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Hash “Brown”

Several years after the application of the Pressler Law in letter and in spirit on Pakistan, effectively drying up US economic and military aid to Pakistan, the Brown Amendment has been passed in overwhelming fashion by US Congress. The most important factor in the public mind regarding the stoppage of US Aid was the refusal of the US to honour the contractual obligation of delivery of F-16s (how many only God and the US $ 350 million plus discrepancy in accounting can tell) already paid for, therefore the critics point to this lack of success as a rank failure, papered over by the sop of the Senator Brown initiative to allow the rest of the military equipment stuck in the pipeline to flow through. The Ms Benazir Regime is naturally effusive over the Amendment’s approval as they point to a significant turnaround in our relationship with the US, which at one point of time in 1993 was about to declare us a “terrorist nation” in the company of such luminaries as Iraq, Libya, North Korea, Sudan etc. In a recent article former VCOAS, Gen (Retd) K.M Arif, has been scathingly sarcastic about the “achievements” of the Ms Benazir Regime.

To put the correct facts on record, it was a major failure of the Zia Regime to accept the Pressler Amendment. Given that in the late 70s the US Congress had passed a law against nuclear proliferation, banning aid to all developing countries engaged in the pursuit of nuclear expertise, the Pressler Amendment was simply a mechanism (allowing the US President to certify Pakistan’s continuation of non-nuclear status) to allow US economic and military aid to flow into Pakistan in the wake of the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan. With US in an antagonistic relationship with Iran, Pakistan was vital ground as a logistics base to counter the Soviet threat. The Soviet invasion was seen as a precursor to the long-awaited Russian dream of reaching the warm waters of the Indian Ocean, this would expose vital US interests in the Gulf (particularly its oil) to Soviet interference. At the same time it would open a totally new front to the existing ones in the West (Europe and Atlantic Ocean), East (Japan, S. Korea and the Pacific Ocean) and the South West (Turkey, Middle East and the Mediterranean). A direct land route to the Indian Ocean would allow the Soviets to maintain a major fleet in the Indian Ocean, outflanking NATO and putting both the Middle East and the ASEAN countries, normally US allies for the most part at maximum risk. The entire US global policy was under threat and it was little wonder that Pakistan again became a “cornerstone” of US policy fairly rapidly. Given that after the execution of the late PM Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1979, Gen Ziaul Haq was many degrees worse as an international pariah than Gen Sani Abacha of Nigeria is today, this was a remarkable transformation. From the doghouse, the late dictator rose to the top of the heap as a bulwark of the free (read western) world against Soviet expansion. Every nation has a fundamental right to protect its own vital interests, in the early 80s, with Iran, the designated western policeman for the Gulf gone, Pakistan became vital to the US to keep within the western camp. Since we were antipathetic to the Soviet presence in Afghanistan, it suited Pakistan to play the “great game” on the side of the west. One wonders what would have happened if Pakistan had pragmatically come to an arrangement with the Soviets that would have allowed Soviet hold over Afghanistan, restraining of the Mujahideen in some accommodation with the Soviets and a land access to the Balochistan coast with permission for Soviet naval facilities. One doubts that this scenario would have been palatable to the people of Pakistan or that the Afghan Mujahideen would have been restrained in any manner without guerrilla warfare taking place on both sides of the Durand Line. As such, it suited Pakistan’s interest to come to terms with the US in its third party war in Afghanistan (a la Vietnam) but the fact remained that we did have options that we failed to use as bargaining chips during negotiations with the US with respect to US economic and military aid mostly as a grant. This was because of a total failure of the Zia Regime (of which Gen Arif was a vital member) to protect Pakistan’s fundamental interests by obtaining the maximum benefit from the circumstances.

Top of the agenda should have been Kashmir. India was an ally of the Soviet Union by treaty, it was supporting the Russian adventure in Afghanistan. We should have taken a firm commitment from the US, which was on record about self-deterioration for the Kashmiri people, to support Pakistan’s cause. This we failed to do! Next, we should have never agreed to a conditional aid package. The US had accepted India’s nuclear potential and we should have insisted that we should be treated at par with India over the nuclear issue i.e. acceptance of our nuclear expertise as a necessary deterrent to India’s overwhelming numerical superiority in conventional weapons and equipment, almost a 4:1 ratio at places. This we failed to do! Since Karachi was used as a major logistics staging port for Afghan Refugees, the main feed for the Afghan Mujahideen, we should have insisted upon development, at US and western expense, of Karachi and an alternate port at Gwadar. This we failed to do! We should have insisted upon development of first class motorways connecting Karachi to Peshawar (and upto the border), Karachi to Quetta/Chaman (and upto the border), Gwadar to Quetta/Chaman as well as Gwadar to Rato Dero (connecting the Karachi-Peshawar Motorway). This we failed to do! We should have gone for four to five modern cities at western cost in the geographical alignment Quetta-Peshawar to house the refugees, taking over the cities and relocating Industrial parks in the aftermath of the war. This we failed to do as we were happy with supply of tents in which many Afghan Refugees still live in 15 years later! With respect to arms and equipment, we should have insisted for in-country manufacture from F-16s to tanks to small arms, as Turkey and Egypt and others had done. This we failed to do! Above all we failed with respect to the economy. Ours is a cotton-based economy and we are smothered by US and EEC quotas on our textile manufactures. If our quotas had been raised to reflect our production and population, our value-added export in early 1980s would have crossed the US $ 110 billion mark, estimated today conservatively at US $ 25 billion. This would have put the economy into the orbit of the Asian Tigers like Japan, Taiwan and South Korea, even Thailand and Singapore in the early 1980s. This we failed to do! In the end, the US and western countries should have been asked to forgive our debt in the manner they have done post-the Gulf War for Egypt (US $ 14 billion), Jordan (US $ 750 million), etc, that would have got us out of the debt trap. That we failed to do! While people like Gen Arif are fine human beings who deserve individual respect, they have no moral right to cast judgment on successive governments who are reaping the whirlwind for their failure in sowing the wind to the country’s advantage. Let us not blame the US, if we go to the negotiating table and do not ask for what should be our right, why should the other party give away things not asked for? Their negotiators were protecting the vital interests of their country, for our negotiators their vital interest seemed only to be the survival of the regime.

