Newshoggers.com

A Duh! Moment

By Steve Hynd

A report today states the bleeding obvious (h/t Kat):

If it were in a position to do so, Al Qaeda would use Pakistan's nuclear weapons in its fight against the United States, a top leader of the group said in remarks aired Sunday.

Duh! Did anyone not know this already? What's far less obvious is the chances of that ever happening.

The Pakistani Taliban, for reasons of demography, comparative firepower and ethnic antipathy, have next to no chance of ever taking over Pakistan from the massive Pakistani military. The AQ network of mainly non-Pakistanis, therefore, have even less chance. Nil. The chances of AQ seizing those heavily-guarded nukes, possibly with their component parts widely disperssed, as well as the codes created with US help needed to unlock their destructive potential are likewise vanishingly small.

The only viable path to AQ's dream would be if Pakistan's military secretly handed them those components and codes, something that's also unlikely in the extreme unless the West backs Pakistan into a corner first. The hawkish penchant for bombing civilians, while not at all helpful, isn't sufficient for that. I'm having difficulties imagining a scenario that could lead to such help for AQ, especially given post-bomb forensic identification methods and the inevitable consequences for Pakistan.

It's a fantasy, a pipe-dream, a scary story intended to get Western pantswetting hawks all in a flutter, psyops terrorism by press release.

UN Finally Starts Bhutto Assassination Investigation

By Steve Hynd

A year and a half after Benazir Bhutto's death by assassination during the lead-up to Pakistani elections, the UN has finally appointed a three man panel to "inquire into the facts and circumstances" of her death. However, the "duty to determine criminal responsibility of the perpetrators of the assassination remains with the Pakistani authorities," according to Michele Montas, UN Secretary Ban Ki Moon's spokeswoman.

I'm not sure what that means. Will they simply be looking into the evidence for her death being by bullet or by head trauma caused by her striking her head against a sun-roof lever, as the Pakistani government maintains happened? Or will they be trying to establish who the gunmen were, what their affilitations might be and the identities of the actual issuers of the assassination order - then leaving it up to Pakistan as to whether it wants to prosecute those who ordered the hit? The Scotland Yard enquiry at the time was restricted, at Pakistani insistence, to the former - and came away inconclusive.

Either way, there's certainly plenty to keep the team busy (as the series of posts we did at the old Newshoggers site at the time shows)  - especially after all this time. I'm sure that a lot of the trail of evidence is very cold by now.

For myself, I'm convinced that the ISI killed Benazir Bhutto, most probably at the instigation of General Musharraf rather than as a "loose cannon" operation. That they then accused Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud, who denied the claim and called for a full independent investigation, because they thought it likely he'd never come to trail for the accusations. And that current Pakistani president and Bhutto's widower Asif Zardari knows all this...and did a deal to keep quiet in return for becoming President, where he can continue his lifelong habit of lining his own pockets via corruption.

When Pakistan Does COIN

By Steve Hynd

American military types and COINdinista gurus have been saying for a few months now that Pakistan really does need to learn how to do proper counter-insurgency operations. US taxpayers are about to foot a $400 million bill to help them do that.

Well, a couple of days ago McClatchy ran a report which passed under most folks radar which suggests the US generals and COIN afficiandos didn't really think through what COIN in Pakistan's own national interest might look like.

A new Islamic militia leader has emerged in Pakistan to openly challenge al Qaida-affiliated warlord Baitullah Mehsud for the first time from within his own tribe, marking the start of a bloody confrontation in the wild Waziristan region that could have profound consequences for both Pakistan and the West.

In his first interview with a Western news organization, Qari Zainuddin told McClatchy this week that he'd wipe out Mehsud and rescue Pakistan from a reign of terror that has pushed the nuclear-armed U.S. ally toward collapse.

...victory will not mean any lessening of efforts to expel Westerners from neighboring Afghanistan, Zainuddin said. He pledged to send his forces into Afghanistan once Mehsud is vanquished...Zainuddin, who described himself as "real" Taliban , reportedly has gathered as many as 3,000 armed followers and is being secretly backed by the Pakistan state against Mehsud.

It's a Pashtun Awakening, even bringing in several of Mehsud's own tribal chiefs against him. But Zainuddin is "real" Taliban, so he would still go after the US in Afghanistan, even while he is backed by the Pakistani military.

