Pakistan: Now or Never?

from Afghan Journal:

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.

CFR on Pakistan: hold course (for now)

The Council on Foreign Relations has just released a new report on U.S. policy on Afghanistan and Pakistan based on a study by a bipartisan group chaired by former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and former national security adviser Sandy Berger and directed by CFR senior fellow Daniel Markey.

As far as Pakistan is concerned, the report broadly endorses U.S. policy of trying to build a long-term partnership, while also aiming to persuade it to turn convincingly against all militant groups. It reiterates a U.S. complaint that while Pakistan is ready to act against militants that threaten the Pakistani state, like al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban, it continues to support or tolerate other groups it believes can be used as proxies against India, including the Afghan Taliban, the Haqqani network and the Lashkar-e-Taiba. Among a range of incentives to build a better relationship with Pakistan, the report argues for continued U.S. financial support for Pakistan, all the more needed after this summer’s devastating floods, along with more favourable trade terms to boost the textile industry, which it says provides 38 percent of the country’s industrial employment.

However, the report’s endorsement of U.S. support for Pakistan comes with a hard edge, warning that failure to achieve results, or an attack on the United States traced back to Pakistan-based militants, could lead to a much more aggressive U.S. policy:

“There are several strategic options available to the United States if the administration concludes that the current strategy is not working. In Pakistan, Washington could turn away from its present emphasis on rewarding and encouraging long-term bilateral cooperation. Instead, it could undertake increasingly aggressive, unilateral U.S. military strikes against Pakistan-based terrorists deeper into Pakistani territory, coercive diplomacy and sanctions, or a range of financial, diplomatic, and legal restrictions to control the flow of people, money, goods, and information to and from Pakistan. This strategy of containment and coercion could be coupled with a distinct diplomatic ’tilt’ toward India, with New Delhi serving as Washington’s main strategic and counterterror partner in the region.”

The report also highlights the potential threat from the Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Punjab-based militant group blamed for the 2008 attack on Mumbai, which it says ”could eventually surpass al-Qaeda as the world’s most sophisticated and dangerous terrorist organization.”

“The growing ambitions and capabilities of LeT and its affiliates (and its ties to al-Qaeda) make it the ticking time bomb of South Asia. Washington should place greater pressure on Islamabad to degrade LeT’s capacity and restrain its sympathizers, bearing in mind that a number of these groups enjoy widespread popular support because of their humanitarian outreach efforts,” it says. 

“Discussion of LeT should receive priority alongside al-Qaeda and the Taliban in U.S.-Pakistan political, military, and intelligence dialogues. Tougher U.S. talk must be backed by strong evidence. The United States should therefore enhance its own intelligence and interdiction capabilities to shut down LeT’s operations outside Pakistan and its recruiting activities in the United States and Europe. By sharing intelligence with India and contributing to its defensive capabilities against terrorists based in Pakistan, the United States can undercut any in Pakistan who still see strategic value in supporting militancy.”

India-Pakistan war games, and Cold Start

Shashank Joshi has a good piece up at RUSI explaining the limitations of India’s military ”Cold Start” doctrine, meant to allow the army to mobilise rapidly for war against Pakistan. The doctrine is intended to ensure Indian forces deploy faster than in 2001/2002 when India mobilised troops along the Pakistan border after an attack on its parliament blamed on Pakistan-based militants.  It would also aim to integrate army operations with those of the Indian Air Force and to a lesser extent its navy.

The doctrine has caused much alarm in Pakistan which sees it as evidence of a threat from its much bigger neighbour which it says forces it to keep the bulk of its army on its border with India rather than fighting militants on the Afghan border.

The problem is, as Joshi writes, Cold Start does not actually work — or at least has yet to be developed in ways which would make it effective in an environment where both countries have nuclear bombs.

The Indian National Interest website argues that by refusing to admit that Cold Start never really got off the drawing board, India does itself a disservice by giving Pakistan a reason to play up the threat from India.

“…the army’s armored units have continued to be focused on a doctrine that is unlikely to be employed in the event of even a limited war in a nuclear environment, in which air power is likely to play a greater role in any case. The army clinging to Cold Start is in many respects impractical, and diverts resources and attention from more meaningful and creative endeavours related to its military preparedness,” it says.

“Second, the political costs of leaving the doctrine announced but unexplained are not insignificant. As is its wont, Pakistan has framed Cold Start as evidence … of imminent Indian plans to initiate hostilities or invade. India also gets questioned unnecessarily by friendly powers for its apparent recklessness in contemplating limited warfare in a nuclear environment.”

