The domestic politics of Pakistan are so rotten that it needs a social movement a la the Arab Awakening (aka the Arab Spring) to completely overhaul the political system.  However, the sad reality is that social movements cannot be created; they spring from seemingly minor events like the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi, the desperate Tunisian fruit seller.  All he wanted was a decent way to earn wages so that he could buy himself a car.  His personal humiliation at the hands of the petty bureaucrats of Tunisia resulted in his decision to burn himself alive.  The flames that burned his body eventually brought down the Taghoots  (dictators) of Tunisia and Libya and the Pharaoh of Egypt.

Manifestations of anger in Pakistan, on the contrary, have many faces of militant Islam.  There are protests supporting the phony “blasphemy” laws, which are essentially anti-Christian in their focus.  No politician or religious leader has the guts to oppose them without fear of being assassinated.  There are frequent bombings of Shiite mosques and religious gatherings, which are expressions of Sunni fanaticism.  There are suicide attacks on the military, which are also essentially Islamist in origin, but are also puzzling in the sense that Pakistan’s Army has had good-to-very-good ties with the Islamist groups.  In fact, if the Army were to adopt a militant posture toward the Islamists – which appears increasingly impossible because its rank and file also have a growing number of staunch supporters of Islamism – then it could score a bloody but decisive victory against those forces.  That would also transform Pakistan into a country of political stability and religious moderation.

As one deciphers the aforementioned statement of Rashid – that the Pakistani Army is now treating the United States as an enemy – it appears that these countries are hell-bent on taking divergent paths for reasons of their own.  From the U.S. side, there remains an overwhelming state of confusion and rising antipathy toward Pakistan for not toeing the American line.  The old adage that Pakistan is heavily influenced by Allah, the Army, and America has the last actor (America) in the process palpably fading, for better or for worse.  As long as the Pakistani Army refuses to play the role of the gendarme of American war-related goals in Afghanistan, the yawning gap of differences may turn into the outbreak of periodic hostilities in the form of skirmishes on the Pak-Afghan borders.

From the Pakistani side, the rising spiral of anti-Americanism is also showing its face in the rising popularity of Pakistan’s Tehreek-e-Insaf  (PTI or justice movement) party, led by former cricket legend Imran Khan.  Unlike the staunchly pro-American Pakistan Peoples’ Party (PPP), the PTI is palpably anti-American.  At a time when – as reported by the Pew Research Center –  73 percent of Pakistanis hold an unfavorable view of the United States, and at a time when only 14 percent of them think it was good that Usama Bin Laden was killed, there is virtually no chance of any meaningful rapprochement between Islamabad and Washington.  Since the Pakistani Army has adopted an overall anti-American approach, it is also likely to develop a nexus with the PTI, especially if it captures 20-30 percent of the legislative seats in the next election.  However, Imran Khan is not likely to become the next president or prime minister of Pakistan, even though his personal popularity is reported by the Pew survey to be around 68 percent among the Pakistanis.

In order for a U.S.-Pak rapprochement to become a reality, the United States has to adopt significant changes in its policies toward Pakistan.  However, there is no constituency for such a development inside the American political arena, regardless of whether or not Obama wins the next presidential election.  If there are no positive overtures from Washington toward Islamabad, no civilian government in Pakistan would dare make a move for the creation of similar overtures.  The PPP is a moribund entity, in terms of its ability to govern in the aftermath of “memogate.”  The Army is convinced that the former Pakistani ambassador to United States, Hussein Haqqani, was merely carrying out the wishes of his boss (President Zardari), when he allegedly prepared that memo.  And the chances of finding the Zardari regime not guilty of that alleged crime in today’s Pakistan are zero.  As Pakistan and the United States continue to drift apart, one has to wonder whether this drift is a permanent one or whether there are likely to be some pleasant surprises in the making whereby the erstwhile partners would succeed in reviving their former ambivalent ties.  The resurgence of even ambivalent relations appears considerably better than the present day’s drift toward escalating antagonism between Islamabad and Washington.

Reviewed

I like watching these former national security officials talk after they leave their respective jobs.  More often than not, they tend to be candid about discussing the most hush-hush aspects of various hot-button issues.  And Jones was quite good about doing just that.

He looked quite baffled when describing his dealings with Pakistan’s top military brass.  His observation was that Pakistan is a country that is hell bent on destroying itself.  He also noted that there is no way General Pervez Kayani and his cohorts in the Pakistani Army did not know about Usama Bin Laden’s (UBL) stay in Abbottabad.  That was the first time I heard anyone inside or outside the U.S. government make that claim.

My sense is that he was saying what the official U.S. national security community really thinks about the knowledge and involvement of Pakistani top military officials about UBL’s long stay in Pakistan.  That might be one reason why the United States is having such a hard time smoothing over its ties with Pakistan.  What seems to frustrate U.S. officials even more is that, not only can they not talk openly about that issue, but the Pakistani Army is being audacious enough to remain angry over what it calls the violation of its territory by the U.S. Special Forces.  For the Obama administration, the real issue is that the Pakistani Army should accept its culpability related to UBL’s stay in Abbottabad.

Jones is also right in stating that Pakistan appears hell-bent on destroying itself.  But, as expected, he did not tell the whole story – he failed to point out that the United States also played a role in that reality.  Of course, I am referring to America’s proxy war in Afghanistan in the 1980s when the resurgence of the Jihad doctrine served its strategic purpose of defeating the Soviet Union.  The United States played no role in the Islamization of Pakistan, it only exploited it.  Pakistan, under General Zia, was almost an ebullient player in that war.  The United States left the region after defeating the Soviet Union, but Pakistan continued its calamitous march down the Islamization road.  An important point here is that that is only part of the story.  The whole story is much too complicated to be covered here; but the most important aspect of it is that it is still developing.  In fact, the International Conference on Afghanistan held in Bonn, Germany, on December 5, 2011, reminded me of a wake-like ceremony being held for Afghanistan.  The war going badly, the Obama administration is determined to redeploy its forces, and no country – including the lone superpower – has the capacity to throw mega-bucks into the black hole called the Karzai administration.  In that sense, Pakistan may have been smart not to attend.

