By Ajai Shukla
India in Transition (https://casi.sas.upenn.edu/iit/ajaishukla)
Centre for Advanced Study of India (CASI)
University of Pennsylvania
Did Pakistan facilitate the May 21st killing of
Mullah Muhammad Mansour because the Taliban chief refused to join peace talks
with Kabul? Mansour’s obstinacy was, after all, preventing Islamabad from delivering
on its promise to the Quadrilateral Coordination Group (QCG) to bring the
Taliban to the dialog table. Was the drone strike that killed Mansour a wasted
effort, given that his successor, Mullah Haibatullah Akhundzada, is equally disinclined
to barter away battlefield gains [1] in
a political settlement that would leave most power with the “puppet regime” in
Kabul? Given the Taliban’s stubbornness, did the Pentagon miss out on a
Heaven-sent opportunity to strike the Taliban leadership when they met to
choose his successor?
The answers to these questions, while necessarily
speculative, are broadly discernible from the sequence in which events played
out. Three days before the attack, the Taliban had boycotted peace talks with
Kabul, organized in Islamabad by the QCG -- which included the US, China,
Afghanistan and Pakistan. Since Mansour’s elevation as the Taliban chief last
July, this had been his consistent response to dialogue proposals, mirroring
the attitude of his predecessor, the Taliban’s first chief, Mullah Muhammad
Omar who reportedly died in a Pakistani hospital in 2013 [2]. Embarrassed
thus by Mansour, Pakistan’s foreign secretary, Aizaz Ahmed Chaudhary, toned
down Islamabad’s previously unqualified support to the insurgent group, declaring
on Friday the 20th that Afghanistan needed to take stronger military
action against the Taliban, which should also be offered “incentives” to come
to the table [3].
The next day, Mansour was killed.
Islamabad’s response to the killing was unusually muted;
especially compared to its voluble outrage after Osama bin Laden’s killing in
2011. On Saturday, May 21st, soon after the Pentagon announced the attack,
a pro forma statement from Islamabad
regretted the “airspace violation”. On Sunday, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif
issued a mild reproof from London. [4] On
Monday, America’s ambassador to Pakistan, David Hale, was called in to the
foreign ministry office in Islamabad and handed a demarche against the “violation
of Pakistan’s sovereignty.” [5] The
same day, Interior Minister Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan criticized the drone strike
as “totally illegal, not acceptable and against the sovereignty and integrity
of the country” [6]. This
relatively strong condemnation placated conservative segments of the populace. Yet,
significantly, not until Thursday did the most powerful man in the land, army
chief General Raheel Sharif, break his silence, asking Hale to desist from
unilateral actions. [7]
Few have taken Pakistan’s protestations of non-involvement in
Mansour’s killing at face value. The skeptics include Indian policymakers,
whose bleak assessments of Pakistani double-dealing in Afghanistan have proven
right over the years. New Delhi pundits are certain that the Pakistan Army
(which controls policy on four areas: Afghanistan, India, the US relationship and
“strategic assets”, which includes the nuclear arsenal and jihadi groups like
the Lashkar-e-Toiba) sacrificed Mansour to signal to other Taliban factions,
and to the next Taliban chief, that bucking the Pakistan Army, and its powerful
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), would incur a heavy cost. Simultaneously, by
denying any role in his killing, Pakistan could continue playing good cop to
America’s bad cop, flavoring its leverage over the Taliban with a subtle touch
of menace.
Pakistan’s obsession with Afghanistan stems from its conviction
that India seeks influence in Kabul to “outflank” Pakistan and engage it on two
fronts. This stymies Islamabad’s vaguely defined notion of “strategic depth”,
in which the military relies on Afghan territory to compensate during wartime for
Pakistan’s limited geographic depth. Pakistani analysts have also rationalized
the need for influence and territorial access in Afghanistan in terms of
alternative havens for jihadi groups; and, incredibly, even for housing nuclear
weapons beyond the range of Indian strike aircraft. A former Pakistan military
intelligence and ISI chief, Lieutenant General Asad Durrani writes: “Strategic
depth is a sound concept. All countries strive to gain and retain it. It is not
merely a geographical or spatial notion, but has many dimensions: military,
economic, demographic, social and political”. [8]
The Taliban with influence in Kabul is central to Islamabad’s
project for strategic depth in Afghanistan, given that Pakistan is widely
reviled amongst other groups in that country as a domineering neighbor. Even the
Taliban is by no means an unquestioning proxy [9],
preferring to follow its own interests rather than those of Islamabad. Yet,
Pakistan realistically calculates that a Taliban toehold in Kabul is its best
shot at retaining leverage and serving as a check on India, which is as popular
across Afghanistan as Pakistan is reviled, particularly in the north.
