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cloud_zhou - 2009/5/14 12:17:00
Introduction



Pakistan is the primary channel through which U.S. and NATO supplies travel to support the war effort in Afghanistan. The reason for this is quite simple: Pakistan offers the shortest and most logistically viable overland supply routes for Western forces operating in landlocked Afghanistan. Once Pakistan found itself in the throes of an intensifying insurgency mid-2007, however, U.S. military strategists had to seriously consider whether the United States would be able to rely on Pakistan to keep these supply lines open, especially when military plans called for increasing the number of troops in theater.

In late 2008, as Pakistan continued its downward spiral, U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) chief Gen. David Petraeus began touring Central Asian capitals in an attempt to stitch together supplemental supply lines into northern Afghanistan. Soon enough, Washington learned that it was fighting an uphill battle in trying to negotiate in Russian-dominated Central Asia without first reaching a broader understanding with Moscow. With U.S.-Russian negotiations now in flux and the so-called “northern distribution network” frozen, the United States has little choice but to face the reality in Pakistan.

This reality is rooted in the Pakistani Taliban’s desire to spread south beyond the Pashtun-dominated northwest tribal badlands (where attacks against the U.S.-NATO supply lines are already intensifying) into the Pakistani core in Punjab province. Punjab is Pakistan’s industrial heartland and home to more than half of the entire Pakistani population. If the Taliban manage to establish a foothold in Punjab, then the idea of a collapsing Pakistani state would actually become a realistic scenario. The key to preventing such a scenario is keeping the Pakistani military, the country’s most powerful institution, intact. However, splits within the military over how to handle the insurgency while preserving ties with militant proxies are threatening the military’s cohesion. Moreover, the threats to the supply lines go even further south than Punjab. The port of Karachi in Sindh province, where U.S.-NATO supplies are offloaded from ships, could be destabilized if the Taliban provoke local political forces.

In league with their jihadist brethren across the border in Afghanistan, the Pakistani Taliban and their local affiliates are just as busy planning their next steps in the insurgency as the United States is in planning its counterinsurgency strategy. Afghanistan is a country that is not kind to outsiders, and the overwhelming opinion of the jihadist forces battling Western, Pakistani and Afghan troops in the region is that this is a war that can be won through the power of exhaustion. Key to this strategy will be an attempt to make the position of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan untenable by increasing risk to their supply lines in Pakistan.


http://www1.stratfor.com/images/interactive/Supply_line_attacks.htm
cloud_zhou - 2009/5/14 12:20:00
A Dearth of Security Options

As the pre-eminent global maritime power, the United States is able to sustain military operations far beyond its coastlines. Afghanistan, however, is a landlocked country whose inaccessibility prevents the U.S. military from utilizing its naval prowess. Instead, the United States and NATO must bring in troops, munitions and militarily sensitive materiel directly by air and rely on long, overland supply routes through Pakistan for non-lethal supplies such as food, building materials and fuel (most of which is refined in Pakistan). This logistical challenge is compounded by the fact that the overland supply routes run through a country that is trying to battle its own jihadist insurgency.

The deteriorating security situation in Pakistan now requires an effective force to protect the supply convoys. Though sending a couple of U.S.-NATO brigades into Pakistan would provide first-rate security for these convoys, such an option would be political dynamite in U.S.-Pakistani relations. Pakistan already has an extremely low tolerance for CIA activity and U.S. unmanned aerial vehicle attacks on its soil. The sight of Western forces operating openly in the country would be a red line that Islamabad simply could not cross. Even if this were an option, U.S.-NATO forces are already stretched to the limit in Afghanistan and there are no troops to spare to send into Pakistan — nor is there the desire on the part of the United States or NATO to insert their troops into such a dicey security situation.