Sounds like the Pakistanis do know how to do COIN after all...they just don't have American interests at heart while they're doing it. But they'll have American money.

When COIN Theory Hits The Gordian Knot Of Reality

By Steve Hynd

As the U.S. goes surging into Afghanistan and the Pakistani military continues its ethnic cleansing operations in Pakistan's own most unloved territories, a cautionary tale about U.S. perceptions and expectations from the London Times:

US and British officials are no doubt delighted to see tribesmen in northwestern Pakistan fighting the Taleban after years of sheltering, tolerating or supporting them. Elsewhere in the country, there has also been an unprecedented wave of public, political and even religious support for the army’s campaign in Swat, despite the massive exodus of refugees.

This appears to show that Pakistanis have at last heeded Western warnings that the militancy they face is indigenous and threatens the existence of the Pakistani state.

What is less encouraging — and less well advertised — is that a key reason for the backlash is that many Pakistanis believe the Taleban is being funded and armed by America as part of an elaborate geopolitical conspiracy.

Absurd as it may sound to Westerners this conspiracy theory, like so many others in Pakistan, seems to have taken root among even well-educated people in the political, military and religious establishments.

It was outlined recently in an interview with Sarfraz Ahmed Naeemi, a respected Sunni cleric who set up an alliance of 22 Islamic groups and political parties last month with the explicit goal of opposing the Taleban.

He explained that the Taleban preached an extreme version of the Deobandi school of Sunni Islam, while most Pakistanis followed the more moderate Barelvi school.

He said that many Pakistanis were outraged when the Taleban attacked Barelvi shrines, and denounced Pakistan’s constitution and democratic system as unIslamic.

Halfway through the interview, however, he suddenly added that the Taleban was also being funded and trained by the CIA, Mossad, and India’s RAW intelligence agency. Why? As part of a strategy to carve out an independent statelet in northwestern Pakistan to help to contain China’s growing military and economic power. And to capture Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.

So even when Pakistan does what the US wants, it's seen as anti- American to do so. Even as Pakistan battles its own extremists, the favored narrative complicates America's tasks of people-centric counter-insurgency in neighbouring Afghanistan and wider regional diplomacy by setting any Pakistani struggle up as being against what many in the region see as America's true colonial motives there. How did that one fly under the planning radar, as it apparently has? It's a potential COIN cock-up of monumental proportions.

COIN has been described as a process of "holistic war", where the "blowing stuff up" and the "hearts and minds" must work in close to perfect harmony or fail. I've written before that the U.S. military's intitutional inertia, coupled with U.S. policymakers tendency to inflict populaist rhetoric designed for domestic rhetoric on foreigners as policy, makes sure that "hollistic" process will fail too often for even a limited COIN strategy in Af/Pak to succeed.

Here's another example of why things go wrong when translating COIN think-tank papers into reality, from security consultant Tim Lynch and regional defense and intelligence expert Joshua Foust, from the latter's post at Registan.net:

Tim Lynch just got back from Gardez, and while I think he undersells the charm of the city a bit, his main point is beautifully spot-on:

As I mentioned in my last post I do not really know what our mission in Afghanistan is. We are engaged in a counterinsurgency war but confine the troops to large FOB’s which directly contradicts our counterinsurgency doctrine. Our troops do not have sustained meaningful contact with local Afghans, cannot provide any real security to them, and due to Big Army casualty policies are forced to ride around in large multimillion dollar MRAP’s where they are subject to IED strikes which they cannot prevent because they do not control one meter of ground outside their FOBs. We also do not have the cooperation of the government of Afghanistan. President Karzai has cobbled together a coalition of Afghan power brokers and will win the upcoming election. The UN and our Department of State can make all the noise they want about a “free and fair” election but they are irrelevant because they stay isolated and unengaged in their high speed compounds. The election was decided in Dubai last month as I reported earlier. Besides Afghans have no idea what a free and fair election is – they are no more capable of conducting one than the state of Illinois. So we are fighting a counterinsurgency in support of a government who is actively hindering our efforts by not cooperating with our military, our hapless State Department, or any other organization trying to bring peace, hope, modernity and the rule of law to this once proud and beautiful country.

