Afghan Journal

Stirring the hornet’s nest in Pakistan’s northwest

The United States has a set of expectations  that it wants Pakistan’s government to meet, Secretary of State of  Hillary Clinton said ahead of her short trip to Islamabad  last week, the kind of language Washington has frequently employed to bring its conflicted partner in the war against militant Islam to heel, each time  there has been a crisis. Clinton didn’t elaborate, saying only at the end of her meetings in Islamabad that she expected Pakistan to take decisive steps in the days ahead.

But on Monday, Pakistan’s The News reported that the military was preparing to launch an air and ground offensive against militants in North Waziristan, a demand that the United States has repeatedly made over the last two years. It said the decision was taken during discussions that Clinton and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of State Admiral Mike Mullen had with Pakistani government and military leaders.

North Waziristan is a redoubt of the Haqqani network, the most powerful of the insurgent groups in eastern Afghanistan and in and around Kabul where it has carried out a wave of bombings against civilians as well as foreign forces. Pakistan has held off going into the forbidding mountains saying it needed to consolidate its operations in southern Waziristan following the offensive there in 2009.

But in the wake of the international opprobrium Pakistan’s military has come under following the killing of Osama bin Laden deep inside Pakistan, its space for manouevre has become less.  The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month U.S. officials as saying  they hoped to use Islamabad’s embarrassment over failing to find bin Laden—he was killed in a house a short distance from the country’s elite military academy—to press for tougher Pakistani action against the Haqqanis and other militant groups that are focused on attacking U.S. forces in neighboring Afghanistan.

It puts the Pakistani military in a spot , as has happened so often since it reluctantly joined the U.S.-led war on al  Qaeda and the Taliban following the Sept 11, 2001 attacks. The Haqqanis are long seen as a  prized asset  of  the Inter-Services Intelligence, the Pakistani spy agency, beginning from the 1980s when it along with the CIA – ironically-  funded them to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Jalaluddin Haqqani, the family patriarch, acquired legendary status among supporters for his exploits against the Red Army.  Like the Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Punjabi group focused on fighting Indian forces in Kashmir and elsewhere in India, the Haqqanis have never carried out an attack on Pakistani soil.

An offensive against them in their Waziristan base carries the risk of a backlash that the Pakistani military is already facing from other militant groups it once nurtured like the members of the Pakistani Taliban. They turned against the state following the army’s operation to clean up the Red Mosque in Islamabad, and today, the Pakistan Taliban are at the forefront of the campaign against the military, claiming responsibility for some of the biggest attacks including the daring raid on the Karachi naval base attack last week to avenge bin Laden’s death.

In Pakistan’s Gwadar port, Chinese whispers grow

First, China helped develop Pakistan’s Gwadar port from scratch on the Baluchistan coast to take the pressure off the country’s main port of Karachi, a few hundred miles to the east. Now Pakistan’s defence minister has said that it would like its long-time ally to build a naval base at Gwadar, which sits on the doorstep of Gulf shipping lanes, less than 200 kms from the mouth of the Straits of Hormuz.

China, which provided more than 80 percent of the port’s $248 million development cost, has moved quickly to distance itself from Pakistani Defence Minister Ahmad Mukhtar’s remarks about a naval base in Gwadar. The foreign ministry said China was not aware of any such proposal.

While China has stood by Pakistan in its hour of embarrassment following the discovery of Osama bin Laden living in relative comfort in a garrison town, it might be squirming a bit at its ally’s rather aggressive portrayal of their ties. The last thing it needs is to trigger off another round of alarm bells in the region about its big power objectives in the Indian Ocean, especially when it is not ready yet.

As Gideon Rachman wrote in the Financial Times this week (behind a paywall) the Chinese may be wincing at the appearance of the story about building a military base on the Pakistani coast in the Western press “because it will heighten the perception that China is overplaying its hand in the Pacific; an idea that has helped America to strengthen its military alliances across the region.”

The spectre of Chinese ships including perhaps the aircraft carrier that is under development and submarines operating from Gwadar is sure to feed insecurities in the region, drive countries to ramp up military spending and deepen alliances.

