The western border is the thing

For sixty years and more we have sought to protect ourselves from eastern winds whereas what has scorched and burnt us are the harsh, pitiless winds from the west, rising from the mists of Afghanistan and bearing down cruelly upon us. India has changed us in subtle ways and over time. Afghanistan’s impact has been crude, brutal and swift.
What Pakistan is today, a boiling pot of various extremist humours, a witches’ brew Macbeth would have been hard put to imagine, has been shaped by our fateful interaction with Afghanistan. Half-baked strategists swept by vague notions of reviving the glories of Islam – who gave them this mandate has yet to be discovered – tried to be king-makers of Afghanistan, in the process forgetting one of the most elementary lessons of Indian history. Invaders from Afghanistan and the lands beyond have shaped Indian history. It has not been the other way round.
Afghanistan has been on the boil for the last 30 years and nothing in the present suggests that when the Americans leave, or partially withdraw, their intervention less military triumph than sucking quagmire, the situation there is going to settle down. So as harsh winds continue to blow from that quarter Pakistan will keep suffering the consequences. We will still have to deal with the Taliban and Mullah Omar and, who knows, the detritus of the burden we could have done without: Al Qaeda. Sheikh Osama may have gone to the happy hunting grounds. His baneful legacy is likely to be around for some more time.
The Nato/American strikes on our border posts underscore a conclusion the Pakistani military mind has a hard time accepting: the threat to us is from the west not the east. But all our strategic theories, our military plans, our deployments and cantonments, are geared to fight the wars of yesterday, wars overtaken by changing circumstances and the march of time.
The Americans are building permanent military bases in Afghanistan at huge expense. Even if they conduct an Iraqi-style withdrawal, withdrawing most of their troops, in one form or the other they are likely to be in the neighbourhood for the foreseeable future. Pakistan does not need to contest their presence. The United States will do what it thinks is in its best interests without consulting us. We need to reorder our American relationship to ensure that (1) we don’t keep getting a raw deal and (2) that we are not taken for granted. But we don’t need to break up this relationship. Fine-tuning, yes, smashing the entire cutlery, no. That would be foolish and counter-productive.
So a more wary eye on our western marches: the time has come for that. The khasadars and the traditional tribal militias are no longer adequate, the threat from the west much more complicated for such simple nostrums. The Taliban are a problem for us, the Americans are a problem for us. The Taliban way of life and their philosophy, if their crude fundamentalism can be called that, are antithetical to our own. The idea of Pakistan only makes sense if it is cast in modern terms. As for the Americans, their presence fuels the fires of Afghan national resistance. No need to be coy on this score.
Now if this is the new threat that we face, our eastern deployment and our heavily-militarised eastern border make no sense at all. We have problems with India but the time may have come to ditch the old idea that India is out to destroy Pakistan. Germany could not fight on two fronts in the Second World War. It did but we know the consequences. The US, greatest military power on earth, had a hard time coping with two wars at the same time: Afghanistan and Iraq. The treasure expended is not the sole reason for America’s economic woes but it has been a huge contributing factor. With far less to go around we are stuck with two deployments: east and west. It doesn’t add up.
In Pakistani military thinking the enemy is India. From Kakul to Staff College to NDU this is the unchanging assumption. Tanks, submarines, F-16s and nuclear delivery systems are all meant for India. Much of India’s military hardware is meant for Pakistan. For both Pakistan and India it is not a question of ceding sovereignty or accepting hegemony but of removing the cobwebs of the past and trying to arrive at the threshold of a slightly more sane relationship.
Circumstances are urging Pakistan and its military command to engage in this rethink. This is a big task and will take some doing. How much harder when we are not getting even smaller things right? A case in point are the objections raised, unthinkingly for the most part, to the grant of ‘most favoured nation’ trading status to India. Are we determined to live in the past forever?
We should be more confident about ourselves. Next to the North Korea-South Korea border, the India-Pakistan border, including the Line of Control in Kashmir, is the craziest in the world. For our own good we need to open it up a bit. A long journey begins with the first steps. Removing or reducing trade restrictions are the first steps in this context. Once in place they can lead on to other things. But if we balk even at them how do we get the larger picture right?
Yes, we must compete with India but in the realm of the mind and the imagination. We had so many advantages in the beginning which could have been built upon to create an efficient and forward-looking republic. An evil star led us down the paths of mostly-mad adventurism. But that’s the past and let’s not moan too much about it. There is still time to turn things around but only if we reduce some of the hype at which we are so good at and try to live like a normal people. A sensible relationship with India, and a redefinition of national animosity, should be part of this larger equation.
For long the military has been the foremost agent of the status quo, the lord protector of the ancient ways of thinking. Now it faces a different task, to be the lead agent of change. The American border post strikes only emphasise this necessity. If our focus is to be on the west, some of the paranoid preoccupation with the east will have to be reduced or we will be distracting ourselves.
Nuclear assets will be true assets only if they allow greater flexibility in military thinking. If with all our nuclear gadgetry we are still wired for a sneak attack from the east then what we are dealing with is not the real world but the world of nightmares and bad dreams. For this the cure is in a psychiatrist’s consulting room.
The Pakistani problem is that there is no political oversight of military planning and military prioritising. The military works out its own assumptions with no one to second-guess it. Political oversight, however, does not flow from the articles of the Constitution. It is a function of competence and superior knowledge. Try explaining this to the political class. Try explaining this to the bonzes of the present order.
It is also a function of stability, the holy grail eluding Pakistan right from the moment of its birth. One crisis is scarcely over before another rears its head. A country perpetually on the edge, living always in interesting times. It is great for journalism and it is fun being a journalist in Pakistan, more fun than most other professions (including, I daresay, the oldest) but not that great for the country. A little less excitability...we could do with that.
Talking of maturity, is there nothing to be done about prohibition? This is not about morality or the lack of it. A country under prohibition is not a normal country. And a country not normal would face a difficult time reordering strategic priorities. Strategy and prohibition – the connection is closer than one may have thought.

Email: winlust@yahoo.com