That almost entirely summarizes why my embed in Afghanistan earlier this year changed me from being optimistic about the war to deeply pessimistic...there is a fundamental disconnect between what we are doing in Afghanistan and what we expect to happen. And that is best exemplified by the big huge FOBs that hold far too many people compared to what needs to happen.

The London Time's article also underlines another point I don't make often enough and the interventionsits who make up the vast bulk of DC's Very Serious Person set don't make at all. It's my conviction that no-one knows how to solve the sub- continent's various problems, of which the Taliban and Islamic extremism is just the one we in the West have been concentrating on most. On top of that there's Pak/India, Pak/Iran, ethnic and religious separatist movements galore, China v India, China v USA, Hindu extremism, working class revolutionary tendencies often mixed up with religious or ethnic extremism, the upcoming religious and economic crises in Bangladesh and the knock on effect they'll have on neighbours power-politics...

It's a perfect Gordian Knot; when you tease out one bit to untangle it, another bit just gets pulled tighter, and there's no sword sharp enough to cut it. Anyone (including myself) who puts forward a solution for one tangle without mentioning how their solution would make other bits of the knot more intransigent is just blowing smoke up their reader's asses. Frankly, though, the notion that all of this can be untangled by military forces - practising counter-insurgency or otherwise - is truly worthy of the description "laughable".

Local coins for COIN

By Fester:

Zenpundit earlier this month reviewed the Accidental Guerrilla by David Kilcullen and he noted one of the major problems in the entire COIN literature:

First, Kilcullen’s three principles are an operational and not a genuinely strategic doctrine. In fairness, no major COIN advocate has ever said otherwise and have often emphasized the point. The problem is that a lot of their intended audience - key civilian decision makers and opinion shapers in their 30’s-50’s often do not understand the difference, except for a minority who have learned from bitter experience. Most of those who have, the Kissingers, Brzezinskis, Shultzes etc. are elder statesmen on the far periphery of policy

This leads to a massive disconnect in planning, policy and goal sets, as operational goals (securing a modicum and 'decent' level of violence) overrides the minimally existent political constraints and goals. 

The 10 second description of the official US Army counter-insurgency doctrine is simple:

Enhance the host government's legitimacy and capability while denying legitimacy and capacity to the insurgent(s).

From this, everything else derives including the strong inclination to NOT using air strike, the argument that the best metric of success is not body counts but secured villages or neighborhoods.  This basic axiom should guide the actions of every leader from the E-4 fire team leader to the Secrtary of Defense and the President.  All actions that contribute to legitimacy and capacity enhancement of the host government are productive actions strategically.  All actions that do not aid in supporting legitimacy and capability are self-defeating actions. 

Time Magazine reports on the current US plan for Afghanistan.  It involves a surge of a few additional brigades, a doubling of the Afghani Army, increasing the national police force and expanding local militias.  There are many problems, including the dispersion of the legitimacy of violence to non-state militias, but there is a far more pragmatic concern of sustainability:

That's the reason the Obama Administration is considering doubling the size of Afghanistan's military and national police forces, to roughly 400,000. That's more than triple what U.S. officials had estimated would be needed to defend the country shortly after the U.S. invaded in late 2001....

But there's a problem with the option of doubling the size of the Afghan security forces: Officials inside and out of the Pentagon warn that the bill for setting up such a large force, estimated at $2 billion to $3 billion annually for several years, could prove daunting — more than double the budget of the Afghan government, and way more than could be sustained by Afghanistan's own economy for the foreseeable future.

Implied with this statement is that the current Afghanistani force structure is more expensive than the government's current budget.  So doubling the force structure either means the Kabul government will forever be a client government begging for outside funding to fund its oversized armed forces or it will be incapable of providing basic public services or it will be subject to the whims of the IMF and economic cycles that dwarf the Kabul government's capacity to influence.  None of those scenarios are legitimacy enhancing scenarios. 

The disconnect will lead to a minimization of political goals as our national decision loop short circuits itself to subjugating itself to the known processes instead of grappling with the needed questions as to what end states are achievable and desirable. 

Every major attack "is planned in detail with the ISI"

By Steve Hynd

Veteran Afghanistan reporter Anand Gopal has an eye-opener of a piece at Christian Science Monitor today.He writes that the major threat to U.S. troops in Afghanistan isn't Omar's Taliban or even Bin Laden's Al Qaeda - it's the Haqqani network of militants. And every major attack is planned with the help of Pakistan's shadowy ISI intelligence service.

