A new Council On Foreign Relations report concludes that the United States will need an adjusted, long-term commitment to Pakistan's tribal regions in order to bolster U.S. security and eliminate national and international terrorist networks.
"The security challenges of Pakistan's tribal areas lie at the center of broader regional and global threats to stability," the report by the council's Center For Preventive Action says.
"The best way to meet these challenges is through enhanced partnership with the political and security institutions of the Pakistani state, and the best way to improve this cooperation is by planning, organizing, and budgeting for a decades-long U.S. commitment to the region."
The report, Securing Pakistan's Tribal Belt, outlines the dangerous nature of terrorist insurgencies in Pakistan's tribal areas, formulates strategies for addressing these challenges, and distills these strategies into policy proposals for the next U.S. administration. The author of the report is former State Department official Daniel Markey, senior fellow for India, Pakistan, and South Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations.
The report says the tribal belt along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan faces the challenges of "harsh geography, poor education, and scarce infrastructure."
At present, it concludes, "the Pakistani government lacks the political, military, or bureaucratic capacity to fix the tribal areas on its own."
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LONG BUT INTERESTING:
"The Pakistan crisis deepens – with Washington’s assistance"
Sol Sanders
A Sense of Asia # 374
July 02, 2008
One learns early in life – or should – that it is never correct to say
that “things couldn’t get worse”. They always can. And with
dysfunctional Third World regimes [yes the appellation still applies
for lack of a better one!] that is certainly often the case.
But it is nevertheless tempting to say that about the current
situation in Pakistan.
The country is beset with a growing internal Islamicist terrorist
movement that is a threat to its long time formal dedication to a
secularized society. That builds on the contradiction since its
founding ethos was as a homeland for British Indian Muslims. Its
immediate neighbors are threatened by the terrorists — e.g., possible
contagion for India’s own Muslim perhaps larger than Pakistan’s 166
million. But the threat of Pakistan’s implosion or splintering would
redound on the Indian Union itself.
Furthermore, Pakistani fanaticism threatens with the long arm of
decades of heavy immigration to the United Kingdom and other parts of
the West as well as in the Persian Gulf states with their hundreds of
thousands of South Indian labor.
And, perhaps more important than all, U.S.Chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff Mike Mullen told a group of American military writers in
early June after a visit to Pakistan that "I believe fundamentally if
the United States is going to get hit [again such as 9/11], it's going
to come out of the planning that the leadership in the FATA [Federally
Administered Tribal Areas] is generating…” in the area fronting
Afghanistan.
Long years of bad governance, corruption and neglect of economic
development – as vast sums were diverted to the cost of a gigantic
[given the size of the country and its poverty] military machine –
have set the stage for poverty, ignorance and fanaticism among a
swelling population. Whatever other pretexts, the military and the
focus of the government since it is the only national functioning
institution in the country, always gives highest priority to its
fragile relations with a larger and more powerful India. That friction
has already descended into armed conflict three and a half times
during the half century of both states’ independence. Relations are
for the moment better but always subject to unexpected incidents of
violence on the [heavily militarized] Line of Control in Kashmir and
in terrorist acts constantly taking place in both countries.
If that were not enough, Pakistan suffers from the tender mercies of
its two allies – the well-meaning, generous [$11 billion in aid in the
past six years, non-military aid current running at $400 million
annually] if bumbling Americans, and the crafty, amoral Chinese. The
focus in Washington has shifted – after a period of malignant neglect
after the Soviet implosion of 1990 – from an alliance against Soviet
imperialism in The Cold War to an alliance against Islamofascism since
9/11.
Beijing has always had a simpler concern: my enemy’s enemy is my
friend. For whatever the current relatively good state of Indian-
Chinese relations – China has moved into first place among India’s
trading partners – Islamabad’s enmity for India is what attracts
Beijing’s interest. With the construction by China of a second major
Pakistan oceangoing port at the entrance to the Persian Gulf on the
Iranian border, Beijing is obviously hoping the strategic depth Gwadar
gives the Pakistan navy against India would come in handy as it
implements its own Blue Water ambitions into the Indian Ocean.
