Pakistan: Now or Never?

Pakistan’s debate on drones, lifting the secrecy

In a rare admission of the effectiveness of drone strikes, a senior Pakistani military officer has said most of those killed are hard-core militants, including foreigners, according to Dawn newspaper.

It quotes Major-General Ghayur Mehmood as telling reporters at a briefing in Miramshah, in North Waziristan, that, “Myths and rumours about US predator strikes and the casualty figures are many, but it’s a reality that many of those being killed in these strikes are hardcore elements, a sizeable number of them foreigners.”

“Yes there are a few civilian casualties in such precision strikes, but a majority of those eliminated are terrorists, including foreign terrorist elements,” he said.

The comments may not have been entirely authorised — the New York Times quoted Pakistan Army spokesman Major General Athar Abbas as playing down the remarks. Abbas called them a “personal assessment”. ”General Abbas emphasised that the army supported the public policy of the government that drone strikes inside Pakistani territory ‘do more harm than good’,” the newspaper said.

And nor were they an unqualified endorsement of the attacks in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.  According to Dawn, “Maj-Gen Ghayur, who is in charge of troops in North Waziristan, admitted that the drone attacks had negative fallout, scaring the local population and causing their migration to other places. Gen Ghayur said the drone attacks also had social and political repercussions and law-enforcement agencies often felt the heat.”

But it is unlikely that such a high-ranking officer would have made such comments if they did not reflect the thinking of the army leadership.  The big question now is on whether they have lifted the lid on what has become a truly poisonous debate within Pakistan on drone attacks.

It has long been an open secret that the drone attacks are carried out with the tacit endorsement of the Pakistani military, with Pakistani intelligence helping to identify targets on the ground.  Yet their covert nature, and a widespread view propagated by some sections of the media that most of those killed are civilians, has fuelled anti-Americanism and stoked conspiracy theories about U.S. intentions in Pakistan.

Bajaur bombing highlights conflicting U.S.-Pakistan interests

Last week’s suicide bombing in Pakistan’s Bajaur region, which killed at least 40 people, had a grim predictability to  it.  The Pakistan Army cleared Pakistani Taliban militants out of their main strongholds in Bajaur, which borders Afghanistan’s Kunar province, after 20 months of intense fighting which ended earlier this year.  But as discussed in this post in October the insurgents’ ability to flee to Kunar — where the U.S. military presence has been thinned out — combined with a failure to provide Bajaur with good governance, suggested the security situation in the region was likely to be deteriorating. The bombing appeared to confirm those fears.

The implications go far beyond Bajaur. The Pakistan Army has resisted U.S. pressure to launch a military offensive against militant strongholds in North Waziristan until it has secured gains made elsewhere.  Pakistani daily The Express Tribune quoted army spokesman Major General Athar Abbas as reiterating that point after the Bajaur bombing and after fighting in the neighbouring Mohmand region. Until areas “cleared” by the military were consolidated, “it is impossible to rush into another campaign,” it quoted him as saying.

The Taliban in Bajaur also had historically close ties with militants who overran the Swat valley and caused worldwide alarm by pushing further into Pakistan’s heartland before they were ousted by the Pakistan Army in 2009.  Any further evidence of the Taliban regaining ground in Bajaur would therefore be a cause for concern that military gains in Swat — itself reeling from this summer’s devastating floods — could also be reversed.

In some aspects — though not all — Pakistan’s problems in tackling militants are a mirror image of those faced by the United States on the other side of the border.  Soldiers can drive militants out of their strongholds, but they can’t stop them melting into the local population or fleeing across the border. And they can’t hold and build on those military gains without civilian back-up to provide people with governance. 

When I visited Bajaur on an army-organised trip in April, the military commander in the main town of Khar — target of last week’s suicide bombing — made two points. First he said the Americans had to “do more” on their side of the border to stop militants fleeing into Afghanistan.  Second he drew a graph showing how security gains made from military operations do not even remain static without governance, but actually dwindle over time – probably rather similar to graphs drawn by U.S. commanders on the other side of the border.

