Weaknesses in the Pakistani Army’s Counterinsurgency Approach (2002_2010)

[Muhammad Saftain Anjum]

(Extract from "The Accidental Guerrilla, Chapter 4", Oxford University Press, 2009)
By David J. Kilcullen
"Terrain ,Tribes and Terrorists: Pakistan, 2006-2008 "

Weaknesses in the Army’s Counterinsurgency Approach:

Why did the Army do so poorly against the insurgents? Based on field assessments with the Pakistani Army in 2006, and on my reading of media and unclassified analytical reporting since
then, I believe there are nine key reasons.

First, Army operations have been enemy-focused, aimed at hunting down and killing or capturing
key enemy personnel (“High Value Targets”, HVTs), and at attacking armed insurgents in the field.
Army and Frontier Corps operations are focused on insurgent fighters, and aimed at eliminating
HVTs and insurgent units.
Protecting and winning over the population are strictly secondary to the aim of destroying the insurgents.
This is contrary to best-practice counterinsurgency36 which, as we
have seen, is to focus on the population — an approach that, counter-intuitively, has been shown to
produce quicker, more effective results than targeting insurgents directly.

Secondly, operations have tended to be large-scale, multi-unit activities. Contrary to best practice,
most Army and Frontier Corps operations are at least battalion-size, with the majority of operations
being conducted at Brigade level or higher.There has been little attempt at small-unit operations
(i.e. company-size and below), local patrolling or presence operations to dominate population
centers and the countryside. Instead, more attention has been given to large-scale sweeps.

A third key reason is that, again contrary to best practice, the majority of Pakistan Army and FC
units are deployed in static garrison, checkpoint or asset protection tasks.39 This is exacerbated by a lack of appropriate mobility assets—there is a particular shortage of helicopters40 and mine-protected vehicles proof against improvised explosive devices (IEDs). Typically, units are deployed
in Forward Operating Bases (FOBs) of half-battalion to battalion size, or larger Brigade garrison positions. They adopt a defensive posture, rarely leaving their positions. This leaves few troops available for operational reserves (although some local quick-reaction forces (QRFs) are maintained), meaning that Pakistani forces cannot flexibly deploy troops to deal with insurgent activity (as commanders acknowledge).

Fourth, this has contributed to an overextension of military forces. The lack of reserves and the
pattern of large-scale static deployment indicates that the Pakistani Army is especially over-
extended—units lack flexibility, have little maneuver room and are forced to rely on kinetic strike
(using aircraft and artillery) to react to incidents or deny areas to insurgents. Simultaneously the
Frontier Corps has been forced to concentrate troops in high-threat areas, leaving other parts of the
FATA unsecured. Several incidences of over-reliance on kinetic means, driven by lack of available manpower, were highlighted in media reporting in 2006, as well as in discussions with field
personnel. For example, on 5 June, 2006 a Frontier Corps convoy was ambushed several miles outside Miranshah using a rocket attack and possible IED, the insurgents disappearing after the
attack. Two Frontier Corps soldiers were killed in the ambush; the Pakistani Army response was to
engage built-up areas in the town of Miranshah with heavy artillery fire, destroying several hotels,
markets and houses and killing several civilians in the process. No ground-based follow-up was
mounted: the response was primarily kinetic suppression (or retaliation) leading to alienation of the
population.Again, this is contrary to counterinsurgency best-practice and is evidence of the tactically precarious position in which the Army finds itself.

Fifth, indeed, the overall pattern of operations is highly kinetic. Because the Pakistani Army has
little maneuver reserve except its Special Services Group (SSG) — a “black” Special Operations
Force unit trained in Direct Action (DA) – ie, strike operations, rather than Unconventional Warfare
(UW) tasks involving close cooperation with the population—it tends to mount kinetic punitive raids in response to information or in reaction to incidents. The Chingai incident of October 2006,
discussed above, is a good example of this. But because there is little small-unit patrolling or local
presence, such information is often wrong, resulting in collateral damage and civilian casualties that
alienate the population. Significant effort is going into medical civic action (MEDCAP), school
construction, road-building and health extension46, but the “hearts and minds” benefits of these
activities are continually undermined by the resentment created by this kinetic focus.
A sixth problem is the discounting, by regular officers the Pakistani Army, of local assets including
Frontier Corps, levies and khassadars. Partly this attitude arises from the Army’s kinetic approach,
which leads some Army officers to judge local forces as lacking capability due to their limited
firepower and mobility. Regular officers have also sometimes tended to discount the value of local
knowledge, cultural understanding, and local contacts. Indeed, these characteristics make some
regular officers doubt the loyalty of local forces.47 While this could be ameliorated by training,
regular officers have tended to exclude Frontier Corps commanders from planning and maneuver
operations, leaving them to static guard duties.

