The Threesome Tango: US, Taliban and Pakistan

Tango is a South American dance form where two dancers dance quite in an embrace.

However, a new type of tango has evolved in the Af-Pak region with three dancers in a deadly embrace, the Americans, the Pakistanis and the Taliban.

Now, the Taliban are not monolithic and are composed of at least two groups, the Afghan and the Pakistani Taliban. The latter, known as Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan or TTP, have two sub-groups, the 'good' and the 'bad' Taliban. The 'good' and 'bad' divisions are convenient creations of Pakistani Establishment to pursue their enduring concept of 'strategic depth'. See this for details. Since the Laal Masjid episode, almost all the Deobandi terrorist tanzeems in Pakistan have identified themselves with the 'bad Taliban', thereby making it the most powerful component of TTP. The 'bad Taliban' could have easily taken on the 'good Taliban' but tribal equations, and sane counsel probably prevailed upon them from starting a war of attrition that could not have helped the larger cause of AQAM.

Even assuming that there exists 'good' and 'bad' Taliban with different objectives and worldviews, the former fighting a jihad to regain their land from foreign occupation forces and the latter an evil force to perpetuate Al Qaeda's ideologies in Pakistan, we need to investigate the latest developments in the last few weeks.

Developments are taking place on two fronts, the Afghan Taliban front and the Pakistani Taliban front. The US, Pakistan and the Taliban are involved in both the fronts. While the US is the prime mover in the US-Afghan Taliban-Pakistan tango, it is Pakistan whih is the prime mover in the Pakistan-Pakistani Taliban-US tango.

Just, what are the objectives of these three players ?

The US wants to have an honourable exit from Af-Pak without much blood loss to retreating troops as the pullout of men and material begins. The US would also like to retain some presence in Afhanistan to oversee transition from the incumbent Karzai government to whatever new power-sharing agreement is arrived at for the post-2014 scenario. The US would like to ensure, for some time to come at least, that the new dispensation that comes to power in Kabul does not become a threat to US and Western interests. A base in Afghanistan would also help geostrategically in a region where American interests are huge such as in nearby Pakisran, Iran or Central Asian Republics (CAR) or even Russia.

For the Pakistanis, the requirement is simple: a pro-Pakistan government in Kabul that would allow Pakistan to re-establish its concept of strategic-depth and remove Indian influence which had alarmingly resurfaced in the last six years in Afghanistan. Other objectives such as bottling-up Pashtun nationalism that could pose a threat to its Durand Line border with Afghanistan come next and way below in terms of immediate priority.

The Taliban also want to regain control of Afghanistan but on their own terms. They want to be seen as victorious in the end of a decade-long battle without surrendering their ideological beliefs. They want the Americans and the Western forces to be seen as vanquished in Afghanistan, and would want to reinforce their usual claim of Afghanistan being country which has the reputation of being a place where no foreign invader has been able to rule the natives, They would therefore like to see no foreign troop on their soil post the American withdrawal in c. 2014. More than anything else, they would like to trumpet two things: the only remaining superpower has been defeated through jihad and that Islam (of Osama's variety)  has won.

Let us therefore interpret the recent developments with the above paradigm in mind.

The US exit strategy in Afghanistan  has a striking similarity to what happened in Vietnam way back in 1969, not only in the fact that the talks were held in Paris then as it is happening now also, but also in the format, content, strategy and situation as well. In Vietnam too, while the US was leading the fight, several SEATO member countries had sent in troops as well. Of course, Pakistan had not. Situationally, the US was not doing well in Vietnam when Richard Nixon came to power in c. 1968 and there were wide protests within the US to withdraw from there. The US decided to train and equip the South Vietnamese troops, a programme that lasted three years doomed only to fail in the end, as in the Afghan case. The US also attacked communist sanctuaries in neighbouring Cambodia.  Secret and open peace talks ensued. The North Vietnamese were particularly tough negotiators and after nearly three years of negotiations, the two sticky points were the likely leader of the provisional government of South Vietnam and the withdrawal of the Vietcong from the South. In the meantime, the US administration was  developing the détente with China and the USSR. This development which made the North Vietnam leadership literally see red (pun intended) along with  a massive punishing air campaign of two weeks made the North agree in the end. The US also needed to engage in other foreign policy initiatives like detente which was expected to reduce not only military risks but also help bring huge economic benefits to the US and so did not want to be drained anymore by the Vietnam situation. The US was engaged with the USSR in the SALT-I treaty negotiations and wanted it to succeed. In c. 1971, the US also engaged with the Chinese through dramatic secret talks, helped by Pakistan, to normalize relationship. Ultimately, the US left Vietnam leaving South Vietnam to decide its own fate. The South and the North fought between themselves for another three years before South Vietnam collapsed and the victorious North Vietnam captured Saigon.

In Afghanistan too, a weary US (and its allies) want(s) to go back home, though there are no massive protests per se within the US, unlike in the 1960s. The US has not been doing well within Afghanistan itself though the drone strikes have been successful in FATA of Pakistan. The US has been having secret and open talks with the Taliban who, like the North Vietnamese negotiators, have not been yielding ground. It is not possible for the US to send B52 bombers and bludgeon the Taliban into submission and the drones are the effective alternates. Already, we see a big rise in the number of drone strikes in the first week of the new year. An important leader of TTP who used to send his troops to Afghanistan to fight the NATO/ISAF, Maulvi Nazeer, has just last week been taken out by these drones in South Waziristan. Many members of another commander, Gul Bahadur, have been similarly killed in North Waziristan a couple of days back. Like developing the détente with USSR and China, the twin supporters of the Vietcong, the current US administration is trying to replicate the same with the Pakistanis who created and now support the Taliban and without whose support, the Taliban would be easily decimated. The US Administration wants to re-focus its foreign policy relations to the developing situation in the East China Sea, South China Sea and the Indian Ocean areas. The Obama administration has therefore decided to ‘pivot’ itself more closely in the evolving situation in Asia-Pacific and a useless unwinnable Afghan situation is unproductive and a massive drain. It has therefore been training the ANA, the Afghan National Army, (along with friends like India) in the hope that they would be able to take over when the US left. It may be that the Americans know what fate awaits the ANA after they leave but they have to maintain a pretext of training them to shoulder responsibilities. Again, like in Vietnam, the guerrilla forces of the Taliban would overcome the ANA easily and take over Kabul and Kandahar, the two centres of power (political and religious respectively) in Afghanistan.

