INTERVIEW
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definitely has to be some kind of a change in
the posture of the Indian military vis-à-vis
Pakistan. If currently nine corps are poised
along the India-Pakistan border that gives a
very different signal to the Pakistani military.
They are not going to lower their guard. I
believe something like 32 or 34 of the strike
airfields are also aligned against Pakistan. So
that is the potential that worries the Pakistan
military, because their job is to defend
Pakistan. Now, if you remove the causes of
any conflict, and if you remove the causes of
hostility, then it wouldn’t matter where they
are. But, for the time being, because a number of these issues remain unresolved, this
obviously does concern the Pakistanis. That
doesn’t mean that they don’t recognize the
immediate danger from within.
At the same hearing, strategic affairs expert
Ashley Tellis brought up what he called the
schizophrenia of the Pakistani security establishment, where the Pakistani military and
the ISI want to confront the internal extremist and terrorist problem, but selectively.
They want to pick and choose some of the
groups that they want to go after and groups
like the Lashkar-e-Tayiba are not on their
radar because they are a strategic asset in
terms of the military and the ISI’s campaign
against India.
Ashley is wrong on that. That relationship
(Pakistan army-ISI-Lashkar) changed even
under Musharraf and he (Tellis) also misspoke when he told the committee that the
Lashkar has a large annual jamboree at
Muridke (in Pakistan occupied Kashmir). I
believe he was referring to the meeting of the
Tablighi Jamaat — which is a missionary group, not a militant group — and that takes place not at Muridke but in
Raiwind. So, he misspoke on that too. There is no annual
jamboree of the Lashkar-e-Tayiba which takes place or
which is allowed by the Pakistani government. At one time
there may have been a relationship between them (the
army, the ISI and Lashkar), but now with the increasing
financial autonomy of these groups, that control or that
relationship doesn’t exist. Now some of the Punjabi Taliban
or the Punjabi militant groups like the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi
or the Sipah-e-Sahaba — both Sunni militant groups from
central and southern Punjab — have been identified as
working with Al Qaeda and with the TTP (
Tehrik-i-Taliban) in FATA (Federally Administered Tribal Areas).
The Le T has not yet been identified in that role, but the Le T
has been obviously linked in many reports to the SIMI
(Students Islamic Movement of India) and to the HuJI
(Harkat-ul Jihad al-Islami) in Bangladesh, which was the
reason for my concern, which I had expressed to the committee. Thus, they can become a transnational conglomerate and they can create difficulties between India and
Pakistan.
If there are no links anymore between the ISI and
JIM YOUNG/REUTERS
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi at the State Department, March 24
Lashkar, how do you explain the retired Pakistani major
Abdur Rehman being the handler of Lashkar operative
David Coleman Headley in the Mumbai attack conspiracy?
That will happen anywhere. It happened in India too
with the attack on the Samjhauta Express — you had a
retired colonel from the Indian Army (involved). That
doesn’t mean that the army took a decision to have that
colonel participate in the bombing attack on the Samjhauta
Express. So, to draw too much out of these kinds of relationships is really at this point not very helpful, particularly when there is now clearly the (Pakistan) government policy to disassociate themselves and distance themselves
from these groups.
At the same hearing, you agreed with the consensus of
the other experts that resolving the Kashmir problem is not
going to remove the threat of groups like the Lashkar, even
though they were initially formed to fight against India in
Kashmir, because the aim of these groups is to leverage
themselves into a position of power inside Pakistan and to
take control?
My point was not about removing the threat. My point
; Shuja Nawaz now writes for
The Huffington Post among
other publications.
; He has worked on projects with
RAND, the United States Institute of
Peace, The Center for Strategic and
International Studies, the Atlantic
Council, and other leading think
tanks on projects dealing with
Pakistan and the Middle East.
; In January 2009, he was appoint-
ed the first director of the South Asia
Center at the Atlantic Council.
A brilliant mind
; An alumnus of Gordon College,
Rawalpindi, and the Graduate
School of Journalism at Columbia
University, where he was a Cabot
Fellow and won the Henry Taylor
International Correspondent Award.
He was also a member of the prize-
winning team at Stanford Univer-
sity’s Publishing Program.
; He has headed three divisions of
the International Monetary
Fund, and worked with the
was in response to Congressman (Dan) Burton’s assertion
that without resolving Kashmir you can’t really tackle these
issues. My point was that even if Kashmir is resolved, these
groups will find some other excuse to raise support among
the population and to see if they can leverage themselves
into power. And, so, it makes it critical for both India and
Pakistan to make sure that they don’t give them these
opportunities where they can take advantage of differences
between the two countries.
For the first time, the Pakistani military has gone all out
in the Swat Valley, in South Waziristan and now in FATA.
One of the problems apparently has been that once they
have cleared this area of the Taliban and other extremist
groups, holding these areas has been a major problem.
And, of course, there has been criticism that the promised
American development aid to win the hearts and minds of
these populations have not been forthcoming or very slow
in coming, which has led to the Taliban to creep back into
these areas and intimidate the populations and/or recruit
among them. How do you address this situation and is this
a failing in US-Pakistan strategic planning in this fight
against terror?
This is not so much the fault of the United States,
although they could have focused on it much sooner. This
is much more an internal issue for Pakistan. The military is
on a war footing. But the civilian government does not
appear to be on a war footing. They need to show much
more clarity and aggressiveness in forging a policy and
implementing it so that they can work with the military
and take over from the military once the military has done
its job. That is only currently being met by different slogans
and rhetoric and it needs to be translated into action with
ministries and bodies set up that will be able to step in very
rapidly to take over in providing judicial systems, providing
administration, providing basic services, and most important of all, sending a well-trained, well-equipped police
force so that the military shouldn’t be the one that would be
policing the area after they’ve cleared it.
