A foreign policy that can't be changed

Khaled Ahmed
Friday Times (Opinion)
Vol XI, No. 46, Regd No. CPL-116
Jan 28-Feb 3, 2000

After the big change that took place in Islamabad on October 12 last year, most analysts thought Pakistan needed an overhaul of policies. The most pressing crisis was economic, but it was tied up with debt-servicing and expenditures connected with national defence. Everybody thought that economic reforms at home would take a long time and needed a gradualist approach, but quick changes could be made in the foreign policy of the country to relieve pressure from an isolated economy and reassure its foreign creditors.

Pakistan's foreign policy can be summed up in short order as confrontation with India and commitment in Afghanistan. The year 1998 saw a peak in Pakistan's confrontation with India. Pakistan exploded a nuclear device in response to India's test in May and couldn't take the political fallout from it. Prime minister Nawaz Sharif, already toying with the idea of normalising relations with India despite the Kashmir dispute, had probably felt the international isolation emanating from the old policy of confrontation. Before his fall, Nawaz Sharif had also expressed his dissatisfaction with Pakistan's Afghan policy in a session of the Defence Committee and looked prepared to make changes in it.

There is no doubt now that Nawaz Sharif had not taken kindly to the Kargil Operation. Whether he had okayed it or not, his inner circle was greatly discomfited by the international reaction against Pakistan and the resultant favour that was showered on India. Tariq Fatemi, his ambassador designate to the United States, was charged by him to follow a new track in Washington, signalling a break in the old foreign policy postures. It is difficult to say if Nawaz Sharif could have survived after changing the well-entrenched direction. Some analysts think that he would have been overthrown by the army sooner or later, and that Pakistan was lucky it had to be General Musharraf and not someone else.

Nature of national consensus: The Kashmir policy has been developed through a 'national consensus' over the last ten years. This consensus has been created in an environment of extreme political instability. Regularly falling governments weakened the politicians and compelled them to go along with it rather than critically examine it. That there was a need to examine it there is no doubt, because the politicians were losing real power to those engaged in the Kashmir jehad. But the new mechanism of attaining power and retaining it coerced the political parties to use the championship of the jehad against each other. The state-owned media made an overkill with its Kashmir propaganda and prepared the public mind against any change in policy on Kashmir. That it was an interventionist policy and not a 'moral and political' one was made clear repeatedly by the jehadi organisations who competitively publicised their feats in Held Kashmir.

In parallel, Pakistan embarked on a new Taliban policy in Afghanistan in 1994. The Taliban were pakhtun, related to the majority pakhtun population living in Pakistan. They 'united' the scattered militias in Afghanistan and took on the North where Ahmad Shah Massoud had been perceived by Pakistan as an enemy aligned with India. Pakistan took more or less the same line as with Kashmir: that Pakistan had recognised the Taliban government but was not involved militarily in Afghanistan. Both Kashmir and Afghan policies were a continuation of the policy of subterfuge adopted during the jehad against the Soviet invasion. The world knew that Pakistan was deeply involved but it accepted its denials and voted overwhelmingly for Pakistan-sponsored resolutions in the UN General Assembly.

The 'deniability' doctrine: Pakistan embraced the practice of a 'deniable' foreign policy and made it permanent. But after the Soviets left Afghanistan, international opinion gradually veered away from accepting it without questioning it. Afghanistan and Kashmir were linked in Islamabad under the simple principle of good management. The militants for Kashmir were also trained in camps in Afghanistan. Jehadi militias operating in Held Kashmir straddled Pakistan, making a bridge out of it. Their proliferation gave birth to rogue and semi-rogue outfits that Pakistan had to tolerate to save its foreign policy from collapsing. It sacrificed security, sectarian peace and an impartial establishment to this foreign policy. A suffering but brain-washed public added to the pressure of continuing a policy that was frequently seen as hurting the interests of Pakistan.