For Pakistan, nothing is more important than seeing the back of the Americans and seeing the re-installation of the Kandahari Taliban in power in Kabul. They would like a smooth transition without the debilitating internecine war that accompanied the transition of power in c. 1989. At times, in the early years of the 1990s, Pakistan came close to losing Afghanistan as some of its plans came a cropper, until the Taliban force was created which had no participation of the powerful but warring mujahideen leaders, Pakistan cannot afford to go through a similar exercise yet another time, what with its own precarious internal conditions. It must have also received strong advice from China, its all-weather friend, that instability must be avoided at all costs since such a situation would lead to civil war for many years. Apart from Pakistan, and to some extent China, no other player in the region is interested in seeing a re-emergence of the Taliban. Afghanistan's neighbours such as Iran or CAR (Central Asian Republics) are against Talibani control of Afghanistan. Other regional players such as India and Russia are equally disinclined towards such a development. It is only the US (some of its allies like the UK) and Pakistan who, for different reasons, prefer the Taliban.

The Pakistani Army cultivated the 'good Taliban', had 'peace deals' with them which were followed scrupulously. This helped the Pakistani Army a relief of pressure to that extent. But, times are changing now. The small component of 'good Taliban' has clearly outlived its utility though they might be close to Mullah Omar. It will be the larger 'bad Taliban' that alone can ensure peace both internally and in FATA and beyond. So long as division existed within TTP, the Pakistani efforts may be derailed and there may be a constant threat to itself. This is what Gen. Kayani meant recently which was wrongly interpreted in India as recognition at last by the Pakistani Army that threats to its existence came from within and not without. Pakistan now wants to effectively turn this 'threat within' to tackle the 'threat without'. The TTP has also been speaking the Pakistan Army's language of avenging the 1971 defeat. At the same time of offering an olive branch to the Pakistani Establishment, the TTP is also showing its ruthless face by assassinating the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Minister, Bashir Ahmed Bilour followed a few days later by the cold blooded murder of the 22 captured Levies soldiers who happened to be Shi'a. The latest Quetta massacre of the Hazara Shi'as is also by the same group. All these incidents sent multiple messages - that TTP would not go soft on its targets just because talks are initiated, that it will keep the pressure on the Establishment, and that TTP is sectarian with a very narrow extremist Sunni agenda that sees Shi'a as murtad,

The Pakistan Army has been unable to take on the TTP and their associates in the last eight years since they launched the operation against them. They have conceded ground to them and the writ of the state has shrunk in large areas of Pakistan where the Taliban have successfully established their rule. Places like FATA, Swat, Peshawar, Quetta, Southern Punjab, parts of Karachi etc come to mind immediately. They have successfully carried out violent attacks against the armed forces including at locations where nuclear weapons are stored, at the General Head Quarters (GHQ), airforce, navy and army bases with little counter attack by the Pakistani armed forces. The Taliban are beginning to considerably establish their sway in Karachi. At a political level, they have the overt support of all Islamist political parties and parties like Imran Khan's Pakistan-Tehrik-e-Insaf (PTI) which completely sympathizes with their demands and actions. A nationalist party like the Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa based Awami National Party (ANP) has been literally bludgeoned into submission especially after the recent killing of Bilour. At a societal level, large scale conversions to Deobandism are taking place or are being attempted all over Pakistan. People who profess the Deobandi interpretation of Islam will provide overt and covert support to the TTP. At an international level, the peace talks between the US and Afghan Taliban have raised the question as to why Pakistan cannot have a similar dialogue with the TTP who after all are all Pakistanis. The US President has, during the joint press conference with the Afghan President Hamid Karzai yesterday (Jan 11, 2013) said options other than military hold the key for peace in Af-Pak.

The Pakistani Army, the main component of the Establishment, is therefore forced to adjust itself to the emerging situation. At the same time, it realizes that increased trade and contacts between the people of India and Pakistan, which Pakistan grudgingly allowed under pressure from the US, might, in the long run, undermine its strategic objective, that of comprehensively defeating India and destroying it if possible. Even if it may not be able to defeat India, it would be happy to see anarchy, violence and terrorism in India in the same scale as it exists in Pakistan.

Pakistan operates on cues. The green signal given by the US to play a prominent role in Afghanistan once again, the US green signal for pursuing options other than military in dealing with terrorists in Pakistan, the arrival of John Kerry as Foreign Secretary in the US, the politically-besieged, clueless and impotent Indian ruling coterie, the imminent withdrawal of the US from Af-Pak, the start of flow of funds and armaments once again from the US and above all the likely re-installation of the Taliban in power in Kabul and Kandahar will all embolden Pakistan to start another misadventure with India. The prelude to that has started along the Line of Control (LoC) already.

Why does Pakistan behave like this ? Part - II

So, there were two streams of thought within the demoralized Muslim community of the Indian subcontinent in the late nineteenth century {See the earlier part here}. One was to wage a jihad against the infidel colonial ruler to retrieve the lost power and pelf of the Mughal Empire, and hence that of Islam by implication. This stream was represented by the likes of Ahmed Berelvi and Jamaluddin Afghani though the latter was not an Indian. The other stream was more realistic. This group realized that the reforms in governance being introduced by the British in India in early twentieth century had to be shaped in such a way that the majority Hindu community did not end up with all the powers in their hand. This group was represented by Sir Syed Ahmed Khan of Aligarh. The latter therefore decided to adopt a cooperative approach with the British to achieve their goal. In the final analysis, it was the latter group that succeeded in creating Pakistan but the former sowed the seed for all the present day problems of terrorism, extremism and fundamentalism in Pakistan. The success of the latter group meant that they were indebted to the British and later the Americans as the British handed over their hegemony to the Americans. The approval by these two western powers to Pakistan to use jihadi extremism against India (in c. 1947) and Afghanistan (in c. 1979) has resulted in the terrible situation that India, Afghanistan and other countries face today from Pakistan.