“The responsibility lies with the Ministry of Defence and the national security apparatus, if not the Prime Minister himself, to affirm Cold Start as a work in progress or admit that it never left the drawing board. Either would render advantages—operational or political—that six years of ambiguity has not.”

The Taliban “spillover” into Pakistan’s Baluchistan

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.

On War in Pakistan and Afghanistan

If you were to apply the advice of 19th century Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz that one of the objectives of war is to destroy the effective strength of the enemy, it is still not clear how that aim is to be achieved when it comes to fighting the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Predictably, the Taliban has melted away in the face of offensives in both countries, retaining its capacity to live to fight another day and to open new fronts in other areas.

In Pakistan, the army has driven Taliban militants out of towns in the Swat valley and won control of the main lines of communication after launching an  offensive at the end of April. But clashes are still flaring daily in some areas, writes Reuters Islamabad correspondent Robert Birsel in this analysis. “Unless you eliminate the leadership, however much damage you do, the command structure will manage to grow back,” he quotes security analyst Ikram Sehgal as saying. “As long as that leadership exists, low-intensity guerrilla warfare will keep going on.”

In the meantime, the Pakistani Taliban are expected to try to open up other fronts to distract the Pakistan Army both from cleaning up Swat and launching an offensive in South Waziristan, the base of Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud.

In Afghanistan,  U.S. Marines have met with little resistance after launching an offensive last week in Helmand province.

But Josh Foust at Registan.net writes that the decision to go in force into Helmand could leave other parts of Afghanistan vulnerable.

“By now, I thought it had become conventional wisdom that the Taliban learned they can never win on the conventional battlefield—that, rather than staging defiant but futile battles, as they did in the 2002 time frame, they instead slink away when there is a major operation, bide their time, and filter back in when the troops leave to intimidate, harass, and punish the collaborators NATO left behind,” he says. “So here we have the Helmand insurgency behaving exactly as it does in other provinces, while safe provinces show increasing signs of fracture and violence…”

More churning in South Asia : India bolsters defences on China border

Power play in South Asia is always a delicate dance and anything that happens between India and China will likely play itself out across the region, not the least in Pakistan, Beijing’s all weather friend.

And things are starting to move on the India-China front. We carried a report this weekabout India’s plan to increase troop levels and build more airstrips in the remote state of Arunachal Pradesh, a territory disputed by China.  New Delhi planned to deploy two army divisions, the report quoted Arunachal governor J.J. Singh as saying.

Other reports in the Indian media said the air force was beefing up its base in Tejpur in the northeast with Su-30 fighter planes, the newest in its armoury. The HIndustan Times said it was part of a decision to move advanced assets close to the Chinese  border.  The IAF base in Tejpur which is in the state of Assam is within striking distance of the border with China in Arunachal Pradesh.

Arunachal evokes especially painful memories for India – for this is where the Chinese advanced deep inside, inflicting heavy casualties on poorly-equipped Indian soldiers in the 1962 war. The Chinese retreated but have refused to recognise Arunachal as part of India, and that along with other disputed stretches of their 3,000 km border has remained at the heart of more than four decades of distrust.

Indeed the renewed Indian defence deployment comes days after the air force chief said China posed a bigger and more potent threat than Pakistan.

Too much fighting, not enough talking?

David Kilcullen knows a thing or two about counter-insurgency.

A former lieutenant-colonel in the Australian army and a senior adviser to U.S. General David Petraeus, he helped shape the “surge” policy that is widely credited with pulling Iraq back from the brink of chaos. He has just written a book entitled “The Accidental Guerrilla: fighting small wars in the midst of a big one” which closely examines insurgencies from Thailand and Indonesia to Afghanistan and Iraq, including what it takes to contain and quell them.

Far from being gung-ho or militaristic, Kilcullen takes an analytical approach, putting a heavy emphasis on the need for cultural and linguistic understanding. Without a deep appreciation of history, politics and anthropology, defeat is all but guaranteed  in complex foreign lands even for the world’s mightiest of armies, he argues.

 Which is why it was particularly notable what he said at a book launch in London this week.

The U.S. military has about 1.6 million personnel all told, from frontline troops to cooks and drivers. But there are just 6,000 foreign service officers in the U.S. State Department, he said. That’s about 260 soldiers to each diplomat, a far higher ratio than in any other major military in the world, according to Kilcullen.

“There are more members of U.S. military marching bands then there are foreign service officers,” he said. “In fact, there are about ten times as many accountants in the U.S. military as there are foreign service officers in the U.S. State Department.”

