Global News Journal

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Bajaur bombing highlights conflicting U.S.-Pakistan interests

Last week's suicide bombing in Pakistan's Bajaur region, which killed at least 40 people, had a grim predictability to  it.  The Pakistan Army cleared Pakistani Taliban militants out of their main strongholds in Bajaur, which borders Afghanistan's Kunar province, after 20 months of intense fighting which ended earlier this year.  But as discussed in this post in October the insurgents' ability to flee to Kunar -- where the U.S. military presence has been thinned out -- combined with a failure to provide Bajaur with good governance, suggested the security situation in the region was likely to be deteriorating. The bombing appeared to confirm those fears.

The implications go far beyond Bajaur. The Pakistan Army has resisted U.S. pressure to launch a military offensive against militant strongholds in North Waziristan until it has secured gains made elsewhere.  Pakistani daily The Express Tribune quoted army spokesman Major General Athar Abbas as reiterating that point after the Bajaur bombing and after fighting in the neighbouring Mohmand region. Until areas "cleared" by the military were consolidated, "it is impossible to rush into another campaign,” it quoted him as saying.

The Taliban in Bajaur also had historically close ties with militants who overran the Swat valley and caused worldwide alarm by pushing further into Pakistan's heartland before they were ousted by the Pakistan Army in 2009.  Any further evidence of the Taliban regaining ground in Bajaur would therefore be a cause for concern that military gains in Swat -- itself reeling from this summer's devastating floods -- could also be reversed.

In some aspects -- though not all -- Pakistan's problems in tackling militants are a mirror image of those faced by the United States on the other side of the border.  Soldiers can drive militants out of their strongholds, but they can't stop them melting into the local population or fleeing across the border. And they can't hold and build on those military gains without civilian back-up to provide people with governance. 

When I visited Bajaur on an army-organised trip in April, the military commander in the main town of Khar -- target of last week's suicide bombing -- made two points. First he said the Americans had to "do more" on their side of the border to stop militants fleeing into Afghanistan.  Second he drew a graph showing how security gains made from military operations do not even remain static without governance, but actually dwindle over time -- probably rather similar to graphs drawn by U.S. commanders on the other side of the border.

You might think the answer would be to coordinate approaches in both Pakistan and Afghanistan -- a much talked about idea that somehow never quite managed to get off the drawing boards in Washington and into the field. If anything military coordination appears to be getting worse. 

The United States, keen to concentrate its forces in areas where they can make a difference, and to protect population centres, has been pulling troops back from remote outposts in Kunar and elsewhere.  Within the context of Afghanistan, that may make sense.  But from Pakistan's point of view, it leaves its  military exposed. Meanwhile, Pakistan has resisted pressure to launch an operation in North Waziristan, both because it needs to consolidate gains elsewhere, and because it fears a backlash of suicide bombings on its towns and cities. Within the context of Pakistan that may also make sense. But from the U.S. point of view, it leaves its own military exposed. 

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Pakistan: street rage and sectarian bombings

One of the more troublesome aspects of the current situation in Pakistan is how subdued - at least relative to the scale of the deaths - are protests against suicide bombings on Pakistani cities. Travelling from Lahore to Islamabad last month, my taxi driver winced in pain when I told him I had a text message saying the city we had just left, his city, had been bombed again. Yet where was the outlet for him to express that pain, or indeed for the many grieving families who had lost relatives?

I was reminded of this reading Nadeem Paracha's latest piece in Dawn on the outcry over Aafia Siddiqui, the Pakistani neuroscientist  jailed in the United States after being convicted of shooting at U.S. soldiers. She has been claimed as the "daughter of the nation" who must be rescued from an American jail.

"Never have the highly vocal keepers of our women’s sanctity even superficially censured the aggravating antics of monsters like the Taliban and al Qaeda at whose hands thousands of innocent Pakistanis have lost their lives," writes Paracha. "None of the many women, children and men who were mercilessly slaughtered by the extremists, it seems, were good enough to also be celebrated as brothers, sisters and children of this nation."

Saba Imtiaz made a similar point in Foreign Policy last month. "Political parties rarely call for protests after suicide bombings, but the Jamaat-e-Islami called for countrywide protests shortly after Aafia's sentencing. Breathless condemnations of the sentencing came in almost instantly from political parties,"  Imtiaz wrote.