The Indian muslims were greatly perturbed by the turn of events in the nineteenth century when the regional Mughal empire finally ceased to exist and by the early twentieth century when the global Ottoman Caliphate itself was also dissolved formally. The ruthless manner in which the War of Independence in c. 1857 was put down by the British, the shabby manner in which the last Mughal Emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, was treated leading to his deportation to Burma (now Myanmar) where he died four years later (c. 1862), and the cruel manner in which his sons and grandson were killed had created revulsion in the minds of Indian Muslims. The dissolution of the Caliphate rendered them further insecure and helpless while raging with impotence. The decline of the Muslim power appeared absolute to them. These two seminal events were the results of centuries of decline for several reasons.

In India, it was Emperor Aurangzeb's (d. 1706) fundamentalist rule of extreme cruelty inflicted on the minorities, especially the Hindus and the Sikhs, that laid the foundation for the decline of the Mughal Empire. Distant Chennai was not under Muslim rule but the equally distant Bengal was, and the incursion of the Christian British East India Company (BEIC) there resulting in the defeat of Nawab Siraj-ud-Dowla in Plassey in c. 1757 started to fray the Empire at the edges. In Europe, the inability of the Ottoman janisarries (the armed forces) to breach the Habsburgs and the Tsars set the ball rolling for their eclipse in the late seventeenth century itself. In the next century, the Habsburgs and the Tsars expanded their empires threatening the Ottoman. Added to this was the foray into Egypt by the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte in the late eighteenth century followed later by the occupation of Algeria. The Caliphate too was fraying at the edges. The janissaries and the ulema combined to depose the Caliph and his bureaucrats in early nineteenth century. These are the same class of players who have usurped and re-usurped power in Pakistan in the last six decades. It is the combination of the military, ulema and the bureaucrats (the evil alliance, euphemistically referred to as the 'Establishment' in Pakistan) who ruled the Ottoman as they have succeeded to do so in Pakistan.

For a Pakistan, which has been fascinated by Turkish history and which yearns to emulate that country and become the leader of the ummah, the coups and palace intrigues might be all déjà vu and even considered as steps to achieving the Caliphate. Since ijtihad {creative interpretation of the Koran and the Sunnah in light of modern thoughts and events} has been closed by the tenth century after the codification of the Koran into the four schools of thought, no modern interpretation is possible and current events have to be somehow fitted into the unalterable framework. Again, the Islamist scholars of the Ottoman Caliphate decided that their decline was not because of any superiority of the Europeans but rather due to Muslims deviating from the strict Islamic code prescribed by the Koran, the Hadith and the Sunnah. This is the same argument that we have heard in Pakistan too every time a tragedy strikes that country or that country blunders itself into yet another disaster. The call from Turkey for the ummah to unite resonated strongly among the Indian muslims too. After the loss of the Mughal empire, the Indian Muslims appealed to the Caliph to be their protector, an impossible task by the Caliph who was himself rapidly sinking.

The Indian Islamic scene during these turbulent and trying moments was dominated by a few personalities such as Ahmed Berelvi, Jamaluddin Afghani (d. 1897), Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, and curiously a Hindu kafir Mahatma Gandhi. Surprisingly, Jinnah, the founder of Islamic Pakistan was not in the picture. He was to gain prominence only in the 1930s.

Ahmed Berelvi (d. 1831) was a disciple of the son of Shah Waliullah Dehelvi (1702 - 1762) who helped the Afghan king Ahmed Shah (also known as Ahmed Shah Durrani or Ahmed Shah Abdali) to overcome the Mahrattas in the Panipat war in 1761. Berelvi introduced militancy into Indian Islam for fighting the Hindus, Sikhs and the British. He created Tariq-e-Muhammadiyah (or, The Way of Muhammad) that combined sufism and orthodox Islam. Sayyid declared jihad against the Sikh rulers and wanted to establish an Islamic state in the Indo-Afghan border where he emigrated to with his followers in circa 1826, a la hijra of Prophet Muhammad. The local Yusufzai tribes rebelled against him for his attempts to enforce rules contradictory to their traditional Pashtunwali code. Maharajah Ranjit Singh, the Sikh Maharajah of the Punjab who had annexed Afghan territories and also Jammu & Kashmir, exploited the situation and his army ambushed the forces of Berelvi near Balakot and killed his followers along with the grandson of Shah Waliullah, Sayyed Ismail. Berelvi was defeated and then executed by the Sikhs in circa 1831. There is evidence that the British, in order to protect their geopolitical interests, actually helped Berelvi to fight the Sikhs, especially because the Sikh rulers had turned to the French. Balakot is today a hallowed spiritual ground for Berelvis of Pakistan. Most Pakistanis are Berelvis and it therefore would not be surprising for them to entertain similar thoughts against infidel India.

Jamaluddin Afghani influenced people in Turkey, Egypt, Iran, Afghanistan and India with his clarion call for resisting the colonial western Christian powers. He stood for ijtihad, militant Islam and pan-Islamic nationalism while being a die-hard opponent of the Western powers. His anti-British ideas were formulated when he first visited India in the aftermath of the failed 1857 uprising. His call for a revolt against the British in Egypt saw him being expelled to Hyderabad, India and then Calcutta while being constantly surveilled by the British. He was a complete anti-thesis of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan of Aligarh and opposed his policy of British sycophancy vehemently. His prime disciple was Muhammad Abdu whose disciple was Rashid Al Rida. Rashid al Rida's salafi ideas were germane for the creation of Ikhwan al Muslimeen (or, Muslim Brotherhood) movement who have wrought havoc in many countries, especially Egypt. After a long line of autocratic military leaders, the first whiff of democracy has brought the Muslim Brotherhood back into power in Egypt now. Two of the leading lights of Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al Banna and Syed Qutb have influenced Islamist ideologues all over the world, including in Pakistan. The works of Syed Qutb and Mawdudi,as the two most important modern Islamist theologians, have influenced militant Islamists that we find in Pakistan today.