You might think the answer would be to coordinate approaches in both Pakistan and Afghanistan — a much talked about idea that somehow never quite managed to get off the drawing boards in Washington and into the field. If anything military coordination appears to be getting worse. 

The United States, keen to concentrate its forces in areas where they can make a difference, and to protect population centres, has been pulling troops back from remote outposts in Kunar and elsewhere.  Within the context of Afghanistan, that may make sense.  But from Pakistan’s point of view, it leaves its  military exposed. Meanwhile, Pakistan has resisted pressure to launch an operation in North Waziristan, both because it needs to consolidate gains elsewhere, and because it fears a backlash of suicide bombings on its towns and cities. Within the context of Pakistan that may also make sense. But from the U.S. point of view, it leaves its own military exposed. 

Pakistan – a list too long

Pakistani journalist Mosharraf Zaidi had a good post up last week attempting to frame the many different challenges Pakistan faces in trying to deal with terrorism.  Definitely worth a read as a counter-balance to the vague “do more” mantra, and as a reminder of how little serious public debate there is out there about the exact nature of the threat posed to a nuclear-armed country of some 180 million people, whose collapse would destabilise the entire region and beyond.

Zaidi has divided the challenges into counter-insurgency, counter-terrorism and counter-extremism.

Counter-insurgency is focused on targeting militants holed up in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) on the border with Afghanistan, with attention directed most recently on U.S. pressure to tackle militant hideouts in North Waziristan.  Pakistan has resisted U.S. pressure to move faster in launching military operations in North Waziristan, in part because it says it needs time to consolidate gains made elsewhere in FATA — itself possible only if adequate governance can be introduced into areas cleared by the army.

“Thus far, Pakistan has fought the insurgency in FATA and earlier, last year, in Swat, using two instruments: negotiation, and conventional military warfare, including ground troops and aerial strikes. This is not how you fight an insurgency. That is how you fight India. To use a hackneyed and tired metaphor in Islamabad, you can’t keep using a jack hammer to try and kill agile, determined and poisonous flies. The approach to the FATA insurgency is all wrong,” writes Zaidi.

Counter-terrorism covers action to prevent attacks across Pakistan including in its heartland Punjab province. ”Repeated and sustained terrorist attacks in Pakistan suggest that the terrorist enterprise in Pakistan enjoys freedom of movement, freedom of procurement, freedom of training, freedom of information and communication, and, quite disturbingly, freedom from the course of law,” he says.

“The third challenge is an obvious and unchallenged problem of religious extremism. The epicentre of religious extremism is the institution of the political articulation of faith in Pakistan. This means that physically there is no epicentre here. Religious extremism is a national problem, transcending demographics, class and ethnicity. Of the three problems, religious extremism is the one that has been around the longest, the one that has the deepest roots in Pakistani culture, the one that has enjoyed the patronage of the state, the one that has the demonstrated ability to undermine linear and rational public policy, and the one that will – because of all the aforesaid factors, take the longest to unpack and resolve.”

Zaidi’s framework is a strong one to use when trying to understand what is going on in Pakistan.

In Pakistan, making sense of the “do more” mantra

White House National Security Adviser Jim Jones and CIA director Leon Panetta are visiting Pakistan to step up pressure on militant groups following this month’s failed car-bombing in New York’s Times Square. But what specifically do they want from Pakistan in what has now become a familiar “do more” mantra from the U.S. administration?  That, as yet, is not entirely clear.

The Washington Post and the New York Times quoted unnamed administration officials as saying Jones and Panetta would press Pakistan to step up its military action against Pakistani and Afghan Taliban militants based in its tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.

“Officials say the administration has been pleased so far with Pakistani cooperation in the investigation (into the failed Times Square bombing), which has focused on any role insurgent groups there might have played in helping to train and otherwise assist bombing suspect Faisal Shahzad,” the Washington Post reported. ”But officials said that Jones and Panetta intend to reiterate to the Pakistanis the importance that the administration places on more aggressive military action against groups allied with al Qaeda in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA.”

