Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, the Pakistani army spokesman, said today that the army doesn't plan to launch any new offensives against the Taliban for the next six to 12 months.
The army's position is being framed as a refusal to "root out" militants, which seems in some ways like an unfortunate characterization.
You can argue that the Pakistani army should devote more resources to fighting the Taliban, and less to an imagined future war with India. That's an argument I agree with. You can also argue that elements within the Pakistani army and intelligence services don't want to really fight the Taliban, because they see it as providing "strategic depth" for that imaginary Indian war. Again, I agree.
Those are critiques that U.S. officials should make in private -- not on the pages of The News.
And the focus on expanding the anti-Taliban campaign ignores the need to consolidate existing offensives. Lest we forget, the army is still operating in South Waziristan (despite Pakistani prime minister Yousuf Raza Gilani's remarks to the contrary). A few months earlier, the army was fighting in the Swat Valley. At some point, the army needs to consolidate these gains. It has limited resources; it cannot keep moving from one month-long offensive to the next.
That's how Abbas framed the refusal to launch new operations. (I should say that I have my doubts that the Pakistani army can actually do the "hold" and "build" phases of counterinsurgency; it doesn't have a great track record.)
Nonetheless: The U.S. needs to encourage the army to consolidate its gains. The campaigns in Swat and South Waziristan created a lot of instability; both produced tens of thousands of internally displaced persons, many of whom have yet to return home. Islamabad needs to stabilize both areas and allow refugees to return -- or it will find itself ultimately dealing with a larger insurgency than it had before the offensives.
The army is doing some interesting work on the security front -- training lashkars in Swat, for example -- which Al-Jazeera's Kamal Hyder reported on earlier this week.
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Categories: Obama Administration, Pakistan, Regional News, War and Terrorism
Tags: internally displaced persons, lashkars, Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, South Waziristan, Swat Valley, Taliban, Yousuf Raza Gilani
1 Comment
Pakistan General Athar Abbas is correct. The Taliban issue in Pakistan and Afghanistan is not "Black and White" [for Pakistan] as it is for the U.S. And the continuous U.S. Predator drones attacks in Pakistan has turned its population into a boling cauldron against the U.S./Pakistan cooperation. Pakistan doesn't see a pro-U.S. regime surviving in Afghanistan, and it doesn't want to turn the Pashtuns into its enemies to please the U.S.
When the U.S. overthrew the Taliban regime in Kabul, the Pakistan president at the time, Pervez Musharraf, insisted that the U.S. appoint a Pashtun as president. Pashtun is the largest tribe in Afghanistan, and in a nation where tribal loyalties predominate, Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun, got the job - after another American-Pashtun who returned to Afghanistan to get the post was hanged by the Taliban. Karzai would have gotten the same fate, but he called the U.S. forces who arrived in helicopters and extracted him out of a hostile Taliban meeting before his demise - according to the U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld at that time.
Karzai's stock as a Pashtun who could bring in the 42% of Afghans on his side is now virtually bankrupt. He has become the target of the Pashtun, and he has survived with government positions and bribes to other warlords, while the Pashtun Taliban insurgency has become deadlier and more sophisticated. Does he have a future as an enemy of his own tribe and American puppet? If he tries to fight corruption, the tribal warlords that support him because they become rich with corruption would ditch him too! And if he loses their support, and with the Pashtun/Taliban support lost already, he won't have any Afghan to count on. How, then, the U.S. will win the Afghan war in McChrystal's plan, when the U.S. appointed president there represents only a small and corrupt clique of Afghans bend on becoming from the spoils of the U.S. occupation and war? The Taliban have made it clear that they won't be bought -like the Sunnis in Iraq - even though the U.S. has removed the name of the Taliban Supreme Leader Mullah Omar from its terrorist list to lure him into a possible pact with the U.S.
Pakistan, therefore, is suspicious that the U.S. demand from them to attack and destroy the Taliban at the same time that the U.S. is trying to negotiate with them behind Pakistan's back. The Taliban were created in Pakistan's Madrassas, and trained and equipped by the Pakistani army, then unleashed to overthrow the corrupt regime in Afghanistan. Why should Pakistan destroy them? To leave Afghanistan an open field to the U.S. and India? Pakistan has in force what they call "Strategic Depth" strategy, (Reuters, Jan. 21, 2009) which is: In case of war with India, Pakistan must not be sandwiched between two enemies, India in the East, and a pro- U.S./pro-India regime in Afghanistan in the West. And "strategic depth", therefore, means that Pakistan want an Afghanistan under its control - not the U.S.'s- to have room to maneuver it forces if there is a war with India, and Indian forces manage to occupy the Eastern part of its territory.
The U.S. Pakistani alliance on the war on terror is, therefore, an alliance of pay-outs [by the U.S.], and opportunity [by Pakistan], not an alliance of political and religious ideology, nor similar strategic interests. And that alliance seems to be edging closer to the open discord as their differences clash over the U.S. demand to have the final say on who will control Central Asia when the war in Afghanistan is over. Nikos Retsos, retired professor
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