ISLAMABAD:
The Pakistan Army chief General Raheel has told Prime Minister Nawaz
Sharif that the time for talks with Taliban was over.
“We
will avenge the blood of every last soldier. Talks or no talks, the
army will retaliate,” one military official told the influential Reuters
news agency in Islamabad.The Reuters report, filed by reporter Mehreen Z
Malik and edited by Mike Collett-White and Maria Golovnina, gave a
revealing picture of civil-military relations in the Nawaz government.
The
report said: “At Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s palatial
offices in Islamabad this week, the army chief sat down to deliver the
head of government a message he did not want to hear: The time for talks
with the troublesome Pakistani Taliban was over.”
Nawaz
Sharif came to power a year ago promising to find a peaceful settlement
with the Islamist militant group, but as round after round of talks
failed, the powerful armed forces favoured a military solution.
Their
patience finally ran out and, late on Tuesday afternoon, during a tense
meeting, the army effectively declared it would override a crucial
plank of the government’s strategy and take matters into its own hands.
“The
army chief and other military officers in the room were clear on the
military’s policy: the last man, the last bullet,” a government insider
with first-hand knowledge of the meeting told Reuters.
Asked
to sum up the message General Raheel Sharif wanted to convey at the
gathering, he added: “The time for talk is over.”The next day, Pakistani
forces launched rare air strikes against the militants holed up in the
remote, lawless tribal belt near the Afghan border. It is not clear
whether Sharif authorised the operation.
On Thursday, they
backed that up with the first major ground offensive against the
Taliban there, undermining Nawaz Sharif’s year-long attempt to end a
bloody insurgency across the country through peaceful means.
Disagreement
over the militant threat is the latest row to flare up between the
government and military, and relations between the two branches of power
are at their lowest ebb for years, according to government officials.
The
government did say talks with the Taliban would go on. “We will talk
with those who are ready for it and the (military) operation is being
launched against those who are not ready to come to the negotiating
table,” spokesman Pervaiz Rashid told local media on Thursday.But the
operations put the military, which has a long record of intervening in
civilian rule through plots and coups, firmly back at the centre of
Pakistan’s security policy.
The balance of power is
shifting at a time when foreign troops are preparing to withdraw from
Afghanistan and arch-rival India has just elected a Hindu nationalist
leader promising to be more assertive on the international stage.“This
is the clearest signal yet that the army will dictate its terms now,” a
member of Nawaz Sharif’s cabinet said.
The Pakistani
Taliban, as distinct from the Afghan Taliban which is actively targeting
the Nato forces in Afghanistan, is believed to be behind attacks on
Pakistani soldiers and civilians that have killed thousands in recent
years.
The Pakistan Army has distinguished between “good”
Taliban like the feared Haqqani network — who do not attack Pakistani
security forces but fight in Afghanistan — and “bad” Taliban, indigenous
Pakistani militants who are seeking to create an Islamic state.
While
Pakistan’s military wants to go after the “bad” Taliban, it has,
despite pressure from Washington, largely avoided taking on groups who
launch attacks against coalition forces in Afghanistan from Pakistan’s
North Waziristan region.
Prompting the latest
intervention, the Pakistani Taliban have become increasingly bold,
striking the army in tribal areas including a recent battle in which an
army major died. Earlier this month, nine soldiers were killed in an
explosion near the Afghan border.“We will avenge the blood of every last
soldier. Talks or no talks, the army will retaliate,” said one military
official, who, like most others interviewed for this article, spoke on
condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject.
The
army has ruled Pakistan for more than half of its history.Nawaz Sharif
himself was toppled by the army in 1999 during his previous tenure as
prime minister.But, humiliated after a secret 2011 US raid that killed
Osama bin Laden on Pakistani soil, the army stood back from politics and
supported the last year’s first democratic transition of power which
brought Nawaz Sharif back to office.
Sharif manoeuvred
carefully, hand picking a new army chief and trying to forge a
partnership with the military in the early days of his tenure, but the
overtures had little lasting impact.
There are other signs
of civil-military discord.Sharif came to power promising to rebuild
relations with India, but has been under pressure to toughen his stance
from hardliners at home, particularly within the army.The nuclear-armed
neighbours have fought three wars since independence from Britain in
1947, two of them over the still-disputed Himalayan territory of
Kashmir.
Nawaz Sharif’s policies towards India have been
heavily scrutinised; some in the army justify its hefty budget by
pointing to — and, critics say, playing up — the potential threat from
India.
And despite signs the military has become more
amenable to overtures from its old foe than in the past, a trade deal
pushed by the prime minister and aimed at improving ties with India was
cancelled at the last minute after pressure from the army, top
government officials said.
Sharif now faces a dilemma over
whether to accept an invitation by Indian Prime Minister-designate
Narendra Modi to attend his inauguration next week.The army is also
bitter about the trial of former military ruler Pervez Musharraf, who
ousted Sharif from power in 1999 and was arrested after he returned to
Pakistan to take part in last year’s election.
Ties with
Afghanistan have never been easy, but some officials believe the army
wants to torpedo the government’s relationship with a future Kabul
administration, risking deterioration in regional security as Nato
troops prepare to leave this year.
Generals have jealously
guarded the right to dictate policy on Afghanistan, seeing friendly
guerrilla groups as “assets” to blunt the influence of India there.
Though
simmering under the surface, tensions between the government and the
army spilled into the open last month when a popular journalist was shot
by unknown gunmen and his channel, Geo News, blamed the army’s powerful
spy agency, the Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
Public
criticism of the shadowy ISI is almost unheard of in Pakistan. In a
rare public response, the army demanded that Geo News, the country’s
most-watched news channel, be shut down.The government’s media regulator
has since resisted the army’s demands to cancel the channel’s license,
which the military sees as a direct sign of defiance.
“Everyone
was looking out to see how the government would treat the army in this
crisis — as a friend or foe?” said a senior military official. “But the
government allowed this to become a free-for-all, army-hunting season.”
For
Sharif, buckling under military pressure is a major risk. “This is not
about one TV channel but about freedom of expression and about living in
a democracy,” Rashid said. “We should live and let live.”But despite
putting on a brave front, officials say the government is feeling under
siege.
“Never in the last year has the government felt
weaker or more vulnerable,” one of Sharif’s key economic advisers said.
“Now every time we have to take a major decision, on India, on
Afghanistan, we will have to think ‘How will the army react?’”
A
serving general said the army chief would always pick the “institution
over the Constitution if push comes to shove,” adding: “As a society and
a state, we have to avoid a context in which the army is pushed to do
something it doesn’t want to.”