India, already worried about an increasingly assertive China, will be sufficently alarmed to pour more funds into its navy besides deepen ties with the United States and of late Japan to balance its interests in the region. Already the Indian Defence Minister A. K. Antony has expressed concern about the growing defence ties between China and Pakistan.

Pakistan military: the enemy within ?

The breach of security at a major Pakistani navy base in the southern city of Karachi has, inevitably, raised questions of complicity, which must be the greatest worry once the night-long siege by the militants ends and the military has finished counting its losses.

That a group of 15 or more attackers armed with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades could gain access to the inner perimeter of the Mehran base and succeed in  blowing up one U.S.-supplied P -3 Orion maritime aircraft and damaging another aircraft, while holding off security forces for more than 12 hours speaks of a large, complex attack that needs some level of help from within.   One former Pakistani navy official told a TV channel that the attack appeared to have been planned from a map of facility.

Time magazine’s Omar Wahraich wrote that most analysts believe the success of an apparently well-organized attack on this scale would have required at least some complicity from within the military. In terms of the sheer audacity of the attack, this one is similar to the Oct. 10, 2009 attack on the Army General Headquarters in Rawalpindi, in which militants penetrated the heavily guarded installation and held several senior and junior officers hostage. The attackers were found to have links to low-ranking military personnel with fundamentalist sympathies, Wahraich notes.

Is the ground starting to shift under the Pakistan military ?  First the militants that it nurtured  turned against it. such as the Pakistani Taliban which has vowed a war against the state and has claimed responsibility for the Mehran attack. Now, are elements within the military turning against the state as it comes under unprecedented international pressure to roll up the militant networks ?

It’s a crisis the military seems to have been grappling with as far back as 2006 as a recent set of  U.S. diplomatic cables reveal. Pakistan’s air force was concerned about radicalisation within its ranks and reported acts of petty sabotage  of fighter planes deployed for security operations along the Afghan border. A March 2006 cable from the U.S. embassy in Islamabad quotes  then Deputy Chief of Air Staff for Operations, Air Vice Marshal Khalid Chaudhry, as saying that the airmen, most of whom came from villages, were being radicalised by extremist Islamic clerics.  The cable also says that Chaudhry claimed “to receive reports monthly of acts of petty sabotage, which he interpreted as an effort by Islamists amongst the enlisted ranks to prevent PAF aircraft from being deployed in support of security operations in the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA) along the Afghan border.” Hers’s a link to the cable released by India’s NDTV.

Here’s a video of the Mehran siege

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Taliban talks – a necessary but not sufficient condition for peace

We have known for months that the United States has begun direct talks with representatives of the Taliban. And as I wrote in this story, the death of Osama bin Laden in a U.S. raid on May 2 should make it easier for the Taliban to break with al Qaeda, a fundamental requirement for including them in any eventual political settlement in Afghanistan. But lest anyone should think these talks, combined with bin Laden's death, would somehow produce an early end to the Afghan war,  it is important to remember that engaging with the Taliban is only a necessary but far from sufficient condition for a political settlement.

As Thomas Ruttig  writes at the Afghanistan Analysts Network,  any deal between the Taliban and Afghan President Hamid Karzai that was simply meant to open the exit door for foreign troops would not serve the interests of Afghans.  "... they need an end of the bloodshed that will also physically reopen spaces for economic and political activities, a debate about where their country is going. A deal which does not address the main causes of the conflict (namely the monopoly over power of resources concentrated in the hands of a small elite, then possibly with some additional Taleban players) will not bring peace.

 "Therefore, the ‘political process’ ... needs to involve a representative cross-section of Afghan society, including former anti-Taleban mujahedin, the ethnic minorities ... and what usually is called civil society ... They need to hammer out a much broader political compromise that will guarantee, finally, the political stabilisation of Afghanistan where everyone has to concede something but finally everyone gains."

The Taliban led by Mullah Mohammed Omar, described by Washington as the Quetta shura Taliban (QST), are not comparable to a national liberation movement with whom a peace deal can be struck and the war ended. Even among the Pashtun community, their support is patchy; and they are regarded with deep suspicion by other groups, Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras, with bad memories of Taliban rule from 1996 - 2001. Already there are signs that some of the Taliban's most bitter opponents are mobilising to scupper any peace talks - among them Amrullah Saleh, former head of Afghanistan's intelligence agency.

