Pakistan: Now or Never?

The “sound and fury” of U.S.-Pakistan ties (Part II)

I have (somewhat belatedly) got around to reading the full text of the statement made by Pakistan Army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani condemning last week’s drone strike in North Waziristan which killed more than 40 people. The strike has reignited tensions with Washington, and came only a day after Pakistan released Raymond Davis, the CIA contractor who shot dead two Pakistanis, after a bruising row with the United States. 

The Pakistani media has put forward many reasons as to why Kayani issued such a public condemnation, and indeed on why the United States chose to  launch such a lethal drone attack just as tempers were beginning to cool over the Davis row (for a must-read round up of the different views of officials and analysts in Peshawar, see Cyril Almeida at Dawn.)

One of the more interesting explanations lies in the statement itself (my italics):

“Chief of Army Staff, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, strongly condemns the Predator Strike carried out today in North Waziristan Agency resulting into loss of innocent lives. It is highly regrettable that a jirga of peaceful citizens including elders of the area was carelessly and callously targeted with complete disregard to human life. In complete violation of human rights, such acts of violence take us away from our objective of elimination of terrorism. It is imperative to understand that this critical objective can not be sacrificed for temporary tactical gains. Security of people of Pakistan, in any case, stands above all.”

His criticism of the United States putting tactical gains ahead of the longer-term needs of battling terrorism goes to the heart of the mismatch between U.S. and Pakistani priorities. The United States, keen to end the war in Afghanistan, needs Pakistan’s help quickly in fighting militants on its side of the border. Pakistan says it can’t fight all militant groups at once and that moving too fast would unleash fresh instability in Pakistan itself.

This ambivalence by Pakistan is often presented as evidence of duplicity, with the many critics of the country’s approach to militancy arguing that while it is allied to the United States, it continues to support militant groups that can be used against India. But then, read Kayani’s statement in conjunction with this WikiLeaks cable published by The Hindu to understand why none of this is as black-and-white as some would have you believe.

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.”

On U.S., India and Pakistan: maybe some transparency would help

According to the Wall Street Journal, ”President Barack Obama issued a secret directive in December to intensify American diplomacy aimed at easing tensions between India and Pakistan, asserting that without détente between the two rivals, the administration’s efforts to win Pakistani cooperation in Afghanistan would suffer. ”

“The directive concluded that India must make resolving its tensions with Pakistan a priority for progress to be made on U.S. goals in the region, according to people familiar with its contents,” it says.

It also says there is a debate within the U.S. administration over how far to push India to improve relations with Pakistan, with the Pentagon lobbying for more pressure on New Delhi and the State Department resisting, arguing this could backfire.

The idea that resolving tensions between India and Pakistan is central to stabilising Afghanistan is not new. Its importance rose up the agenda during Obama’s election campaign in 2008. And it never really went away despite successful Indian lobbying to keep any reference to India or Kashmir out of the title given to U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke in January 2009.  At the time, the truncated title was seen as not so much as a reflection of ground realities (Pakistan has always fixed its foreign and security policies in relation to India), but as a way of providing the space for discreet diplomacy to succeed where public pressure might fail.

What is new is the context.   India is deeply sensitive to what it sees as Washington’s favouritism towards Pakistan as it tries to find a way out of the stalemate in Afghanistan.  As a result it has become “America’s Wounded Ally” in the expression used by Indian analyst Sumit Ganguly in Newsweek, angry with Obama for turning his back on a blossoming relationship forged by his predecessors.

As a brief aside, this has happened before. Immediately after 9/11 India sought to capitalise on its then growing ties with the United States by offering the use of Indian bases for its campaign in Afghanistan only to see Washington turn instead to its old Cold War favourite Pakistan. At the time, an Indian analyst I knew rather graphically compared the sense of betrayal in New Delhi to that of a mistress whose lover goes back to his wife.  His analogy may have accurately captured the emotional response at the time, but it was wrong in substance, since India and the United States went on to build an even stronger relationship, including signing a deal effectively recognising India as a nuclear power.  The same may yet happen again despite all the current hand-wringing.

However, to return to the subject of the WSJ report, and the debate over how far Washington should go to push India and Pakistan into improving relations:

India and Pakistan on the U.S. see-saw

Few who follow South Asia could miss the symbolism of two separate developments in the past week –  in one Pakistan was cosying up to the United States in a new “strategic dialogue”; in the other India was complaining to Washington about its failure to provide access to David Headley, the Chicago man accused of helping to plan the 2008 attack on Mumbai.

