One of the things U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ran into last week during her trip to Pakistan was anger over attacks by unmanned “drone” aircraft inside Pakistan and along the border with Afghanistan.

 One questioner during an interaction with members of the public said the missile strikes by Predator aircraft amounted to “executions without trial” for those killed.  Another asked Clinton to define terrorism and whether she considered the drone attacks to be an act of terrorim like the car bomb that ripped through Peshawar that same week killing more than 100 people.

The people of Pakistan aren’t the only ones asking that question.  A top UN rights expert has swung the attention back on the drone programme, saying that the United States may be violating international law with the missile strikes.

Philip Aston, the Special Rapporteur on extradjudicial, summary or arbitary executions, said there could be circumstances under which the use of such techniques could be justified in international law, but Washington would have to show it followed appropriate precautions and accountability mechanisms.

The United States will have to be more upfront about its Predator war. “Otherwise you have the really problematic bottom line, which is that the Central Intelligence Agency is running a programme that is killing a significant number of people, and there is absolutely no accountability in terms of the relevant international law.”

There is little doubt now that targeted killing is official U.S. policy,  Jane Meyer argues in a detailed piece for the New Yorker.  What is worrying is that the embrace of the Predator programme has occurred with remarkably little public discussion, given that it represents a radically new and geographically unbounded use of state-sanctioned lethal force. “And because of the CIA program’s secrecy, there is no visible system of accountability in place, despite the fact that the agency has killed many civilians inside a politically fragile nuclear-armed country with which the U.S. is not at war,” Meyer writes. (more…)

The Jihadica website has just posted an item about an apparent rift between al Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban in the so-called Quetta shura led by Mullah Omar.

“Mullah Omar’s Afghan Taliban and al-Qa’ida’s senior leaders have been issuing some very mixed messages of late, and the online jihadi community is in an uproar, with some calling these developments ‘the beginning of the end of relations’ between the two movements,” it says.

“Beginning with a statement from Mullah Omar in September, the Afghan Taliban’s Quetta-based leadership has been emphasizing the ‘nationalist’ character of their movement, and has sent several communications to Afghanistan’s neighbors expressing an intent to establish positive international relations.  In what are increasingly being viewed by the forums as direct rejoinders to these sentiments, recent messages from al-Qa’ida have pointedly rejected the ‘national’ model of revolutionary Islamism and reiterated calls for jihad against Afghanistan’s neighbors, especially Pakistan and China.”

Reports of rifts between different militant groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan have surfaced before, particularly between Mullah Omar’s Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani Taliban, the Tehrik-e-Taliban (TTP), over the latter’s insistence on targetting Pakistan. Mullah Omar, according to media reports earlier this year, wanted the TTP - which is believed to be close to al Qaeda - to focus instead on fighting western troops in Afghanistan.

Such reports of rifts are impossible to verify and may be deliberately designed to confuse - the talk of a break between Mullah Omar and al Qaeda comes as the United States has talked of stepping up pressure on the ”Quetta shura”, named after the capital of Pakistan’s Baluchistan province, where Washington says the Afghan Taliban are based. Islamabad says Mullah Omar is not in Pakistan.

But history would suggest that the Islamist militants do not always form a cohesive whole or even follow a common ideology. After the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, the mujahideen who had driven them out became fragmented, leading to a bloody civil war.  In Kashmir too, where a separatist revolt began in 1989, different militant groups rivalled and sometimes fought each other.

The general picture is of many different Islamist militant groups which often make common cause, and sometimes co-operate opportunistically when this suits their many different objectives. 

According to U.S. commander General Stanley McChrystal the three main insurgent groups in Afghanistan co-ordinate their efforts but have different command structures and work under separate strategic plans. These are the Quetta shura Taliban, the Haqqani network and the Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin.

Within Pakistan, security forces appear to be fighting against a coalition of militant groups which include the Tehrik-e-Taliban (TTP), based in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, and the sectarian anti-Shi’ite Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), both of which have been suspected of involvement in gun and bomb attacks in Punjab province in recent weeks. The banned LeJ was originally based in Punjab, but has been operating increasingly out of the tribal areas.

