It is difficult to recall a previous instance when a nation has been referred to as afflicted with the cancer of terrorism, as President Obama referred to Pakistan in his press briefing along with President Karzai on 12 May, 2010. He could not have done it cynically. He lost his mother and grandmother to cancer and the fight against cancer is one of the major planks in his healthcare programme. Obviously, he was using this analogy to convey a message to Pakistani civil society and the Pakistani establishment, including the Army, which is its core. Cancer leads to the multiplication of malignant cells in the body and today that is what is happening in respect of different terrorist organisations in Pakistan.
He said, “I think what you’ve seen over the last several months is a growing recognition that they have a cancer in their midst; that the extremist organisations that have been allowed to congregate and use as a base the frontier areas to then go into Afghanistan, that that now threatens Pakistan’s sovereignty.”
He also predicted that it will take time for Pakistan to deal with this cancer. He told the audience, “But just as it’s going to take some time for Afghanistan’s economy, for example, to fully recover from 30 years of war, it’s going to take some time for Pakistan, even where there is a will, to find a way in order to effectively deal with these extremists in areas that are fairly loosely governed from Islamabad. Part of what I’ve been encouraged by is Pakistan’s willingness to start asserting more control over some of these areas. But it’s not going to happen overnight. And they have been taking enormous casualties; the Pakistani military has been going in fairly aggressively. But this will be a ongoing project.”
His assertion that Pakistan is obsessed with India as a threat has been criticised in Pakistan on the ground that he did not refer to India’s obsession with Pakistan. The former happens to be a revisionist state which started four wars with India, while India is a status quo one. There are any number of terrorist organisations threatening the US, India, UK, Spain and various other countries, operating from Pakistan and threatening Pakistan’s own sovereignty. That is not the case with India.
President Obama made it clear that the US will not cut and run from the Af-Pak area in July 2011, as is being speculated in Pakistan, India and even the US. He said, “What I have said is that having put in more troops over the last several months in order to break the momentum of the Taliban, that beginning in 2011 July, we will start bringing those troops down and turning over more and more responsibility to Afghan security forces that we are building up. But we are not suddenly, as of July 2011, finished with Afghanistan. In fact, to the contrary, part of what I’ve tried to emphasise to President Karzai and the Afghan people, but also to the American people, is this is a long-term partnership that is not simply defined by our military presence….. But after July 2011, we are still going to have an interest in making sure that Afghanistan is secure, that economic development is taking place, that good governance is being promoted. And so we’re going to still be putting in resources and we’re still going to be a friend to the Afghan people in their efforts to stabilise. So that’s something I want to make absolutely clear.”
He was even more emphatic in his talk in Kabul on 28 March 2010, when he said , “But we also want to continue to make progress on the civilian process of ensuring that agricultural production, energy production, good governance, rule of law, anti-corruption efforts — all these things end up resulting in an Afghanistan that is more prosperous, more secure, independent; is not subject to meddling by its neighbours; a transition will be able to occur so that more and more security efforts are made by the Afghans.” (Emphasis added.) If the Pakistani Army was dreaming of installing a friendly Taliban in power to derive strategic depth from Afghanistan, they can forget about it.
Three messages flow from President Obama’s articulation of his Af-Pak policy, which totally contradicts widely held popular perceptions. The US will not evacuate totally from Afghanistan in July 2011 and will not allow Afghanistan to be subjected to meddling by its neighbours. The terrorist-cancer afflicted Pakistan is of great concern to the US and Pakistan’s cancer treatment will be a prolonged one. The Kerry-Lugar-Berman Act is the chemotherapy the US will be administering over a period of time. In US calculations Pakistan will be fighting its terrorism over a considerable period of time and may need US help. Many observers in Pakistan have referred to the resurgence of the Taliban in South Waziristan and Swat and the increasing trend among different Jihadi groups — including those who were until recently patronised by the Pakistani Army and the Inter-Services Intelligence — to form opportunistic alliances. It is highly likely that in the coming days the Pakistan Army will ask the US to intensify its drone strikes to support its own counter-insurgency operations.
In India there is a tendency to give undue importance to the pronouncements of officials like Holbrooke, Mullen and McChrystal (which usually have a Pakistani-friendly flavour) and draw the conclusion that the US is leaning towards Islamabad. The Pakistani Army and civil society have been propagating that the US is keen to withdraw from Afghanistan by July 2011 and that they are looking forward to the Pakistani Army’s help to achieve that goal. Such an assessment totally contradicts the clear and unambiguous pronouncements of President Obama.
While Holbrooke, Mullen and McChrystal, being in close contact with the Pakistani Army chief, have a compulsion to get along with him, President Obama is under no such compulsion. He expects to be in office for the next six-and-a-half years and needs to take the people of the US into confidence on the realities on the ground. Hence his assertion on Pakistan’s cancer and the long chemotherapy needed to cure it. India will be committing a serious mistake if it ignores these candid presidential pronouncements while making its assessment.