It is no longer possible to defend the 'deniable' foreign policy in Kashmir and Afghanistan. International opinion may be critical of India's violation of human rights in Kashmir, but it is more troubled by Pakistan's intervention in Held Kashmir. Ruling politicians have been forced in the past to 'admit' that the foreign policy of Pakistan is no longer in their hands. Nawaz Sharif's chief of the ISI, General Ziauddin, actually went to the United States and briefed the Pentagon about the difficulties his government was facing in this domain. His complaint about the rise of fundamentalism in Pakistan was actually the complaint of all those who ruled Pakistan in the days of the Kashmir-Afghanistan policy. They had to assume a double face: pretending in Pakistan to defy the accusation of Islamic terrorism, but secretly helping Washington in apprehending terrorists inside Pakistan.

The 'deniable' mode has forced Pakistan to allow its civil society to become involved in the conduct of its foreign policy. The militants have been allowed to wield power inside civil society, becoming an alternative to the state itself. In short, Pakistan has sacrificed the writ of the state at the altar of a 'deniable' foreign policy. Its Foreign Office goes on defending a policy it has not helped make. Since it cannot change policies even to safeguard Pakistan's self-interest, it simply becomes pugnacious in the face of criticism. But that doesn't mean that there is no one in the Foreign Office who objects to the coercive way the foreign policy is being conducted. Foreign policy hawks have come to the fore because the policy cannot be changed. A bureaucrat hawk can be more powerful than the prime minister himself. All foreign secretaries know this.

Army and Kashmir policy: A change in Kashmir policy can threaten the army chief too. In 1995, a perceived laxity in the conduct of Kashmir jehad caused a major-general to stage an unsuccessful coup from within the GHQ. In November 1995, the month when most religious parties with mass following hold their congregations in Lahore, the arrested major-general was lionised, thus putting the GHQ on the defensive. The army favours the jehad because it is a part of the civilian consensus too. It is the civilian government in power which feels the declining curve of the jehad in the eyes of the international community and its own declining power in civil society. It has also experienced the practical impossibility of putting an end to a trend that is harming the state and its various institutions.

Those who recommend continuation of policies in Kashmir and Afghanistan should ponder the fact that Pakistan's civil society has become too visibly involved in the two civil wars. The world is focusing more on the identity of Masood Azhar within Pakistan as the leader of a terrorist organisation than on his imprisonment in India without charges. Ahmad Shah Massoud has hundreds of Pakistani prisoners of war in his custody and claims to have killed a number of officers of the Pakistan army. Pakistan denies being involved in Afghanistan just as it denies being involved in such faraway conflicts as the war in Chechnya, but with less and less credibility. It is helpless in the face of more credible allegations that international terrorists use its territory. It is quite possible that the government and in particular the Foreign Office, which issues the regular denials, may not be aware of the international plans of the jehadi organisations it tolerates.

*Pakistan's 'spill-over' foreign policy: One major weakness of Pakistan's foreign policy is that Pakistan is not able to change it even when its self-interest dictates it. In fact, it is a misnomer to call it foreign policy when so much of Pakistan's domestic policy is involved in it. Normally, states keep their foreign policies sufficiently flexible to effect changes in them. Pakistan has 'spilled over', so to speak, till very little real distinction exists between what is internal and what is external. In some ways, Pakistan may find it more difficult to change its foreign policy than Israel, because the latter is internally intact. In short, to change its foreign policy, Pakistan itself may have to change.

Those who wish to stick to the old policy are simply resisting internal change in Pakistan either because they favour what is happening inside Pakistan or are simply too fearful of the consequences of defying the internal trends. Their weakness lies in the fact that they do not legitimately discuss foreign policy qua foreign policy. They simply give in to the seeming impossibility of effecting changes. They may be scared of the Talibanisation of Pakistan but will not factor that into their consideration of Pakistan's Afghan policy. It is therefore more convenient to presume that the state in Pakistan still has a writ and that fear of Talibanisation is simply a chimera. The biggest crisis in Pakistan's history is that today it is being forced by the self-interest of the state to change its foreign policy. But the internal trend is to change the state itself to suit a foreign policy that can't be altered.