"The Haqqani network has proven itself to be the most capable [of the insurgent groups], able to conduct spectacular attacks inside Afghanistan," says Matthew DuPee, researcher at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif.

The network, which is independent of (but allied with) the Taliban, showed its mettle again on May 12, when nearly a dozen fighters stormed government buildings in Afghanistan's southeastern city of Khost. The coordinated attack featured multiple suicide bombers and was one of the most brazen to take place in the city in years.

The Haqqani network is considered the most sophisticated of Afghanistan's insurgent groups. The group is alleged to be behind many high-profile assaults, including a raid on a luxury hotel in Kabul in January 2008 and a massive car bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul that left 41 people dead in July 2008.

The group is active in Afghanistan's southeastern provinces – Paktia, Paktika, Khost, Logar, and Ghazni. In parts of Paktika, Khost, and Paktia, they have established parallel governments and control the countryside of many districts. "In Khost, government officials need letters from Haqqani just to move about on the roads in the districts," says Hanif Shah Husseini, a parliamentarian from Khost.

The leadership, according to US and Afghan sources, is based near Miramshah, North Waziristan, in the Pakistani tribal areas. Pakistani authorities and leading Haqqani figures deny this, although former Haqqani fighters say this is indeed the case.

The network is better connected to Pakistani intelligence and Arab jihadist groups than any other Afghan insurgent group, according to American intelligence officials.

...In addition to suicide attacks, the Haqqanis are known for their well-orchestrated attacks. US intelligence officials and Haqqani insiders say that this is largely a result of close cooperation with the Pakistani ISI – something Pakistani officials have denied.

Every major attack "is planned in detail with the ISI in camps in Waziristan," says one former Haqqani commander, who declined to be named for fear of retribution. Officials say the Haqqanis use money from Al Qaeda-linked sources, and also possibly from timber smuggling, to finance their operations.

The current head of the Pakistani armed forces, General Kayani, is de facto ruler of that nation, keeping a convenient civilian figurehead so the U.S. can keep sending weapons without looking like it's still arming a dictatorship. He was also head of the ISI back in 2006 when bombs blasted out across Mumbai in India - an attack the Indian's say was as much planned by the ISI as the more recent attacks of last year. There's a massive body of accounts and evidence that the ISI are deeply involved, still and at an institutional level, in using terror groups as proxies. Yet Kayani's bff Admiral Mullen and the Obama administration keep saying the problem is limited only to "certain elements" within the ISI and that Pakistan is a tue, staunch ally of America's GWOT (tm). Either Obama, Mullen et al are being had, or we are.

Pakistan's Refugee Problem "On A Comparable Scale To Rwanda"

By Steve Hynd

The British religious advocacy website Ekklesia reports today that the refugee crisis caused by fighting between the Pakistani military and Taliban is the "largest and fastest anywhere in the world in recent years, putting it on a comparable scale to Rwanda in 1994."

The suffering and need of millions of Pakistan’s displaced people has the potential to be protracted, lasting for many months, according to UK relief and development agency Tearfund.

According to local sources, as many as 3.4 million people are now reported to be vulnerable after being uprooted from their homes in the Swat Valley and neighbouring areas of northern Pakistan; the majority leaving since the Pakistan Army began its recent offensive last month.

Tearfund says that the scale of need should focus international attention and trigger a major humanitarian response to avoid prolonging the suffering.

"The needs are massively underserved and the world’s media attention is elsewhere," says David Bainbridge, Tearfund’s Disaster Management Director. "At present our response is a drop in the ocean. The delayed media attention to Sri Lanka hindered the humanitarian response there. We must avoid the same situation in Pakistan where limited access and media coverage make this another forgotten crisis where the humanitarian needs of the displaced are inadequately provided for."

According to World Health Organisation officials and local sources, some 2.9 million people are estimated to have fled from the region in recent weeks.

...The crisis comes at a key point in the region’s crop planting season and is likely to have a detrimental knock-on effect for food supplies this winter and into next year.

Concerns that this crisis could result in a protracted displacement are underlined by the uncertainty about the length of the Pakistan Army operations in the region. Further fighting in Waziristan, which borders Afghanistan to the south west of the Swat Valley, could lead to further population movements as people fear becoming trapped in subsequent military attacks.

