Given the debate about whether the United States should refocus its strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan more narrowly on hunting down al Qaeda, it’s worth looking at what happened immediately after 9/11 when it did precisely that.

Reluctant to destabilise Pakistan, then under former president Pervez Musharraf, the United States turned a blind eye to the training camps and poured money into the country. In return, Pakistan hunted down al Qaeda leaders — among them alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, captured in 2003. ”For the Bush administration, the priority was al Qaeda,” writes Bruguiere. ”The Pakistan Army and the ISI would focus on this - external - objective, which would not destabilise the fragile political balance in Pakistan.”

But for Bruguiere, one of the major lessons was that Islamist militants can’t be separated into “good guys and bad guys”, since they were all inter-linked. 

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.”

(Photos: Jean-Louis Bruguiere; Pervez Musharraf, the Taj in Mumbai, the Marriot in Islamabad)

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.”

The Pakistan Army has made it clear it has no intention of taking over the country after former general and president Pervez Musharraf was forced to stand down earlier this year.  But in a country which has spent much of its life under military rule, any hint of political interference by the army tends to be seized upon in Pakistan.

The aid bill, championed by the government of President Asif Ali Zardari, has already been slammed by the main opposition party of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif as a humiliation for Pakistan.

At a time when the United States is keen for Pakistan to unite to fight Islamist militants, the last thing it needs is for the country to be riven by arguments both between the political parties and between the government of Zardari and the army.

And the other unintended consequence has been to increase resentment against America for what is seen as unwarranted interference.

(Photos: burning the U.S. flag in Peshawar in a protest over the Kerry-Lugar bill; file photo of army chief General Ashfaq Kayani)

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…”

“One of the methods of doctrinal counterinsurgency is to start in the easy areas, make them models, and move into increasingly more difficult ones.” So why, he asks, did the U.S. army choose ”to jump right into the hardest province in the country to manage….”

Presumably there is an overall gameplan to destroy the effective strength of the Taliban, by winning over the hearts and minds of the local population in both countries by providing security and development; by cutting off the militants’ source of funding by targeting opium-growing areas in Helmand; and by co-ordinating operations between Afghanistan and Pakistan so they can no longer hide by going back and forth across the border.

What is worrying though, is that it does not yet seem clear how that gameplan is meant to fit together.

And in the meantime, the Taliban has had plenty of time to come up with a rival plan of its own. Perhaps it’s worth considering what the Taliban might do if its aim were to destroy the effective strength of the enemy.

(Photos: U.S. Marines in Helmand/Ahmad Masood)

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.

The "coalition" refers to Operation Enduring Freedom, the U.S. (or, as they like to say, "U.S.-led") mission ordered by President George W. Bush back in 2001 to catch Osama bin Laden and overthrow the Taliban.

Occasionally over the past eight years it has actually operated as a coalition, with contributions from Britain and other countries.

But these days, it's strictly an American mission, with thousands of U.S. troops engaged in hunting insurgents, training Afghans and providing air support. (Well, maybe not quite strictly American: there could be a handful of British or Australian special forces in there too. But that's a secret.)

"The alliance", meanwhile, refers to NATO, which now leads the International Security Assistance Force, set up by the United Nations to provide a small number of mostly European peacekeepers for the capital after the fall of the Taliban, also back in 2001.

ISAF's role gradually expanded until 2006, when it spread throughout the country, got a lot bigger and began fighting the Taliban, especially in the south and east. ISAF now includes contributions from around 40 nations, but these days the force is about half American and getting more so by the week as thousands of U.S. reinforcements arrive.

Since last year, ISAF and "the coalition" have both been commanded by the same U.S. General, David McKiernan, who is about to be replaced by another, Stanley McChrystal.

Because ISAF -- unlike "the coalition" -- actually IS a coalition, it has stringent rules on what its members let it say. When its troops are involved in an incident, ISAF won’t say what country they come from, or precisely where in Afghanistan the incident took place.

The defence ministry of each country is supposed to reveal that information back home, but that can take hours or even days. And if troops from more than one Western country are involved -- not to mention Afghan soldiers and police -- piecing details together can require the skills of Sherlock Holmes.

Here's an example: a few weeks ago, "the coalition" said one of its soldiers was killed in an incident. NATO said four of its soldiers had died. Neither said where: somewhere in eastern Afghanistan. It took several hours and phone calls throughout Afghanistan and Riga to determine that three of the soldiers were Americans, two were Latvians, and that the incident was the same as one Afghan troops had already reported in Kunar province.

The investigation ended with a conversation that went like something like this:

    Reuters: You've said one American was killed, right?
    U.S. military spokeswoman: That's what we've said, yes.
    Reuters: And four NATO soldiers were also killed, right?
    U.S. military spokeswoman: Yes, that's what ISAF has said.
    Reuters: And two of those NATO soldiers were also American?
    U.S. military spokeswoman: Yes, I can confirm that.
    Reuters: So actually three Americans were killed, yes?
    U.S. military spokeswoman: Yes, that's correct.

