From Strategic Depth To Strategic Dilemma: Pakistan And The Taliban

ISLAMABAD: When Taliban Acting Defense Minister Mullah Muhammad Yaqub, last week, landed at Kabul Airport after concluding Defense cooperation agreement with Russia during his Moscow visit, he issued a pointed warning to Pakistan: Islamabad, he vowed, would never dare to strike Afghan territory now.

It is beside the point whether Yaqub’s boast should be taken seriously or simply as an empty bravado. The central question could be how come Pak-Afghan relations reached a point where the Taliban Defense Minister was compelled to signal military deterrence against Pakistan?

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Pakistan’s strategic and political elites need to revisit a chapter of their own political and military history to answer this question.

For decades, Pakistan has been complaining that Indian political and military hostility after independence created an enduring sense of insecurity within the Pakistani state. From the day one Pakistan was faced with a much larger and much stronger military power on its Eastern border, and this forced Pakistan’s military planners to seek military strength, external alliances and strategic depth. What if Afghanistan under the Taliban is beginning to undergo a similar process?

Past five months have witnessed Pakistani political elites continuously talking about punishing the Afghan Taliban, applying military coercion on Afghanistan to make the Taliban government comply with Pakistani demands. The latest Taliban-Russia defense agreement clearly indicates that Pakistan’s coercive tactics have encouraged Afghan Taliban to seek new security patrons, new security alliances and new means of deterrence vis-à-vis Pakistan. Likely our region may be witnessing an early stage of a familiar phenomenon: the formation of a security dilemma which Pakistan’s strategic elites didn’t originally intend.

After coming under military pressure from the India, Pakistan’s decision-makers got convinced that they would have to woo an extra-regional power to get involved in the political affairs of South Asia to ward off Indian military threat. This made Islamabad seek alliances with militarily powerful United States and China and financially strong, oil-rich Gulf States.

In its first 25 years Pakistan had to defend itself against militarily superior Indian forces in three conventional wars. India continued to browbeat Pakistan militarily with holding dangerous military maneuvers close to its border, amassing troops aggressively deployed on its borders and direct attack across international borders in a military move that is widely described as non-contact warfare.

Pakistan came into being as a Muslim-majority state which seceded from India which was considered by Pakistani political elites as a Hindu-majority state. Communal tensions were converted into inter-state military and political tensions. Indian political elites never desisted from impressing upon Pakistan the reality of India’s military superiority. This led to creation of siege mentality among Pakistani elites.

In the initial years of Pakistan national life, the Pakistan government, on average, used to allocate more than 50 percent of the budget on defense procurements and other defense related spendings. It is generally believed in the principle of international relations that under military pressure, states go to any extent to seek security rather than submit to military pressure.

This made Islamabad seek anti-Communist alliance with Washington to secure military supplies which it wanted to use to balance the military threat from India. After the1965 Indo-Pakistan war, the US imposed arms on Pakistan, which led the latter to secure China as an alternate source of military supplies. In the process Pakistan spread itself thin. It didn’t have the financial and economic means to fulfil the needs of an oversized military establishment that was required to balance the Indian threat.

It will be useful to make sense of the current trajectory of Pak-Afghan relations by introducing the concept of security dilemma. In international politics, when one state takes steps to enhance its security, it is often taken by another state as a threat to its own security. The second state then takes countermeasures which leaves both the states in a situation worse than before. Pakistani political and military elites think that air strikes inside Afghanistan are a necessary response to the militant threat emanating from the presence of Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan in Afghan border areas. However, Afghan Taliban may interpret this as a hostile intent with broader military objectives.

As a result, all this leads to a cycle in which each side’s attempts to enhance its security encourages the other side to seek stronger defenses, strategic autonomy and new security partners in the international system. World history is witness to the fact that such security dynamics never produce compliance, rather they create enduring rivalries.

In India-Pakistan’s case this led to an enduring arms race from matching conventional capabilities to acquiring nuclear weapons and their delivery systems. Billions of dollars have been spent on this arms race. And yet not a single decade has passed that has seen the military situation in South Asia getting stabilized.

The moment the Taliban acting Defense Minister stepped out of his plane at Kabul Airport after concluding his Moscow visit, he was clear about the intentions of his government about seeking military support from Russia. Islamabad, he said, would “soon no longer dare” to attack Afghan territory due to the military-technical cooperation agreement he had just signed in Moscow.
There is an expediency involved in Russia-Taliban defense agreement, which primarily deals with providing technical assistance to Taliban in the maintenance and repair of their stockpile of Russian made weapon systems.

Military experts generally believe Russian weapons systems suit the Afghan environment for two reasons: first, their maintenance cost is low, and Afghanistan’s existing military manpower is mostly trained in Russian weapons systems. When Americans started to plan to raise Afghan military forces, they also secured supplies of Russian weapons systems for Afghan Air force and land forces from Central Asia. Not surprisingly, for the same reasons Afghan Taliban have not shown any reluctance in seeking military assistance from India as the Indian military also operates mostly on Russian Weapon systems.

So, all the requirements of a mini-Pak-India style rivalry on Pakistan’s Western Front are in place. This rivalry can become institutionalized with the passage of time as the Afghan state under Taliban secure regional legitimacy from powers like Russia, China and even Iran. Russia has now even accepted the Taliban as a legitimate military force after the signing of this defense pact. Earlier, the Afghan Taliban were considered a terrorist militia.

There is no doubt that Pakistan has genuine security concerns regarding the attitudes and policies of Afghan Taliban in providing sanctuaries to Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) fighters on its soil. Afghan intelligence, according to the UN security council monitoring team, hosts 12 international terrorist groups on its territory. The fact that ISIS-K is growing into a dreadful threat in Northern Afghanistan—which borders three Central Asian states of Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan– is also a cause of concern for Russia, which considers Central Asia as its security backyard. This might more exactly explain the Russian decision to provide weapons to the Afghanistan Taliban.

Big power and regional powers create threats that they later complain about. The question Pakistan’s military planners and political elites should be asking themselves is: “Do we want a cooperative Afghanistan or a permanently suspicious Afghanistan?”. South Asia already has a full-fledged and well-entrenched security rivalry in the shape of Pak-India military tensions.
Creating a second one on Pakistan’s western border would be a strategic failure and not a strategic success. Don’t make your temporary security problems the basis of permanent security rivalry.