A new resolve?.and other things..

[Ratus Ratus]

The Editorial “A new resolve?” seems that the politicians are still in a sea of self pity and doubt. It would imply that the Army will not really move till they all have a full consensus on doing something about the militants.
Link: DAWN.COM | Pakistan | A new resolve?

WITH districts around Swat seemingly falling like ninepins, the state has been shockingly ambivalent about it plans to restore its writ in northern Pakistan. But yesterday it appeared that the Pakistan Army has finally awoken from its slumber. The message from the chief himself, Gen Kayani: the militants will not be allowed to run amok and order will be restored. So far the army’s wait-and-watch policy in Malakand division has had dangerous consequences. Buner is now in the militants’ hands and IDPs are pouring into neighbouring districts, especially Swabi, Mardan and Haripur. Meanwhile, Shangla has been penetrated by the militants and Swabi and Mardan are the next likely targets. Shrewdly taking advantage of the cessation in hostilities in the valley, militants from Swat fanned out into neighbouring areas, expanding the theatre in which they will have to be taken on and ensuring that an even messier fight lies ahead.

Why has the army waited? It claims the ‘operational pause’ was meant to give a chance to the forces of reconciliation and not as a concession to the militants. Now that the army has sensed the panic among the people and seen the militants’ determination to expand their territorial control, it has pledged to achieve ‘victory’ against terrorism and militancy ‘at all costs.’ We hope this resolve will not melt in the days ahead. But two points regarding the overall war against militancy need to be flagged. One, the army has been particularly agitated by the recent spate of foreign comments that Pakistan is on the verge of collapse and that the army is unwilling or unable to defeat militancy. Gen Kayani’s forceful statement that the army ‘never has and never will hesitate to sacrifice, whatever it may take, to ensure [the] safety and well-being’ of Pakistan’s people and its territorial integrity should be noted in foreign capitals. Whatever the suspicions, the Pakistan Army is an indispensable element in any successful strategy against militancy in Pakistan and the region generally, and riling the army high command to score a few public points cannot be part of a sound strategy.

The second point concerns the political component here in Pakistan. While the Pakistan Army isn’t under the full control of the civilians, it has made it clear that it will only fight when there is a political consensus for it to do so. Thus far the politicians have been woefully divided; whether the dissenters blame America as the root cause of militancy or harp on about fuzzy ideas of dialogue, they have not been able to unite on the need to take on the militants militarily. That discord may finally be changing. The PML-N, the PML-Q and the religious parties have voiced concerns about militants on the march, while the MQM has come out as the foremost critic of the peace deal in Swat. It is not clear yet whether they will support the military option, but the army cannot fail to note that the politicians are at last beginning to agree on the seriousness of the threat of militancy.



After reading this one “Sufi too weak to deliver on promises”
link
DAWN.COM | NWFP | Sufi too weak to deliver on promises

Sufi Mohammad likes to be outspoken while airing his views, but on that day he was lost for words. His head buried in his hands, he sat listening intently as officials unveiled evidence linking Swat militants to the April 15 suicide bombing in Charsadda that killed 15 men, mostly police.

The evidence included a video footage of a teenaged suicide bomber who had earlier tried to target Sikandar Hayat Sherpao, the eldest son of former interior minister Aftab Ahmad Khan Sherpao.

A militant seized from the scene of Charsadda bombing in wounded condition said it all. The plan was conceived in Charbagh, Swat, and executed by militants from Swat —two months after the NWFP government signed a peace deal with the head of defunct Tehrik-i-Nifaz-i-Shariat-i-Muhammadi.

Sufi promised to issue a religious decree against armed militant activities at a public meeting in Mingora three days later.

Far from it, the octogenarian leader set new deadlines to the government to fully implement the Nizam-i-Adl Regulation by April 23 and termed the Constitution as un-Islamic.

‘He played the wrong tape,’ commented a senior figure in the NWFP government who met Sufi in Maidan, Dir. ‘This is not the kind of things he had promised us to talk about.’

A deeply dismayed Chief Minister Ameer Haider Khan Hoti, who had planned to visit Mingora the following day to announce, among other things, a grand reconciliation jirga to let bygones be bygones and burry the hatchet, cancelled the trip.

More bad news was in store as hundreds of militants entered neighbouring Buner and Shangla districts and set up a base in Hassankhel, in the tribal territory of Kala Dhaka of Mansehra district.