The insurgency itself is also fragmented - even within the so-called Quetta shura Taliban, no one is sure how far Mullah Omar can deliver some of the younger fighters into a peace settlement.  Then there are other major groups including the Haqqani network and the Hizb-e-Islami-Gulbuddin (HiG) led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. So far, according to official sources from several countries, the United States is talking only with representatives of the Quetta shura Taliban.  (The Taliban themselves deny being involved in talks, while Washington has made no official comment.)

Yet the Haqqani network in particular is one of the most active insurgent groups in Afghanistan and blamed among other things for involvement in a suicide attack which killed CIA agents in eastern Afghanistan in 2009.  It is based on the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan's tribal areas, along with the remnants of al Qaeda, the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), and various other militants from groups with their roots in Pakistan's Punjab province. What happens to them in the event of a political settlement in Afghanistan which draws in the Quetta shura Taliban?

This is where it gets even more complicated.  The professed objective of the United States and its allies has always been to bring stability to both Afghanistan and Pakistan.  Yet as Shuja Nawaz writes here,  the Pakistani Taliban have declared war on the Pakistani state,  claiming responsibility for a string of bombings inside Pakistan.

Pakistan : four probes and a killing

Pakistan has launched four separate investigations into the life and death of Osama bin Laden on its soil, according to U.S. Senator John Kerry. The army, the air force and the intelligence establishment are running a probe each while parliament last week ordered an investigation by an independent commission to be set up for the purpose.

It’s not entirely clear who is investigating what but a common theme running through the probes is to find out how did the United States launch a heliborne  operation so deep in the country, hunt bin Laden down in his compound after a shootout in the outer wing  and fly away with his corpse, without the knowledge of the Pakistani authorities. Indeed the military and the government only got to know about it after the Americans told them once they were safely out of Pakistani airspace.

It’s, doubtless,  a serious breach of Pakistan’s air and ground defences and the biggest worry for the nation’s security planners would be ensure that its eastern borders are secure, lest it gives bitter foe India any ideas of mounting an incursion of its own. It is also a failure of the intelligence agencies they didn’t know it was coming, or indeed what had happened until they were informed by the Americans. All that will be the subject of the parallel investigations.

But what about the other question that people inside Pakistan as well abroad are asking : how is it that bin Laden came to live in a town buzzing with military officers, serving and retired, and not far from the nation’s premier military academy without anyone finding out. The world’s most hunted man is found to be living not in caves in the mountains of the northwest region straddling Afghanistan, but in relative comfort in a military town, barely two hour’s drive from the office of the country’s intelligence agency.  Shouldn’t that be a question the nation must ask its security establishment ?  Indeed, avoiding the issue would only put the security agencies under a greater cloud of suspicion, as Pakistani commentators themselves are saying, not to mention their rather aggressive American interlocutors.

Badar Alam, the editor of the monthly magazine Herald. said it was revealing that the unanimous resolution that parliament passed in setting up a commission to probe the incident in Abbottabad had little reference to bin Laden and the militant Islamist groups that threaten not just other countries, but Pakistan itself. Indeed, contrary to worries that parliament would use the opportunity presented by the security agencies’ discomfiture to crack open the steel curtain and reveal their functioning, it seemed to have narrowed down the focus of the investigation to the U.S. violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty, he wrote in a piece for Dawn.

 ”Going by the tone, tenor and the text of the joint resolution, it is more than obvious that the investigators will be strictly focused on the American invasion into Pakistan, not on how bin Laden could live in Abbottabad undetected and whether there is any truth in unceasing reports about Pakistan army and intelligence agencies secretly collaborating with terrorists.”

from India Insight:

Are Kashmiri militants ready to return home from Pakistan?

Hundreds of Muslim militants based in the Pakistani part of Kashmir are ready to give up arms and return to their homes in the Indian part of the Himalayan region following New Delhi's formal approval of a rehabilitation policy for rebels.

