Winning the Good War

Winning the Good War

Why Afghanistan is not Obama’s Vietnam.

By Peter Bergen

hroughout his campaign last year, President Barack Obama said repeatedly that the real central front of the war against terrorists was on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. And now he is living up to his campaign promise to roll back the Taliban and al-Qaeda with significant resources. By the end of the year there will be some 70,000 American soldiers in Afghanistan, and the Obama administration is pushing for billions of dollars in additional aid to both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

This has caused consternation among some in the Democratic Party. In May, fifty-one House Democrats voted against continued funding for the Afghan war. And David Obey, the chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, which controls federal spending, says the White House must show concrete results in Afghanistan within a year—implying that if it doesn’t do so, he will move to turn off the money spigot. If this is the attitude of Obama’s own party, one can imagine what the Republicans will be saying if his "Af-Pak" strategy doesn’t start yielding results as they gear up for the 2010 midterm elections.

It’s not just politicians who are souring on the Afghan war. A USA Today poll earlier this year found that 42 percent of Americans believe the war is a mistake, up from 6 percent in 2002. The media has only added to the gloom. Newsweek ran a cover story in January speculating that Afghanistan could be Obama’s Vietnam. And the New York Times has run prominent opinion pieces with headlines like "The ‘Good War’ Isn’t Worth Fighting" and "Fearing Another Quagmire in Afghanistan."

But the growing skepticism about Obama’s chances for success in Afghanistan is largely based on deep misreadings of both the country’s history and the views of its people, which are often compounded by facile comparisons to the United States’s misadventures of past decades in Southeast Asia and the Middle East. Afghanistan will not be Obama’s Vietnam, nor will it be his Iraq. Rather, the renewed and better resourced American effort in Afghanistan will, in time, produce a relatively stable and prosperous Central Asian state.

bjections to Obama’s ramp-up in Afghanistan begin with the observation that Afghanistan has long been the "graveyard of empires"—as went the disastrous British expedition there in 1842 and the Soviet invasion in 1979, so too the current American occupation is doomed to follow. In fact, any number of empire builders, from Alexander the Great to the Mogul emperor Babur in the sixteenth century to the British in the Second Afghan War three decades after their infamous defeat, have won military victories in Afghanistan. The graveyard of empires metaphor belongs in the graveyard of clichés.

The Soviets, of course, spent almost a decade waging war in Afghanistan, only to retreat ignominiously in 1989, an important factor in their own empire’s consignment to history’s dustbin. But today’s American-led intervention in Afghanistan is quite different from the Communist occupation. The Soviet army killed more than a million Afghans and forced some five million more to flee the country, creating what was then the world’s largest refugee population. The Soviets also sowed millions of mines (including some that resembled toys), making Afghanistan one of the most heavily mined countries in the world. And Soviet soldiers were a largely unprofessional rabble of conscripts who drank heavily, used drugs, and consistently engaged in looting. The Soviets’ strategy, tactics, and behavior were, in short, the exact opposite of those used in successful counterinsurgency campaigns.

Unsurprisingly, the brutal Soviet occupation provoked a countrywide insurrection that drew from a wide array of ethnic groups—Tajiks, Uzbeks, Pashtuns, and Hazaras—and every class in Afghan society, from mullahs to urban professionals to peasants. By contrast, the insurgents in Afghanistan today are overwhelmingly rural Pashtuns with negligible support in urban areas and among other ethnic groups.

That makes quite a difference to the scale of today’s insurgency. Even the most generous estimates of the size of the Taliban force hold it to be no more than 20,000 men, while authoritative estimates of the numbers of Afghans on the battlefield at any given moment in the war against the Soviets range up to 250,000. The Taliban insurgency today is only around 10 percent the size of what the Soviets faced.

And while today’s Afghan insurgents are well financed, in part by the drug trade, this backing is not on the scale of the financial and military support that the anti-Communist guerrillas enjoyed in the 1980s. The mujahideen were the recipients of billions of dollars of American and Saudi aid, large-scale Pakistani training, and sophisticated U.S. military hardware such as highly effective anti-aircraft Stinger missiles, which ended the Soviets’ command of the air.

corollary to the argument that Afghanistan is unconquerable is the argument that it is ungovernable—that the country has never been a functioning nation-state, and that its people, mired in a culture of violence not amenable to Western fixes, have no interest in helping to build a more open and peaceful society. Certainly endemic low-level warfare is embedded in Pashtun society—the words for cousin and enemy in Pashtu, for instance, are the same. But the level of violence in Afghanistan is actually far lower than most Americans believe. In 2008 more than 2,000 Afghan civilians died at the hands of the Taliban or coalition forces; this is too many, but it is also less than a quarter of the deaths last year in Iraq, a country that is both more sparsely populated and often assumed to be easier to govern. (At the height of the violence in Iraq, 3,200 civilians were dying every month, making the country around twenty times more violent than Afghanistan is today.) Not only are Afghan civilians much safer under American occupation than Iraqis, they are also statistically less likely to be killed in the war than anyone living in the United States during the early 1990s, when the U.S. murder rate peaked at more than 24,000 killings a year.

An assertion that deserves a similarly hard look is the argument that nation building in Afghanistan is doomed because the country isn’t a nation-state, but rather a jury-rigged patchwork of competing tribal groupings. In fact, Afghanistan is a much older nation-state than, say, Italy or Germany, both of which were only unified in the late nineteenth century. Modern Afghanistan is considered to have emerged with the first Afghan empire under Ahmad Shah Durrani in 1747, and so has been a nation for decades longer than the United States. Accordingly, Afghans have a strong sense of nationhood.

What they have had just as long, however, is a weak central state. The last king of Afghanistan, Zahir Shah, who reigned from 1933 to 1973, presided lightly over a country in a time that Afghans recall with great nostalgia as one of relative peace and prosperity. Today President Hamid Karzai similarly presides over a weak central government. Critics contend that President Karzai is unable or unwilling to fight the epic corruption in his government, and joke that he is only the "mayor of Kabul." This criticism is largely accurate, but misses the fact that Karzai is still a somewhat popular leader in Afghanistan. Fifty-two percent of Afghans say that the president is doing a good job, only 15 percent less than the number of Americans who say the same thing about Obama—and that is eight years after Karzai assumed the leadership of a country in which any honeymoon period has long since evaporated. Afghans are also wildly enthusiastic about participating in real politics. In the 2004 presidential election, more than 80 percent of them turned out to vote, an accomplishment Americans haven’t been able to claim since the late nineteenth century.

o if Afghanistan itself is not necessarily ungovernable, what of the other argument—that as far as the United States is concerned, the war there will be a rerun of Vietnam? Hardly. The similarities between the Taliban and the Vietcong end with their mutual hostility toward the U.S. military. The some 20,000 Taliban fighters are too few to hold even small Afghan towns, let alone mount a Tet-style offensive on Kabul. As a military force, they are armed lightly enough to constitute a tactical problem, not a strategic threat. By contrast, the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese Army at the height of the Vietnam War numbered more than half a million men who were equipped with artillery and tanks, and were well supplied by both the Soviet Union and Mao’s China. And the number of casualties is orders of magnitude smaller: in Afghanistan last year, 154 American soldiers died, the largest number since the fall of the Taliban; in 1968, the deadliest year of the Vietnam conflict, the same number of U.S. servicemen were dying every four days. Estimates of the total civilian death toll in Vietnam are in the low millions, while estimates of the total number of Afghan civilian casualties since the fall of the Taliban are in the thousands.

Nor has the U.S. intervention in Afghanistan been anywhere near as expensive as Vietnam was—in fact, that’s in part why American efforts have not met with as much success as they could have. During the Vietnam War, the United States spent almost 10 percent of its GDP on military spending. Today’s military expenditures are somewhere between 4 and 5 percent of GDP, and of that, Afghanistan last year consumed only 6 percent of the total expenditure, while Iraq sucked up some five times that amount. And unlike the Vietnamese and Iraqis, Afghans have generally embraced international forces. In 2005, four years after the fall of the Taliban, eight out of ten Afghans expressed in a BBC/ABC poll a favorable opinion of the United States, and the same number supported foreign soldiers in their country. Contrast that with Iraq, where a BBC/ABC poll in 2005 found that only one in three Iraqis supported international forces in their country. While the same poll taken in Afghanistan this year reported, for the first time, that just under half of Afghans have a favorable view of the United States, that’s still a higher approval rating than the U.S. gets in any other Muslim-majority country save Lebanon. And a solid majority of Afghans continue to approve of the international forces in their country. What Afghans want is not for American and other foreign soldiers to leave, but for them to deliver on their promises of helping to midwife a more secure and prosperous country.

keptics of Obama’s Afghanistan policy say that the right approach is to either reduce American commitments there or just get out entirely. The short explanation of why this won’t work is that the United States has tried this already—twice. In 1989, after the most successful covert program in the history of the CIA helped to defeat the Soviets in Afghanistan, the George H. W. Bush administration closed the U.S. embassy in Kabul. The Clinton administration subsequently effectively zeroed out aid to the country, one of the poorest in the world. Out of the chaos of the Afghan civil war in the early 1990s emerged the Taliban, who then gave sanctuary to al Qaeda. In 2001, the next Bush administration returned to topple the Taliban, but because of its ideological aversion to nation building it ensured that Afghanistan was the least-resourced per capita reconstruction effort the United States has engaged in since World War II. An indication of how desultory those efforts were was the puny size of the Afghan army, which two years after the fall of the Taliban numbered only 5,000 men, around the same size as the police department of an American city like Houston. We got what we paid for with this on-the-cheap approach: since 2001 the Taliban has reemerged, and fused ideologically and tactically with al-Qaeda. The new Taliban has adopted wholesale al-Qaeda’s Iraq playbook of suicide attacks, IED operations, hostage beheadings, and aggressive video-based information campaigns. (The pre-9/11 Taliban had, of course, banned television.)

Why should we believe that the alternative offered by the Obama administration—committing large numbers of boots on the ground and significant sums of money to Afghanistan—has a better chance of success? In part, because the Afghan people themselves, the center of gravity in a counterinsurgency, are rooting for us to win. BBC/ABC polling found that 58 percent of Afghans named the Taliban—who only 7 percent of Afghans view favorably—as the greatest threat to their nation; only 8 percent said it was the United States.

There are other positive indices. Refugees don’t return to places they don’t think have a future, and more than four million Afghan refugees have returned home since the fall of the Taliban. (By contrast, about the same number of Iraqi refugees fled their homes after the American-led invasion of their country in 2003, and few have returned.) There are also more than two million Afghan kids in schools, including, of course, many girls. Music, kites, movies, independent newspapers, and TV stations—all of which were banned under the Taliban—are now ubiquitous. One in six Afghans now has a cell phone, in a country that didn’t have a phone system under the Taliban. And, according to the World Bank, the 2007 GDP growth rate for Afghanistan was 14 percent. Under Taliban rule the country was so poor that the World Bank didn’t even bother to measure its economic indicators.

