The debate about the fate of Pakistan and Afghanistan is getting noisier by the day.

According to this McClatchy report, a new U.S. National Intelligence Estimate — reflecting the consensus of U.S. intelligence agencies — has described Pakistan as being “on the edge”.

“A growing al Qaeda-backed insurgency, combined with the Pakistani army’s reluctance to launch an all-out crackdown, political infighting and energy and food shortages are plunging America’s key ally in the war on terror deeper into turmoil and violence,” it quotes the soon-to-be completed U.S. intelligence assessment as saying. It also quotes a U.S. official as summarising the NIE’s conclusions about the state of Pakistan as: “no money, no energy, no government.” (more…)

Reading the latest spate of news reports about U.S. policies in Afghanistan, one thing strikes me as troubling — the failure to distinguish between tactics and strategy. Military boffins argue about the exact meaning of those two words, but for the purposes of argument, let’s say that tactics are a means to an end, while strategy contains within it an understanding of the end to be attained.

U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates gave us an idea of the end earlier this week when he talked of reconciliation with the Taliban, while excluding anyone belonging to al Qaeda. ”There has to be ultimately, and I’ll underscore ultimately, reconciliation as part of a political outcome to this,” Gates said. ”That’s ultimately the exit strategy for all of us.”

Now let’s look at tactics.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the United States is considering training up Afghanistan’s tribal militias to fight the Taliban.  “The plan is controversial because it could extend the influence of warlords while undermining the government of President Hamid Karzai in Kabul,” the newspaper says. It adds that, “by focusing on tribal militias and local security, the approach resembles the U.S. campaign in Iraq, where former Sunni insurgents are paid to guard their neighborhoods.”

The New York Times picks up the same theme in its own story about the forthcoming National Intelligence Estimate – a report by American intelligence agencies due to be finished after the November presidential election — which it says concludes that Afghanistan is in a “downward spiral” and casts serious doubt on the ability of the Afghan government to stem the rise in the Taliban.

“The administration is considering whether the United States should devote more effort to working directly with tribal leaders in far-flung provinces, and possibly arming tribal militias, to fight the Taliban in places where Afghanistan’s army and police forces have been ineffective,” the New York Times says.

“The Bush administration had long resisted making tribal elders a centerpiece of American strategy in Afghanistan. American officials had hoped instead that strong national institutions like the Afghan Army could protect the Afghan population, but the escalating violence this year has forced a reassessment of the value of the tribal system for counterinsurgency operations.”

As a tactic, training or arming tribal militias does not contradict an overall strategy of forcing the Taliban into peace talks, presumably after they have been suitably weakened by their fellow Afghans. Even the 19th century Prussian military strategist Carl von Clausewitz argued that one of the objectives of war was to destroy the effective strength of the enemy.

But it does beg the question of the kind of Afghanistan the United States wants to leave behind. Does it want a strong central government, in which a tamed Taliban, minus al Qaeda, has a share of the power and a stake in the prosperity of a unified country? Or a decentralised Afghanistan in which tribal militias hold the power — potentially recreating the tensions that led to the outbreak of civil war after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989?

It’s a question that needs to be asked. What is the strategy for Afghanistan — not just for the United States getting out, but also for the fate of the country after western troops leave? Only when you know that, can you judge which tactics make sense. 

And there is all the more reason to ask that question given that the jury is still out on the sustainability of U.S. gains in reducing violence in Iraq, which Washington attributes partly to its policy of arming Sunni insurgents there.  According to this McClatchy story, a nearly completed National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq warns that unresolved ethnic and sectarian tensions could unleash a new wave of violence, potentially reversing security gains achieved over the last year.

Arming one group of people to fight against their countrymen may or may not be a useful tactic.  But it’s not nation-building. So how does it fit into the overall strategy for Afghanistan? Or is the main objective of this war, seven years after the U.S.-led invasion, now to find an “exit strategy”?

Following up on yesterday’s post about U.S. military action in Pakistan, I see the New York Times is reporting that President George W. Bush secretly approved orders in July allowing American Special Operations forces to carry out ground assaults inside Pakistan without the prior approval of the Pakistani government.

The new orders, it says, relax firm restrictions on conducting raids on the soil of an important ally without permission.

The paper also quotes two American officials as saying that last week’s raid by U.S. troops involved more than two dozen members of the Navy Seals who spent several hours on the ground and killed about two dozen suspected al Qaeda fighters. ”Supported by an AC-130 gunship, the Special Operations forces were whisked away by helicopters after completing the mission.”