That further fighting is already happening, as the Pakistani military practise what has always been the most effective of all COIN tactics - ethnic cleansing and scorched earth. Right now, Mingora, the main city of the Swat Valley looks like this:

 

The BBC reports:

The International Red Cross said it was "gravely concerned" by the humanitarian situation in Swat.

Water and electricity were not available, there was no fuel for generators, most medical facilities had stopped operating and food was scarce, it said.

"The people of Swat need greater humanitarian protection and assistance immediately," said Pascal Cuttat, head of the organisation's delegation in Pakistan.

Fawad Hussein, of the United Nations office for the co-ordination of humanitarian affairs, said:

"Since there is no electricity supply, the wells are not working. People are forced to use alternative water sources, which is causing water-borne diseases. There is no electricity in any of the health facilities."

All this to chase a minority among a minority, a few thousand rag-tag militants without tanks, aircraft or artillery that couldn't be a really existential threat to Pakistan in any possible world.

The Pakistani government and military initated their offensive at the Obama administration's urging. Obama should now step up with major humanitarian aid plans. His administration's pressure on Pakistan to act forcefully will be directly responsible for a humanitarian catastrophe that makes Iraq's displaced - something many of Obama's supporters have described as a war crime - pale by comparison. Making some amends is the least he can do.

Afghanistan Timeline: Decades

By Fester:

Building on what Steve wrote earlier, the US strategy for Afghanistan is optimistically only a decade long strategy so the Afghanistan War will be eligible to vote when victory can be declared.

Here is some more from David Kilcullen, the leading COIN advocate on an optimistic Afghanistan time-line: h/t Bruce R

As of mid-2008 only about one quarter of Afghanistan was under government control, half was disputed, and the remaining quarter was Taleban-controlled. Should everything go well this year, we will succeed — at best — in stopping the rot, stabilising the country and setting the conditions for progress from next year onwards. Either way, we can expect at least another year or two of serious combat before we can begin handing over more fully to newly expanded Afghan police and military units; these will become available around 2011 as current schemes to increase their numbers come to fruition. This handover process could take another three to five years, and we may then be in a position, after (say) 2015, to drop back to a mentoring, partnering and overwatch role — a role we may need to maintain for several more years to come.

And here is the problem with COIN as a strategic doctrine in and of itself; it neglects the political constraints in barging forward.  As I wrote in March on the weakness of COIN as a preferred policy:

COIN today promises the same type of inputs --- ten to twenty year wars, operational costs of one to two points of annual GDP at a time of structural deficits and domestic fiscal crisis --- with the same type of outcomes --- weak, client states in need of continual support in secondary or tertiary areas of interest.

And shockingly the public of democracies don't like COIN nor do they want to spend those resources for minimal real gains in security that operational and tactical successes may or may not generate. 

So if we assume that democracies are not likely to support doctrines, strategies and techniques  that produce long term ongoing costs with minimal prospects of producing desired long term political benefits, the problem in the Clauswitzian perspective is not the grand strategic level, but at the strategic and operational levels where the COIN doctrine is implemented in disregard to the grand strategic appreciation of forces and reality. 

The successes at the lower levels of importance do not align with the grand strategic interests of a democracy. At that point, COIN is an attempt to use tactical and operational success to ignore divergent grand strategic aims.

 

Change? Not So Much - Again

Commentary By Ron Beasley

Steve touched on this below but I think it deserves a little more attention.

Iraq redux? Obama seeks funds for Pakistan super-embassy

The U.S. is embarking on a $1 billion crash program to expand its diplomatic presence in Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan, another sign that the Obama administration is making a costly, long-term commitment to war-torn South Asia, U.S. officials said Wednesday.

The White House has asked Congress for — and seems likely to receive — $736 million to build a new U.S. embassy in Islamabad, along with permanent housing for U.S. government civilians and new office space in the Pakistani capital.

The scale of the projects rivals the giant U.S. Embassy in Baghdad, which was completed last year after construction delays at a cost of $740 million.

It would appear they are planing for a big presence for a very long time.  And it's not just Pakistan:

Other major projects are planned for Kabul, Afghanistan; and for the Pakistani cities of Lahore and Peshawar. In Peshawar, the U.S. government is negotiating the purchase of a five-star hotel that would house a new U.S. consulate.

