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Sixty Years of Pakistan’s Foreign Policy

Karamatullah K. Ghori
A country’s foreign policy, in the classical sense, is supposed to stay in
lockstep with its political progression. By this yardstick, Pakistan’s
foreign policy has, indeed, kept as tortuous a course as its political
meandering, stumbling from crisis to crisis. Another definition of a
country’s foreign policy says that it ought to reflect the national
aspirations, goals and interests of its people. Foreign policy gurus have
long argued that a country’s foreign policy should, ideally, be a distillate
of its ideology and, taking a lead from this national font, morph itself into
an instrument of national strength, international respect and global
recognition for its ideological bedrock.

Let us analyze Pakistan’s foreign policy performance and progression

against this backdrop. For facility, we may divide it into various phases,
starting with the earliest one that commenced with the birth of Pakistan
as a sovereign state.

First phase: Seeking unwarranted alliances

Pakistan was born in a highly unusual and tumultuous ambience. Its

birth was attended by a gruesome religious-communal frenzy in which
Hindus and Muslims shed a lot of each other’s blood, thus leaving
grievous scars of hostility on each other’s psyche. Pakistan, the junior,
weaker and less-privileged of the two new states emerging from the
maelstrom of the Partition of the Indian subcontinent received,
additionally, a much larger influx of refugees than was the case with the
larger Dominion of India. It was a case, veritably, of double jeopardy and
twin dilemma for the infant state of Pakistan, whose psychological impact
was devastating, almost traumatic. It suddenly found itself saddled with
a larder of challenges, which would be enough to test the mettle of a long-
established state, much less one struggling to find its feet under daunting
conditions.

The war triggered, virtually on the day after its birth, with India on
the issue of the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir could have only
added to the sense of insecurity, which came creeping into the new
nation’s psyche, right behind the trail of blood from the Partition’s
mayhem. The death of the new nation’s founding father, Mohammad Ali

Karamatullah K. Ghori is a former ambassador and former research officer at the Pakistan
Institute of International Affairs.
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Jinnah, 13 months after the birth of Pakistan, was another devastating

blow to the nation’s already fragile morale. Insecurity spiralled into
alarm.

The psychological trauma surrounding Pakistan’s infancy as a nation

became the backdrop for its hectic search for security alliances that its
leadership deemed ineluctable to instil some sense of security and
protection in the nation’s heart. Pakistan was perceived as too weak and
too under-equipped to stand up to a much larger, stronger and
resourceful India all by itself. The search was quickly out to balance the
inequality of power, vis-à-vis India, by finding partners who would be
able to extend a security umbrella over Pakistan’s head and make up for
its perceptible handicap.

There could be little argument with the quest for security. However, it
led Pakistan to the wrong door and laid the foundations of a foreign
policy short on strategic and long-term interest but long on ad hoc and
short-term tactical advantage. The keel for what subsequently mutated
into Pakistan’s hopelessly West-oriented and West-dependant foreign
policy was laid by Liaquat Ali Khan’s decision to accept the American
invitation to pay an official visit to Washington and disregard an earlier
invitation from the Soviet Union for a similar visit.

Much has been written in Pakistan’s foreign policy annals as to why

Liaquat Ali opted for Washington and ignored Moscow. Spin doctors
toeing the establishment line have argued, vociferously, that it was a
decision driven by pragmatism and national interest. Pakistan needed an
early injection of military assistance to narrow the gap with a much
stronger India; the US was the only power capable at that stage, so close
on the heels of the end of World War II, to furnish that kind of material
help to Pakistan. The Soviet Union, as the argument goes, was still
licking its wounds of a war that had exacted a horrendous toll of 20
million of its people, and did not have the wherewithal to come to
Pakistan’s assistance. Another argument, an obvious after-thought
concocted much later as Pakistan dug itself deeper into the hole of
dependence on the West, contended that entering into an alliance with
the world’s prime communist and atheist power would have flown in the
face of Pakistan’s founding ideology of adherence to Islam and Islamic
precepts. Both lines of reasoning were deceptively calibrated, deeply
flawed and obtuse.

Granted that the US had come out of the war relatively unscathed and
had the means to oblige a Pakistan pleading for military assistance. But
how convincing, or realistic, is the assumption that the Soviet Union did
not have the means to oblige Pakistan on that front? The Soviet Union
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was known to be the principal source of weapons to the communists of

China making the last Herculean effort to oust the Western-backed
Koumintang from the mainland. The Korean War broke out in 1950–
within five years of the end of World War II–and the Soviet Union
pumped military assistance at a robust scale and pace to the Korean
communists, as well as China, to keep the Americans at bay for three
long years of a bleeding confrontation.

