The All Parties Conference which brought together military and political leadership seemed to have conveyed to the United States that Pakistan now wanted to shift its focus from carrying out operations against militants in the restive tribal region to negotiating peace with various warring factions as was being done by the Americans in Afghanistan.
Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani who had convened the conference set the tone by declaring that “Pakistan cannot be pressured to do more…our national interest must be respected and honoured.” Even though the APC was convened against the backdrop of the security environment following US Joint Chiefs Chairman Adm Mike Mullen’s diatribe against the ISI, the resolution signed by the participants had no mention of the Haqqani network.
DG ISI Lt Gen Ahmad Shuja Pasha, however, rejected the perception about the Haqqani network being a ‘veritable arm’ of the ISI and suggested that instead of taking the group head-on the Americans should now focus on dialogue for a lasting peace in Afghanistan.
The military leaders who wanted the conference to send a strong message to the US, but cautioned against taking the situation to a point of no return in relations with the US had to face some tough questioning and comments from the participants with Mehmood Khan Achakzai saying that there could be peace in Afghanistan within a month if the ISI wished so. Then there was Mian Nawaz Sharif’s blunt remark about there being some fire behind the smoke of the US allegations. And he was quoted as having gone to the extent of saying that if the country had become increasingly isolated then there must be some reason for that.
The two observations coincided with Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s statement that initial investigations into the assassination of former President Burhanuddin Rabbani had implicated known individuals in the Pakistani city of Quetta. In a television interview on Friday, he said he would send a fact-finding mission to Pakistan in the next two days to investigate and if the latter did not cooperate, he would refer the matter to the United Nations.
The statement came just ahead of the next round of the tripartite talks scheduled for October 8 which the Afghan government has decided to cancel. The meeting was aimed at discussing ways of getting insurgents into peace talks and ending the 10-year-old conflict. Not just that, there are also reports of Kabul having decided to shelve plans for Prime Minister Gilani to visit Afghanistan at the end of October for a meeting of the Afghanistan-Pakistan Joint Commission for Reconciliation and Peace in Afghanistan.
The problem is that whenever Pakistan tries to clear the misperception about its role in the ongoing war on terror, its intelligence apparatus is subjected to intense finger pointing not only by the Pentagon or State Department but also by the American media. A case in point is a recent report in The New York Times titled “New details reveal face of Pakistan as enemy” according to which a group of US military officers and Afghan officials had just finished a five-hour meeting with their Pakistani hosts in a village schoolhouse settling a border dispute in Teri Mengal in May 2007 when they were ambushed by the Pakistanis. A US Major was killed and three officers were wounded along with their Afghan interpreter.
A former American military officer who had served in both Afghanistan and Pakistan was quoted as having said that the Pakistanis often seemed to retaliate for losses they had suffered in an accidental attack by US forces with a deliberate assault on US troops, most probably to maintain morale among their own troops or to make a point to the Americans that they could not be pushed around. “Though both sides kept any deeper investigations of the ambush under wraps, even at the time it was seen as a turning point by American officials managing day-to-day relations with Pakistan,” the reporter added.
The NYT report appeared at a time when the temperature was still heated by Admiral Mullen’s scathing attack on the ISI. In his briefing to the APC the DG ISI refuted the charges levelled by the outgoing US Joint Chiefs Chairman but he needs to do a lot of explaining, especially after Mian Nawaz expressed his dissatisfaction with security briefings. This was with reference to the one given after the US raids in Abbottabad on May 2.
There is no doubt that convening the APC was the right decision to push back the undue pressure brought to bear upon on Pakistan by the United States without any solid evidence to support its claim. But if the conference was aimed at making the security establishment submit itself to the political leadership and answer questions which have remained unanswered so far, it did not happen. There is a need to understand that the best way to safeguard our national interest is to do away with the policy of extending covert support to the militant groups operating on our soil.
The writer is Executive Editor, Pakistan Today.
"The problem is that whenever Pakistan tries to clear the misperception about its role in the ongoing war on terror, its intelligence apparatus is subjected to intense finger pointing not only by the Pentagon or State Department but also by the American media."
Is that a complain? You got to be kidding!
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