Pakistan’s military offensive in South Waziristan appears to be showing considerably more success than earlier attempts to take control of the tribal region on the Afghan border, at least according to army accounts which are the only real source of information. 

But will it turn the tide in Pakistan’s battle against Islamist militants? A few articles which have appeared over the last few days give pause for thought.

Dawn newspaper says in an editorial the Taliban have “been subdued, not vanquished”.

“Before operation Rah-i-Najat was launched, the army put the Taliban strength at about 10,000. Since the maximum number of Taliban fatalities has been put at about 500, those not taken prisoner may have slipped into North Waziristan or the adjoining settled districts. They must be pursued relentlessly without being given a chance to reorganise, and the nation ought to be told what strategy the authorities have up their sleeve to finish the job.”

And to achieve lasting success, the civilian administration is going to have to provide the kind of basic development - schools, roads, healthcare, electricity - that the refugees quoted in this Los Angeles Times article say they are hoping for. 

But that might prove difficult at a time when the country’s political parties – rather than focusing on development and political reforms to convince people to back the government rather than the Taliban — are once again embroiled in the kind of in-fighting that has destroyed civilian democracy in the past.

Writing in Gulf newspaper The National, historian Manan Ahmed worries about the Pakistani Taliban spilling into Baluchistan and finding fertile ground for growth among a people unhappy with the government in Islamabad.  The province is already home to a separatist Baluch insurgency. “The true crisis facing Pakistan is not the Taliban,” he writes. It is instead the state’s failure to provide political and economic rights to the many different people and ethnic groups who make up the country.

The Pakistan Army this year has driven the Taliban out of the Swat valley and is on the way to pushing them out of their South Waziristan stronghold.  But can the civilian government provide the administrative backbone needed to ensure the military operations eventually defeat rather than merely displace the Taliban? The signs are not looking promising.

(A word on comments: my last post elicited some very interesting and insightful comments for which many thanks.  But I’d like to ask everyone again to avoid polemics and focus on making points which take the discussion forward.)

(File photos of refugees from Swat during a dust-storm)

According to the New York Times, Pakistan has objected to the influx of U.S. troops into southern Afghanistan, saying this will drive Taliban militants across the border into its troubled Baluchistan province. It quotes a Pakistani intelligence official as saying that a Taliban spillover would force Pakistan to put more troops into Baluchistan, troops the country does not have right now.

The Pakistan Army has already moved into the Swat valley to clear out a Pakistani Taliban group there and is now preparing an offensive against Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud in his stronghold in South Waziristan. At the same time it is unwilling to move significant numbers of troops away from the Indian border.

What is puzzling about Pakistan’s objection to the U.S. military offensive is not so much its logic, but its timing. All this information was publicly available months ago. A cursory look at a map would show that Pakistani troops were going to be stretched fighting in Swat and Waziristan while also preventing Taliban militants fleeing from Afghanistan into Baluchistan - let alone tackling the Afghan Taliban leadership which the United States says is based in Baluchistan’s capital Quetta. 

The United States and Pakistan discussed their military plans well in advance - the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen said in May that both countries were aware of the risk of a Taliban spillover from Afghanistan into Baluchistan and were planning measures to prevent it. The timing of the U.S. offensive was also clearly flagged in advance - to take place before August elections in Afghanistan. And while Pakistan’s planned offensive into South Waziristan is not going as expected, it’s hard to believe that the professional armies in both countries would base their strategy on an assumption of everything going smoothly in the tribal areas. Nor did anyone expect a sudden peace deal with India that would allow Pakistan to move large numbers of troops from east to west.

So what has changed?  Or why object now more than before?

By coincidence, an insurgency in Baluchistan by Baluch separatists - which is quite different from the Pashtun Taliban insurgency - is also gaining fresh attention. A joint statement issued by the prime ministers of India and Pakistan last week included a reference to Pakistani concerns about India helping the Baluch separatists, a charge New Delhi denies. While Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been heavily criticised at home for agreeing to the reference, Praveen Swami at the Hindu argues that it could put the long-forgotten Baluch separatist insurgency back in focus.

Pakistan is already under intense pressure from the United States and India to crack down on militant groups inside its borders. Now Iran has added its own pressure after 25 people were killed last week in the bombing of a Shi’ite mosque in Zahedan, in the southeast of the country towards the Pakistan border.

According to the Tehran Times, the Iranian foreign ministry summoned Pakistan’s ambassador to Iran to protest about the bombing, which it blamed on militants on Pakistan’s side of the border.