Today 40 percent of Afghans say their country is going in the right direction (only 17 percent of Americans felt the same way in the waning months of the Bush administration). Considering Afghanistan’s rampant drug trade, pervasive corruption, and rising violence, this may seem counterintuitive—until you recall that no country in the world has ever suffered Afghanistan’s combination of an invasion and occupation by a totalitarian regime followed by a civil war, with subsequent "government" by warlords and then the neo-medieval misrule of the Taliban. In other words, the bar is pretty low. No Afghan is expecting that the country will turn into, say, Belgium, but there is an expectation that Afghanistan can be returned to the somewhat secure condition it enjoyed in the 1970s before the Soviet invasion, and that the country will be able to grow its way out of being simply a subsistence agricultural economy.

Obama’s Afghanistan strategy is well poised to deliver on these expectations because it primarily emphasizes increased security for the Afghan people—the first public good that Afghans want. In the south of Afghanistan, where the insurgency is the most intense, the U.S. is deploying two Marine brigades and a Stryker brigade, 17,000 soldiers in all, to supplement the thinly stretched British, Dutch, and Canadian forces in the region. These are not the kind of units that do peacekeeping; they will go in and clear areas of the Taliban and, most crucially, hold them. This will be a major improvement in a region where NATO forces have often had enough manpower to clear areas but not to hold them. One Western diplomat in Kabul joked grimly to me that every year in the south NATO soldiers have gone in to "mow the lawn." This time the idea is not to let the grass grow back.

One potential objection to Obama’s Afghanistan strategy is that the thousands of additional American soldiers that are now deploying to the country will only be the thin end of the wedge, because the Pentagon will inevitably ask for significantly more troops. This is a reasonable concern, but should be obviated by the fact that dramatically scaling up the size of the Afghan army and police is the best American exit strategy from the country, and that effort is at the heart of Obama’s plan.

Today there are only some 160,000 Afghan soldiers and cops, a quarter of the size of Iraq’s security services, and they are tasked with bringing order to a country that is larger and more populous than Iraq. Obama wants to modestly improve the size and professionalism of Afghanistan’s police force, and almost double the ranks of the Afghan army over the next two years. The latter is especially important because Afghans trust their army more than any other institution, and the army has emerged as a truly national force not riven by ethnic divisions. To help train those Afghan security services, some 4,000 trainers from the 82nd Airborne are deploying to Afghanistan. The administration is also pushing to make salaries in those forces competitive with what the Taliban pays its foot soldiers—often three times what an Afghan policeman makes.

Another possible objection to the introduction of more U.S. soldiers into Afghanistan is that, inevitably, they will kill more civilians, the main issue that angers Afghans about the foreign military presence. In fact, the presence of more boots on the ground is likely to reduce civilian casualties, because historically it has been the overreliance on American air strikes—as a result of too few ground forces—which has been the key cause of civilian deaths. According to the U.S. Air Force, between January and August 2008 there were almost 2,400 air strikes in Afghanistan, fully three times as many as in Iraq. And the United Nations concluded that it was air strikes, rather than action on the ground, which were responsible for the largest percentage—64 percent—of civilian deaths attributed to pro-government forces in 2008.

Cognizant of the importance of the issue of civilian casualties, in his Senate confirmation hearing in June the new commander in Afghanistan, Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, testified that their avoidance "may be the critical point" of American military operations, adding, "I cannot overstate my commitment to the importance of this concept." McChrystal, generally regarded as one of the most effective officers of his generation, has now put the avoidance of civilian casualties at the core of his military strategy in Afghanistan, and that message will undoubtedly filter down the chain of command.

hese key features of the Obama administration’s Afghan policy are supplemented by several others that merit highlighting and represent a distinct break from the Bush administration’s sputtering efforts. One is a shifting emphasis within the attempt to curtail the opium trade, from poppy eradication to going after the drug lords. This is a no-brainer—poppy eradication penalizes poor Afghan farmers who can’t pay the bribes to ensure their fields are not eradicated, and who are then easy marks for Taliban recruitment. Obama is also seeking to draw in potential regional partners like Iran, which played a vital role in the formation of the first Afghan government that emerged out of the discussions in Bonn in the winter of 2001. And third, the U.S. government plans to regularly host meetings among key Afghan and Pakistani officials, as it did in Washington in February and May. This is important for confidence-building measures between Afghans and Pakistanis, whose relations have varied between icy and openly hostile.

This brings us to the one skunk at this garden party, and it is a rather large one: Afghanistan’s nuclear-armed, al-Qaeda- and Taliban-headquartering neighbor to the east. The Pakistani dimension of Obama’s Af-Pak strategy is his critics’ most reasonable objection to his plans for the region. It is difficult for the United States to have an effective strategy for Pakistan when Pakistan doesn’t have an effective strategy for Pakistan. There is a set of interwoven problems that the country must face if it is to effectively confront the militants in its own territory. If it fails to do this, the regional insurgency that encompasses both sides of the Afghanistan/Pakistan border will continue to gather strength.

The first problem is that Pakistan effectively has two governments. There is a weak, elected civilian one, and a strong, unelected military one. Pakistan’s civilian government knows little about military strategy and is often at odds with the army, which has veto power over all aspects of national security policy. Pakistan’s army, meanwhile, has wavered ineffectually between mounting punitive expeditions against the militants and appeasing them, and is generally unable or unwilling to adopt an effective strategy against the Taliban. (The recent operations in the Swat Valley, characterized by the use of artillery and air power and millions of refugees streaming out of the battle zone, are not the hallmarks of a successful counterinsurgency.) As a result, civilians caught in the middle don’t know which way the wind will blow from day to day. They have reason to be skeptical that the government will protect them from the predations of the Taliban if the former chooses to revisit the various "peace" agreements it has struck with the militants over the past several years. Finally, the Pakistani establishment has done a poor job of persuading the public that the Taliban and other militant groups to which it once gave succor, and which are now attacking the Pakistani state, pose a grave threat to Pakistan itself.

Some have argued that if the U.S. does succeed in Afghanistan, it will only make this situation worse, pushing the Taliban and their allied foreign fighters into Pakistan and further destabilizing the already rickety nuclear-armed state. But this line of reasoning has the equation precisely the wrong way around: al-Qaeda was founded in Pakistan in 1988, and many of the Taliban’s leaders and foot soldiers emerged out of Pakistani madrassas and refugee camps. Following the vacuum created by the Afghan civil war of the early 1990s, the Pakistan-based militants expanded into Afghanistan. The notion of the militants enjoying safe havens in either Afghanistan or Pakistan is a false choice—in truth, they have had a persistent presence in both countries for decades.

That said, there are some hopeful signs that the militants have shot themselves in the feet in Pakistan. There has been no single "9/11 moment," but the cumulative weight of a number of events—the Taliban’s assassination of Benazir Bhutto; al-Qaeda’s bombing of the Marriott hotel in Islamabad; the attacks on the visiting Sri Lankan cricket team and the police academy in Lahore; the widely circulated video images of the Taliban flogging a seventeen-year-old girl; and the Taliban’s decision to move from Swat into Buner District, only sixty miles from Islamabad—has accomplished something similar. Each of these incidents has provoked revulsion and fear among the Pakistani public. Indicative of this, the alliance of pro-Taliban religious parties known as the MMA was annihilated in the 2008 election, earning just 2 percent of the vote. And support for suicide bombing among Pakistanis has cratered, from 33 percent in 2002 to 5 percent in 2008.

he United States can neither precipitously withdraw from Afghanistan nor help foster the emergence of a stable Afghan state by doing it on the cheap; the consequence would be the return of the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Fortunately, the U.S. is not alone; unlike in Iraq, there is an international coalition of forty-two countries in Afghanistan supporting NATO efforts there, with troops or other assistance. Even Muslim countries are part of this mix. Turkey, for instance, ran the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan in 2005, and the United Arab Emirates and Jordan have both sent small numbers of soldiers.

The United States overthrew the Taliban in the winter of 2001. It has a moral obligation to ensure that when it does leave Afghanistan it does so secure in the knowledge that the country will never again be a launching pad for the world’s deadliest terrorist groups, and that the country is on the way to a measure of stability and prosperity. When that happens, it is not too fanciful to think that Afghanistan’s majestic mountains, verdant valleys, and jasmine-scented gardens may once again draw the tourists that once flocked there.

Architects of our own fate

Monday, July 27, 2009 Zafar Hilaly It has become almost a fad to decry the absence of good governance and lay the blame at the doorstep of civil servants, politicians, �key stakeholders,� a euphemism for generals, and others. However what few shed light on is why they have failed so often and so regularly. The failure is one of society as a whole. In other words, failure taints the rich and the poor alike, the educated and the illiterate, the political activist as much as the silent majority. It is a comprehensive failure of a life credo and a value system; of a work ethic and mores that we, as a society, rather than merely individuals, have crafted and by default adopted. This credo/value system to which most subscribe is threatening to convert Pakistan to a failed state. Some deny this and say that it is more in the nature of a systemic failure. The dysfuctionality of the system itself is the fault of the credo and values that society has adopted. A good or a bad Constitution or even the existence of a Constitution; a good or bad service structure or a military more focused on its duties is not the reason nor the answer. It is our collective approach to life and living in society that is to blame. What, for example, can one make of a venerable Haji returning from having performed Haj and trying to smuggle in a VCR without paying duty (when duties were required). Who, when asked: �Babaji, why did you, of all people, have to lie and say that you had nothing to declare?� responded: �Duties and taxes are manmade laws and have nothing to do with God�s commandments. There is no sin in breaking them.� He, and the millions of our fellow citizens who agree with him, choose to live by such a code thereby making in this case the financial viability of any regulated society impossible. In other words whatever may be wrong with the system, much more is wrong with us. Similarly, when asked what the justification was for the Taliban blowing up schools, a leading cleric on a recent TV panel discussion remarked that it was because �the Army used school buildings as fortifications to fire on the Taliban.� When told that the area in which the school was situated had never been visited by the Army he remarked that nevertheless it was �potentially� an Army fortification. When further informed that actually the blowing up of the school had everything to do with the Taliban�s belief that girls should not attend schools and not the Army�s presence, finding himself cornered he conceded disarmingly that he did not agree with that aspect of the Taliban�s credo. He and his co-panellists, who were lay citizens, thought nothing of the kind of intellectual dishonesty in which he had indulged. Anyone shameless enough to indulge in such rascality and expect to get away with it with his reputation intact, which this cleric did, can only flourish in a milieu that is base and value-free. No system can function, let alone deliver, when such mindsets prevail. Hence bureaucrats, politicians and generals cannot exclusively be blamed for reducing society to the present pass. Singling them out is itself a reflection of the proclivity of societies in denial to pass the buck and blame others for their shortcomings. It is said that leadership counts because it sets an example to which people can aspire and that our problems stem mostly from the fact that our leaders are corrupt. There was no more honest a man intellectually, or one of greater rectitude financially, than Mr Jinnah. And he was betrayed by some of his chosen disciples � and so that they could acquire another house from the Evacuee Trust Board. And yet their names continue to be listed in the pantheon of our public heroes. Admittedly many of them were politicians but the countless others who benefited in an identical fashion and who actually set the trend with false property claims were not. They came from all walks of life. Similarly, among our judges were men of great virtue, principle and integrity, but also others for whom ambition, wealth and office became a necessity, which they proceeded to frame as a legal doctrine to be followed, regardless of the law and statutes or the requirements of justice and fair play. Noticeably the public preferred to follow the lead of the latter, rather than the former, which presumably was why there was not a squeak from civil society when a mockery of the law occurred in several decisions of seminal importance which resulted in the demise of democracy and put paid to hopes of good governance. Even when judges stooped to judicial murder of a popular politician barely a leaf stirred. The failure to rise and confront such a blatant legal atrocity was that of society as a whole and not exclusively that of the bureaucrats, etc. If, as a people, we are scared to go to the brink and confront a wrong, even at the risk of our lives, then we are lost. It is instructive that the British ruled India for 200 years and faced but one serious revolt, that of 1857, notwithstanding being outnumbered several hundred million times at any given moment. Similarly the Sikhs, who constituted a miniscule minority of Punjab�s population, ruled Punjab and beyond comprising millions for decades; and even banned the Azaan without so much as a murmur of protest from the millions of their Muslim subjects. We are the heirs of those who passively accepted foreign subjugation and it is not surprising that we are following in their footsteps while casting aspersions and laying the blame on segments of our own society for failing to stand up to injustice and repression. It was not the Maharajas and their fellow travellers who are exclusively to blame for not opposing the colonialists but rather our direct ancestors. Had there been then, or now, a resolute desire for revolt such a desire would have found its natural leaders. Another and more recent example of collective failure is how initially the nation was in denial over the threat of the Taliban, who were not only openly using our territory, in alliance with foreigners, to take over the country and impose a foreign ideology, but also to help those foreigners with their ambitions in Afghanistan. Only when all seemed lost did the military finally act and even then the public was and remains somewhat double-minded. Any society that expects to be rescued from themselves cannot prosper. When, therefore, it comes to apportioning blame those doing so must recognise wherein lies the true responsibility. Each society, not a mere couple of professions, is the architect of its own fate. They stand or fall by what they do to themselves not what others do to them and certainly not a select few living in their midst. The buck for Pakistan�s success or failure falls on civil society as a whole hence arguments that this or that profession is solely to blame, or that the system is responsible, are by now tiresome sermons and, what is more, dangerously misleading. The writer is a former ambassador. Email: charles123it@hotmail.com

