A Faustian Pact Replayed

In 1979, the US again felt the need to use Pakistan—this time for a proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Pakistan again offered its help not because it was afraid of the Soviet Union but since it saw an opportunity to trade help to the mujahideen for economic and military help against India. This time it secured not only arms and aid but also a blind eye to its China-assisted nuclear weapons programme. Again India’s protests were of no avail.

But like its predecessors, the US-Pakistan deal over Afghanistan was a Faustian one. On September 11, the devil came to New York and Washington to collect his due. The devil left a visiting card and it had a postal address in Afghanistan. So, having learned precisely nothing from history, the US has turned again to Pakistan to find and exorcise him.

Will history repeat itself? Will India find itself protesting once again and once again being ignored? American spokesmen deny this, of course. They take pains to explain that they have learned from experience. They know Pakistan has systematically nurtured the jehadis who have targeted the US in the past. They know, for instance, that Ramzi Youssef, of World Trade Center fame, the assassin who shot two cia operatives on the steps of Langley, the members of Abu Sayaf who came within an ace of blowing 10 United Airlines planes out of the skies in the Far East in 1993 and all the Nairobi bombers of 1998 had plane tickets to Karachi in Pakistan. They know that the instructions to Al Gamaa al Islamiyya in Egypt for the assassination bids on President Mubarak and some of his ministers in 1993 and 1994 came from Peshawar. What the Clinton administration didn’t want to admit was that the terrorists who operated to the west of Pakistan were kith and kin to the so-called freedom fighters of Al Faran and the Harkat-ul-Ansar operating in Kashmir.

The Bush administration, its spokesmen claim, has removed this glass partition. Never again will India’s interests be sacrificed at the altar of expediency. Terrorism, Colin Powell observed, does not stop at the LoC but includes Kashmir in its ambit. It will have to be fought accordingly.

To Indians, whom history has rendered chronically suspicious of the US, these are vastly reassuring sentiments. But someone is obviously not getting the state department’s message in Washington itself. If Washington understands the umbilical cord that links the Taliban to Pakistan’s military establishment, and is thus aware of the need to use every political, economic and military lever to force Islamabad to cut it, what made it surrender the single-most powerful lever by virtually writing off more than half of Pakistan’s $30 billion debt? Is this how one should fight terrorism, or could it be that all the evidence that the cia had accumulated, of Pakistan’s involvement with the ‘Army of Islam’ and the Taliban—the evidence that made President Bush’s father put Pakistan on the watch list of terrorist states—was false?

Washington may believe the debt rescheduling does not matter and that it still has enough levers to make Pakistan dance to its tune. But if that is so, then someone obviously failed to inform Pervez Musharraf and Abdus Sattar. For hardly was the ink dry on the rescheduling agreement than Pakistan made three significant announcements: it refused to break diplomatic links with the Taliban; Sattar warned other countries not to help the anti-Taliban northern alliance and Musharraf served notice on the US that what was happening in Kashmir was not terrorism but a war of independence. In short, the glass partition was very much in place and the US had better keep it there if it wanted Pakistan’s cooperation.

If news reports from Kashmir are to be believed, to reinforce this impression (or to give the US a fig-leaf behind which to renege on its commitments to India), Musharraf has made the Hizbul Mujahideen mass some 400 genuine Kashmiri insurgents at launch points in "Azad Kashmir". Musharraf’s strategy is not hard to discern. On the one hand, he is sending the message to his own highly disturbed people, his religious leaders and his soldiers in the Taliban army that no matter what he tells the Americans (and the amnesiac delegation of EU leaders now visiting Islamabad), Pakistan will not let the Taliban down. By implication, that means that Pakistan will also not betray Osama bin Laden. If Pakistan does cooperate in any attacks against the Taliban, it is doing so against its will and only to the minimum extent possible. On the other, he is reassuring the confused jehadis in Kashmir that notwithstanding anything he and his ministers may say in public, their hearts remain true to the cause of jehad and the "liberation" of Kashmir. If the US turns a blind eye not just to Pakistan’s domestic compulsions but to its overt public statements, it will soon find that it has clasped not a new-found ally but Cleopatra’s adder to its breast.