When the commander of the Central Air Command of the US Air Force, Lieutenant-General Gary L North, touched down on Tuesday at the Pakistan Air Force (PAF) base in Sargodha, northwest of Lahore in Pakistan's heartland Punjab province, the poignancy of the moment couldn't have been lost on him.
The chief of staff of the PAF, Air Chief Marshal Tanvir Mehmood Ahmed, and the US ambassador to Pakistan, Anne W Peterson, were waiting on the tarmac to receive the US general.
North was arriving after a continuous eight-hour flight across the Atlantic. He was flying an F-16 Fighter Falcon capable of carrying nuclear missiles. Another F-16 accompanied him. They are the first of a fleet of a dozen F-16 aircraft that the PAF will receive in the coming months "at very nominal prices" (to quote Ahmed). Pakistan, in addition, may get a further batch of 16 F-16s, bringing the total to 28.
By coincidence, the handing-over ceremony in Sargodha was held just ahead of President General Pervez Musharraf's calculated decision on Tuesday to order the Pakistan Army to attack Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) in Islamabad. Last weekend, US Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte told the Urdu service of Voice of America in an interview that the United States was prepared to help Pakistan "in any way we can".
In essence, the US is making up for the 28 F-16 aircraft that Pakistan paid for in the early 1990s and Washington failed to deliver once Pakistan lost its importance as a pivotal state in US regional policy in the post-Cold War period.
SCO joins the fray
The huge US gesture comes at a critical juncture in the geopolitics of the region. What emerges is that the summit of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), scheduled to take place in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, in a little more than a month, is already casting its shadow on Pakistan's regional role. Islamabad has barely disguised its interest in forging closer ties with the SCO, and the summit opens a window of opportunity. The SCO comprises China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan.
From the proceedings of the meeting of the SCO's Council of Foreign Ministers (CFM) held in Bishkek on Monday in preparation of the summit on August 16, trends are available that must definitely be annoying Washington. There is no mistaking that the SCO is slouching toward Afghanistan and Pakistan with an irresistible offer of mutual engagement in terms of shared interests of regional security and stability.
The CFM particularly stressed the "importance of intensifying further collaboration with the SCO observer states as well as with the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan within the SCO-Afghanistan Contact Group". More important, it decided on "creating mechanisms of cooperation by the SCO with international partners, particularly under the auspices of RATS" (Regional Anti-Terrorist Structure).
The SCO summit by all indications may turn out to be one of the most productive in the organization's history. Taking place against the backdrop of the deepening chill in US-Russia relations, the summit is invested with added significance. Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, who took part in the CFM meet in Bishkek on Monday, highlighted the SCO's "quest for a new world order, which will rest on international law and collective action to solve global, regional and other problems".
The CFM has decided to recommend to the SCO summit that observer countries such as Pakistan must be involved "more actively" in the organization's activities and projects. It concluded that the stability of the Central Asian region is directly linked to the stabilization of Afghanistan.
For the first time, the SCO is likely to pose a challenge to the United States' monopoly of conflict resolution in Afghanistan. The CFM has taken the view that the existing pattern of involvement by the international community is restricted to specific sectoral problems in Afghanistan. It concluded that such a narrow issue-based approach on the part of the international community will not serve the purpose of stabilizing the country.
The SCO, therefore, intends to pitch for a "comprehensive approach" that will include its participation not only in Afghan reconstruction work and in countering drug trafficking but also in terms of "support for national consensus within Afghanistan on a principled basis of barring access to power for the Taliban leaders who, with the backing of al-Qaeda, had brought Afghanistan to the condition in which it was not so long ago" - to quote Lavrov.
Cold war in the Hindu Kush
Plainly speaking, the SCO is unambiguously proclaiming its intention to work closely with Kabul and Islamabad - a turf that has hitherto been tacitly accepted by the regional powers as more or less the exclusive playpen of the US and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). This runs counter to the consistent US approach based on keeping Russia out of Afghanistan, and disrupting any Russian-Chinese coordinated policies in Afghanistan.
Washington, in fact, incrementally stifled the French initiative at NATO's Riga summit last year for forming a "contact group" of countries interested in an Afghan settlement. American diplomats have barely been able to disguise their displeasure over Moscow's proactive moves toward Kabul in recent months.