Why this selective war on terror?

http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=187658
Sunday, July 12, 2009
Farhat Taj

The government of Pakistan and the Army are engaged in the “Rah-e-Nijat” operation against Baitullah Mahsud and his network in South Waziristan Agency. The military spokesman and director general of the ISPR, Major General Athar Abbas, announced that the preparatory phase of the decisive operation against the militants was already underway and the operation would be taken to its logical end.

This operation should have been launched much before, at the time when Baitullah launched his campaign of terrorism in the name of Islam on the Pakhtun in Waziristan. Baitullah should have been killed or arrested long ago and his network destroyed. He and his terrorists have wreaked havoc on Pakhtuns’ lives and properties and have insulted the Pakhtun culture and way of life. He and his gang of militants have disrupted life through acts of terrorism all over Pakistan. An operation against him is good news.

But the Pakhtun, especially the people of Waziristan, are deeply concerned how selectively the Pakistani Army is dealing with the terrorists. It seems there are “good” Taliban and “bad” Taliban in the sights of the generals in the military establishment. The Pakhtun wonder whether their slaughter, sufferings and even the genocide-like situation that they face is a source of any concern for the elites of Pakistan. They ask why the army is after Baitullah Mahsud now, and, most importantly, why the army is silent on other terrorist leaders who have exposed the Pakhtun to the utmost savagery. Yes, the Pakhtun want to know what the army’s policy is on the three terrorist chiefs and their networks based in Waziristan—i.e., Maulvi Nazir, Hafiz Gul Bahadur and, the deadliest of them all, Jalaluddin Haqani, a national of Afghanistan. The army high command’s silence on the three terrorists is sending a very upsetting message to the Pakhtun and a wrong signal to the world at large.

The message to the Pakhtun is this: the terrorists are Pakistan’s strategic assets to deal with India in regional power politics. That the generals of the Pakistani Army will not offend them by interfering in what they are doing to Pakhtun lives and properties as long as they restrict their acts of terrorism to Pakhtun territories, but the military will use the full might of the state against them the moment they cross the other side of the Indus to launch acts of terrorism in Punjab and Sindh. That the blood of people on the other side of the Indus is more precious than Pakhtun blood, and Punjabi and Sindhi cultures are much more valuable than Pakhtun culture. That the military will not tolerate anyone disrupting educational activities in Punjab and Sindh, but will not make a fuss over the destruction of schools by the terrorists in Pakhtun area. The terrorists have made jihadi madrasas all over occupied Pakhtun territory so as to leave Pakhtun children with no option to go to the madrasas to become suicide bombers and foot soldiers of the violent jihad, so Pakhtun children better go to those madrasas. It is as if the international gangs of terrorists can do whatever they wish to Pakhtun culture and lives. It is as if all this is tolerable in the name of national security interests. On the other hand, it is as if the state security paradigm will be mortally threatened when a terrorists chief expands his outreach beyond Pakhtun territories.

This is a very dangerous message. It may threaten the foundations of the federation of Pakistan.

There are already a minority of hardline nationalist Pakhtun who believe that the army and the Taliban terrorists are two sides of the same coin. They insist that those Pakhtun, like myself, who believe that the two can be separated live in fool’s paradise. They argue that the Pakhtun must strike a deal with the US across the border in Afghanistan to get rid of the Taliban, and also so that they backing they get can be removed. Silence over the activities of Maulvi Nazir, Hafiz Gul Bahadur and Jalaluddin Haqqani is adding to the grievances of the Pakhtun against the establishment. Unlike Baitullah the three have not attacked the state and society in the wider Pakistan – but they have trapped the people of Waziristan in an anti-civilisation. Isn’t it the responsibility of the Pakistani Army to break the trap of the anti-civilisation?

The message to the international community is equally dangerous—i.e., Pakistan is not controlling the terrorists who have openly declared a war on the world in the name of Islam. All the three Waziristan-based terrorists — Maulvi Nazir, Hafiz Gul Bahadur and Jalaluddin Haqqani – are part of the Shura-e-Ittihad-e-Mujahideen, a grand international alliance of Pakistan- and Afghanistan-based terrorist organisations. Osama bin Laden is their patron-in-chief and Mullah Omar their central commander. The alliance has made public vows to attack “enemies of Islam” all over the world. Clearly, the “enemies of Islam” means the US/NATO forces and the governments of all Muslim states which are opposed to violent jihad.

Maulvi Nazir, Hafiz Gul Bahadur and Jalaluddin Haqqani are in fact more dangerous than Baitullah Mehsud, for the simple reason that the danger they present is to the whole world while Baitullah is concentrating on Pakistan alone. By their actions, the likes of Nazir, Gul Bahadur and Haqqani invite the anger of the whole world to Pakistan. And in fact such a state of affairs on serves to strengthen the argument of those anti-Pakistan elements in the international community who wish to see Pakistan declared a terrorist state or a failing state.

The state must clearly declare its policy on the three Waziristan-based terrorists. Are they seen as enemies of Pakistan or strategic assets? They are enemies of the Pakhtun. Enemies of the Pakhtun must be declared enemies of Pakistan, because the Pakhtun are an integral part of the federation. The Pakistani Army must kill or arrest the three terrorists and destroy their networks mainly in North Waziristan. Jalaluddin Haqqani, if not killed, must be deported to Afghanistan along with his entire family in North Waziristan. And this includes his son, Sirajuddin Haqqani, who is wanted by Interpol.

A War That Cannot Be Won Or-Lost

We should be careful of what we wish for. For years now, there has been a chorus from the right as well as the left in Pakistan, calling for foreign troops to pull out of Afghanistan.

There are indications that they might get their wish before too long.Although July is still not behind us, Britain has already lost 19 soldiers killed in combat, while 150 have sustained serious injuries in this month alone. The war in Afghanistan has already lasted longer than the Second World War, and has cost the British government £5.6bn. And the military still cannot give any timeframe for the duration of the campaign.

No wonder, then, that ordinary people are growing weary of the conflict, especially in the wake of the recent spike in casualties. These days, it’s hard to pick up a newspaper, watch a TV chat show, or listen to a newscast without some criticism of the government’s conduct of the war. In a recent poll, the majority of Britons wanted the troops back by the end of the year.

Although Americans are more used to having their troops fighting in distant lands, fatigue with this unending war is setting in. As Robert Gates, the American secretary of defence, said recently, US citizens as well as the soldiers fighting in Afghanistan are getting sick of their involvement there.

Even though Barack Obama has made Afghanistan the centrepiece of the American battle against Islamic extremism, things can shift quickly in Washington if rising costs and casualties sway public opinion.

More and more pundits and military experts in London and Washington are stating the obvious: the war in Afghanistan is unwinnable. Already, military and political goals have been scaled back to lower public expectations. One of the stated aims of the current ‘surge’ is to stabilise the most violent provinces in order to prevent the Taliban from disrupting next month’s presidential elections. However, all indications are that the incumbent, Hamid Karzai, will win easily.

The question being asked is whether four more years of Karzai will put the country on the path to stability. Judging from his track record, there will be little change. The corruption, poppy production and violence will continue, and the war-torn country will be just as wretched in 2013 as it is today. So what, western critics ask, are allied forces doing, propping up a weak, useless leader who lacks the will and the ability to improve things to the point when western forces can leave?

It is this absence of an exit strategy that is causing sleepless nights for politicians and generals in the West. In Iraq, there was a structure and institutions to build on. These are sadly lacking in Afghanistan. Another big difference is the porous border with Pakistan that allows easy cross-border movement. This gives the Taliban bases to withdraw to. Iraqi insurgents did not have such safe sanctuaries across their borders.

Yet another qualitative difference is the changing nature of the conflict: collateral damage is less acceptable now in Afghanistan than it was in the earlier phase of the conflict. The Americans were thus able to use massive firepower to obliterate their enemies, even if hundreds of non-combatants were killed. This is politically less palatable now, especially under Obama. By relying more on boots on the ground rather than shock and awe, the number of casualties is bound to go up.

So what happens if public opinion forces western governments to pull their troops back from Afghanistan? A resurgent Taliban would be quickly back in Kabul, probably supported by Pakistan. India and Iran would help the Northern Alliance in the ensuing civil war. Relations between Pakistan and Iran would deteriorate, while we would be eyeball-to-eyeball with India.

In other words, we would be back to the pre-9/11 situation. The only difference would be that the Taliban would be viewed as the force that had defeated the mighty Americans. This would give them an aura of legitimacy and invincibility that would win them many recruits and financial backers.

In this scenario, can advocates of the Taliban like Imran Khan and Hamid Gul seriously think the region would be better off? Elements of the Pakistan Army and intelligence agencies are already ambivalent about the need to fight extremism. If foreign forces were to pull out from Afghanistan, they would stand vindicated. One reason they have been reluctant to completely cut off their links with jihadi groups is that they have never been convinced that the West had the political will to stay the distance. A western retreat would rekindle the old dream of strategic depth in Afghanistan that our generals have long harboured.

