In a world used to watching war played out on television, and more recently to following protests in Iran via Twitter and YouTube, the Pakistan Army’s impending military offensive in South Waziristan on the Afghan border is probably not getting the attention it deserves — not least but because the operation is shrouded in secrecy.

Yet the offensive has the potential to be a turning point in the battle against the Taliban which began with the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. Many Taliban and their al Qaeda allies fled Afghanistan to Pakistan’s tribal areas after the U.S. invasion – the CIA said this month it believed Osama bin Laden was still hiding in Pakistan. The offensive in South Waziristan, designed to target Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud, would if successful deprive the Taliban and al Qaeda of what has been until now one of their safest boltholes.

Before the army launches a full-scale offensive, the United States appears to be stepping up missile strikes by unmanned aircraft to weaken the Pakistani Taliban –  an attack on Tuesday by a U.S. drone killed about 70 militants.  The attack, on a funeral for one of six militants killed in a similar strike earlier in the day, would appear to indicate increasing coordination between the United States and Pakistan, although Pakistan publicly condemns the drone operations. When the army does go in, it is likely to face intense fighting against Mehsud and his thousands of well-armed followers, who have had years to prepare defences.

The killing on Tuesday of Mehsud rival Qari Zainuddin has also encouraged speculation that the military is working hard on time-honoured tactics of divide and rule, by trying to find tribal leaders who will turn against Mehsud (the blog Changing up Pakistan has produced an excellent round-up of media reports on Zainuddin’s death). 

 If Pakistan’s military intelligence is indeed looking for allies, Zainuddin’s death might deter potential candidates - Mehsud has a reputation for being both clever and ruthless, and well capable of planning many steps ahead of the offensive he has long known is coming. Anyone who doubts the Taliban and al Qaeda’s capacity to plan ahead should remember that Afghan resistance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud was killed two days before 9/11 in what many analysts now see as a pre-emptive strike to undercut domestic support for U.S. retaliation for the attacks on New York and Washington. So be prepared for the unexpected.

But beyond the reports of drone attacks, the news of Zainuddin’s death, and the refugees streaming out of Waziristan, it is hard to know exactly what is going on there. 

“The truth is though little is known about what exactly is going on in South Waziristan Agency, who is fighting whom and why, and what is likely to happen in the days and weeks ahead,” Dawn newspaper says in an editorial. “What is clear so far is that the security forces are squeezing Baitullah Mehsud’s strongholds by cutting off the three main routes that lead to them and pounding targets from the air.”

What you do keep hearing is that the Pakistan Army — which has been accused in the past of on-again off-again operations in the tribal areas that only allowed the militants to get stronger — is absolutely serious about pressing on with an offensive against the Pakistani Taliban which began in the Swat valley and will now continue into Waziristan. 

One to follow closely — even without live TV or Twitter.

(Photos of Pakistani military in the Swat region)

It was Lord Curzon, Britain’s turn of the century Viceroy of India, who said it would need a brave man to subjugate Pakistan’s rebellious Waziristan region and he was not up to it.

“No patchwork scheme—and all our present recent schemes…are mere patchwork—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,” he said in remarks that have oft been repeated each time anyone has attempted to bring the region under control.

Is Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari up to it?  Pakistan’s military has been ordered to carry out an offensive against Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, and his fighters believed to be in the South Waziristan region, according to the provincial governor.

Pakistani wants to build on the momentum of its operation in the Swat Valley, but is it taking on more than it can by going into Waziristan? Nicholas Schmidle, writing in the Washington Post, says it is completely unrealistic to believe that the Pakistan army could continue fighting Taliban remnants in Swat, be heavily deployed on the eastern frontier with India ,and dedicate enough troops to resemble the steam-roller that Lord Curzon spoke of.

Eric Margolis, in a piece written a while ago, was more blunt, warning of the risk to Pakistan from such a course of action, which he said was clearly under U.S. pressure. “The real danger is in the U.S. acting like an enraged mastodon, trampling Pakistan under foot, and forcing Islamabad’s military to make war on its own people. Pakistan could end up like U.S.- occupied Iraq, split into three parts and helpless.”