While these Islamists had set forth on one particular stream of thought to restore the glory of Islam in the Indian subcontinent, the other group, the elites of the Ganga-Jamuna belt had other ideas for achieving the same. It was in Delhi and its surroundings as well as the fertile Gangetic plains to its south-east extending upto the borders of Bengal that the Mughal Empire had established authoritatively its rule. The remnants of the defunct Mughal empire, the nawabs and other aristocratic elites, decided to face the emerging problem politically. Before looking at their approach, we need to look at the political scenario in India at the turn of the century. After the 1857 War, the British Empire had taken over the governance of India from the hands of the British East India Company (BEIC). The Raj, as it was known, was running this huge country through a three-tier mechanism of the Viceroy, the Governors at the Provinces and the Collectors at the districts. The Raj introduced electoral reforms in 1880 when municipal councillors were allowed to be elected. The Minto-Morley reforms of 1909 extended it to the Provincial level. Later, the Montagu-Chelmsford reforms (Montford Reforms as they were to be known) extended the electoral process even further up, though the Raj was ruling the country still with an iron grip centrally. These reforms were aimed at more securely ruling the country and securing Indian support for the war efforts rather than introducing natives to modern models of governance as a precursor to the Raj eventually leaving the shores. For example, Morley-Minto Reforms were initiated to address the great tumult following the partitioning of Bengal by Lord Curzon.

Traditionally, the land owners were the pivots through which the Mughal Empire reached out to the common folk in the country side. The land owners, by virtue of possession of land, enjoyed power and also acted as collectors of land revenue for the Empire. This was a practice the British Raj also continued with. As in the Mughal courts, so too in the British bureaucracy, land-owners contributed much to manpower and held important positions. Among the four British-controlled provinces, it was in the Ganga-Jamuna belt that the land ownership by the Muslims was significant and unsurprisingly so due to historical reasons. It was therefore no wonder that insecurity was fanned among the Muslim landowners as the wind of reforms in the electoral process began to blow.

It was in this milieu that, at the turn of the twentieth century, that a group of Muslim elites from this core region of the erstwhile Mughal Empire decided to stake their claims politically even as they foresaw the shape of things to come. Lord Minto, the successor Viceroy to Curzon, declared to the elite group of Mussalman who called upon him on October 1, 1906 at Simla that the Muslims of India “were descendants of a conquering and ruling race” forgetting conveniently that but for a minuscule descendants of Turks, Persians, Pathans or Mughals, the vast majority of the Indian Muslims were converts from the Hindu religion. This description by Lord Minto has resulted, among other things, for an everlasting desire among Pakistanis today to hoist their flag on the Red Fort at New Delhi, the symbol of the Mughal Empire. The 'All India Muhammedan Deputation' that met Lord Minto asked for separate electorates for Muslims and asked for a 'due share' in government jobs. In an analysis published by New York Times on October 26, 1906, the newspaper presciently called this as “an incident in the history of India which may prove of great and lasting importance”. It further said that the Mohammedans consider the majority community “with jealousy, suspicion often with contempt, and with an ineradicable animosity that is held in control only by the British Rule”. Among the delegation that called on Lord Minto in c. 1906 was the founder of the Aligarh Muslim University (AMU), Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, who said “No Mohammedan can say that the English are not ‘people of the Book’ (ahl-e-kitab). No Mohammedan can deny this: that God has said that no people of other religions can be friends of Mohammedans except the Christians. . . . Now God has made them rulers over us. Therefore we should cultivate friendship with them, and should adopt that method by which their rule may remain permanent and firm in India, and may not pass into the hands of the Bengalis. This is our true friendship with our Christian rulers . . . for we do not want to become subjects of the Hindus instead of the subjects of the people of the Book." No wonder then that the AMU at Aligarh has played a significant role in creating Pakistan through subservience to British interests and causing permanent divide between the Hindus and the Muslims.

After the 1857 War of Independence, the British relied on the Punjabis more than ever before as it was the Punjab component of the Army that was used to crush the uprising. As a result, the British Raj adopted different policies for security reasons (and it was for the same reason that Maharaja Ranjit Singh's youngest son, Maharaja Dalip Singh, was forcibly taken away to England) in the Punjab, and land owners began to appear there as the Raj developed extensive irrigation facilities and began to parcel off pieces of land for those who served the Imperial power loyally as well as the retiring service personnel. We continue to see the disproportionate amount of clout enjoyed by landowners in Pakistan even today, a country where land reforms have not been successfully implemented, even struck down by the ulema as un-islamic. Most of the top Pakistani leaders, even when they spoke of socialism, were unabashed feudalists and continue to remain so. Their feudal mindset is apparent in domestic as well as foreign policies. Similarly, the province of Punjab dominates the political, military, economic and terrorist scenes over the other three provinces of today's Pakistan. By the mid nineteenth century, the British began to treat the province of Punjab differently from the rest of the Indian Union for two different security reasons. One was that the Punjab contributed significantly to the British India Army and the other was that the sensitive Punjab province was abutting the restive North Western Frontier Province (NWFP) and Afghanistan. This practice has continued in the current state of Pakistan as well. Another practice that the British introduced in the Punjab was the 'sense of entitlement' among the service personnel for benefits, especially the allocation of land. The well known Pakistani analyst Ms. Ayesha Siddiqa writes in her book, "Military Inc. - Inside Pakistan's Military Economy", the following, "Land entitlement varies from 240 acres for generals to 100 acres from lieutenants to majors to 32 acres for non-commissioned officers (NCOs)." Punjab was also the region where the British introduced separate Muslim electorates for municipalities much before they were introduced three decades later all over India as part of Montford Reforms.