U.S. Central Command chief Gen. David Petraeus

Enlisting the Pakistani military would be another option, but the Pentagon has thus far resisted allowing the Pakistani military to take direct charge of protecting and transporting U.S.-NATO supplies through Pakistan into Afghanistan. The reasons for this are unclear, but they likely can be attributed (at least in part) to U.S. distrust for the Pakistani military-intelligence apparatus, which is heavily infiltrated by Islamist sympathizers who retain links to their militant Islamist proxies.

Instead, CENTCOM’s logistics team has given the security responsibility to private Pakistani security contractors. This is not unusual in recent U.S. military campaigns, which have come to rely on private contractors for many logistical and security functions, including local firms in countries linked to the military supply chain. In Pakistan, such contractors provide security escorts to Pakistani truck drivers who transport supplies from the port of Karachi through Pakistan via a northern route and a southern route into Afghanistan, where the supplies are then delivered to key logistical hubs. While this approach provided sufficient security in the early years of the Afghan campaign, it has recently become an issue because of increasingly aggressive attacks by Taliban and other militants in Pakistan.

STRATFOR is told that many within the Pakistani military have long resented the fact that Washington has not entrusted them with the responsibility to secure the routes. The reasons behind the Pakistani military’s complaints are twofold. First, the military feels that its authority is being undermined by the dealings between the U.S. military and local contractors. Even beyond these deals, the Pakistani military consistently expresses its frustration when it is not the chief interlocutor with the United States in Pakistan, and has done so as much when U.S. officials have met with local leaders in the country and with the civilian government in Islamabad.

Second, there is a deep financial interest on the part of the military, which does not want to miss out on the large profits reaped by private security contractors in protecting the supply routes. As a result, Pakistani security forces are believed to turn a blind eye and occasionally even facilitate attacks on U.S. and NATO convoys in Pakistan in order to pressure Washington into giving the contracts to the better-equipped Pakistani military. That said, it is unclear whether the Pakistani military could fulfill such a commitment since the military itself is already stretched thin between its operations along the Afghan-Pakistani border and its massive military focus on the eastern border with India.

Many of the private Pakistani security companies guarding the routes are owned by wealthy Pakistani civilians who have strong links to government and to retired military officials. The private Pakistani security firms currently guarding the routes include Ghazi Security, Ready Guard, Phoenix Security Agency and SE Security Agency. Most of the main offices of these companies are located in Islamabad, but these contractors have also hired smaller security agencies in Peshawar. The private companies that own terminals used for the northern and southern supply routes include al Faisal Terminal (whose owner has been kidnapped by militants and whose whereabouts are unknown), Bilal Terminal (owned by Shahid Ansari from Punjab), World Port Logistics (owned by Major Fakhar, a nephew of former Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf), Raziq International, Peace Line, Pak-Afghan and Waqar Terminal.

While the owners of these security firms make a handsome profit from the U.S.-NATO military contracts, the guards who actually drive and protect the trucks ferrying supplies make a meager salary, somewhere between 4,000 and 5,000 rupees (under $65) per month. Not surprisingly, the security is shoddy, with three to five poorly trained and equipped guards usually spread throughout a convoy who are easily overrun by Taliban forces that frequently attack the convoys in hordes. Given their poor compensation, these security guards feel little compulsion to hold their positions and resist concerted assaults.


A Pakistani soldier stands guards on top of an armored personnel carrier on a street in Quetta on April 12

The motivations for attacks against the supply infrastructure can vary. The Taliban and their jihadist affiliates are ideologically driven to target Western forces and increase the cost for them to remain in the region. There are also a number of criminally motivated fighters who adopt the Taliban label as a convenient cover but who are far more interested in making a profit. Both groups can benefit from racketeering enterprises that allow them to extort hefty protection fees from private security firms in return for the contractors’ physical safety.

One Pakistani truck driver relayed a story in which he was told by a suspected Taliban operative to leave his truck and come back in the morning to drive to Afghanistan. When the driver returned he found the truck on fire. Inadequate security allows for easy infiltration and manipulation by Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, which is already heavily penetrated by Islamist sympathizers. Drivers will often strike a deal with the militants allowing raids on the convoys in return for a cut of the proceeds once the goods are sold on the black market. One indication of just how porous U.S.-NATO security arrangements are in Pakistan is that the commander of the most active Taliban faction in Khyber agency, Mangal Bagh of Lashkar-e-Islam (LI), is allegedly a former transporter himself now using jihad as a cover for his criminal activities.