However, the victorious Taliban would have their own agenda, and would not be the puppets the ISI think they would be able to manipulate. An earlier generation of jihadis drove out the Red Army, and after defeating the US-led coalition, it is unlikely that Mullah Omar would accept dictation from our generals in Islamabad. Chances are that he and his Pakistani allies would seek to extend their writ across large swathes of Pakistan.

Encouraged by the success of the holy warriors in Afghanistan, groups like the Lashkar-i-Taiba would step up their jihad against India in Kashmir. A re-Talibanised Afghanistan would once again become a magnet for young jihadis from across the world. Al Qaeda would emerge from hiding and renew its war against the West and modernity. Rapidly, Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan would become the epicentre of the global jihad to an even greater extent than the region is now.

Already, there is said to be a strong nexus between the Taliban and the Muslim Uighur separatist movement. The Chinese government is highly suspicious of these links, but if, with or without Pakistani support, the Taliban provoke separatist, Islamic sentiments in China’s Xinjiang province, Beijing is likely to take a distinctly jaundiced view of the situation. Pakistan would be put on the spot, and asked to rein in the Taliban. Sooner or later, our Chinese allies would demand that we ‘do more’, a somewhat familiar refrain.

The Taliban, ignorant as they are of how the world works, would provoke Russia by openly supporting the Chechen rebels. In short, they would quickly antagonise India, Iran, the West, Russia and China. And as Pakistan would once again be sucked into supporting Kabul, we would be tarred with the same brush as the Taliban. This is the scenario that we and the West need to keep in mind as the war against the Taliban drags on.

This is a war that cannot be won. But equally, it is a war that cannot be lost.

Armageddon in Islamabad

Armageddon in Islamabad

by Bruce Riedel

06.23.2009

From the July/August 2009 issue of The National Interest. Please click here to view the full table of contents.

IN DECEMBER 2007 Benazir Bhutto said, “I now think al-Qaeda can be marching on Islamabad in two to four years.” Before this interview could even be published she was murdered, most likely by the Pakistani Taliban, an al-Qaeda ally. Benazir’s words now look all too accurate. A jihadist victory in Pakistan, meaning the takeover of the nation by a militant Sunni movement led by the Taliban, would have devastating consequences. It would create the greatest threat the United States has yet to face in its war on terror. Pakistan as an Islamic-extremist safe haven would bolster al-Qaeda’s capabilities tenfold. The jihadist threat bred in Afghanistan would be a cakewalk in comparison. The old Afghan sanctuary was remote, landlocked and weak; a new one in Pakistan would be in the Islamic mainstream with a modern communications and transportation infrastructure linking it to the world. The threat would be almost unfathomable. The implications would be literally felt around the globe. American options for dealing with such a state would be limited and costly.

The growing strength of the Taliban in Pakistan has raised the serious possibility of a jihadist takeover of the country. Even with the army’s reluctant efforts in areas like the Swat Valley and sporadic popular revulsion with Taliban violence, at heart the country is unstable. A jihadist victory is neither imminent nor inevitable, but it is now a real possibility in the foreseeable future. This essay presumes (though does not predict) an Islamic-militant victory in Pakistan, examining how the country’s creation of and collusion with extremist groups has left Islamabad vulnerable to an Islamist coup.

THE ORIGINS of today’s crisis of course lie in the war against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. The modern global jihad began in the Afghan refugee camps of Pakistan’s frontier lands along the one-thousand-five-hundred-mile border between the two countries. Volunteers from across the Islamic world came to fight with the Afghans. According to a senior Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI) commander at the time, the ISI trained eighty thousand fighters from forty-three countries.

Yet, this is not just about the fighters recruited, trained and radicalized by that battle. It is also a story of the “Islamization” of Pakistan’s society—an Islamization that was supported by Pakistan’s own president, Zia ul-Haq, and was used not only to fight the Red Army but also to create a warring corps that could violently enforce Islamabad’s interests. And those interests lie more with defeating India than with controlling Kabul.

Zia predictably saw the Soviet invasion as part of a plot between Moscow and New Delhi to destroy Pakistan. He quietly began working with the CIA to help the mujahideen; while at home, Zia began the transition of the country from the soft-Muslim, even almost-secular, state of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the founder of modern-day Pakistan, to a more fundamentalist Islam. The country became the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, the army became an instrument of jihad and the politics of Pakistan became Islamized. Zia, the hit of Washington, was feted in the White House. His repressive policies inside Pakistan, including harsh Islamic punishments; his immense expansion of the role of the ISI into domestic spying; and his systematic Islamization of Pakistani life went ignored. So too did the growth of a Kalashnikov culture in the western badlands and the breakdown of traditional order as millions of Afghan refugees poured into the country.

Over the objections of the more cautious professionals in the CIA, the United States provided Zia and the Pakistani intelligence service vast amounts of money and weapons. The Saudis became equal partners in the project, bringing even-more money, their Wahhabi Islamic faith and young volunteers like Osama bin Laden to the war effort. Thus was the groundwork laid for a radicalized and well-armed Pakistani state.

Once the Soviets were defeated, Pakistan’s army and its ISI focused their sights back on their primary enemy—India. Employing the terror tactics and weaponry they acquired on the battlefields of Afghanistan, they went on to support an insurgency in Kashmir in the early 1990s, returning to help the Taliban take over most of Afghanistan a few years later. Finally, in the late 1990s they created terror groups based in the eastern Pakistani province of Punjab, like Lashkar-e-Taiba (LET) and Jaish-e-Muhammad (JEM), to take the war against their mortal enemy deep into India itself. Supporting asymmetric warfare is a tool to fight New Delhi. With an officer corps increasingly sympathetic to jihad, alliances with extremists were and are a natural fit.

And so Zia had helped create a fighting force that would become increasingly hard to control, let alone roll back. His successors found this out quickly enough. After Zia’s death, Pakistani politics came to revolve around a struggle between Ms. Bhutto and her archrival Nawaz Sharif. Neither was competent as a manager of the nation. Both were mired in corruption. Neither controlled the army or the ISI, which went on to build a state within the state and engage in creating a host of private terrorist armies to fight India and gain control of Afghanistan.

Because of this the Pakistani jihadists were inside Afghanistan and part and parcel of the Taliban problem at the time of 9/11. In 1999, General Pervez Musharraf, an enthusiastic supporter of the struggle against India, had come to power in a military coup that overthrew Sharif. As a member of the army, he could in theory better control the rogue elements of the state, but in large part his interests were allied with the extremists in their struggle to dominate Afghanistan and fight India. After 9/11, Musharraf reluctantly agreed under tremendous U.S. pressure to a crackdown on some terrorists, but not surprisingly it was a selective and halfhearted effort. After a couple of years, the Afghan Taliban was allowed to regroup in Quetta, the largest city in Baluchistan, and in Peshawar, in the North-West Frontier Province, helping give birth to the Pakistani Taliban. LET and JEM though formally outlawed were kept active just beneath the surface. Al-Qaeda found a new home in the tribal regions of Pakistan. Once again, Pakistan became the breeder of and a home to Islamist terrorists. This has been one of Pakistan’s greatest military assets and one of its greatest domestic weaknesses. The push and pull between the government, which has abetted these efforts, and the army and ISI, which created and in some parts run these groups, is fraught with tension.

PAKISTAN IS in the midst of a complex and difficult transition from the military dictatorship of Musharraf to an elected civilian government. The army is reluctant to surrender real power; it is the largest landholder in the country and has created a massive military-industrial complex that benefits the officer corps. And it controls Pakistan’s powerful intelligence service. For most of 2004 to 2007—when the jihadists regrouped—the director of ISI was General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, now the army’s commander. This shows not only the critical role of the ISI but also the pervasiveness and unity of the military-industrial complex. In contrast, the civilians are divided by party and region; they spend more time infighting than governing.

The economy is dominated by almost-feudal landlords. The education system has been in decline for decades, starved of funds by the military’s requirements. The judiciary has been systematically attacked by the army and the political parties and is only now trying to achieve independence and credibility.

Thus Pakistan is both a patron and victim of terror. The Frankenstein created by the army and the ISI is now increasingly out of control and threatening the freedoms of all Pakistanis. Incidents of terrorist violence in Pakistan doubled from almost nine hundred in 2007 to over one thousand eight hundred in 2008 according to the National Counterterrorism Center. Many remain in denial, however, especially in the army. Others blame it all on the Americans and the CIA. As the mayor of Karachi, the largest megacity in the Islamic world, recently told me, Pakistan today is a country in the intensive-care ward of the global state system. Many expect it will fail to recover. All too easily it could fail completely.

The country is ripe for change, but it could be radical change for the worst. The battle for the soul of Pakistan has never been so acute.

Extremist forces are beginning to align. The spread of their influence could come easily. To secure power, the Taliban—currently concentrated in the tribal areas west of the Indus and all along the border with Afghanistan—would need to move east. This would take them from the Pashtun-dominated regions into the Punjabi heartland, where they need to gain significantly more support. There is good evidence this is already happening. The Pakistani Taliban is now coalescing with the Punjab-based Lashkar-e-Taiba. Though differences between the organizations remain (they have no common leader or agreed-upon agenda other than jihad against India and the West), they could well overcome their differences and make overthrowing the government their common priority.

Terrorist leaders would likely be able to tap into the deep anger among landless peasants as well. In the India-bordering provinces of Punjab and Sindh, where they already have a great deal of support, the extremists could mobilize a mass movement similar in some respects to that which toppled the shah of Iran in 1979. Press reports suggest antilandlord agitation has been a part of the extremists’ success in the last year in Swat and elsewhere. And in this way the current civilian government would be swept from power and the army would be pressed to make an accommodation with the new Islamist leadership. Since many in the army back the jihadists already, a deal with an Islamist movement would be attractive, especially if the Islamists made promises of protecting the army’s interests (which might or might not be kept later). The new government would be composed of representatives of the Pakistani Taliban, LET and possibly the Islamist political parties that have contested electoral power in the past. It might even draw some support from disaffected parts of the two mainstream political parties, the Pakistan Muslim League (PML) and Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), hoping to “moderate” the movement and to “tame” the Taliban.

A JIHADIST state would presumably come to power through some combination of violence and intimidation, and the takeover would not be without its problems. But none would likely threaten the success of the transition. All, however, would lead to an increasingly unstable and violence-wracked state.

Indeed, the Islamists would face significant internal opposition. The fifth of Pakistanis who are Shia would be extremely uneasy with a Sunni-militant regime and communal violence would probably intensify, with implications for Islamabad’s ties with Tehran. Pakistan has long been shaken by bombings and murders orchestrated by extremist Sunni and Shia elements, sometimes stoked by the ISI. This could escalate into more extensive anti-Shia violence.

The Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) in the large cities of Sindh—Pakistan’s southeasternmost province—would probably resist and have to be defeated by force. The MQM is the representative party of Muslims who fled India in 1947 and has become a secular and liberal force in recent years, but its appeal is limited to a minority. Though especially strong in Karachi, Pakistan’s biggest city, the MQM is not a national party and its leadership is in exile in London, weakening its ability to stand up to extremists. It would fight for its life in Sindh but lacks the ability to lead a national resistance, and so it would be more of an annoying disruption than a real challenge to the new government.

