he day the world changed forever. Osama bin Laden. Unarmed. Taken out with one bullet to his head, and a burst of gunfire to his chest.
The golden bullet, that altered the world as we know it.
It ended the life of a Saudi millionaire whose delusional, extremist jihad was fodder to the vituperative, anti-western rhetoric that fuelled Arab anger over Washington’s propping up of a series of unrepresentative governments in the Arab world.
It helped US President Barack Obama reclaim his persona as the silver-tongued orator. He is now Cool Hand Luke with a steady hand on the rudder of his hitherto messy foreign policy boat, a stream of studied photo-ops steadily erasing his imperfections.
Only days after the Abbotabad raid, he is photographed with victims of 9/11 against the backdrop of a monument at Ground Zero; then, pictured alongside US troops returning from a traumatic tour of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan, the promise of a drawdown quietening murmurs over the much reviled surge; pictures released by the White House of an inscrutable Obama watching the Osama endgame in the Situation Room are the final touch. Clearly, there’s little doubt that barring an unforseen catastrophe, the Oval Office is Barack Obama’s for a second term.
That’s the obvious conclusion. Less clear is the fall-out on relations between India’s arch enemy Pakistan — embarrassed over how they have been supposedly outed over the stashing away of bin Laden from prying eyes these last ten years — and the Americans, to all intents and purposes, rattled by mistrustful ways of their ally of 60 years.
How the purported “unhinging” of the partnership between the two nations affects India, which has much to gain if Islamabad reverses years of manipulation and gains an upper hand over Rawalpindi, is open to debate.
In other words, can the discredited civilian leadership take the first baby steps towards independent decision-making, unmindful of interference from the well-entrenched and hitherto hugely respected military and intelligence power centres which have always claimed they know what’s best for Pakistan.
Army chief Ashfaq Kiyani has lost little time in swiftly and publicly saying he disagrees with Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari’s nuclear no-first use policy, pre-empting any move by this unpopular president to cash in on the ordinary Pakistani’s unease over the Abbotabad debacle.
The reworking of the nuke policy would have been the one Zardari gesture that, like former prime minister Nawaz Sharif’s path-breaking Lahore parleys with Indian premier Atal Behari Vajpayee, and former president Pervez Musharraf’s promised nixing of terrorism from Pakistani soil, could break the Indo-Pak logjam post 26/11.
It could win Zardari plaudits in Delhi which, given the present climate, cannot serve up what Rawalpindi has pushed its pliant foreign ministry into asking for — a withdrawal by Indian forces from Siachen or any agreement on Kashmir that would give Pakistan a face-saver.
It would certainly work for Zardari in Washington where, much to Rawalpindi’s alarm, US hawks have let it be known that given the singular and demonstrable inability of Pakistan’s air force to detect the intrusion by US helicopters of its airspace, taking out Pakistan’s nuclear assets should be the next priority.
Zardari, gainsayed by a pro-military prime minister and cabinet, may not be able to turn the tables right away. Public anger over continuing US drone attacks in the tribal areas, where Pakistan’s army has suffered severe reverses, is always cleverly directed to Zardari’s door, even though it’s an open secret that on matters military and on relations with the US and India, it’s GHQ that always calls the shots.
The military budget is closed off to questioning by the civilian government.
Barring a brief period when former premier Benazir Bhutto attempted to, and was outmanouevred, and Sharif sacked a military chief — no, not Musharraf — and paid the price later, no elected leader has remained immune to military pressure. As both prime ministers made known after they demitted office, pressure would come from ministers in their inner circle, who suddenly exhibited links to the military.
Pakistan, lying as it does at the cross-roads of Central and South Asia with one eye on the Islamic Arab world, sharing a long, often unmanned border with Afghanistan, with strategic ties to China, the pre-eminent power in Asia, is of more value to the US as a pliant ally than as an enemy.
But if the Osama kill is, as commonly deduced, the work of a double-dealing military, the US must review its policy of pouring arms and money into this nation. Either by accident or design — surely, more design — civilian leaderships have either been annihilated or made redundant in Pakistan.
And it is the billions of dollars in US aid that are meant to build schools and colleges and change conservative, nihilistic mindsets that have, instead, strengthened the military-industrial complex and ensured that the military remains super-eminent.
Any perceived threat to bringing in western norms that would empower and educate all, feeds into the paranoia, the fear of change. More so, in places like Punjab and Pakhtunkhwa, the army’s main recruiting grounds, which contribute in great measure to keeping the jihadi infrastructure well-oiled and alive.
A jihad, that former president Pervez Musharraf’s bombastic ‘your jihadi, my freedom fighter’, is part of the Pakistani narrative, and has been employed by an army, which has won no war, in keeping the larger Indian state off-balance with its continual jihadi pin-pricks.
As Musharraf — and in fact, every military man of any standing in Pakistan — averred on the small screen in recent days, the irrational hatred of India and justification that it is right to wage war by employing jihadis and criminals, incubated in Pakistan’s laboratories of evil, remains central to the military’s strategic thinking.
Conspiracy theorists have put out that the very fact that Washington and Rawalpindi were on the same page on the Osama kill shows the strong ties between the mentor and the rentier state, and that the Abbotabad operation was in fact, GHQ serving up the ultimate Al-Qaeda crumb — Osama bin Laden, whom even Musharraf had said died seven years ago.
One’s only question then would be — why would the pompous Pakistan military allow itself to be debased in the eyes of the world?
Instead, the truth may lie somewhere in between. That the US, with incontrovertible evidence of the military-ISI’s links with the jihadists — Taliban, to keep Karzai’s pro-India Afghanistan off-balance, and Al Qaida, to keep the American dollars coming — gave the Pakistan establishment, the ‘you are either with us or with them’ spiel that former US President George W. Bush gave to Musharraf after cataclysmic 9/11.
The US, with one eye on the ‘Arab spring’ that has seen its Arab allies toppled, must review whether its policy of blindly backing Pakistan’s military over its civilian leadership yields the kind of dividends that can contribute to peace between the two nuclear-armed neighbours.
India would do well to ensure that it steps up its own rhetoric on discrediting the Pakistani army that has always remained inimical to India.
It must not cut back on support to the Afghan president Hamid Karzai who could be mired in more trouble as the ISI-military intel dust off a newly-minted Mullah Omar, or someone like him, as a Pashtun counter to a pro-India Kabul.
India would do well to reach out to the political leadership in Pakistan that has served it well in the past and help persuade a deluded military into reversing its sorry path to self-destruction where the jihadis they have birthed are coming back to haunt them.
The Osama kill then, the first step towards the coming of a South Asian spring in Pakistan?