This is big stuff, with enormous potential for escalation, should the raids continue. What happens if a ground assault goes wrong and some U.S. troops are kidnapped and handed over to al Qaeda? An enormous publicity coup for al Qaeda, which would no doubt provoke more raids, in turn requiring air support to cover the U.S. troops on the ground.

According to a comment posted earlier on this blog by Pakistan military expert Brian Cloughley: “If they (U.S. troops) tried to walk in from Afghanistan it would be the duty of the Frontier Corps or the Pakistan Army to repel them. And U.S. ground forces, these days, are incapable of fighting without massive air support. So if they called in airstrikes within Pakistan the PAF would have no alternative but to support their own kin, and use their American-supplied F-16s to counter violations of Pakistan’s airspace by US aircraft.”

So is the United States walking into a quagmire in Pakistan’s border areas? Or will a series of “surgical” raids be enough to destroy the leadership of al Qaeda and the Taliban and turn the war in Afghanistan back in Washington’s favour?

Much will depend on how Pakistan itself — both the new civilian government and the Pakistan Army –  respond to the American actions. The Pakistan Army is already carrying out its own military offensive in the border areas. But Pakistan Army chief General Ashfaq Kayani has warned the United States to keep out, promising that “the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the country will be defended at all cost.”

And here’s a scary thought. Will the consequences of the U.S. operations in Pakistan depend on one of the more common variables in war, especially in rough hostile terrain: luck?

Last week, after U.S. forces were reported to have launched their first ground assault in Pakistan, the website Registan.net asked the obvious question: “Did We Just Invade Pakistan?”  Nearly a week and several missile attacks by U.S. drones later, I am still pondering the same question.

We have just witnessed what may have been the most sustained U.S. military action against targets inside Pakistan, not just since 2001, but since 1947 when the country was founded.  Yet it is not any clearer what is going on.  The Council on Foreign Relations has produced an excellent round-up of media reports on Pakistan, published by the Washington Post. But I’d defy anyone to read through them and come up with a coherent hypothesis that does not immediately run into a contradiction.  Here are some of the ideas being discussed:

1) Washington has lost patience with Pakistan because it is not doing enough to root out al Qaeda and the Taliban on its border with Afghanistan, and has decided to go it alone (all the more so because the Bush administration would like a foreign policy success before the presidential election). This argument does not quite make sense, since as I noted in my last post, the stepped-up U.S. military operations happened after the Pakistan Army had launched its own offensives in Pakistan’s border areas. Plus, if we were to accept that the United States attacked because the Pakistan Army had failed, why are U.S. forces and drones targeting North and South Waziristan, while the Pakistan military launched its offensives elsewhere, in Bajaur and Swat?

2)  The United States is now working, if not in concert, at least not against, the civilian administration in Pakistan, whose new President, Asif Ali Zardari, has called the fight against terrorism a battle for Pakistan’s soul. According to this argument, the Pakistanis were very rattled earlier this year by fears that Peshawar, the capital of North West Frontier Province, might fall into Taliban hands. This could have led to the Balkanisation of Pakistan, encouraging other provinces to peel away from Punjab, the country’s traditional heartland. Therefore Pakistan and the United States share a common interest in driving out al Qaeda and the Taliban. According to this argument, there is some method in the madness – although critics mutter about echoes of Vietnam.

3) It is all chaos on the western front. This view holds that nobody has a master plan, there is no coordination and sometimes Pakistan and the United States are working against each other. In this context, the New York Times has a story about how soldiers in Pakistan’s Frontier Corps and U.S. troops ended up, it says, fighting against each other in June.   The argument here is that many in the Pakistan Army, or perhaps more precisely in the Frontier Corps, sympathise with the Taliban and will defend them against a U.S. attack.  The argument against would be, as I noted in an earlier post, that the leaders of the Pakistan Army were aware of this problem and had begun to take action to deal with it so that by now it is less of an issue.

That’s three possible theories, and there are more, in many different permutations.  As I have seen from the comments on previous posts, there are strong views out there on the answers. But maybe it would be a good idea to start with the questions?

Senator Barack Obama has accused Pakistan of misusing U.S. military aid meant to help it fight al Qaeda and the Taliban to prepare for war against India. In an interview with Fox News he also says the United States must put more pressure on Pakistan to crack down on Islamist militants, hold it accountable for increased military support, and be prepared to act aggressively against al Qaeda; “if we have bin Laden in our sights, we target him and we knock him out,” he says. However he adds that “nobody talked about some full-blown invasion of Pakistan.”