STRATFOR is not aware of any plans by the Pentagon to turn these security contracts over to the Pakistani military. It is even more unclear whether doing so would do much to improve the situation. If the U.S. military continues to rely on these contractors to guard the supply routes in the face of a growing Taliban threat, certain changes could be made to enhance the contractors’ capabilities. Already, U.S. logistics teams are revising the northern route by moving some of the supply depots farther south in Punjab where the security threat is lower (though the Taliban are attempting to expand their presence there). More funding could also be directed toward these security contractors to ensure that the guards protecting the convoys are properly trained and paid sufficiently to give them more of an incentive to resist Taliban attacks. Nonetheless, the current outsourcing to private Pakistani security firms is evidently fraught with complications that are unlikely to be resolved in the near term.
cloud_zhou - 2009/5/14 12:21:00
Both supply routes originate in Pakistan’s largest city and primary seaport, Karachi. The city is Pakistan’s financial hub and provides critical ocean access for U.S.-NATO logistics support in Afghanistan. If Karachi — a city already known to have a high incidence of violence — were to destabilize, the Western military supply chain could be threatened even before supplies embarked on the lengthy and volatile journey through the rest of Pakistan.

There are two inter-linking security risks in Karachi: the local ruling party — the Mutahiddah Qaumi Movement (MQM) — and the Islamist militancy. The MQM is a political movement representing the Muhajir ethnic community of Muslims who migrated to Pakistan from India. Since its rise in the 1980s, the party has demonstrated a proclivity for ethnic-driven violence through its armed cadres. While the MQM does not have a formal militia and is part of the Sindh provincial legislature as well as the national parliament, the party is very sensitive about any challenges to its power base in the metropolitan Karachi area and controls powerful organized crime groups in the city. On many occasions, clashes between MQM and other rival political forces have paralyzed the city.


Armed Pakistani militants

Ideologically speaking, the MQM is secular and has been firmly opposed to Islamist groups since its inception. The party has been watching nervously as the Taliban have crept southward from their stronghold in the country’s northwest. In recent weeks, the MQM also has been the loudest political voice in the country sounding the alarm against the growing jihadist threat. The party is well aware that any jihadist strategy that aims to strike at Pakistan’s economic nerve center and the most critical node of the U.S.-NATO supply lines makes Karachi a prime target.

The MQM is particularly concerned that Baitullah Mehsud’s Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) will try to encroach on its turf in Karachi. While the Waziristan-based TTP itself has very little presence in Karachi, it does have a jihadist network in the city that could be utilized. Many Taliban members come from Pashtun tribes and derive much of their political support from Pashtun populations. Karachi has a Pashtun population of 3.5 million, making up some 30 percent of the city’s population. Moreover, Karachi police have reported that Taliban members are among the “several hundred thousand” tribesmen fleeing violence in the frontier regions who have settled on the outskirts of Karachi.

Jihadists have thus far demonstrated a limited ability to operate in the city. In 2002, jihadists kidnapped and killed U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl and attacked the U.S. Consulate. In a 2007 suicide attack on a vehicle belonging to the U.S. Consulate in Karachi, jihadists killed a U.S. diplomat and injured 52 others on the eve of one of then-President George W. Bush’s rare trips to Pakistan. A host of Pakistani jihadist groups as well as “al Qaeda Prime” (its core leadership) have been active in the area, evidenced by the capture of Ramzi bin al-Shibh, deputy coordinator of the 9/11 attacks, in Karachi in 2002.

Until now the MQM did not perceive the Taliban to be a direct threat to its hold over the city, but the MQM is now feeling vulnerable given the Taliban’s spread in the north. There has been a historic tension between the MQM and the significant Pashtun minority in Karachi. The MQM regards this minority with deep suspicion because it believes the Pashtuns could provide a safe haven for Pashtun jihadists seeking to extend their influence to the south.