The argument of Pakistan being motivated and decisively swayed by

its Islamic ideology to shun the godless communists was as specious as it
was disingenuous and amounted to making a mockery of the Islamic
precepts it supposedly strove to promote by rejecting Soviet overtures. It
was a travesty of Islam’s pristine universalism and myopically ignored
the example set by the Prophet of Islam (PBUH) himself when he entered
into treaty commitments with the Jews of Medina in the interest of
ushering in an ambience of peaceful coexistence even with those who had
refused to accept his divine message. Pakistan itself, subsequently, made
light of its supposedly robust religiosity and religion-dictated foreign
policy orientation by cultivating the closest possible relations with China,
as much communist and godless as the shunned Soviet Union.

Not only that seeking security with a putative superpower, 10,000

miles from Pakistan, whose interest, at that stage in South Asian affairs
was, at best marginal, made absolutely no sense to the strategic interest
of Pakistan. Also, it did not augur well for Pakistan to seek security in
arms and weapons only and ignore the far more crucial task of anchoring
it in sound national institutions that could withstand the disappearance,
by force or nature, of national icons like Jinnah and Liaquat Ali Khan.
Liaquat Ali could be excused for being Anglophile by his feudal moorings
and upbringing. Much of the leadership of the League was, like him,
Anglophile and may have had insufficient or precious-little awareness of
the other superpower next door in the Soviet Union.

It is a tragic fact of our history, however, that Pakistan’s powerful

military-bureaucratic elite had started seeking political power even in the
new nation’s teething period. The Rawalpindi conspiracy, hatched
together by Bonapartist military officers and some left-leaning
intellectuals belonging to the communist movement in Pakistan, was
symptomatic of non-political forces coveting political power by any means.
The unravelling of the Rawalpindi conspiracy did not, apparently,
discourage these forces; they remained fixated on their mission of
subverting political leadership. Their ploy sought to get Pakistan
embroiled in the emerging East-West rivalry. The post-Rawalpindi
conspiracy power barons, however, seemed to have calculated, rightly as
far as their parochial interest was concerned, that a Pakistan tied to
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American global security interest and dependent on its largesse, would be

a Pakistan in thrall to them. History proved them right. But that ‘initial
sin’ launched Pakistan’s foreign policy on an elliptical curve from which it
has not, to date, found a way to climb down to reality and pragmatism.
The adventurism, begun early in Pakistan’s infancy, has remained shorn
of the sophistication expected in maturity.

Establishment apologists may dismiss it out of hand as a flight of

fancy but it is not too farfetched to reason that had Pakistan not rebuffed
and deflated the Soviet Union’s friendly overtures so unceremoniously,
the foreign policy curve of Pakistan would have developed far more
smoothly than it did under its unnatural and unequal relationship–
bondage, to be more precise–with the US. Cultivating the superpower
closer to home would have made more eminent and rewarding sense than
courting a power so distant from the shores of Pakistan, in a physical as
well as metaphysical sense. Pakistan would possibly not have
encountered the rough ride it did on its core dispute on Kashmir with
India if it had not incurred the Soviet wrath. India, in the event of a
friendly relationship between Pakistan and the Soviet Union, could not
have bottled up Kashmir the way it did, with impunity, because of the
carte blanche given to it by Moscow. It is entirely possible that there
would have been no invasion and occupation of Afghanistan by the Soviet
Union if Moscow did not have such strong–and from Pakistan’s point of
view totally unwarranted–reservations about a Pakistan hopelessly tied
to Washington’s apronstrings.

But going back to the ‘first sin’ argument, Liaquat Ali’s decision to
cultivate Washington over Moscow, as a friendly superpower, did not, in
his mind, amount to surrendering Pakistan’s will or sovereignty as his
successors so readily did, to Washington’s global policy of networking
against the communist bloc. The US national archives pertaining to the
early period of Pakistan, recently declassified and opened to public
scrutiny under the Freedom of Information Act, suggest that Liaquat Ali
was not prepared to grant military base facilities to the US on Pakistan’s
soil. Some of the reports, written in anguish, from the American
ambassador in Karachi vouch for that impression which gives good
reason to cynics to argue that Washington could have had a hand in
Liaquat Ali’s broad-daylight murder in Rawalpindi through a hired
Afghan assassin. Afghanistan’s hostility to Pakistan, in that period, lends
grist to the conspiracy theory surrounding Liaquat Ali’s murder.

