Rawalpindi Fallout

By Steve Hynd

I've been watching the growing tension in the Sub-Continent which has been fuelled by the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul and by high profile attacks in the Khyber Bazaar, Peshawar, and - most recently - at Army HQ in Rawalpindi.  The Rawalpindi attack in particular has meant new opportunities for political machinations between Pakistan's civilian government and military, while overall relations between India and Pakistan are perhaps at their lowest ebb since 2001, when the two nations almost went to war.

In Pakistan, two news items today worried me. In the first, Pakistan's ambassador to the U.S., Hussain Haqqani, told AmericaTV that the Pakistani military believed in the supremacy of parliament - a remarkable statement given that the military has rebuffed three attempts to increase civilian control and oversight of the ISI since President Zardari took office and has been in control of Pakistan for around half the nation's history. Meanwhile, Asian Age ran a report based on an anonymous Presidential aide which said Zardari has been advised to remove General Kayani from his position as head of the military.

"This option has been in the mind of the President. He has been advised to remove the Army Chief and others who may create obstacles for him in the future," a close aide of the President told this newspaper. He added, "The President certainly doesn�t want to rush things. He wants to take time and strike his enemies one by one." The President had to compromise against his will to the conditions of the Army Chief on Saturday when he accepted his demands of checking the "insulting" clauses in the Kerry-Lugar aid bill proposed by the US. While Mr Zardari had been a strong advocate of the bill, the Army Chief together with other senior Generals had rejected it saying it contained insulting clauses and was against the country�s sovereignty.

As Mosharraf Zaidi, columnist for Pakistan's International News paper told me, there's a lot of "court politics" being played in Pakistan right now, and that's perhaps the most dangerously destabilizing part of the purely domestic picture there, rather than any increase in Taliban capabilities.

However, both pieces centered around the split between military and civilian leadership over the Kerry-Lugar Bill, and both pieces also mentioned Pakistani accusations that India is arming and directing the Pakistani Taliban. Meanwhile, India is accusing Pakistan of being behind the recent Kabul embassy bombing, just as they were accused of being behind last year's bomb at the same place by both India and the U.S. India is getting angrier too about what it sees as Pakistani foot dragging over bringing people behind last year's Mumbai attacks to justice. Now is exactly the wrong time for a divide to open between Pakistani's ruling military and feudal elites, but that seems to be what's happening.

Just to compound the fallout Pakistan is about to launch an assault on the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) in their heartland of South Waziristan. Even for Pakistan itself, this will probably turn out to be a game of terrorist whack-a-mole. In Swat, with winter bearing down, reconstruction has yet to begin. The danger there is that what has been a war on the TTP begins to look far more like collective punishment of the Pashtun, fuelling nationalist sentiment and driving ,ore recruits into the TTP's arms. In South Waziristan, leaders of Taliban groups focussed upon Afghanistan, like Mullah Nazeer, have already been told their peace accords are safe - the assault will be purely upon the TTP's presence, which doesn't help the U.S. very much at all.

And then there's the Punjab:

"All roads lead to South Waziristan," Interior Minister Rehman Malik said on Saturday, after a week of violence which included an attack on a U.N. office in Islamabad and a suspected suicide bombing which killed 49 people in Peshawar.

"Now the government has no other option but to launch an offensive," he said.

But even if the military manages to pin down Pakistani Taliban fighters in South Waziristan, the country remains vulnerable to attacks by Punjab-based militants acting either in concert with the TTP or alone.

"South Punjab has become the hub of jihadism," Pakistani analyst Ayesha Siddiqa wrote in a magazine article last month. (here).

"Yet, somehow, there are still many people in Pakistan who refuse to acknowledge this threat," she wrote.

The province is home to an array of militant organisations including anti-Shia sectarian groups and those originally used to fight India in Kashmir. Security officials said a militant arrested after the 22-hour-long attack and hostage-taking at army headquarters was believed be a member of the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, an al Qaeda-linked Punjab-based group.

... North West Frontier Province Information Minister Iftikhar Hussain called on Saturday for the elimination of militant bases in Punjab. Even if a South Waziristan offensive was successful militants would still get help from Punjab, he told reporters.

But targetting all of Pakistan's militants at once could create an even more dangerous coalition by driving disparate groups closer together to make common cause with the Pakistani Taliban and al Qaeda in fighting the state, analysts say.

The army also draws many of its recruits from Punjab, making any efforts to root out militants there all the harder.

"Deploying the military is not an option. In the Punjab this will create a division within the powerful army because of regional loyalty," wrote Siddiqa.

India has a Punjab Province too, and will not be happy to see a rising militancy just across its border there - especially if the Pakistani military doesn't want to act. A breakdown in Pakistan's ruling system could only increase that unhappiness and hawkish urgings to intervene in India's national interest. We could be on our way to another 2001-style standoff.