In the wake of the “shariah for peace” agreement in the Swat district of Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), tensions have risen between the MQM and the country’s largest Pashtun political group, the Awami National Party (ANP), which rules the NWFP and is the party chiefly responsible for negotiating the peace agreement with the Tehrik-Nifaz-i-Shariat-i-Muhammadi (TNSM), the jihadist group in the greater Swat region. MQM’s 19 members of parliament were the only ones who did not vote in favor of the Swat peace deal, which has amplified its concerns over the threat of Talibanization in Pakistan. In response, TNSM leader Maulana Sufi Muhammad has declared parliamentarians who oppose the Nizam-i-Adl Regulation non-Muslims. The MQM is also trying to mobilize religious groups that oppose the Sunni Islamic Deobandi movement, particularly Barelvis, against the Taliban.

With rising Muhajir-Pashtun ethnic tensions, the MQM-ANP spat and the MQM’s fear of a jihadist threat to its authority, conditions in Karachi are slowly building toward a confrontation. Should jihadists demonstrate a capability to step up operations in the city, the MQM will show little to no restraint in cracking down on the city’s Pashtun minority through its armed cadres, which would lead to wider-scale clashes between the MQM and the Pashtun community. There is a precedent for urban conflict in Karachi, and it could cause authorities to impose a citywide curfew that would disrupt operations at the port and impede supplies from making their way out of the city.

The situation described above is still a worst-case scenario. Since Karachi is the financial center of the country, the MQM-controlled local government, the federal government in Islamabad and the Rawalpindi-based military establishment all share an interest in preserving stability in this key city. It will also likely take some time before Pakistani jihadists are able to project power that far south. Even a few days or weeks of turmoil in Karachi, however, will threaten the country’s economy — which is already on the verge of bankruptcy — and further undercut the weakened state’s ability to address the growing insecurity. So far, the MQM has kept its hold over Karachi, but the Taliban already have their eyes on the city, and it would not take much to provoke the MQM into a confrontation that could threaten a crucial link in the U.S.-NATO supply chain.
cloud_zhou - 2009/5/14 12:24:00
The Northern Route

The northern route through Pakistan, used for transporting the bulk of U.S.-NATO overland supplies to Afghanistan, travels through four provinces — Sindh, Punjab, the NWFP and the tribal badlands of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) — before it snakes its way through the Khyber Pass to reach the Torkham border crossing with Afghanistan.

Route Variations

Convoys generally travel on main north-south national highway N-5 or a combination of N-5 and N-55 from Karachi to Torkham, a distance that can range from approximately 1,325 kilometers to 1,820 kilometers. Most transporters say they prefer the combination of N-5 and N-55, which allows them to cut across Sindh by switching from N-5 to N-65 near Sukkur and then jumping onto N-55 at Shikarpur before heading into Punjab. A small percentage of trucks (some 5 percent) use a combination of national highways and what are called “motorways,” essentially expressways that allow for better security, have no traffic lights and avoid urban centers. These motorways also have fewer chokepoints and thus fewer opportunities for militant ambushes, but they also lack rest stops, which is why most convoys travel on the national highways.

Pakistani transporters tell STRATFOR that they typically decide on a day-to-day basis whether to go the longer N-5 route or the shorter N-55 route. If they feel the security situation is bad enough, they are far more likely to take the longer N-5 route to Peshawar, which reduces their risk because it goes through less volatile areas — essentially, less of the NWFP. With the Taliban rapidly taking over territory in the NWFP, trucks are likely to rely more heavily on N-5.

