Khaled Ahmed's review of Husain Haqqani’s book ‘Pakistan: between Mosque and Military’.

From The Friday Times

Mosque, military and textbook nationalism

Husain Haqqani in his book Pakistan: between Mosque and Military (Vanguard Books) has not delved into the textbook controversy in Pakistan, but, reading the Pakistani textbooks, one is compelled to draw the conclusion that the paramountcy of the army in Pakistan cannot be removed unless the textbook nationalism of Pakistan is altered. Agreeing with Haqqani’s basic thesis of India-centricism of this indoctrination, one has to take note of the almost universal resistance in Pakistan to any changes in the anti-India curriculum fashioned in Islamabad. In the post-2000 period most of the attempts made by the Musharraf government to detoxify the textbooks have failed. This move was aimed at eliminating two elements in the books: the anti-India (strategic depth) reference and its corollary, the reference to Islam (internal fusion of identities in order to face India effectively).

The ruling party PML was subliminally distressed by the task. The PML (Nawaz) was vehemently opposed to taking out the ideology from the books. The religious parties came out in the streets till the project was laid aside. Anti-Indianism necessitates the dominance of the army and the army needs Islamisation to secure its back as it faces India. The opposition in Pakistan wants the army out of power but wants to retain the textbook nationalism, a policy that contains two mutually destructive passions. The only party capable of grasping the importance of altering the nature of Pakistan’s nationalism – the PPP - is humbled by the brainwash of the Punjabi vote-bank in favour of this nationalism.

Nawaz Sharif, the Jamaat and the ISI: Haqqani reveals that after Nawaz Sharif got the divided mujahideen to agree to an interim government after the fall of the Najibullah regime in Kabul, Pakistani army helicopters actually flew Hekmatyar and his men to a place outside Kabul so that he could take over as a member of the mujahideen cabinet. Pressured by the ISI and his IJI cohort, Qazi Hussain Ahmad, Nawaz Sharif had toed the line on Hekmatyar, but he was becoming aware that Hekmatyar had no support among even the Pushtun mujahideen. During his first tenure he did try to ‘balance’ the Afghan policy, but the cumulative pull of the ISI and Jamaat Islami on his vote-bank was too strong for him to resist. In 1993 after the Nawaz Sharif government was ousted from power and Ms Bhutto once again returned to rule Pakistan, the establishment was still rolling with its old momentum. Even the intelligence agencies under her were divided. Hameed Gul ‘cells’ existed in the ISI and the ‘professional’ army chief continued to feel weak and besieged by the ghostof General Zia.

Ms Bhutto was even more vulnerable to the pressures the military put on her with regard to the Kashmir policy, which was clearly falling apart in the mid-1990s, with the US declaring the big operator in Held Kashmir – the Harkatul Ansar militia – a terrorist organisation. The new ISI chief General Javed Ashraf Qazi told the Americans he knew nothing about the banned Harkatul Ansar and therefore could not arrest any of the Harkat leaders. The banned militia resurfaced as Harkatul Mujahideen, which was to become the most dreaded military arm of Al Qaeda in the days to come. The generals thought as one on Kashmir and India. This is one thesis on which Haqqani cannot be faulted: from Iskander Mirza and Ayub Khan to Ziaul Haq, Jehangir Karamat and Musharraf, Islamist and non-Islamist generals alike, were unwilling to help a prime minister shift away from an India-centric worldview. Nawaz Sharif and Ms Bhutto were both blackmailed into pretending to advance the Kashmir policy and actually use it as a plank during election campaigns. It is moot if the weak ‘professional’ army chiefs too were similarly blackmailed.

Post-Zia reality of weak PM and weak army chief: The second PPP tenure also saw the Hamid Gul ‘cell’ type of rogue military officers masterminding a takeover which would be politically fronted by philanthropists like Abdus Sattar Edhi and Imran Khan. (Haqqani doesn’t mention Imran and is skimpy on detail.) This was followed by an actual attempt at an overthrow in 1995 led by a major general who was ‘allegedly’ patronised by the ex-ISI chief General Javed Nasir of the Tablighi Jamaat. A ‘weak’ army chief was also to be targeted by the coup-plotters together with Ms Bhutto and her government. Was the next ‘weak’ (professional) army chief General Jehangir Karamat able to punish the coup-plotters? Evidence is that he avoided confronting the ‘strong’ elements within the army whom a more thoroughgoing ‘correction’ would have offended.

General Javed Nasir kept snubbing the weak army chief even after he was ousted from the ISI. Haqqani reveals that he authorised the 1993 attack, through Indian underworld figure Daud Ibrahim, on the Bombay Stock Exchange, which killed 250 as a revenge for the destruction of Babri Masjid by Hindu fanatics. That was the year that Javed Nasir was prematurely retired from the ISI, only to be given a more important ‘India-related’ job in the Evacuee Property Trust in Lahore regulating the Sikh properties in Pakistan and therefore the traffic of Sikhs to their shrines. Who gave him the job? Javed Nasir’s list of ‘enemies of Islam’ at the ISI included ‘the United States, Hindu leadership of India and the Zionists’. Musharraf fired him from his Lahore job also in 2002. His pro-Kargil Operation articles in the press, written in the low-IQ but highly spiritually uplifting style of Hamid Gul, did not save him in the end.