Large numbers of educated and Westernized Pakistanis would try to flee a new Islamic Emirate of Pakistan. They would find it difficult to find a port willing to take them, however, as security services around the world would insist on tight visa controls; potential states of refuge like the UK or Norway, both of which have large Pakistani émigré populations already, would face strong internal opposition to taking in more Muslims. The Gulf city-states like Abu Dhabi and Doha would probably take the most exiles, especially those with money.

Imposition of harsh Islamic penalties for social reasons, land reforms and the flight of many with capital would damage an already-weak economy and discourage foreign investment and loans. The emirate would probably blame its economic difficulties on the outside world and use foreign pressure as an excuse for even-more draconian crackdowns inside.

The army would be the most dangerous adversary. Some in the officer corps that would rather be in power themselves would certainly resist and might indeed try to stage a coup. The emirate would move to purge the armed forces of these potential coup plotters. It might also set up a new military force to act as a counterweight to the regular army, akin to the role of the SS in Nazi Germany or the Revolutionary Guard in Iran. The ISI in particular would be cleansed to eliminate any potential threats to the regime from secularists or those who seek more personal power.

The new regime would be quick to take control of the nuclear arsenal as it purged the army of any dissident voices. And it would welcome Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri from their hiding places of the last decade (although they would presumably keep a low profile to avoid being attacked by outside security services). Certainly al-Qaeda, LET and a host of other terrorist groups would have much more room to operate, free of any significant constraints on their activities from the Pakistani authorities. Even worse, the new government might abet their terrorist activities, providing the use of embassies and missions abroad for staging operations.

In the end, we would be left with an extremist-controlled Pakistan, infested with violence, an almost completely dysfunctional economy, harsh laws and even-harsher methods for imposing them, and above all a nuclear-armed nation controlled by terrorist sympathizers.

THE EFFECTS of an extremist takeover would not end at Pakistan’s borders. A worsening conflict between Sunni and Shia could easily seep into the rest of the Muslim world.

Pakistan’s influence in Afghanistan would deepen. The south and east of the country would be a virtual part of the Pakistani state. The commander of the faithful, Mullah Muhammad Omar, and his Quetta shura (ruling council) would emerge as the odds-on favorite to take over the area. The non-Pashtun majority in Afghanistan would certainly resist, but in the Pashtun belt across the south and east, the Afghan Taliban would be even stronger than it is now. Afghanistan would go back to looking much like it did pre–the American intervention in 2001, with a dominant Taliban backed by Pakistan fighting the Tajiks, Uzbeks and Shia backed by Iran, Russia and the central-Asian republics.

Afghanistan would become a battleground for influence between Pakistan and Iran, as Sunni-dominated Pakistan and Shia-dominated Iran would find a war for ideological dominance almost irresistible. Both states would also be tempted to meddle with each other’s minorities—the Shia in Pakistan and Sunni in Iran, as well as both countries’ Baluchi minority. Baluchistan, Pakistan’s southwestern province that neighbors both Afghanistan and Iran, is already unstable on both sides of the border. It would become another area of conflict. The low-intensity insurgencies already burning in the border areas would become more severe with outsiders fueling the fires. As the Islamic Emirate of Pakistan suppressed its Shia minority, Tehran would be forced to sit and watch because of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. And so Iran would certainly accelerate its nuclear-weapons-development program but would be years, if not decades, behind its neighbor.

With many of the LET in power, a major mass-casualty attack on India like the November 2008 Mumbai bombings would be likely. And this time it could spark war. India has shown remarkable restraint over the last decade as the Pakistani army, militants in Pakistan or both have carried out provocations like the Kargil War in 1999, the attack on the Indian parliament in 2001 and the Mumbai raid last year. Of course, a big part of India’s restraint is the lack of any good military option for retaliation that would avoid the risk of nuclear Armageddon. But if pressed hard enough, New Delhi may need to take some action. Blockading Karachi and demanding the closure of militant training camps might seem to be a way to increase pressure without firing the first shot but it carries a high risk of spiraling escalation. And of course any chance for a peace agreement in Kashmir would be dead. Violence in the region would rise. The new militant regime in Pakistan would increase support for the insurgency.

And Israel would come into the emirate’s crosshairs as a major target. Pakistan has always supported the Palestinian cause. In the past, most of the championing has been rhetorical, but an Islamic state would become a more practical supporter of Sunni groups like Hamas, giving money and arms. Pakistani embassies could become safe havens for terrorists pinpointing Zionist and Crusader targets. Of course, Pakistan could also provide the bomb. Farther away from Israel than Iran, Pakistan would be a harder foe for the Israelis to counter with force. And Israel has done little or no strategic thinking about the Pakistani threat.

A militant Islamic state in Pakistan, the second-largest Muslim country and the only one with a nuclear arsenal, would have a massive ripple effect across the Islamic world. All of the existing Muslim regimes would be alarmed by the prospect of their own jihadists finding a new refuge and training facilities; the extremists would then have a new base from which to fight their home governments. The psychological impact on Muslim nations would be far more profound than previous Islamic takeovers in relatively remote or marginal states like Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia or Gaza.

The global Islamic jihad, spearheaded by al-Qaeda, would proclaim the liberation of the ummah, or community, was at hand. In Pakistani-diaspora communities in the United Kingdom and the Gulf states the risk of terrorism would be even greater than it is today. The United States would have to take steps to curb travel by its citizens of Pakistani origin to their homeland. The damage that could be wrought is many magnitudes greater than the capabilities lent to al-Qaeda through having a safe haven in Afghanistan. Our options in facing down an extremist-controlled Pakistan would be far more limited than those we had in 2001 after the 9/11 attacks.

A JIHADIST Pakistan would be the most serious threat to the United States since the end of the cold war. Aligned with al-Qaeda and armed with nuclear weapons, the Islamic Emirate of Pakistan would be a nightmare. U.S. options for dealing with it would all be bad.

Engagement would be nearly impossible as the new leadership in Islamabad would have no faith and little interest in any dialogue with the Crusaders and Zionists. If we retained an embassy in Pakistan, it would be at constant risk of attack—if not from the regime itself then from its allies like al-Qaeda. Islamabad would almost certainly demand an immediate and complete withdrawal of all foreign forces from neighboring Afghanistan and consider any counterterrorist operations on its territory cause for retaliation against American interests elsewhere. Since more than three-quarters of all of NATO’s supplies in Afghanistan come via Karachi, the new emirate would have us in a tight bind. In an international forum, Pakistan would outdo Iran as the leader of the anti-Israel cause and constantly demand the handover of all of Kashmir from India.

U.S. options to change the regime by a coup or by assisting dissidents like the MQM would be minimal. The United States is so unpopular in Pakistan today that American endorsement of a politician is the kiss of death. Ms. Bhutto learned this lesson literally. The Pakistani Shia community would look to Iran, not America, for help.

Military options would be unappealing at best and counterproductive at worst. The United States would discover the same difficult choices Indian leaders have looked at for a decade. Striking terrorist training camps achieves virtually nothing since they can easily and cheaply be rebuilt. The risk of collateral damage—real or invented—probably creates more terrorists than the raids could kill. Even a successful operation creates new martyrs for the terrorists’ propaganda machines.

A naval blockade to coerce behavior change would mean imposing humanitarian suffering on the population. It would also prompt terrorist reprisals in and outside of South Asia. Combined with air strikes, a blockade might impose real costs on the jihadist regime but is unlikely to topple it and would be hard to sustain in the absence of a major provocation.

Invasion á la Iraq in 2003 would require a land base nearby. Landlocked Afghanistan would be a risky place from which to work. Iran is a nonstarter. India might be prepared in some extreme scenario to attack with American forces, but that would rally every Pakistani to the extremists’ cause.

The Pakistanis would, of course, use their nuclear weapons to defend themselves. While they do not have delivery systems capable of reaching America, they could certainly destroy cities and bases in Afghanistan, India, the Gulf states and, if smuggled out ahead of time by terrorists, perhaps the United States. A victory in such a conflict would be Pyrrhic indeed.

Of course, the hardest problem would be the day after. What would we do with a country twice the size of California with enormous poverty, almost 50 percent illiteracy and intense popular hatred for all that we stand for after we have fought a nuclear war to occupy it?

The worst thing about the military option is that we might have little choice but to use it if al-Qaeda launched another 9/11-magnitude attack on the United States from a jihadist Pakistan. It is highly unlikely a jihadist Islamabad would turn over bin Laden for justice after a new “Manhattan raid,” and sanctions would be a very unsatisfying response to thousands of deaths—or more if al-Qaeda had acquired one of Pakistan’s bombs.

A jihadist, nuclear-armed Pakistan is a scenario we need to avoid at all costs. That means working with the Pakistan we have today to try to improve its spotty record on terrorism and proliferation. There is good reason for pessimism. Working with the existing order in Pakistan may not succeed. But there is every reason to try, given the horrors of the alternative.

FOR THE last sixty years American policy toward Pakistan has oscillated wildly between periods when Washington was entranced by Islamabad and embraced its policies without question (Eisenhower, Nixon, Reagan and Bush 43), or sanctioned Pakistan and blamed it for either provoking wars or developing nuclear weapons (Johnson, Carter, Bush 41 and Clinton). In the love-affair years, Washington would build secret relationships (the U-2 base in Peshawar and the mujahideen war in the 1980s) and throw literally billions of dollars at Pakistan with little or no accountability. In the scorned years, Pakistan would be démarched to death and Washington would cut off all military and economic aid. Both approaches failed dismally.

Moreover, America endorsed every Pakistani military dictator, no matter that they started wars with India and moved the country ever deeper into the jihadist embrace. John F. Kennedy entertained the first dictator, Ayub Khan, at Mount Vernon, the only time George Washington’s home has ever witnessed a state dinner. Richard Nixon turned a blind eye to Pakistan’s murder of hundreds of thousands of Bangladeshis to keep his friends in the army in power—and his back channel to China open. Yet despite Nixon’s support of Islamabad, India still scored an overwhelming victory against Pakistan in the 1971 Indo-Pakistani War. Ronald Reagan entertained Mohammad Zia ul-Haq as he encouraged the Arab jihadists that would become al-Qaeda. George W. Bush let Pervez Musharraf give the Afghan Taliban a sanctuary to kill American and NATO soldiers in Afghanistan.

In contrast, LBJ cut off military aid when Pakistan started the 1965 war with India, and George H. W. Bush sanctioned Islamabad for building a bomb that Reagan had tacitly approved. Bill Clinton sanctioned the country again for testing the bomb after India goaded it into doing so (he had little choice, as the U.S. Congress mandated automatic sanctions for testing).

What the U.S.-Pakistan relationship needs is constancy and consistency. We need to recognize that change in Pakistan will come when we engage reliably with the Pakistani people, support the democratic process and address Pakistan’s legitimate security concerns. Candor needs to be the hallmark of an enduring commitment to civilian rule in Pakistan.

U.S.-aid levels should not be the product of temper tantrums on Capitol Hill. We should help Pakistan deal with its illiteracy rate, because literate women will fight the Taliban. We should provide the Pakistani army with the helicopter fleet it needs to combat insurgents in the western badlands. We should stop trying to legislate Pakistani behavior by attaching conditions to aid legislation, a tactic that has consistently failed with Pakistan in the past. Our goal should be to convince Pakistanis that the existential threat to their liberty comes not from the CIA or India, but from al-Qaeda.