"The millions displaced by the floods in Pakistan, thousands languishing in jail awaiting trial and the countless women who are victims of honor killings, mistreatment in jails and discrimination will not see anyone rallying for their cause. Not acting swiftly to help them -- who should also be dubbed daughters of Pakistan and supported by politicians -- is the real injustice."

Not that those comments are meant to suggest Siddiqui's case should be ignored altogether. But it does indicate a worrying tendency in the way Pakistani society's national narratives are constructed.  As discussed here, Manan Ahmed at Chapati Mystery has already written about how the Siddiqui case has tapped into the historical narrative about Mohammad bin Qasim, who first brought Islam to South Asia by conquering Sindh in the 8th century - allegedly after racing to the rescue of a Muslim woman who had been raped. The story of bin Qasim was specifically cited by Faisal Shahzad, the failed Times Square bomber.

"This particular brand of national machismo projected onto a woman’s body is neither new nor unique, yet it is a potent mixture in the oppressive, patriarchal Pakistani middle class. The mullahs can safely rage about the nation’s daughter, and the street urchins can eagerly vow to invade Manhattan," wrote Ahmed.

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Bombs and tipping points: Pakistan and Northern Ireland

When Northern Ireland's Omagh bomb exploded, killing 29 people, I was in England, by cruel coincidence attending the wedding of a young man who had been badly injured in another attack in the town of Enniskillen more than a decade earlier.

I had just switched my phone on after leaving the church on a glorious, sunny Saturday afternoon when my news editor called. "There's been a bomb. It sounds bad. We're trying to get you on a flight."

Memories of Omagh returned this week when a massive car bomb ripped through a market in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, killing more than 100 people, many of them women and children.

Will the Taliban's bloody assault on Pakistan's cities deprive them of popular support and ultimately lead to their defeat?

The BBC's Urdu service had reported earlier this month that sympathy for the Taliban in Peshawar -- where many are deeply hostile to the United States -- was waning due to the violence being unleashed on the border city since the Army began its assault on the militants' South Waziristan stronghold.

Was this a sign the Islamists were overreaching themselves on their war against the Pakistani state, much as they had done in Swat?

Against that, as others have pointed out on this blog, a coherent leadership that might unite a stricken country against its attackers has yet to emerge.

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Pakistan: Getting Waziristan right this time