So, where did the kafir Hindu Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi fit in this Islamic fervour ? Gandhi was the rising star within the Indian National Congress (INC) at that time and he seized the opportunity the Khilafat movement presented to catapult himself into the national scene. Whether it was done with a design or out of genuine concern for the perceived plight of Muslims of India at that time or as a convenient tool to pressurize the beleagured British with, is debatable. By the turn of the first decade of the twentieth century, there emerged from the Aligarh Mahommedan Anglo Oriental College, an institution founded by the Muslim elites especially Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, two brothers, Mohammed and Shaukat Ali who militantly advanced the cause of the rapidly dismantling Ottoman Caliphate. They were imprisoned in c. 1915 by the British government and their cause was taken up by Mohandas Gandhi in a big way. Thus, a pan-Islamist frenzy was whipped up across the country by a kafir ! The August 1918 Congress Session at Bombay found the Montford Constitutional reforms shallow and asked the British to adopt the Lucknow Pact as the basis for reforms. This was the time that there was widespread terrorism against British interests and symbols of power all over India. The British introduced the Rowlatt Act (also known as Black Act) in 1919 and Gandhi emerged on the scene with his new weapon of hartal against these acts. There was also the Jallianwallabagh Massacre at this time. The Khilafat Day was observed on March 19, 1920. The terms under which peace was offered to the Ottomans on May 14, 1920 angered the Muslims and Gandhiji decided that his movement of non-cooperation, that he was planning for sometime then, should be launched immediately. He returned the Kaiser-e-Hind Gold medal, the Zulu war Medal and the Boer War Medal bestowed upon him by the British for the ‘unscrupulous, immoral and unjust manner’ in which the Imperial Government had acted in the Khilafat matter. When Gandhi's non-violence did not result in the release of the Ali brothers, the Khilaftists lost faith in his approach and the ulema hijacked the movement.

Ironically, Jinnah, who was opposed to Khilafat, said that the Hindu leaders did not realize that the pan-Islamic Khilafat movement would dilute the nationalism of the Indian Muslims. Jinnah’s fears came true when in August 1921, the Moplah rebellion took place in Malabar, Kerala when innocent Hindus were massacred, raped and forcibly converted to Islam. It was widely believed that the speeches of Mohammed Ali (the younger of the Ali Brothers who were dramatically released by the British after being charged with sedition) in the South, and the prevailing atmosphere of non-cooperation movement helped their fanatical cause. Earlier the new Viceroy Reading had accused the Ali brothers of extra-territorial loyalty and encouragement to violence through their speeches at the All India Khilafat Conference at Karachi in August 1921. Reading asked Gandhiji to make the Ali brothers apologize, which he did. The Ali brothers soon fell foul of Gandhiji (and Shaukat Ali, the elder brother, called Gandhiji’s attempt at Swaraj as Hinduraj. He urged the Muslims to boycott the Dandi Salt March in circa 1929). Thus, Gandhi's association with the Khilafat movement resulted in unifying Muslims for a pan-Islamist cause and also sowed suspicions that an emerging India would be to the disadvantage of the Muslims.

The two approaches, that I noted at the beginning of this post, while differing significantly in the means adopted to achieve their common goal, had some significant overlaps too. While the goal was one of re-establishing the pre-eminence of Islam in the Indian subcontinent and restore the Muslims as rulers, it was these overlaps that led to an identity crisis that has befuddled generation after generation of Pakistanis. The overlap and hence the confusion came in several forms.

Abu Ala al Mawdudi acted as the bridge between the two streams, one of boundaryless Caliphate and the other of bounded nationalist movement of Pakistan. The pure Islamists only looked at Islam and the nationalists looked only at politics (though they used Isalm and its symbols for this end) while it was Mawdudi who married Islam and politics in the context of the Muslim narrative in the Indian subcontinent, through his Jama'at-e-Islami (JI). Mawdudi was educated in Deobandi madrasseh and hailed from a family which served, with pride, the Mughal court and after its decline, the Nizam of Hyderabad. The decline of Islamic power and more importantly, the imminent rise of the Hindu power perturbed him a great deal, just as it did the Aligarh group. The most common approach of all Islamists, whenever they perceive any threat to Muslim power, has been to call for the Believers to protect Islam which was imminently in danger. They thus equate Muslim power with Islam or in other words meaning that unless Muslims were in power Islam would be in danger in that nation-state. The solution adopted by the Islamists therefore was to always dig deeper into Islam and make the Muslim populace more fundamentalist by dinning into their ears that it was their waywardness and deviation that led them to the sorry state in the first place and they should therefore return to a purer version of Islam. Thus, the more the troubles or perceived troubles, the narrower the interpretation of Islam that was prescribed as the solution. This was magically supposed to cure all the ills and restore the slipping glory. Mawdudi was no exception either. However, he differed from the two streams in that he did not want to abdicate India and create a new nation, but, he rather wanted to stay put in India and face the Hindu majoritarianism and convert the whole of India to Islam. He derived inspiration from the way Prophet Mohammed was able to not only protect his small group of followers from the much larger Pagan, but also eventually convert the latter successfully. Thus, he was initially opposed to the Muslim League which by c. 1940 had almost proposed a separate nation. Later, when he was won over to Pakistan, Mawdudi added to the prevalent confusion in Pakistan by suggesting a 'theocratically democratic Caliphate'. It was this form of governance that Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif decided to implement in his second term (and crown himself as Amir-ul-Momineen or Leader of the Faithful) before his rule was cut short by a more ambitious army General.