Liaquat Ali’s elimination from the scene in Pakistan paved the way for
a more cooperative and pliable government in Pakistan, one that was not
given to dragging its feet on Washington’s imperial commands and
diktats. However, the real reason for Washington’s star rising high on
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Pakistan’s firmament–and staying there to date–was the ascendancy of

the army in Pakistan’s national politics in the wake of Liaquat Ali’s
demise. As far as Washington’s regional and global interests, focused on
Pakistan or in alliance with Pakistan were concerned, they became a
done thing once Pakistan slipped under the military’s sway. Pakistan’s
alignment under SEATO, in 1954, and CENTO (successor to the 1955
Baghdad Pact) followed swiftly and in quick succession to stamp the
authority of the Pakistan Army as the country’s ultimate power broker.
That introduced in the annals of Pakistan the bizarre innovation of
foreign policy being made subservient to its ruling elite’s convenience and
interest, rather than the classical concept of a country’s foreign policy
being subordinate to its larger national interest anchored in the people’s
power.

As the Pakistani Bonapartes craved for the country’s political

mastery, its foreign policy had to be tailored to fit their requirements. A
powerful army was deemed essential to knock the fear of God in the
hearts of Pakistan’s teeming masses. For that purpose, it was deemed
ineluctable that the armed forces must be equipped with modern
weapons. Washington, in its Cold War frenzy, stepped in to fill that gap.
The army fell for crumbs and signed on the dotted lines. The rest, as they
say, is history. With the unwarranted dismissal of the emaciated civilian
government in October 1958, and the imposition of the first of a series of
martial laws in the country, the fig leaf that had been hedging the army
pulling the strings from behind the scene dropped, and the total military
takeover of all national institutions in the country became formal.

Military rule in Pakistan incorporated American interests in its

national affairs in a more systematized and robust manner. General
Ayub Khan–the ‘swell guy’ in the eyes of his American mentors–moved
quickly to cement the ties with Washington with great élan and oblige his
‘friends’ (he insisted, in his ghost-written memoirs that they were not his
masters) generously with concessions they had been seeking for years.
Ayub Khan gave a free hand to Washington to set up military bases on
Pakistan’s soil, something they could not convince Liaquat Ali to do. The
U-2 spy scandal in which the Soviets, in May 1960, shot down over their
territory an American spy aircraft and publicly paraded its pilot,
Commander Gary Powers, exposed Ayub Khan’s dangerous ploy, besides
incurring the public wrath of Nikita Khruschev.

Ayub Khan also aspired for the title of Washington’s most loyal ally in
the region by launching in concert with Turkey and Iran, two other
lynchpins of the American security cordon around the Soviet Union, a
supposedly economic-oriented regional association, called the Regional
Cooperation for Development (RCD). But the move was inspired solely to
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lend greater teeth to American stranglehold over the region, stretching

from the Mediterranean to the Arabian Sea, and bind it ever more closely
with the American network of regional alliances aimed at the communist
bloc.

All this pandering to American regional and global interests was going
on in an autocratic Pakistan, at a time when the bulk of the newly freed
Third World countries were organizing themselves zealously under the
canopy of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), to chart a course of action
in global affairs free of any constraints and limitations for their
sovereignty.

Ayub Khan managed to get away with his haemorrhaging of

Pakistan’s foreign policy orientation because he was not accountable to
any democratic calling or institution. Moreover, in what was destined to
become a template for all subsequent Bonapartes of Pakistan, he had
conflated his narrow parochial interest–the interest of Pakistan’s highly
tenacious and resilient ruling oligarchy made up of conniving feudals,
military barons and power hungry bureaucrats–with that of Pakistan’s
national interest.

Since then, the interest of this ruling cabal has ruled the roost under
successive military regimes, masqueraded as the core interest of
Pakistan. Ironically, because of it, what was deemed from the inception of
Pakistan as its real core interest–the so-called ‘unfinished agenda’ of the
Partition of India–Kashmir, has become an unattainable target for
Pakistan. Three wars with India, largely over Kashmir, have not dented
India’s resolve to hold on to its prized possession of Kashmir. Conversely,
the five decades old status quo in Kashmir has chipped away Pakistan’s
earlier resolve to bend India and wrest concessions from it.

Pakistan became increasingly isolated on Kashmir as it slipped deeper

into the quicksand of its military alliances with a neo-imperialist power.
In the process, it lost irretrievably whatever little moral support it had
garnered in the comity of nations on this dispute with India in the early
years of the conflict.