Updated:  15 Dec 11

The memo is an interesting read.  It was written only days after the assassination of Usama Bin Laden.  That event placed the Pakistani government in an extremely bad light, hugely embarrassed the Pakistani Army because it seemed totally unaware of the violation of Pakistani sovereignty by the U.S. Special Forces when they flew in to assassinate UBL, and created lasting tensions between Islamabad and Washington.  If one momentarily ignores the actual contents of the memo, the timing of its writing, the fact that it was written at all for the reading of top American military officials, and that it requested their intervention at the highest levels of the Pakistani government with a view to bringing about major structural changes favored by the United States, speaks volumes about how powerful and acutely contentious the civil-military divide inside Pakistan remains today.

The memo starts out by describing the tensions that prevailed between the Army and the civilian government in Pakistan in the aftermath of the assassination of UBL at the hands of American Special Forces.  It goes on to state that, if the civilian government of Pakistan were to be ousted by the military, that country is likely to become “a sanctuary of UBL’s legacy and potentially the platform for a far more rapid spread of an al-Qaida brand of fanaticism and terror.”  It then accuses the Army and its intelligence directorate of “complicity in the UBL matter,” which, by itself, is an explosive charge.

The memorandum then requests “direct intervention” of U.S. officials demanding from General Kayani, Pakistan’s Army Chief, and General Shuja Pasha, Chief of the ISI, “to end their brinkmanship aimed at bringing down the civilian apparatus….”  Such an intervention, according to the author of the memo, would result in a revamping of the civilian government that would be “favorably viewed by Washington.”

Knowing what a dark image the highly politicized Pakistan Army and the ISI hold inside American governmental circles, the author of the memo promises wholesale changes that would alter the nature of civil-military relations inside that country.  The memo identifies several such changes; however, the one that stands out is its proposed elimination of the “Section S of the ISI charged with maintaining relations with the Taliban, the Haqqani network, etc.”  Admiral Mullen will be long remembered for his accusation that the Haqqani network “acts as a veritable arm” of Pakistan’s ISI.

Hussain Haqqani, the former Pakistani ambassador to the United States, who was accused of writing that memo, has a strong reputation inside Washington of being staunchly pro-American.  Before becoming ambassador, he was affiliated with the high profile think tank, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.  In that capacity, he wrote articles and gave talks that were highly critical of the role of the Army inside his native land.  In fact, he articulated his anti-Army position in his book, Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military.  That reputation places him as a possible suspected author of that highly controversial memorandum.  The question of the hour, however, is whether he would get a fair hearing in the inquiry of this alleged authorship.  Haqqani’s chief weakness has been that, in his public appearances inside the United States, he went out of his way to identify himself as favoring the United States, a behavior that one does not expect in the public posture of most diplomats.  However, that fact alone should not be held against him in the eyes of those heading the inquiry into memogate.  He should be treated as innocent until the brunt of the evidence proves to the contrary.
If he is innocent, then he deserves to be restored to his position with a full apology from his superiors in Pakistan.

The brouhaha surrounding this controversy should not take the focus away from the fact that Pakistan’s civilian government – even though it has been proving itself incompetent and corrupt – remains a hostage to the whims and fancies of the military, which has been acting no better than a bunch of keystone cops in its highly inept way of conducting operations against the rag-tag group of
homegrown Islamists.  The fact that its ambassador was summoned to Islamabad, was given a hearing in a kangaroo court, and then was asked (or told) to resign, speaks volumes about the continued sway of the military.  If the U.S. government has any influence, it should state publicly that democracy should be given a chance to thrive in Pakistan.  That would be a noble goal.  Let the Pakistani populace, not a bunch of baton-wielding generals, determine when a corps of elected officials ought to be thrown out of office, and then only as a result of a general election.

First, the republics of Central Asia, like the Arab states, are predominantly Muslim.  Second, they are being ruled by aging autocrats; they have a high number of people that are below the age of 30; a number of them have acute poverty; and they have highly corrupt and inept governments.  Third, even though Islamic practices are not as prevalent in a number of Central Asian
states as they are in the Arab countries, Islamist forces have been active inside the borders of a number of them.  The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 turned out to be a major setback for the Islamist groups of Central Asia.  A number of them were in that country because they had fled their home countries or they were there to receive insurgent training from al-Qaida.  The most well-known Central Asian Islamist group, the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU), was cause for much insomnia for
President Islam Karimov of Uzbekistan, Askar Akayev of Kyrgyzstan (who was ousted in 2006, but not by the Islamists), and President Emomali Rahmon of Tajikistan.  No one knows for sure how strong the Islamist forces really are in today’s Central Asia.

While the Islamist groups of Central Asia may not pose a serious threat to Central Asian regimes, the dictators of those countries are fearful of an Arab Awakening-like social movement, which is secular and staunchly pro-democratic.  As such, it can garner
worldwide support and encouragement once it gathers momentum.  It is these features of a social movement that are the constant source of consternation in the capitals of the Central Asian republics, as well as in Moscow and Beijing.

In order to fully comprehend how afraid those countries really are about a potential birth of an Arab Awakening-like social movement inside their own borders, one has to examine the foremost objective underlying the military exercise – Tsentr-2011 – of the Russian-dominated military alliance, the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO).  Aside from Russia, its membership comprises Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Armenia, and Belarus.  Prior to that military exercise, which lasted from September 19 through 27, General Nikolai Makarov, head of the Russian Army, said that the focus would be to deal with any Arab Awakening-like “social uprisings” and “the increasing threat from military Islamists.”

