The American commando raid that killed Osama bin Laden on 2 May accelerated the struggle underway inside Pakistan to determine the country’s future. Contrary to some assessments, Pakistan is neither a failed state nor a failing state. It functions as effectively today as in decades past. Rather, it is a state under siege from a radical syndicate of loosely-aligned terror groups with the goal of creating an extremist jihadist state in South Asia, aiming to hijack Pakistan and its weapons.

Less than a hundred hours after the Abbottabad raid, Al Qaeda’s shura council — its command centre — announced the group was declaring war on Pakistan and the ‘traitors and thieves’ in the government who had betrayed the ‘martyr shaykh’ bin Laden to the Americans. It was ironic since many Americans suspect the Pakistani army was actually complicit in abetting bin Laden’s successful 10-year evasion of the largest manhunt in human history. That both Al Qaeda and America distrust the Pakistani army speaks volumes.

Since then Al Qaeda and its allies in Pakistan have carried out their threat with a vengeance. Suicide bombings and other terror attacks have occurred across the country. The worst was an attack on a major Pakistani navy base in Karachi — a heavily-guarded facility where both US and Chinese experts assist the Navy. The assailants had insider knowledge of the base, and Pakistani security has arrested former naval personnel accused of helping the attackers. This attack illustrates the essence of the battle for Pakistan today: the militants support Al Qaeda and are affiliated with its ally the Pakistani Taliban; the Navy fought back, but is riddled with jihadist sympathisers who help the militants.

The Pakistani army is genuinely at war with parts of the syndicate of jihadi terror in Pakistan, like Al Qaeda and the Taliban. It has more than 140,000 troops engaged in operations against the militants along the Afghan border. Some 35,000 Pakistanis, including several thousand soldiers, have died in the fighting since 2001. Dozens of Inter Service Intelligence (ISI) men have died — notwithstanding the intelligence organisation’s collaboration with groups like Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, who attacked Mumbai in 2008, and the Afghan Taliban that fights NATO.

The army’s ambivalence about the jihad flows from its deep obsession with India. Pakistan — with American help — created the jihad in the 1980s to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan. But from the start the ISI planned to use jihadi groups against India as well. Over the decades the ‘S’ Department of ISI established close connections with scores of jihadi groups, becoming a state within ISI, which in turn is a state within the army. The army decides national security policy with little or no input from the political establishment.

General Nadeem Taj exemplifies the story. He orchestrated the coup that put former dictator Pervez Musharraf in power and was rewarded with several key jobs including command of the Kakul Military Academy in Abbottabad. It was on his watch as commandant of the academy that bin Laden moved into his hideout less than a mile away. One wonders if Taj was clueless or complicit.

In September 2007 Taj became Director General of ISI replacing General Ashfaq Kayani who was promoted to Chief of Army Staff (COAS). Taj lasted less than a year before he was removed under intense pressure from Washington — the Bush administration concluding that Taj’s ISI was directly involved in the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul in 2008 and undermining the new drone program to attack Al Qaeda targets inside Pakistan by warning the terrorists before attacks. Still, Taj was promoted to command a key corps in the army, the highest command level short of COAS.

The jihadist penetrations of the army raise persistent questions about the security of Pakistan’s nukes. According to a September-2009 ‘WikiLeaked’ State Department cable, France’s national security adviser, Jean-David Levitte, told the American Embassy in Paris that France believes the weapons are not secure. Levitte is one of the most astute diplomats in the world today, and he is almost certainly right.

The policies that would help wean the Pakistani army off its obsession with India and jihad are well known. A concerted effort to end the Indo-Pakistani conflict is essential. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, despite Mumbai, is trying to do just that — but it is a hard challenge. Talks to resolve the relatively simple issue of the disputed Siachen Glacier, the world’s highest war zone at the roof of the Himalayas, failed again in May. The harder issue, Kashmir, will probably take years to resolve at best.

But we don’t have years. Only a fortnight before the Abbottabad raid, General Kayani gave a speech at the military academy in the city, almost within earshot of bin Laden. In his remarks Kayani claimed the back of the militant syndicate in Pakistan had been broken and the army had triumphed. Evidently, he was mistaken.

 

Bruce Riedel is a senior fellow at the Saban Center in the Brookings Institution and Adjunct Professor at the School for Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. His most recent book, Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America and the Future of the Global Jihad, came out in March.

This piece was first published here, on YaleGlobal Online, on 2 June 2011.