Second phase: Brief interlude

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s rise to power, after the truncation of Pakistan in the
dark shadow of the tragedy of December 1971, ushered in a period of
course-correction in the foreign policy of the country. It was Bhutto who
managed to extricate Pakistan out of the anomalies of its defence
alliances and attachments with the US. But the damage had been done
by then; Pakistan’s credentials had become suspicious in the eyes of those
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in the comity of nations that viewed military alliances with great

mistrust. To date, Pakistan remains saddled with the stigma of its
erstwhile military alliances with a neo-imperialist power.

Although he flaunted his credentials as a foreign policy ace with

characteristic arrogance, Bhutto was also guilty of serious errors of
judgment on foreign policy issues that made him look like an amateur.
Bhutto’s first mistake was the theatrical, almost petulant, manner of his
decision to take Pakistan out of the Commonwealth. It was a decision
taken in sheer pique, because the British government had hurt his
‘higher-than-the Himalayas’ ego. That was a crystal clear indication of
how fragile Pakistan’s foreign relations were in the hands of a feudal-
socialist who, despite his protestations of being a democrat, brooked no
interference in his feudal style of governance. The Commonwealth was
the first litmus test of his sobriety as a leader, which he failed. The
Commonwealth was not Britain alone but a multi-ethnic mosaic held
together by the English language. Besides, despite its aura of an
exclusive club, it was still the largest association of independent countries
with a lot of common denominators binding them loosely. Because of
Bhutto’s knee-jerk behaviour, Pakistan was deprived of a considerable
range of benefits and perks–for its nationals, if not for the government–
enjoyed by the member states. It took 16 years, and Bhutto’s own
daughter, to rectify the error in the late 1980s.

Bhutto committed an even bigger wrong at Simla, in 1972, when he

signed away, on proddings by Indira Gandhi, the international nature of
the quarter-century-old Kashmir dispute. Up to that point, Pakistan had
vigorously pursued a policy line on Kashmir that accorded the highest
primacy to the skein of UN Security Council resolutions on the dispute.
But at Simla, Bhutto buckled under pressure and agreed to the Indian
demand to downgrade the dispute into a purely bilateral issue between
the two countries, India and Pakistan. This virtually sounded the death-
knell for any kind of UN role in the dispute. India has copiously
capitalized on Bhutto’s surrender at Simla and has since refused to allow
any third party intervention in the Kashmir dispute, thus leaving
Pakistan with practically no wiggle room to manoeuvre. This was an
unfortunate sacrifice of Pakistan’s core foreign policy interest, one that
Bhutto had championed with great élan and zest as the foreign minister
of Ayub Khan.

Bhutto fell for the Indian ploy because he was anxious to get the
90,000 Pakistani POWs freed from India. The canny politician in him told
him that he would become an instant hero in the eyes of the Pakistan
Army if he could get its officers and jawans released from their prison
camps in India. So his personal interest was conflated with national
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interest. In fact, whatever was deemed an asset to feather his nest

became, instantly, the national interest. Bhutto was no different in his
lust for absolute power than Ayub Khan, the military soldier of fortune
whom he so routinely demonized and denounced.

Third and ongoing phase: Client state?

Bhutto paid the price of whatever innovation and independence he had

ushered into Pakistan’s foreign policy. With a lot of help and input from
its foreign friends and mentors in the US–the same global power that had
shunned and ditched Pakistan every time its assistance was needed, in
1965 or 1971–the Pakistan Army quickly put the clock back to where it
was before Bhutto turned it on its head. Bhutto’s nemesis, the new
Bonaparte of Pakistan, General Zia-ul-Haq had taken note of the fact
that the maverick leader had been made a ‘horrible example’, in the
words of that non-apologetic champion and promoter of American
hegemonism in the world, Henry Kissinger, because of daring to thumb
his nose at the greatest superpower of our times. He was determined not
to repeat that mistake. Afghanistan gave him just the opening he was
waiting for to get into the American orbit; Pakistan has stayed there ever
since and shows no inclination or desire to get out of it, or move away
from it.

Those arguing in defence of Zia-ul-Haq contend that the Soviet

invasion of Afghanistan, in December 1979, galvanized Zia-ul-Haq’s sense
of pan-Islamism to rise in support of the Afghans. But that would be
stretching Zia-ul-Haq’s Islamism a little beyond reasonable limits. His
Islamic brotherhood was taking him nowhere, even among his Arab
brothers for whom he pretended to have a special niche in his heart. They
were angry and annoyed with him, to the extent of not even standing on
diplomatic niceties, because he had reneged on his ‘solemn’ commitment
to them to not hang Bhutto. So, Zia-ul-Haq seized the Afghan jihad
against the Soviets with both hands, more so because it offered him the
God-sent opportunity to ingratiate himself with the Americans, who got
their foot in the Afghan door only to kick the rival Soviet superpower in
the teeth.

