CONFLICTED CHOICES
Shuja Nawaz’s earlier book, Crossed Swords, which appeared about a decade ago, stood out as an authoritative study of the interface between Pakistan and its army. Alongside his competence as a journalist and scholar, the author had high-level access on account of family connections. This helped readers get an insider account of how the Pakistan army thinks about its domestic and external environment. To the cognoscenti, Crossed Swords provided a deep history of the Pakistan army and a flavour of the mindsets till the end of the Musharraf era.
A sequel had been expected for some time, and we have it now in The Battle for Pakistan. The subtitle, The Bitter US Friendship and a Tough Neighbourhood, suggests a strong US-Pakistan focus, but the book also takes a close look at the Pakistan army’s thinking and its traditional preoccupation with India and Afghanistan. The postMusharraf decade—broadly the book’s period—was Pakistan’s most conflicted since 1971. The army’s battles within Pakistan and the increasingly large space counter-insurgency ops occupied in the military mind and consequently its changing doctrine, training and planning are a prominent part of the book.
Much of the ground traversed is not new—it was covered most recently in Steve Coll’s Directorate S. Yet Nawaz’s account is of value as it is from a sympathetic but still critical observer. His analysis, while not disagreeing with the generally accepted view of how Pakistan ‘played’ the US for a decade and a half, also paints a more complex process than of simplistic ‘deceit’ or US ‘naivety’. The US-Pakistan relationship bears the burden of numerous contradictions, not least, as one former US official is quoted as saying, the unusual position that America is fighting the same war ‘twice from opposite sides’. Through the book, Nawaz distributes responsibility and blame evenly: on the US for ‘pushing to the background the doctrinal and existential issues that Pakistan faces’; on Pakistan for its failure to build a functional democracy, confront Islamic extremists and for letting the state lose its monopoly on power.
None of these issues has easy answers in terms of policy takeaways. The book’s final chapter, ‘Choices’, outlines different positive scenarios, yet dark forebodings constantly intrude, including the nuclear bombs factor in the India-Pakistan context. Nawaz suggests that most positive scenarios would be contingent on the US playing an important role in fostering regional economic integration; a failure to play such a role leads to dimmer prospects.
Afghanistan and India draw the author’s attention at some length. China does figure, but less prominently. Nawaz appears somewhat tentative on China, almost as if willing the United States to be Pakistan’s most important external engagement. Thus, he says ‘it would be critical for Pakistan not to present China as an alternative to the US and the West’. But that in fact is the long-term trend and there appear to be no contrarian forces to retard such movement. So if a general weakness is to be identified in The Battle for Pakistan, it is that it appears excessively optimistic about the US’s future role in Pakistan. But how will it radically differ from the immediate past? The obvious convergences of interest do exist but the prognosis is unavoidable: that Washington and Islamabad’s approach will be transactional and tactical.
For Pakistan followers in India, the book is strongly recommended. It accords great importance to better Indo-Pak ties in Pakistan’s own interest, reflecting an authentic Pakistani, if minority, perspective often unacknowledged in India. The author, though, fails to confront the pernicious impact that terrorism has had on the relationship. Amongst the numerous historical, ideological and structural factors that bedevil Indo-Pak relations, it is, ironically enough, terrorism that offers Pakistan the most space to move ahead. But it is also here that it has demonstrated so much inertia. My reading of the book is that it instead gives greater emphasis to a ‘strategic restraint regime’ to reduce the chances of accidental conflict. While this is certainly the thinking of the military fraternity in Pakistan, it does not gel with the rest of the book on what Pakistan needs to get right. ■
ACCORDING TO ONE FORMER US OFFICIAL, AMERICA HAS BEEN FIGHTING THE SAME WAR, ‘TWICE FROM OPPOSITE SIDES’