The New York Times quoted a senior administration official as saying that General Jones would not threaten the Pakistanis, but would convey the risks to the country’s relationship with the United States if a deadly terrorist attack originated there. He planned to prod them to take tougher steps against the Taliban and other insurgent groups, the newspaper quoted the official as saying.

“While General Jones’s specific requests were not clear,” according to the newspaper, “the senior administration official said he might ask Pakistan’s military to push harder into North Waziristan, the main base for the Pakistani Taliban, al Qaeda and other militant groups.”

“There is creeping frustration,” it quoted the administration official as saying.  “Some people are asking, ‘Why are they not going into North Waziristan?’ ” Among the other possible American requests, it said, were more intense surveillance of suspected terrorists and allowing more American military advisers to operate in Pakistan. The United States is also proposing to open a new consulate in Quetta, in southwestern Pakistan, where the C.I.A. would likely have a sizable presence.

The Pakistan Army says it is already stretched fighting in other parts of the tribal areas and is reluctant to rush into a new offensive in North Waziristan until it has consolidated its gains elsewhere.  It launched a major operation in South Waziristan last year, and is now engaged in heavy fighting in Orakzai to the north after clearing out other tribal areas.  As a result it is slowly tightening a noose around North Waziristan.  (The Long War Journal has a good map showing where Orakzai is in relation to North Waziristan.)

from Afghan Journal:

Guest Column: Getting Obama’s Afghan policy back on track

(C. Uday Bhaskar is a New Delhi-based strategic analyst. The views expressed in the column are his own).

By C. Uday Bhaskar

The May 12 summit meeting in the White House between visiting Afghan President Hamid Karzai and his host, U.S. President Barack Obama comes against the backdrop of the mercifully aborted May 1 terrorist bombing incident in New York's Times Square.

From the barrage of news and commentary that floods various media outlets here in Washington DC, it is evident that the Obama Af-Pak policy unveiled with considerable fanfare last year will be in for detailed and contested policy review.

Immediate U.S. interests apart - including the Obama second term, the stakes for the long-term stability of the entire southern Asian region and the troubled Muslim populace in the scattered diaspora ranging from North America to west Europe are immense and complex.

Afghanistan came into global focus with the tragic enormity of September 11, 2001 when it was under the control of the Taliban and the obscurantist, anti-liberal ideology espoused by this group had earlier impacted India's security interests in the December 1999 aircraft hijacking episode.

Pakistan-despite failed NY attack, change will be slow in coming

After the media frenzy following last weekend’s failed car bomb attack on Times Square, you would be forgiven for thinking that something dramatic is about to change in Pakistan. The reality, however, is probably going to be much greyer.

Much attention has naturally focused on North Waziristan, a bastion for al Qaeda, the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), Afghan fighters including those in the Haqqani network, and the so-called “Punjabi Taliban” - militants from Punjab-based groups who have joined the battle either in Afghanistan or against the Pakistani state.  The Pakistan Army is expected to come under fresh pressure to launch an offensive in North Waziristan after Faisal Shahzad, who according to U.S. authorities admitted to the failed car-bombing in Times Square, said he had received training in Waziristan. Unlike other parts of the tribal areas on the Pakistan-Afghan border, North Waziristan has so far been left largely alone.

But it is by no means clear that the Pakistan Army will be rushed into launching a big offensive in North Waziristan.  It is already stretched fighting in other parts of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), including in South Waziristan, where it embarked on a major operation last year.  Before starting any new offensive, it needs to be sure it is not going to be attacked from the rear, or become so thinly stretched that it loses hard-fought gains elsewhere.  As one senior military official told me, you have to be very sure-footed, consolidate your gains, and make sure your bases are secure.

That said, even before the failed Times Square attack, the New York Times suggested Pakistan was beginning to weigh the possibility of tackling militants in North Waziristan.  But its decision on timing is unlikely to be dictated by one incident, however dramatic. The Pakistan Army has put considerable energy into improving its image after the tarnishing of the Musharraf years, and is determined to show that when it does launch military offensives, it does so to win. And if there is one thing worse than not going into North Waziristan, it is going in there and losing.

