The PakAf Mistake

By Steve Hynd

COIN advocates and their neocon fellow-travellers have been telling us for a while now that Pakistan is where the real action is in AfPak, because that's where the leadership of Al Qaeda and the Taliban are. Its a belief underlined by the growing use of PakAf as the acronym for the two nations instead and one which raises the prospect of the U.S. admitting tacitly it is occupying one nation only because it cannot conceivably occupy another.

If so, anything that could plausibly be called success in the region would depend upon the earnest co-operation of the massive Pakistani military-industrial complex, not the weak civilian government. "The military controls one-third of all heavy manufacturing and up to 7% of private assets" according to expert Dr Ayesha Siddiqa, including cement factories, bakeries, housing and banks in a $10 billion empire. It also controls the fifth largest armed forces in the world. Whenever any threat to the empire's supremacy has surfaced - be it civilian leadership or militants in Swat - they have been ruthlessly crushed, indicating that scary stories of the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) ever taking over Pakistan and its nuclear arsenal are just that -scary stories serving hawkish aims.

But how serious is the Pakistani military-industrial complex, the entity that holds the most real political power in Pakistan, about aiding U.S. attempts to reduce or eradicate Al Qaeda or the various groups collectively called the Afghan Taliban? After all, that complex was the main supporter of Islamic terrorist groups in the region for years.

Admiral Mullen, General Petraeus and DHS head Janet Napolitano have stuck publicly to the line that General Kayani and his corrupt puppet President Zardari have ensured that Pakistan has put the bad days behind itself and is now a whole-hearted ally in the War on Terror. It's exactly the same line that the Bush administration used to publicly take about Musharraf even as Musharaff's ISI intelligence agency was revitalizing its plans to regain its strategic depth in Afghanistan by resuming its political and military support for the Taliban.

 Either Mullen et al have been conned by ex-Pakistani intelligence chief Kayani or they themselves are conning their public, because it simply isn't true. The U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Patterson, revealed on Friday that Pakistan isn't backing U.S. goals at all, showing extreme reluctance to use their military might to crack down on Afghan Taliban bases or leadership inside Pakistan. As a cynic like my colleague Eric Martin might say, does the word "Duh!" mean anything to Mullen?

The simple truth is that Pakistan is preserving its (probably partial) control over regional extremist groups as a hedge against India. India really is a threat to Pakistan because Pakistan is allied with China, which really is a threat to India. All concerned have decided that the benefits of trade outweigh their wish to fight their enemies directly, and so have largely confined themselves to military posturing and proxy forces - so far. But Afghanistan is the battleground for a facedown between India and China/Pakistan, each trying to deny the other important overland trade access to the Middle East and Europe. The latter see the U.S. as primarily an ally of India and theories run wild as to America's true motives. None of this is going to stop just because America says so.

And, like kids who know that the best way to deflect wrongdoing is to accuse someone else of the same thing, Pakistan accuses a others of exactly what it is doing itself in Afghanistan.

ISLAMABAD/PESHAWAR: The arrested commanders of Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan have confessed that secret departments of India, including RAW, and Afghanistan have been providing them weapons and funds to fight against the Pakistan Army.

A report here on Saturday submitted to high officials by a joint investigation team said that 23 most wanted militant commanders including Sim Khan, Mahmood Khan and Maulvi Umer who were captured during operation Rah-e-Rast have confessed that they had been provided financial aid, weapons and special training by secret agencies from India and Afghanistan to fight against Pakistan’s security forces.

The report also divulged that some militants received special war training from Afghanistan and secret agencies of two other neighbouring countries also supported them in the plan.

Whether this report is true or not is almost beside the point. Pakistanis, including their leadership, will act as if it were true in any case. It's in their national interest to do so.

Nothing has really changed since Musharraf's days, and nothing is likely to unless the geopolitical face-off between China and India, which is the prime cause of the sub-continents proxy-war problems, is defused. That might require a shift in focus from the U.S., concentrating upon diplomatic and economic means to leverage China and address the actual cause, rather than using military force to try to address the symptoms. In the meantime, as I've argued for years now, it is a deep mistake to call Pakistan even a reluctant ally. The U.S. has been had, conned, bilked - aid for fighting America's terrorist enemies has instead gone to suppport those enemies or to bolster Pakistan's armed stance against India. Containment, not alliance, should be America's Pakistan strategy until such time as the root causes of the regions manifold problems can be addressed.

Comments

[John Ballard]

In my efforts to figure out what's going on over there I came across a book review/commentary by Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist and writer.

http://www.nybooks.com/authors/8939

It prints out to about eight pages and covers two books on the subject. His take on the Pakistan position reflects what you said.