His point hardly needed reinforcing. The U.S. military spends vast amounts — forecast to be $650 billion in 2009 — on ensuring its armed forces are able to fight whatever threat may emerge anywhere in the world at any given time, but a tiny fraction of that amount on diplomatic and cultural liaison work that might help understand a conflict better or even prevent it.

Garrisons and force protection crowd out other objectives in Afghanistan

- Joshua Foust is a defense consultant who has just spent the last 10 weeks embedded with the U.S. Army in Afghanistan. He also blogs at Registan.net. Any opinions expressed are his own. -

It is a cliché that, in counterinsurgency, one must be among “the people”. In Iraq, the U.S. Army did this to great effect under the leadership of General David Petraeus, moving large numbers of soldiers off the enormous bases and into smaller, community-oriented security outposts. As a result, in densely populated urban areas like Baghdad, an active presence of troops played a significant role in calming the worst of the violence. The Western Coalition forces in Afghanistan, however, face an altogether different problem. Kabul is not Baghdad – far less of Afghanistan’s population lives there than in Iraq, and the insurgency is concentrated outside the country’s largest urban areas. In many urban areas-Herat in the west, Jalalabad in the east, Mazar-i Sharif in the north-a westerner is far safer in the city itself than out in the countryside.

A rural insurgency is a devil’s game. It is difficult for a foreign counterinsurgent force to concentrate itself to maximize effectiveness, in part because the insurgency itself is not concentrated. When there are no obvious population clusters, there are no obvious choices for bases. Bagram Air Base, the country’s largest military base, is in the middle of nowhere, comparatively speaking – dozens of miles north of Kabul, and a 45-minute drive from Charikar, the nearest city in Parwan Province. FOB Salerno, a large base in Khost Province, is miles away from Khost City, the province’s capital-and the road in between is riddled with IEDs.

The many smaller bases strung in between are surrounded by enormous Hesco barriers, concertina wire, and guard towers. No one is allowed on the base without being badged and interviewed by base security, and in many places delivery trucks are forced to wait in the open for 24 hours before completing their trips to the dining halls, clinics, or technology offices.

There are other ways in which Coalition Forces are separated from the people of Afghanistan beyond their heavily fortified bases. Most transit – on patrol, on delivery runs, or on humanitarian missions – is performed through Mine Resistance Ambush Protection, or MRAP vehicles. These enormous trucks, thickly plated with metal blast shields on the bottom with tiny blue-tinted ballistic glass, make it near-impossible to even see the surrounding countryside from another other than the front seat.

On the narrow mountain roads that sometimes collapse under the mutli-ton trucks, soldiers drive, too, in up-armored Humvees, which are similarly coated in thick plates of armor and heavy glass windows they aren’t allowed to open.

When soldiers emerge from their imposing vehicles, they are covered from head to groin in various forms of shielding: thick ceramic plates on the torso, the ubiquitous Kevlar helmets, tinted ballistic eye glasses, neck and nape guards, heavy shrapnel-resistant flaps of fabric about the shoulders and groin, and fire-resistant uniforms. A common sentiment among Afghans who see these men and women wandering in their midst is that they look like aliens, or, if they know of them, robots.

Reforming Pakistan’s security agencies

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has put out a paper on the need to reform Pakistan’s intelligence agencies just as army chief General Ashfaq Kayani is winning much praise for playing what is seen as a decisive role in defusing the country’s latest political crisis and saving democracy.

French scholar Frederic Grare says in the paper the reform and “depoliticisation” of the agencies, in particular the military’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), is imperative.

Grare says there is no magic formula to transform overnight an authoritarian regime into a full-fledged democracy but says there’s no excuse for the government to sit on its hands (“patience should not be an alibi for inaction”).

(more…)

More U.S. troops for Afghanistan

President Barack Obama is sending 17,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan to fight a growing insurgency, but will they make a difference?

America and its allies have far fewer boots on the ground in Afghanistan than Iraq, although the former is larger, more populous and features more challenging terrain.

As two former U.S. soldiers pointed out in Foreign Policy magazine, military strategists generally believe a successful counter-insurgency strategy requires 20-25 troops for every 1,000 civilians.

This “force ratio” was outlined by Rand Corp military analyst James Quinlivan in an influential study in the 1990s that has become one of the standard works on the subject.

Quinlivan’s paper drew on the British experience in Northern Ireland — as well as their 1950s anti-communist campaign in Malaya — and although the conflict is very different from Afghanistan a comparison of the size of forces is interesting.

(more…)