 Confused? Join the coalition...

An overwhelming majority of Americans support President Barack Obama’s decision to deploy an additional 17,000 troops to Afghanistan, according to a Gallup poll this week. It said 65 percent approved the measure, with support among Republicans hitting 75 percent, making it one of the rare policy decisions where a president gets greater backing from those who identify with an opposing political party than his own.

And in a still greater boost for his young presidency, 77 percent of those who voted for the surge said they would also approve if  Obama decided to send another 13,000 troops to Afghanistan as many expect after a regional policy review.

What’s the reason for this support for American boots on the ground ? Is Afghanistan really the good war in a way that Iraq was not?

One clue could be found in another poll that Gallup did before the latest one. It showed that a majority of Americans believed that the war was going very or moderately badly for the United States in Afghanistan, continuing a trend that began in mid-2008. And fully 70 percent of those polled felt that the Taliban would re-take control if U.S. forces were withdrawn. So they likely view the decision to send more troops as unfortunate but necessary.

Another interesting finding that was that only 30 percent thought sending troops to Afghanistan was a mistake in contrast to the majority who consistently said from Octber 2008 that deployment in Iraq was a mistake. (more…)

America’s deadly Predator unmanned planes won’t go away from the skies above Pakistan’s troubled northwest, and the controversy over whether these aircraft operate from Pakistani soil only gets more intense.

Following a U.S. senator disclosure that the drones, which have wrecked such havoc and are the cause of much popular anger against the United States, were being flown from within the country, Pakistan’s The News conducted its own investigation.

It has found old Google earth satellite pictures from 2006 showing U.S. drones parked on a runway whose coordinates 27 degrees 51 minutes north, 65 degrees and 10 minutes east place it in Baluchistan.

While the paper identified the three robotic planes parked on the runway as the massive Global Hawks, the specialists over at Danger Room say they are more likely to be the Predators that the United States has come to rely upon heavily on the Afghan-Pakistan border.

Britain’s Times also said it had a copy of the Google image showing drones outside a hangar at the edge of a runway whose coordinates placed it in Pakistan.

(more…)

Herschel Smith at the Captain’s Journal has picked up on a presentation about the increasing sophistication of Taliban fighting, which he thinks ”should be considered the most important thing to come out of Afghanistan in the past two years.”  It’s very focused on the approach he says the U.S. military needs to adopt in response, but worth a read even by those not interested in army tactics.

The conclusion is striking:

“Iraq has allowed us to become tactically sloppy as the majority of fighters there are unorganized and poorly trained.  This is not the case in Afghanistan.  The enemy combatants here will exploit any mistake made by coalition forces with catastrophic results.  Complacency and laziness will result in mass causalities.”

Over at Registan.net, Joshua Foust continues his series of reports from Bagram Air Base with a post fretting about how U.S. reluctance to take casualties has been institutionalised to the point where failing in a mission is less important than losing a soldier.  “As of late, I’ve been fighting this nagging feeling that, from command on down, there is no concerted desire to accomplish the mission, just a desire to finish one’s tour and head home and screw whoever has to pick up the pieces later,” he writes.

As discussed before on this blog, this reluctance to take casualties undermines any counter-insurgency strategy which would require troops to try to win hearts and minds by getting out of large bases and spreading out into the villages (the argument being that the more you protect your troops, the less secure you are in the long run).

Do look at both posts if you want to understand the extent of the military challenges faced in bringing stability to Afghanistan.

(Reuters photos in Semkar village in eastern Afghanistan/Oleg Popov)

With Richard Holbrooke very much keeping his own counsel about his maiden visit to Pakistan, it’s been hard to assess quite how much change is to be expected from President Barack Obama’s new special envoy.

But a couple of early op-eds suggest that the change might be quite substantial. 

In the Indian Express, Indian analyst C. Raja Mohan writes that Islamabad’s  acknowledgement that at least part of the planning for last year’s Mumbai attacks could have taken place in Pakistan could be Holbrooke’s first success. “It will be difficult not to see the connection between Pakistan’s significant announcements on Mumbai and the U.S. Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke’s trip to the region this week and President Barack Obama’s call to (President Asif Ali) Zardari on Wednesday night,”  he says.

The crucial issue will be the extent to which Holbrooke can achieve the United States’ avowed aim of strengthening the civilian government in Pakistan, which many in India suspected of ceding much decision-making to the Pakistan Army after the Mumbai attacks. In admitting to a link to the Mumbai attacks, Raja Mohan says, Zardari appears to have taken a significant political risk.   

Picking up a similar theme, the New York Times quotes Pakistani author Ahmed Rashid as saying the high-profile visit by a civilian envoy could change the tone of the U.S. conversation with Pakistan (the traditional dominance of military-to-military contacts in the U.S. relationship with Pakistan has been criticised for enhancing the role of the Pakistan Army and undermining civilian governments.)