As we approached the end of the Afghan war, we were repeatedly told by the Bush Administration that since the Pressler Amendment was law in the US, if we failed to curb our nuclear aspirations we would run afoul of US Congress as the US President would not be able to certify that we were not engaged in nuclear proliferation. Accustomed to such warnings in the past, we gambled that we could still get away with certification despite the fact that the raison d’etre for continued US assistance, Soviet involvement in the Afghan conflict was winding down. In 1990, soon after the fall of the Ms Benazir Government, then US President George Bush found it difficult in the face of mounting evidence that we had “uncapped” our nuclear potential, to give necessary certification to US Congress. Our aid then rapidly dried up, particularly military aid. The portents were there on the wall for anyone to see but we kept hoping otherwise and kept paying instalments for the F-16s kept in storage in the Mojave Desert. As the cooperation between the CIA and ISI also scaled down in Afghanistan, the Afghan Mujahideen turned from freedom fighters into potential “terrorists of the fundamentalist-kind.” To make matters worse, the then PM chose a man with conservative religious bent, Lt Gen Javed Nasir, to be DG ISI, thus running afoul of the US on one hand and his own COAS Gen Asif Nawaz Janjua on the other, though for different reasons. In an inspirational example of Murphy’s Law at its worst, at about the time the US was clamping down on terrorism as a world policy, Javed Nasir’s ISI seemed to embark on their own Jehad “in the spread of Islam.” Needless to say, with great and undisguised glee, the Indians smeared us far and wide for true and false alike, mostly false. Soon we were almost among the nations on the US hit-list. The events of 1993 changed things and by the end of the year the new DG ISI went to the other extreme in a “more loyal than the king” exercise, not only putting paid to our intelligence expertise gathered over a dozen years of working closely with a Superpower in the continued demise of another Superpower but effectively destroying most of ISI’s inherent capabilities acquired through hard experience. Worst of all, the best (and most) of ISI’s human assets were sent home, mostly to ruminate as to why they risked life and limb in their country’s cause for so long? From a peak wartime capability the ISI rapidly became filled with peacetime soldiers loath to change the status quo.

Enter Ms Benazir into this sorry state of things. We may not agree with the US on a great number of things, we cannot escape the fact that it is presently the only Superpower and one that we have to live with. Whether for high-tech and/or sophisticated military expertise or for economic development, we have to primarily deal with the US. From a terrorist nation status, however extreme in being judged so, we had to return to the status of a developing nation with economic potential attractive to western investors. The F-16s or other sophisticated military equipment remained beyond our reach but the ones in the pipeline were still needed. The ignorant cannot even begin to understand why it is necessary to be an economic powerhouse before aspiring to maintain a credible military deterrent, particularly in the face of development of high-tech and sophisticated military hardware by India indigenously as well as an ability to acquire such equipment from all available world sources. The Pressler Law ensured that all US investment was closed to us, with the rest of the developed world taking its cue from the US. We were bereft of necessary US Government financial guarantees for investment available through OPIC, MARAD, etc. We had to break out of the cold that we were being thrust into, a stage would have come that the military and economic disparity would have been so predominantly in India’s favour that they would not have to go to war with us to establish hegemony in the entire region. It was necessary Ms Benazir took it up as the utmost challenge to stop the rot and reverse the trend.

Ms Maleeha Lodhi, our Ambassador in the US, has done a remarkable job. Not only did she have to break the mindset in the US Congress as regards their attitude towards a dependable and time-tested friend, she had to convince the US Administration (and a Democratic one at that) that we were partners in the effort. The whole Pakistani Community, normally riven by divisions along party lines, came together as she motivated them to do so out of a commitment to national objectives. It was a team effort that had Ms Benazir’s unrelenting charisma in the west to back the effort in accomplishing a national purpose. We needed the Brown Amendment. According to an old saying, even a journey of a thousand miles has to start with a single step, this was one giant stride down the road to acceptability as a responsible player among the comity of nations. So let’s not be peevish about credit where credit is due, let’s not “hash” the Brown Amendment out of spite. One has to be objective and pragmatic about ground realities, the Brown Amendment is one such reality.

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