For this, Pakistan has translated its influence over the
Taliban leadership and the Haqqani Network into membership of the QCG, from
where it could influence the formation of a convenient post-conflict government
in Afghanistan [10]. Pakistan’s
National Security Advisor Sartaj Aziz told a Washington audience in March: "We
have some influence on them because their leadership is in Pakistan, and they
get some medical facilities, their families are here. So we can use those
levers to pressurize them, to say, 'come to the table'." [11] Islamabad’s
undisguised opportunism suited everyone in the QCG: Kabul desperately wants a
settlement with the Taliban; Beijing is backing close ally, Pakistan, to create
the post-conflict stability in which China could economically exploit
Afghanistan; and Washington hopes the Taliban’s inclusion in a broad-based
government would provide a fig leaf of respectability to its withdrawal from Afghanistan.
The 9,800 US soldiers currently in Afghanistan need to be drawn down to 5,500
by the start of 2017.
This applecart was upset by the Taliban’s flat refusal to
join peace talks with Kabul, jeopardizing Pakistan’s place in the QCG, as also
its game plan for Afghanistan. Even if the Pakistan military did not actually
pull the trigger on Mullah Mansour, the khaki-clad generals in Rawalpindi who
Mansour was defying would have shed few tears.
The question of who actually killed Mansour has three possible
answers. First, it could have been a unilateral American attack, riding on the
experience gained during years of armed drone operations that have decimated
the jihadi leadership in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA).
The Mansour strike occurred in neighboring Baluchistan that, like FATA, would have
very thin air defenses, given that the bulk of Pakistan’s assets guard against
pre-emptive strikes by India on the eastern front.
The second possibility is a fully Pakistani military operation.
That would have required the US to supply Pakistan the American platforms and systems
needed for unmanned strikes --- unlikely, given the current trust deficit.
Furthermore, Washington knows maintaining security is difficult in the leaky
Pakistani system.
The most likely possibility is a joint US-Pakistani
operation. Unlike the bin Laden operation, this time American and Pakistani
interests strongly converged. Both needed to send the Taliban leadership a
message --- comply, or die. Pakistani ground intelligence would have helped
place the crosshairs of an American drone on Mansour, since the CIA has no ground
intelligence network in Baluchistan of the kind it painstakingly developed in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa and FATA.
Mansour’s killing underlines that the Taliban is not so much
a Pakistani proxy as an independent player guided by its own organizational
interests. Proving many assessments incorrect, recent Taliban statements and
actions (e.g. Akhundzada’s defiant rejection of talks) suggest that most
Taliban leaders still see continued battle as the route to power in Kabul,
rather than negotiating with a depleting enemy. This is not accepted by US
policymakers, who allowed the Taliban factions to meet unharmed, to select a
new leader, who would inevitably be as recalcitrant as the last. It was an
opportunity lost.
[1]
Reuters, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-afghanistan-talks-idUSKCN0YN5T1?feedType=RSS&feedName=worldNews&utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+Reuters%2FworldNews+%28Reuters+World+News%29
[2]
BBC, http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-33703097
[3]
Interview to Reuters, http://www.reuters.com/article/us-pakistan-afghanistan-idUSKCN0YB0RN
[4]
Dawn, http://www.dawn.com/news/1260041
[5]
New York Times, http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/24/us/politics/afghanistan-pakistan-taliban-leader.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=first-column-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0
[6]
The Guardian, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/may/24/pakistan-condemns-us-drone-strike-that-killed-taliban-leader-mansoor
[7]
Dawn, http://www.dawn.com/news/1260760/army-chief-asks-us-to-desist-from-unilateral-actions
[8]
Centre for Land Warfare Studies, New Delhi: http://www.claws.in/publication-detail.php?pID=60
[9]
Ajai Shukla, Time to Talk to the Taliban? http://www.anantaaspencentre.in/pdf/taliban.pdf
[10]
The New Yorker, http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/what-the-u-s-strike-on-the-taliban-means-for-peace-in-afghanistan
[11]
BBC: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-35719031
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