The Pakistan Army has launched an offensive in South Waziristan, stronghold of the TTP. It says around 1,000 foreign fighters, mainly Uzbeks, are also holed up there.

Punjab is also the base for the Lashkar-e-Taiba, which was blamed for last year’s attack on Mumbai. Lashkar differs from many other militant groups in that it is not believed to have launched attacks within Pakistan itself, focusing instead on Kashmir and India. Nor does it share the Deobandi religious ideology of many of Pakistan’s militant groups and of the Afghan Taliban, instead following a tradition more akin to al Qaeda’s Salafist views.

Jaish-e-Mohammed, another Punjab-based group which like Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) originally focused mainly on Kashmir, is seen as much closer to al Qaeda than the LeT.  It is one of many militant groups which is believed to have splintered in Pakistan as a result of various crackdowns following 9/11, creating many dangerous offshoots.

In Pakistan’s Baluchistan province, rebels have long been waging a separatist insurgency which Pakistan says is backed by India - a charge Delhi denies. But these rebels are quite separate from the Jundollah Sunni militant group blamed for last Sunday’s suicide bomb attack in Sistan-Baluchestan province in neighbouring Iran.  Analysts argue that Jundollah, whose religious ideology is Deobandi, is increasingly following a sectarian anti-Shi’ite agenda, under the influence of Pakistan’s own Deobandi groups.

But according to French historian Stephane Dudoignon, quoted in this Reuters interview, the group does not share the Islamic internationalism of al Qaeda. Instead, its leader Abdolmalik Rigi had always stressed that he was a Baluch and Iranian patriot. And the rise of Jundollah, he says, coincided with an explosion of drug smuggling on the eastern fringes of Iran, from which it drew much of its funding.

Meanwhile on the subject of drug smuggling and to return to the original subject of the jihadica post, it’s worth noting that the Afghan Taliban under Mullah Omar appear to be considerably better funded than al Qaeda nowadays. That would suggest that if there is indeed a rift between a nationalist and internationalist agenda, the Afghan Taliban may have the upper hand.

(Photos: U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan; the TTP, opium field)
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Regular readers of this blog will know that I have questioned before the value of the “AfPak” label, which implies that an incredibly complicated situation involving many different countries can be reduced to a five-letter word.

Having spent the last couple of days trying to make sense of the suicide bomb attack in Iran which Tehran blamed on Jundollah, an ethnic Baluchi, Sunni insurgent group it says has bases in Pakistan,  I’m more inclined than ever to believe the “AfPak” label blinds us to the broader regional context. Analysts argue that Jundollah has been heavily influenced by hardline Sunni sectarian Islamist thinking within Pakistan which is itself the product of 30 years of proxy wars in the region dating back to the Iranian Islamic Revolution in 1979, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan towards the end of the same year.

This Sunni-Shi’ite faultline is showing up in suicide bombings in Iran, while at the same time Sunni Islamist groups continue to challenge the writ of state inside Pakistan even as the Pakistan Army presses ahead with its offensive in South Waziristan, stronghold of the Pakistani Taliban.

Such is the power of the Sunni Islamist movement, that Pakistan has been forced to close schools for fear of more bombings in its heartland in response to its military offensive in South Waziristan.

So what is the response on the “Af” side of the “AfPak” strategists? After intense diplomatic efforts, President Hamid Karzai has agreed to a second-round run-off in a disputed election. Allegations of electoral fraud had undermined Washington’s strategy in Afghanistan, and delayed a decision by President Barack Obama on whether to send more troops to the region.

But how many people believe that a second-round run-off on Nov. 7 will change the dynamics of a region which is getting more, rather than less, unstable by the day? (That is not to say a run-off is a bad idea, but rather that it may be overrated in its significance).

In the meantime India is becoming increasingly worried about instability in neighbouring Pakistan. But it is in a difficult position in working out how to respond, since it wants action against the Lashkar-e-Taiba, blamed for last year’s attack on Mumbai. Yet Lashkar-e-Taiba is one of the few militant groups which is not believed to have been involved in attacking targets within Pakistan, potentially pushing it down the priority list for an army already fighting in South Waziristan and facing an assault in the country’s heartland from Punjab-based groups.