The latter part of his comments is not that new, nor indeed that different from the policies of the current U.S. administration. But it is his comment about India that has been seized upon by the media in South Asia. ”We are providing them military aid without having enough strings attached. So they’re using the military aid that we use, to Pakistan, they’re preparing for war against India,” he says.

You can see the stories in The Times of India and Dawn here and here. 

It will be interesting to see if Obama expands on those comments next week, either in the Fox News interview (so far only the early part has been released) or elsewhere. The main question is how the United States would try to convince the Pakistan Army to turn its full force against al Qaeda and the Taliban on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, while easing up on its traditional preoccupation of defending its border with India. Holding Pakistan accountable for U.S. military aid is one thing; changing the psychology of the Pakistan Army is quite another.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, Obama has said the U.S. war in Afghanistan would be made easier if the United States worked to improve trust between India and Pakistan. “A lot of what drives, it appears, motivations on the Pakistan side of the border, still has to do with their concerns and suspicions about India,” he told a news conference in Amman back in July.

So pressure on Pakistan to crack down harder on al Qaeda and the Taliban is likely to be accompanied by U.S. pressure on India to make peace with its much smaller neighbour. But India deeply resents any outside interference in its dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir, which it sees as a bilateral issue.

The United States desperately needs Pakistan’s help to avoid a humiliating failure in Afghanistan.  But it is also anxiously courting India (as highlighted by the U.S.-India nuclear deal) as it realigns its alliances in Asia to deal with an increasingly powerful China. 

So what gives?

Are the Taliban and al Qaeda finally under serious pressure in their hideouts along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border?

Pakistani officials say U.S.-led helicopter-borne troops launched a ground assault on a Pakistani village near the Afghan border on Wednesday, killing 20 people.  The raid, in the South Waziristan tribal area, was the first known incursion into Pakistan by U.S.-led troops since the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.

The raid has been condemned by Pakistan as a violation of its sovereignty. But the timing is puzzling.

Under intense U.S. pressure, the Pakistani army had launched major offensives against Taliban and al Qaeda strongholds in Bajaur,  another border area, and in Swat in the North-West Frontier Province, although Pakistan has since called a ceasefire for Ramadan.  Details of the offensives were sketchy, but their scale was implied by the tens of thousands of refugees fleeing the fighting.  It began to look as though Pakistan was finally taking determined action to drive out the Taliban and al Qaeda.

According to French journalist Marie-France Calle,  writing of a week spent travelling between Karachi, Peshawar and Islamabad, “everyone I have spoken to have told me that … the new people in charge have decided to go all the way in the tribal areas. They all said the only solution was to continue military operations until the Taliban and other militants were wiped out”.

So if Pakistan had begun its own campaign — as Washington has long asked it to do — why did the United States take the risk of enraging Islamabad by sending in ground troops? Did the U.S. troops believe they had a major target in their sights, a high-profile al Qaeda leader, and decide it was worth the risk? Or was the attack evidence of mounting pressure from both the United States and Pakistan on the Islamist militants  hiding out on the Pakistani-Afghan border? (The reported ground assault was followed up on Thursday by what Pakistan security officials said was a missile attack by a suspected U.S. drone in North Waziristan.)

It is too early to draw any real conclusions. However, let us just suppose the tide is turning against the Taliban and al Qaeda in Pakistan’s border areas and they are being forced out. Where will they go?

Less than a month ago, Senator Barack Obama was saying  that the U.S. war in Afghanistan would be made easier if the United States worked to improve trust between India and Pakistan. “A lot of what drives, it appears, motivations on the Pakistan side of the border, still has to do with their concerns and suspicions about India,” he told a news conference in Amman.

The logic was in line with thinking expounded by U.S. analysts at the time who argued that elements within Pakistan will never completely relinquish support for Islamist militants in both Pakistan and Afghanistan as long as they believe they can be used to counter Indian influence in the region. Therefore end Pakistan’s insecurity about India, and support for militants will melt away, making the U.S. campaign against al Qaeda and the Taliban much easier — or so the argument goes.  At least that was the thinking barely a few weeks ago, as I wrote in an earlier blog on this subject. 

