Late last month a Pakistani Army major, captain and eight infantrymen, operating on U.S.-supplied intelligence, were killed in a Qaeda ambush near the Afghan border. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf continues to promise the risks are worth the rewards. But the rank and file are not so sure. Now, in mess halls and officer barracks throughout the country, soldiers are asking, “What’s in it for us?” Old grudges and new concerns may be giving rise to an anti-American feeling within the Pakistani officer corps, blunting the effectiveness of the U.S. war on terror. “The Americans always want our support, but then they don’t reciprocate on Kashmir or with long-term military or economic aid,” says one Army major. “We’ve been burned before.”
Indeed they have. In the 1980s, when Pakistan was a key American ally against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, bright young captains and colonels could study at West Point. Islamabad received impressive packages of U.S. military hardware from its Washington wish list, including F-16 fighters, M-48 tanks and vintage American warships. American training opened officers’ minds, while arms transfers put the best weapons in their hands. But Pakistan’s headlong pursuit of its nuclear-weapons program ended the courtship. In 1990, soon after the Soviets left Afghanistan, the U.S. Congress passed the Pressler amendment, prohibiting Pakistan from receiving any U.S. military training, arms or even spare parts because of its surreptitious nuclear ambitions. Almost overnight, Pakistan and its proud military went from being a favored American ally to a pariah. The American about-face stung Pakistan’s corps of young officers. “Many younger officers became anti-American, not for ideological reasons but because they thought Pakistan was being unfairly discriminated against,” says Rifaat Hussain, a Pakistani defense analyst who is now a visiting scholar at Stanford University. “The sanctions hurt the younger officers the most, resulting in feelings of anger, resentment and betrayal against the U.S.”
America’s abandonment of Pakistan changed the military’s mind-set, and left a void to be filled. “To make up for the lack of new technology, senior officers placed a greater emphasis on ideological motivation and orientation,” says retired Lt. Gen. Talat Masood. The lieutenants, captains and majors who were deprived of U.S. training in the 1990s are described today as being “more nationalistic, xenophobic, conservative” than their predecessors, according to retired Pakistani generals. “Lacking contact with the West, the officers’ world view began to change,” says Masood. “Their vision became more narrow and parochial and they became isolated and alienated from the West.” So when America dropped Pakistan cold in 1990, officers were more prone to listen to the shrill anti-American rhetoric coming from the religious right and the country’s Urdu-language press. Musharraf’s call to aid America’s antiterror war last year only increased the volume and fervor of anti-Americanism being delivered from pulpits and in the papers. “This anti-American line influences and shapes younger Army officers as well as the society as a whole,” says Husain Haqqani, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington. “That does not mean that the officers are on the same wavelength as the religious groups, but many agree with the basic anti-American and anti-Indian tenets of the Islamists.”
Musharraf has made a gallant effort to sell the concept that cooperation with America is in Pakistan’s national interest. He says that Pakistan has no alternative but to stop the perils of terrorism at home, and that the Americans can be crucial allies in that fight. He also tells his officers that the United States has promised to assist him in bringing India to the negotiating table over Kashmir, and that significant military aid will be forthcoming from Washington. So far most officers seem to be willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. But officers differ in their definitions of a terrorist. Some, especially those who served a tour of duty in the military’s powerful Inter-Services Intelligence branch and who helped train many of the militants for the Kashmir “jihad,” tend to sympathize with their former charges. And some younger officers worry that a blanket crackdown on militants comes dangerously close to the suppression of Islam.
Pakistani officers, young and old, see themselves as leaders of a “pro-people force,” says Rifaat Hussain. Consequently, the Pakistani Army is unlikely to launch assaults on right-wing religious parties as its counterparts in Algeria and Egypt have done, say retired officers. “The Army is very reluctant to be put into a situation in which they are in an eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with a popular demonstration, whether the protesters are Punjabi or tribesmen,” adds Hussain.
For that reason Musharraf was slow to deploy the Army in the tribal areas into which Taliban and Qaeda fighters fled to escape the heavy U.S. bombing campaigns. Many of the tribes are ethnic Pashtun and therefore have deep sympathies for the largely Pashtun Taliban and its Qaeda allies. The military is still haunted by the specter of a bloody, 18-month-long, anti-government tribal insurgency that broke out along the Afghan border in 1973. The Army was called in to crush the separatist revolt and has never divulged the extent of the carnage that led to the insurrection’s collapse. Now for the first time since the uprising, the Army has dispatched infantry regulars in large numbers–some 40,000–into the tribal areas to hunt the Taliban and Al Qaeda. But the troops are moving gingerly. “The Army is reluctant to disturb the status quo in the tribal belt in a manner that could provoke an unnecessary backlash and perhaps re-ignite anti-government activity,” says Hussain.
Musharraf has stonewalled Washington’s requests to allow U.S. troops into the tribal territories. He has also refused repeated American requests to increase the number of U.S. intelligence personnel operating there. Musharraf is intent on keeping their numbers in the dozens, not the hundreds. Those restrictions on the Americans sit well with most officers. “I don’t like working with Americans,” offers one senior Pakistani officer who says his views reflect those of younger officers. “Their demands keep increasing.” Not only are the number of FBI, CIA and U.S. Army personnel working with the Pakistani Army strictly limited, so are their size and color. Pakistan is refusing to allow “blacks, blonds and six-footers” to accompany the troops, according to the senior officer. They have to wear Pakistani Army uniforms, speak local languages and be able to pass as locals.
The Bush administration never tires of praising Musharraf and his military for their flawless cooperation with U.S. forces. But young Pakistani officers may not be doing all they could. “I don’t think there is going to be any deliberate disobedience because of the anti-Americanism,” says Haqqani. “But a lot of decisions taken at the top can be diluted by the time they reach the bottom.” If so, such anti-Western attitudes could significantly slow down, if not sabotage, operations.
While there is no evidence that younger, anti-American officers have disobeyed or watered down orders, Musharraf is eager to show some tangible benefits of the Army’s cooperation with the United States. “If Musharraf is willing to let the Pakistan Army continue to do the dirty work for the U.S. in the tribal areas, then he will have to show that the U.S. is delivering the goods,” says Hussain. Lately the Americans are trying to come up with some carrots, no matter how small. U.S. officials say that the military-training programs that were canceled in 1990 will resume shortly. The selection process is already underway to choose younger officers for training in the United States. Next month a small joint U.S.-Pakistani naval exercise is scheduled to begin, the first in years. Negotiations are also underway for Washington to supply Pakistan with “some pretty basic military stuff,” not planes or tanks but workaday weapons, say American officials. That’s a far cry from the military-aid packages of old, but it’s a start. The danger for the United States and Musharraf is that it may be too little, too late.