The Central Asian dictators are reported to have been studying how the Arab Awakening was born and grew like a tsunami of change.  Since the global media presented a comprehensive picture of the role of the social media in the awesome surge of
that movement, Central Asian rulers are already reported to be monitoring social media websites within their respective borders.  Nursultan Nazerbayev spoke about “the need to build an ‘impregnable wall’ to prevent any spillover of such revolutions in Central Asia.”  Referring to the Arab Awakening, he also expressed high concern about “an unregulated information space” that posed “threats to regional security and stability in the CSTO member states, especially in light of the latest developments in the
world.”  Kazakhstan is also studying the possibility of constantly monitoring the Internet cafes nationwide by requiring the installation of video cameras.

The Secretary General of the CSTO, Nikolai Bordyuzha, provided a comprehensive view of what CSTO has on its planning board, in terms of what he labeled as “cyberterrorism.”  He said CSTO aims to develop new plans of “information counteraction” to fight cyberterrorism, which, to him, included all cyberspace activities aimed at destabilizing a state.

It should also be noted that Kazakhstan, after studying the fate of former Egyptian ruler Hosni Mubarak, abandoned a previous plan to declare Nazerbayev the country’s unelected leader until 2020.  Instead, the government hastily organized another sham election to “prove” Nazerbayev’s “democratic credentials.”  Another country, Uzbekistan, systematically endeavored to filter out all images of the Arab Awakening from the Internet.

A number of Arab autocrats have found out that a social movement is considerably stronger than their tanks and their repressive security forces.   Those dictators who refused to believe that reality are still fighting, the rulers of Yemen and Syria, for instance. When people are willing to die for what they believe in – in the case of the Arab Awakening, it is the powerful will to be free – no force can crush them.  That may be by why the autocratic regimes of Central Asia (and even of China and Russia) are trembling in anticipation of the time when political change becomes an inevitable reality.  In their hearts they know a paraphrased version of Victor Hugo’s immortal words – no matter how much they attempt to suppress, they cannot resist an idea whose time has come.

It is India’s obsession with Pakistan that is forcing it to increase its strategic presence in Afghanistan.  India knows that, given the geographic propinquity to Afghanistan, Pakistan will always enjoy an unsurpassable strategic advantage over India.  Still, India has a number of additional advantages.  First, it is a rising economic power and can entice Afghanistan by offering huge amounts for economic development.  As a country whose economy is teetering at the edge of a calamitous precipice, Pakistan has little to offer Afghanistan in terms of developmental assistance.  Second, as a strategic partner of the United States, India is given pretty much a green light by the administration of President Barack Obama to escalate its strategic presence in its immediate
neighborhood.  As recently as only a few days ago, President Obama – who knows as much about the tortured history of South Asia as he does about the convoluted history of Afghanistan – gave Pakistan a public lecture that it should not view India as its “mortal enemy.”  Needless to say, India also believes along the same line.  However, what is more noteworthy is that Pakistan does not.  Thus, it makes a lot of sense for India to persuade Pakistan of that through its foreign policy behavior – its non-threatening posture – rather than a near-obsessive pursuit of enhancing its strategic presence in Afghanistan.

A complete picture of the reality of South Asia is that both Pakistan and India have been behaving obsessively when it comes to Afghanistan.  The darkest days of India’s foreign policy were when Pakistan succeeded in enabling the capture of power by the Taliban in Afghanistan in the mid-1990s.  After that, India, along with Russia and Iran, did its best – albeit quite unsuccessfully –
to provide military and economic assistance to the Northern Alliance of Ahmad Shah Masood in his uphill but enormously courageous military campaign to dislodge the Taliban from power.  The United States succeeded in obtaining that goal where the collective endeavors of India, Russia and Iran failed.  The Taliban regime was dismantled in November 2001 as a result of the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan.

Pakistan brought the Taliban to power in Afghanistan substantially in its quest for “strategic depth,” which was supposed to provide it some advantage over India in future military conflicts.  India, for its part, had every reason to be fearful of the growing power of Islamist extremism in relation to the Taliban rule of Afghanistan, which provided an enhanced strategic advantage of Pakistan.  That advantage was expressed through numerous incidents of terrorism in the Indian-administered Kashmir.

As the Islamist groups inside Pakistan turned against their own government in the first decade of the current century, and as the U.S.-Pakistan ties remain under enormous stress, the shoe is on the other foot.  India is exploiting the situation to enhance its strategic presence in Afghanistan.  The recent strategic partnership between New Delhi and Kabul, which might turn out to be not worth the paper it is written on – is a persuasive example of that reality.  There is little doubt that it is aimed at undermining the strategic advantage of Pakistan, the strong denials of India and Afghanistan to the contrary.  In that sense, those ties remain the legitimate target of Pakistan’s own future endeavors to undermine them.

One wonders how much of this egregious reality of South Asian power politics President Obama knows, understands, and internalizes, when he stood atop his soap box and started lecturing Pakistan that India is not its mortal enemy.  If the United States were not embroiled in finding a political solution to the war of Afghanistan – a war that it seems to be losing at present –  it may have played a role in bringing the two South Asian arch-rivals together.  However, upon reflection, India is not at all perturbed that the United States is too busy with the war to be playing such a role.  In fact, India is of the view that its best interest will be served while the United States plays no such role, for it is afraid of losing its strategic advantage in its negotiations with Pakistan; negotiations that are not really aimed at resolving anything.