The Waziristans are the poorest of Pakistan’s seven semi-autonomous Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and home to its most recalcitrant tribes as this piece notes.

They don’t like the Pakistan army being in their lands. An offensive 18 months ago resulted in around 200,000 people being lodged in camps for several months, before the army realized it was pointless holding empty territory and allowed them back.

Pakistan is already paying a price and there could be worse to come, cricketer-turned politician Imran Khan is quoted as having said. He thought his country was on a suicidal course and that the offensive against the Taliban will backfire and fuel more extremism and bomb attacks.

I’m not pro-Taliban,” he said. “But my point is: shouldn’t we have looked at other options? How do you justify using heavy artillery, helicopter gunships and F-16 fighter-jets in civilian areas? Who in the world does this?.”

And it is a war that pits Pakistanis against Pakistanis, Muslims against Muslims, - unlike in the past when all all its wars have been against India. For the soldiers who are fighting and for the families forced to bury their sons, the struggle seems to go against their very DNA, as this piece in the Washington Post argues.

{File photo of Taliban fighters  waiting for Mehsud during a media visit last year]

The Pakistan Army may have driven the Taliban out of Swat but the refugees who fled to escape the military offensive are still in limbo.

Aid agencies are calling on the government to make sure that basic services are restored for people trying to return home after the offensive. They are also saying that landmines and other unexploded weapons pose an additional risk and say public areas - especially around schools, hospitals and markets - must be cleared of ordnance immediately.

Dawn newspaper quoted a military spokesman as saying that the army was ready to remain in Swat indefinitely to provide security for the people in Swat, which had been overrun by Taliban militants before the offensive.

‘The army will stay in the area till a sense of security among the people is revived, a credible defence system by law enforcement agencies put in place and the possibility of terrorists hiding in the mountains coming back to launch a second phase of insurgency is obviated. This will not take less than a year,’ it quoted the spokesman as saying.

But in an op-ed in The News, defence analyst Ikram Sehgal urges the government to do more to help the returning refugees, not least because enough Taliban insurgents escaped the offensive to threaten a guerrilla war that could destabilise the population further.

“One must counter civilian guerrilla activity by winning over the hearts and minds of the local population, in the present insecure circumstances that will be a hard sell. The prime mission must be to restore the civil administration as soon as possible,” he writes.

“While on the ground, the troops have performed above and beyond the call of duty in the tactical sense, in the strategic sense we may have created conditions that spell a disaster in the looming,” he adds. ”We are in trouble. No, let me correct that, we are in deep trouble. Islamabad, we have a problem!”

The refugees are not only facing problems in camps or staying with relatives in crowded homes, but have also run into hostility in other parts of Pakistan.

“Politically they must go back. If they do not, there will be a political explosion,” according to U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke. Urging other countries to provide money to help the refugees, he said that, ”in the end we are going to need several billion dollars for this small part of Pakistan.”

And the Swat operation was just the start of what could be a much bigger offensive against the Taliban.

(Photos: refugees at Yar Hussain camp/Akhtar Soomro)

Some people in India are calling upon the new coalition government to make a series of bold moves towards Pakistan that will compel the neighbour to put its money where  the mouth is.

If Pakistan keeps saying that it cannot fully and single-mindedly go after militants on its northwest frontier and indeed increasingly within the heartland because of the threat it faces from India, then New Delhi must call its bluff, argued authors Nitin Pai and Sushant K. Singh in a recent piece for India’s Mint newspaper.

How about Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, back for a second term, giving a categorical public declaration that Pakistan need not fear an Indian military attack so long as the Pakistan army is engaged in fighting with Taliban militants?  While a verbal commitment may not convince the military brass in Rawalpindi, it will likely play well in Washington as it rathchets up pressure on the Pakistan army to take the battle to the militants.

Second and to back up its assurance, India could move some of the army strike formations from the international border with Pakistan in Punjab and Rajasthan. “Such a bold, strategic move will not only make India’s verbal assurances credible, but it will also immediately result in irresistible pressure on the Pakistani army to commit more of its troops to the western border,” the authors wrote in the Mint piece.

Clearly, the aim of such a peace gamble is to expose the contradiction within the Pakistani position, force them to either go full throttle after militant groups, some of whom are suspected to be tied to its intelligence agencies, or  face America’s wrath.