In the post-9/11 crisis, tough U.S. talk forced Pakistan’s President
Gen. Pervez Musharraf to choose Washington in President George W.
Bush’s dictum of “you are either with us or against us”. The choice
was stark: drop Pakistan’s sponsorship of the Taliban Regime in
neighboring Afghanistan and work to round up Osama’s gang, or face the
full wrath of the U.S.
Musharraf made the choice quickly and switched. He collaborated with
the Americans in swiftly overturning of the Taliban regime in Kabul.
And he went after his own “true believers” in Pakistan’s somewhat
notorious intelligence operations who had backed the Taliban regime
and did not want to pursue the U.S.’ war on terrorism. They let
themselves be heard in what were at least three publicly acknowledged
attempts to assassinate the Pakistani leader, two, significantly,
within earshot of the general headquarters of the military in the
Rawalpindi Cantonement.
And it must be remembered that most of the captured high value Al
Qaeda operatives have been with Pakistani collaboration, even if the
leader himself has managed to elude the Americans. If some of the
battlefield prisoners fingered by the Pakistanis lingering at
Guatanamo have turned out to be innocents caught in the cat’s cradle
of the region’s loyalties, it is also true that some 50 released
prisoners have been identified, captured, or killed when they returned
to the battlefield in Afghanistan.
But what has followed on has been a caricature of Washington foreign
policy failures in past years. The Pakistan-U.S. relationship recalls
the assistance in undermining of the Shah of Iran or the murder of
President Ngo Dinh Diem of Vietnam at the hands of a U.S sponsored
coup which led to the victory of an enemy.
Washington, not content to try to slowly modify the Musharraf military
regime’s grip, started a campaign to return the country to
“democracy”. It ignored the fact that Pakistan had the freest media it
probably ever has had including widespread electronic coverage
critical of the regime. Party government, in its corrupt fashion, was
operating in the state assemblies and Musharraf had finagled or bought
a majority in the national showpiece legislature. The “restoration”
Washington called for was of incredibly corrupt, feudal, civilians –
whom Musharraf had overthrown, as had army leaders before him had to
do when their administrations failed completely. [Half Pakistan’s
history has been under military rule.]
A vast gaggle of U.S. officials – including a loose tongued commander
of the U.S. Central Command who had to be removed because he talked
too much – loudly paraded through Islamabad giving substance to one of
the main appeals of the Islamicists, i.e., that Pakistan was returning
to colonial dictation from the U.S. A gullible American media bought
into the fiction of a reformist Pakistani judiciary [whom Musharraf
had decapitated as had happened before him]. The recent “Long March”
demonstration – an interesting choice of titles – of Pakistani lawyers
ended with a physical assault on judges. Washington think tanks who
had no experience or background in the affairs of the Subcontinent
nevertheless offered “solutions” through hired Pakistani hit men.
Washington forced a “shotgun marriage” with former Prime Minister
Benazir Bhutto on Musharraf and a return of former Prime Minister
Nawaz Sharif, surrogate in Pakistan of the Saudis. Through him they
had continued Wahabi Islamist extremist evangelism in a country with a
once solid British Indian secular tradition. [Now the courts have
ruled Nawaz Sharif cannot stand for election to the parliament because
of unresolved corruption accusations.]
That “civilianization” effort has succeeded, at least in part. But the
catastrophe when Bhutto was assassinated [in part through her own
insistence in flaunting security] exacerbated the crisis. Behind her
stood her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, the man the whole country had
called “Mr. 10 percent”, the most notoriously corrupt official the
country had ever known in a rogues’ roster that is all too extensive.
Now, the civilian government is near paralysis.