Pakistani newspaper The News International quoted diplomatic sources in Islamabad as saying the future of a gas pipeline from Iran to Pakistan could be jeopardised because of Tehran’s anger at what it saw as Pakistan’s failure to crack down on Sunni militants targeting Iran. It said Iran believed the mosque bombing could have been averted if Pakistan had acted on information provided by Iranian intelligence.

Dawn newspaper  said Iran had partially shut its border with Pakistan, leading to a suspension of trade and causing hardship to the people in the area, in the restive Pakistani province of Baluchistan.

Pakistan and Iran have a long history of difficult relations, driven by Sunni-Shi’ite rivalry and by competition for influence in Afghanistan and in the broader Islamic world. But a summit meeting in Tehran last month between the presidents of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan was meant to help smooth over those differences. Plans for the Iran-Pakistan pipeline — giving Iran an export market for its gas and Pakistan much-needed energy — would give the two countries a powerful economic incentive to bury their political differences.

So the row over the Zahedan bombing comes at a particularly bad time, all the more so given that Pakistan desperately needs friends as it tries to tackle an Islamist insurgency within its borders.  ”At this crucial time, we cannot afford a new diplomatic front,” said a post in the Pakistan blog Chowrangi.

(Photo: Presidents Karzai, Ahmadinejad and Zardari)

The Pakistan Army is engaged in what appears to be a very nasty little war in the Swat valley against heavily armed Taliban militants.  With journalists having left Swat, there have been no independent reports of what is going on there, though the scale of the operation can be partly measured by the huge numbers of refugees - nearly 1.7 million - who fled to escape the military offensive.

Dawn newspaper carried an interview with a wounded soldier saying the Taliban had buried mines and planted IEDs every 50 metres.  ‘They positioned snipers in holes made out of the walls of houses. They used civilians as human shields. They used to attack from houses and roofs,” it quoted him as saying. ‘They are well equipped, they have mortars. They have rockets, sniper rifles and every type of sophisticated weapons.”

Al Jazeera’s correspondent said that the battle was about to get worse as the army prepared to enter Mingora, the main town in the Swat valley. The BBC’s Urdu service managed to talk to a couple of people trapped inside Mingora, one of whom mentioned coming across an Arab among a group of militants.

President Asif Ali Zardari has talked of extending the battle into Waziristan, believed to be the hideout of al Qaeda, and now Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said a U.S. military offensive in southern Afghanistan could push Taliban fighters from there into Pakistan’s Baluchistan province. (To get a sense of the geographical scale of this, scroll down to the map at the bottom of this page to see how far Quetta, the main city in Baluchistan, is from the Swat valley.) Mullen said both U.S. and Pakistani forces were aware of the risk of a spillover from Afghanistan into Pakistan, and were planning measures to prevent it.

He did not say how they would do this, although the Wall Street Journal said earlier this week that the United States was sending 25 to 50 Special Forces personnel into Baluchistan to train Pakistanis, bringing U.S. troops deeper into Pakistan. The Special Forces would focus on training Pakistan’s Frontier Corps, but were not meant to fight alongside them, it said. But it added, “A senior American military officer said he hoped Islamabad would gradually allow the U.S. to expand its training footprint inside Pakistan’s borders. A former U.S. official familiar with the plans said the deployments would ‘get more American eyes and ears’ into the strategically important region.”

U.S. officials say Quetta is the base for the Afghan Taliban and its leader Mullah Omar, who are able to hide in the Afghan refugee camps that sprang up after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. (Mukhtar Khan at CTC Sentinel has a detailed report on the Afghan Taliban in Quetta which you can find by scrolling down on this pdf document.)

But taking on the Afghan Taliban in Baluchistan, while also chasing the Pakistan Taliban out of Swat, and pursuing al Qaeda in Waziristan would be a massive operation. It’s not clear whether there is some kind of masterplan and timeline for all this that we have yet to be told about, or if as Cyril Almeida worries in a column in Dawn, the Pakistan government is simply “steering blindfolded” with “a mix of lucky breaks and nonsense planning.”

Nor is it clear how all this fits into the plans set out by the U.S. administration of President Barack Obama for Afghanistan and Pakistan, which are looking more and more in need of revision every day.

(Photos taken at Baine Baba Ziarat mountain in Swat during trip organised by Pakistan Army/Mian Kursheed)

Read President Barack Obama’s speech on his new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan and compare it to what he said a year ago and it’s hard to see how much further forward we are in understanding exactly how he intends to uproot Islamist militants inside Pakistan.

Last year, Obama said that ”If we have actionable intelligence about high-level al Qaeda targets in Pakistan’s border region, we must act if Pakistan will not or cannot.” Last week, he said that, ”Pakistan must demonstrate its commitment to rooting out al Qaeda and the violent extremists within its borders.  And we will insist that action be taken — one way or another — when we have intelligence about high-level terrorist targets.”