“This is a complete sea change in what Pakistan is used to,” the newspaper quotes him as saying. “There is a suspicion in the American establishment that the Pakistani Army has found it easier to pull the wool over the eyes of the American military. It will be harder to do that with the civilians.”

Given the multiple challenges facing Pakistan (this Indian website has a good round-up of the many cross-currents threatening to engulf the country), it’s perhaps a bit too tempting to hope for miracles from Holbrooke. But are we beginning to see signs of a real change in U.S. policy towards Pakistan? And if so, will it work, or turn out to be too little, too late?

Afghanistan is beginning to accumulate cliches. If it’s not “Obama’s Vietnam”, then it’s the “graveyard of empires”.  (The British press, never one to be bamboozled by the big picture, says it’s the end of bully beef for the troops.)

It is perhaps a measure of how little people really know about Afghanistan after more than seven years of war that such a complex conflict has to be simplified into labels.  Afghanistan’s history of defeating the British in the 19th century and the Soviet Union in the 20th century certainly lends itself to dramatic comparisons. But they are not entirely accurate. Britain’s failed Afghan campaign in 1838 was not the graveyard of the British empire — it went on to defeat the Sikhs and rule India for another 100 years.  And the Soviet Union’s disastrous occupation of Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989 may simply have accompanied rather than precipitated the collapse of an empire that had been rotting from within years before Soviet troops reached Kabul. 

What the 19th century British and the Soviets had in common was in the extent to which Afghans did not want them there. And that’s where the comparisons become not only inaccurate, but potentially misleading.

According to this BBC survey  of more than 1,500 Afghans carried out in all of the country’s 34 provinces, 63 percent support the presence of U.S. forces. That is down from 71 percent in 2007, reflecting uncertainty about where the country is headed and resentment about civilian casualties in U.S. air strikes, but still a sizeable majority.  The survey also shows that the public is still very much opposed to the Taliban, with 58 percent judging them to be the biggest threat to the country.

If the survey is accurate (a difficult challenge in a country at war), then you have to wonder where the wishes of the Afghan people fit into the new strategy for Pakistan and Afghanistan ordered up by President Barack Obama.  Much of the discussion recently has been on what the war in Afghanistan will mean for the United States. But what will U.S. success or failure mean for the Afghan people?

U.S. efforts to improve supplies for its troops in Afghanistan just had a double setback after militants in northwest Pakistan severed the main supply route for western forces and Kyrgyzstan’s president said the United States must close its military base there.

Militants blew up a bridge on the Khyber Pass, cutting the supply route to western forces in Afghanistan and underscoring the need for the United States to seek alternative supply lines. The U.S. military sends 75 percent of supplies for the Afghan war through Pakistan but has been looking at using other transit routes through Central Asia. Although Washington has been sketchy on the details of its plans, its Manas military airbase near the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek has so far provided important logistical support for its operations in Afghanistan.  During a visit to Moscow, Kyrgyz President Kurmanbek Bakiyev announced the closure of the base, opened after the 9/11 attacks.  Bakiyev made the announcement after securing a $2 billion loan and a further $150 million in aid from Russia.

So what is going on here? Is Russia taking advantage of U.S. vulnerability in Afghanistan to flex its muscles in Central Asia? Or responding to a perceived threat of U.S. expansionism in the region?

“Russia has the capability to exact a steep price for its cooperation, and it seems fairly certain that the Kremlin will strive to do just that,” he wrote. “One area in which it will likely try to exact that price is in the Caucasus and Black Sea regions, specifically in seeking NATO assurances that Georgia and Ukraine will not be offered membership in the alliance for the foreseeable future, if ever. It is a mark of the strategic malpractice of past U.S. policymakers in Central Asia and Afghanistan that Moscow now finds itself in position to potentially dictate conditions for participation in an endeavor that is clearly in Russia’s best interests.”

There are still lots of stray threads in this struggle for influence in Central Asia. Tajik President Imomali Rakhmon just reversed an earlier decision to cancel a trip to Moscow, in what was seen as an attempt to put pressure on Russia to increase financial support for Tajikistan. Meanwhile the United States is quietly rebuilding ties with Uzbekistan, despite its human rights record, according to this article in the Christian Science Monitor. Uzbekistan evicted the U.S. military in 2005 after Washington and other Western governments called for an inquiry into the reported massacre of hundreds of civilians during a protest in the city of Andizhan.

And if you don’t want to go through Central Asia, NATO says it would not oppose member nations making deals with Iran to use it as a transit route to supply their forces in Afghanistan, according to this AP story. That would probably require compromises of its own, not least over Iran’s nuclear programme. The alternative, of course, is to keep relying on Pakistan as the easiest entry point into Afghanistan – bringing us full circle back to the early days post 9/11 when the Bush administration turned to Islamabad for help in overturning the Taliban.

Can, or will, the new administration of President Barack Obama chart a different course?