The policy was introduced by India last year for militants who had crossed over to Pakistan-administered Kashmir to be trained and join militant groups fighting New Delhi's rule in Kashmir.

Omar Abdullah, the chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, said the government has received nearly 700 applications from militants who are in the Pakistani part of Kashmir and want to return home.

"Out of the total applications received, 125 have been cleared by authorities for the militants to return to the state,” Abdullah said.

He added that the information will be passed to the families of militants on how they can come back. But the government says militants "must renounce violence and accept the integrity of India."

There are no figures on how many people from Indian Kashmir are currently on the Pakistani side.

Thousands of people have crossed over to Pakistani Kashmir for arms training since a revolt against India broke out in 1989.

Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and the bin Laden raid

In conducting a raid deep inside Pakistan to take out Osama bin Laden, the United States pushed the boundaries of military operations,  inter-state ties and international law, all of which are the subject of a raging debate in the region and beyond. 

 One of the less talked-about issues is that the boots-on-ground operation by the U.S. Special Forces also blows a hole in a long-held argument that states which have nuclear weapons, legitimately or otherwise,  face a lower chance of a foreign strike or invasion than those without them. Thus  the United States didn’t think twice before going into Afghanistan within weeks of the September 11 attacks or striking against Libya now because there was no nuclear threat lurking at the back of the mind. Even Iraq was a tempting target because it was not known to have a well-established nuclear arsenal  although the whole point of the invasion was that it had weapons of mass destruction. That only turned out to be untrue.

And conversely there is a belief that the United States or some of the other Western powers  wouldn’t  take on North Korea because of the nuclear weapons it  holds. It is simply too dangerous and even in the case of Iran those who favour action say the time to do it is now while it is still developing the weapons, not when it has completed the programme.  

But the May 2 raid in a compound in a Pakistani garrison town tests that logic and shows the limits of nuclear deterrence, as Elbridge Colby, who served recently in the office of the U.S. Defense Secretary on START negotiations wrote in Real Clear World’s Compass blog. Pakistan has a powerful  nuclear arsenal, growing at a rate that will make it the fourth-largest in a decade behind only the United States, Russia and China. It has the delivery systems, both missiles and aircraft, to fire these weapons and a huge professional army to support the nuclear programme. Yet all that nuclear infrastructure  did not stop the United States from breaching its air space, inserting soldiers in the ground right under the Pakistani military’s nose, hunting down bin Laden and his associates in the house and flying away with his corpse. All without Islamabad’s consent, according to the version put out by both sides.

Things could have spun out of control, the Pakistani military could have engaged the Special Forces with unpredictable results. The air force  according to reports did scramble its fighters, so there was always the chance of a fight. Yet, as Colby says, it is striking – and a lesson for others – that America seemed willing to take its chances against a nuclear-armed power.  It shows that nuclear weapons do not provide blanket protection.

“Countries that have nuclear weapons can still be confronted and operated against without escalation to nuclear use, particularly when the objective pursued is limited and discriminate, and especially when that objective is connected to a truly vital national interest,” he writes.

from Bernd Debusmann:

Pakistan and questions over foreign aid

In the flurry of statements on the killing of Osama bin Laden, a remark from Pakistan's ambassador to Washington, Husain Haqqani, spoke volumes about how U.S. foreign aid tends to be perceived by its recipients. It's not enough.

"The United States spent much more money in Iraq than it did in Afghanistan," Haqqani said in a television interview. "And then it spent much more in Afghanistan than it did in Pakistan. So were there cracks through which things fell through? Absolutely."

That twisted logic suggests that if only Washington had given Pakistan a few billion more than the $20.7 billion it provided over the past decade, bin Laden, a man with a $27 million bounty on his head, would not have "fallen through the cracks." Those cracks were wide enough to swallow bin Laden's one-acre walled compound with a three-storey building in a garrison town near the Pakistani capital.

The mass murderer's six-year stay in Abbottabad has prompted some members of Congress to demand the immediate suspension of aid to Pakistan, others to look for reductions. Deep cuts, however, are unlikely. The 140,000 U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan rely on supplies landed at the Pakistani port of Karachi and trucked through the Khyber Pass to bases in Afghanistan.

