Prisoners of Geography Read online

  In the spring of 2015, the two countries agreed a $46 billion deal to build a superhighway of roads, railways and pipelines running 1,800 miles from Gwadar to China’s Xinjiang region. The China–Pakistan Economic Corridor, as it is called, will give China direct access to the Indian Ocean and beyond. In late 2015, China also signed a forty-year lease on 2,300 acres of land in the port area, to develop a massive ‘special economic zone’ and an international airport, all as part of the China– Pakistan Economic Corridor. Because both sides know that Baluchistan is likely to remain volatile, a security force of up to 25,000 men is being formed to protect the zone.

  Massive Chinese investment in building a land route such as this would make Pakistan very happy, and this is one of the reasons Pakistan will always seek to crush any secessionist movements that arise in the province. However, until more of the wealth Baluchistan creates is returned home and used for its own development, the area is destined to remain restive and occasionally violent.

  Islam, cricket, the intelligence services, the military and fear of India are what hold Pakistan together. None of these will be enough to prevent it from being pulled apart if the forces of separatism grow stronger. In effect Pakistan has been in a state of civil war for more than a decade, following periodic and ill-judged wars with its giant neighbour India.

  The first was in 1947, shortly after partition, and was fought over Kashmir, which in 1948 ended up divided along the Line of Control (also known as Asia’s Berlin Wall); however, both India and Pakistan continue to claim sovereignty.

  Nearly twenty years later Pakistan miscalculated the strength of the Indian military because of India’s poor performance in the 1962 India–China war. Tensions between India and China had risen due to the Chinese invasion of Tibet, which in turn had led India to give refuge to the Dalai Lama. During this brief conflict the Chinese military showed their superiority and pushed forward almost into the state of Assam near the Indian heartland. The Pakistan military watched with glee then, overestimating their own prowess, went to war with India in 1965 and lost.

  In 1984 Pakistan and India fought skirmishes at an altitude of 22,000 feet on the Siachen Glacier, thought to be the highest battle in history. More fighting broke out in 1985, 1987 and 1995. Pakistan continued to train militants to infiltrate across the Line of Control and another battle broke out over Kashmir in 1999. By then both countries were armed with nuclear weapons, and for several weeks the unspoken threat of an escalation to nuclear war hovered over the conflict before American diplomacy kicked in and the two sides were talked down. They came close to war again in 2001, and gunfire still breaks out sporadically along the border.

  Militarily, India and Pakistan are pitted against each other. Both sides say their posture is defensive, but neither believes the other and so they continue to mass troops on the border, locked together in a potential dance of death.

  The relationship between India and Pakistan will never be friendly, but were it not for the thorn of Kashmir in both sides it could potentially be cordial. As it is, India is content to see Pakistan divided within itself and will work to maintain that situation, and Pakistan will seek to undermine India, with elements within the state even supporting terror attacks inside India, such as the Mumbai massacre of 2008.

  The Kashmir issue is partially one of national pride, but it is also strategic. Full control of Kashmir would give India a window into Central Asia and a border with Afghanistan. It would also deny Pakistan a border with China and thus diminish the usefulness of a Chinese–Pakistani relationship. The Pakistani government likes to trumpet that its friendship with China is ‘taller than the mountains and deeper than the oceans’. This is not true, but it is useful in sometimes making the Americans nervous about cutting Pakistan off from the massive financial aid it receives from Washington.

  If Pakistan had full control of Kashmir it would strengthen Islamabad’s foreign policy options and deny India opportunities. It would also help Pakistan’s water security. The Indus River originates in Himalayan Tibet but passes through the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir before entering Pakistan and then running the length of the country and emptying into the Arabian Sea at Karachi.

  The Indus and its tributaries provide water to two-thirds of the country: without it the cotton industry and many other mainstays of Pakistan’s struggling economy would collapse. By a treaty that has been honoured through all of their wars, India and Pakistan agreed to share the waters; but both populations are growing at an alarming rate, and global warming could diminish the water flow. Annexing all of Kashmir would secure Pakistan’s water supply. Given the stakes, neither side will let go; and until they agree on Kashmir the key to unlocking the hostility between them cannot be found. Kashmir looks destined to remain a place where a sporadic proxy war between Pakistani-trained fighters and the Indian army is conducted – a conflict which threatens to spill over into full-scale war with the inherent danger of the use of nuclear weapons. Both countries will also continue to fight another proxy war – in Afghanistan – especially now that most NATO forces have left.

  Pakistan lacks internal ‘strategic depth’ – somewhere to fall back to in the event of being overrun from the east – from India. The Pakistan/Indian border includes swampland in the south, the Thar Desert and the mountains of the north; all are extremely difficult territory for an army to cross. It can be done and both sides have battle plans of how to fight there. The Indian Army plan involves blockading the port of Karachi and its fuel storage depots by land and sea, but an easier invasion route is between the south and the north – it lies in the centre, in the more hospitable Punjab, and in the Punjab is Pakistan’s capital – Islamabad.