Sindh

Once the trucks leave Karachi, the stretch of road through Sindh province is the safest along the entire northern route. Most of Sindh, especially the rural areas, form the core support base of the secular Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), which controls both the federal and the provincial governments. Outside of Karachi, there is virtually no serious militant Islamist presence in the province. However, small pockets of jihadists do pop up from time to time. In 2004, a top Pakistani militant leader, Amjad Farooqi of Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), who worked closely with al Qaeda Prime operational commander Abu Faraj al-Libi and was responsible for assassination attempts on Musharraf, was killed in a shootout with police in the town of Nawabshah in central Sindh.

Punjab

Once out of Sindh and into Punjab province, the northern supply route enters the core of Pakistan, the political, industrial and agricultural heartland of the country where some 60 percent of the population is concentrated. The province is also the mainstay of the country’s powerful military establishment, with six of the army’s nine corps are headquartered in the key urban areas of Rawalpindi, Mangla, Lahore, Gujranwala, Bahawalpur and Multan.

This province has not yet witnessed jihadist attacks targeting the U.S.-NATO supply chain, but the jihadist threat in Punjab is slowly rising. Major jihadist figures have found a save haven in the province, evidenced by the fact that several top al Qaeda leaders, including the mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, were captured in various parts of Punjab, including Rawalpindi, Faisalabad and Gujarat. Punjab also has witnessed a number of high-profile jihadist attacks in major cities, including suicide bombings in the capital, Islamabad, and its twin city Rawalpindi (where the military is headquartered) as well as manpower-heavy armed assaults in the provincial capital, Lahore, where teams of gunmen have assaulted both moving and stationary targets. The attacks have mostly targeted Pakistani security installations and have been conducted mainly by Pashtun jihadists in conjunction with Punjabi jihadist allies. The bulk of jihadist activity in the province takes place in the northern part of Punjab, closer to the NWFP border, where suicide bombings have been concentrated.


Pakistani soldiers guard trucks carrying NATO supplies on a street in the Khyber tribal region near the Afghan border on Jan. 1

The Punjabi jihadist phenomenon was born in the 1980s, when the military regime of Gen. Mohammed Zia-ul-Haq aggressively pursued a policy of Islamization to secure power and weaken his principal opponent, the PPP, whose government he had overthrown to come to power. It was during the Zia years that Pakistan, along with Saudi Arabia and the United States, was heavily involved in backing Islamist militias to fight the Marxist government and its allied Soviet troops Afghanistan, where many of the Punjab-based groups joined the Pashtun groups and had their first taste of battle. Later in the 1990s, many of these Punjabi groups, who followed an extremist Deobandi interpretation of Sunni Islam, were used by the security establishment to support the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan and to aid the insurgency in Indian-administered Kashmir. Sectarian groups like Sipah Sahaba Pakistan and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ) were also developed to help the regime keep the Shiite minority in Pakistan contained.

Pakistan’s Afghan and Kashmiri jihadist project suffered a major setback with the 9/11 attacks against the United States and the American response. Caught between contradictory objectives — the need to align itself with the United States and to preserve its Islamist militant assets — Pakistan eventually lost control of many of its former Islamist militant assets, who then started teaming up with al Qaeda-led transnational jihadists in the region.

Most alarming for Islamabad is the fact that these groups are now striking at the core of Pakistan in places like Lahore, where brazen assaults were launched on March 3 against a bus carrying the Sri Lankan national cricket team and on March 30 against a police academy. These attacks illustrated this trend of Pakistan’s militant proxies turning against their erstwhile patron — first in the Pashtun areas and now in Punjab. The Lahore attacks also both involved multi-man assault teams, a sign that the jihadists are able to use a large number of Islamist recruits from the province itself.

Though Pakistan came under massive pressure to crack down on these groups in the wake of the November 2008 Mumbai attacks in India, groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) have considerable influence in the Lahore region. Similarly, LeJ and JeM have growing pockets of support in various parts of Punjab, particularly in southern Seraiki-speaking districts such as Bahawalpur, Rahim Yar Khan and Dera Ghazi Khan. One of the major causes of rising support for such jihadist groups in Punjab stems from a incident in 2007, when a clerical family hailing from the border region between Punjab and Balochistan led an uprising at Islamabad’s Red Mosque. The subsequent security operation to regain control of the mosque from the militants turned many locals against the military and into the arms of the Islamists.