The latest crisis in Kashmir has turned that logic on its head.  After a dispute over land snowballed into some of the biggest protests since a separatist revolt erupted in 1989, India and Pakistan are back at each other’s throats, hurling allegations at each other.  Rather than asking whether the two countries can be persuaded to make a durable peace, the question now is how bad the relationship can get. “India-Pakistan relations are getting perilously close to ground zero,” writes former Indian diplomat M.K. Bhadrakumar in an Asia Times article.

Add in the domestic political instability in Pakistan, and relations between India and Pakistan have probably not been so combustible since they declared a ceasefire on the Line of Control dividing Kashmir in November 2003.

So where does that leave Obama’s plans for Afghanistan? How much does it assume U.S. efforts to “manage” Pakistan more effectively — including encouraging peace with India — will combine with his pledge to send more troops to Afghanistan to succeed in a campaign he has declared more important that Iraq? The blog New America Media went as far as to say that “Kashmir may be the key to Obama’s Counterterrorism Policy” – perhaps overstating the case but well worth reading to see how it all fits together.

And if India and Pakistan descend into the dark days before the 2003 ceasefire, and play out their rivalry across the region from Kashmir to Kabul, what is the fall-back plan? Sending even more U.S. troops to Afghanistan?

As far as a strategy for Afghanistan is concerned, it’s a long shot. Bring peace to India and Pakistan and not only will that stabilise Pakistan but it will also ease tensions in Afghanistan. Indeed it’s such a long shot that it has not been considered as a serious policy option. That was until last month’s bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul. 

A spate of allegations that Pakistan’s powerful spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI),  was involved in the bombing has forced India-Pakistan rivalry back onto centre-stage. This is not just about India and Pakistan, or so the argument goes. Their rivalry is undermining U.S. efforts to defeat al Qaeda and the Taliban since the ISI is maintaining links with Islamist militants to counter Indian influence in the region. And Pakistan’s denial of involvement in the embassy attack has done little to quell the speculation.

In The Atlantic.com, Robert Kaplan argues that the war in Afghanistan is part of Pakistan’s larger struggle with India. “Afghanistan has been a prize that Pakistan and India have fought over directly and indirectly for decades,” he writes. ”To Pakistan, Afghanistan represents a strategic rear base that would (along with the Islamic nations of ex-Soviet Central Asia) offer a united front against Hindu-dominated India and block its rival’s access to energy-rich regions. Conversely, for India, a friendly Afghanistan would pressure Pakistan on its western border-just as India itself pressures Pakistan on its eastern border-thus dealing Pakistan a strategic defeat.”

His argument is that the ISI will never rest easy as long as it fears that Pakistan is threatened by a hostile Afghanistan on one side and a hostile India on the other.  “Unless we address what’s angering the ISI, we won’t be able to stabilize Afghanistan or capture al-Qaeda leaders inside its borders,” he says.

In the Globe and Mail Saeed Shah writes that the ISI was supposed to have severed ties with Islamist militants and the Taliban after 9/11. ”Only it didn’t. The links were loosened, but they remain, for the simple reason these militants are viewed as vital pawns in a bigger game: Keeping Afghanistan unsettled to limit the United States’s - and by extension arch-rival India’s -influence in the region,” he writes. “This is a military doctrine about national survival, not an ideology of religious fanaticism. Civilians are not welcome to meddle with it,” he says.

To understand where these writers are coming from, it’s important to remember that the Pakistan Army — and by extension the ISI — sees itself as the ultimate guarantor of Pakistani survival. And although it has stepped into the background from time to time to allow civilian governments into power, it will never allow Pakistan to become as vulnerable again as it was in 1971 when what were then West and East Pakistan were torn apart with the creation of Bangladesh.

“ISI’s primary duty is defending Pakistan,” writes Eric Margolis in another article which tries to explain the behaviour of the ISI.

The arguments are contentious, not least because Pakistan has repeatedly denied using militant groups as pawns against its much bigger neighbour.  India too is extremely touchy about the subject of Afghanistan, arguing that as a regional power it has a legitimate role there that does not deserve to be dragged down to the level of India-Pakistan rivalry. It has also spent years accusing the ISI of fomenting violence, from the Punjab insurgency in the 1980s to the Kashmir revolt in the 1990s, to Afghanistan in the 21st century — charges rebuffed by Pakistan — until the issue has become both impossibly murky and highly emotive.

But just suppose for a moment the arguments were correct.  Then would renewed efforts towards peace between India and Pakistan help stabilise Afghanistan? And conversely, what would be the price of their fragile peace process disintegrating?