Kashmir first, Pakistan second: When Nawaz Sharif came to power for the first time (1990-1993) he was steamrollered into pushing the Kashmir policy. Despite foreign secretary Shaharyar Khan’s reasoned argument that Kashmir could not be won through jihadi militias, he inclined in favour of the ISI making the clandestine Kashmir policy more clandestine in the face of rising American objections. The covert policy swing out of control under Ms Bhutto in 1993 as Mast Gul, a Jamaat Islami hero of Charar Sharif, was paraded in the streets of Pakistan by the ISI against her wishes, during which Mast Gul condemned her government! She appealed to the US to come to her help ‘against militancy and terrorism’ but the truth is that militancy and terrorism were emanating from the military and the American routine was to support whoever was powerful so as not to ‘go against the people of Pakistan’.

Haqqani narrates the story of how in 1998 Nawaz Sharif was compelled to mend fences with Lashkar-e-Tayba in Muridke near Lahore when Governor Punjab and federal information minister called on its leader and praised him and his terrorist forays into India. He doesn’t mention it but the fact is that Mushahid Hussain - ‘the other fixer’ - had gone to Muridke to apologise to Hafiz Saeed on behalf of the prime minister for inadequate past support. He also mentions the October 2001 attack by Jaish Muhammad on the Kashmir assembly in Srinagar. It first owned it, but later denied it. Then in December the same year Lashkar-e-Tayba attacked the Indian parliament, bringing the Indian army eyeball-to-eyeball with the Pakistan army on the borders. Musharraf arrested Hafiz Saeed but let him go after keeping him in safe custody for some time.

Take Afghanistan, give Kashmir: He says the ISI handed the jihadis a ‘severance pay’ to ask them to quit jihad because its heat was too much to bear for Islamabad. When it arrested their leaders, it usually let them go after some time. There is reference to Fazlur Rehman Khaleel of Harkatul Mujahideen who has been the subject of an extremely special treatment by the ISI during times when other jihadi leaders were on the run. Khaleel was the logistics man of Osama bin Laden and had co-signed the 1998 fatwa of death against the Americans with Osama bin Laden. He was in the camp when the Americans unsuccessfully targeted Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan after the Al Qaeda bombing of USS Cole. The recent confession of Hamid Hayat in the United States - that he took terrorist training in one of Khaleel’s camps in 2003 - has further exposed Khaleel and called in question Musharraf’s declared policy against the jihadis.

Haqqani’s chapter on Musharraf is the mainstay of his book. He quotes him in 2004 to prove that Musharraf ‘sacrificed Afghanistan’ to retain hold over Pakistan’s nuclear weapons capability and the claim to Kashmir. This means that a major political obstacle complicating the role of the political parties in Pakistan has been eliminated. The prime ministers will no longer have to genuflect to the militias and their leaders because they were fighting the army’s proxy war in Afghanistan. But how could the retention of the Kashmir policy, and thus the India policy, remove the steel-ball of military domination from the ankle of Pakistan’s democracy? Wouldn’t the militias and their dreaded leaders make a comeback as a part of the ‘Kashmir option’? Musharraf says he knows what is possible to do in Pakistan and what must be postponed till the odds become less adverse (not quoted by Haqqani); but this period of ambivalence is costing him his credibility, in India as well as, more importantly, in the United States.

Ideology is the sticking point: What about the mosque-and-military thesis? Is Musharraf really personally committed to loosen the clerical noose the military has tightened around the neck of Pakistan? Not if he retains his old India policy and the proxy war option that Pakistan army has taken so well to heart. Haqqani notes that General Javed Hassan of the Kargil Operation fame - whose book personified the Indian state as ‘presumptuous, persistent and devious Hindu’ – was till late his close partner in power. (He now heads Lahore’s Administrative Staff College after a stint earlier as head of the National Defence College in Islamabad.) More ironically, even though his feud with the ‘pro-Afghan jihad’ religious parties appears to be no put-on show, he has to live down the fact that in the ‘pre-rigged’ election of 2002, the MMA got 20 percent of the seats in the National Assembly. In the PML ruling party today there are holdovers from the old ISI-moulded political order who openly contradict Musharraf’s pronouncements on enlightenment and moderation and will not allow reforms in madrassas and the national syllabus.

What came first, the army-sponsored India policy or army-sponsored Islamic extremism? Haqqani ends the book with a well-argued concluding chapter proving that it was the India-centrism of Pakistan that finally brought it to Islamic extremism. The myth of India not accepting Pakistan and India attacking Pakistan was perpetuated beyond the actual contours of early threat and continue to be mouthed even after the acquisition of nuclear deterrence by Pakistan. Is it a kind of an ‘anticipatory’ argument to conceal the Pakistan army’s intent on attacking India? And Pakistan ideology? It is the army’s answer to its fear that some communities within Pakistan might not show the same level of commitment to the India policy decided by the army. Haqqani says normalisation of relations with India is the only available solvent to what the military has done to Pakistan. But has Musharraf shown evidence of changing the ideological orientation that stands in the way of this normalisation. Haqqani doesn’t think so.

Part three of the three-part review article on Husain Haqqani’s book ‘Pakistan: between Mosque and Military’.