This was a calculated move, according to some officials. The militants had in the past made similar attempts to cut off the vital Karakoram Highway linking Pakistan with China.

What was more alarming about the militants’ advance in Buner was the threat they posed to the plains of Peshawar Valley in the adjoining Mardan and Swabi.

With Swat firmly under their belt, and making a foothold in Dir, it did not leave any doubt in the minds of policy-makers about the Taliban’s intentions —to control Malakand.

If this were not enough, the collapse of local resistance to the Taliban advance in Buner, in the absence of a state security backup, rang alarm bells. That Buner could fall so easily to the Taliban was depressing and alarming.

The government dispatched a team to speak to Sufi Mohammad about the ‘violations’ of the peace agreement. That the TNSM leader is a difficult and unpredictable interlocutor was well-known, but what was hitherto not clear to the government was his relative inability to rein in militants.

'The old man has been changing goal posts,’ commented a government official. Initially, the TNSM chief had promised to seek the militants’ disarming. This didn’t happen.

Then, he promised that he would issue a fatwa against militancy in Swat as and when the government announced the enforcement of Nizam-i-Adl Regulation. He didn’t do it.

He changed tack again and asked the government to sign the document first before he could lean on the Taliban to disarm.

All eyes were fixed on Sufi Mohammad when President Asif Ali Zardari finally affixed his signature to the regulation documents after much trepidation. But Sufi went ahead and set his own deadline for its enforcement.

However, as Sufi dragged his feet, the Swat Taliban stepped up their activities. The government decided to hold the TNSM chief to his words. ‘It was time for plain talk,’ said an official.

What the black-turbaned leader had to say to the government team was disappointing. According to a source privy to the last round of talks with Sufi Mohammad, the TNSM chief narrated an incident to highlight his own helplessness in the situation.

He, however, did say that the militants would lay down arms before a Qazi and promised, yet again, to issue a statement against those continuing to indulge in militancy after the enforcement of the Nizam-i-Adl Regulation earlier this month.

Officials now concede that they have been left with few policy options vis-à-vis Sufi Mohammad, knowing his limitations and unpredictability.

A statement from him denouncing militancy would at least give the government the moral authority to go after violent extremists.

The militants have upped the ante but the government, say the officials, would refrain from reacting to their violent moves in Swat and not move against them till it put in place the judicial structure in line with its commitment to enforce the new regulation.

According to the newly devised policy, the government would continue to show restraint in Swat till the full enforcement of the regulation but would respond to any militant provocations outside its limits. The political and military leadership, they say, are on the same page on the new strategy.

‘There is a lot of concern and a sense of urgency to do something about it before it is too late,’ said one senior official. ‘We want to give them enough rope to hang themselves,’ said one senior official.

But as one commentator observed, given the state of denial and paralysis, it was quite possible that the government would give them so much rope that one day it would realise that it had run out of rope to hang them.


I just wonder what the governments, provincial and national, have got into. The guy sounds as if he is not all there all the time. That is not a good environment to be working with. The implication is he has no control on the Taliban that he is supposed to represent in all these dealings.


The following makes a bit of sense “Peace deals and other blunders”.
link:
DAWN.COM | Pakistan | Peace deals and other blunders

TWO months into Operation Enduring Freedom, the fugitives’ escape into Pakistan’s tribal areas was a foregone conclusion. That was the time to closely watch the Durand Line, not just the Khyber and Kurram agencies.

Even meagre efforts like mobile scout parties, tribal lashkars and airborne patrols would have sent a signal that Fata was not an open sanctuary. These efforts may have discouraged or even intercepted some of these 3,500 mule-trotting, heavily armed foreign fighters. They would have kept the trail hot for those that did manage to breach the Durand Line in the last few weeks of 2001.

As was expected, fleeing Al Qaeda and other militants notably those from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, members of the Chechen resistance movement, Chinese Uighur fighters and other smaller groups rode into Pakistan and set up camp around Angoor Adda in South Waziristan.

We can all beat up on Tommy Franks later for taking his eye off the ball but that doesn’t absolve us from taking ours off the Durand Line. That was our first blunder. Now with these foreign fighters inside its borders, what did Pakistan do in response? The short answer is ‘nothing’. The long answer is that right until the spring of 2004 Pakistan did nothing to prevent foreign fugitives from settling in areas under its control. It did nothing to prevent them from forming local linkages often beyond the tribal areas. It did nothing to stop them from carrying out subsequent attacks across the Durand Line.

