“We now have a full partner in Pakistan”

by | Apr 22, 2008


Barney Rubin has an excellent post updating on latest developments in Pakistan’s federally administered tribal areas.  Start, he says, from a clear recognition of one thing at least: the US has no plan.  Here’s a graph from the US Government’s General Accountability Office which proves the point:

graphic

Note especially the amount being allocated to political reform, he says: 0%.  Meanwhile, Khalid Aziz – the former chief secretary of NWFP – has been doing some serious strategising about what needs to happen next (in the wake of Pakistan’s elections – which as the BBC put it “saw an overwhelming vote for parties that advocate secularism, or the separation of religion from politics” in the NWFP). Aziz writes:

…the Feb 18 election has clearly indicated that the people of Pakistan voted against militarism and violence. The Taliban recognise that resort to force alone will not lead to the achievement of their main political objective which is the creation of an Islamist Caliphate.

However, while everyone waits for good sense to prevail, there may be forces amongst the non-state fighters planning another strike in the West. If that happens, one may be certain of an air war in FATA and this could lead to incalculable harm to Pakistan. This in a nutshell is the danger surrounding the process of talks. . . .

Many conservative Pakhtuns believe that the fighting in Swat, Kohat and Waziristan is a war of liberation against US occupation of Afghanistan; they fight the Pakistani state because of its alliance with the US. However, it does not make it a US war alone. Whatever may be the case at the start, this is now Pakistan’s war, since the objective of the insurgents is to change the nature of the Pakistani state. To fellow Pakistanis I would say that it is our war, whether we like it or not.

Compare that, Rubin says, to Musharraf – with whom “all negotiations with militants… had as their aim to balance the imperative of acting against alQaida with that of saving the Taliban as a strategic asset for Pakistan”.  His conclusion:

We now have a full partner in Pakistan, elected, ironically enough, by Pakistani voters angry at what the GAO calls the “lack of a comprehensive plan,” rather than just a military approach. It is indeed time to “sit down and think through what we can collectively do” with these partners.

Author

  • Alex Evans

    Alex Evans is founder of Larger Us, which explores how we can use psychology to reduce political tribalism and polarisation, a senior fellow at New York University, and author of The Myth Gap: What Happens When Evidence and Arguments Aren’t Enough? (Penguin, 2017). He is a former Campaign Director of the 50 million member global citizen’s movement Avaaz, special adviser to two UK Cabinet Ministers, climate expert in the UN Secretary-General’s office, and was Research Director for the Business Commission on Sustainable Development. Alex lives with his wife and two children in Yorkshire.

    View all posts

More from Global Dashboard

Let’s make climate a culture war!

Let’s make climate a culture war!

If the politics of climate change end up polarised, is that so bad?  No – it’s disastrous. Or so I’ve long thought. Look at the US – where climate is even more polarised than abortion. Result: decades of flip flopping. Ambition under Clinton; reversal...