Moving Indian troops back will compel the Pakistan army to act against the Taliban, and because it is incapable of doing so, will cause the United States to realise that there is no alternative to dismantling the military-jihadi complex, Pai and Singh argue.

Taking out Pakistan’s military-jihadi establishment is really what the battle in Pakistan is all about - that is the refrain you hear incessantly in the strategic establishment in New Delhi  as I did during a visit over the past few weeks, and one you can be sure it will be telling U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton expected to visit sometime in July.

But in the immediate future, is such a bold gamble as troop pullback really going to work?
Two issues. One, what about Kashmir ? No pullback is proposed on Kashmir where tens of thousands of troops are massed on both sides of the Line of Control, and according to some Pakistani experts this really is where is there should be a re-deployment of forces.

Ejaz Haider in a piece for Pakistan’s Daily Times, says the bulk of India’s military deployment  iscentred on Pakistan, with 7 of the army’s 13 corps “specific to Pakistan.”  In any case, given that the Pakistan army’s numerical strength is half that of India, the deployment of the Pakistan army along the eastern frontier is much thinner than India’s.

And if Pakistan does not face the threat of a hot war from India as everyone keeps telling it, Haider says, then India too does not face that prospect.

“If Pakistan is asked by the US and other western capitals on the basis of this argument to pull out troops from the eastern border and deploy them to the west, then perhaps India should also be called upon to thin its much-heavier Pakistan-specific deployment along the international border, the Line of Control, the working boundary and the actual ground position line,” he says.

But can the Indian army really thin out of Kashmir? At this point when the threat of infiltration of militants from Pakistan is again being talked about?

And finally does Singh, even with a stronger parliamentary support after a general election, really have the people’s endorsement of cutting back troops from the Pakistan frontier. The wounds from the 26/11 attack on Mumbai for which the Pakistan-based group Lashkar-e-Taiba has been held responsible, remain fresh for a large number of Indians.  They are not in a mood to forgive or forget.

[Photos of Indian and Pakistani troops at a border checkpoint and the site of a car bombing in Lahore on May 27)

With Pakistan facing a refugee crisis, and its army engaged in intense fighting in the Swat valley, the question of who makes decisions in the country and how these are taken may not seem like the top priority.

But Shuja Nawaz at the Atlantic Council makes a strong argument in favour of deepening institutional mechanisms for decision-making. While President Asif Ali Zardari, who has retained the sweeping presidential powers of his predecessor Pervez Musharraf, made many decisions himself and also personally represented Pakistan diplomatically on trips overseas, the institutional process of decision-making that would allow coordination between the different branches of the country’s government is lacking, he writes. As a result the government seemed unprepared to deal with the million refugees created by Pakistan’s military offensive against the Taliban. 

“If there had been an institutional mechanism for national security analysis and decision-making with a clear central command authority … the exodus would have been anticipated and arrangements put in place to look after the displaced people,” he writes. ”The National Security Council has been abolished. The Defence Committee of the cabinet does not appear to have met to discuss the crisis. And in the absence of a National Security Adviser, sacked by the prime minister in a moment of pique following the Mumbai attack, there is no formal mechanism for studying such issues nor a central point in government to ensure that all parts of the administration work together to anticipate problems and resolve issues.”

“A highly personalized decision-making process remains in place, informed in some cases more by anecdote than by analysis. Most exchanges on military issues take place directly between the President and the Army Chief. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is often by-passed. Coordination of the fight against the militants between Interior Ministry and the military is desultory at best,” he says.

“The army, still unequipped and untrained for counterinsurgency, may yet be able to clear the Swat valley of the militants. But, as a senior military officer confided to me, the army will be unable to hold the territory indefinitely. Providing governance and justice is the civilians’ job. And there is no evidence of civilian institutions or a police force to do the needful. So the Taliban may return to fill the vacuum, as they did before.”

By most accounts, Pakistan faces a long war if it is to take on the Taliban while also rebuilding shattered communities and bringing much-needed economic development to its north-west.  But success in long wars tends to depend more on logistics than on leadership. It will be interesting to see how well Pakistan develops the institutional mechanisms needed to provide those logistics.