In my 25 years of journalism, I’ve rarely seen a situation move so quickly.  I’d like to think there is someone in power who is not only keeping pace, but keeping ahead.

In the meantime, here are some articles worth reading:

Steve Coll makes a compelling argument for U.S. commitment to Afghanistan in an article reproduced by Foreign Policy

Shuja Nawaz, also writing at Foreign Policy, argues that the Pakistan Army deserves more support and equipment in its offensive in South Waziristan (read on to the bit where he writes about Frontier Corps scouts having to go out in open-toed sandals).

Andrew Exum has done us all a favour by arguing that comparisons with Vietnam depend entirely on how you view the history of that war (it’s hard enough to make sense of what is happening now, so maybe Vietnam analogies need to be consigned to the same cyber-dustbin as the AfPak label?)

And last, but not least, look at Reuters new Afghan Journal blog, combining the insights of our team of journalists on the ground with news from around the world.

(Photos: Presidents of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran; British soldier in Afghanistan)

A week after suspected Sunni Islamist insurgents attacked the headquarters of the Pakistan Army, a suicide bomber killed six senior Revolutionary Guards commanders and 25 other people in Shi’ite Iran in one of the deadliest attacks in years on the country’s most powerful military institution.

Were these two events connected only by the loose network of Sunni insurgent groups based in and around Pakistan? Or are there other common threads that link the two?

Iranian state media said Jundollah, an ethnic Baluch Sunni insurgent group, claimed responsibility for the attack in the Iranian province of Sistan-Baluchistan. The group, led by Abdomalek Rigi, is believed to have bases in neighbouring Pakistan’s Baluchistan province.

Jundollah has been linked in some reports to the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, an anti-Shia sectarian group based in Pakistan’s Punjab province, and to the Pakistani Taliban, or Tehrik-e-Taliban (TTP), based in Pakistan’s tribal areas bordering Afghanistan. Both the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and the TTP are believed to have close ties to al Qaeda, and are suspected of involvement in the attack on the headquarters of the Pakistan Army.

Trawling through published reports about Jundollah, it is not easy to work out how clear its links are to the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, the Pakistani Taliban and al Qaeda. This article in the Asia Times Online cautions that there are two organisations with the same name, one focused on Pakistan and the other on Iran.  Pakistani newspapers, however, have reported links specifically between Rigi’s group and the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and TTP.

Being fellow travellers in the network of Sunni Islamist insurgent groups does not necessarily mean they are pursuing a common agenda. However, it does raise intriguing questions about how far they are collaborating, and about how far al Qaeda might be directing operations behind the scenes.

According to the Jihadica website, al Qaeda has been publicly cementing its ties with the Tehrik-e-Taliban, whose declared aim is to take over Pakistan.  The TTP is currently under siege in its stronghold in South Waziristan, where the Pakistan Army launched a long-awaited ground offensive on Saturday. A series of militant attacks across Pakistan in the past few weeks have been seen as an attempt by the Tehrik-e-Taliban and its al Qaeda-linked allies to show it can outwit the Pakistani security forces.

So was the bombing in Iran part of that deliberate attempt to spread mayhem across the region? That’s almost impossible to tell for now, although the Long War Journal earlier this year quoted an al Qaeda commander as talking about expanding the jihad into neighbouring countries, including Iran.

Of all the many players in the region, al Qaeda probably has the most to gain from the fall-out of the attack in Iran.

The Iranian armed forces, which have long harboured suspicions that Jundollah was funded by the west to weaken Iran, have accused the United States and Britain of involvement in the attack and vowed revenge.  That could torpedo efforts by President Barack Obama’s administration to improve relations with Iran and seek its help in stabilising Afghanistan.

It could also raise tensions between Pakistan and Iran, which reacted sharply to the bombing of a mosque in the Iranian city of Zahedan earlier this year. As Pakistan struggles to fight militants within the country and defeat them in South Waziristan, the last thing it needs is trouble on its border with Iran.

So is there an overall plan at work here? Or instead, is it simply that the region has become so destabilised that insurgents are finding it easier to operate both inside and outside of Pakistan?

(Photos: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; Pakistani soldiers in Lahore)

A few weeks ago I asked a Pakistani diplomat what was, among the multiple threats facing the country, the single biggest challenge?