We also need to engage India constructively on how to reduce and then end the tensions, including in Kashmir, that have resulted from partition. Ironically, the Pakistanis and Indians have made great progress on this issue behind the scenes in the last decade. Musharraf deserves credit for much of this. After trying to force India to give up Kashmir by limited war, nuclear intimidation and terror, he finally settled on a back-channel negotiation process. No one on either side denies how close to a deal they have come. Quiet and subtle American diplomacy should now try to advance this further.

None of this will be easy. Pakistan is a complex and combustible society undergoing a severe crisis. America helped create that crisis over a long period of time. If we don’t help Pakistan now, we may have to deal with a jihadist Pakistan later. That should focus our attention.

Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer, is a senior fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at the Brookings Institution. He has advised four sitting presidents on Pakistan. He chaired an interagency review of policy toward Afghanistan and Pakistan for the Obama administration that was completed in March 2009.

Pakistan Objects to U.S. Expansion in Afghan War

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/22/world/asia/22pstan.html?_r=1&hpw

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan is objecting to expanded American combat operations in neighboring Afghanistan, creating new fissures in the alliance with Washington at a critical juncture when thousands of new American forces are arriving in the region.

Pakistani officials have told the Obama administration that the Marines fighting the Taliban in southern Afghanistan will force militants across the border into Pakistan, with the potential to further inflame the troubled province of Baluchistan, according to Pakistani intelligence officials.

Pakistan does not have enough troops to deploy to Baluchistan to take on the Taliban without denuding its border with its archenemy, India, the officials said. Dialogue with the Taliban, not more fighting, is in Pakistan’s national interest, they said.

The Pakistani account made clear that even as the United States recommits troops and other resources to take on a growing Taliban threat, Pakistani officials still consider India their top priority and the Taliban militants a problem that can be negotiated. In the long term, the Taliban in Afghanistan may even remain potential allies for Pakistan, as they were in the past, once the United States leaves.

The Pakistani officials gave views starkly different from those of American officials regarding the threat presented by top Taliban commanders, some of whom the Americans say have long taken refuge on the Pakistani side of the border.

Recent Pakistani military operations against Taliban in the Swat Valley and parts of the tribal areas have done little to close the gap in perceptions.

Even as Obama administration officials praise the operations, they express frustration that Pakistan is failing to act against the full array of Islamic militants using the country as a base.

Instead, they say, Pakistani authorities have chosen to fight Pakistani Taliban who threaten their government, while ignoring Taliban and other militants fighting Americans in Afghanistan or terrorizing India.

Such tensions have mounted despite a steady rotation of American officials through the region. They were on display last weekend when, during a visit to India, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said those who had planned the Sept. 11 attacks were now sheltering in Pakistan. The Pakistani Foreign Ministry issued an immediate rebuttal.

Pakistan’s critical assessment was provided as the Obama administration’s special envoy for the region, Richard C. Holbrooke, arrived in Pakistan on Tuesday night.

The country’s perspective was given in a nearly two-hour briefing on Friday for The New York Times by senior analysts and officials of Pakistan’s main spy service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence. They spoke on the condition of anonymity in keeping with the agency’s policy. The main themes of the briefing were echoed in conversations with several military officers over the past few days.

One of the first briefing slides read, in part: “The surge in Afghanistan will further reinforce the perception of a foreign occupation of Afghanistan. It will result in more civilian casualties; further alienate local population. Thus more local resistance to foreign troops.”

A major concern is that the American offensive may push Taliban militants over the border into Baluchistan, a province that borders Waziristan in the tribal areas. The Pakistani Army is already fighting a longstanding insurgency of Baluch separatists in the province.

A Taliban spillover would require Pakistan to put more troops there, a Pakistani intelligence official said, troops the country does not have now. Diverting troops from the border with India is out of the question, the official said.

A spokesman for the American and NATO commands in Afghanistan, Rear Adm. Gregory J. Smith, said in an e-mail message on Monday that there was no significant movement of insurgents out of Afghanistan, and no indication of foreign fighters moving into Afghanistan through Baluchistan or Iran, another concern of the Pakistanis.

Pakistani and American officials also cited some positive signs for the alliance. Increased sharing of information has sharpened the accuracy of strikes against militant hide-outs by Pakistani F-16 warplanes and drones operated by the Central Intelligence Agency. And Pakistani and American intelligence operatives are fighting together in dangerous missions to hunt down fighters from the Taliban and Al Qaeda in the tribal areas and in the North-West Frontier Province.

But the intelligence briefing clearly illuminated the differences between the two countries over how, in the American view, Pakistan was still picking proxies and choosing enemies among various Islamic militant groups in Pakistan.

The United States maintains that the Afghan Taliban leader, Mullah Muhammad Omar, leads an inner circle of commanders who guide the war in southern Afghanistan from their base in Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan.

American officials say this Taliban council, known as the Quetta shura, is sheltered by Pakistani authorities, who may yet want to employ the Taliban as future allies in Afghanistan.

In an interview last week, the new leader of American and NATO combat operations in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, paused when asked whether he was getting the cooperation he wanted from Pakistani forces in combating the Quetta shura. “What I would love is for the government of Pakistan to have the ability to completely eliminate the safe havens that the Afghan Taliban enjoy,” he said.

The Pakistani intelligence officials denied that Mullah Omar was even in Pakistan, insisting that he was in Afghanistan.

The United States asked Pakistan in recent years to round up 10 Taliban leaders in Quetta, the Pakistani officials said. Of those 10, 6 were killed by the Pakistanis, 2 were probably in Afghanistan, and the remaining 2 presented no threat to the Marines in Afghanistan, the officials said.

They also said no threat was posed by Sirajuddin Haqqani, an Afghan Taliban leader who American military commanders say operates with Pakistani protection out of North Waziristan and equips and trains Taliban fighters for Afghanistan.

Last year, Washington presented evidence to Pakistani leaders that Mr. Haqqani, working with Inter-Services Intelligence, was responsible for the bombing last summer of the Indian Embassy in Kabul that killed 54 people.

Pakistani officials insisted that Mr. Haqqani spent most of his time in Afghanistan, suggesting that the American complaints about him being provided sanctuary were invalid.

Another militant group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, is also a source of deep disagreement.

India and the United States have criticized Pakistan for allowing Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, the founder of Lashkar-e-Taiba, to be freed from jail last month.

The Pakistani officials said Mr. Saeed deserved to be freed because the government had failed to convince the courts that he should be kept in custody. There would be no effort to imprison Mr. Saeed again, in part because he was just an ideologue who did not have an anti-Pakistan agenda, the officials said.

Time to shun the past

http://www.dawn.com/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/pakistan/14-time-to-shun-the-past-01

At the heart of Pakistan’s foreign and security policies lies India and at the heart of our India policy lies Kashmir, Pakistan’s jugular vein as the country’s founder described it.

Kashmir has bedeviled Pakistan-India relations, is the source of insecurity and instability in the region and a cause of serious concern for the international community.

India reneged on its commitments to Pakistan, the United Nations and the Kashmiris to the holding of a plebiscite in the state. Six rounds of Bhutto-Swaran Singh talks, focused entirely on Kashmir, in 1962-3, proved inconclusive. The negotiations took place in the wake of India’s Himalayan debacle at the hands of China and on the serious prodding of the United States and Great Britain.

Having exhausted the path of diplomacy with an intransigent India, Pakistan embarked on a strategy to bring India to the table in a serious and meaningful engagement on the dispute. In 1965 Pakistan launched Operation Gibraltar in a bid to get Kashmiris to rise against their Indian occupiers. That did not happen. Instead, Pakistan and India got involved in a full-scale war, which neither could afford. After 17 days both were exhausted.

Whatever implications the war might have had for India, its consequences for Pakistan were disastrous. The perceived economic growth that Pakistan had been enjoying for several years and which was widely quoted as a model for Third World countries came to an abrupt halt. Western sanctions were imposed on Pakistan; East Pakistanis were extremely disenchanted leading Mujibur Rahman to launch his six-point programme and the country was engulfed in political turmoil. Six years later Pakistan was embroiled in another war with India. Its outcome was the disintegration of the country.

The East Pakistan tragedy should have prompted an earnest and urgent review of our policy towards India. The security establishment, however, was successful in having recommendations of the Hamoodur Rahman Commission report, which called for the trial of Gen Yahya and his confederacy of generals, shelved. It also managed to have high priority assigned and substantial resources allocated to the rebuilding of the armed forces. After all, East Pakistan had to be avenged.

The military, once again, began to loom large in Pakistan’s politics leading to its logical conclusion. Not only was the democratic government overthrown in a coup d’état, but Pakistan’s most popular and accomplished prime minister was dispatched to the gallows.

The Indian factor again played a major role in Pakistan’s reaction to the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan. The military dictator, who had usurped power on July 5, 1977, enthusiastically embraced the US which lent a new lease of life to his shaky and sanctioned government. The uni-dimensional military-based relationship with the US improved the military balance vis-à-vis India.

The victory of the Mujahideen against a superpower prompted him and his coterie of generals to (a) adopt the ‘strategic depth’ doctrine by ensuring that the new regime in Kabul should be so ingratiated to Pakistan as to invariably do its bidding; (b) employ the CIA-ISI Mujahideen model, successfully used in the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, against India in occupied Kashmir. The former strategy led to the emergence of the Taliban Frankenstein; the latter to such jihadi outfits as the Lashkar-i-Taiba, Jaish-i-Mohammad and the Harkat-ul-Ansar.

It did not take long for Al Qaeda, the Taliban and others to establish a nexus for the use of terror against their adversaries. Neither were the Taliban able to provide strategic depth, nor were the jihadis able to coerce India into settling the Kashmir dispute. The policy, in fact, dangerously backfired, with these battle-hardened and self-sustaining militants posing an existentialist threat to Pakistan itself.

As if the failure of our strategy was not enough of a setback, an emboldened military embarked upon a course that brought serious embarrassment and disgrace to the country. The overthrow in October 1999 of a legally constituted, democratically elected popular government was a direct consequence of the Kargil episode — once again the outcome of our policy of confronting India.

The multiple wars and skirmishes with India (futile at best) and the ensuing instability and insecurity in the region have adversely impacted on the internal political dynamics of Pakistan. The imbalance of a powerful military and a fragile democracy has seriously undermined the political process and impaired the healthy growth of civil institutions. The pursuit of highly ambitious and inherently unrealistic policies of ‘strategic depth’ and ‘coercive diplomacy’ have overstretched our limited resources and subjected our foreign relations to avoidable stresses.

A policy of confrontation with India — and its close cousins militancy and coup d’états — contains within itself the seeds of our destruction and must be avoided like the plague. It has become a millstone around our neck.

The real threat to Pakistan comes not from India, but from militant extremism. The second biggest source of instability emanates, also not from India, but from the widespread poverty and the low levels of human development that characterise our society. We need to divert the enormous time and resources that we continue to invest in our confrontation with India towards fighting militancy and getting rid of the all-pervasive poverty, ignorance and disease.

Pakistan’s history and its present precarious condition demand a serious and honest appraisal of its traditional India policy with the objective of establishing a close, cooperative and tension-free relationship. Realpolitik and sound common sense dictate that Pakistan and India should live in peace and friendship.