Pakistan, for its part, knows that it does not have much of a strategic advantage over economically powerful and politically resourceful India.  So Pakistan seems to be operating on a slightly different version of the old adage: “The strong do whatever they will, and the weak suffer what they must.”  Pakistan’s version of that adage involving India seems to be “weak will do unto the strong whenever they can.”  Afghanistan serves (and will continue to serve) as an ideal place for Pakistan, regardless of whether the United States stays or leaves that country.  Since it considers that country as a legitimate part of its sphere of  influence, Pakistan regards the “encroachment” of India in that country as a serious “offense,” which deserves an appropriate response.  Thus, and sadly so, the unending Indo-Pak rivalry in Afghanistan promises to be both brutal and bloody.

The best way to think about the making of a successful strategy to defeat or eradicate al-Qaida is to examine some countries where its presence and/or influence appears to be mounting: Afghanistan,
Pakistan, Yemen, countries of the Horn of Africa, Algeria (not so much in the entire North Africa at least for now), and Iraq. Some variables that are common to these states include, (but are not limited to): the absence of good governance, high unemployment, a high degree of corruption, the sustained promotion of Islamic radicalism through madrasas (religious schools), and highly ineffective and antiquated institutions of modern education.

The current global economic problems are the “best friends” of al-Qaida because they promise to keep the aforementioned countries as almost permanent victims of economic underdevelopment and the attendant political instability.  What is also likely to help AQ and other Islamist groups is that no one from the developed part of the world would come to them with any enduring rescue plans.

Even a casual reader of the newspaper knows that the phrase “nation-building” has become a four-letter word in almost all Western countries, and especially in the United States.  Since nation-building requires an enormous amount of investment of precious economic resources, with little promise of gratifying results even in the medium-term, no shrewd politician would stick his/her neck out by advocating nation-building, even for Afghanistan, which is listed in the “critical” category of the Foreign Policy Magazine’s list of failed states.  Besides, the deterioration of the economic
situation inside a number of major Western countries has been popularizing the public discussion of “nation-building, which is focused primarily inside their respective borders.  Let’s face it, when
American (or Greek, or Irish, or any other) citizens are facing mounting economic problems, high levels of unemployment, and relentless demands from the IMF and other economic institutions for belt-tightening for deficit reduction, most, if not all, in the West are in no mood to be charitable about the suffering “foreigners” from the so-called Third World countries.

Another major problem the aforementioned failing or failed states are facing is the chronic level of corruption that has consistently abused the large amount of economic assistance that has been
provided by a number of generous countries, especially the United States. Pakistan stands out as one such example.  If there were hopes that its current corps of civilian politicians would be more dedicated than their civilian or military predecessors about transparency and fighting chronic graft within the official circles, the world has been severely disappointed now.  While the institutions like the IMF insist on transparency related to the massive amount of money it releases as a debt, it cannot be sure that the money is being spent for the intended cause of raising the standard of living
of citizens of Pakistan, and that it would not go into the pockets of high politicians of that country.  The problem of corruption is probably ten-fold, or even hundred-fold, more in countries like Sudan, Algeria, and in almost all states of the Middle East and North Africa.

It is possible that the U.S. government has become utterly convinced that, since it cannot commit mega-funds for nation-building in failed or failing states, it would pursue the second best option of degrading the capabilities of the AQ and other Islamist organizations to carry out terrorist
attacks against the U.S. homeland.  The Obama administration’s current focus on killing AQ’s top leaders is that second-best option, which also provides the United States tactical victories.  No one can deny that the pursuit of such a goal is not a rational option.  Unfortunately, however, that does not solve the lasting problem related to transnational terrorism.

By tracking the current Islamist debates and activism in a number of Islamic countries, I have developed a strong sense that, despite the continuing rhetoric of attacking the United States, those groups are really focused on creating more failed states in South Asia, the Horn of Africa, North
Africa, and Central Asia.  One of the most prominent Islamist theoreticians, Musab al-Suri’s
concept of “Nizam la Tanzim” (system, not organization) has been given a new meaning.  His advice to the Islamists to create “small resistance units” seems to have emerged as a new twist in its focus on various Muslim countries.

One has to see how the presence of AQ is rising through increased number of attacks inside Iraq.  The same is true in the case of Pakistan, where the nexus between the Tehrik-e-Taliban-e-Pakistan (TTP) and AQ is busy consistently raising the civilian toll through mindless acts of suicide bombings,
thereby strengthening the perception inside Pakistan about the growing vulnerability of the government.  Yemen is sliding steadily toward becoming the next “poster child” for regional
terrorism and a failed state.  The situation in Sudan is so complicated and hopeless that any serious global attempt to rectify the situation appears out of the question.  More to the point, no one really knows the exact meaning of “rectifying” the worsening politico-economic situation in that country.

Without belaboring the Kudzu analogy, the best way of weeding it out is to kill all the underground runners that provide sustenance to it, the most practical solution of defeating AQ and other Islamist groups is through the implementation of a nation-building strategy.  As long as it is perceived in
the West as a wasteful strategy, the Islamists’ strategy of increasing the number of failed states would enable them to not only survive but become even stronger in those failed states.  Just keep
examining what is currently transpiring in Pakistan and Yemen.  In fact, a recent government study has already proven the point that I have been making in this space for a long time.  The Horn of Africa
has already become well-nigh a lost cause.

As much as President Barak Obama entered office claiming to know the world of Islam – since he is the son of a Muslim father who was never there, but the fact that he grew up in Indonesia, a country with largest Muslim population – the promise related to his upbringing was never reflected in his handling of America’s ties with the world of Islam.  Watching his performance in office, he looks like another Chicago politician, full of verbose rhetoric but palpably short on implementing it.  I don’t question his intentions when he became president.  My sense is that issues affecting the world of Islam never really remained the focus of his attention for long.

