POLITICS-PAKISTAN: U.S. Exodus Latest Blow to Alliance

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

ISLAMABAD, Aug 24 1998 (IPS) - For Pakistani schoolteacher Shaheen Hassan, the U.S. attack on Afghanistan last week not only hurt Washington’s image here – it has also interrupted classes at her school and possibly cost her her job.

Hassan, who teaches French and German at the U.S.-supported International School of Islamabad, contends she may have to find new employment after the institution shut down Friday for at least 30 days, following the mass departure of all U.S. students and teachers.

“If the school is shut for more than 90 days, we were told, it would be closed for good,” Hassan says. That would be the end both of her teaching job and of this term’s classes for her son Samir, a fifth-grade student at the school. She is convinced that is likely, since, as she puts it, “it doesn’t look as if the Americans are coming back soon”.

Pakistani society, long allied to the United States, watched with surprise and some bitterness as virtually all U.S. citizens – and even many Europeans and United Nations staff – left Pakistan en masse after U.S. forces stationed in the Indian Ocean fired some 70 Cruise Tomahawk missiles at Afghanistan.

Thursday’s attack — prompted by the alleged support by Afghanistan-based Saudi financier Osama bin Laden for the bombings this month of U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam — are believed to have killed at least 50 people. (A simultaneous attack on Sudan is reported to have wounded about a dozen people, but to have resulted in no immediate fatalities.)

Pakistanis, however, are angered not just by the attack, which resulted in Cruise missiles flying over Pakistani territory, but also by the swift departure of all U.S. personnel. Although Pakistan is a longtime U.S. ally, Ambassador William Simon explained the move as a precautionary measure in case bin Laden’s supporters intend to retaliate against any U.S. citizens based in Pakistan.

“The whole thing is crazy,” says Iqbal, a researcher at a local think tank. “There isn’t even any hint of a threat, and yet they’re all in a panic to leave.”

U.S. diplomatic staff began to pull out last Tuesday, following the first signs that Washington was preparing an attack on bin Laden’s camps in Khost, near the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. Since then, all U.S.-backed schools in Pakistan – and one in Dhaka, Bangladesh – have shut their doors, several aid programmes have stopped and a U.S. State Department advisory has requested that all U.S. nationals leave immediately.

Nor have the Americans been encouraged to travel even in relatively quiet areas like Islamabad, the largely suburban capital. One U.S. student says that most embassy personnel were instructed to stay in the heavily-guarded U.S. compound until Sunday, when they were escorted to planes flying them out of the country.

U.N. officials also suspended many office activities last week, and several other foreign nationals were advised to stay at their homes. Meghnad Desai, a visiting scholar from the London School of Economics, says that one U.N. staffer told him not to show up at his office on Friday.

The irony of the haste of the U.S. reaction is not lost on Pakistanis, who backed the U.S.-funded campaign to arm Afghan mujahedin groups to fight the 1979-90 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

Now, a Pakistan-supported Islamist group, the Taliban, is on the verge of controlling all Afghanistan – allegedly with massive financial support from bin Laden, a critic of the U.S. who had joined Washington’s anti-Soviet campaign and whose family made considerable money constructing U.S. facilities in Saudi Arabia.

Some Pakistani foreign ministry officials are particularly upset that the recent souring of relations comes even though Islamabad has tried to help Washington’s crackdown on what it deems to be terrorist groups.

In recent years, the Pakistani government has helped to turn over Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, convicted of planning the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centre in New York, and Mir Amal Kasi, who this year received the death penalty in Virginia for the murders of two Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) staffers. Last week, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s government also arrested at least three men suspected of involvement in the Nairobi bombing.

Despite that, some U.S. officials believe bin Laden, regarded as a hero here for his personal involvement in the Afghanistan war, and his Islamist followers travel through Pakistan with considerable freedom. One Pakistani official, speaking on condition of anonymity, says that the Saudi financier is believed to be the real owner of a house in Islamabad where alleged allies stay.

Bin Laden’s image here has only been raised by the U.S. attack, however. Pakistani state-run media quickly relayed the news that bin Laden had been unhurt by the Thursday night raid, and assured the public that Nawaz Sharif had strongly protested the attack in a phone conversation with U.S. President Bill Clinton.

Despite such semi-official pronouncements, Islamabad is walking a delicate diplomatic tightrope, wanting to project a strong public stance against the raid without endangering the already fragile alliance with Washington.

That dual effort was most clearly seen after the head of the country’s Inter-Service Intelligence agency, Chaudry Manzoor, reported that at least one Cruise missile had missed Afghanistan entirely and killed at least six people in a Pakistani border town. Although state-run media earlier confirmed that U.S. officials blamed the deaths on a “technical error”, the government retracted the report and dismissed Manzoor on Saturday.

Yet the souring of U.S.-Pakistani relations, already bad since Islamabad conducted six nuclear tests on May 28 and 30, has worsened dramatically amid reports that two Pakistani-backed groups fighting against Indian forces in Kashmir – the Harkat-al- Mujahedin and Jamiat-al-Mujahedin – were hit by U.S. missiles.

Pakistan’s main Islamist political party, the Jamiat-e-Islami, staged a massive anti-U.S. demonstration, comprising thousands of Pakistanis, outside Islamabad’s Saudi-Pak Tower on Friday. Jamiat leader Qazi Hussein Ahmed, sharply criticised Nawaz Sharif’s government for its ties to Washington and called for the departure of all Americans.

Even as he was speaking, however, the U.S. government was helping to achieve the latter goal for its own security reasons – although Ambassador Simon has insisted the Americans will return.