For Zia-ul-Haq, getting Pakistan entangled as a partisan into the

superpower duel, fought on Afghan soil with no-holds-barred, was the
perfect antidote to his erstwhile pariah status in the global community,
including the Muslim states. General Musharraf did exactly the same
thing two decades later, borrowing from Zia-ul-Haq’s book, chapter and
verse, to bring his own isolation in the comity of nations to an end.
George Bush’s much-heralded, so-called ‘war on terror’, became
Musharraf’s ticket to international stardom and legitimacy in a copycat
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reprise of Zia-ul-Haq’s instant camaraderie with Ronald Reagan’s

undeclared war against the ‘evil empire.’

For Zia-ul-Haq, involvement in Afghanistan may have meant

allegiance to faith and affirmation of Pakistan’s pan-Islamic identity, as
far as support for the Afghan victims of Soviet aggrandizement was
concerned. However, he negated its Islamic component by agreeing to
become a conduit for one superpower battling another with the sole intent
of bleeding it to death. Becoming complicit with the US did nothing to
augment Zia-ul-Haq’s religious credentials. On the contrary, he abused
and undermined the pan-Islamist passion of his countrymen who felt
genuinely repelled by the naked aggression of a non-believing communist
superpower against a poor and defenceless Muslim neighbour of
Pakistan.

Donning the mantle of an American agent-state, Pakistan under Zia-

ul-Haq did a terrible disservice to its national and foreign policy interest.
The US had no brief for Zia-ul-Haq’s Islamic faith or fervour. Nor did it
feel particularly moved by the plight of the oppressed Afghans whose
freedom had been snuffed out by the Russian invaders. It was using
Pakistan to reach the Soviets’ jugular in Afghanistan, and the Afghans
fighting the Soviets for their freedom were only pawns on the chessboard
of a proxy war.

The American credentials vis-à-vis Pakistan’s pivotal interest in

acquiring nuclear parity with India were known to be suspect up to that
point. The US had brazenly targeted Pakistan’s nuclear programme ever
since it had been commissioned under Bhutto. Zia-ul-Haq, to give him
credit, had stuck by the national pursuit to access nuclear power to match
rival India. However, by giving the Americans a free run of Pakistan, in
the name of facilitating the Afghan jihad against the Soviets, Zia-ul-Haq
was taking a huge risk and could have, unwittingly, exposed it to
sabotage by the Americans.

In the process of pulling the American chestnut out of the fire of

Afghanistan, Zia-ul-Haq also allowed the Afghans to run berserk all over
Pakistan. It was a hospitality bordering on self-destruction. The Afghans
abused Pakistan’s hospitality with impunity. A rampant drug and gun
culture in Pakistan was an immediate and direct blowback of Pakistan’s
fervent patronage of the Afghan resistance against the Soviets.

An even bigger scourge were the Taliban, whose rise in Afghanistan

after the defeat of the Soviets, was perhaps the biggest blunder of a
Pakistan policy conceived and implemented by its intelligence agencies.
Even if one were to give the benefit of doubt to Pakistan’s overarching
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and ubiquitous intelligence agencies for not directly bringing the Taliban
into power in Afghanistan, it is an incontrovertible fact that it was the
ISI that pampered the Taliban and smoothed their way to get a
stranglehold over Afghanistan. Extending official recognition to the
Taliban as the de jure government of Afghanistan was a decision of the
Pakistani intelligence outfit and not that of the Foreign Office.

The dubious argument of Afghanistan providing the much-needed

strategic depth to Pakistan was the alibi used to justify Pakistan being
friendly and more than business-like with the Taliban. But this
justification lost all its logic and relevance with both India and Pakistan
becoming nuclear powers, soon after. The cover of Afghanistan’s much-
touted strategic depth was punctured the moment India acquired an
atomic bomb. Pakistan’s military geniuses could no longer wield the
Afghan card to buttress their ‘strategic depth’ mantra in the context of
conventional warfare. Sadly, the ruling oligarchy of Pakistan never seems
to have realized that ‘strategic depth,’ in the real sense of the word, comes
to a country in two ways: by building national institutions that would be
resilient enough to flourish on their own strength and not be dependent
on this or that personality or ‘strongman’; and by cultivating neighbours
to have the best of relations with them, thus eliminating the need for
inordinate reliance on military parity or a balance of terror, vis-à-vis the
neighbours.

