Opinion
‘Splitist’ policies
Owen Bennett-Jones
Tuesday, October 28, 2014
Earlier this year, when the government was talking to the Taliban, the argument used to justify the dialogue went like this: ‘If we can split the Taliban, then it will mean it is much easier for the army to deal with the remaining irreconcilables.’
And, for once, everything seems to have gone according to plan. Khalid Mehsud, formerly the TTP South Waziristan chief, took the money. With copious quantities of ‘compensation’ funds, he marched out of the TTP describing it as a criminal cartel killing innocent people. Makes you wonder why he joined up in the first place.
His decision to break away left the army in a much stronger position to win back control of North Waziristan. Fazlullah, exposed to be incapable of keeping the Taliban united, was distracted by the need to tackle internal divisions. And as he did so Pakistan enjoyed a period of relative quiet in the big cities.
And yet some Pakistanis have watched these developments with a raised eyebrow. As they are all too well aware, there is a history of the Pakistani state failing to crush its enemies but instead trying to weaken them by a policy of creating splits.
How much easier, the official thinking goes, to get our opponents to fight each other rather than doing the job ourselves. How much better to use guile and cunning to achieve our objectives rather than brute force.
The most of obvious example comes from the 1990s in Karachi. Faced with the growing power of the MQM, the state sponsored a breakaway rival faction, MQM Haqiqi. As intended, the Haqiqis went about their given task of confronting their former comrades with force.
But there was, in fact, a price to be paid for the policy. All those weapons supplied to the Haqiqis only made the situation for Karachiites even worse as the violence in the city became ever more intense. And of course the state didn’t go as far as to allow the Haqiqis to entirely destroy the MQM. After all, the calculation went, Altaf Hussain might come in handy one day.
Take another example: Kashmir. At first the ISI backed the JKLF seeing it as a way of putting pressure on India. But when Pakistan’s securicrats realised that the JKLF was in fact struggling not for union with Pakistan but for Kashmiri independence, the ISI went in for a bit of splitism. Within a few years there was an alphabet soup of Kashmiri militant outfits, some under direct state sponsorship and others being supported through various proxies.
As in Karachi, there was a price – and not just for the Kashmiris who had to put up with violence all around them. True, the insurgency became more focused on union with Pakistan. But at the same time many militant leaders took their eye off the Indian security forces and started fighting each other. In theory the various groups’ shared opposition to Indian rule in Kashmir should have united them. In practice their need – or at least their desire – to secure official Pakistani support undermined their cause.
It is a pattern that has been repeated in other spheres of Pakistani life. Sectarian groups have found their efforts to kill those they object to confused by their desire to secure official backing and the funds that come with it. It’s happened in mainstream politics too: remember the PML-N and PML-Q.
Breakaway factions can disappear into relative obscurity – as MQM Haqiqi and the JKLF have done. But some – such as Harakat al Ansar – can end up having a life of their own.
Divide and rule is a time-honoured method of governance, once much loved by the British. And it does have its advantages. It is perhaps too easy to overlook the times when the policy works. After all in recent months the Pakistani Army has managed to win back control of North Waziristan. This time last year many Pakistanis believed that would never happen. Creating the split in the Waziri Taliban, it turns out, was an effective piece of statecraft.
But that is not the whole story. The reliance on splits also exposes an underlying state weakness. By effectively paying part of the Taliban not to fight, the state not only rewarded one of its enemies but also allowed would be militants to conclude that if they want to make serious money the best way to do it is to become such a problem that the government will pay you to go away.
The splitist policy in the tribal areas sent a signal that, by force alone, the state is incapable of enforcing its writ. Indeed with Khalid Mehsud likely to be given a very free hand in the parts of South Waziristan he controls, the army might end up giving up some of its recent hard-won gains there. So, the short-term gains may lead to some some longer-term losses.
And looking further ahead, history suggests that splits lead to factions which will at some point use the state patronage they enjoy to pursue their own objectives and not those of Pakistan as a whole. And then, no doubt, they will be helped by the state’s tendency to take a distinctly indulgent approach towards errant allies. And all the while the state will have failed to do the one thing that it needs to do above all else: establish rule of law.
The writer is a freelance British journalist, one of the hosts of BBC’s Newshour and the author of the new political thriller, Target Britain.
Twitter: @OwenBennettJone
Email:
bennettjones@hotmail.com