The two principal political leaders, Zardari and Nawaz Sharif, are at
each other’s throats. They have tried to unite to oust Musharraf. But
he has played them against one another, and the military – the only
national institution in the country which functions – remains,
apparently, loyal to its command structure based largely on
seniority.
What now is bringing the crisis to a boiling point is Pakistan’s
troubled border area with Afghanistan and the growing role it is
playing in the war on terror in Afghanistan and worldwide.
Basically, the problem of governing the region is one inherited and
never resolved by British India. Primitive tribal societies divided by
an arbitrary border in some of the world’s most inaccessible terrain
have always harassed their more peaceful neighbors in the plains. And
they have been used in the power games – from Tsarist-Soviet efforts
to reach the Indian Ocean to British Imperial efforts to block them
and expand into Central Asia to the nationalist/anticolonial movements
of all ethnicities and ideologies.
The strands of all those former conflicts feed into the present chaos.
What’s been added is the element of Osama Ben Ladin’s Islamofascism, a
highly professional international call using modern communications for
the return to a nonexistent paradisiacal model of an Islamic
religiously oriented state. His henchmen’s tactics are exploiting the
framework of the American and Saudi-assisted successful resistance
which led to the Soviets’ final disaster in Afghanistan. It was from
that sanctuary that Osama executed his 9/11 attacks. And his adherents
obviously hope to repeat their earlier performance by again capturing
strongholds in Afghanistan or repeating their successes against the
Soviets with the Americans and NATO.
Osama’s continued presence in the area – whether real or mythical –
has fed on the traditional xenophobia, a resurgence of the radical
Islamicists whom the Pakistanis had helped install in the vaccum left
by the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan. Foreign recruits still flock to
the area, now to join in the holy war against the Americans and the
regime of Pres. Hamid Karzai and its U.S. and NATO supporting forces.
Frontiers which existed largely in the minds of mapmakers are breached
by the Islamicists on an almost daily basis with coordination between
U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan and the Pakistani military at a
minimal. Restrictions on the use of inferior numbers of NATO troops,
Indian intrigue with the Karzai regime against Pakistan, and the
ethnic divides among the Afghans themselves are part of the witches
brew.
The local 80,000-man Pakistan militia – which along with bribery and
an occasional swat across the mouth was the old British Indian way of
dealing with the tribals inherited by the Pakistanis – has been
infiltrated. [This was dramatized when an American officer was
publicly assassinated by them last year during a negotiation].
In the constant melee there are episodes of “friendly fire” and
“collateral damage” [the inevitable unintended civilian casualties] as
American forces hunt the Islamicists in hot pursuit across the
international frontier. This action intensifies the strongest appeal
of the Islamicists, agitation against “foreign” intervention in the
tribal areas – whether it be American, Afghan or Pakistani. Add to
that the regular Pakistani military’s lack of expertise in
“counterinsurgency”. They are trained for the set-piece battles on the
Punjab plain with India — although Islamabad has instigated and
trained the same tribals against what has become New Delhi’s military
occupation of the disputed state of Kashmir lying betwixt India,
Pakistan, and China’s Occupied Tibet.
Were all this not enough, the denizens of the Clinton Administration
at the U.S. State Department had a moment of inspired if totally
misguided enlightenment. They decided that contrary to the infinite
and often selfdefeating complications of trying to maintain a policy
toward the Subcontinent which recognized the Indian-Pakistan
confrontation as fundamental, they would simply cut the Gordian Knot:
they would treat each on a bilateral basis.
The Bush Administrations with the help of what passes for diplomatic
professionalism at State has blithely tried to imitate this strategy.
That meant, for example, overthrowing nonproliferation dogma vis-a-vis
India [at a time when one of the chief aims of the Administration was
to curb a proliferation in North Korea and Iran]. With India moving
rapidly toward disassembling its 35-year-old Soviet-style planning for
economic liberalization and a skyrocketing trade with the U.S. – not
excluding billions in offshore information technology – Washington
suddenly offered New Delhi open sesame to American nuclear technology
and other high tech formerly denied a Soviet ally. Past transgressions
[secretly building nuclear weapons and refusing to sign the non-
proliferation treaties] were to be forgiven.