The army would prefer to wait and see what happens in Waziristan and also in Afghanistan. It is hesitant to move into the tribal areas, where since 2004 it has been defeated by the guerrilla tactics of the Taliban and their advantage in the area's harsh mountainous terrain. Pakistan continues to pursue a policy of containing the Taliban fighters on the Afghan border rather than eliminating them. That clearly will not satisfy Western governments and military leaders since it leaves NATO forces in Afghanistan vulnerable to the inflow of men, supplies, and suicide bombers from the tribal areas of Pakistan.

Senior Pakistani officials say they will only be able to adopt a new strategy against the Taliban when India changes its current policy toward Pakistan and Kashmir. In Swat the army succeeded because it made use of Pakistani troops transferred from the Indian border, where 80 percent of the army is based. The key to launching a Pakistani offensive in the tribal areas is for the Americans to help improve Pakistan's relations with New Delhi, so that the army can move more of its troops to the Afghan border.

India is not helping. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said on August 17 that Pakistan-based terrorist groups were plotting more attacks against India. Last November the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Pure) carried out attacks in Mumbai that killed 166 people. Lashkar is a group that is distinct from the Taliban and has been particularly active against targets in India and Kashmir. Indian officials now say that Hafiz Saeed, the Lashkar leader who lives undisturbed in Lahore, was "the brain" behind the Mumbai attack. They demand that he be put on trial.

Pakistan is refusing to clamp down on Lashkar or put Saeed behind bars. Lashkar is the best disciplined, organized, and loyal of the jihadi groups that the ISI has trained and sponsored since the 1980s, and it has always targeted India rather than the Pakistani army. The army will do everything to preserve Lashkar, as long as it believes there is a threat from India. Similarly, Pakistan's continued support for the Afghan Taliban is based on countering India's influence in Afghanistan and on having an alternative force that Pakistan can count on, in case the Americans leave Afghanistan.

In short, the strategy of the Pakistani military to selectively use Islamic extremists both as a tool in its foreign policy arsenal against India and to gain influence in Afghanistan is not going to change in a hurry. The Obama administration's main strategy for the moment is hand-holding—it wants to keep engaging with the Pakistani leaders to try to get them to change course. At least one senior US official arrives in Islamabad every other week to argue the American case.

Another wrinkle in the fabric is the issue of Balochistan vs Punjab.

Balochistan is Pakistan's largest province, comprising 48 percent of its territory and sharing a long border with southern Afghanistan; but it is a land of rugged mountains and deserts, with a population of only 12 million people. Ever since Pakistan's creation in 1947, the Baloch tribes have been in revolt against what they see as the chauvinism and denial of their rights by the Pakistani army in favor of Punjab, the country's most populous province, with 86 million people.

In five major insurgencies against the army, the Baloch have demanded greater autonomy, royalties for the province's gas, development funds, and genuine political representation. The fifth insurgency began in 2005 and has intensified because of the brutal repression and hundreds of "disappearances" of Baloch nationalists, for which the army under former President Pervez Musharraf was responsible.

Many young Baloch are now demanding their own state. In August, with the start of the new school year, Baloch students refused to hoist the Pakistani flag or sing the national anthem. Ten non-Baloch college principals were assassinated by guerrillas the same month, creating panic among the Punjabi settler population. The Khan of Kalat, Mir Suleman Dawood, the titular chief of chiefs of all the Baloch tribes—whose ancestors once ruled Balochistan—announced on August 11 the formation of a council for "an independent Balochistan"; he rejected any reconciliation with the government unless there was international mediation from the UN. According to human rights activists, hundreds of Baloch nationalists have disappeared—they are believed to have been secretly arrested and tortured by the military but their whereabouts remain unknown.

I also get the impression that the region between Pakistan and Afghanistan is something like our Indian Reservations, minus any semblance of civility or humanity. They call it the Federal Administered Tribal Areas (FATA for short... no kin to Fatah, of course, but easy to remember) which is the big area including Waziristan in the South, which in turn is split into North Waziristan and South Waziristan.

The cast of characters reminds me of a cross between a Russian novel and a Cosa Nostra Who's Who. This place is truly a can of worms. I cannot imagine that even someone who knows all the details can come up with any rational way to resolve centuries of conflict still strong on all sides.

=====================

Another link is "Four Reasons for Optimism in Pakistan" by Imtiaz Gul in FP.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/09/16/four_reasons_for_optimism_in_pakistan

Shorter and less detailed, and silent, unfortunately, about FATA and the Baloch tribal area. (It's human nature to be in denial about problems that remain unresolved for generations.)

======================

The sooner we clarify what the hell we're doing the better. This much is clear: every civilian killed by Americans creates yet another cluster of family and acquaintances with an identifiable reason to hate Americans.