It remains to be seen if the joint resolution passed in Parliament's in-camera session will have any impact on correcting the strategic and tactical fault lines that culminated in the capture and execution of Osama bin Laden on Pakistan soil. No doubt that the military, which owns our relations with the US, the Afghan policy and management of non-state actors, has much explanation to do; but if some of the emotional recommendations of the Parliamentary resolution were to be followed, Pakistan would be placed even further away from the path towards conventional thinking on the issue of tackling terrorism.
That the US and Pakistan were on a collision course was inevitable because, from the beginning, the two sides have been prosecuting their joint war on terror from different perspectives. Where the US priority has been to exact the maximum vengeance on al Qaeda and somewhat less on the Afghan Taliban as it attempts to restructure the Afghan state along secular lines, Pakistan's focus was earlier to ensure that the Afghan Taliban did not regroup and begin activities inside Pakistan and, since 2008, tackling the armed rebellion by the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan. Frictions arise because, while America urges that the terrorists it has flushed out of Afghanistan into Pakistan's tribal areas be destroyed by the Pakistan Army, it offers no reciprocal demolition of the shelters and training camps provided in Afghanistan to the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan.
Both sides are seen also to have different strategic objectives - the US, once it quits Afghanistan, most likely by handing over a role to the Taliban, can be expected to resume its strong opposition to Pakistan's strategic arsenal and nurturing of various extremists for non-state intervention in the region. Pakistan, wary of the jolts it has received from the US in return for its support of the Afghan Mujahideen continues to view developments in Afghanistan from the perspective of "strategic depth" and therefore cultivates, in that country and within Pakistan, various combatant and non-combatants that are on America's hit list.
The Abbottabad episode strikes Pakistan's strategists with a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the circumstantial linkage with the abetment of the al Qaeda leadership, an organisation no longer viewed with favour by the Afghan Taliban, is a serious setback to Pakistan's plans for a major role in the post-America dispensation in Afghanistan. On the other, bin Laden's unearthing in Pakistan loses us the support of several influential and friendly countries that are already uncomfortable with the wide-ranging sympathy extended to extremists, by official quarters and informed sections of the polity, in a nuclear-capable country. On the canvas of global public opinion, we risk being painted in the same colours as Libya.
Thus, while the Parliament rightly wishes to inquire into the intelligence failure concerning the whereabouts of bin Laden, it should be prepared there will be no satisfactory outcome, because most of the facts of this incident are known only to the Americans and may never become known to us, especially because America's military and economic power allows it to create its own truths. It never shared with the world the proof that connected al Qaeda with 9/11 and at the present time it chooses not to provide any information relating to bin Laden's capture and summary execution.
The failure of Pakistan's air and land defence perimeters to uncover the armed US intrusion is of course a matter that gives rise to serious concern, both in view of the ceaseless vigilance required for the protection of the strategic assets and the professionalism that is expected of our armed services. It would have been good to know that the intrusion had indeed been detected. However, given that it was not, we can take comfort from the fact that, once the intruders had been identified, a decision was taken not to intervene and those involved need to be lauded for prudence and sound reasoning. What if Pakistan had shot down the helicopters, forced them to land or to return outside our airspace? What if the Pakistani forces had engaged in a firefight or shootout with US troops at the target compound? What if, in the process of obstructing the US mission, bin Laden had been spirited away by his handlers? Could Pakistan have gained anything from such actions?
Alongside the relief that the hunt for bin Laden is finally over, another positive from this episode is that Pakistan's inter-services co-ordination and air-land command chains remained intact and line officers manning a highly sensitive front remained responsive to orders rather than launching trigger-happy responses that could have led to incalculable negative results. Such discipline is important when allies are engaged in hostilities against a common enemy, because there has to be space for operational exigencies, especially when these are in pursuit of shared objectives, as in the Abbottabad incident.