It wasn’t al Qaeda or the Taliban, it wasn’t the United States as many Pakistanis believe. And it wasn’t even India, for long the existential threat the military and succeeding generations of politicians have invested blood and treasure to checkmate.

It was the economy which has virtually ground to a halt as the global recession erodes exports and investment, the diplomat said. Fix the power shortages, win investors back and get the economy moving, the tide of militancy could begin to be pushed back.

You could of course argue that the miitancy itself has sapped the economy and if it weren’t for the militants, Pakistan would have done far better . So tackle them first, and the economy would take care of itself. In the light of the attacks of last week and this, that certainly would seem to be an overiding immediate objective.

But the diplomat’s point was that the opportunities created by an expanding economy would, in the longer term,  make it a bit less likely for young men to gravitate to a hate-filled career of violence in the name of religion.

The suicide bomber who struck in Shangla near the Swat valley on Monday was apparently in his early teens, one report put his age at 13.  Was he from the impoverished masses that the Taliban have increasingly turned to, to carry out the attacks ?

Pakistani Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Quereshi told National Public Radio that the Taliban had been “extracting out of poverty and the misery of people.” If the people were educated and enlightened they wouldn’t join them, he said. And it doesn’t stop at Waziristan or other parts of the northwest where the Taliban and al Qaeda are operating out of. It may well be also Punjab in the very heart of Pakistan; its poverty stricken, feudal dominated southern part with a  large illiiterate population a huge pool to tap. 

(more…)

An attack on the headquarters of the Pakistan Army in the city of Rawalpindi has highlighted the country’s vulnerability to a backlash from Islamist militants in the Pakistani Taliban as it prepares an offensive against their stronghold in South Waziristan. It follows a suicide bombing in Peshawar which prompted Interior Minister Rehman Malik to say that ”all roads are leading to South Waziristan.”

But what is perhaps more troubling about the attack is not so much the backlash from the Pakistani Taliban (the Tehrik-e-Taliban, or TTP)  holed up in the Waziristan tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, but rather suggestions of growing co-operation between al Qaeda-linked groups there and those based in Punjab, the heartland of Pakistan.

Analysts have long argued that the biggest danger to Pakistan would come not from the tribal areas, but from the creation of a stregthening coalition of militant groups which brought together the Pakistani Taliban, al Qaeda, and militant groups based in Punjab - which include sectarian groups and those originally set up to fight India in Kashmir.

According to the New York Times, the militants behind the attack were a mixed group from across Pakistan. It quoted an unnamed military official as saying that some came from the tribal areas, some from Punjab and some from Pakistani Kashmir.

Pakistan’s GEO TV said it had received a call from the Tehrik-e-Taliban (Ajmad Farooqi) group claiming responsibility for the attack. The caller demanded, among other things, that former president Pervez Musharraf be held accountable.

Claims of responsibility are just that - a claim that remains to be verified. But I looked up Musharraf’s autobiography “In the Line of Fire” to see what he had to say about Ajmad Farooqi. According to Musharraf, Farooqi was a senior al Qaeda operative who had been involved in the killing of U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl in 2002, and subsequently was involved in two attempts to assassinate him.  Farooqi was killed in a shoot-out with Pakistani security forces in the town of Nawabshah in Sind province in 2004, after a manhunt held under the supervision of current Pakistan Army head General Pervez Ashfaq Kayani.

Here is what Musharraf had to say about Farooqi’s links to Punjab: In the manhunt, Pakistan started by tracking his phone calls. “In September 2004 we found that he was talking to two people in particular, in the Punjabi dialect of Faisalbad, the third largest of our cities in central Punjab.”

As discussed earlier on this blog, including here and here, the danger from Islamist militants in Punjab tends to be overlooked in the focus on tackling the Pakistani Taliban in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.  But if it turns out that those behind the attack on the Pakistan Army headquarters were not only from the remote areas bordering Afghanistan but also from the heartland of the country, then the risk to Pakistan’s stability has just got a lot bigger.