The proposed change in our India policy is not tantamount to an acceptance of India’s hegemony. On the contrary, an economically vibrant, politically stable, socially cohesive nuclear Pakistan with 170 million economically empowered, healthy and educated citizens should be able to exude enough confidence and maturity to deter any entity contemplating domination.

PRESERVING PAKISTAN

PRESERVING PAKISTAN

TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDED DOCUMENTARY

Presenter: Owen Bennett-Jones
Producer: Chris Bowlby
Editor: Innes Bowen

http://news.bbc.co.uk/nol/shared/spl/hi/programmes/analysis/transcripts/13_07_09.txt


Taking part in order of appearance:

Mahboob Mahdood
Professor, INSEAD Business School

Khalid Aziz
Former Chief Secretary of North West Frontier Province

Christine Fair
Georgetown University

Malik Naveed Khan
Chief of Police, North West Frontier Province

Farzana Shaikh
Author of ‘Making Sense of Pakistan’

Jugnoo Mohsin
Newspaper Editor, Lahore

BENNETT-JONES: The current fighting in Pakistan is vicious: there have been the
Taliban’s beheadings and child suicide bombers, and the army’s offensive in which few
prisoners have been taken. The battleground - the tribal areas which lie on the border with Afghanistan - has for over a century been ungovernable, wild and remote. But the fighting today is no longer a local affair: it has global implications, and some believe it could lead to a new revolutionary state.

MAHDOOD: What I mean by Jihadistan is a state that is controlled by people who believe
in militant movement both within the country to impose Islam and to export it internationally.

BENNETT-JONES: If there were a Jihadistan, where would it be?

MAHDOOD: I think the likelihood is that it may start in the North West Frontier as well as
in the Northern areas of Baluchistan Province. It could then spread to Southern Punjab
where there is also a strong militant movement, and then over time it could take over the
whole country.

MAHDOOD: Mahboob Mahdood, a Pakistani business professor at the INSEAD
business school, has recently been on a field trip to Pakistan to see what’s going on first-hand, and he wrote a paper which stated that Pakistan is rapidly transforming into the world’s first Sunni militant fascist state - a state he calls Jihadistan. Is he right? Some in Washington are also pessimistic. US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, speaking in April.

CLINTON: I think that we cannot underscore the seriousness of the existential threat
posed to the state of Pakistan by the continuing advances now within hours of Islamabad
that are being made by a loosely confederated group of terrorists and others who are
seeking the overthrow of the Pakistani state - which is, as we all know, a nuclear armed
state.

BENNETT-JONES: For many years, Pakistanis have tended to dismiss Western
concerns about the Jihadis as exaggerated, prejudiced and ill-informed. But that’s changed. Now Pakistanis themselves see the threat as real; and with public opinion behind the army,the state is confronting Jihadis on fronts throughout the North West of the country. In the main city in that part of Pakistan, Peshawar, thousands have been killed and millions have fled their homes nearby. Khalid Aziz is a former chief secretary of the North West Frontier Province, and he is seeing the conflict close up.

AZIZ: Pakistan is at war. I mean we are fighting a war in the tribal areas and now in the
North West Frontier Province. I mean what is war? I mean when about 1.5 million people
become homeless - if that’s not war, what else is?

BENNETT-JONES: It’s a civil war then?

AZIZ: Well I would classify it as such. There is no other classification because if your own people are fighting the government, they are Pakistanis who are doing it, the Pakistan
military is reacting to them and there are casualties, there’s mass destruction, there’s mass displacement of people - so it is a civil war, yes.

BENNETT-JONES: It is a military struggle and an ideological one - a conflict between
two competing visions of Pakistan. It is also a test of political will; and when it comes to that, one side always has the edge. Mahboob Mahdood.

MAHDOOD: Clearly the militants have the greater resolve. The resolve of the government
is principally to maintain the status quo. The bureaucracy wants to maintain its privileges; the people who are in power, the various political parties want to keep things the way they are. So their principal interest is not to change things, but I think the pressure for change is now building up to a very substantial degree.

BENNETT-JONES: To what extent do you think the timescale matters? The militants can
play a much longer game than the politicians. Do you think that’s true?


MAHDOOD: I think the politicians are in it for the long haul as well, but I think the real
question is at what point will the United States say: “OK, we’ve had enough, we’re getting
out”. And if aid gets cut off in a substantial way, things could rapidly start moving in favour of the Jihadi Movement.

BENNETT-JONES: But who are the Taliban? Together with Al-Qaeda, they’re in the
vanguard of the Jihadi Movement. It’s a complicated set-up. There’s the Afghan Taliban
and the Pakistani Taliban. The Pakistani bit includes disgruntled, young tribesmen railing
against the stifling authority of their elders, landless peasants; Kashmiri fighters from
Pakistan’s main province Punjab; Central Asians and so on. There are lots of groups and
each has its own objectives, structures, funding arrangements and leaders. The Taliban
stronghold is the Federally Administered Tribal Areas - known in Pakistan as FATA - and
the most powerful fighter there is Baitullah Mehsud. A former Guantanamo detainee, he has
attracted support in Pakistan and beyond. Christine Fair of Georgetown University
frequently visits Pakistan.

FAIR: What is very clear is that the Southern Punjabi groups, and specifically the Deobandi groups, they are very much the ally of Baitullah Mehsud; and they are - as one of my British colleagues said - they’re the elevator that takes people from the diaspora particularly in the UK to FATA. You simply don’t show up from Birmingham or wherever and find yourself in the court of Baitullah Mehsud. It requires a tier of intermediaries, and many people believe that that tier of intermediaries is in fact the Punjabi so-called Jihadi groups because they do share ethnic affinities with some of the folks that are coming from abroad.

BENNETT-JONES: So when we hear that some of the Taliban who’ve been killed have
been found with tattoos from British football clubs, probably they went from Birmingham (in that case I think it was) to Southern Punjab, and then on to the North West of Pakistan and the fight?

FAIR: Yeah. And it doesn’t have to be Southern Punjab. We’re really looking at that
Punjab itself is home to many of these groups.
BENNETT-JONES: British citizens may be fighting in Pakistan, but some are being
targeted too. Gordon Brown has said that three quarters of all terrorist plots in the UK
originate in Pakistan. Baitullah Mehsud is not only Pakistan’s most wanted man; the US has
shown its interest in him too with a five million dollar bounty on his head. But in the past, Pakistan has reached agreements with leaders like Baitullah Mehsud, often leaving them to their own devices as long as they stay in their own areas. And in May last year, presumably because he’d done a deal with the government, Baitullah Mehsud felt confident enough to hold a news conference.

FX: CHANTING

BENNETT-JONES: He invited some cameramen to his redoubt of Waziristan on the
Afghan border; and then hiding behind a veil, on the grounds that it’s un-Islamic to be
filmed, he made some statements. Like many Jihadis, his pitch for support is predicated on
unshakeable, defiant anti-Americanism.

MEHSUD: (laughs/native language)

TRANSLATOR: They are unbelievers. By the blessing of Allah, in all conditions we are
resolute against the unbelievers - the Jews and the Christians. If I am martyred, my people will be happy and so will I. So what do the Americans have that would cause us pain?

BENNETT-JONES: But apart from hating America, what do Baitullah Mehsud and the
Taliban really stand for? As a career bureaucrat in the North West Frontier Province,
Khalid Aziz devoted many years of his life to maintaining stability in the area. And for that, he had to understand the radical Islamists: their grievances, their demands, and their ideas.

AZIZ: They think in terms of rituals. They think in terms of a life which is not open to
interpretation. They think in terms of the hardcore messages in the Koran, the literal sense. They do not relate to the modern world - music, TV, photography, unveiled women. These are all exercises or activities which, according to these conservative elements, take you away from God. It changes your mindsetting. Because according to them, you should be thinking twenty-four hours about nothing else but God. You see a lot of anger there because they have been left out and they believe that part of the problem is that because they have been like that, the world is passing them by.

BENNETT-JONES: The Taliban supporters may be a minority, but they can still be
counted in the hundreds of thousands, if not millions. And the Taliban’s appeal relies in part on being seen as the champion of the poor in a society with very big gaps in wealth and power. In addition, in places such as Baitullah Mehsud’s base of Waziristan, the Taliban can get things done - as Christine Fair points out.

FAIR: You’ll hear stories and you talk to people in Waziristan that you’ll go to the political agent to get a very basic service, like for example an identity card, and the implication is if you give me money - i.e. a bribe - it’ll get done. So instead they go to the local Taliban commander who then sends a note ever so politely to the political agent, explaining that if he doesn’t provide this service, he’s going to be in big trouble and, voila, the service is provided. At the same time, of course, the Taliban are totally brutal and they are able to literally behead dissent and the state has largely been unable to protect those people. You had again, as you have in North and South Waziristan, a tremendous hierarchy between the landowners and everyone else. And even if the non-landowners had accumulated a lot of money through remittances or for business, they simply had no prestige, and so the Taliban again were able to go to the money people who had resources but no social cache and was also able to mobilise their grievance.

BENNETT-JONES: Malik Naveed Khan has long experience of the Taliban. He’s the
Chief of Police in the North West Frontier Province and last year 168 of his men were killed by the Taliban, many of them in suicide attacks at police check points. Every day he gets text messages threatening him with violent death. And in his office, behind several layers of walls, barriers, barricades and armed men, he told me that the young men who carry out the attacks are themselves often victims of ruthless Taliban handlers.

NAVEED KHAN: These are people who are being exploited and they are exploiting
people. They are totally misdirected, misled. There are some who actually believe, falsely, that what they are doing is right, and there are some like criminals who have joined them like the have-nots class who were doing nothing, jobless. They have joined them just to have a gun in their hand; fifteen, twenty thousand rupees per month, five to six hundred dollars; a vehicle to drive; a Kalashnikov in their hand; grenades tied to their bodies. And they just enjoy that status.

BENNETT-JONES: At the same time, if people are blowing themselves up, killing
themselves, they must genuinely believe that they are on God’s side, that they’re going to
heaven?

NAVEED KHAN: We have done some psychological study on this and unfortunately in
the areas where this thing is mostly happening - the recruitment of the suicide bombers -
these people have not been given proper education. So at the age of fourteen, you have a
mind which is very, very vulnerable. Secondly, these people have developed the art of
indoctrinating people. They totally brainwash them. And there are masters, trainers - and
now they are training the trainers, you see. They have gone into special programmes, so they are multiplying. The trainers are multiplying. And then it is not a kind of religion. It has become a cult.

BENNETT-JONES: A newspaper article in Pakistan recently quoted a Taliban recruiter
who said that when it came to finding suicide bombers, the younger they were, the easier it was to convince them. And as Mahboob Mahdood argues, it’s not just that the Taliban has
worked out how to convince young men of their cause. It’s also that the state has so little to offer.

MAHDOOD: I think one of the attractions of the Taliban was that they gave people of
other militant groups, and in fact of various non-militant Islamic groups as well, that they gave people a sense of identity. They get food to eat, they get clean clothes to wear, they get an education, they get a sense of identity in a society that has aspirations and the like. So there are many positive things that even the militants have to offer. It’s just that their solutions are pretty horrific, and over the long-term could create a very stunted and ghastly society.