Therefore, when the Parliament seizes itself on the subject of territorial sovereignty, a rational approach would be to analyse which was the more damaging transgression, the US helicopter raid to capture bin Laden or al Qaeda's violation of Pakistan's sovereignty, which continues unabated. Either way, the political leadership may consider it is more important for Pakistan's well-being that a national consensus is developed for exterminating all hues of terrorism rather than being selective and making adversaries of our major trading, finance and weapons-supply partners.
The Parliament may also use such a debate to investigate into the rationale behind the acceptance of the "Af-Pak" policy, by which Pakistan not only included itself in a theater of war that was hitherto confined to Afghanistan but also laid itself open to unrestricted drone attacks. Indeed, if our military is to be castigated, it should be for not demanding as part of "Af-Pak" the reciprocal right of "hot pursuit" into Afghanistan to destroy the camps being run there that train and arm the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan.
The way forward from the Abbottabad episode is to reason that this was not a one-off phenomenon linked to intelligence failure but the outcome of ill-conceived foreign policies that, lacking the economic depth and stable polity necessary to attain lofty ambitions, at best would not succeed and at worst invite reprisal. Thus, having exhausted our financial resources on erecting a nuclear and conventional defence against threats perceived from the east, we find ourselves confronted in the north and exposed in the south to major powers with trans-continental capability, against whom we enjoy neither military nor financial parity and are additionally vulnerable to their financial pressures.
These powers confront us because of our reluctance to act against domestic and foreign terrorists using Pakistan as a base for cross-border activities. Our reluctance to rein in these terrorist arises from the desire to play a controlling role for "strategic depth" in Afghanistan and to influence events in Kashmir. Both objectives place us squarely in opposition to the Great Powers.
Why then should we be surprised that this twenty-year quest for "strategic depth" has resulted in foreign troops arriving uninvited less than one hundred miles from Islamabad and an Afghan President boasting of having his agents ensconced inside our country to aid the Americans, whereas we have been unable to place one boot on the ground across the north western frontier.
Management of domestic affairs has been no better, the civil law enforcement agencies having long ago capitulated to criminals with strong links to the terrorists and the legislatures, media and civil society intimidated into inaction, though threat, violence and assassination by religious extremists, who use the pulpit to mobilise public opinion in support of "jihadists" and against Pakistan's allies and neighbours. The state remains a silent spectator, unable or unwilling to stop this drift towards militant national extremism. If the objective were to become a hermit state on the pattern of North Korea, with a starving population and a million-strong army, firing the occasional missile to keep the world at bay, we might have been left to our own devices. Unlike North Korea, however, our military leadership is unable to resist the urge to project its power across our frontiers and should have factored that such policies would eventually lead us into the eye of the storm.
When analysing the Abbottabad raid and contemplating the future, Parliament may reflect that, in a globalised planet, the concepts of territorial integrity and national sovereignty are being redefined at a rapid pace. Some years ago Lebanon opened a new chapter in international relations by not resisting Israeli bombardment of its infrastructure and targeted killing of Lebanese citizens associated with a party that had strong representation in Parliament. A year ago the Iranians intercepted and force-landed, without protest, a commercial UAE registered airliner flying from Dubai to Kabul in order to capture and subsequently execute the most wanted Iranian terrorist (who incidentally was carrying a Pakistan identity card.)
In 2011, to quell internal disturbances, Saudi security forces have moved uninvited into Bahrain. The UAE has contracted an overseas mercenary force as a first line of defence against civil commotion and Bahrain has hired security personnel from Pakistan for the same purpose. The Western powers bomb and strafe on behalf of one side against what is still the legitimate government of Libya. The Iraqis do not protest Turkish tank excursions into their territory against Kurd separatists. South Sudan has been separated without any reference to the will of the majority of Sudanese people. Intervention by outside forces has become the rule rather than the exception.
If Parliament sets aside its emotions, logic and reason will demonstrate that many of our sorrows are self-induced and that, while the major responsibility lies with the military, political society must take its share of the blame. If all our state institutions do not act resolutely to defeat the terrorists operating in Pakistan as well as their extremist backers working for the destruction of the constitutional state, it will be difficult to prevent other "Abbottabads" in the future, Parliamentary bluster notwithstanding.