(Photos: Soldiers take position in Rawalpindi; and Pakistan army chief, General Kayani)

With one million Britons of Pakistani origin, and as the former colonial power, Britain has a unique relationship with Pakistan. But concerns about Britain’s vulnerability to bomb attacks planned by Pakistan-based militants — British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said that three-quarters of the most serious plots investigated by British authorities had links to al Qaeda in Pakistan — has made for a rocky relationship.

Irfan Husain, a columnist for Dawn newspaper who divides his time between Britain and Pakistan, writes that these tensions are being worsened by the problems Pakistanis have in obtaining visas to visit Britain.

“It is true that Pakistan is increasingly viewed as the epicentre of Islamic terrorism. Many plots, real and imaginary, have had their roots in the badlands of Fata (the Federally Administered Tribal Areas),” he writes. “Many young Brits of Pakistani descent have travelled to remote parts of the country to receive training in bomb-making. But the point is that these young men do not need visas to return to Bradford and Wolverhampton. Being born in Britain, they enter their country without let or hindrance.”

Among those denied entry were members of the Lahore Pipe Band hoping to take part in a world championship in Scotland, a trade delegation, a well-known columnist, and a guitarist.

It’s not entirely clear whether the visa problems are driven more by bureaucratic bungling than fear of terrorism. The Guardian newspaper says that several thousand Pakistani students hoping to start university in Britain are facing delays of three months or more for visas because of a “bureaucratic fiasco” - after a reorganisation, visa applications from Pakistan are now processed in Abu Dhabi.

Husain argues that by denying entry to the likes of writers and musicians, Britain is compounding the very problem it wants to contain - the spread of extremism. These are the kind of people who should be made welcome in the west, he says. ”Given the position they enjoy in Pakistan, they can influence many to see that the enemy is not the West, but the forces of darkness that have gained the ascendancy in our own country. By turning them down, the British government only provides ammunition to those who are convinced of the West’s inherent anti-Islam policies.”

In any case, most security analysts would argue that the main  concern is not about Pakistanis coming into Britain; it is about Britons of Pakistani origin leaving the country to attend militant training camps based in Pakistan. On this subject, Stephen Tankel has an interesting post about signs of growth in the operations of the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) militant groups. Based in Pakistan’s heartland Punjab province, these groups were initially focused on fighting India over Kashmir, but are increasingly seen as a potential or direct threat to the west.

“In the past JeM and LeT were valuable to al-Qaeda because of what is called the ‘Kashmiri Escalator’. A disproportionate number of British Pakistanis are of Kashmiri decent and those interested in making contact with a militant group often can employ familial connections in Pakistan-controlled Kashmir to find their ways to Lashkar or JeM,” he writes. 

“Recruits procure training from one of the two groups, after which some of them are passed on to al-Qaeda operatives who are often in the FATA. In 2009 British security officials estimated that approximately 4,000 people were trained in this way since 9/11…”

The apparent growth of these two groups in the heart of Pakistan, he writes, give pause for thought about the U.S.-led campaign in Afghanistan. “Enormous sacrifices are being made to keep Afghanistan free from al-Qaeda and its allies. Meanwhile, next-door some of those same allies are building away in the seemingly safest of havens.”

The argument about who is responsible for British citizens seeking training in militant camps in Pakistan is a complex one - both countries tend to blame the other. And as Amil Khan wrote in this post last year, the attitude of British Pakistanis to Pakistan is far more layered than a simple question of which country should take the blame when something goes wrong.

But if one of the aims is to stop young British Pakistanis from being drawn towards hardline Islam, and at the same time offer them an alternative image of both Britain and Pakistan, why ban the bagpipers?

Try hard as you can, there doesn’t seem to be any escaping from comparing America’s eight-year war in Afghanistan to the one it fought in Vietnam.

Every now and then, either when there is a fresh setback or a key moment in Afghanistan’s turbulent history, like last week when it went to the polls to choose a president, the debate flares anew.

Foreign Policy magazine has a provocative piece headlined “Saigon 2009: Afghanistan is today’s Vietnam. No question mark needed.” No matter who wins last week’s election, America is certainly not winning the war in Afghanistan because it is committing the same mistakes it did in Vietnam, authors Thomas H.Johnson and M Chris Mason argue.

