A Rogue State

- Dr. Ramesh N. Rao

Pakistan and India are on the brink of war, and American newspapers and television programs have been full of the diplomatic to-ing and fro-ing as well as war preparations in the region. Pakistan has been well represented on television shows as many of its paid spokespersons, including a Pakistani-American who contributed $1,00,000 to the Clinton presidential campaign have been roped in to defend the military dictatorship of General Musharraf, and to keep reminding Americans of the enormous and strategic help that Pakistan has provided the U.S. in its war against Osama bin Laden and his Al Quaeda terrorist network.

What one is not told equally repeatedly is that America has “bought” Pakistan’s help and support. American taxpayers have paid the Pakistanis about a billion dollars (one hundred crore dollars) in the past three months, and there is no accountability about how the money is going to be spent, because the Americans did not insist on such pre-conditions. That such money and support in the past have gone into the pockets of the Pakistani elite, including its Armed Forces, and the notorious Pakistani intelligence agency, the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) seems to have been blithely ignored not just by the Bush administration but the lawmakers on Capitol Hill. The ISI in turn funnelled the money into fundamentalist Islamic groups waging jihad around the world should have made Americans pause this time, but they were so eager to begin bombing Osama’s hideouts that President Bush and his advisers were willing to give and thus gave whatever General Musharraf and his strategists demanded, no questions asked.

Pakistan has escaped being labelled a “rogue state” because it has cleverly played its cards. The Pakistani army and the ISI have hunted with the hounds and run with the hare in matters regarding terrorism. A rogue state has been defined as one “that puts a high priority on subverting other states and sponsoring non-conventional types of violence against them. It does not react predictably to deterrence or other tools of diplomacy and statecraft. In short, such a state requires special treatment and high levels of international pressure in order to prevent it from wrecking public order, setting off wars, and subverting whole areas of the world”.

Of course, we should note that “rogue states” are so labelled by the U.S. and by no other international body or sovereign nation, and such categorizing has basically helped shaped American foreign policy and military action against its perceived enemies. At various times states which have been so labelled included Cuba, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and North Korea. By consistently siding with the U.S. over the past 50 years, and helping funnel American money and arms to the Afghan Mujahiddeen in the 1980s, Pakistan has escaped being tarred as a rogue state despite its support, encouragement, and funding of terrorist groups and activities, and despite its devious nuclear program abetted and supported by the Chinese. That the Taliban was chiefly supported and funded by the Pakistanis seems to have also gone unnoticed and under-reported in the American media.

Pakistan’s sponsorship of terrorism has been known all along, and experts have acknowledged Pakistani government involvement in the planning, execution, and material support of terror groups, as well as in harbouring terrorists and terrorist training camps within its territory. There is evidence that the weapons sold to the Pakistani military were used in the 984 hijacking of an Indian Airlines plane. More spectacularly, the attacks on Indian financial centres in Mumbai in 1993 were similarly traced to the Pakistani military. Pakistan’s patronage, and provision of safe harbour and training for Islamic militants is similarly well known. Pakistani trained Islamic terrorists have conducted assassination attempts on the Egyptian leader, Hosni Mubarak, and Chechen fighters have admitted to being trained in Pakistan. The Indian government has shouted hoarse about Pakistan-based terrorist organizations that hijacked an Indian Airlines Boeing 737 in December 1999, and now it is evident that the modus operandi of those hijackers was the same as the one linked to the hijacking of the planes that hit the World Trade Centre.

Islamic fundamentalist organisations that advocate terror have been linked to the ISI, and these include organisations such as the Harkat-ul-Ansar, Lashkar-e-Toiba, Al Badr, and Osama Bin Laden’s Al Qaeda. All these organisations are designated as Foreign Terrorist Organisations by the United States for documented acts of terror. Groups like the Lashkar-e-Toiba, whose membership and leadership includes retired members of the Pakistani Military and ISI, have been documented as receiving overt material support from Gen. Musharraf’s government. The United States (in the Senate Testimony of Michael Sheehan of the State Department) has also admitted that there is a discernable shift in the sponsorship of terror from Libya and Syria, to Pakistan.

Pakistani military personnel, including middle and high-ranking officers were directly involved in the fighting in Afghanistan, and were air-lifted out of Kunduz as that city fell. Most of the “foreign fighters” that comprised the Taliban are Pakistani, including the majority of those that were responsible for the prison-uprising in Mazar-e-Sharif that led to the killing of CIA Officer Johnny Spann. Experts now believe that following the fall of the Taliban, and in order to forestall the capture of Osama Bin Laden and the upper echelon of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, Pakistan ordered the attack on India’s Parliament to divert American and world attention, and to take American focus away from the terrorists to the threat of nuclear-war on the subcontinent.

Despite all this, and despite more evidence that should be in the safe lockers of the U.S. State and Defence Departments, why is the Bush administration bending over backwards to give a clean chit to Gen. Musharraf and ignore the proxy wars that he and his fellow military adventurers have been waging in the South Asian region? As Ken Adelman, the Cold-War period American arms negotiator recently revealed in an interview on Fox Television, it seems that Pakistani support to the U.S. during the Cold War period, and the Indian leaders’ and administrations’ cussedness and moral grandstanding during the same time has skewed American policy in the region. But it is ironical that the U.S. continues to harbour suspicions of the world’s largest democracy because it supported the Soviet Union during the Cold War period but seems to have no such suspicions of the Russians themselves now! But more dangerous than the ignoring of India is the American embrace of Pakistan, a rogue state.

-- Ramesh N. Rao
December 31, 2001

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