Despite mounting pressure from the United States since the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani seems unlikely to respond to American demands to root out other militant leaders, according to people who have met him in the last 10 days, The New York Times said in a report on Friday.
The report said that while the general did not want to abandon the alliance altogether, he was more likely to pursue a strategy of decreasing Pakistan’s reliance on the US, and continuing to offer just enough cooperation to keep the billions of dollars in American aid flowing, according to a confidant of the general who has spoken with him recently. Such a response was certain to test the patience of American officials, who had grown more mistrustful of Pakistan than ever, said the Times.
The US will now push harder than ever for General Kayani to break relations with other militant leaders who American officials believe are hiding in Pakistan, with the support of the military and intelligence service, the report quoted a senior US official as saying. These leaders included Mullah Muhammad Omar, the spiritual leader of the Afghan Taliban; the allied militant network of Sirajuddin Haqqani; and Lashkar-e-Taiba, the American official said. Pakistani officials, meanwhile, were anxiously waiting to see if any new intelligence about al Qaeda in Pakistan spills from the American raid that could be used to exert more pressure on them, and what form that pressure might take, said the report.
But those who had spoken with General Kayani recently said that demands to break with top militant leaders were likely to be too much for the military chief, who gave an in-camera briefing to a joint session of parliament on Friday to salvage his reputation and explain the military’s lapses surrounding the American raid. The Times said the American wish list was tantamount to an overnight transformation of Pakistan’s long-held strategic posture that called for using the militant groups as proxies against Pakistan’s neighbours, said Kayani’s confidants.
It came amid mounting anti-American pressure on Kayani from hard-line generals in his top command, two of the people who met him said. Many in the lower ranks of the military had greater sympathy for the militant groups than for the US, the paper said. To take out the leadership of these groups – longtime assets of Pakistan’s army and intelligence services – would result in such a severe backlash from the militants that a “civil war” in Pakistan would result, said a former senior Pakistani official who was consulted by General Kayani in the aftermath of the bin Laden raid.
The general, who had been courted for nearly three years by the most senior US military officers in an effort to persuade him to launch an attack against the Haqqani network in North Waziristan, was even more unlikely to do so now, the Pakistani official said. The army chief was described as “angered” that the Obama administration failed to trust him enough to tell him before the raid, asserting that in keeping him in the dark the US had alienated Pakistan’s best friend, former ISI chief General Ashraf Qazi said.
Gen Kayani could not ignore the sentiment of his soldiers, said Riaz Khokhar, a former ambassador to the US, who had also met with General Kayani. “There is a feeling in the rank and file of the army from A to Z that the United States is a most untrustworthy ally,” Khokhar was quoted as saying. Gen Qazi said hard questions were being asked about whether the American financial support to the Pakistani military was “worth the lives we have lost” in fighting Islamic militants.