Washington has been propagating a "Great Central Asia" strategy, aimed at rolling back the influence of Russia and China in the region, and encouraging the Central Asian states to form partnerships with the South Asian region instead. The strategy is a barely disguised attempt to undercut the raison d'etre of the SCO.
Indeed, Monday's CFM meet seems to have taken into account the entire range of regional and international developments. Its hidden message is that the SCO is beginning to factor US plans for the deployment of missile-defense systems in Europe and Asia. Lavrov said, "We [CFM] did not specifically discuss the US plans ... but of course we see that the consequences of the unilateral actions in this sphere will make themselves felt here [Central Asia] too, especially considering not merely the composition of the SCO members, but also the composition of the observers who work within the SCO in such capacity."
Significantly, China's position on the US plans of deployment of anti-ballistic-missile systems in the Asia-Pacific region is hardening. A commentary in the People's Daily on Wednesday lambasted the US for seeking "absolute nuclear superiority": Strategic nuclear balance is very important. Today, only strategic nuclear weapons can produce a deadly threat to the United Sates ... Balance helps maintain stability. Without strategic balance, the order of the multipolar world would be difficult to maintain. To this extent, the issue of strategic balance does not simply indicate a military struggle. It is actually a question of the type of world order that should be established, and a contest between the unipolar and multipolar world order. The SCO summit is expected to adopt a "long-term good neighborhood, friendship and cooperation treaty". There is no gainsaying the fact that the above SCO initiatives emanate primarily out of a Chinese-Russian common understanding. Closely following Russian-Chinese consultations on the sidelines of the CFM on Monday in Bishkek, the foreign ministers of Russia and China will have an opportunity for further extended discussions during Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi's scheduled four-day visit to Moscow from Thursday.
The eagle has landed
How does all this add up? Without doubt, from the US perspective, Pakistan's strategic importance becomes compelling. Washington desperately needs a power structure in Islamabad that it can manipulate, but which will have the staying power to ensure continuity in policies. The challenge is arguably formidable.
New factors are at work compared with the Cold War era. Unlike in the 1970s and 1980s, China and Russia are increasingly coordinating their policies regionally and internationally, though the two countries are not thinking of any formal alliance.
On its part, unlike in the Cold War era, Washington is keenly developing its ties with India. By professing a "de-hyphenated" relationship with the two South Asian rivals, Washington has so far managed to have the best of both worlds. But it is a delicate act, especially if Pakistan reassumes its role as the pivotal state in US regional policy.
Besides, the path to power in Pakistan runs through the military, but the spirit of the times requires that the military must be seen as serving civilian masters. Such a calculus, however, is difficult to put together in Islamabad. It has been tried out before in Pakistan, and it proved to be impractical.
Meanwhile, the specter that haunts Pakistan is not of any Islamist takeover. The Islamists simply lack substantial support. The overwhelming majority of Pakistani people are averse to religious extremism and militancy. The real challenge facing Musharraf (and the US) is from a popular uprising. Such a threat looms large, which may altogether result in a drawdown of US influence in Pakistan, given the pervasive "anti-Americanism" in the country. It increasingly appears that a military crackdown may become necessary to preempt a popular uprising.
From a somewhat non-committal stance five days earlier, the US State Department spokesman purposively shifted gear by Tuesday to endorse strongly Musharraf's handling of the Red Mosque standoff. He said, "The Pakistani security forces have gone in there [mosque] after exercising a great deal of patience and restraint in offering every possible opportunity for innocents that may still be in the mosque to leave, as well as offering those who have threatened to use violence, and have in fact used violence, to resolve the situation peacefully.
"Of course, everybody wants to see these kinds of situations resolved peacefully. It's everybody's optimal solution. But it's fundamentally a matter for the government to decide when negotiations end and when action needs to take place to bring some sort of resolution to the situation. In my understanding, it was a situation where they had exercised any number of opportunities for these individuals to resolve peacefully, yet they persisted, and they persisted to the point of using children as human shields."
Thus the second week of July is set to go down as a defining period in US regional policy. North's landing in the F-16 at Sargodha amounts to more than a mere snapshot of US-Pakistan defense transactions. Washington is, for all purposes, shoring up Pakistan's beleaguered, hugely unpopular army chief. It is imploring wobbling corps commanders to hold the line.
M K Bhadrakumar served as a career diplomat in the Indian Foreign Service for more than 29 years, with postings including ambassador to Uzbekistan (1995-98) and to Turkey (1998-2001). |
