ABSTRACT
Faced with the choice of standing ‘with or against’ the US in the autumn of 2001, thenpresident General Pervez Musharraf announced a u-turn on Pakistan’s two-decades old policy of training and supporting the mujahideen – a process in which Pakistani intelligence agencies have been actively involved since the Soviet-Afghanistan war. But despite active cooperation with the US through the provision of extensive logistical support, intelligence-sharing and the implementation of numerous counter-insurgency measures within the country (Cohen and Chollet 2007), seven years later, Pakistan was ranked as ‘the world’s most dangerous place’ (The Economist 2008; Moreau and Hirsh 2008). Its tribal belt, and increasingly the whole of the North West Frontier Province (NWFP), is reportedly slipping out of state control and becoming a focal point for the gathering of Muslim militants from across the globe. Pakistan today therefore has the unique status of being criticized as a rogue state and praised for being on the front line of the ‘war on terror’ at the same time (Cohen 2004). The US policy towards Pakistan remained an important electoral concern in the 2008 US presidential elections (Rafique 2008). On the one hand, it is feared that the country’s nuclear weapons might fall in the hands of Islamic militants, who could use them for potentially devastating acts of political violence; on the other, the rise in militancy arguably threatens the survival of the Pakistani state. The Bush administration has used both carrot and stick policies to persuade the Pakistani
government to support counter-insurgency programmes. General Musharraf was pressured to launch military operations starting from 2003 – which continue to date, despite the transfer of power to the Pakistan Peoples Party after the 2008 elections – to flush out militants from the tribal belts; in addition, the US has on occasion carried out aerial strikes in the tribal belt (HoC 2007). At the same time, the Western governments have increased aid to Pakistan to sustain Islamabad’s cooperation in the ‘war on terror’ and to help improve the state of human development. The British Department for International Development (DFID), for instance, increased its development aid to Pakistan from £97 million in 2000 to £236 million for the period 2005-8 and then doubled it to £480 million for the period 2008-11 (DFID 2008). The failure of these hard and soft measures to check militancy in Pakistan highlights the need to reassess the presumed causes of Muslim radicalism in Pakistan as well as the feasibility of the existing counter-terrorism strategies.
