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| India-Pakistan |
| For the US, Haqqanis are irreconcilable |
| 2011-08-02 |
| Washington's plans for Afghanistan must not exclude Mullah Umar and the Haqqani network just as Islamabad's plans must not be exclusively based on them," Friday Times editor in chief Najam Sethi had said in his July 15 editorial. Indeed, the Haqqanis are the most operationally far-reaching and potent actors in the insurgent melange of the borderlands, but their lineage and structure remain ill understood in both Pakistan and the West. The Haqqani Nexus, a new report from the Combating Terrorism Centre at West Point, therefore arrives at the right moment to inform ongoing debates over the nature of Pakistani militancy, its relationship to the future of Afghanistan, and its sustenance over the years by the Pakistani military. An institute based at the US Military Academy is hardly a disinterested party in these questions. Don Rassler and Vahid Brown have, however, meticulously sourced their report - much of it from Urdu and Pashto, rather than just Arabic, documents. They incorporate the first known review of thousands of pages of jihadist magazines and letters between Haqqani commanders. Their conclusions are thus grounded on this scholarship, not American animosities towards Rawalpindi. Three primary strands run through The Haqqani Nexus: the foundational role of the Haqqanis in the global jihadist movement; the marriage of convenience between the Haqqanis and the Afghan Taliban; and the enduring utility of the group to the ISI in its pursuit of that decades-old chimera, "strategic depth". Haqqanis and Al Qaeda The first contention is that the Haqqanis have been "more important to the development and sustainment of Al Qaeda and the global jihad than any other single actor or group". Rassler and Brown show that the routing of supplies to the mujahidin through Haqqani-dominated turf greatly empowered the group, turning its camps into the "single most common destination for the Arabs who went beyond Peshawar in the 1980s". Indeed, "to join the nascent Al Qaeda ... meant first training with the Haqqani network". Through the 1990s, the Haqqanis stressed the need to expand jihad globally even as bin Laden remained focused on the Arabian Peninsula. The Haqqanis hosted bin Laden on his return to Afghanistan in 1996, and helped the latter to circumvent the various restrictions imposed on him by the Taliban. After 9/11, US counterterrorism efforts forced Al Qaeda and the Haqqanis closer together. Ayman al Zawahiri's wife, for instance, took refuge in a Haqqani-owned building when she was killed in a US airstrike in 2001. The cumulative effect has been "a sense of shared suffering and ideological affinity", which explains why the US considers the Haqqanis to be fundamentally irreconcilable actors whose exclusion from the Afghan stage is the sine qua non of any settlement. Haqqanis and the Taliban In contrast, The Haqqani Nexus portrays the Taliban-Haqqani link as far looser. Why, then, do the Haqqanis remain "a central partner for the [Balochistan-based] Quetta Shura Taliban", even enjoying representation on the Taliban's central coordinating body, the Rahbari Shura? The answer is simply that the Haqqanis bridge the cultural gulf between the lowland tribes of Loya Kandahar (home to most of the Taliban's leadership) and the mountain tribes of Loya Paktia, allowing the Taliban to extend their brand and coercive power well beyond Kandahar, and "project itself as a cohesive national ... movement". Major attacks on Kabul are usually of Haqqani provenance, highlighting the group's "uniquely valuable asset: a geographically central platform for the delivery of violence". Haqqanis and Pakistan And so we reach the core issue in the blighted US-Pakistan relationship. Over the past decade, US policymakers have reassessed "the myth of Talqaeda", to use Alex Strick van Linschoten's wonderful phrase. In Washington, reconciliation is now respectable. But the Haqqanis, from their inception wedded to global jihad, are deemed beyond the pale. Pakistan, conversely, "has long been a core sponsor and beneficiary" of the group. It functions as "a kinetic strike force through which Pakistan can achieve important signalling effects vis-a-vis India and its regional posture". This was more than evident from the prominent attacks by the Haqqanis on the Indian embassy in Kabul. As Rassler and Brown note, another troubling implication of this relationship is that "Pakistan could have played a more influential role in the development of Al Qaeda than has thus far been recognised". The Haqqanis do serve as interlocutors between Pakistani state and the Pakistani Taliban (TTP). But this itself is a reflection of the fact that the TTP and its flourishing insurgency are "outgrowths", as the authors put it, of a self-destructive - and ongoing - process facilitated by the ISI over three decades. Nearly 2,500 Pakistani soldiers were killed in the Tribal Areas between 2004 and May 2010. A push into North Waziristan would lead to the deaths of thousands more - but not nearly as many as will perish in the years ahead if Waziristan remains a petri dish of jihadis. Regrettably, it is that course - the percolation of militancy in the strategic depths of the ISI's sandbox - on which Pakistan seems set. Shashank Joshi is a doctoral student at Harvard University; and also works as an Associate Fellow, Royal United Services Institute |
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