Last week, the chief of Pakistan’s army sat down at Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s palatial offices in Islamabad to deliver a message that the head of government did not want to hear: The time for talks with the troublesome Pakistani Taliban is over.
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 country’s powerful armed forces favored a military solution.
Their patience has finally ran out and during a tense meeting late on Tuesday, the army effectively declared that 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 reporters.
Asked to sum up the message Chief of Staff of the Pakistan Army General Raheel Sharif wanted to convey at last week’s gathering, the source said: “The time for talk is over.”
The next day, Pakistani forces launched rare air strikes against militants holed up in the country’s remote, lawless tribal belt near the Afghan border. It is not clear if the prime minister authorized the operation.
On Thursday, they backed that up with the first major ground offensive against the Taliban in the tribal area, undermining Nawaz Sharif’s year-long attempt to end a bloody insurgency across his 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 in years, according to government officials.
Yet Islamabad 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,” government spokesman Pervez Rashid told local media on Thursday.
Yet the operations put the military, which has a long record of intervening in civilian rule through plots and coups, firmly back in the center of Pakistan’s security policy.
The balance of power is shifting at a time when foreign troops are preparing to withdraw from Afghanistan and archrival India has just Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi, who promises 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 — distinct from the Afghan Taliban that is actively targeting 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 al-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 has become increasingly bold, striking the army in tribal areas, including a recent battle in which a major was killed. 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 and Nawaz Sharif was himself toppled by the army in 1999 during his previous tenure as prime minister.
However, humiliated after the clandestine US raid that killed former al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden on Pakistani soil in 2011, the army stood back from politics and supported last year’s first democratic transition of power, which brought Nawaz Sharif back to office.
Once back in power, the prime minister maneuvered 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 and there are other signs of civil-military discord.
Nawaz 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 neighbors have fought three wars since gaining independence from Britain in 1947, two of which were over the still-disputed Himalayan territory of Kashmir.
The prime minister’s policies toward India have been heavily scrutinized; some in the army justify its hefty budget by pointing to — and, critics say, playing up — the potential threat from India.
Despite signs that 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 New Delhi was canceled at the last minute after pressure from the army, top government officials said.
The army is also bitter about the trial of former Pakistani prime minister Pervez Musharraf, who ousted Nawaz Sharif from power in 1999 and was arrested after he returned home 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 a deterioration in regional security as NATO-led 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.
Public criticism of the shadowy agency is almost unheard of in Pakistan.
In a rare public response to the incident, the army demanded that Geo News, the country’s most-watched news channel, be shut down.
The government’s media regulator has 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?” a senior military official said. “But the government allowed this to become a free-for-all, army-hunting season.”
For Nawaz 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.”
Yet despite putting on a brave front, officials say the government feels under siege.
“Never in the last year has the government felt weaker or more vulnerable,” one of the prime minister’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?’” the adviser added.
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.”
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