Shahid Ali
In January this year, former Army Chief Gen (Retd) Raheel Sharif was seen rubbing shoulders with CEOs of multinationals and entrepreneurs in the world’s most elite corporate gathering – Davos World Economic Forum. Invited to speak on ‘terrorism in a digital age’, Sharif’s qualification to have a seat on the panel was his success in leading a counterinsurgency campaign against terrorists in Pakistan that brought peace and spurred economic development. Surprising for many, but when all else has failed in Libya, Syria, Iraq, Yemen and Afghanistan- perhaps it was time to turn to Pakistan and ask, how?
Move 8000 km west across the Atlantic and you arrive at not just another country but a place where at least some political analysts are on another planet. Less than half a dozen South Asia watchers in Washington DC are booting to get Pakistan declared as ‘state sponsor of terrorism’. This disconnect between Davos and Washington is in light years. Both cannot be right at the same time. Is Pakistan succeeding against terrorism while concurrently promoting it?
A recently released report by the Hudson Institute in Washington lays such a policy groundwork for declaring Pakistan as the leading abettor of terrorism in the region. The report, an elaborate charge sheet against Pakistan, reads like a piece of fiction as it jumps from one sweeping judgment to the next. It claims, for example, that OBL’s son is active in Pakistan. The authors didn’t feel the need to reference the source for this dazzling discovery. If it was an intel background briefing then were they allowed to publicize it through this report? In a master stroke of scholarship, only known to authors, the whole report is devoid of any references for whatever it claims. Certainly, there can be no historical reference for recreating the entire 2011 Salala incident, as the report does, or for presenting GLOCs as an American gift to ungrateful Pakistani trucking companies. The report presumption that the Pakistanis are pathologically obsessed and paranoid about India is enough basis for suggesting a hands off US approach on Kashmir. One has to be delusional to even remotely take this seriously. The authors could be forgiven for a one sided view of history, but could they be pardoned for not reading newspapers. On the top of it, in a 16 page report, the authors could not find a single character space for mentioning thousands of Pakistanis killed by terrorists during the period of Pakistani behavior under their review. A sixth grader, relying on open sources including ‘The Onion’, would have produced a better weekend assignment. Hudson’s report is a classic case of what may be called as the “Alternate-Analysis” built on layers of presumptions and by treating every jackal in Afghanistan as a high value HUMINT.
But are the authors, who have built careers in South Asia expertise, really that dumb? Despite claims of independence, it would still be acceptable for a US Think Tanks to act as proxy of the its government in the name of national interest, but as they say for Washington’s politics, “It’s worse than it looks”. A New York Times Report in September 2016 illustrated how DC Think Tanks could be acting as proxies of foreign governments. A comparison of the language used to describe Hudson’s ‘India Globalization Initiative’ and ‘Pakistan Initiative’ at its website lays bare the fact as to which side of Hudson’s bread, is buttered.
No wonder that the shining stars in constellation of signatories to the Hudson report have been competing in bashing Pakistan for years. For example, meet Bruce Riedel! The leader of Obama’s interagency task force created in early 2009 for policy review on Afghanistan. Riedel’s report laid down the foundation of the famous AfPak strategy that recommended a well-resourced counter interagency campaign in Afghanistan. Riedel’s report, which the Bob Woodward’s book Obama’s Wars, mentions as a ‘copy-paste’ exercise presumably in about ‘two days’, rolled the ball that eventually lead to the two prongs of US troops surge in Afghanistan and the US policy of treating Pakistan with perennial suspicion. A year later, Riedel boasted in the Daily Beast, “We are no longer close to the precipice of defeat and strategic disaster as we were when the president inherited the war in January 2009”. But Excuse Us! That is exactly where we are at the end of Obama’s second term with thousands of lives lost and billions spent. If the Congress, US Afghan veterans and Afghans themselves want to ‘why’ and ‘who’, then please Google image ‘Bruce Riedel’. Still, Riedel’s co-author of the Hudson report Ms. Christine Fair beats him in many respects.
If ever, there was a niche category of ‘curse-analysis’, Christine Fair could claim it. An Associate Professor in Georgetown University, Christine Fair is possibly that largest repository on Punjabi expletives in the world. If you don’t know her then imagine Hassan Nisar on steroids. Her social media posts merit introducing parental controls on the Twitter. Her tweets smack of suspicions that every able bodied man with Punjabi books in an ISI goon launched on some carnal mission against her. But let’s get serious here! Christine Fair’s proclivity for mocking everything Pakistan is no secret in expert community. She has claimed all be herself to be in contact with Baloch militant groups that gladly own killing civilians and whose human rights violations find place in State Department annual country reports. In a Facebook post in August, 2015, Christine Fair called for burning down Pakistani Embassy including its staff in Kabul. Why the Georgetown University employs “experts” of such gory credential is a secret best known to the University alone. And yet, the most puzzling of the authors of this report is not Christine Fair.
Leading the charge of the light brigade against his own country is our former Ambassador Hussain Haqqani. From taking credit of getting F-16s for Pakistan under his watch in 2010 to arguing against sale of F-16s, in the Congress in 2016, – Haqqani is a epitome of intellectual summersaults. The PPP’s pick for Ambassador in Washington had once ridiculed late PM Benazir Bhutto in an interview to Shekhar Gupta by calling her “a non-native leader creating enthusiasm for things like Pierre Cardin and ignoring bread and butter issues”. In the Hudson’s recent report, Haqqani’s arguments for curtailing US assistance to Pakistan are a U turn from his complaints, as reported by the Reuters in 2011, that US was spending much more on Afghanistan than on Pakistan. For those, too perturbed by this report, take this – by ‘proper inducements’ he might, one day, be selling Pakistan as the Holy Grail in Washington! But until then the budding Bhutto’s may have added him to their “Never Again” checklist.
“The world is a mess”, as President Trump has often tweeted. It is partly a mess because the mammoth of US military and diplomatic power was put in the hands of google advisors with an agenda. Not much is knows about Trump’s South Asia Policy. But the choice of advisors will determine the results. Until such advisors thrive in Washington, it will be not just from within the US, but from the wastelands of North Africa and Middle East that the chorus may pick momentum-Drain this Swamp.