In this window of time, space and resources, Al Qaeda scaled up its 055 Brigade into a full-fledged shadow army. The Lashkar-i-Zil, as it is called, has come to permeate the Taliban and all other foreign and local jihadi groups. In the recent Swat footage its soldiers are discernable — heads covered in hoods, generally better dressed, wearing green military jackets with stashes of AK- 47 magazines, shalwars above ankles and sneakers.

Blunder number two came when we lost the opportunity to mop up the local jihadi outfits lock, stock and barrel. The writing was on the wall in black and bold: Pakistani jihadis were redundant liabilities with no place in the new world at least in the foreseeable future. A swift dragnet operation could have put them out of business in one single stroke. Instead we got the famous U-turn speech of January 2002 and a light-fisted crackdown that only drove these outfits underground and eventually out of the intelligence orbit altogether. They subsequently resurfaced in the tribal areas.

The third blunder was Kalosha, a badly planned military operation, with disastrous consequences. Fast forward to March 2004. Location: Azam Warsak where Tahir Yuladashev was holed up with 300 fighters of the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, an Al Qaeda affiliate. An intelligence estimate of their position and strength existed with the ISI but was not shared with the FC and the army. On being surrounded, the IMU fighters fought ferociously and then tore through the cordon riding Toyota pick-ups with mounted missile launchers.

Inflicting 200 casualties on the FC, the Al Qaeda fighters broke away to link up with reinforcements — the forces of Pakistani Taliban commander Nek Mohammad. Soon helicopter gunships were called in. However the can of worms had been opened and the fighting spread all over Wana. South Waziristan was now on fire. What could have been a short, precise and hard-hitting operational plan in a localised area no more than 40 square miles turned out to be a bungle with disastrous implications.

When did our war courses stop teaching how to employ stealth, surprise and deception in combat operations? What happened to our Special Forces? Why aren’t field and electronic intelligence and psychological operations being utilised to inflict maximum and targeted damage on the enemy? Have we considered engaging the enemy in surprise locations with night operations deploying the advantage of night vision equipment, and the eight Cobra attack helicopters that are C-Nite equipped? How often have these capabilities been used and to what effect?

Nek Mohammad was subsequently taken out in a US drone attack. Over time 80,000 additional troops were sent into South Waziristan. The rebels responded in classic guerrilla style — by enlarging the battle theatre to include North Waziristan and subsequently Mohmand and Bajaur. The capture and burning of the Sararogha Fort was particularly indicative of the enemy’s ability to organise and undertake operations in battalion-sized formations. This was an important milestone indicating that a guerrilla movement, in a matter of six bungled years, had come of age.

More recently in Bajaur, the Taliban have demonstrated the capability to beat back a frontal assault. In Al Jazeera’s documentary ‘Pakistan’s War on the Frontline’, tanks and infantry of the 63rd FF regiment are seen retreating in panic after encountering Taliban fire. The reporter Rageh Omar describes the Pakistani tank commander as ‘quite shaken’. Ominously, the footage shows Lashkar-i-Zil’s sophisticated work — trench and tunnel networks and bunkers that are largely beyond the reach of the Pakistani military’s limited ‘hard target’ capability.

According to Pakistani writer Ahmed Rashid, it was military blunders that convinced the Americans in 2006 to intervene with more drone and missile attacks to assist a beleaguered military that was now largely hunkered in its bases and cantonments (with the exception of Bajaur). With its men losing morale and its (as well as Nato’s) hardware being captured or destroyed by the Taliban, the fourth blunder was to enter into a series of ‘peace deals’ with groups of highly organised and armed Islamist rebels.American commentator Bill Roggio learnt of the terms of the truce from an anonymous US intelligence source.

Writing in the Long War Journal in 2006, he likens it to an instrument of surrender: the military was to evacuate Waziristan after handing over all seized weapons and equipment. An unknown quantity of money was also transferred to the Taliban.

Some 130 Al Qaeda members were released from Pakistani prisons and allowed to remain in what the truce referred to as the Islamic Emirate of Waziristan for the governance of which, the document mentions, the Taliban and Al Qaeda have set up a ‘Mujahideen Shura’. Pakistani officials arriving at the soccer field for the signing were frisked for weapons by armed Taliban as Al Qaeda’s black flag, the Al Rayah, hung over the scoreboard of the stadium.

Referring to the Swat deal Hasan Askari Rizvi, professor of political science, terms it as ‘co-opting the Taliban as an acceptable alternative to state governance or at best making them partners with the state, instead of subjects of the state’.So the question once again is: could we have played the hand we were dealt any better? I will leave this for the reader to judge.