With Pakistan launching what the country’s Daily Times calls an “all-out war” against the Taliban, more than 500,000 people have fled the fighting in the northwest, bringing to more than a million those displaced since August, according to the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR.

After apparently giving the Taliban enough rope to hang themselves, by offering a peace deal in the Swat valley which the government said they then reneged upon, the government for now seems to have won enough popular backing to launch its offensive.

But to succeed in defeating the Taliban, the government must also be ready with a strategy to rebuild shattered lives if the mood in the northwest is not to turn sour, Dawn newspaper says. It quotes defence analyst Ikram Sehgal as estimating the military could take up to two months to conclude its campaign, and that dealing with the impact on civilians will require more than 10 times the one billion rupees (12 million dollars) the government has so far announced.

In a separate article, it says that refugees are already upset about the behaviour of both the Taliban and the military. ’We are frightened of the Taliban and the army. If they want to fight, they should kill each other, they should not take refuge in our homes,” it quotes an 18-year-old girl as saying.

Both Pakistan’s The News International newspaper and the blog Changing up Pakistan warn against the onset of compassion fatigue, both for  the sake of the people affected and to make sure refugee camps do not turn into recruiting grounds for the Taliban.

“If the militants can provide services and offer more viable options for IDPs than the state, that is a dangerous phenomenon. The government and international agencies must therefore do more to relieve the plight of the ever-increasing number of displaced persons in Pakistan, not just for humanitarian purposes, but because we cannot afford to let the Taliban win any more,” Changing up Pakistan says.

In the meantime, more questions are being raised about the U.S. administration’s policy of using unmanned drone aircraft to fire missiles on Pakistan’s tribal areas. The missile attacks, meant to target militant leaders and disrupt al Qaeda’s capabilities, cause civilian casualties, alienate Pakistanis who see them as an invasion of sovereignty and add to a perception that Pakistan is fighting “America’s war” in one place, while being bombed by American planes in another.

Foreign Policy Journal quotes U.S. Congressman Ron Paul as criticising the Obama administration for continuing the drone missile attacks first started under President George W. Bush. “We are bombing a sovereign country,” it quotes him as saying. “Where do we get the authority to do that? Did the Pakistani government give us written permission? Did the Congress give us written permission to expand the war and start bombing in Pakistan?” he asked.

It adds that he said there are “many, many thousands of Pashtuns that are right smack in the middle, getting killed by our bombs, and then we wonder why they object to our policies over there. How do you win the hearts and minds of these people if we’re seen as invaders and occupies?”

Dawn newspaper also urges an end to the drone attacks in a passionately worded editorial.

(more…)

President Barack Obama’s statement on Pakistan at a news conference on Wednesday appeared to be more measured than the spate of alarmist comments about the country in the past week or so.  It is worth reading in full:

“Q    Thank you, Mr. President.  I want to move to Pakistan. Pakistan appears to be at war with the Taliban inside their own country.  Can you reassure the American people that, if necessary, America could secure Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal and keep it from getting into the Taliban’s hands or, worst-case scenario, even al Qaeda’s hands?

THE PRESIDENT:  I’m confident that we can make sure that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is secure — primarily, initially, because the Pakistani army, I think, recognises the hazards of those weapons falling into the wrong hands.  We’ve got strong military-to-military consultation and cooperation.  I am gravely concerned about the situation in Pakistan, not because I think that they’re immediately going to be overrun and the Taliban would take over in Pakistan; more concerned that the civilian government there right now is very fragile and don’t seem to have the capacity to deliver basic services — schools, health care, rule of law, a judicial system that works for the majority of people.  And so as a consequence, it is very difficult for them to gain the support and the loyalty of their people.

So we need to help Pakistan help Pakistanis.  And I think that there’s a recognition increasingly on the part of both the civilian government there and the army that that is their biggest weakness.

On the military side, you’re starting to see some recognition just in the last few days, that the obsession with India as the mortal threat to Pakistan has been misguided, and that their biggest threat right now comes internally.  And you’re starting to see the Pakistan military take much more seriously the armed threat from militant extremists.

