelligence officials add that some Pakistani nuclear researchers may have shared nuclear technology with al-Qaeda, but they have released no hard evidence to support this.
Is Muslim fundamentalism widespread in Pakistan?
Yes. According to The Washington Post, some 7,000 madrasas currently operate in Pakistan, with enrollment at more than 650,000 students. Pakistani officials estimate that 10 to 15 percent of the madrasas in Pakistan promote extremist ideologies. (There may actually be many more such seminaries operating in Pakistan; Jessica Stern of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government calculates that at least 40,000 more madrasas exist but have not registered with the Pakistani government.) These schools provide food, clothing, shelter, and an Islamist education of varying degrees of militancy to thousands of Pakistani boys each year.
Pakistani leader Gen. Pervez Musharraf
announces crackdown on Islamist militants,
Jan. 2002.
(AP Photo/Press Information
Department/HO )
Beyond the madrasas, militant Islamists demanding the imposition of Islamic law have instigated conflict between Shiite and Sunni Muslims in Punjab, helped trigger endemic violence in Karachi, and caused isolated violent incidents in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province and the adjoining tribal areas. A 1995 revolt in the province attracted hundreds of Afghan and Pakistani madrasa students before the army broke it up. Islamist militants have also smashed satellite dishes, shot video-shop owners, and, in the western Pakistani city of Quetta, chased women off the street to “defend modesty.”
Is Musharraf’s rule threatened by his support for the war on terrorism?
Experts disagree, but so far, his grip on power seems solid. According to Anatol Lieven of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Pakistan’s armed forces remain disciplined and well funded, making a military coup to oust Musharraf unlikely. Also, the Taliban’s swift collapse made Musharraf’s pro-U.S. policy easier to sustain by preventing prolonged, destabilizing street protests in support of the Taliban. And according to Radha Kumar, an Asia specialist at the Council on Foreign Relations, many of Pakistan’s businesspeople and intelligentsia and large segments of the general public back Musharraf’s pledges to crack down on terrorism and Islamist militancy. In April 2002, Musharraf won a referendum authorizing his rule for five more years. But critics insist that the record turnout, Musharraf’s overwhelming margin of victory, and reports of stuffed ballet-boxes indicate that the election was rigged.
Still, by turning against the Pakistan’s erstwhile Taliban allies, Musharraf alienated many Islamists, including members of ISI, the army, and Kashmiri militant movements. And experts say U.S. pressure to crack down on terrorists after a December 2001 attack on the Indian parliament, blamed by India on the Pakistani-backed militant groups Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Muhammad, made Musharraf’s position more awkward. |