When it came to Pakistan, Obama was more interested in fulfilling the intent of his speeches as a presidential candidate – he bluntly promised to take whatever action was needed against Pakistan, if he found evidence of that country’s involvement in terrorism (perhaps he did not use those exact words, but I am not violating his general intent underlying those frequently iterated statements).  Even before the assassination of Usama Bin Laden last May, Obama bought the argument of Vice President Joe Biden that the United States’ best approach to deal with terrorism is the wholesale implementation of a counterterrorism (CT) strategy.  As much as General David Petraeus – a champion of the counterinsurgency strategy – disagreed with him, he was forced to adopt it.  There is no doubt that the use of drone attacks targeting al-Qaida leaders had some success.  However, if the Obama administration thought that the use of CT would result in winning the war in Afghanistan, it was sadly mistaken.  The U.S. Special Forces are reportedly killing many Taliban fighters, but the Taliban are consistently showing their increased capabilities to launch attacks on a number of important targets inside Afghanistan, including the U.S. Embassy.

At least during the Bush administration, Pakistan could get away with the deceptive policy of constantly providing a wink and a nod to the Islamist groups while assuring the United States that it was serious about fighting these groups to help win Bush’s war
against terrorism.  George W. Bush may have chosen to believe that lie.  The Obama administration has learned not to trust the Pakistani leadership.  That attitude has gained in strength in the past three years.

The Obama administration also raised the bar of “credible performance” too high for Pakistan from the very beginning.  The litmus test of credibility was how brutal the Pak Army was going to be in fighting and eradicating the Islamist groups in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), and how efficiently it would be in patrolling the highly porous Pak-Afghan
borders.

What the Obama administration did not understand was that the price for such behavior was going to be too high for Washington to pay.  Simply put, Pakistan, in turn, wanted the reestablishment of the hyphenated Indo-Pak relationship in U.S. foreign policy; it wanted to acquire the same rewards that India was given through its strategic partnership with America; and it also wanted to gain access to the cutting edge of U.S. defense technology and defense platforms to modernize its military.  Even if President Obama wanted to, he would not have been able to sell that package to the U.S. Congress. The Indian lobby inside the U.S. legislature has done an excellent job of creating a highly friendly environment for India – something akin to the Israeli lobby.

Could Pakistan have been satisfied with a lesser package of friendship from the U.S.?  Perhaps, but events were moving too fast for its leaders inside Pakistan.  The Islamists were getting too powerful to be taken on even by the Army without being able to absorb the cost.  And the cost was (and it remains) too high in the form of increased instability.  The turning of Pakistan into a Jihadi suicidal culture is the worst nightmare even for the Army. What is also hurting it is the fact that Islamization has become a mounting challenge within the ranks of the Army.  The Pakistani Army needs a period of peace to figure its long-term strategy regarding the Islamists and the United States’ involvement in Afghanistan.  But it has neither peace from the Islamists nor
less pressure from the United States.

Then came the assassination of UBL at the hands of the U.S. Special Forces.  The Army took it so personally as a violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty, and the fact that it was caught napping, that there was not much room left for trust or cooperation between Pakistan and the United States.  To add insult to injury, the Special Force’s success in killing UBL enabled America’s Defense officials to issue arrogant statements about how willing they are to repeat such future operations inside Pakistan.

Have the Pakistan-U.S. deteriorating ties reached a point of no return?  Certainly not; both sides need each other badly. As long as the United States remains in Afghanistan, it needs Pakistani routes to get supplies to the NATO troops.  Similarly, Pakistan badly needs American economic and military assistance.  The only question is who is going to blink first?  Is the Pakistani Army willing to buckle down and accept its previous role of serving America’s security interests and paying the price, in terms of the increased internal instability?  Given a high degree of pragmatism on the part of Pakistan’s Army, it can still be done, but for the right price.  So, an even more important question is how far is the Obama administration willing to go to pay that price?  The answer to that question is likely to emerge in the next few weeks and months.  In the meantime, both sides would be well-advised to tone down their contentious and accusatory rhetoric towards each other.

Since I am finishing my own book on the relationship between the Islamic challenge and the great powers, I read Kull’s essay with considerable interest.  His essay is interesting and contains more than a few insights about Muslims.  I think his insights are worth considering, because he is much more informed than most of the other written work that I have read on the subject.

One of Kull’s observations that captured my interest deserves some attention.  Describing one of the “most fundamental” aspects of the Muslim perception about America, he writes: Muslims are of the view “…that America seeks to undermine Islam – a perception held by overwhelming majorities.”  The author goes on to add:

Muslims tend to view current events through the lens of a long-standing historical narrative.  According to this narrative, going back to the Middle Ages Christian forces from the West have persistently sought to break the grip of Islam on its people.  By holding fast, Muslims believe, they were able to flourish as a civilization, at times superseding the West in many dimensions.  Today, they believe, that struggle continues – except that today the challenge is greater.  Western cultural products are seen as seductively undermining Islamic culture.  More importantly, Western powers have gained extraordinary military might that is seen as threatening and coercively dominating the Muslim world and propping up secular autocrats ready to accommodate the West.”

Since I have been reflecting over the issue of why there is so much antipathy between the United States and the world of Islam, my own tentative conclusion is that it is the outcome of America’s long-held perception (which goes back to the Islamic Revolution of 1979 in Iran, which brought to power a stridently anti-American government) that Islam as a political force
is determined to challenge the United States’ global dominance.  The first phase of that challenge would come within the world of Islam (it can be argued that it is already a reality in Iran, and it is likely to become a reality if or when anti-U.S. governments are  elected as a result of political changes stemming from the Arab Awakening).  Then, in the next phase, it is likely to become a global challenge, since the followers of Islam reside all over the world.  That perception was only intensified in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the United States.  The anti-U.S. rhetoric of al-Qaida continues to echo throughout the Muslim world, even when that entity is experiencing a palpable decline, largely as a result of the assassination of Usama Bin Laden at the hands of the U.S. Special Forces in May of this year.