Mawdudi had to face challenges in defining the particular strain of Islam he wanted Pakistan to be engulfed with. One of them was Gen. (later Field Marshal) Ayub Khan. Many Pakistani leaders had this propensity to see themselves as Ataturk of Pakistan. Jinnah himself was a great admirer of Ataturk and so was Ayub Khan. Jinnah, a non-practitioner of Islamic rites and rituals, nevertheless used Islamic and Islamist symbolism extensively both just prior to and after the creation of Pakistan. Except for that one speech of August 11, 1947 where he vaguely referred to secularism, he was not known to have done anything at all in that direction. Gen. Ayub Khan disliked the mullahs and even removed the term 'Islamic' from the name of the nation state simply referring to it as 'Republic of Pakistan'. Of course, all this lasted only a while and soon he turned to Mawdudi for support. Thus a Mawdudi, who had been condemned to death once in Pakistan, was restored to full glory to propagate his poisonous ideas. Similar to Gen. Ayub's was the approach of Gen. Musharraf, another great admirer of Ataturk. He cobbled up the most virulent Sunni Deobandi Islamist political group, the MMA (Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal) that was allowed a free run in the volatile NWFP (North Western Frontier Province, now Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa) during the crucial period of 2002-2008 that enabled the Taliban to entrench themselves there escaping from Afghanistan and demand shariah and almost marching into Islamabad by c. 2008. Thus, this fatal and alternate attraction to nationalism (as exemplified by Ataturk) and jihadi Islamism has been a source of another confusion to Pakistan. This led to great churning within Pakistan and even a determination of 'Who was indeed a Muslim', a question that two Supreme Court judges of Pakistan set forth to answer in c. 1953 after the first anti-Ahmedi riots, but which remains unanswered to this day.

This confusion has not escaped the armed forces also. As the Pakistani Army is the most visible of the three branches of the armed forces, we will see how this confusion affected the PA. Until c. 1971, the PA deceived the nation by claiming manufactured victories in wars and skirmishes with India. But, the 1971 defeat was too massive to be brushed under the carpet. The PA needed a reason that could be believed and swallowed by the masses so that it could escape the ignominy. The masses, who had hitherto had been fed on a diet of cowardly Hindu India which needed 10 soldiers to match even one Pakistani soldier, or how Islam would defeat Hinduism etc. found it hard to digest the massive defeat inflicted on an Islamic nation by a kafir army and that too within a fortnight. They were also looking forward to a credible excuse to salvage the pride. While several reasons were trotted out such as Hindu bania conspiracy, traitorous behaviour of cowardly, short, dark and rice-eating Bengalis, or even the refusal of the US to come to Pakistan's help under various treaties, the nation was convinced by the ulema that Pakistan had been punished for deviating from Islam. The reprieved PA's motto was thus changed from “Unity, Faith and Discipline(Ittehad, Yaqeen aur Tanzeem as coined by Jinnah)” to Iman-Taqwa-Jihad fi sabilillah (Faith, Fear of Allah, Jihad in the way of Allah as coined by Gen. Zia-ul-Haq). The PA was tasked additionally with 'defending the ideological border' and every Prime Minister and President since then has taken pains to reiterate this aspect to both the PA and the Nation. The PA took on board the jihadi terrorists as their 'first line of defence' and also as a tool to 'inflict a thousand cuts to bleed India to death', though the PA had used Islamists in earlier wars as well as in the genocide in East Pakistan. The idea of 'strategic depth' through a pliant Afghanistan government was also conceived and later implemented. The use of jihadi terrorism and strategic depth are now institutionalized and are deeply ingrained and immutable within the PA. Since in Pakistan, the PA 'possesses' the nation rather than the other way around, the narrative set by the PA largely becomes the narrative of the nation and therefore, the national identity became enmeshed with jihadi extremism, and hatred for the Hindu India. The nation was already frothing at the mouth corners against the Jews. After 1965, Pakistani political leaders, starting with Z.A.Bhutto, began to ascribe a villainous role to the Americans even while accepting billions of dollars of aid and a third component was added to the hatred list, the Christians.

The Army believes that they are the defenders of the “Ideological Frontiers of Islam” and they are the “Army of Islam” and so anybody fighting the Pakistani Army was indeed fighting Islam itself. An example would help. At the peak of the Taliban insurgency in May 2008, the Commandant of the Mehsud Scouts appealed to the tribal people thus: "This (Pakistan Army) is the army of Islam. This is the army of Pakistan. But there are forces, which want to divide the army and the tribal people. My soldiers recite the Quran everyday and say prayers five times a day. How can they fight for foreign forces? This Islamic army will guard Islam. How can this army go against Islam or join hands with anti-Islamic forces?"

So, today it is the triad of hatred for the Yahud, Hunud and the Nazara that propels Pakistan. Thus, the efforts of Berelvi and Afghani have finally come to fruition. That is why one says that the efforts of jihadi Islamists from before Pakistan's Independence have succeeded though Pakistan itself was created by the remnant elites of the Mughal empire.

One of the most significant confusions has been, if Pakistan was demanded as a separate nation on the basis of a borderless and seamless Islamic religious identity, then the concept of a nation-state militated against that very basis or vice-versa. The founders of Pakistan were unwilling to allow unlimited migratiion of Muslims from dar-ul-harb of India to the newly-established dar-ul-aman of Islamic Pakistan and finally actually stopped migration in c. 1951. In this, they differ significantly from the Jewish state of Israel even as the Pakistanis proudly claim that they were the only other state founded on solely religious identity. Such confusion manifested itself in every sphere of the State's activity, from Constitution-making, to economic planning to day-to-day governance to political activities etc. While Jinnah and his Muslim League were transfixed on bisecting India to get a Muslim majority nation without taking on the Imperial colonial British power, they paid scant attention to details over how such a nation would be managed. Even when they got an opportunity to govern undivided India along with the Congress in c. 1946, they were more interested in thwarting the government's proposals rather than in gaining experience in governing the nation. After the creation of Pakistan, various competing sets of Islam were thrust upon the people by political and military leaders to perpetuate their own hold on them. For example, Jinnah himself yielded space to fundamentalist Deobandi ulema which ultimately led to the passing of the Objectives Resolution under the weaker leader of Liaquat Ali Khan. Thus it was that Quaid-e-Azam Jinnah prepared the ground for fundamentalism by promising all sorts of things to Deobandi clerics, pirs and the ulema in order to create Pakistan; his successor Liaquat Ali Khan caved in meekly to Deobandi extremism; Gen. Ayub Khan tried to introduce a 'modernist Islam' along the lines of Ataturk which was defeated by Mawdudi's Jama'at-e-Islami (JI) party; Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, a feudal to the core, tried to introduce 'Islamic socialism' but without any success; Gen. Zia-ul-Haq enforced a 'literalist Islam' of wahhabi variety quite successfully; Nawaz Sharif was partial to a similar approach and wanted himself to be the 'Amir-ul-Momineen' but was thrown out before he could succeed; and Gen. Musharraf feebly attempted to re-introduce Ataturk's 'modernist Islam' but quickly gave up and allowed the Deobandi and wahhabi clerics to take over the country. It is thus a complete confusion in Pakistan among traditional sufi edition, a modernist enlightened edition, an abbreviated edition of Islamic socialism and a salafi medieval edition of Islam. The fog may be clearing there now with wahhabi, deobandi and salafi versions gaining ascendancy over the Berelvi sufi version.

