I can’t help but feel a little sorry for the armed forces of Pakistan. It’s bad enough that they have been charged with protecting ‘the most dangerous country in the world’ (label courtesy The Economist). But following Osama bin Laden’s ‘treacherous’ killing on Pakistani soil, they now have to contend with obscure Al-Qaeda and Taliban factions, random splinter groups, opportunistic copycats and other mischief-makers, all because they couldn’t keep Osama safer.
My analysis and crystal ball have been known to get it wrong, but I don’t think many people will dispute the fabricated nature of my facts. Here’s what I think has been happening so far. The Afghan Taliban, who ruled Afghanistan through the 90s and up until the US invasion in 2001, were really tight with Pakistan in general and the Pakistan Army in particular. The tightness of this relationship can be traced back to the first Afghan war, when many a Pakistani officer trained, commanded and supervised the Stinger-toting Afghan irregulars who were single-handedly responsible for bringing the Soviet Union down to its ‘Hind’ legs.
These old war dogs spent so much time in the Afghan badlands and forged so many ties, illicit and otherwise, with local chieftains and their daughters that when it came time to disengage, these servicemen began to experience something known to medical science as separation anxiety. This is similar to the feeling a newborn feels when its umbilical cord is snipped and he/she has to feed on their own. The bawling baby metaphor fits our current hypothetical situation perfectly, because a bawling baby is exactly what the agencies turned into when they found out at the beginning of the 90s that their services were no longer required by the United States of Amnesia. Trust-fund brats will no doubt sympathise, because the end of the first Afghan war – from the military’s perspective – was the end of the blank cheque that the Yanks had hitherto issued to our defenders.
This would not do, the disgruntled war dogs reasoned, and began to lay the groundwork for a scenario which would force the US to re-enter the Afghan theatre. That these mountains are known as the graveyard of great empires was a fact that the establishment was counting on as they set in motion this great game of Risk. Their board game strategies served them well as long as there was a Bush in the White House, mostly because ‘Dubya’ hadn’t read the instructions (they were on the bottom of the box, the last place a civilised white man would look). But as the fates would have it, the minute a black man entered the Ozymoronic house at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, his preoccupation with bottoms (feminine and otherwise) immediately led him to examine the bottom of the box, where he promptly found and mastered the game which his predecessor had bungled up.
This was hardly good news for our guys, who had to change tact. But doing so would require a lot more money, which could only come from the US. Granted that ‘The Great Shaitan’ owes us over $3 billion in back payments for the Coalition Support Fund, but then the most powerful country in the world seldom honours its debts, a fact reflected in their gargantuan deficit.
In the meanwhile, the servicemen who had fought alongside Afghan war heroes – such as the Saudi oil magnate Osama and the Long John Silver of the Wakhan corridor, Mullah ‘Red Beard’ Omar – had entered into an agreement with their old comrades-in-arms. In exchange for giving these ‘most wanted men’ asylum in a maximum-security resort and ammunitions dump, the war dogs managed to extract immunity for themselves from these merchants of destruction. The deal was, no one messes with Osama and, in exchange, no really key military targets would be attacked.
This arrangement, although forged through necessity, was founded on shaky footings, as the government and people of Pakistan were already locked in a “with us or against us” deal with the US, which had by now realised that something was not right in the Afghan graveyard. Therefore, when Senor Musharraf caved to Armitrage the Terrible, the dirty deal did not go down well among the ranks of those who had gone native while in Afghanistan. This was the beginning of a long-drawn campaign against Musharraf from within the army itself that culminated in the attacks on his person. This is also about the time that terrorists began targeting military officers and sensitive installations across the country. Whatever the target and whatever the modus operandi, one thing was painfully evident in all such cases: the attackers knew what the security forces were doing before they did it!
This was the assumption under which Messrs Obama and Clinton conducted the ‘surgical’ Abbottabad operation and were vindicated in their belief that Pakistan’s military has both moles and gaping holes. So it was only a matter of time before these highly-trained and unemployed war dogs found a new outlet for themselves. Now they’ve moved on from toppling governments to insurance fraud. Why, you may ask? The answer is simple, the payout is much bigger. But, as with any good paranoid insurance company, Washington is bound to start nosing around in places where they might find something actionable. And that’s what I’m afraid of.