Ever since the London conference on Afghanistan in January signalled an exit strategy which could include reconciliation with the Taliban, it has been clear that Pakistan’s star has been rising in Washington while India’s has been falling. 

If the United States wants to force the Taliban to the negotiating table, it needs Pakistan’s help. And Pakistan has shown by arresting Taliban commander Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar amongst others that it intends to keep control of any negotiations. In return for its cooperation, it expects Washington’s help in securing Pakistan’s own interests, including through a scaling back of India’s involvement in Afghanistan.

By contrast, the relationship between India and the United States which blossomed under the Bush administration has been fading as Washington looks to China and Pakistan to help meet respectively its economic and security needs. An initial outpouring of sympathy and international support for India following the Mumbai attack  - which led to intense pressure on Pakistan to crack down on the Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group blamed for the assault – has dissipated over time.

Nowadays the mantra in Washington is that India and Pakistan must talk to each other to resolve their differences. Pakistan, after initially cracking down on the Lashkar-e-Taiba, eased the pressure on the group in the second part of 2009. India suspects the Lashkar-e-Taiba is not only active again but may have been involved in last month’s attack in Kabul which targeted Indian interests. If true, this would suggest that Lashkar-e-Taiba is acting in conformity with the interests of the Pakistan Army, which is deeply sensitive about India’s growing presence in Afghanistan following the fall of the Pakistan-backed Taliban in 2001.

To rewind briefly, it has always been unclear how far the Pakistan Army and its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency could go in dismantling the Punjab-based militant group it once nurtured to fight India in Kashmir. While few doubt it could shut down the Lashkar-e-Taiba if it chose to do so, the risk has been that action against an organisation which has been scrupulous in avoiding attacks within Pakistan itself would shatter it into splinter groups which would make common cause with al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban. A raid on the Pakistan Army’s own headquarters last October highlighted just how vulnerable the country could be to an alliance between militants in its tribal areas bordering Afghanistan and those based in its heartland Punjab province.

So the debate amongst analysts has been whether relative inaction against the Lashkar-e-Taiba has been driven by self-preservation or a desire on the part of the ISI to retain the group’s operational capacity to use it against India. Islamabad is convinced India’s own intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), is using Afghanistan as a base to destabilise Pakistan, particularly by funding separatists in its Baluchistan province.  Any evidence of Lashkar-e-Taiba’s involvement in the Kabul attack would therefore reinforce suspicions that the Pakistan Army is still using it as part of a proxy war between the two countries’ intelligence agencies. (Both countries deny the accusations levelled at each other’s intelligence agencies.)

Seeking Saudi cooperation on Afghanistan and Pakistan

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is making the first visit to Saudi Arabia by an Indian leader since 1982, seeking to build economic ties and to enlist the kingdom’s help in improving regional security. While much of the focus is likely to be on securing oil supplies for India’s growing economy, the visit is also part of the complex manoeuvres by regional players jostling for position on Afghanistan and beyond.

Singh told Saudi journalists ahead of the visit that he would discuss with Saudi King Abdullah how to promote greater stability and security in the region.  “Both King Abdullah and I reject the notion that any cause justifies wanton violence against innocent people. We are strong allies against the scourge of extremism and terrorism that affects global peace and security,” he said.

Junior Foreign Minister Shashi Tharoor also said India could seek Saudi support in persuading Pakistan to act against Pakistan-based Islamist militant groups — later adding however this did not mean looking for Saudi mediation (anathema to India which sees no room for third party involvement in its relationship with Pakistan).

“Saudi Arabia of course has a long and close relationship with Pakistan but that makes Saudi Arabia all the more a valuable interlocutor for us,” he said. ”When we tell them about our experience, Saudi Arabia listens as somebody who is not anyway an enemy of Pakistan but rather as a friend of Pakistan, and therefore I am sure listens with sympathy and concern to a matter of this nature.”

Sunni Saudi Arabia has close ties with Pakistan, seeing it in part as a bulwark against Shiite Iran, its main rival. Analysts say it shares Pakistan’s concerns about Indian and Iranian influence in Afghanistan. It has also been cited as potential mediator with the Taliban. While it has shown little enthusiasm right now to act as a mediator, it is expected to play a powerful role in negotiating any eventual political settlement in Afghanistan.