On Why Lashkar-e-Tayba is so Important for the Pakistani Army

The Islamic Republic of Pakistan is today home to several dozen major terrorist tanzeems. These tanzeems have evolved for several decades now. Many of them appeared on the scene after the 1979-1989 period of jihad in Afghanistan against the Soviet forces. They were created to send mujahideen into the Afghan theatre in the jihad against the Godless communists. A classic case of Dar-ul-Islam (Land of Islam) fighting the kufr (infidels) occupying another Dar-ul-Islam. Some other tanzeems appeared on the scene as sectarian groups to fight the Shi'a and the much detested Ahmedis (Qadianis). Yet another set of terrorist groups had appeared even earlier to fight along with the Pakistani Army (PA) in the genocide of East Pakistan in circa 1971. The very early manifestation of the Pakistani State using terror as an accepted state policy was in c. 1947 when the lashkars of the Sutti, Sudhan, Afridi and Mehsud tribes were used in the invasion and surreptitious grabbing of the Princely State of Jammu & Kashmir.

The civilian governments, including those headed by Prime Ministers such as Ms. Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, extended all forms of support to these terrorist outfits, though they later lamented how Pakistan had slipped into anarchy because of terrorism, whenever they were out of power. All these tanzeems have had extensive support from the Inter Services Intelligence Directorate (ISID), the intelligence wing of the Pakistani armed forces, and the various units of the armed forces themselves. The ISI split them and regrouped the splinters in various permutations and combinations according to the exigencies of the situation. No group was allowed to become too big for its shoes, lest the tail wagged the ISI dog. The more or less effective management of these groups continued until the cataclysmic events of September, 11, 2001. The riot-act that Richard Armitage read out to the ISID Director-General Lt. Gen. Mehmood Ahmed in Washington D.C. and later Gen. Powell to the Pakistani President Gen. Parvez Musharraf, changed the situation for Pakistan overnight. Pakistan was forced to redesign its strategy of support to the Taliban and Al Qaeda. Soon enough, another terror event took place, this time an attack on the Indian Parliament on December 13, 2001. This was preceded by a suicide car-bomb attack on the Jammu & Kashmir Assembly in Srinagar and a dry run on the Red Fort in c. 2000. These events so angered even a usually docile India that it mobilized its troops along the borders with Pakistan by January, 2002. The coercive diplomacy by India led Gen. Musharraf, who was now caught between a rock and a hard place, to make promises to India that Pakistani territory would no longer be used for sponsoring terrorism on India. He banned several organizations including Lashkar-e-Tayba (LeT) in January 2002. That this was another Hudaybaya-like approach is besides the point here. Anyway, the twin reversal of state support to Taliban and Pakistan-based jihadi terrorist groups, angered them.

Gen. Musharraf's strategy was to engage with the adversaries, who were formidable indeed, in a Hudaybaya-like approach. He even mentioned that approach openly in the nationally televised speech. The capitulation by a nuclear Pakistan to the US and more shamefully to Indian threats, so angered the various tanzeems that they now considered the Pakistani armed forces (especially the Pakistani Army, PA) and its Chief, Gen. Musharraf as a munafiq (hypocrite) and an ally of the Great Satan (the term usually used by Pakistani Islamists to refer to the US). He and his Establishment therefore needed to be tackled as vigorously as the Americans, Jews and the Hindus. Either the jihadis could not understand the nuanced approach of Gen. Musharraf, or they did not have faith in him or possibly both, that they decided to confront head-on the Pakistani Establishment. Two more incidents later confirmed their suspicion of Musharraf and his state apparatus and their fury knew no bounds after these.

The first was the March, 2004 incidents at Kaloosha, near Wana in South Waziristan in an operation to reportedly capture Ayman-al-Zawahiri, Tahir Yuldashev and Nek Mohammed. The Wazir and Mehsud tribes regarded the PA operation as a 'stab in their back' and bloodied the PA inflicting very heavy losses on them. The escalating cycle of violence also turned this area completely against the PA. The economic blockade imposed by the PA worsened the situation. Al Qaeda promised the locals to 'turn South Waziristan a Kashmir'. The rest has been history with PA soldiers refusing to fight the AQ and Taliban jihadis, PA platoons surrendering to the TTP (Tehrik-e-Taliban, Pakistan) meekly, or even running away from battlefields. Gen. Musharraf's brave Army sought a series of peace deals with humiliating conditions attached to them. Gen. Musharraf himself was targetted at least thrice, with him escaping barely in each attack. His own officers from the armed forces and the police were involved in these attacks along with the jihadis. Other top officers of the armed forces have been regularly targetted and even killed. Major military installations including the General Head Quarters (GHQ), nuclear weapon-related locations, ordnance factories, military bases, vehicles and personnel, offices of intelligence agencies, and military and police recruitment and training centres have been attacked with impunity.