While the major urban areas of Punjab have not been spared by jihadists, most jihadist activity in the province is concentrated closer to the provincial border with the NWFP. The route that travels along N-5 must pass through Wah, Kamra and Attock, the three main towns of northwestern Punjab. Each of these towns has been rocked by suicide attacks. Attock was the scene of a July 2004 assassination attempt against former Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz. Kamra, home of the Pakistan Aeronautical Complex, an aircraft servicing and manufacturing facility, was the scene of a December 2007 suicide attack targeting a school bus carrying children of air force personnel. In August 2008 in Wah, a pair of suicide bombers struck Pakistan’s main ordnance factory.

There are indications that such jihadist activity could creep further south into the heart of Punjab and potentially target the U.S.-NATO supply chain. The Taliban are growing bolder by the day now that they have made significant territorial gains in the greater Swat region in the NWFP further north. As the security situation in the NWFP and FATA deteriorates, U.S.-NATO supply depots and terminals are being moved further south to Punjab where they will be safer, or so it is thought. However, locals in the area are already protesting the relocation of these terminals because they know that they will run a greater chance of becoming Taliban targets the more closely attached they are to the U.S.-NATO supply chain. These people have good reason to be nervous. The jihadists are now openly declaring grander intentions of spreading beyond the Pashtun-dominated periphery into Punjab, Pakistan’s core. Though it would take some time to achieve this, these jihadist groups would have a strategic interest in carrying out attacks against Western supply lines in Punjab that could demonstrate the jihadist reach, aggravate already intense anti-U.S. sentiment and hamper U.S.-NATO logistics for the war in Afghanistan.
cloud_zhou - 2009/5/14 12:26:00
NWFP/FATA

The last leg of the northern supply line runs through the NWFP and the tribal badlands of the FATA. This is by far the most dangerous portion along the route and where Taliban activity is already reaching a crescendo.

Once in the NWFP the route goes through the district of Nowshehra before it reaches the provincial capital Peshawar and begins to hug Taliban territory. A variety of Taliban groups based in the FATA, many of whom are part of the TTP umbrella organization and/or the Mujahideen Shura Council, have taken over several districts in western NWFP and are now on Peshawar’s doorstep. There have been several attacks in Peshawar and further north in Charsaddah, where former Interior Minister Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao twice escaped assassination at the hands of suicide bombers, and east in Nowshehra, where an army base was targeted.


Pakistani paramilitary soldiers inspect seized ammunition on Jan. 2

Though suicide attacks have occurred in these areas, the Pashtun jihadists are not in control of the territory in the NWFP that lies east of Peshawar. All attacks on the northern route have taken place to the west of Peshawar, on the stretch of N-5 between Peshawar and the Torkham border crossing, a distance of nearly 60 kilometers where jihadist activity is intensifying.

Once the transporters reach Peshawar, they hit what is called the “ring road” area, where 15 to 20 bus terminals are located for containers coming from Karachi to stop and then head toward Afghanistan through the Khyber Pass. The area where the bus terminals are situated is under the jurisdiction of Peshawar district, a settled and relatively calm area. But when the trucks travel east on the Peshawar-Torkham road toward Afghanistan, they enter a critical danger zone. Some Pakistani truckers have refused to drive this stretch between Peshawar and the Khyber Pass for fear of being attacked. Militants destroyed a key bridge in February on the Peshawar-Torkham road, where there are a dozen of other bridges that can be targeted in future attacks. The most recent and daring attack on highway N-5 between Peshawar and Torkham was the March 27 suicide bombing of a mosque during Friday prayers that killed dozens of local political and security officials.