  The distance from the Indian border to Islamabad is less than 250 miles, most of it flat ground. In the event of a massive, overwhelming, conventional attack the Indian army could be in the capital within a few days. That they profess no desire to do so is not the point: from Pakistan’s point of view they might, and the geographical possibility is enough for Pakistan to require a Plan A and a Plan B to counter the risk.

  Plan A is to halt an Indian advance in the Punjab and possibly counter-attack across the border and cut the Indian Highway 1A, which is a vital supply route for the Indian military. The Indian Army is more than 1 million strong, twice the size of Pakistan’s, but if it can’t be supplied, it can’t fight. Plan B is to fall back across the Afghan border if required, and that requires a sympathetic government in Kabul. Hence geography has dictated that Pakistan will involve itself in Afghanistan, as will India.

  To thwart each other, each side seeks to mould the government of Afghanistan to its liking – or, to put it another way, each side wants Kabul to be an enemy of its enemy.

  When the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979 India gave diplomatic support to Moscow, but Pakistan was quick to help the Americans and Saudis to arm, train and pay for the Mujahedeen to fight the Red Army. Once the Soviets were beaten Pakistan’s intelligence service, the ISI, helped to create, and then back, the Afghan Taliban, which duly took over the country.

  Pakistan had a natural ‘in’ with the Afghan Taliban. Most are Pashtun, the same ethnicity as the majority of the Pakistanis of the North West Frontier (now known as Khyber Pakhtunkhwa). They have never thought of themselves as two peoples and consider the border between them as a Western invention, which in some ways it is.

  The Afghan–Pakistani border is known as the Durand Line. Sir Mortimer Durand, the Foreign Secretary of the colonial government of India, drew it in 1893 and the then ruler of Afghanistan agreed to it. However, in 1949 the Afghan government ‘annulled’ the agreement, believing it to be an artificial relic of the colonial era. Since then Pakistan has tried to persuade Afghanistan to change its mind, Afghanistan refuses, and the Pashtuns each side of the mountains try to carry on as they have for centuries by ignoring the border and maintaining their ancient connections.

  The main ethnic groups in the Afghan–Pakistani area did not fit into t
he border that was imposed in 1893 by the Durand Line; many of these groups continue to identify more with their tribes beyond the borders than with the rest of the nation.

  Central to this area, sometimes called Pashtunistan, is the Pakistani city of Peshawar, a sort of urban Taliban military-industrial complex. Knock-off Kalashnikovs, bomb-making technology and fighters flow out from the city, and support from within sections of the state flows in.

  It is also a staging post for ISI officers en route to Afghanistan with funds and instructions for the Talibanesque groups across the border. Pakistan has been involved militarily in Afghanistan for decades now, but it has overreached itself, and the tiger it was riding has bitten it.

  In 2001 the Pakistani-created Taliban had been hosting the foreign fighters of Al Qaeda for several years. Then, on 9/11, Al Qaeda struck the USA on its home soil in an operation put together in Afghanistan. In response US military power ran the Taliban and Al Qaeda out of town. Afghan Northern Alliance anti-Taliban forces moved down to take over the country and a NATO stabilisation force followed.

  Across the border on the day after 9/11, the Americans had begun breathing diplomatic fire on the Pakistanis, demanding their participation in the ‘War on Terror’ and an end to their support for terrorism. The then Secretary of State, Colin Powell, had phoned President Musharraf and demanded he come out of a meeting to take the call, in which he told him: ‘You are either with us or against us.’

  It has never been confirmed by the American side, but Musharraf has written that the call was followed up by Powell’s deputy Richard Armitage ringing the head of the ISI and telling him ‘that if we chose the terrorists, then we should be prepared to be bombed back to the Stone Age’. Pakistan co-operated, and that was that. Except – they hadn’t fully co-operated, and that wasn’t that.

  Islamabad was forced to act, and did; but not everyone in the Pakistani system was on board. The government banned several militant groups and tried to rein in religious groups it deemed extremist. By 2004 it was involved militarily against groups in the North West Frontier and privately accepted the American policy of drone strikes on its territory whilst publically decrying them.

  These were tough decisions. The Pakistan military and ISI had to turn on the very Taliban leaders they had trained and formed friendships with in the 1990s. The Taliban groups reacted with fury, seizing complete control of several regions in the tribal areas. Musharraf was the target of three failed assassination attempts, his would-be successor Benazir Bhutto was murdered, and amid the chaos of bombing campaigns and military offensives up to 50,000 Pakistani civilians have been killed.

  The American/NATO operation in Afghanistan, and the Pakistani measures across the border, had helped scatter the Arab, Chechen and other foreign fighters of Al Qaeda to the corners of the earth, where their leadership was hunted down and killed; but the Taliban had nowhere to go – they were Afghans and Pakistanis – and, as they told these new technologically advanced foreign invaders from America and Europe, ‘You may have the watches – but we have the time.’ They would wait out the foreigners no matter what was thrown at them, and in this they would be helped by elements in Pakistan.

  Within a couple of years it became clear: the Taliban had not been defeated, they had melted into where they came from, the Pashtun population, and were now emerging again at times and places of their choosing.