The United States never understood that the chief strength of al-Qaida’s message was not related to Islam as a religion, but with Islam as a political force.  From the religious perspective, no one can create a universally accepted argument (universal in its applicability among the Muslims of the world) about the implementation of Jihad against the United States – that is when it is  legitimate to declare a Jihad or who is a legitimate authority to make such a declaration.  However, from the perspective of politics, a powerful argument can be made – and was indeed made by al-Qaida and other Islamist groups – that the United States has a fight with Islam.

The United States had to respond to attacks on its territory by invading Afghanistan, where originally planned by al-Qaida  originally planned those attacks.  However, the rhetoric and the palpable resolve of the Bush administration to remain on the offensive under the general rubric of “global war on terrorism,” perpetuated its own narrative, especially on the part of the
Muslims that America is determined to dominate the world of Islam through military attacks and occupation.  That  narrative and the decision of President George W. Bush to invade Iraq, more than anything that al-Qaida would have said or done, became the mother’s milk for anti-American feelings inside various Muslim countries.

From the American side, the perception related to Islam may not have been driven primarily by the treatment of it as a religion, but as a political force.  In fact, a lot of Western “experts” on Islam take the position that America’s problem is with “political  Islam” and not with the religion of Islam.  Sadly, a number of Muslim scholars, in parroting Western scholars, have adopted that rhetoric.  However, anyone who knows anything about Islam knows that politics is only the flip side of Islam as a religion.  For a majority of Muslims anywhere in the world, Islam is both a religion and a political force.  As such, Islam contains its notions of government, its own rules of governance (the Shariah), and its own code of conduct in terms of dealing with the West.  There is a lot of room for interpretation on all those issues and there is no one prevailing dominant perspective on them.

This is one of the most controversial  of the problem that exists between Islam and the West. While al-Qaida and other  self-styled “Jihadists” have articulated their militant rhetoric related to the West and how to deal with it (i.e., only by perpetrating terrorist attacks), there is no equally voluble or dominant narrative that came out from the side of any Muslim government countering that of the Islamists.  As a complicated political force and religion, Islam needed equally sophisticated narratives explaining the meaning of a lot of concepts like Jihad, Ijtihad, and the need of interpreting both of them in the ever-changing intricacies of a globalized world.  However, no Muslim scholar – much less a Muslim politician – could muster enough mental prowess or courage to respond to the challenge.  Thus, the best that he Western world knows about the relationship between Muslims and the West is through the notion of anger.  It is mostly an intellectual cop-out on the part of its peddlers, because they lack other multi-dimensional and sophisticated explanations.

Muslim attitudes, at the least, are a potpourri of feelings of antipathy, frustration, and even anger for being at the bottom of the barrel in the hierarchy of nations.  The Quran indentifies them as the best of the chosen people.  Yet what confuses them is why that divine statement does not include them among the most powerful and influential nations of the contemporary world.  Muslims might be angry at their inability to alter their plight as a collective entity or as individuals when it comes to their failure to bring an end to enduring autocratic rules in their polities.  They rightly blame those rules for keeping them backward and poor and for their incapability to control their destiny in the realms of politics and economics.  Perhaps they feel too strongly in blaming the West for its support of autocratic rulers; however, no one can ever state that they are wrong in holding that conviction.

Being backward, weak, and subservient to the West were motivating forces behind China’s desire to become a premier rising power of the world.  However, the most important initial step that China took in becoming a rising power was when it
succeeded in overthrowing the highly corrupt regime of Chiang Kai-shek, which was also a friend of the West.  Neither the Arabs nor the Muslims of other nations succeeded in creating governments that are even half as dedicated about becoming a world-class power as the PRC (Contemporary Turkey might be one rare exception).  Muslim autocrats seem happy to be heading the regimes that kept their peoples backward and weak.  Those rulers treat those traits as guarantees for prolonging their discreditable rule.

Still, Kull is right in noting that Muslim anger stems from the fact that the United States has been determined about imposing its own model of secularism on Muslim countries, because “most Muslims want to preserve the Islamic foundations of their society and want their public life to be infused with Islamic principles.  Most want Shariah to play a greater role.  They want a quality of piety to pervade their culture. Integrating these aspirations with liberal ideas of democracy and freedom of religion is a decidedly challenging endeavor.”  Consequently, according to Kull, “…it is particularly infuriating to Muslims when America intervenes in a way that is destabilizing, trying to root for one imagined side against another, in what Americans conceive of as an inevitable evolution toward the victory of one side.”

As much as the United States portrays itself as a champion of democracy, when it comes to the world of Islam, the lone superpower wishes to see the establishment of a “secular” democracy only.  Bush was clearly disappointed, indeed shocked, at the emergence of an Islamic democracy in the post-Saddam Iraq, which he wanted to emerge as a prototype of the Jeffersonian
democracy in the Middle East.  To add further to his dismay, the citizens of the occupied Palestine overwhelmingly voted for Hamas, a predominantly Islamist party, in the election of January 2006.  Even after entering into office, Hamas refused to either renounce violence or recognize Israel so that it could negotiate with the Jewish state the political resolution of the Palestinian
conflict.  The immediate response of the United States and the EU was the issuance of a threat that they would cut off funds for the Palestinian Authority (PA).  That decision became the basis for denying any chances of effective governance for Hamas, and thereby leaving the entire Palestinian conflict on the precipice of another disaster of a major proportion.  To be fair, however, Hamas, as well as the West, are equally responsible for this catastrophe in the making.

As the countries of the Middle East and North Africa experience the Arab Awakening, the American hope is that the eventual outcome of the ouster of a number of aging autocrats is the emergence of secular democracy.  Needless to say, the chances of the emergence of such a model of governance in a number of Arab countries appear reasonably good for now.  However, the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Al-Nahda (Renaissance) party in Tunisia remain very well-established Islamist parties, one cannot rule out the emergence of a coalition in which the Islamists will also play a visible role, at least initially.  The major unknown about this issue is whether the Islamist parties will remain committed to the proposition of the evolution of a pluralistic democracy – as they appear to be for now – or the moderate elements of them would be replaced by the hardliners or the self-styled Jihadists.

