AM,
You must understand strategic depth. Wikipedia has not totally explained it. It is more of a sanctuary with backup to reorganise and strike back!
That is not how Pakistani security establishment views the idea of strategic depth. Maybe the following article would shed light on what Pakistan's aim and goals are with regards to finding strategic depth in the neighborhood. Pakistani concerns are nothing unreasonable:
analysis: Pakistan’s fix —Rasul Bakhsh Rais
The United States has not been as much with us as we have been with it. Its outlook toward Pakistan is ambiguous, tentative and often overridden by interests of third parties
Never has the security environment of Pakistan been as adverse and threatening as the one we find ourselves amid today. Some elements of our regional security system are as old as our country itself, while others have accumulated over the past quarter-century of conflict in Afghanistan, and some, as a result of global transformations after the Cold War.
The present security climate is more alarming than ever due to its internal dimension, pertaining to the ongoing conflict in Swat, FATA and some parts of Balochistan.
The other two features of our security dilemma are old, and inherited.
The Indian threat, no matter how we interpret history, has been an irrefutable fact of our security problems. India has been and may remain a focal point of our security, until some fundamental transformation of the region into a zone of peace, harmony and interdependent economies—a dream and an ideal worth pursuing—is successfully achieved through visionary South Asian leaders. We have yet to see that rare breed make its presence known on the political stage of the subcontinent.
The second feature: Afghanistan, our troublesome neighbour. The real source of trouble throughout our history is the character of the Afghan state—a weak, rentier state that is overly dependent on the outside.
What compounded our security predicament was the ever willingness of our leaders to offer Pakistan as a base to countries opposed to our national interests; neither could their nexus with India in our early formative phase, nor could their bringing Soviet forces right on our borders be thought of as benign or innocent.
Afghanistan may be a sovereign state, but if its actions, policies, and strategic alignments affect us negatively, we have a right to respond; as we did in collaboration with the international community, including the United States, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan.
Pakistan’s policy toward Afghanistan is best explained by the concept of strategic depth, which is often misconstrued as Islamabad’s attempt at establishing its dominance over the neighbouring country. This negative connotation was better expressed in one of those prickly statements of President Hamid Karzai that Pakistan wants to “enslave Afghanistan”. Not really.
Since the idea of strategic depth is both theoretically and empirically unexplored, common observers have drawn their own wide-ranging meanings of it. Though this idea was articulated after the Mujahideen victory over the Soviet forces and the Pakistani sense of triumphalism for its key role in defeating the red forces, the idea germinated out of our troubled relations with Afghanistan.
What we leant was that Afghanistan by itself was not a problem, but posed one when it joined countries that were antagonistic toward Pakistan: India and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. It offered itself as a base not only for the intelligence agencies of these two countries but also as a sanctuary to any internal faction that had a problem with the federal government of Pakistan—Baloch and Pashtun nationalists, and the Al-Zulfikar terrorist organisation.
There is no empirical evidence to suggest that the steps that Afghanistan took during a very difficult time in Pakistan’s history were in reaction to the latter’s intervention. In fact Pakistan intervened much later, once the Baloch and Pashtun nationalists had established a base in Afghanistan.
Neither Pakistan nor the rest of the world could afford to ignore the presence of Soviet forces in Afghanistan. In retrospect, the strategy during the Cold War might appear as damaging, given the subsequent disintegration of the Soviet Union and the legacies of our intervention in Afghanistan which pose very grave threats today. But this can only be said due to the benefit of hindsight.
The concept of strategic depth is essentially defensive in contesting Afghanistan’s move to allow our adversaries to operate against us from its territory. Apparently, there is no balance between the ambitions of the Afghans to be sovereign through security actions against Pakistan and its multiple vulnerabilities. Pakistan has in the past mobilised and supported Afghan groups that were opposed to the ruling regime. When there is no love lost between the ruling factions of Afghanistan and the Pakistani government, by the same historical logic, the latter would be compelled to do the same.
It seems the Afghan state’s historical trajectory is moving in an endless cycle of internal fragmentation and strife, and foreign intervention. This time around it is a larger set of actors driven by the American strategic need to defeat its post-cold war enemy: the radical and militant Islamic forces.
Our earlier optimism that Afghanistan will be in safer hands with the international community rebuilding the country and neutralising the regional rivals has been shattered. None of these goals are anywhere closer to realisation. Rather, India has re-entered the Afghan game riding on the strategic partnership with the United States and goodwill of the leaders of Northern Front that it assisted during their civil war with the Taliban.
India with its outsized strategic ambitions, has not helped expedite the peace process with Pakistan or re-establish the stability of Afghanistan by using its territory to destabilise Fata and Balochistan.
In a way, we are back to the strategic equations of the Cold War years, with the enormous difference that Washington, our strategic partner of those years, is with the Afghan-India twin. The United States accusing us of everything that goes wrong in Afghanistan and frequently lobbing missiles on targets inside Pakistan only make matters worse for us; this comes despite having done more than we could politically afford to help the international coalition.
Under unrelenting US pressure for our security falilures, we have pushed ourselves into a war with the tribes in FATA and Swat as in support of the Washington in its war on terror. It didn’t start as our war because we were supporting the Taliban before 9/11, but circumstances have forced us to own it. The forced or forged convergence of interests on the war on terror with the United States has produced very adverse consequences for our national security in the western borderlands.
The same groups that were fighting against the Afghan, NATO and American forces in Afghanistan have teamed up against Pakistan. The Pakistani Taliban are now part of the regional and transnational network of militant forces that want to fight a long war both against the regional states and the US. Their ideological orientations, world outlook and armed struggle (by necessity) push us closer to their nemesis, the US.
But the real difficulty is that the United States has not been as much with us as we have been with it. Its outlook toward Pakistan is ambiguous, tentative and often overridden by interests of third parties. For this reason, the level of trust is low between the two countries, particularly between the intelligence agencies that in the past have cooperated very closely.
Pakistan is currently in a big fix in view of the local, regional and global developments that have re-shaped our geopolitical landscape. We face one of the most difficult and complex security situations with both state and non-state actors at play. What complicates our national security further is political fragmentation, an ongoing economic down-turn, and a pervading sense of gloom about the coherence and competence of the elected government.
Dr Rasul Baksh Rais is author of Recovering the Frontier State: War, Ethnicity and State in Afghanistan (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books 2008) and a professor of Political Science at the Lahore University of Management Sciences. He can be reached at
rasul@lums.edu.pk