  The Americans came up with a ‘hammer and anvil’ strategy. They would hammer the Afghan Taliban against the anvil of the Pakistani operation on the other side of the border. The ‘anvil’ in the tribal areas turned out instead to be a sponge that soaked up whatever was thrown at it, including any Afghan Taliban retreating from the American hammer.

  In 2006 the British decided they would stabilise Helmand Province in the south, where the Afghan government’s remit did not run far outside of the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah. This was Afghan Pashtun heartland territory. The British went in with good intentions, they knew their history, but it seems they just ignored it – the reason why remains a mystery. The then British Defence Secretary John Reid is wrongly quoted, and blamed, for having said that summer that he ‘hoped not a shot will be fired in anger’. In fact he said, ‘We’re in the south to help and protect the Afghan people to reconstruct their economy and democracy. We would be perfectly happy to leave in three years’ time without firing one shot.’

  That may have been a fine aspiration, but was it ever feasible? That summer, after he gave a briefing at the Foreign Office in London, I had an exchange with the Defence Secretary, as follows:

  ‘Don’t worry, Tim. We’re not going after the

  Taliban, we’re there to protect people.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Secretary of State, the Taliban are going to come after you.’

  It was an amicable exchange, conducted before more than 450 British soldiers had been killed, but to this day I don’t know if the British government was softening up public opinion ahead of the deployment of troops whilst privately predicting it would be tough going, or whether it was being inexplicably naive about what lay ahead.

  So the Taliban bled the British, bled the Americans, bled NATO, waited NATO out, and after thirteen years NATO went away.

  During this whole period members of the highest levels of Pakistan’s establishment were playing a double game. America might have its strategy, but Pakistan knew what the Taliban knew: that one day the Americans would go away, and when they left, Pakistan’s foreign policy would still require a Pakistan-friendly government in Afghanistan. Factions within the Pakistan military and government had continued to give help to the Taliban, gambling that after NATO’s retreat the southern half of Afghanistan at the very least would revert to Taliban dominance, thus ensuring that Kabul would need to talk to Islamabad.

  Pakistan’s perfidy was laid bare when the Americans eventually found Al Qaeda’s leader, Osama bin Laden, hiding in plain sight of the government in Abbottabad, a military garrison town. By that point, such was the Americans’ lack of trust in their Pakistani ‘allies’ that they failed to tell Islamabad in advance about the Special Forces team which flew in to kill bin Laden. This was a breach of sovereignty that humiliated the military and government of Pakistan, as did the argument which went: ‘If you didn’t know he was there you were incompetent; if you did you were complicit.’

  The Pakistani government had always denied playing the double game that resulted in the deaths of huge numbers of Afghans and Pakistanis, as well as relatively small numbers of Americans. After the Abbottabad mission Islamabad continued the denials, but now there were fewer people who believed them. If elements of the Pakistani establishment were prepared to give succour to America’s most wanted man, even though he was by then of limited value to them, it was obvious they would support groups which furthered their ambitions to influence events in Afghanistan. The problem was that those groups now had their counterparts in Pakistan and they wanted to influence events there. The biter was bitten.

  The Pakistani Taliban is a natural outgrowth of the Afghan version. Both are predominantly Pashtun and neither will accept domination from any non-Pashtun power, be it the British army of the nineteenth century or the Punjabi-dominated Pakistani army of the twenty-first century.

  This was always understood and accepted by Islamabad. The Pakistani government pretended it ruled the entire country, and the Pashtun of the North West Frontier pretended they were loyal to the Pakistani state. This relationship worked until 11 September 2001.

  The years since then have been exceptionally hard on Pakistan. The civilian death toll is enormous and foreign investment has dwindled away, making ordinary life even harder. The army, forced to go up against what was a de facto ally, has lost up to 5,000 men and the civil war has endangered the fragile unity of the state.

  Things became so bad that the Pakistani military and government ended up having to give the US military intelligence and co-ordinates allowing them to conduct drone strikes against Pakistani Tali
ban targets in the North West Frontier. At the same time, when the strikes became apparent, Islamabad had to pretend to condemn them and describe them as a violation of Pakistani sovereignty due to the hundreds of civilian deaths attributed to mistakes by the US.

  The drones were mostly flown out of a base in Afghanistan but some are thought to have been launched from a secret base inside Pakistan. Wherever they came from, there were a lot of them. Drone strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan massively increased during the Obama Presidency from the numbers fired during George Bush’s tenure.

  By the spring of 2015 things had become even tougher. NATO had left Afghanistan and the Americans had announced an end to combat missions, leaving behind only a residual force. Officially this is to conduct Special Forces operations and training missions; unofficially it is to try to ensure that Kabul does not fall to the Taliban. Without NATO harrying the Taliban on the Afghan side of the border, Pakistan’s job of beating the Pakistani Taliban has become even harder. Washington continues to press Islamabad, and this leaves several possible scenarios:

  • The full weight of the Pakistani military falls upon the North West Frontier and defeats the Taliban.