From the perspectives of the Muslims of the Arab world, the Arab Awakening holds a great promise that they would take charge of their destiny, even though the high visibility of France and the UK in the immediate aftermath of the downfall (though not yet the capture of) Muammar Qaddafi is a worrisome development.  Given the reprehensible legacy of colonialism of those two countries in the Arab world, the Libyan National Transitional Council (NTC) has every reason to remain wary about not losing any control to the representatives of those two countries or to the United States in its eagerness to get technical assistance in governing Libya in the coming months and years.

In the final analysis, Muslims have reason to be angry at the United States; however, they must ensure that, while they remain ambivalent or unhappy toward Washington, they do not lose track of finding a rapprochement with it.  After all, the United States has an established record of coming to the rescue of Kuwait when it was invaded by Saddam Hussein.  Washington also played a
crucial role in the Yugoslavian conflict and in bringing an end to the Serbian massacre and dominance of the Bosnian Muslims.

As a starting point, Muslims need to shed their legacy of believing in conspiracies and stop looking for one-dimensional explanations related to the United States’ attitude toward Islam.  At the same time, US decision makers need to revisit their cultural prejudice of imposing secularism on the world of Islam.  This palpable feeling of condescension toward Muslim countries has to be cast aside if the United States is to have even a decent chance of playing the role of an honest broker in the Muslim regions in the future.

The post-9/11 involvement of the United States in the world of Islam should have provided its top officials a sophisticated understanding about Muslims’ feelings toward secularism, especially when proposed or imposed from the West.  Secularism might be tried as an important rule of governance in countries like Egypt, Tunisia, or Libya.  However, that experimentation has a greater chance of success if it is implemented from within; it is most likely to fail if it is imposed from abroad.  If the United States should have learned one lesson after invading Iraq, it is that externally imposed democracy is likely to be very tenable at best.  Only when it is adopted as a result of popular demand from within that it holds a high promise of success.  Indonesia is an excellent example of the correctness of that observation.

It was AQ’s obsession for violence that was one of the major reasons why it lost whatever support it had inside a number of Muslim countries, at least in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the United States.  The best example of that fact was the entire episode of the emergence of the Sahwa (awakening) movement in Iraq in 2005 and its decision to cooperate with the U.S. occupation forces in order to defeat AQ.

It is only with the benefit of hindsight that we can now state that the major reason for AQ’s downfall was that it had no long-term strategy or plan.  It succeeded in carrying out the 9/11 attacks on the United States, and was stunned not only by its success but especially by the magnitude of the U.S. response.  Even if had the luxury of staying put in one country and continue to train its terrorist forces, it could not have come up with an effective plan of taking over any Arab regime, because all it knew during the heyday of its existence was destruction, murder, and mayhem.

AQ’s success in carrying out the 9/11 attacks had a lot to do with the fact that, as an open society, America was always vulnerable for such a possibility.  However, after the United States went on the defensive in terms of protecting its homeland from any such future attacks, it was next to impossible for AQ, or any other organization, to succeed again, at least not in terms of carrying out another attack of the scale of 9/11.  So, especially during the last two or three years of his life — when he became increasingly convinced of the irreversible nature of the diminishing popularity of AQ — Bin Laden was fixated about carrying out such an attack as the only hope of escalating the popularity, if not increasing the relevance, of his organization.  His obsession underscored not only his desperation to make his organization relevant once again, but it was also a reflection of how cut off he really was during those years about the irreversibility of the growing irrelevance of AQ.

The United States’ decision to relentlessly pursue the eradication of AQ played a major role in that organization’s inability to adjust fast enough for the changed realities of the post-9/11 world.  Even though the AQ “experts” in the West kept using their imagination to underscore the alleged growing effectiveness of a “leaderless Jihad,” in reality, AQ was only living off of its reputation stemming from its success of carrying out the 9/11 attacks on the United States.  The Bush administration might have been successful in eradicating AQ right after the Afghanistan invasion in 2001 if not for its foolish adventurism of invading Iraq.  Still, given the enormous resources that the United States invested in destroying AQ, even while it was bogged down in Iraq, that objective had to bear fruit over the long haul.  Only AQ’s mindless use of violence, even against the Sunnis in Iraq, turned out to be a major blow to it when the U.S. military leaders, quite deftly, accepted the Sahwa’s offer of fighting and defeating AQ in Iraq.

No one did more damage to the long-term effectiveness and popularity of AQ than Musab al-Zarqawi himself.  His use of mindless violence from 2004 until his death in June 2006 was so potentially damaging for AQ that even UBL and Ayman al-Zawahiri wrote letters to Zarqawi from their hiding places advising him to tone down his sectarian (anti-Shia) agenda.  It was the legacy of AQ violence against the Sunni insurgents that led to the creation of the Sahwa movement and the decision of that movement to approach the U.S. forces with a view to forming the anti-AQ nexus.  In this sense, even though AQ had an excellent opportunity to emerge as an anti-American and pro-Arab entity in Iraq, it not only blew that opportunity but also became the chief tool for its own major defeat.

There was also a special attribute of AQ as an Islamist entity that almost guaranteed its destruction in the long run.  It never was a fighting force that was driven by political objectives in the pursuit of which it was capable of using pragmatism as its major operating tool.  At least the most deadly leaders of that organization were suffering from visions of grandeur as the true heir apparent of the Salafis.  As such, they could not lose their self-styled religiosity long enough to become opportunistic in their modus operandi.  What they also did not realize — and might never realize — is that no matter how convinced they were of that “fact,” they were never accepted as Salafis by the global Muslim community at large.