The parallels are just too strong, too structural to be ignored. Both Afghanistan and Vietrnam (prior to U.S. engagement there) had surprisingly defeated a European power in a guerrilla war that lasted a decade, followed by a civil war which last another decade. Insurgents in both enjoyed the advantage of a long, trackless and unclosable border and sanctuary beyond it, the authors say.

Both were land wars in Asia with logistics lines more than 9,000 miles long and extremely harsh terrain with few roads, which nullified U.S. advantages in ground mobility and artillery. Almost exactly 80 percent of the population of both countries was rural, and literacy hovered around 10 percent. In both countries, the United States sought to create an indigenous army modeled in its own image, based on U.S. army organization charts.

But above all, the United States has consistently and profoundly misunderstood the nature of the enemy in each circumstance, the authors say. “In Vietnam, the United States insisted on fighting a war against communism, while the enemy was fighting a war of national reunification. In Afghanistan, the United States still insists on fighting a secular counterinsurgency, while the enemy is fighting a jihad.”.  In short, it is hard, almost impossible, to defeat an enemy you don’t understand.

Already, like the Vietnam war, support is starting to dwindle at home with a Washington Post-ABC poll showing the number of Americans who believed the war in Afghanistan was worth fighting slipping to below 50 percent.

Is Afghanistan already starting to weigh on President Barack Obama, then ? The New York Times this weekend questioned whether he was fated to be another Lyndon B. Johnson,  and not another Abraham Lincoln or the second coming of Franklin D. Roosevelt as his supporters portrayed him to be even before he took office.

Each presidency is different, but it is “the L.B.J. model — a president who aspired to reshape America at home while fighting a losing war abroad — is one that haunts Mr. Obama’s White House as it seeks to salvage Afghanistan while enacting an expansive domestic program,” the newspaper said.  Obama himself  has expressed concern that Afghanistan may yet hijack his presidency, it reported based on accounts of a group of historians who had dinner with him at the White House this summer.

Like Johnson, Obama has framed Afghanistan as a war of necessity and not choice. Just as Johnson had no choice but to fight in Vietnam to contain communism,  America has to be engaged in Afghanistan as the bulwark against international terrorism.  “Those who attacked America on 9/11 are plotting to do so again. If left unchecked, the Taliban  insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans,” he told the Veterans of Foreign Wars at their convention in Phoenix last week.

But is it really a war of necessity ? Richard Haas, the president of the Council of Foreign Relations, argues it was necessary to go into Afghanistan in the wake of 9/11, but no longer to remain there. Wars of necessity must meet two tests, he says in an op-ed in the New York Times. They must involve vital national interests, and second, a lack of viable alternatives to the use of military power to defend those interests.

While it was necessary to invade Afghanistan to oust the Taliban,  now that there is a friendly government in Kabul is it necessary to maintain a military presence ? While it is true that the government is weak, and unable to enforce its writ in large parts of the country, it is equally true that terrorism cannot be eliminated even if you had a strong government, Haas argues.

 Militants could still operate from Afghanistan and would put down roots elsewhere. And Pakistan’s future would remain uncertain at best.

Moreover, he says  there are alternatives available.  The United States can begin to curtail  ground combat operations and emphasise drone attacks on militants, the training of Afghan police officers and soldiers, development and diplomacy to fracture the Taliban.

A more radical approach would be withdraw completely and focus on regional and global counter-terrorism efforts and homeland security initiatives to protect the United States from threats that may emanate from Afghanistan, Haas suggests, In that sense, Afghanistan would resemble the approach toward Somalia and other countries where governments are unable or unwilling to take on militants, and the United States eschews military confrontation.

But is the world ready for that ?

[Photographs of Afghan women voting, U.S. troops in Bagram and Obama in Phoenix last week]

The death of Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud in a U.S. Predator strike last week - now considered a certainty by U.S. and Pakistani security officials - and subsequent reports of fighting among potential successors would seem to justify the strategy of taking out top insurgent leaders

The Taliban are looking in disarray and fighting among themselves to find a successor to Mehsud, the powerful leader of the Tehrik-e- Taliban  Pakistan, the umbrella group of militant groups in the northwest, if Pakistani intelligence reports are any indication. Top Taliban commanders have since sought to deny any rift, but they certainly look more on the defensive than at any time in recent months.