The United States has already stepped up attacks by drone missiles on suspected militant targets in Pakistan’s tribal areas since Obama took office, despite official protests by Pakistan, which says they are counterproductive since they cause civilian casualties and encourage people to support the insurgents.

The Pakistani protests began to look rather hollow after media reports that the drones were taking off from a base inside Pakistan. But that may have missed the point. The question of where the drones are based is perhaps less important than the distrust between the U.S. and Pakistani militaries on sharing intelligence about militant targets.

General Ashfaq Kayani, now head of the Pakistan Army, tells a rather revealing story about this. He is quoted in Brian Cloughley’s book “War, Coups and Terror” as describing the case of a tribesman with a performing monkey who gathered an audience of turban-clad, rifle-bearing men around him in a village in 2005. The U.S. controllers of the drone mistook the event for a weapons-training session or military briefing and dropped a missile, killing many in the audience (he doesn’t say what happened to the monkey). “This, said the General, was an example of lack of cultural understanding,” writes Cloughley.

“The monkey incident, and other attacks by the U.S. within Pakistan,” adds Cloughley, “have convinced the population of North West Frontier Province and a disturbing number of other citizens, including many in uniform, that there is nothing to be gained by supporting the United States, which they consider to be overbearing and imperceptive in its engagement with the country.”

So has intelligence-sharing moved on since then?  If the United States wanted to be sure of hitting the right targets, it could ask the Pakistani military to help it guide the drones and then assess, on looking through the remote camera, whether they were on course.  Or as Foreign Minister Mahmood  Qureshi said last month, it could give Pakistan drones to carry out the task itself.

But intelligence-sharing is not easy at the best of times between different national armies. It’s particularly tough when you don’t trust your allies. Senior U.S. military officers say they believe elements in Pakistan’s Inter-Services intelligence, or ISI, provide support to Taliban or al Qaeda militants. Has Obama worked out how to square that circle? As yet, we don’t know.

The other big question is over where the United States intends to target the Islamists. U.S. officials have begun saying publicly that the Afghan Taliban are based in Quetta in the Pakistani province of Baluchistan — quite different from the tribal areas where both the Pakistan Army and the U.S. drone missiles have been concentrated until now.  “Quetta appears to be the headquarters for the leaders of the Taliban and some of the worst people in the world,” special envoy Richard Holbrooke said in an interview with the BBC.

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Concern is mounting over the health of John Solecki, an American working for the UNHCR, who was kidnapped from the Pakistani city of Quetta 45 days ago.

The UN said it was worried about an apparent deterioration in his health after a little known Baluch group, which says it is holding him, called a local news agency saying he was seriously ill with a heart condition.

Three deadlines set by a group calling itself the Baluchistan Liberation United Front have passed and a new one was meant to end on Thursday. The group wants the release of 1,000 Baluch prisoners, including women, said to be held in Pakistan government cells.

With little sign of any resolution Pakistani media are questioning the seriousness of the effort to secure Solecki’s release. Neither the Baluch government nor the government in Islamabad had taken the task seriously, the liberal Daily Times said. “No matter who kidnapped Solecki, observers say the government cannot absolve itself of the primary responsibility of protecting all those in Pakistan’s territory,” it said.

And the News wrote of the “casual cruelty” involved in picking up an unarmed aid worker on his way to work. It said there were credible reports that extremist groups had a a sort of “rate card” of potential victims. grading them by their public profile and relative value. And since the number of foreigners on Pakistani soil is dwindling fast, the value of those who remain such as Solecki is high. 

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While the firepower and consequently all the media attention has been focused on Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas and the North West Frontier Province, violence in Baluchistan province to the south has worsened.
 
The year gone by was the bloodiest in a decade for Baluchistan, the country’s largest but most impoverished province where a low key insurgency has raged for decades, the Daily Times said. Official data showed a steadily rising level of violence, up from 303 people killed in 2005 to 433 in 2008, the first time killings crossed the 400-mark.

 
There were 120 bomb blasts, 208 rocket attacks, 141 landmine blasts and 32 hand grenade attacks in the past year, and it could have been worse if the three main Baluch nationalist insurgent groups operating in the area - the BLA, the Baloch Republic Army and Baloch Liberation Front - had not declared ceasefire, the newspaper said. One of them, the BRA, has announced the end of the ceasefire from the New Year accusing the government of  of kiling tribesmen.The other two groups may well follow suit, the Daily Times said, warning of a difficult year ahead in the vast sparsely populated desert region that straddles Afghanistan and Iran.

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