India, meanwhile, invested heavily in Afghanistan after the fall of the Pakistan-backed Taliban in 2001, and built close ties with the government of President Hamid Karzai. It has been caught on the back foot by talk of reconciliation with the Taliban, which it fears could give Pakistan an opportunity to reassert its old influence over Afghanistan as well as bolstering its position as Washington’s indispensable ally in the region.

Some analysts have argued that India should counter this by building its own relationships with both Saudi Arabia and Iran — C. Raja Mohan made this point as early as May last year. Any improvement in the relationship between India and Saudi Arabia, including a deepening economic inter-dependency, could therefore be significant.

On India-Pakistan thaw and the changing Afghan dynamics

There is a time and a place for everything and back in the days of the Obama election campaign the idea that progress on the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan could help turn around the flagging military campaign in Afghanistan looked plausible. The argument, much touted by Washington think-tankers, was that Pakistan would not turn against Afghan Taliban militants on its western border as long as it believed it might need to use them to counter India’s growing influence in Afghanistan, and as long as it felt the need to keep the bulk of its army on its eastern border with India.

Even in the middle of last year, when Pakistan and India made an ultimately unsuccessful attempt to revive peace talks which had been frozen since the attack on Mumbai at the end of 2008, the possibility of a “grand bargain” from Kashmir to Kabul still carried some resonance.

But time has moved on, so it is a little bit strange to see these arguments resurfacing now after India proposed to resume talks with Pakistan.  (See Newsweek’s “Kashmir is the key to peace in Afghanistan” or the op-ed by David Ignatius in the Washington Post)

As I wrote in this analysis, a thaw in relations between India and Pakistan would be too little, too late to achieve results in time for Washington’s 2011 deadline for drawing down troops in Afghanistan. Real progress on Kashmir would require them to get back to a roadmap for peace sketched out between India and Pakistan in 2007 under former president Pervez Musharraf. But Pakistan, whose vulnerability to attacks by Islamist militants has been demonstrated in a spate of gun and bomb attacks over the past year, probably no longer has the political space to offer the kind of concessions Musharraf made to get there without risking a backlash at home. And while the roadmap provided a framework for further negotiations on Kashmir, a lot of ground had yet to be covered to translate that into a real agreement; even if indeed it would ever have worked.

So public opinion in the West, already weary of the long Afghan war, is unlikely to have the patience to support ongoing military operations in Afghanistan for the kind of time it would take to achieve a breakthrough on Kashmir.  That is not to suggest the India-Pakistan thaw is not important for Afghanistan – by talking both countries may be able to reduce their suspicions about each other’s involvement there so that they don’t end up backing opposite sides in any renewed civil war which might erupt as U.S.-led forces begin to leave.  But the road to Kabul no longer runs through Kashmir, if indeed it ever did (as regular readers of this blog know, it is a hotly contested subject.)

Perhaps of more significance even than the long timeline for progress in relations between India and Pakistan  is the way in which Western governments are looking at the war in Afghanistan.  In a sea-change to their approach to Afghanistan which surfaced in the days before last month’s London conference, the United States and its allies acknowledged that lasting peace there would need to involve the Taliban. As a result, the talk in the corridors at the London conference was about the possibility of an eventual political settlement with Taliban leaders – right up to and including Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar, condemned in the West for his refusal to hand over al Qaeda leaders after the Sept. 11 attacks.

From what I am being told,  Taliban leaders would be willing to negotiate if they believed that they could secure a better settlement through talks than by waiting it out for U.S.-led troops to start to leave and then trying to fight their way to power in a renewed civil war.  Talks would also get them the international recognition denied them when they were in power from 1996 to 2001. To get one perspective on this, do read the statement posted on the Taliban website in which they say they ”want to have good and positive relations with the neighbouring countries in an atmosphere of mutual respect and take far-reaching steps for bilateral cooperation, economic development and prosperous future”.  On the other side, Washington and its allies are insisting that the Taliban sever ties with al Qaeda and renounce violence.

Pakistan and Afghanistan: “the bad guys don’t stay in their lanes”

This new style of international terrorism was quite unlike militant groups he had investigated in the past, with their pyramidal structures. ”After 1994/1995, like viruses, all the groups have been spreading on a very large scale all over the world, in a horizontal way and even a random way,” he said. “All the groups are scattered, very polymorphous and even mutant.”