Increased drone missile attacks on targets in North Waziristan are another option. But for drone missile strikes to be successful - taking out militant targets while limiting the civilian deaths which make them so unpopular in Pakistan - you need good intelligence on the ground. The killing in North Waziristan last month of former Pakistan intelligence officer Khalid Khawaja, who reportedly had strong contacts with al Qaeda and the Taliban,  leaves a question mark over whether anyone now has really good intelligence on what is happening there.

Meanwhile, uncertainty over the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan is not helping – you can already hear Pakistan Army officers wondering aloud why Pakistan is driving militants out of its tribal areas only for them to escape across the border to live to fight another day. 

Nor are tentative peace talks with India likely to lead to a sudden change in Pakistan’s military posture, under which it keeps the bulk of its army on the Indian border.  The Pakistan Army already moved a significant number of troops from its Indian border to fight Taliban militants on its Afghan border last year and is unlikely to redeploy more despite an easing of tensions with India – its army chief is reported to say that the military deals with capabilities rather than intentions.

Defeating the Taliban in Pakistan’s Tribal Areas

Brian Clougley is a South Asia defence analyst.  Reuters is not responsible for the content – the views are the author’s alone.

When the Taliban insurrection in Pakistan began in earnest, in 2004, the Pakistan army did not have enough troops in North West Frontier Province to combat the growing menace.  It was not possible for the army and the paramilitary Frontier Corps to conduct operations without considerable reinforcement.  In any event, the role of the lightly-armed Frontier Corps has always been more akin to policing than to engaging in conventional military operations. Dealing with inter-tribe skirmishes and cross-border smugglers is very different to combating organised bands of fanatics whose objective is total destruction of the state.

It was therefore decided to redeploy some units and formations from the eastern frontier to the west, but the main problem with the decision, no matter its appropriateness, was that troops facing India along the border and the Line of Control in Kashmir are skilled in conventional warfare tactics but not trained in counter insurgency (COIN). Retraining was essential if there was to be a properly conducted campaign against militants in the west of the country. The process requires much time and energy. (The British, for example, had to design a training programme lasting up to eight months before units were considered effective to fight the terrorist Irish Republican Army. The US belatedly dealt with a similar problem before deploying units to Iraq, having learned the hard way.)

But there is another important factor in Pakistan’s equation of redeploying troops : the attitude of India.

The Indian government and people reacted strongly to the terrorist attacks in Mumbai in September 2008 — quite understandably — and blamed Pakistan for fostering those who carried them out. Many in India considered that Pakistan actually had some formal and official role in assisting the attackers, and most Indians – spurred by an active media – now firmly believe that Pakistan was involved. In this atmosphere it was tempting for politicians, especially those of ultra-nationalist persuasion, to beat war drums and threaten Pakistan with dire consequences if there were another terrorist outrage – which there is almost certain to be.

Although there was no reinforcement or movement of troops on the Indian side of the border after the Mumbai atrocities, Pakistan could not forget the major deployment, Operation Parakram, that took place in 2002 following a terrorist assault on the Indian Parliament in December 2001. There was no reason to be complacent concerning Indian intentions, given the similarity of the Mumbai and Delhi attacks and the ensuing rhetoric, and Pakistan’s armed forces were required to remain vigilant. There could be no question of lowering guard on the eastern border unless there were assurance from India that it would not engage in military action. This was not given.

Even after the initial outburst of anti-Pakistan bellicosity had died down, there came carefully composed but confrontational statements by major national figures who could not be ignored, and they came in a period of especial concern to Pakistan – the very time at which it was necessary to continue relocating troops from the eastern frontier area in order to combat the menace of terror and insurrection in the west.

Pakistan’s Waziristan fight tougher than Kashmir ?

The Pakistani Taliban are warning the Pakistani military that it faces a fight in Waziristan tougher than Kashmir where the Indian army has struggled to quell a 20-year armed revolt.

It must be a rather bitter irony for the Pakistani army to be dealt such a warning from an umbrella militant group, several of whose members it once nurtured to fight the Indian army in Kashmir.