Between 2003 and 2011, the operational maneuverability of AQ’s leadership was incessantly shrinking.  The spectacular role played by the United States’ National Security Agency (NSA) in tracking the AQ leaders and then eradicating them through the use of drone attacks at will during the second term of the Bush administration and throughout the current term of President Barack Obama reduced AQ into a virtual non-entity, at least within the geographical boundaries of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Even though other AQ-affiliated organizations flourished in the Arabian Peninsula, the Horn of Africa, and North Africa, the main organization could never emerge as an entity that could carry out another attack on the United States on the scale of 9/11. The U.S. global campaign to dry up terrorist financing should be given a major credit for that.

Despite the aforementioned setbacks, the worst nightmare of AQ was the Arab Awakening that arose in Tunisia in December of 2010 and caught on like wildfire in the entire Arab world.  Even though the future of Tunisia and Egypt — countries that successfully overthrew their dictators — is not known, in terms of their promise to become democratic, there is a lot of hope in that part of the world that such a reality is most likely to emerge in the next months.  As Muammar Qaddafi has become a fugitive former head of state in Libya, as Ali Abdullah Saleh of Yemen is recuperating in Saudi Arabia while threatening to return to Yemen to his job as president, and as Bishara Assad is likely to meet the same fate as Qaddafi, no one anywhere is thinking of AQ as a movement that holds any promise of political change in the Arab or any other Muslim country.

Even when one thinks of a new generation of AQ leaders in the coming years — assuming that AQ survives as a movement of any promise — the speculations are that they would be even deadlier than UBL or al-Zawahiri.  Such an ominous description, if anything, underscores the fact that AQ truly belongs in the dustbin of history.  It never was a true movement for change for the Arab or Muslim world.  On the contrary, most, if not all, observers of the Arab world hold high hopes in the Arab Awakening.

The Army—or at least its lower echelons—had some role in giving refuge to Usama Bin Laden.   There is no way anyone can deny why else the head of al-Qaida resided inside Pakistan for so many years without being traced even by the widening electronic tentacles of America’s National Security Agency (NSA) .  After the assassination of Bin Laden at the hands of the U.S. Special Forces on May 1, the pro-al-Qaida functionaries of Pakistan were so incensed that they carried out an attack on that country’s naval base as revenge.  The Pakistan investigative journalist—Saleem Shahzad’s “crime” was that he disclosed the ISI-al-Qaida connections related to that attack.

The ISI—Pakistan’s spy agency—cannot gather so much power and clout unless it has the support of its powerful Corps commanders.  No one is suggesting that the Corps commanders also supported or were even aware of the presence of Bin Laden inside Pakistan.  We have no such evidence at this point.  However, the middle ranks of the ISI seem to have drawn their own conclusions about how far they could go on that issue.  The most dangerous aspect of that frame of mind is that it regarded Bin Laden a “hero.”

The very nature of spy work is such that the functionaries—especially in most Third World countries—could get away with murder in terms of remaining operationally autonomous of the upper echelon of  the security bureaucracy.  And given the explosive nature of Pakistani internal politics, such independence can lead to awful results, such as the murder of Saleem Shahzad, because he was disclosing the state “secrets” by telling the world of the ISI-al-Qaida’s connections.

The security agencies do not want the world to know of their demons and rogue elements.  In  the world of security agencies, those elements are also regarded as “patriotic” and are not to be exposed.  Besides, while the journalists are driven by the desire to uncover the failed policies of  their countries of residence (and other countries), the “security Nazi” implementers of the failed policies envisage the investigative role of the journalists as “treason.” And the “traitors” have to be ruthlessly eliminated in order to discourage other journalists.

While the world was being exposed to the growing dysfunctionalities of the Pakistani Army, there was another story about the nuclear proliferation, in which Dr. A. Q. Khan—the “father” of Pakistani nuclear weapons—accused some of the top former Army officials to have been involved in getting huge payoffs for providing the nuclear know-how to the rogue regime of Kim Jong Il.  As expected, there were denials from the ones whose names were disclosed.  The world may or may not know the “real” and the whole truth behind this episode. However, Pakistan continues to sink in deeper in the widening whirlpool of dysfunctionalities.

The choices for Pakistan are also stark.  The United States wishes for the Army to transform its domestic front into a long-term battlefield with the Pakistani Islamists, elements that remain an important tool of the Army’s ongoing battles with India.  Washington also wants the Army to seal the borders with Afghanistan so that the NATO’s ongoing war with the Taliban’s of Afghanistan can be won. The fulfillment of the U.S. agenda is not deemed as worth the price by the Army.  Thus, the impasse continues between Washington and Islamabad.

What is favoring Pakistan is the fact the Obama administration direly needs its assistance and might be willing to pay any price to do it.  However, the window of opportunity for Pakistan might be closing soon if the NATO forces continue to encounter bloodier realities in the battlefields of Afghanistan in the coming months than are right now.  May be that is what Pakistan really wants, because such a scenario also promises to escalate the desperation of the lone superpower.  President Barack Obama has made a serious mistake by calling Afghanistan the “right” war.  Now he must win it, or  at least create some semblance of victory in order to reasonably increase his chances of reelection (even though his chances of reelection substantially depend on the improving the performance of the U.S. economy and especially improving the employment figures).

The only way of eradicating the whirlpools of dysfunctionalities for the Pakistani Army is to reform its own ranks.  It has to rid itself of the Islamists, whose Jihadist framework has no room for peaceful development.  If the United States really wishes to develop a healthy strategic relationship with Pakistan (instead of constantly envisaging it as strategic errand boy to win its war in Afghanistan) it has no choice but to spend a lot of time in understanding the security concerns of that  country, instead of dismissing it. Pakistan needs assistance, but most of that assistance has to be in the field of economic development and institution building.  It has to emerge as a viable economic actor before it can spend its resources in building its military muscles.