For those convoys that make it out of the Peshawar terminal-depot hub, the next major stop is the Khyber Pass leading into Khyber agency, where the route travels along N-5 through Jamrud, Landikotal and Michni Post and then reaches the border with Afghanistan. The border area between Peshawar district and Khyber agency is called the Karkhano Market, which is essentially a massive black market for stolen goods run by smugglers, drug dealers and other organized-crime elements. Here one can find high quality merchandise at cheap prices, including stolen goods that were meant for U.S. and NATO forces. STRATFOR sources claim they have seen U.S.-NATO military uniforms and laptops going for $100 in the market.

Khyber agency (the most developed agency in the tribal belt) has been the scene of high-profile abductions, destroyed bridges and attacks against local political and security officials. Considering the frequency of the attacks, it appears that the militants can strike at the supply chain with impunity, and with likely encouragement from Pakistani security forces. This area is inhabited by four tribes — the Afridi, Shinwari, Mullagori and Shimani. But as is the case in other agencies of the FATA, the mullahs and militia commanders have usurped the tribal elders in Khyber agency. As many as three different Taliban groups in this area are battling Pakistani forces as well as each other.

Militiamen of the most active Taliban faction in Khyber agency, Mangal Bagh’s LI, heavily patrol the Bara area and have blown up several shrines, abducted local Christians and fought gunbattles with police. LI is not part of Baitullah Mehsud’s TTP umbrella group but maintains significant influence among the tribal maliks. Mehsud is allied with another faction called the Hakimullah Group, which rivals a third faction called Amr bil Maarouf wa Nahi Anil Munkar (“Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice”), whose leader, Haji Namdaar, was killed by Hakimullah militiamen.

Not all the Khyber agency militants are ideologically driven jihadists like Baitullah Mehsud of the TTP and Mullah Fazlullah of the TNSM. Some are organized-crime elements who lack religious training and have long been engaged in smuggling operations. When the Pakistani military entered the region to crack down on the insurgency, these criminal groups saw their illegal activities disrupted. To continue to earn a livelihood, many of these criminal elements were reborn as militants under the veil of jihad.


Khyber district

LI commander Bagh (the alleged former convoy driver) is uneducated overall, and never received any kind of formal religious education. He became the leader of LI two years ago when he succeeded Deobandi cleric Mufti Munir Shakir. Bagh stays clear of targeting Pakistani military forces and says his objective is to clean up the area’s criminal elements and, like his counterparts in other parts of the Pashtun region, impose a Talibanesque interpretation of religious law. This tendency on the part of organized-crime elements in Pakistan to jump on the jihad bandwagon actually runs the risk of weakening the insurgency. Because criminal groups are not ideologically driven, it is easier for Pakistani forces and U.S. intelligence operatives to bribe them away from the insurgency.
cloud_zhou - 2009/5/14 12:27:00
The Southern Route

The southern route into Afghanistan is the shorter of the two U.S.-NATO supply routes. The entire route traverses the 813-kilometer-long national highway N-25, running north from the port of Karachi through Sindh and northwest into Balochistan before crossing into southern Afghanistan at the Chaman border crossing.

About 25 to 30 percent of the supplies going to U.S.-NATO forces operating in southern Afghanistan travel along this route. Though most of the southern route through Pakistan is relatively secure, the security risks rise dramatically once the trucks cross into Afghanistan on highway A-75, which runs through the heart of Taliban country in Kandahar province and surrounding areas.

Once out of Karachi, the route through Sindh is secure. Problems arise once the trucks hit Balochistan province, a resource-rich region where ethnic Baloch separatists have waged an insurgency for decades against Punjabi rule. The Baloch insurgency is directed against the Pakistani state and is led by three main groups: the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA), the Balochistan Liberation Front (BLF) and the People’s Liberation Army. The BLA is the most active of the three and focuses its attacks on Pakistani police and military personnel, natural gas pipelines and civil servants. The Pakistani military deals with the Baloch rebels with an iron fist, but the Baloch insurgency has been a long and insoluble one. (Balochistan enjoyed autonomy under the British, and when Pakistan was created it forcibly took over the province; successive Pakistani regimes have mishandled the issue.)

