This Article is From Nov 29, 2013

A military era in Pakistan quietly ends

A military era in Pakistan quietly ends

File photo of General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani

London: When he leaves his post Friday, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the inscrutable Pakistani army chief and former spymaster, will end a nearly decade-long chapter as the focus of U.S. fears and frustrations in Pakistan, the reluctant partner in a contentious and often ill-tempered strategic dance.

Suspicious U.S. officials frequently accused him, and the 600,000-strong army he led, of double-dealing and bad faith: supporting the Afghan Taliban, allying with militant groups who bombed embassies and bases, and sheltering Osama bin Laden.

Those accusations were made in private, usually, but exploded into the open in late 2011 when Adm. Mike Mullen, the U.S. military chief who sought to befriend Kayani over golf and dinners, issued an angry tirade to Congress about Pakistani duplicity.

The tactiturn Kayani weathered those accusations with a sangfroid that left both allies and enemies guessing about what, or whom, he knew. But few doubted that he nursed grievances, too - about CIA covert operations, the humiliating raid that killed bin Laden, and perceived U.S. arrogance and inconstancy.

Kayani, 61, steps down with those arguments still lingering. And reckoning with his legacy exposes a cold truth at the heart of the turbulent U.S.-Pakistani relationship: that after years of diplomatic effort, and billions of dollars in aid, the countries' aims and methods remain fundamentally opposed - particularly when it comes to the endgame next door in Afghanistan.

"We have almost no strategic convergences with Pakistan, at any level," admitted a senior U.S. defense official. "You'll never change that, and it's naive to think we can do it with an appeal to the war on terror."

Seen through Pakistani eyes, however, Kayani was a more understandable, even positive, force. Despite his personal antipathy for the country's civilian leadership, he restrained army meddling in politics and showed greater tolerance for criticism. After the country's first successful completion of a democratic election cycle, Pakistanis can dare to imagine that a long era of military coups might be over.

Further, he was at least partly successful in refocusing the army's monomaniacal attention on India, the old enemy, toward a new threat posed by the militants lurking in the country's remote areas.

Still, in other respects, Pakistan's bullying military class has remained unchanged, particularly in its dismal record on rights abuses. Kayani's soldiers and spies have prosecuted a dirty war against separatists in Baluchistan province, cultivated contacts with sectarian militias, and intimidated and bloodied rights campaigners and journalists.

For all that, his authority was never seriously challenged. "He's one of the most powerful generals Pakistan has ever had," said Vali R. Nasr, the dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

The Taliban's drive to destroy the security forces and central government shook the Pakistani military's jihadist sympathies, through unprecedented violence: the beheading of soldiers, the assassination of senior generals, and even suicide bombings against the feared military spy agency, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI.

After a wave of attacks that included a militant assault that drove within a few hundred feet of his personal office in the army's headquarters in Rawalpindi, Kayani launched a successful military offensive in the Swat Valley in 2009. In driving out the wing of the Pakistani Taliban that ruled the area, he dusted off the army's creaky, India-centric military doctrine, and infused a sense of modern counterinsurgency thinking.

He also publicly acknowledged the country's Frankenstein problem: that jihadi groups which the army had once nurtured to fight Indian interests in Kashmir and elsewhere had become a menace to Pakistan's stability.

"We as a nation must stand united against this threat," he said in a widely acclaimed speech in August 2012.

But the army only partly embraced this conversion, to the immense frustration of U.S. officials, especially Mullen.

With Kayani, it came down to a confidence vote on the future of Afghanistan. He and his staff did not believe U.S. assurances of a stable Afghanistan in which India, Pakistan's main preoccupation, would be excluded, so he hedged his bets by refusing to turn the army's guns on the Haqqanis, U.S. and Pakistani officials said.

"The problem with our Afghanistan strategy is that everything about it was anathema to Pakistan," said Nasr, who previously served in the Obama administration. "You can't have a partner who sees everything you do as a threat to his own interests."

Those contradictions unraveled most spectacularly in 2011, a year of serial crisis that plunged relations with Pakistan to their nadir: a CIA contractor gunned down two men in Lahore, a Navy SEAL raid killed bin Laden a few miles from the military's headquarters just days after Kayani had spoken there, and U.S. aircraft mistakenly killed 24 Pakistani soldiers on the border.

Kayani, under pressure from other generals, closed a CIA drone base within Pakistan, froze military cooperation and temporarily closed NATO supply lines into Afghanistan. But through it all, U.S. and Pakistani officials said, he kept the relationship going - even though it cost him politically within the angry Pakistani officer corps.

Now, after an extended term as army chief, he is retiring at a time of institutional flux in Pakistan. President Asif Ali Zardari stepped down in September; the country's mercurial chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, leaves next month.

Whether his policy of militant restraint endures will depend partly on his successor - a choice that reflected a rare defeat for Kayani, when Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif ignored his recommendation in favor of the new army chief, Lt. Gen. Raheel Sharif.

But for all his impenetrable airs, one thing seems clear. Pakistan's core strategic doctrine - distrust of India, and an accompanying insistence on exerting control through proxies in Afghanistan - is likely to remain unchanged. It predated Kayani's rise to power. And in the end, his legacy may be to be seen as the general who protected that doctrine, for better and worse, through the stormy years of U.S. involvement in the region.

"He can say, 'I survived the Americans,'" Nasr said.
© 2013, The New York Times News Service
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