War by a thousand cuts, the Pakistan strategic establishment said, referring to the strategy to bleed India’s much larger army and ensure parity. So militants were given material support to take on the Indian army which was then forced to throw in more and more troops in to the conflict zone, until there were almost – and to this day remain –  anything around 400,000 to 500,000 troops in the area.  Such a large military presence by itself deepens the people’s alienation and perpetuates the insurgency.

Is it going to be the same for the Pakistani army as Pakistan Taliban spokesman  Azam Tariq told Reuters on Tuesday just as suspected militants carried out the third attack near the frontier city of Peshawar in as many days ?

Waziristan as Kashmir does seem a stretch. One, the Pakistani Taliban don’t have the cross border backing that the militants operating in Kashmir had, beginning with helping them cross over, to training, to  giving them arms and then pushing them back across the Kashmir frontier. Leave alone state support, it’s not even certain that their brothers-in-arms, the Afghan Taliban, are backing them to the hilt in what must be their toughest battle yet since they turned against the Pakistani state.

For what it’s worth an Afghan  Taliban commander on Tuesday distanced himself from the Pakistani Taliban, saying it didn’t support targeting innocent people.  The Afghan Taliban’s target were only the foreign forces in Afghanistan, Afghan Taliban commander Abdul Mannan alias Mullah Toor told Pakistan’s GEO TV.

Targeted killings in Pakistan and elsewhere : official U.S. policy now ?

One of the things U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ran into last week during her trip to Pakistan was anger over attacks by unmanned “drone” aircraft inside Pakistan and along the border with Afghanistan.

 One questioner during an interaction with members of the public said the missile strikes by Predator aircraft amounted to “executions without trial” for those killed.  Another asked Clinton to define terrorism and whether she considered the drone attacks to be an act of terrorim like the car bomb that ripped through Peshawar that same week killing more than 100 people.

The people of Pakistan aren’t the only ones asking that question.  A top UN rights expert has swung the attention back on the drone programme, saying that the United States may be violating international law with the missile strikes.

Philip Aston, the Special Rapporteur on extradjudicial, summary or arbitary executions, said there could be circumstances under which the use of such techniques could be justified in international law, but Washington would have to show it followed appropriate precautions and accountability mechanisms.

The United States will have to be more upfront about its Predator war. “Otherwise you have the really problematic bottom line, which is that the Central Intelligence Agency is running a programme that is killing a significant number of people, and there is absolutely no accountability in terms of the relevant international law.”

There is little doubt now that targeted killing is official U.S. policy,  Jane Meyer argues in a detailed piece for the New Yorker.  What is worrying is that the embrace of the Predator programme has occurred with remarkably little public discussion, given that it represents a radically new and geographically unbounded use of state-sanctioned lethal force. “And because of the CIA program’s secrecy, there is no visible system of accountability in place, despite the fact that the agency has killed many civilians inside a politically fragile nuclear-armed country with which the U.S. is not at war,” Meyer writes. (more…)

Talk of Waziristan offensive picks up in Pakistan

According to Dawn newspaper, the Pakistan Army is poised to launch a major military operation in South Waziristan, stronghold of the Pakistani Taliban.

It quotes senior military and security officials as saying that the army would launch what it called “the mother of all battles” in the coming days.

“If we don’t take the battle to them, they will bring the battle to us,” it quotes a senior military official as saying of the militants. “The epicentre of the behemoth called the Taliban lies in South Waziristan, and this is where we will be fighting the toughest of all battles.”

“For three months, the military has been drawing up plans, holding in-depth deliberations and carrying out studies on past expeditions to make what seems to be the last grand stand against Pakistani Taliban in the Mehsud heartland a success,” it says.

“We are ready. The environment is ready,” it quotes the senior officer as saying. “It will not be a walkover. This is going to be casualty-intensive hard fighting. The nation will have to bear the pain,” said another officer.

The Pakistan Army is not saying anything in public, and information about its operations in Waziristan is hard to come by since the area is so remote and inaccessible.

But any ground offensive into South Waziristan would be a major escalation in the Pakistan Army’s battle against the Pakistani Taliban, dwarfing its operation earlier this year to clear militants out of the Swat valley northwest of Islamabad.