So is decapitation or targeting the heads of militant groups, as a strategy to destroy these organisations, beginning to work in Pakistan ?

A considerable amount of research has gone into such a snake-head strategy, or the killing or capture of militant leaders, since Israel went down this road decades ago and the results are mixed.

Daniel Byman, Director of the Center for Peace and Security Studies at Georgetown University, says that while the U.S. strategy  could tamp down the threat from al Qaeda, it can neither defeat the group nor remove it from its stronghold in Pakistan.  In a piece for Foreign Affairs, Byman who previously studied the Israeli campaign of targeting enemy leaders, lays out the gains as well as the limits to such a strategy.

- A sustained campaign of targeted killings can disrupt a militant group tremendously, as slain leaders are replaced by less experienced and less skilled colleagues. This can lead the group to make operational and strategic mistakes, and over time, pose less of a danger. Moreover, constant killings can create command rivalries and confusion. Most important, the attacks force an enemy to concentrate on defense rather than offense.

And the limits as in Pakistan’s case are:

- The Predator strikes can force al Qaeda to watch its step in Pakistan, but it can still carry out some operations.  Moreover, their local jihadi partners (such as Lashkar-e-Taiba) remain unaffected. So far, the strikes have been confined to tribal areas near the Afghan-Pakistani border, meaning that al Qaeda and the Taliban have been able to relocate parts of their apparatus further inside Pakistan, which may work to actually widen the zone of instability

- Although Israel achieved some success through its campaign of targeted killings during the second intifada in the early years of this decade, it was able to fully shut down Palestinian militancy only by reoccupying parts of the West Bank and building a massive security barrier between itself and much of the Palestinian territories — options that are not available to the United States in Pakistan, Byman notes.

Over the longer term the results of  the decapitation strategy are even more mixed.  Aaron Mannes, a researcher at the University of Maryland,  says his study “in general found that the decapitation strategy appears to have little effect on the reduction of terrorist activity.”

In fact he found a distinction between groups that are ideologically driven or nationalist- separatist ones like the IRA and ETA  - and religous groups such as al Qaeda or Hezbollah.  While the ideological groups were forced to restrict acivity following  a decapitation strike, the religious groups actually grew even more deadly.  Hezbollah and Hamas are more reboust organisations, which is an important criterion for surviving the loss of a leader, his study found

Revenge also plays a key role in upsurge of violence following the loss of a leader. Another explanation might be the rise of the most violent elements within a religious militant group to the fore.  “Based on this data, decapitation strikes are not a silver bullet against terrorist organisations. In the case of religious groups, they may even be counter-productive,” he says.

Ultimately, as Nighwatch intelligence here notes, there is no alternative but to destroy the sanctuaries in which militant groups operate. And it is hard to see that being done through these “bolts from the blue.”

[File photograph of Baitullah Mehsud at a news conference, and a village in South Waziristan cleared of fighters loyal to him]

In the eight years since the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, political pundits have used, and largely overused, all the available historical references. We have had the comparisons to the British 19th century failures there, to the Great Game, and to the Soviet Union’s disastrous experience in the 1980s. More recently, it has been labelled ”Obama’s Vietnam”.

The latest leitmotif is the domino theory - the view that Vietnam had to be saved from communism or other Asian countries would go the same way.  In the case of Afghanistan, the argument is that if it falls to the Taliban, then Pakistan too might become vulnerable - an infinitely more dangerous proposition given that it is a country of some 170 million people with nuclear bombs.

Britain’s Paddy Ashdown alluded to this idea in an op-ed in the Independent titled “What we must do to win this war in Afghanistan”. “I start from the proposition that the war in Afghanistan is one we have to fight and must win. The cost of failure there is just too great. It includes the certain fall of Pakistan and the possible emergence of the world’s first jihadist government with a nuclear weapon …” he writes.

In an article in the American Interest, analyst Stephen Biddle spells this out further by arguing that the main reason for the United States to fight in Afghanistan is to prevent it from destabilising Pakistan.