The 2007 Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) event in the centre of the capital city Islamabad, was another major turning point. The chain of massive suicide bombings that followed the Army commando action at Lal Masjid, some like the Marriott etched in our memory forever perhaps, made the nuclear-armed Pakistan look completely naked and vulnerable. In c. 2008, the Taliban came within 120 Kms of Islamabad before the situation was retrieved. They caused a major diplomatic embarrassment with the Chinese by abducting Chinese nationals into the Masjid.

In the meanwhile, taking advantage of the anarchy, the sectarian outfits have been regularly killing and terrorizing Ahmedis, Christians, Hindus and Sikhs. The federal and provincial governments have been unable to do anything to stop them.

These attacks were by the Punjabi Taliban allied with TTP and Al Qaeda, together referred to as AQAM. The Punjabi Taliban are all Deobandi outfits. They do not include the LeT. Let's see why.

The terrorist tanzeems in Pakistan can be classified as Deobandi, Ahl-e-Hadees (or, Hadith), Berelvi or Shi'a. The most powerful of the Deobandi tanzeems are: Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), Harkat-ul-Jihadi-Islami (HuJI), Jandullah, Brigade 313, Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP) etc. They are all sectarian outfits too with SSP being the shining lodestar of all sectarian terrorist organizations. Among the Ahl-e-Hadees groups, the only important tanzeem is the Lashkar-e-Tayba (LeT).

The origins of LeT, just like any other similar group, are not well defined. It is generally believed that it was launched in 1991 in Kunar province of Afghanistan. The Ahl-e-Hadees {People of the Traditions of the Prophet} do not follow any of the four traditional Islamic schools of thought as they believe that everything is available in the Hadith and anything else is ‘imitation’. They also hate syncretism. They are also identified as Wahhabis, after ibn Abd-al-Wahhab of Saudi Arabia. Though it was announced after the c. 2002 ban on LeT that it had split into Jama'at-ud-Dawah which was involved purely in charitable work, nobody accepts this excuse and we would also treat LeT and JuD as one entity and accordingly use the terms interchangeably here. Prof. Hafeez Saeed heads the JuD and he was the head of LeT earlier. Prof. Hafeez Sayeed was a co-founder, along with Abdullah Azzam, of Maktab-al-Khidmat (Office of Service) in Peshawar in circa 1979 to help the Arab jihadis. After Azzam's assassination on Nov. 24, 1989, the Maktab became Jama'at-ud-Dawah. Prof. Hafeez Sayeed was nominated to be a member of Pakistan's Council of Islamic Ideology (CII) by Gen. Zia-ul-Haq. Gen. Zia-ul-Haq's interest in LeT flowed from his close relationship with the Saudi monarchy, for whom Jama'at-e-Islami (JI) and Makaz-Daw'a-wal-Arshad, the parent organization of LeT, were the closest in ideology of all the Islamist organizations of Pakistan. Thus a very close relationship had existed between the PA and the LeT since its inception.

An American analyst of repute, Ms. Christine Fair had recently suggested that it was the domestic compulsions of the Pakistani state that enables a continued bonding between the PA and the LeT. She attributes ideological differences as underpinning the distinction between the Punjabi Taliban (Deobandi) and the LeT. I argue below that it is inaccurate. She argues that since the Deobandis classify anybody else as 'munafiq' and since the LeT/JuD follow a more inclusivist policy of not antagonising any Muslim by such a classification, the former attack the State while the latter does not. In such a case, it needs to be exlained how the Deobandis have been able to forge a very close relationship with the wahhabi al Qaeda for decades now, a relationship that has only become stronger after c. 2001.

In Pakistan, the Ahl-e-Hadees are an insgnificant minority. For example, less than 10% of the madrasseh belong to the Ahl-e-Hadees. Even then, there are 17 Ahl-e-Hadees groups managing the affairs of this sect of Believers. So, when a new Ahl-e-Hadees group was setup by Prof. Hafeez Sayeed, they did not welcome a new entity into their fold as the space was already overcrowded, especially when the new entity enjoyed the patronage of the ISI and later the PA at the highest levels. This has remained so ever since. As Prof. Hafeez Sayeed entered the Afghan jihad scenario only towards the fag end, there was not much cause for concern among the various groups. He was also limiting himself to helping the newly arriving jihadis from Arab countries. But, when these jihadi groups were let loose on J&K by the ISI after the termination of jihad in Afghanistan in c. 1989, there arose a competition between the Deobandi groups and the lone Ahl-e-Hadees LeT. Because of a chronic shortage of Ahl-e-Hadees manpower in Pakistan, the LeT tried to swell its manpower by converting Berelvis. This has been their tactic ever since. Ahl-e-Hadees men are on constant prowl to catch vulnerable Berelvis. That was how Ajmal Amir Kasab was 'caught' in a Berelvi mosque and brainwashed. Thus, the LeT had to depend upon the ISI/PA for its growth as it was shunned by everybody else, though it was otherwise well funded by KSA and rich Saudi and other Arab individuals. The PA thus managed the core terrorist activities of the LeT such as training, planning and logistics while the LeT handled other aspects such as providing the cover for PA, recruitment, indoctrination etc. The PA today have lost the trust and hence the support of all those who were their blue-eyed boys once upon a time. They are even afraid of tackling them harshly for fear of mutiny within the PA. The recent PNS Mehran attack illustrates this dilemma. The repeated arrests and releases of Qari Saifullah Akhtar is another case in point. Even Maulana Masood Azhar whose Jaish-e-Muhammad (JeM) owes its creation to PA/ISI, is no longer considered a friend. Thus, the PA is left holding only one asset in its hands, namely the LeT. They have therefore been a perfect complement for each other upto this point of time. Islamist jihadi groups have a notorious propensity for internecine quarrel. Therefore, only time can tell how long this partnership between the PA and the LeT will continue even as the situation in Af-Pak region turns darker.