But heck , one still has to just blamed the foreign hand. Its simpler.


BBC tonight, ‘Dateline London’. They were talking about Pakistan issues.
One comment and it does ring true is the it is about time that the GoP brought FATA etc into the sphere of the national government and hence have them come truly under the umbrella of Pakistan. The feeling being it has been 60 plus years since the founding of Pakistan and these regions are still in limbo with respect to the state.
OK I may have paraphrased it badly.


I would suggest that it is time to stop doing the find some one to blame dance, or the foreign hand shuffle.

 

[S-2]

Moazzam Hussain is the first writer beside myself whom I've read suggesting that Pakistan just might have dropped the ball back in 2002. Nicely put.

Sufi Mohammad? Let's be real. The militants rode his cachet as leader of a failed lashkar of 20,000 sent to fight the yanks in 2001.

They got their azzes kicked but this guy got elevated by jail. Had you turned him loose to those enraged parents of all those sons he'd hauled to their deaths in Afghanistan, this would be a moot issue.

Now, the young turks have kicked him aside and his only remainly value is his continuing dissemblance. The true leaders regard him as irrelevant. Their planning indicates as much.

 

[dbc]

Moazzam Hussain is the first writer beside myself whom I've read suggesting that Pakistan just might have dropped the ball back in 2002. Nicely put.

I suspect the dropping of balls started way back in the 40's when Pakistan failed to establish the writ of the state and uniform judicial code across its territory.

 

[S-2]

"I suspect the dropping of balls started way back in the 40's when Pakistan failed to establish the writ of the state and uniform judicial code across its territory."

You're digging into CORE issues now. The bevy of policy mistakes that have defined what is Pakistan today is a list longer than my arm.

Exceptionalism for FATA was a mistake but...there it is. The immediacy of this crisis makes impossible any focus on more "esotoric" issues. The security issue is so overwhelming that even the most basic elements of aid can't be safely delivered west of Peshawar, much less schools and intellectual discussions about integrating this pashtu tribal society into the larger state.

 

[dbc]

"I suspect the dropping of balls started way back in the 40's when Pakistan failed to establish the writ of the state and uniform judicial code across its territory."

You're digging into CORE issues now. The bevy of policy mistakes that have defined what is Pakistan today is a list longer than my arm.

Exceptionalism for FATA was a mistake but...there it is. The immediacy of this crisis makes impossible any focus on more "esotoric" issues. The security issue is so overwhelming that even the most basic elements of aid can't be safely delivered west of Peshawar, much less schools and intellectual discussions about integrating this pashtu tribal society into the larger state.

Obvious isn't it, as plain as day - the root cause is the failure to establish writ by the GoP since independence in 1947. The militants simply filled a vacuum that existed in FATA, replacing ad hoc jirga justice with their own brand of Sharia law. I see two possible outcomes; one the army grows a pair, sheds its India obsession and mobilizes in earnest defense of Pakistan. The second scarier outcome is that the Taliban slowly takes control of Pakistan not overtly by moving into the presidential palace in Islamabad but by controlling the government covertly through the intimidation of key officials in GoP.

 

[S-2]

"The second scarier outcome is that the Taliban slowly takes control of Pakistan..."

Militant accession to power will often seem insidious and appear slow, even benignly so at times. Measure, though, events since a year ago. Measure too the tactical expedience that comes with semi-impromptu, ad hoc flexibility to the organizational design. This promotes initiative at lower levels so, like water, they fill vacumns and space as it's uncovered.

"...controlling the government covertly through the intimidation of key officials in GoP."

Intimidation is a key component but such with "key officials" worries me less only because they'll be last- or nearly so.

It's the "not-so-key" officials in the small towns and cities who do the day-to-day work of governance. They're the ones receiving the phone-calls at night asking if they love their children. Or the shabnamah posted on an office door for the morning workers to read.

A week later some pickups full of armed guys drive into the neighborhood and immediately visit the homes of the local leaders and it's "game on".

This is the "artillery preparation" to an irhabi offensive. It softens the target like no brigade time-on-target could ever hope. Islamabad will simply wake up one day and realize, like Karzai in Kabul, that the Pakistani nat'l gov't has become Islamabad's city gov't instead.

...and not for long at that as guess who NOW receives the midnight phone call or letter? You're correct- "key officials in GOP".

JMHO.