BENNETT-JONES: Do you think it’s fair to say that those militant organisations are also
actually more meritocratic than the rest of Pakistani society?

MAHDOOD: Absolutely. I mean, for example, if you look at political parties, the two
major parties - the Peoples Party and the Muslim League - don’t hold elections and they are highly feudalistic parties.

BENNETT-JONES: If you’re a feudal vassel, you look for radical outcomes?

MAHDOOD: Yes, the alternatives don’t look so bad. I mean they look horrific to us, but
if you’ve no other prospects in life, they don’t look so bad.

BENNETT-JONES: And that is the real danger for Pakistan. I was talking with a senior
civil servant in Peshawar recently and asked if the insurgency could spread. “Of course”, he answered. “Give me a reason why it won’t spread? The land issue is here in the North
West, but it’s the same throughout Pakistan.” One of the confusing things about recent
Pakistani history is that the state itself has at times supported various parts of the Taliban. To westerners, it seems incomprehensible, but there were reasons for the policy. For one thing, there’s been no internal consensus about the nature of Pakistan. Was it created as an Islamic country or just a country for Muslims to live in? Secondly, the military have seen the Taliban and their Jihadi forebears as a useful, deniable force to be used in regional conflicts, especially with India. Farzana Shaikh has just written a history of Pakistan which traces the country’s longstanding ideological confusion.

SHAIKH: The Pakistani military establishment has generally tended to regard militant
groups as strategic assets in the conduct of an asymmetric war with India, an asymmetric
power relation with India where India of course is far superior in terms of its conventional military forces. And, therefore, this has encouraged the Pakistani military to use these militant groups as assets in trying to gain some kind of advantage.
BENNETT-JONES: But that was a strategy which would seem to have such obvious
disadvantages that these people could destabilise the state at a later point.

SHAIKH: Well that is much clearer now than it ever has been in the past, and I think the
reason why the military chose to rely on these groups, chose to work with them was
because there was a clear understanding on the part of the military establishment that this relationship would be one that the military could clearly control, that would be heavily biased in favour of the military. Obviously it has not turned out like that and what we’ve seen is these militant groups go on to develop their own agendas - many of them quite independent of the military’s agenda - and that’s what has caused all the difficulty today: many of them acting autonomously of the military.

BENNETT-JONES: The fighting now taking place in Pakistan is important, but it’s only
part of the story. In any straight fight, the army - half a million strong - should win through. But what then? There are so many uncertainties. Will the state support the millions forced from their homes by the fighting or lose them to the Taliban? Will the state itself do deals with the Taliban seeking their help once more in Kashmir or Afghanistan? Khalid Aziz fears the administrative capacity of the Pakistan government is now so weak that there’s no guarantee it will do what’s needed.

AZIZ: The problem with military action is that this issue is not a military issue. Now
militaries, they try to target what they think are areas where the militants are the hostile state. They do not have the wherewithal to command that area. After the firing of the guns or the launching of the air strikes, what happens to the ground after that? And that has to be held by the civilians and that is what we are not doing, the more we delay it. Since 2001, if you look at it, till 2004, we didn’t have any trouble, and once the fighting began from Waziristan it’s been coming into the districts. And if we have not been holding it and it goes to Lahore and the rest of the area, then what’s happening? We are losing the country, so why are we not doing it?

BENNETT-JONES: Farzana Shaikh shares those worries. After all, if the fighting goes on
for years - as many expect - will the public grow weary of the conflict and demand a
negotiated settlement? Who, in short, is going to win?

SHAIKH: It’s still too early to tell. And I think one ought to be cautious and careful about this because the national mood such as it is can be very fickle, and I think the way in which the government and indeed the military respond to and handle the huge humanitarian crisis in Pakistan is going to determine very much how this national mood plays out in favour or against the army and the government.

BENNETT-JONES: Well if that’s right, then the outlook’s not very good, is it, because
the Pakistan state has never shown a capacity to organise and to administer things of that
kind very well?

SHAIKH: That is in fact the great concern. The record of the government in the past,
particularly as we’ve seen in 2005 - the earthquake disaster, the rehabilitation and relief of refugees - its handling has always been very poor. And there is great concern now that with the government not being able to rise to the challenge as it were and with the international community still not coming forth with the kind of assistance that Pakistan has repeatedly called for, many of the military gains can easily evaporate as political discontent intensifies.

BENNETT-JONES: Western governments are rarely shy when it comes to telling
Pakistan that it needs to be more determined and more democratic. But for many Pakistanis,
the key issue is not so much democracy as the rule of law; and on the ground, that depends
in large part on the police. When the army is back in the barracks, it will be Pakistan’s
battered, underpaid policemen and women who will be on the frontline. Christine Fair:

FAIR: The counterinsurgency literature is so clear that armies don’t win
counterinsurgencies, police do. Yet for the last eight years, the international community has pumped money into the army. And I know, speaking for the United States, the money that
we have spent on all activities, including border security as well as police training (because it all gets lumped into one package for international you know counter narcotics and law enforcement activities), it’s been a pittance. So even if the state didn’t realise this and the international community didn’t realise it, the Taliban did realise it because, as you said, they’re at the frontline. They’ve been beheaded, they’ve been driven out. In fact you saw in Swat police officers taking ads out in the paper. ‘Hi, my name is Zahed Hussein. I used to be a police officer. I’m not anymore, so please don’t hunt me and my family down’. And of course if you look at the way in which the police, and of course the Frontier constabulary is you know a similar animal, they don’t have modern munitions - they have bolt action rifles; they don’t have effective ground transport; they don’t have secure communications. So this has really been an enormous opportunity lost, and many police officers have lost their life trying to do the right thing and they have simply been sitting ducks.

FX: TALIBAN CHANTING

BENNETT-JONES: Pakistan has so many challenges. As things stand, the education
system is producing a steady stream of Jihadi recruits - and there’s no quick fix there; and there may be no quick outcome to the conflict. Mahboob Mahdood from INSEAD believes
it may be a mistake to think in terms of a decisive battle after which everything will change. It might be that the increasing religiosity and maybe radicalisation of the Pakistan government happens quite gradually.

MAHDOOD: It could be a slow, gradual revolution as opposed to something that happens
at one time because I don’t think there’s one single force that would take over. But what
may happen is - and is indeed happening - is that sections of the country are going more in one direction or the other. For example, the whole spread of Sharia law and Talibanism and various militant movements and fundamentalist movements in the North West Frontier has
been going on for many, many years now. Now this is spreading to Southern Punjab and the
like, so it’s not as if there will be a revolution in the sense of a communist party taking over the country or that bits and pieces of the country begin to fall towards what I call Jihadistans.

BENNETT-JONES: Let me put this argument to you. You talk of the possibility of a
Jihadistan being established and yet 70% perhaps of Pakistanis are Sufis, they are moderate, they want nothing to do with the kind of violence that the Taliban have. And it is not the Pakistan Army and the American backers who will prevent Jihadistan; it is the people of Pakistan.

MAHDOOD: You’re right. I do believe that most Pakistanis are moderate and many of
them are either implicitly or explicitly of a mystical orientation. But mystical Islam, Sufism made its compromise with the state over a thousand years ago and became Quietest, so that means that they haven’t really had the intellectual organisational capacity to intervene in state affairs or in the direction of the state.

BENNETT-JONES: I see. So you’re saying that if the state were taken over, those
people would actually just follow the state?

MAHDOOD: I think so, unless there’s a revolution. And I think there needs to be a much
more activist now mystical or tolerant Islam that needs to develop, but this isn’t going to happen overnight.

BENNETT-JONES: So you’re saying that if there was some central collapse, the
moderate majority would go along with what happened because they’re not active?

MAHDOOD: You see in some ways the majority have seen the Islamicisation of Pakistan
occur over a long period of time. During Bhutto’s regime, he banned alcohol; during Zia’s
regime, a whole series of religious ordinances were passed and the country became much
more Islamicised. And it’s been developing since then. So this is not something coming out
of the sky. The growth of militant Islam has been about thirty or forty years in the making.

BENNETT-JONES: That’s one view. Others think the moderate majority in Pakistan will
be more resilient and that it’s already showing its resolve. At the start of this year, I was thinking Pakistan is in denial - the threat is so obvious and yet people just don’t see it - and then the mood changed. Last time I went a few weeks ago, the papers were full of vociferous denunciations of the beheadings and the suicide attacks. It’s now possible to think the state may prevail. So what happened? What changed? Jugnoo Mohsin is a
newspaper editor in Lahore whose articles have long been very critical of the Taliban, which in turn has repeatedly threatened to kill her. The government offensive began in earnest in April this year and Jugnoo Mohsin, like many others, believes a two minute clip of video broadcast shortly before that time made a big difference.

FX: TALIBAN OFFICIAL FLOGGING WOMAN

BENNETT-JONES: It shows a Taliban official in the Swat Valley flogging a young
woman who was accused of adultery. And it shocked Pakistan.

MOHSIN: For years, it was a very, very lonely struggle. We have felt very vulnerable, we
have felt very threatened because ours was a voice in the wilderness for many years. We
were the only ones who were saying that this is the enemy within. We have to tackle the
enemy within. This is our war. These people are as much the enemies of civilisation in
Pakistan - of prosperity, of economic growth, of liberal values - as they are enemies of any foreign power. But we feel far less alone now than we did before because there are many
more people who are beginning to think like us and who are beginning, more importantly, to
talk like us.

BENNETT-JONES: Some people say that these pictures have a woman being flogged in
the Swat Valley and the move into Buner, taking the Taliban quite close to Islamabad, that
those were the turning points. What do you think?

MOHSIN: I think absolutely right. You had the flogging of that girl and you had some
brave TV channels, one in particular called Dunya Television, that played that over and over again. And that became widely disseminated and that caused a sort of wave of revulsion throughout Pakistan because Swat is only a hundred miles from Islamabad. It’s not some North Waziristan or some tribal agency. And they came out in their true colours. And in urban Pakistan, in civilised Pakistan, in the Pakistan that identifies with the world that wants to educate its children, that wants to increase its social mobility, that wants to travel, that wants to be like any other civilised nation in the world, it caused such a revulsion. Here we are casting our vote in 60% turnouts of the electorate. Here we are casting our vote for all the secular middle running moderate political parties, never casting our votes for religious fundamentalists or extremists, and we suddenly turn round in urban Pakistan and say, “Oh my god, is this the future that awaits us?” And suddenly the penny began to drop. That is when people realised, saw the real face of the Taliban, of religious extremism, and what these people are all about, and also caused people to question how they had become so powerful.

BENNETT-JONES: The risks are real, but it is still the case that most Pakistanis vote
against religious parties and believe in a type of Islam that is non-confrontational, peaceful and relaxed. And that may be the state’s best defense. There is a lot at stake: Pakistan is home to many Jihadis, the central state is weak, and it has the bomb. For all these reasons, Pakistan matters. The last few months have been highly significant. Mainstream Pakistanis - not urban liberals and their western friends - have for the first time expressed real concern about the Taliban. And the fight is on. It is a military and ideological struggle, it will last for years, and the outcome is uncertain.