We want to continue to encourage Pakistan to move in that direction and we will provide them all the cooperation that we can.  We want to respect their sovereignty, but we also recognise that we have huge strategic interests, huge national security interests in making sure that Pakistan is stable and that you don’t end up having a nuclear armed militant state.

Q    But in a worst-case scenario –

THE PRESIDENT:  I’m not going to engage –

Q    — military, U.S. military could secure this nuclear –

THE PRESIDENT:  I’m not going to engage in hypotheticals of that sort.  I feel confident that that nuclear arsenal will remain out of militant hands.  Okay?”

 

Obama’s acknowledgement that he was alarmed about Pakistan, and his reference to the military’s “misguided” obsession with India, have been widely reported.  But personally, I was struck by his comments that the real cause for concern was the fragility of the civilian government and its inability to deliver basic services — because, if nothing else, they seemed to echo more closely views written from inside the country.

Pakistani newspapers ran a couple of excellent news analyses earlier this week.  In this editorial in Dawn newspaperMohammad Waseem explains why there is such a cacophony of views about Pakistan, by comparing those expounding on it to the blind men who tried to make sense of an elephant by touching different parts of its body and reaching different conclusions about the nature of the beast. In the News International, Asif Ezdi picks up on what has become a recurring theme — that the struggle under way within Pakistan is not just between religious obscurantists and secularists, but between the great mass of the poor and the feudalandmilitary elite which dominates the country.  Unless the elite moves quickly to deliver social justice (the basic services mentioned by Obama), he says, the poor will continue to see the Taliban, with their speedy Islamic law and free schools, as a viable alternative

Do Obama’s comments, therefore, suggest a shift in U.S. thinking about Pakistan? The United States has traditionally been criticised by Pakistanis for heavy-handedness, buying Pakistan’s loyalty with heavy doses of aid while simultaneously bombing its territory with missile strikes from unmanned drone aircraft. Or are these merely reassuring words, offering style rather than substance?

There is clearly an intense debate under way within the Obama administration over how to handle Pakistan.

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The Pakistan Army has been getting a lot of flak over the past week or so for its alleged failure to take a tough line against Taliban militants expanding their reach across Pakistan’s north-west.  And although Pakistan Army chief General Ashfaq Kayani issued a statement promising to fight the militants and security forces began a new offensive, doubts remain about the military’s willingness to take on Islamist groups that it once nurtured as part of its rivalry with India.

Among a spate of articles about Pakistan’s powerful military, Newsweek ran a piece headlined “Pakistan’s Self-Defeating Army”. It argued that far from serving as a bulwark against chaos, the military had helped destabilise Pakistan by undermining the development of a civilian democracy in the decades since the country was founded in 1947.

David Kilcullen, a counter-insurgency expert, called during a Congressional hearing for “fundamental, root and branch reform of the Pakistani military, and bringing it firmly under the authority of civilian elected officials”. Arguing that U.S. aid should be channelled into building up the police rather than the military, he said this ”would protect the Pakistani people, improve counterinsurgency performance, enhance the rule of law and weaken the stranglehold of the army over the civilian leadership of Pakistan.”

The arguments in favour of civilian democracy were well rehearsed when President Pervez Musharraf was forced out of office last year, and then endorsed by the administration of President Barack Obama. Kayani himself has so far stressed his commitment to civilian democracy. So to some extent the latest talk about the role of the Pakistan Army is a rehash of old news.

What I have not seen however, is a coherent and clear explanation of how the army is supposed to do more in fighting the Taliban, while also doing less by subsuming its power to that of the civilian government. Were the civilian government determined and united in fighting the Taliban, there would be no contradiction - in a constitutional democracy, the army is supposed to follow the orders of the political leadership. But there seems to be something of a suggestion creeping in that the army should be ready to take the initiative, with or without the backing of the government.

My impression, and readers will correct me if I am wrong, is that this suggestion crops up far more in the foreign media than in the Pakistani (English-language) press, which acknowledges the ambiguity of an army that is supposed to rescue Pakistan from the Taliban while also reducing its power.

(more…)

A retired Indian Army officer has written an open letter to Pakistan Army chief General Ashfaq Kayani that Pakistan’s The News carried this week and which is now popping up on blogs.