It would be hard to think of a more complex web of problems.  Pakistan and Afghanistan face, in very different ways, severe domestic political crises which are being exacerbated by soaring prices and food shortages. Both blame each other for failing to crack down on the Taliban and al Qaeda. And now tensions are rising over attempts by Pakistan, the traditional supplier of food to Afghanistan, to curb its wheat exports to make sure it can feed its own hungry population.

For an idea of how significant this is in Afghanistan, it’s worth reading this piece in the Chicago Tribune. “Western officials - including officers with the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force - say the food crisis is potentially more destabilizing to the U.S.-backed government of President Hamid Karzai than the insurgency itself,” it says.

The website Registan.net followed this up by saying that the food crisis will drive more people into the arms of the Taliban. “Hungry, disenfranchised people are angry people,” it says. ”… every time someone can’t afford to buy bread for his family, he’ll have one more reason to … blow up some Humvees.

The World Food Programme says that emergency food aid meant to help 2.55 million Afghans affected by soaring food prices has reached only about 38 percent of the targeted population, according to IRIN, largely due to curbs on Pakistani food exports.

“One of the main reasons why food aid has not yet reached even half the targeted communities is procurement and logistical hurdles,” IRIN reports. “Initially it was decided that wheat and other food items would be procured from markets in neighbouring countries, especially Pakistan, which traditionally supplies Afghan food markets. However, rising prices have prompted Pakistani authorities to impose a strict ban on food exports, hitting WFP’s operation in Afghanistan.” 

Yet look at it from Pakistan’s point of view. It has a shaky coalition government which will become all the more vulnerable if it doesn’t make sure its people have enough food to eat. For all its interference in Afghanistan, it has also felt the burden of supporting three million Afghan refugees. 

“The priority must be on feeding the people of Pakistan, not excluding the three million Afghan refugees who still enjoy our hospitality, Hamid Karzai and company’s ingratitude notwithstanding,” wrote Ikram Seghal in The News last month. “Find me another nation in the world having so many refugees.”

Can someone see a way out of this morass? Or are Pakistan and Afghanistan condemned to stumble from crisis to crisis until historians write, with 20/20 hindsight, that whatever happens next was inevitable?  

With Senator Barack Obama looking increasingly confident about winning the Democratic nomination, there have been a new spate of articles on what it would mean for Pakistan if he becomes president.

The most eye-catching, perhaps, was a story in The News  about how President Pervez Musharraf’s family in the United States have been giving donations to Obama’s campaign.  ”President Pervez Musharraf’s family members here are supporting and giving donations to a US presidential candidate who strongly opposes the Bush administration policy of supporting and keeping the retired general in the presidency,” it says.

The Daily Times, in an analysis by former Pakistani foreign secretary Najmuddin A Shaikh, says there would be little difference between Obama and the Bush administration on the need to hunt out al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan — if needs be through unilateral U.S. action – and on keeping its nuclear weapons safe. What the writer sees is a difference in tone,  which would be welcomed in Pakistan:

“What one can expect, however, is that Obama will be less averse - as the candidate for change - to recognising that extremism in the Muslim world flows from causes other than religious injunctions, no matter how this may be portrayed by so-called spokesmen for Islam or misguided scholars in the West,” he says. “He certainly will not be talking about crusades nor will he oppose direct talks with adversaries.”

But what strikes me is how this optimism about Obama may be offset by the United States in general taking a harder line against Pakistan, regardless of who wins the presidential elections.  A couple of months ago,  in a blog on Obama’s policies on Pakistan, I wrote about how he supports unilateral strikes on al Qaeda targets in the country.

Since then, the background noise in the United States about the need to attack al Qaeda and the Taliban inside Pakistan has increased —  to the point where you wonder whether any difference in style and substance Obama might bring would be drowned out by a hardening shift in public opinion towards taking a more aggressive stance.

One blog I came across, calling itself the Danger Room on Wired.com, argues that Pakistan is in fact al Qaeda’s best base for planning attacks on the United States and Europe, since unlike more unstable places like Iraq where the United States is free to use force, the group flourishes in countries where there is a reasonable amount of state control.

“Pakistan’s better infrastructure, weak counterterrorism capacity, ambivalent counterterrorism policy, and increasingly prickly sovereignty issues gives al Qaeda a more stable platform to train, shield and export personnel-everything a terrorist group needs to organize an attack against targets in the West, as a string of plots now seem to show,” it says.

There are arguments against this — the most obvious being that al Qaeda developed first of all in the chaos of Afghanistan — but it’s worth reading to see where the tide of public opinion might be headed.