Last month Richard Holbrooke, the US state department’s special representative, met students from Pakistan’s northwest tribal areas. They were enraged by drone attacks, which — according to David Kilcullen, counter-insurgency adviser to US General David Petraeus — have eliminated only about 14 terrorist leaders while killing 700 civilians. One young man told Holbrooke that he knew someone killed in a Predator drone strike.
“You killed 10 members of his family,” he said.
Another said that the strikes had unleashed a fresh wave of refugees.
“Are many of them Taliban?” Holbrooke asked.
“We are all Taliban,” he replied.
Describing this scene in Time, Joe Klein said he was shocked by the declaration, though he recognized it as one “of solidarity, not affiliation.” He was also bewildered by the “mixed loyalties and deep resentments [that] make Pakistan so difficult to handle.” One wishes Klein had paused to wonder if people anywhere else would wholeheartedly support a foreign power that “collaterally” murders 50 relatives and friends from the air for every militant killed.
Much has been made of Pakistan’s “denial” about the threat posed by the Taliban rather than India; correspondingly, western politicians and commentators have applauded the Pakistani military operation in Swat valley that has exposed 3 million people to what Human Rights Watch calls a humanitarian catastrophe. Relatively little attention has been given to the US’ more damaging evasion of the fact that most people in Pakistan, a “frontline” country in the war on terror, are unsympathetic if not actively hostile to it.
Political bitterness rather than racial or religious supremacism fuels this variant of anti-Americanism. Twice in three decades the US has enlisted military dictators in Pakistan to fight its battles — most damagingly in the cold war when, as US President Barack Obama conceded recently in Cairo, the US heedlessly deployed Muslims as proxies against Soviet communism. Many Pakistanis remember how the blowback from the CIA’s anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan (millions of Afghan refugees, a rampant Kalashnikov “culture” and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism) ravaged their country, years before it crashed into the US itself on Sept. 11, 2001. Pakistanis now accuse the US, again not unreasonably, for pursuing its failed war on terror in Afghanistan into Pakistan, reinvigorating the extremists it had helped to spawn.
Though beholden to US aid, Pakistan’s civilian-military elite has been naturally reluctant to fight too hard to redeem the blunders of an overweening and unreliable ally; covertly supporting extremist groups, elements in the army and intelligence have tried to maintain their room for maneuver in both Afghanistan and Kashmir. Occasionally, as in Swat and now again in Waziristan, intense US pressure yields a military assault. It can even attract a degree of public support, as most Pakistanis are appalled by the brutality of Talibanized Pashtuns.
But this does not amount to popular endorsement of drone attacks. Last month Indian-born US journalist Fareed Zakaria told Jon Stewart on the Daily Show that Pakistan was emerging from its state of denial since his Pakistani friends, who previously opposed the drone attacks, now tell him: “You know what? If that’s the only thing that will work, kill those guys.”
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