Gone were the political objectives which drove terrorism before, he writes, to be replaced with a nihilistic aim of spreading chaos in order to create the conditions for an Islamic caliphate. For the hijackers on the Algiers-Paris flight, their demands seemed almost incidental. “We realised we faced the language of hatred and a total determination to see it through.”

Many have argued against this view of international terrorism as a new and nebulous Islamist network without obvious political objectives, which found its most powerful expression in al Qaeda. Just as Lashkar-e-Taiba grew out of rivalry between India and Pakistan over Kashmir, the GIA sprang from anger about the annulment of elections in Algeria that an Islamist group was poised to win. Its attacks on Paris in the mid 1990s were seen as a reprisal for France’s role in supporting the government in its former colony. Many of those who support al Qaeda and other Islamist groups are driven by anger over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and other perceived injustices across the Middle East. 

Yet if he is right that the United States and its allies are facing a loose international network of Islamists with no clear pyramid structure, then it would suggest that no amount of drone bombing of al Qaeda and the Taliban leadership of the kind promoted by counter-terrorism supporters would work. Nor would it be enough, alone, to address political grievances at a national level without taking account of a network which operates globally and does not recognise the validity of the nation state. Rather, you would need a sophisticated and comprehensive strategy which went far beyond the kind of focused counter-terrorism first used by the Bush administration.

Browsing through the New Yorker profile on U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke, I noticed the same argument was raised there:

“A pure counter-terror approach had, in fact, been the Bush Administration’s policy for years: kill or capture terrorist leaders, with minimal support for political institutions in Kabul and Islamabad,” it said. “It had created the mess that (President Barack) Obama inherited, with two countries under threat from insurgents and Al Qaeda’s strength increasing.

“‘Al Qaeda doesn’t exist in a vacuum,” it quoted former CIA officer Bruce Riedel, who led Obama’s first review of strategy, as saying.  “They’re part of a syndicate of terrorist groups. Selective counterterrorism won’t get you anywhere, because the bad guys don’t stay in their lanes.”

U.S. aid to Pakistan: the law of unintended consequences

U.S. plans to triple aid to Pakistan to $1.5 billion a year appear to have run rather quickly afoul of the law of unintended consequences – by threatening to create tensions between the government and the army.

The Kerry-Lugar aid bill is meant to bolster Pakistan’s civilian democracy and help the country fight Islamist militants.  But it also stipulates that U.S. military aid will cease if Pakistan does not help fight the militants; seeks Pakistani cooperation on nuclear non-proliferation and provides for an assessment of how effective the civilian government’s control is over the military.

The aid conditions have already been criticised by Pakistan’s opposition parties, and in an unusually public statement, the Pakistan Army added its note of disapproval about what is being seen as unwarranted interference in Pakistan’s internal affairs.

During a meeting of his top commanders, Pakistan Army chief General Pervez Ashfaq Kayani noted that ”Pakistan is a sovereign state and has all the rights to analyse and respond to the threat in accordance with her own national interests”, according to the statement.

“Kerry-Lugar bill also came under discussion during the conference,” it said. “The forum expressed serious concern regarding clauses impacting on national security. A formal input is being provided to the government. However, in the considered view of the forum, it is the parliament, that represents the will of the people of Pakistan, which would deliberate on the issue, enabling the government to develop a national response.”

In an editorial, Dawn newspaper cautioned that the row over the Kerry-Lugar bill “is inching worryingly towards becoming a debate about ‘national security’ versus democracy”.

“Right or wrong, wise or unwise, the bill must not become the basis for fresh cleavages between the army and the political opposition on one side and the government on the other,” it said. “The national security–democracy debate is not an either/or issue — national security can and must be protected through the democratic process. Even by Pakistani standards, it is too soon to forget the damage caused by extra-constitutional interventions.”

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…”

from Global News Journal:

When is a coalition not a coalition?

How can you tell when U.S. forces in Afghanistan are operating alone?

When they call it "the coalition".

That’s not a joke. It's just how things work in Afghanistan, where two separate forces with two separate command structures -- one completely American, the other about half American -- operate side by side under the command of the same U.S. general.

 "When we say 'coalition', basically that means it's just us," a helpful U.S. military spokeswoman explained last month to a reporter who had just arrived in country after being away for a couple of  years. "Otherwise, it's the 'alliance'."

And it's not just words.

"The alliance" and "the coalition" maintain completely separate press offices, each of which is often allowed to give only bits and pieces of detail about the same incident. The result can be a bit confusing.

First, some history.