U.S. defence officials, in a ringing vote of confidence, said over the weekend that Pakistan had the forces and equipment to launch a long-awaited ground offensive in South Waziristan. It could mount this assault without seeking more reinforcements, a U.S. official said, according to this Reuters report. Yet Pakistan had cited in recent months shortages of helicopters, armoured vehicles and precision weapons in putting off a Waziristan assault.So what has changed? Has the United States,  desperate to turn around a faltering war in Afghanistan, got ahead of itself in nudging Pakistan toward "the mother-of-all battles"? Some people are asking if the Pakistan Army is really ready to start what must be its bigest test yet since the militants turned on the Pakistani state. If the idea is to go in and linflict casualties on the Taliban in the hope of killing senior leaders, then it will be another punitive strike for which the force levels may well be adequate.But if the Pakistan Army plans to go into the Mehsud strongholds and occupy the region then the numbers are a bit worrying, says Bill Roggio at The Long War Journal.  A Pakistan Army spokesman has said that  two divisions, or up to 28,000 soldiers, are in place to take on an estimated 10,000 hard-core Taliban. But Roggio says Waliur Rehman Mehsud, who heads the Mehsud Taliban forces in Waziristan, (Hakimullah Mehsud who surfaced at the weekend is the overall head of the Pakistani Taliban) is estimated to command anything between 10,000 to 30,000 forces.  If the army were to wage a full-scale counter-insurgency they and the Frontier Corps "would need to throw multiple divisions against a Taliban force of this size," he argues. And then there is the Haqqani network, as well as a sizeable contingent of Uzbek and other non-Pakistani fighters in the area. They may well join the fight, according to the Dawn newspaper.Pakistani expert Imtiaz Gul, who heads the  Independent Centre for Research and Security Studies in Islamabad, calls Waziristan a "blackhole" for security and intelligence forces. At least 800 pro-government tribal elders and intelligence officials have lost their lives to Taliban and al Qaeda assassins in Waziristan and adjacent tribal areas, most of them in the last four years, eroding Pakistani intelligence from the region and in turn forcing a greater reliance on U.S. drone surveillance and strikes, he says in a piece for the AFPAK channel for Foreign Policy.Gul reckons one of the prime objectives of the impending military assault would be to take out the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan entrenched there and whose powerful leader Tahir Yuldashev is believed to have been killed in a U.S. drone strike in August.Some others are saying there is actually no public estimate of the total number of Waziri fighters, and that the Pakistan Army might end up in a 1:1 ratio with the militants, which is far too low to sustain a counter-insurgency campaign, let alone win it. You can't help recalling again the oft-quoted words of Lord Curzon, the turn-of-the-century British Viceroy of India, who said : "No patchwork scheme will settle the Waziristan problem. Not until the military steamroller has passed over the country from end to end, will there be peace. But I do not want to be the person to start that machine."And even if Pakistan were willing to run the steamroller it may just not be avaialble to it, not yet at least.Sameer Lalwani in a study for the New America Foundation says that the Pakistan Army is already overstretched with the Swat operation and lacks the capacity to  expand the fight. The study provides a fairly detailed assessment of Pakistani capabilities for a counter-insurgency campaign focussing on  1) the nature of the insurgency, including its strength, capabilities, tactics, and strategic objectives; 2) the terrain challenges posed by the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), and 3) current and potential Pakistani potential military capabilites.  Here is the PDF of the full report.In short, Lalwani argues that 370,000 and 430,000 more troops would be needed in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas  and the North West Frontier Province region to meet the minimum force-to-population ratios prescribed by standard counter-insurgency (COIN) doctrine, much higher than current Pakistani deployments of 150,000, and even this is no assurance of success given adverse conditions.It is too big for the army alone, and  would need the calling up of reserves and also greater reliance on the poorly-equipped Frontier Corps. And the Pakistan Army would resist redeployment of more forces from the Indian border because for it, the Indians remain an enduring threat.And as Roggio asks is the state ready for the blow back from a full-scale assault? The militants have repeatedly attacked cities each time they have come under pressure. On Monday, a suicide bomber breached the tightly guarded office of the United Nations World Food Programme in a residential part of Islamabad, killing five people.[Photographs of Hakimullah Mehsud and paramilitary soldiers] The Pakistani Army and Frontier Corps would need to throw multiple divisions against a Taliban force of this size

Southeast Asia’s Islamists try the domino theory

A half-century ago, Washington worried about Southeast Asian nations falling like dominoes to an international communist movement backed by Maoist China, and became bogged down in the Vietnam War.

Noordin Top, believed to be the mastermind behind most of the suicide bombings in Indonesia — including the July 17 attacks on two luxury Jakarta hotels — pronounced himself to be al Qaeda’s franchise in Southeast Asia.

Top and his allies in Jemaah Islamiah (JI) aimed to create an Islamic caliphate across Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, southern Thailand and Southern Philippines. Even before the 9/11 suicide airliner attacks, they were trying to spark an Islamic revolution with ambitious plots and attacks.

Their young foot soldiers dreamed these pro-Western nations (which had banded together to form ASEAN under the U.S. military umbrella at the height of the Vietnam War in 1967) might fall like dominoes to the righteousness of an Islamic jihad. Their martyrdom to the cause would given them a blissful reward in Heaven.

But just as Communism was not the monolith it was feared to be in the 1960s — China and the Soviet Union had split for one thing — so too has the Southeast Asian jihadist movement failed to cohere into a singular movement.

Vietnam, it turned out, was fighting what it believed to be a war of national liberation, and was (still is) historically suspicious of China. Al Qaeda’s jihad in Southeast Asia has stumbled over similar misconceptions.

JI’s former military commander, Indonesian Riduan Isamuddin or “Hambali”, tried to pull together various insurgencies in the region under an al Qaeda umbrella before he was captured in Thailand in 2003. He even helped sponsor an “al Qaeda summit” with bin Laden’s lieutenants in Kuala Lumpur in 2000.

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Pakistani Taliban’s new chief:more ambitious, more ruthless?

The first big suicide bombing in Pakistan this week since the slaying of Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud in a U.S.-missile strike had a particularly nasty edge to it.