But it couldn’t be done with Pakistan, the argument went, which
requested it. There was the still not entirely resolved operations of
the A.G. Khan network which peddled stolen nuclear technology,
borrowed Chinese and North Korean tech, to pariah states. Khan
presented a problem for Musharraf as well as the U.S., not only for
his possible connections to former military and civilian leaders, but
because he had been ballyhooed as “the father of the Islamic bomb” in
Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. [That was despite the fact that Washington
has chosen to ignore the fact that it has sanctioned Indian companies
for passing nuclear secrets to Tehran.]
Now the Indian government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh – with the
widowed Sonia Gandhi driving from the back seat as leader of the
Congress Party – faces the choice of pushing through this important
economic initiative against his coalition’s Communist supporters, or
defying them and going to elections over this and other issues. That
is a Hobson’s choice. With its main opponent – once enthusiastically
for an American alliance but recently opposing the U.S. agreement –
the Bharat Janata Party winning crucial state elections one after the
other, Singh, a career economist, may have to drop this keystone in
his program
Meanwhile, Pakistan has gone to Beijing for promised assistance on
what pretends to be an expanded peaceful nuclear energy program even
though China, itself, is calling on Japanese and American companies
for a dramatic boost to its own nuclear electricity generating
capacity. That ties in to Chinese sales to Pakistan of a replicas of
Soviet fighter planes and the promise of a small fleet of missile-
carrying sloops as well as an array of other arms – including North
Korean missile technology in part a loan from Beijing and the Soviets
over the years.
All of this feeds into the long standing propaganda line that China is
Pakistan’s “all weather ally” having not abandoned it after the defeat
of the Soviets in Afghanistan as Washington is alleged to have done.
And there is the lingering suspicion in Pakistan that if and when the
Osama Bin Laden problem is “solved”, Washington again will abandon the
alliance.
Where to now?
Although the civilian politicians and media calls for Musharraf’s
ouster continue, there are no public signs of the military abandoning
their former commander –although there is speculation of Islamaicst
infiltration at lower levels. Musharraf was forced to take off his
military cap to retain the presidency. But, in fact, recent publicity
of a meeting of Musharraf with Chief of the Army Staff Gen. Ashfaq
Parvez Kayani was a renewed call for combating terrorism and extremism
with “full force and all available resources”. It was the first
publicly announced encounter between the President and Kayani since
the escalation of recent border episodes. Kayani is regarded as the
quintessential nonpolitical Rajput warrior, and the meeting and
announcement was apparently a gesture of unity of the armed forces
behind the President. And that seems to have been echoed in a
statement by Prime Minister Syed Yousaf Raza Gillani, seen as a
transition caretaker, backing away from is earlier softer approach to
the “militants” in the frontier area.
At the end of June, the military began two new offensives – one in the
Khyber Pass area where logistics for U.S. and NATO troops in
Afghanistan from the Pakistan ports have been intercepted by the
Islamicists. The Pakistan army has also launched an offensive with
regular troops in the area around Quetta, closing off exits to
Afghanistan, where there has been a recent increase in guerrilla
activity.
Perhaps even more significant, Baitullah Mehsud, an Islamicist leader
who once threatened to take over control of large parts of non-tribal
northwest Pakistan said he was suspending peace talks with the
government. Mehsud is widely believed to have involved in the
assassination of Bhutto.
Whatever the success or failure of these new operations as
manifestations of Pakistan resolve, it is clear that the new U.S.
Central Command head, Gen. David Petraeus, has his work cut out for
him. One can only hope that the improved situation in Iraq permits him
– with the direct line he has to the White House – to lead the way
toward more coordinated [and quiet] American tactics in an incredibly
complex and difficult situation.
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