Colonel Harish Puri says it is incredible that the Pakistan Army allowed something as reprehensible as the public flogging of a teenage girl in the Swat  Valley without lifting a finger, even though it coudn’t have happened very far from an army checkpoint.

For a force that is as professional as the Pakistan Army and which has fought valiantly in all three wars with India,  and acquitted itself well in  U.N. peacekeeping missions worldwide, such an “abject surrender is unthinkable,” he writes.

The Pakistan Army’s inability to jam militant radio broadcasts in the region that have helped spread their power around is equally incomprehensible, Puri, who is from the army’s Signals unit, says. (The United States has just begun a broad effort in Pakistan and Afghanistan to prevent the Taliban from making these broadcasts, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday.)

Puri urges Kayani to act, not just for the sake of Pakistan but the entire region. “It doesn’t matter if it is “my war” or “your war” – it is a war that has to be won.”

An Indian Army oficer writing to the Pakistan Army chief is rare and the fact that the letter is published in a Pakistani newspaper even more extraordinary.

Or perhaps these are unprecedented times. McClatchy newspapers ran a story this week quoting U.S. experts as saying Pakistan was a “disaster in the making on the scale of the Iranian revolution.”  Counter-insurgency expert David Kilcullen has been quoted as saying Pakistan could collapse within months.

The sense of foreboding has risen with the international cricket authorities taking away the hosting rights for the 2011 World Cup from Pakistan, citing an uncertain security situation.

The tournament is still two years away, but it didn’t stop the International Cricket Council from making an early call on the security situation in the country. The tournament will be played in co-host nations -  India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh.

[Army chief Kayani with troops and supporters of a radical cleric in Islamabad]

Two years after Iftikhar Chaudhry was first sacked by then President Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan government officials said he would be reinstated as Chief Justice after a nationwide protest led by Pakistan’s lawyers.

It’s been a rollercoaster ride. After he was removed by Musharraf, Chaudhry was reinstated only to be sacked again and placed under house arrest along with many other lawyers when the former general declared emergency rule in November 2007. At the time, Pakistani lawyer/politician Aitzaz Ahsan wrote in an editorial in the New York Times that the leaders of the lawyers movement ”will neither be silent nor still”. But he also fretted that the lawyers’ movement would be ignored by the United States and overlooked by the forthcoming election.

Then after an election which brought President Asif Ali Zardari to power, the lawyers protested again in June last year in what they called a “Long March” - named somewhat perversely after the military retreat led by Mao Zedung in the 1930s.  Their protest fizzled after failing to achieve its objective.  This time around, a “Long March” to Islamabad seems to have succeeded. 

“The quiet, patient man is on his third life, having been deposed twice previously by former President Pervez Musharraf.  Let’s hope he serves his term completely, without obstruction, and for the public good,” wrote Arif Rafiq on the Pakistan Policy Blog. “Kudos to the lawyers movement — one of Pakistan’s most organized, disciplined, and strategically-keen social movements.  Kudos to the political parties, third party groups, and street and Internet activists who stuck by their side.”

The lawyers’ movement was in some ways a triumph for civil society.  It sought to find its ideological roots in the founder of Pakistan, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, himself a lawyer. And given that hardline Islamism tends to flourish in places where the rule of law has broken down, it can also say it has played its part in undercutting a growing Taliban insurgency.

But after teetering on the edge of a precipice over the lawyers protest, has Pakistan really reached a turning point, or simply righted itself temporarily?

Chaudhry himself was first appointed by Musharraf after the then-general launched a military coup in 1999, so he cannot say he has always been a loyal servant of civilian democracy. And as discussed in an earlier post, the deal to reinstate Chaudhry may have been achieved as a result of prodding from the Pakistan Army, which begs the question of how well civilian democracy can flourish in Pakistan if it has to be underwritten by the country’s powerful military.  His promised reinstatement — announced after days of negotiations — may also carry with it a political deal whose outcome and required allegiances we are yet to discover.

So is the government’s promise to reinstate Chaudhry a triumph for civil society? Or a false dawn, masking further problems ahead?

(Reuters photo: a lawyer tries to escape tear gas in Lahore)