Whether one may like it or not, the most important neighbour to

Pakistan is India, in relation to which Pakistan has consistently had an
adversarial relationship. The legacy of strained, and at times overtly
hostile, relations with India is, no doubt, a two-way process in which the
input from India has been as much negative and counterproductive as
from Pakistan. However, there is a qualitative difference in the two
inputs. India, the bigger component of the equation, has never suffered
from the fear factor that has routinely blighted Pakistan’s policy and
posture against India. The vested interest in Pakistan, with deliberate
design, has allowed enmity with India to simmer on the front burner. The
fear card, of an India determined to overrun Pakistan and snuff out its
independence and sovereignty, has been wielded so that no questions
should be asked about Pakistan’s bloated military and defence
establishment. The same card has also been played over and over again
to trump the country’s democratic culture and its evolution in the name
of augmenting order and security, both internally and externally.

That the military oligarchy of Pakistan did not favour the country’s
politicians pursuing a course vis-à-vis India outside the military-okayed
box was in full evidence in the manner the army brass literally pulled the
rug from under Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s initiative to turn a corner
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in the tortuous course of relations with India. The Pakistani top brass,
led by the newly-appointed Chief of the Army Staff, General Pervez
Musharraf, boycotted the Prime Minister’s reception for his Indian guest,
Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee, in Lahore in February 1999.

General Musharraf’s defiance of the civilian government’s peace

initiative was in keeping with the oligarchic ambitions of the army
generals who must always cry wolf on India in order to have justification
for maintaining the large army that Pakistan can ill-afford at the cost of
badly needed inputs into social infrastructure, like public health and
education. Pakistan’s Human Development Index (HDI) is one of the
lowest in the world–lower even than some of the poor countries of Africa–
largely because of the heavy disparity between expenditure on defence
and that on socio-economic indices. In the 2006 HDI report of the UN,
Pakistan ranked 134 out of 175 member states of the UN surveyed,
ranking below Laos, Comoros, Botswana, and even a cloistered country
like Myanmar (Burma); it ranked only above countries like Bhutan and
Papua New Guinea.

The cataclysm of 9/11 may have caused distress to many. To General

Musharraf, however, it was a heavenly intervention to put an end to his
diplomatic isolation. Literally overnight, he was bestowed the title of a
front line soldier in George W. Bush’s open-ended ‘war against terror.’ No
doubt, this was a remarkable change of fortune for a general who, until
that moment, was shunned by the world to such an extent that President
Clinton would not agree to have himself photographed with him during a
four-hour hectoring halt in Islamabad. George Bush’s memory of the
general was so weak that, at a widely reported television interview
during the 2000 presidential campaign, he could not recall the Pakistani
leader’s name and famously sufficed to refer to him as ‘the general.’

Without a modicum of doubt, General Musharraf’s rise to

international stardom was a reprise of General Zia-ul-Haq breaking loose
from his isolation in 1979. But in equally identical fashion, the change of
status remained entirely personal, and almost totally devoid of a national
consensus backing the transformation of a leader’s fortunes. Just as Zia-
ul-Haq had cast the die in favour of joining America’s war against the
rival superpower of his own bat, Musharraf, too, took the plunge into
George Bush’s ‘crusade’ entirely on his own. If one goes by the account of
the sequence of events following the apocalypse of 9/11, as recorded in his
book, Bush At War, the Watergate-famed Bob Woodward argues that
General Musharraf relented, then and there, to each one of the US
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demands catalogued by Secretary of State Colin Powell in his telephone

call, the third day after 9/11.1

Did Musharraf try to ascertain the wishes of the people of Pakistan on

the sea change he was going to bring about in the country’s policy on
Afghanistan? Were any representatives of the people consulted before the
seismic volte-face in Pakistan’s international posture was made? Was any
thought given to what impact Pakistan’s role reversal in Afghanistan will
have on its standing in the global community, especially in the Muslim
world to which Pakistan paid so much lip service? The answers to all
these questions must be in the negative.

The only light guiding General Musharraf’s path was his own status
and stature. His sole concern, before 9/11, was rivetted on seeking the
legitimacy and recognition he lacked in the comity of nations, especially
in the West. Joining Bush’s crusade was going to make him a ‘legitimate’
player on the global stage. That feeling was enough to sway him off his
feet and drive him into the waiting arms of the US war lobby.

Let us, briefly, see what ‘rewards’ General Musharraf’s decision has
brought to Pakistan? He may have become, briefly, the toast of the town
in Washington, given the patina of a front line soldier vital for the success
of the war against terrorism. But his charm offensive soon turned into an
open offensive against his policy in regard to Afghanistan. As the US got
caught up in the bog of Afghanistan and the Taliban’s counter-offensive
punctured the American facade of a ‘quick fix’ in that war ravaged
country, Musharraf’s image in the American media changed. The General
has since been routinely pilloried in the establishment media, which now
rules the roost in Washington, as ‘not doing enough’ and ‘playing on both
sides of the street.’

