No assessment of Pakistan’s present policy towards North Waziristan
can be complete without factoring in the complexities of the army’s hot
and cold relationship with the civilian leadership. These complexities
have had a strong bearing upon the strange no-peace-no-war situation
prevailing in this vital part of our western border.
Some domestic considerations that have held back a full-throttle military operation in North Waziristan
are easy to describe. These relate to costs, both material as well as
that which will inevitably come in the form of a blowback in the
country’s urban centres as a reaction to military strikes in the Agency.
It is amazing but true that most of the dozens of small and big
military operations in Pakistan have never had budgets sanctioned for
them at the federal level. There have been in-house assessments of the
financial implications by the army, but no separate allocations approved
by parliament and presented by the ministry of finance as a separate
spending head. The government has always assumed that the army has the
necessary flexibility of resources built into its existing defence
allocation to roll the tanks or fly the jets against an elusive enemy.
That is why little or no documentation is available to show how much has
been actually taken out of national resources to win these long drawn
out battles in some of the toughest terrains of the world.
While the military carries its own budgetary exercise and bills the
government for reimbursement, there is no special allocation named or
claimed by the federal government in its annual budgets of the last five
years. This means that while everyone has been shouting from the
rooftop about “mortal danger” to Pakistan in the shape of terrorism and
the “inescapable need to fight terrorists”, there has been no real
financial work done to fund the fight. Some of these money matters were
resolved because of the Coalition Support Fund
(CSF) reimbursements, which typically came late, but still did not hold
up operational planning because these were eventually paid, even if
partially. In case of North Waziristan, funding has been a real issue.
The CSF has become unreliable and the federal government does not seem
to be in the mood to foot the bill of almost Rs40 billion, which could
increase if the operation lingers on. Looking after the displaced
population and compensating for material damages, lost lives, injured
persons, rehabilitation and reconstruction would add more to the bill.
Is the government willing to foot the bill? Beyond stale rhetoric of
commitment to countering terrorism, no one gives a serious answer. In
fact, this question is not even asked anywhere in the power corridors.
The second cost consideration is the TTP’s targeting of business and commercial hubs,
assassinating political and religious leadership, besides blowing up
vital infrastructure in a bloody spree of coordinated attacks and
suicide hits. Can the country afford that? Is the political leadership
willing to absorb massive retaliation from the TTP in mainland Pakistan?
In private, most of the representatives of the parties that I have
spoken with are unwilling to experience another bout of extremist
terrorism in their midst. They want North Waziristan cleansed but not at
the cost of ruining their homes and disturbing their peaceful lives.
This across-the-board sentiment translates into big strategic
impediment: a half-hearted political leadership cannot craft a national
consensus on arguably the hardest and the longest of all Fata battles,
and the army is unwilling to start the operation without a clear-cut
direction and secure lines of public and political support.
In another country, these issues would have been categorised as usual
matters of coordination between the civilian and the military wings of
the state. After negotiations and adjustments, rough edges of the
divergence could have been filed and a united front put in place. But
Pakistan’s landscape is bumpy. Here, transparent and focussed
decision-making is permanently distorted by deep distrust between the
civilians and the military. It was in June this year that all plans were
supposed to be operationalised to move into North Waziristan but it was
always doubtful whether unity of thought and action — of the sort that
was witnessed in Swat, for example — could ever be achieved. These
doubts proved correct. Lately, every time the military high command has talked about the need to go after the militants in North Waziristan,
apprehensions have increased in the political circles that, perhaps,
this operation is being used as a means to create an unstable domestic
situation in order to postpone the upcoming elections. Such speculation
has been particularly rife within the PML-N, whose fears of a silent
coup have been reinforced by hardliners constantly harping on the theme
that the army would do anything to keep Nawaz Sharif out of power.
Another senior leader told me two months ago that he smelled “deep
conspiracy in the talk of North Waziristan operation” because, he said,
“this has been deliberately timed with elections. They know that law and
order situation can cause the election schedule to be disturbed. Even
emergency might have to be imposed. Who knows what might happen then.
Why do they (the army) want to do it now?”
Such fears have been subdued in the PPP camp but eyebrows were raised, for instance, when on August 14, General Ashfaq Pervaiz Kayani in his Abbottabad speech
used unusually harsh language in describing the state of national
affairs and in the same breath also spoke of the resolve to fight
extremism. The conclusions that most PPP leaders have drawn are not
different from those of the PML-N camp — apart from rounding up the TTP,
the North Waziristan operation can potentially fold up the political
system too. Now, whatever chances have been there for the civilians to
back a North Waziristan Operation have all dissolved in the heat of
suspicion and distrust of the generals’ intentions. The PML-N does not
want to back the operation this year, and neither does the PPP for that
matter — an army which would be the final battle against the TTP. It is
interesting to note that it is not just the civilians who have been
speaking from both sides of their mouths on North Waziristan. The army,
despite having prepared and positioned itself for the operation, has had
its head in a cloud of doubts. And this is primarily because of the
complex and contradictory nature of its engagement with Washington.