ABSTRACT
Since the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, Pakistan has assumed center-stage in the U.S.-led war against al-Qaeda. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan pushed Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders to seek sanctuary in Pakistan, especially in its poorly governed tribal areas. The Taliban have used these “safe havens” to recruit, train and arm for a renewed jihad against U.S.-led troops in Afghanistan. The incompetence and corruption of the U.S.-backed government of President Karzai, unmet international aid commitments, the lack of a usable Afghan state apparatus and the illegal trade in narcotics has allowed the Taliban to emerge and coalesce into a resilient insurgency. In 2008, they inflicted the highest number of casualties on international forces since their fall from power in 2001. The resurgence of the Taliban and their al-Qaeda allies seriously threatens international efforts to reconstruct and stabilize Afghanistan. It has also raised concerns in Washington that a future 9/11 style terrorist attack on the U.S. mainland is most likely to be planned from Pakistan’s tribal areas. In other words, stabilizing Afghanistan, which is crucial to defeating global jihadism, hinges in good measure on denying them their sanctuaries in Pakistan. That task requires eliciting Pakistan’s unstinted political and military cooperation in the
“war on terror.” While Pakistan has aided the U.S. in aprehending al-Qaeda leaders in its territory, it has also backed the Afghan Taliban fighting international troops in Afghanistan as an insurance against Indian presence and influence in that country.1
Hence, stabilizing Pakistan is complicated by its threat perceptions of India, rooted in their rivalry over Kashmir which has erupted into two conventional wars (1948 and 1965) and at least one border war (Kargil 1999) under the menacing shadow of atomic weapons. In 2001-2, both armies were eyeball-to-eyeball for months after India mobilized its troops in reaction to attacks on the parliament in Delhi allegedly masterminded by Lashkare Tayyaba (LeT), a militant group operating out of Pakistan. They reportedly came close to another confrontation in the wake of the gruesome Mumbai terrorist attacks on 26 November 2008 also allegedly executed by Let militants. The Mumbai attacks derailed the composite dialogue between the two sides in which they had made slow but steady progress in confidence-building measures, such as trade across the line of control, the easing of travel restrictions and to a lesser degree in evolving bilateral modalities for the resolution of outstanding disputes, such as Kashmir. In the neo-realist view,2 not wholly unwarranted, the imperative of balancing the
threat3 from militarily superior rival India drives Pakistan’s search for security. Threat balancing in this case involves spending high levels of its meager revenues on the military, frequently engaging outside powers, acquiring nuclear weapons, and relying on asymmetric warfare in Indian-administered Kashmir. In fact, as mentioned above,
even its policy toward its western neighbor Afghanistan is heavily influenced by its desire to deny India a foothold in an area it considers its legitimate sphere of influence. This chapter argues that the picture is slightly more complex. Acknowledging that the
military imbalance of power between India and Pakistan is one important part of the story, I argue that the perceived threat from India is not determinative. In fact, “objective” security threats can neither adequately explain the Pakistani elite’s threat perceptions, nor the ways in which it answers those threats. In order to understand where its insecurity “comes from,” there is a need to problematize rather than assume the Pakistani state’s security preferences. Drawing on constructivist scholarship in international relations,4 I make the case that Pakistan, like any other modern state, was not genetically programmed only to seek physical security. Rather, it had both physical and identity needs.5 And, furthermore, its physical security interests were shaped by the social construction of its identity in a specific historical context. Thus, as Wendt succinctly put it, “anarchy is what states make of it.”6 This is not to imply that states make their own history as they please. But it is not entirely outside the realm of historical possibility that the two successor states to British India could have chosen different, less pugnacious paths to structure their bilateral interactions. The argument is that before states can become singularly focused on protecting their security, they have to define who they are, identify their enemies and decide what they must do to protect their identity and the interests attached or associated with it, as part of an inter-state socialization process in the context of an anarchic international system.7