The Bush administration, for its sake and with an eye on its
campaign against the Afghans, may still hail Musharraf as a steadfast
ally and front line soldier but the media and Washington’s think tank-
based intelligentsia holds a different opinion and subscribes to the myth,
wholeheartedly, that Musharraf’s heart is not in the US and NATO-led
campaign in Afghanistan.

While Musharraf may take some satisfaction from what he might

regard as his still intact rapport with the American government,
especially with the incumbent of the White House, this has not been the
fortune of the Pakistani people or the Pakistani nation. Pakistanis in the
US became a favourite target of America’s Islamophobia in the immediate

1 Bob Woodward, Bush at War (New York: Simon & Shuster, 2002), p. 59.
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aftermath of 9/11. Tens of thousands of them were rounded up on charges

of immigration law violations; thousands were deported peremptorily and
unceremoniously to Pakistan; thousands others made a beeline to the
Canadian border to seek asylum.

Nobody knows how many Pakistani nationals were taken to the

American Gulag, the notorious Guantanamo internment camp in Cuba.
According to Pakistan’s Home Minister, Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao, at
least 35 of them are still held there without any charges against them,
despite five years of rigorous imprisonment. Human rights groups
throughout the world have catalogued the inhuman treatment of these
prisoners caught in the limbo of America’s blatant disregard of the rights
of POWs under the Geneva Conventions and its persistent violations of
the norms of international law and convention.

Pakistan’s image in general in the US, and among its European allies,
is that of a country rife with religious fundamentalism. The US media
has been in the forefront of painting this picture of Pakistan, with the
tacit endorsement of the Bush administration. Pakistan is still a pariah
as far as its credibility as a responsible nuclear power is concerned. Dr.
Qadeer Khan has become a punching bag for those who cannot bring
themselves to accept a Muslim state entering the exclusive nuclear club.
Pakistan is being ruthlessly demonized as a purveyor of nuclear
technology and knowhow to ‘rogue’ states.

No doubt Pakistan’s foreign policy, over the last six decades, has
meandered and followed a tortuous course. And yet there is one
creditable success story: the lone ‘silver star’, so to speak, on its
scorecard. The framers of Pakistan’s foreign policy, both civilians and
generals have, so far, successfully parried the enormous and crude
American pressure and blandishments to cap off the country’s nuclear
capability and power. This is one creditable example of Pakistan standing
up to an international bully in the defence of its national interest.

There is neither reason nor incentive for Pakistan to succumb to

American arm-twisting to sign on to NPT or CTBT, especially in the face
of Western reluctance to ask any questions about Israel’s well-known
nuclear arsenal or India’s now American-sanctified nuclear expansion.
The Bush administration simply would not countenance treating
Pakistan, a front line ‘ally’ in the ‘war against terror,’ at par with India in
the ‘nuclear club.’

NPT, in any case, has been used by the Western nuclear powers to
augment their nuclear monopoly at the expense of the legitimate and
peaceful, civil-oriented, programmes of the developing countries. What is
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being done to Iran, a signatory to NPT, is fully illustrative of this cartel

mentality and hegemonic syndrome dictating terms to the non-nuclear
world. Pakistan cannot, and should not, barter away its nuclear autarky
and make it a prisoner to Indian whims or American pressure. This is one
foreign policy card that must not be squandered. At stake is our
credibility as a sovereign state.

The Bush administration has showered India with the status of a most
favoured nation for the transfer of nuclear technology; it is not prepared
to share even a shred of that with its ‘front line ally,’ Pakistan. It has
been told, in so many words, that it should not expect to be on the same
pedestal with India. In spite of so much denigration being heaped on
Pakistan, General Musharraf has remained as steadfast a soldier of the
US global imperial interests as General Ayub was in his days, or General
Zia-ul-Haq in his.

On Musharraf’s watch, and under relentless prodding from

Washington, the Pakistan Army has been engaged, on a regular footing,
in the tribal areas of Pakistan–the prickly hedge of the heyday of British
imperialism in this part of the world. To date, the casualty toll of this
adventure in the frontier land is a stiff 700 Pakistani military personnel,
soldiers and officers, killed, according to the official tally; the actual toll
could be considerably higher. But irrespective of how many lives may
have been lost in the process of pleasing General Musharraf’s neo-
imperialist mentors, it has never been deemed ‘enough’ or sufficient by
the power that be; the goalpost of expectations of Pakistan has been
shifting all the time and Pakistan is being lambasted for ‘not doing
enough.’