A seventh key problem is lack of helicopters. Only 19 trooplift helicopters were forward-deployed in
the FATA in 2006, leaving only about 12 available at any one time due to maintenance
requirements.48 This represents a company-size airlift capability — sufficient to respond to a small-
scale insurgent incident but insufficient for extended or large-scale operations. This means that
helicopter lift (essential in mountainous terrain with a limited road network, such as the FATA) is
limited to SSG raids, because the helicopter base is collocated with the SSG FOB. The traditional
mountain warfare security techniques of “crowning the heights”, picqueting routes, and area
surveillance become extremely difficult without helicopters, and are therefore rarely done, though
these are recognized as essential tactics in mountain warfare against insurgents.

Eighth ,The lack of mine-protected or IED-proof vehicles (especially in FC units) makes convoy movement
difficult and dangerous, and is another major problem for Pakistani military operations.50 Vehicles
are frequently attacked by IEDs, and the response is usually to spray the surrounding area with
“suppressive” (i.e. untargeted) fire.51 This tendency is exacerbated because most IED attacks cause
casualties, due to the lack of protected vehicles — thus troops are angry and frightened, leading to a
harsher attitude to the local population and increased alienation due to over-reaction to IED attacks.

A final, perhaps counterintuitive problem that has hampered the Army’s performance is a desire to
copy United States methods. Army and Frontier Corps leaders I dealt with frequently expressed a
desire to copy U.S. methods as used in Afghanistan and Iraq. They characterized these as “sting”
operations, but seemed to be describing pre-planned air assault raids, based on intelligence, rather
than patrol-based area dominance and population security operations.52 Army leaders argued that
such operations would be better as they would “remove forces from contact with the people,
decrease resentment and allow a focus on HVTs”53. This was worrying for several reasons: U.S.
methods, as described in previous chapters, rely on extremely sophisticated surveillance,
intelligence, targeting and mobility systems — none of which Pakistan has or is likely to acquire;
U.S. methods such as these actually proved counterproductive in Iraq and Afghanistan, and as
described in previous chapters the U.S. itself has moved away from them towards a small team
presence-based approach.54 Pakistani officers also seemed motivated in part by the prestige involved
in technologically-advanced operations rather than by their effectiveness in countering the local
insurgency; and given Pakistan’s strategic focus on India, such capabilities were often more likely to
be applied to eastern frontier operations than to current operations in the FATA.

Implications:
Based on the above, it is clear that the campaign in Pakistan, since well before 9/11 but even more
so since then, is a relatively classic example of the accidental guerrilla syndrome. AQ and other
extremists moved into an already disrupted social framework in the FATA during and after the
Soviet-Afghan war, infecting an existing problem of poor governance and societal weakness. The
contagion effect from their presence (most obviously the 9/11 attacks themselves) brought a
western-prompted intervention by the Pakistan Army into the FATA. The use of heavy-handed,
overly kinetic tactics by troops who were mainly lowland Punjabis, culturally foreign to the area
where they were operating, contributed to a societal auto-immune rejection response. The tribes
coalesced and rose up to drive out the intrusion, resulting in the perpetuation of destructive patterns
of what Akbar Ahmed called “resistance and control” on the frontier, and undermining the
established, if loose, local governance system. Pumping additional assistance to Pakistan, without a
fundamental rethink of political strategy, is therefore likely to be highly counterproductive in the
long run.

I think the Pak forces are deploying UAVs now and their approach is same again "hunting down enemies rather than winning over the population"