As Michael Scheuer, the former head of the Central Intelligence Agency's bin Laden unit, puts it: "They (the Pakistanis) know we need them more than they need us. They also know that the Saudis and the Chinese would step in with money and aid if we backed out."

Consequently, military and civilian aid is likely to continue flowing and the strained marriage of convenience between the U.S. and Pakistan will survive this latest spat. But giving billions of dollars to a country where, according to President Barack Obama, "we think that there had to be some sort of support network for bin Laden" will probably rekindle a long-running debate over the how and why of foreign aid as a whole.

The United States is the world's biggest donor of foreign aid, giving more than the runners-up, France and Germany, put together. Last year, Washington provided assistance in one form or another to 149 countries, according to the Congressional Research Service, the research arm of Congress. That's almost four-fifths of all the countries on earth but the aid has not made the United States the world's most popular country.

from Gregg Easterbrook:

With bin Laden dead, why doesn’t the U.S. leave Afghanistan?

In 2003, the United States invaded Iraq citing two justifications: to depose Saddam Hussein and to destroy Iraq’s banned weapons program. Within a year, Hussein and his accomplices were imprisoned, and it had been discovered there was no Iraqi banned weapons program. Having achieved its goals, why didn’t the United States leave? Seven years later, this question haunts the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

In 2001, the United States invaded Afghanistan, citing two justifications: to find Osama bin Laden, and break up al Qaeda. Bin Laden is now dead, and al Qaeda broken.

So why doesn’t the United States leave?

By autumn, American forces will have spent a full decade in Afghanistan -- conducting patrols, bombing the heinous, bombing the innocent. The United States has roughly 100,000 soldiers and air crew in Afghanistan, almost as many as the peak force in Iraq. The U.S. presence in Afghanistan constrains the Taliban, and the Taliban are an awful group. But the Taliban are a central Asian problem afflicting Afghanistan and Pakistan -- their existence does not in any way threaten the United States' national interest.

Having fulfilled its goals in Afghanistan, why doesn’t the United States leave?

Max Boot, a Council on Foreign Relations fellow, writes in the Wall Street Journal that, “Since 9-11, al-Qaeda has never had more than a few dozen fighters inside Afghanistan at any given time.” Boot is a hardliner -- he supports the Afghanistan war, and is author of the 2003 book Savage Wars of Peace, a spirited defense of superpower engagement in low-level conflicts. Boot also thinks there are terrorist groups other than al Qaeda in Afghanistan.

from FaithWorld:

Even without bin Laden, Pakistan’s Islamist militants strike fear

(Supporters of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden shout anti-American slogans, after the news of his death, during a rally in Quetta May 2, 2011/Naseer Ahmed)

The death of Osama bin Laden has robbed Islamist militants of their biggest inspiration and al Qaeda itself has dwindled to a few hundred fighters in the region, but Pakistan remains a haven for militants with both ambition and means to strike overseas. Worse, there are signs that groups such as the Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Pure), nurtured by Pakistan's spy agency to advance strategic interests in India and Afghanistan, are no longer entirely under the agency's control.

Even if the Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI), under intense pressure following the discovery of bin Laden in a Pakistani garrison town, sought to roll up the groups, it may not be able to do so without provoking a major backlash. In Lashkar's case, according to experts, it is not even certain if it is under the control of its own leadership, with many within pushing for greater global jihad. Several others are spinning off into independent operatives which makes it harder for security agencies to track down.

"Lashkar has become international, and no more a Pakistani outfit, per se. It has got its claws sunk in Central Asia, Afghanistan and Arabia, if not in the Maghreb (north Africa) nations. So, Pakistanis may not condone them any longer," said a U.S.-based South Asia expert with ties to the intelligence community.

"Lashkar's jihadi appetite cannot be whetted with Kashmir alone. They are now for the Caliphate (theocratic Islamic state) -- thanks to the Saudi and other Arabian money. The question is will Pakistan's tainted security apparatus be able to quell an organization like that? I hope they will, but I doubt it."

Read the full analysis here.