“With a population of 173 million (five times Afghanistan’s), a GDP of more than $160 billion (more than 10 times Afghanistan’s) and a functional nuclear arsenal of perhaps 20 to 50 warheads, Pakistan is a much more dangerous prospective state sanctuary for al Qaeda. Furthermore, the likelihood of government collapse in Pakistan, which would enable the establishment of such a sanctuary, may be in the same ballpark as Afghanistan, at least in the medium to long term,” he writes.

“Pakistani state collapse, moreover, is a danger over which the United States has only limited influence. We have uneven and historically fraught relations with the Pakistani military and intelligence services, and our ties with the civilian government of the moment can be no more efficacious than that government’s own sway over the country. The United States is too unpopular with the Pakistani public to have any meaningful prospect of deploying major ground forces there to assist the government in counterinsurgency.”

Robert Haddick, the managing editor of Small Wars Journal, takes aim at this line of thinking in an article in Foreign Policy.

“Contrary to Biddle’s assertion, it seems equally reasonable to argue that Taliban-controlled Afghanistan provided a relief valve of sorts for Islamist pressure that might have otherwise formed inside Pakistan during the 1990s. And although the Afghan Taliban and Pakistani Taliban are two distinct movements, the U.S.-led operation in Afghanistan may be inciting and pressurizing Taliban activity inside Pakistan. Contrary to what Biddle argues, the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan may be increasing rather than decreasing the risk to Pakistan,” he says.

“As Biddle points out, the Barack Obama’s administration will have a hard enough time maintaining public support for the Afghan campaign. Best to leave the domino theory out of it.”

He is perhaps right to say that the domino theory is not a useful comparison, having been so widely discredited in Vietnam. Yet arguably the domino theory went wrong not as a concept but on specifics. The United States failed to notice that the Vietminh/Vietcong were nationalists more than communists while it also misread the intentions and capabilities of the Soviet Union and China when it allowed itself to be dragged into military defeat.

But if the real reason for fighting in Afghanistan is to prevent the destabilisation of Pakistan, should this not be discussed openly?

The questions, as in Vietnam, come down to specifics. Are the Taliban primarily Pashtun nationalists who, if brought into the political power structure in Afghanistan, would cease to be a threat? Or are they primarily a religious force intent on spreading global jihad in which Pakistan would be the next domino? (Most people you ask say both, with the argument being over which characteristic predominates.) And what are the intentions of Afghanistan’s neighbours, and of the United States and its allies? Would success or failure in Afghanistan lead to more problems in the neighbourhood - as was widely assumed in Vietnam - or not?

In one of the more dispassionate articles I have read on this in recent weeks, Dawn columnist Irfan Husain writes that the war in Afghanistan can be neither won nor lost.

But the price of failure, and a Western troop withdrawal would be this: ”… we would be back to the pre-9/11 situation. The only difference would be that the Taliban would be viewed as the force that had defeated the mighty Americans. This would give them an aura of legitimacy and invincibility that would win them many recruits and financial backers.”

“… the victorious Taliban would have their own agenda, and would not be the puppets the ISI think they would be able to manipulate. An earlier generation of jihadis drove out the Red Army, and after defeating the U.S.-led coalition, it is unlikely that Mullah Omar would accept dictation from our generals in Islamabad. Chances are that he and his Pakistani allies would seek to extend their writ across large swathes of Pakistan.

“Encouraged by the success of the holy warriors in Afghanistan, groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba would step up their jihad against India in Kashmir. A re-Talibanised Afghanistan would once again become a magnet for young jihadis from across the world. Al Qaeda would emerge from hiding and renew its war against the West and modernity. Rapidly, Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan would become the epicentre of the global jihad to an even greater extent than the region is now.

“Already, there is said to be a strong nexus between the Taliban and the Muslim Uighur separatist movement … The Taliban, ignorant as they are of how the world works, would provoke Russia by openly supporting the Chechen rebels. In short, they would quickly antagonise India, Iran, the West, Russia and China. And as Pakistan would once again be sucked into supporting Kabul, we would be tarred with the same brush as the Taliban. This is the scenario that we and the West need to keep in mind as the war against the Taliban drags on.

“This is a war that cannot be won. But equally, it is a war that cannot be lost.”