Funds for the projects are included in a 2009 supplemental spending bill that the House of Representatives and the Senate have passed in slightly different forms.

Obama has repeatedly stated that stabilizing Pakistan and Afghanistan, the countries from which al Qaida and the Taliban operate, is vital to U.S. national security. He's ordered thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan and is proposing substantially increased aid to both countries.

Something that is rarely mentioned is that the Taliban was created by Pakistan's ISI during the Reagan, Bush 41 and Clinton administrations.

Independent journalist Jeremy Scahill sums it up: 

Ah, good thing the US quest for violent global domination was brought to a screeching halt with the November presidential election. Without Obama’s election, we’d still have an occupation of Iraq, mercenaries on the US payroll, torture of prisoners, an unending and worsening war that kills civilians in Afghanistan, regular airstrikes in Pakistan, killing civilians and an embassy the size of Vatican city in Baghdad, which was built in part on slave labor. Not to mention those crazy “Bush/Cheney” neocons running around trying to become the “CEOs” of foreign nations. Wow, glad that’s all over. Whew! And, it’s a really good thing Bush is no longer in power or else the US would come up with some crazy idea like building a colonial fortress in Pakistan to defend “US interests” in the region.

"Our Common Foes"

By Steve Hynd

A massive car bomb, placed by suicide attackers right between a police station and an office of the ISI intelligence agency, has killed at least 30 in Lahore, Pakistan, and wounded over 250. The attack is being blamed on the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which is probably a safe bet although no-one has claimed responsibility as yet.

Both the Pakistani authorities and the Obama administration are declaring solidarity in the fight against extremism in the aftermath of this horrific attack. But those declarations hide the truth about the multi-faceted nature of the extremist movement in the region.

[Interior Minister Rehman] Malik blamed the attack on militants that government forces are fighting in the northeastern Swat Valley and the border region where U.S. and other officials believe al-Qaida and Taliban militants are hiding and planning attacks against Western forces in Afghanistan.

"They are anti-state elements, and after being defeated in Swat they have moved to our big cities," Malik told the Express news channel.

U.S. officials and others in the past have accused the Inter-Services Intelligence agency of having links to militant groups, including the Taliban in Afghanistan. But the secretive agency has also been responsible for capturing and interrogating al-Qaida terrorist suspects and collecting intelligence that helps the military's campaign against militants in the border region.

President Asif Ali Zardari condemned the attack in a statement and said his government remained committed to rooting out terrorism.

U.S. Ambassador Anne W. Patterson expressed sympathy for the victims of Wednesday's attack and praise for the security forces for battling "our common foes."

"These attacks show the lengths extremist elements are willing to go to as they attempt to force their agenda onto a people who only wish to go about their daily lives in peace," she said in a statement.

Despite these declarations, the two nations have few foes in common. When the Pakistani government says it is devoted to the fight against terrorists, it should be understood as adding sotto voce "except those under our infuence" - which includes the Afghan Taliban the US is fighting as well as Kashmiri separatist fighters and groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba responsible for atrocities in Mumbai. Muddying that distinction is in the best interests of the Pakistani elite, since if it were clearer there would be far more resistance in the West to sending military aid which is the be-all-and-end-all of Pakistan's co-operation, such as it is, in the "War on Terror".

But the Obama administration, like the Bush administration before it, benefits from depicting extremists in the region as homogenous too. From the U.S. point of view, that military aid ensures a supply line to Afghanistan, one the occupation there still couldn't be sustained without. Spinning Pakistan as being wholeheartedly "in it with us" is essential to that occupation - and leaving Afghanistan is seen as losing by the political right, Dem interventionists and the preponderance of Village talking heads. There's simply too much invested in staying to admit the truth about Pakistan's meddling in Afghanistan too loud and too often.

Then there's the domestic value of an appearance of a united front, a truly gobal war rather than a War On Some Terror. Gates himself admits that the American people have maybe a year of patience for the Af/Pak conflict as domestic opinion currently stands. How much shorter would that patience be if America was seen as in bed with a duplicitous ally, and committing billions in resources to fighting Pakistan's own indigenous war against what has become in effect a Pashtun insurgency for them?