The attack in Torkham, a post on the main route for moving supplies to NATO and American forces in Afghanistan, took place just before dusk, as a group of tribal police officers prepared to break the Ramadan fast on the lawn outside their barracks.

Because the attacker, who by most accounts appeared to be a teenager, offered food, he was welcomed to join the gathering, in accordance with local traditions during the fasting month, the New York Times reported, citing one of the police officers who was there at the time.

So the attacker walked in and detonated his explosives among the policemen, killing 22 people.

A militant group affiliated with the Taliban claimed responsibility for the bombing, which came two days after the Taliban confirmed Baitullah's death, after weeks of denials, and announced the appointment of one-time aide Hakimullah Mehsud, as his successor.

The question being asked is whether this is the face of a more ruthless and vicious Taliban under Hakimullah,  who, by all accounts, appears to be a young, battle-hardened ambitious leader.

Long list of enemies in Syria blast

One of the problems with countries like Syria – secretive and authoritarian – is that whenever a bomb goes off or someone is assassinated, the list of possible suspects is extensive.

One can draw up a long list of enemies who could have plotted and carried out Saturday’s rare car bomb attack on a major road near a Syrian state security complex and an intersection leading to a famous Shi’ite Muslim shrine. The blast, which killed 17 people including a brigadier general and his son, poses another test to Syria’s reputation for keeping a tight grip on dissent and maintaining stability in a troubled area. 

High on any list of possible perpetrators are Sunni Salafi jihadis active in Syria now, and who for years were able to cross through the Syrian borders into Iraq to fight U.S. troops. This stopped recently when Damascus tightened its borders following pressure from Iraq and the United States and opted for a policy of detente and moderation starting with indirect peace talks with Israel through Turkish mediation and a diplomatic drive to end its international isolation.

The jihadis, angry at Syria cutting off their routes, relaunching peace talks with the Jewish state and detaining their militants, could have turned their guns against Damascus. And this could have involved a mix of personnel — foreign expertise helping local Islamists.

Another motive for the latest attack could be Sunni-Alawite tensions in Lebanon. Sunni militant groups based in northern Lebanon have been fighting a sectarian war with Lebanon’s Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shi’ite Islam which has close links to Syria, whose ruling elite has been dominated by minority Alawites for over four decades.

Syria said an Islamist suicide bomber was responsible for the attack and that the vehicle had entered Syria from a neighbouring Arab country on Sept 26. It did not name the country but Syria’s Arab neighbours are Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan.

Assad, whose country has dominated Lebanon for three decades and was forced to withdraw its troops after the assassination of former prime minister Rafik al-Hariri, warned this month of a danger from what he called foreign-backed Sunni extremists in the predominantly Sunni city of Tripoli. He called for a solution to “the rising threat” of Islamist militants in the city.

Algerian bombers strike again

For years Algerian authorities have said the country’s Islamist armed groups are on their last legs. Attacks are sometimes described as the last kicks of a dying horse.

However, the militants have proved themselves to be resilient. Bombings and ambushes over the past week have caused at least 65 deaths, making it the bloodiest in years, and the toll so far for August stands at more than 80. That is the worst month in a long time.

It is true that the security forces have been effective in containing the armed groups in much of the countryside, apart from the Kabylie region.

And the intense rural-based violence of the 1990s is highly unlikely to reoccur – an understanding struck in 1997 between the army and the original leaders of the Islamist rebellion laid the foundations for the end of the worst of Algeria’s political violence.

But a shift in tactics in 2007 to Iraq-style suicide bombings – delivered by car, motorbike and in person – has been a relative success for the Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat. There is apparently no shortage of young men willing to offer themselves for duty as kamikaze attackers.

Twinned with use of the al Qaeda brand, they have helped the insurgent leaders cast a pall over Algeria’s efforts to emerge from its troubled past.

Quite why that should be is a puzzle. The state is much stronger, and wealthier, and better equipped than it was in the 1990s.  It is no longer an international pariah. So why are its security forces making such heavy weather of the fight? Is it because the militants are strong? Or is it because the security forces are weakened? Is the overall policy of offering amnesty to the rebels sensible? Anecdotal evidence suggests that the reconciliation policy of the government is a major factor in demotivating the army and police. What do you think?