Unending Crisis: National Security Policy After 9/11

Four: Pakistan

80 F O U R Pakistan o ne cannot sePaR ate the Issue of PaKIstan fRom that of Afghanistan or indeed from other major security issues. Through the depredations of A. Q. Khan,1 as well as other disastrous and unconstructive policies over the years, Pakistan is linked to the nuclear weapon programs in North Korea and Iran as well as to international terrorism . Western Pakistan has become the world center of terrorism. As Ahmed Rashid writes in his Descent into Chaos, When Osama bin Laden escaped into FATA [Federally Administered Tribal Areas, in Pakistan] in December 2001, the place was so inviting that over the next few years he never strayed far. The seven tribal agencies that make up the Federally Administered Tribal Areas adjoining the North-West Frontier Province became the new base area for al Qaeda. It was from there that the bomb plots in London, Madrid, Bali, Islamabad, and later Germany and Denmark were planned. While Mullah Omar’s command structure in Quetta deliberately did not include Arabs or any non-Afghans, so they would not become a focus for U.S. forces chasing only al Qaeda, FATA became a multi-layered terrorist cake. At its base were Pakistani Pashtun tribesmen, soon to become Taliban in their own right, who provided the hide-outs and logistical support. Above them were the Afghan Taliban who settled there after 9/11, followed by militants from Central Asia, Chechnya, Africa, China and Kashmir, and PAKISTAN 81 topped by Arabs who forged a protective ring around bin Laden. FATA became the world’s “terrorism central.”2 And indeed, the Afghan Taliban, who are absorbing the energies of the Afghan state and U.S. forces committed to bringing some order and normalcy into the chaos that has existed there for so long, were created and nurtured by, and are still supported by, the government of Pakistan through its Inter-Services Intelligence organization. The Pakistani nuclear weapon program has created huge instabilities as a result of both its vulnerability to militant terrorist organizations and its proliferation to dangerous states through its “father,” A. Q. Khan. A Council on Foreign Relations 2010 Task Force Report states that “The existence of extensive militant networks that target Pakistanis and their government is particularly dangerous given Pakistan’s expanding nuclear program of between eighty and one hundred warheads.”3 Pakistan truly represents the gravest threat to U.S. national security of any country in the world today. But how, why, and when did this state of affairs come about? This relatively brief analysis is divided into several sections in order to facilitate the weaving together of two separate but related tales, the emergence on Pakistani territory of “terrorism central” and the proliferation of nuclear weapons led by A. Q. Khan. 1 Since its creation in the wake of a retreating British empire in 1947, Pakistan has been beset with an “acute sense of insecurity in the midst of a continuing and seemingly irresolvable identity crisis.”4 The Moghul empire was a Muslim state that had ruled India for several centuries before the British came in the eighteenth century. The British conquest of India was gradual, with the eastern and largely Hindu areas coming under the rule of the British Empire long before the western and largely Muslim areas. The territory that makes up most of Pakistan today—the provinces of Punjab and Sindh—came under British control only in the 1840s, approximately a century after the East India Company took control of Bengal and central India. When Muslim India rose in revolt in 1857 in the so-called India Mutiny, Moghul rule in India was destroyed and India reverted to Hindu control, under the British Raj. After two wars in Afghanistan (1839–42 and 82 ChAPTeR FoUR 1878–81), which did not turn out well, Britain turned northwestern India, the area that includes Baluchistan and the Northwest Frontier Province — including the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA)—into a military -dominated area ruled from Lahore as a bulwark against Afghan tribes and potential Russian expansionism. More than half the British Army in India was deployed along this border, supplemented by a significant local army raised in Punjab, which the British ruled like a feudal state from the Middle Ages. Pakistan eventually inherited this garrison national security state created in the nineteenth century. In the 1940s, following the end of World War II, after resisting pressures...