And what about the people of Pakistan? Are they in accord with what
the military regime has been doing in their name? The fact of the matter
is that the chasm between the interest of the rulers and that of the people
of Pakistan, the so-called silent majority, has never been greater than
what it is today. The years-long military operation in the tribal areas has
deeply fissured national cohesion and strained the fabric of allegiance to
the state, not only in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA)
and NWFP but also in Balochistan, where a quasi insurgency against
Islamabad’s edict is being fuelled by a crisis of confidence between the
centre and the province.

Popular disapproval of the policies of the Musharraf regime are

finding an echo in the swelling curve of anti-Americanism in the people of
Pakistan. Dozens of independent surveys–American, European and
Pakistani–have time and again arrived at the same conclusion: that the
US, since 9/11, is seen by an overwhelming majority of people in our
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‘global village’ as a dangerous, almost lawless, ‘rogue’ state, with no

regard in its actions for international law or conventions. The negative
image of the US is interpolated in the mind of a Pakistani with his
government’s subservience to Washington’s diktat. The Musharraf
regime, in the common sense of a Pakistani man on the street is nothing
but a lackey of American global expansionism and neo-imperialism.

An average Pakistani is not swayed by the official rhetoric of

‘enlightened moderation’, whatever it may stand for. What he sees with
his eyes is that Pakistan is burning its fingers in Afghanistan in trying to
pull the American chestnut out of the fire. Pakistan still plays host to at
least three million Afghan refugees on its soil, while the government
stoutly refuses to bring one-tenth of this number of Pakistanis stranded
in Bangladesh for well over three decades–the so-called pariah
Pakistanis, derisively named, and consigned to the blind alley of history,
as Biharis.

The common man of Pakistan knows that his green passport is not
worth much for American immigration, and getting an American visa is
the most difficult for not only an ordinary Pakistani but, occasionally, for
even the privileged and the powerful. So untrusting is the US
government of its front line ally that no PIA aircraft is allowed to fly to a
US airport non-stop from Pakistan; it must stop over somewhere in the
West in order to qualify for landing rights in America.

Because of this accretion of disconnect between the ruling elite and

the man on the street, Pakistan is being consumed by utter frustration
and gloom about the direction of the country.

Indeed it would be unrealistic to deny that there is a very serious

problem of religious fundamentalism in Pakistan. It is also true that
Pakistan has become a crucible of militancy in the post-9/11 period. But
the American-friendly policy of the present ruling order in Pakistan is the
principal reason for the mushrooming growth of violence and terrorism.
Zia-ul-Haq’s intoxication with the Afghan jihad against the Soviet Union–
and in cahoots with the US–had spawned for Pakistan the bitter legacy of
gun and drug culture that also, in the final analysis, bred the nightmare
phenomenon of the Taliban. Pakistan and the Pakistanis are still
grappling with the fallout of that shortsighted fervour of a military ruler.
Ironically, Afghanistan ultimately became the tripwire for Zia-ul-Haq’s
tragic death. General Musharraf, in identical fashion, has used
Afghanistan to promote his personal fortunes by making a 180-degree
turn on his own erstwhile patronage of the Taliban and committing
Pakistan on the side of the Bush’s ‘crusade.’ In a re-run of the Zia era,
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Pakistan is desperately trying to fend off the inevitable blowback of its

involvement with a superpower’s global interests.

The most ironic element in this dance in a circle foreign policy for
more than half a century is that no Pakistani strongman seems ready to
see the reality that a foreign policy shorn of popular sanction of the
people of Pakistan is unlikely to serve the nation’s interests. Likewise,
any relationship between a global superpower and a middle rank country,
like Pakistan, is bound to be bumpy and uneven. The latest reminder of
this is implicit in the American crude pressure on Pakistan to desist from
entering into a tripartite deal with Iran and India for importing Iranian
natural gas.

The tragedy of the people of Pakistan remains unabated for the simple
reason that their interests and aspirations are not reflected in the foreign
policy practised and exploited in their name. The bane of Pakistan is not
only its feudal and non-democratic culture but also a more dangerous
culture of arrogance that has laced its firmly entrenched ruling elite’s
disdain for the will of the people. Recurring reliance on a distant and
alien power, which has no brief for Pakistan’s ideological underpinnings,
and no empathy for its peculiar genesis, has spread despondency among
the people and cursed its rollercoaster foreign policy. The result is a
country groping in the dark for its interest and what must be done to
secure it on a long-term basis.