Once inside Balochistan, the supply route runs first into the major industrial town of Hub (also known as Hub Chowki) and then into the Baloch capital of Quetta. These are areas that have witnessed a number of Baloch separatist attacks in recent years, including the December 2004 bombing of a Pakistani military truck in Quetta (claimed by the BLA), the killing of three Chinese engineers working at Gwadar Port in May of the same year and, more recently, the abduction of the head of the U.N. refugee agency (an American citizen) in February 2009 from Quetta. Although the Baloch insurgency has been relatively calm over the past year, unrest reignited in the province in early April after the bodies of three top Baloch rebel leaders were discovered in the Turbat area near the Iranian border. The Baloch separatist groups claim that the rebel leaders died at the hands of Pakistani security forces.

The Baloch rebels have no direct quarrel with the United States or NATO member states and are far more interested in attacking Pakistani targets. But they have struck foreign interests before in Balochistan to pressure Islamabad in negotiations. Baloch rebels also demonstrated the ability to strike Western targets in Karachi when they bombed a KFC fast-food restaurant in November 2005. Although the separatists have yet to show any interest in attacking U.S.-NATO convoys running through the region, future attacks cannot be ruled out.

The main threat along this route comes from Islamist militants who are active in the final 150-kilometer stretch of the road between the Quetta region and the Chaman border crossing. This section of highway N-25 runs through what is known as the Pashtun corridor in northwest Balochistan, bordering South Waziristan agency on the southern tip of the FATA.

Although the supply route traversing this region has seen very few attacks, the situation could easily change. A number of jihadists who have sought sanctuary from the firefights farther north as well as Afghan Taliban chief Mullah Mohammed Omar and his Quetta Shura (or leadership council) are believed to be hiding in the Quetta area. The Pashtun corridor also is the stronghold of Pakistan’s largest Islamist party, the pro-Taliban Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam. In addition, the al Qaeda-linked anti-Shiite group LeJ has been engaged in sectarian and other attacks in the region. Northwestern Balochistan also is a key launchpad for Taliban operations in southern Afghanistan and is the natural extension of Pakistani Taliban activity in the tribal belt. Although the Baloch separatists are firmly secular in their views, they have been energized by the rise of Islamist groups fighting the same enemy: the Pakistani state.
cloud_zhou - 2009/5/14 12:28:00
A Worrisome Outlook

The developing U.S. military strategy for Afghanistan suffers from a number of strategic flaws. Chief among them is the fact — and there is no getting around it — that Pakistan serves as the primary supply line for both the Western forces and the jihadist forces fighting each other in Afghanistan.

Pakistan’s balancing act between the United States and its former Islamist militant proxies is becoming untenable as many of those proxies turn against the Pakistani state. And as stability deteriorates in Pakistan, the less reliable the landscape is for facilitating the overland shipment of military supplies into Afghanistan. The Russians, meanwhile, are not exactly eager to make life easier for the United States in Afghanistan by cooperating in any meaningful way on alternate supply routes through Central Asia.

Jihadist forces in Pakistan’s northwest have already picked up on the idea that the long U.S.-NATO supply route through northern Pakistan makes a strategic and vulnerable target in their campaign against the West. Attacks on supply convoys have thus far been concentrated in the volatile tribal badlands along the northwest frontier with Afghanistan. But the Pakistani Taliban are growing bolder by the day and are publicly announcing their intent to spread beyond the Pashtun areas and into the Pakistani core of Punjab. The Pakistani government and military, meanwhile, are strategically stymied. They cannot follow U.S. orders and turn every Pashtun into an enemy, and they cannot afford to see their country crushed under the weight of the jihadists. As a result, the jihadists gain strength while the writ of the Pakistani state erodes.

But the jihadists are not the only ones that CENTCOM should be worrying about as it analyzes its logistical challenges in Pakistan. Islamist sympathizers in Pakistan’s security apparatus and organized crime elements can take — and have taken — advantage of the shoddy security infrastructure in place to transport U.S.-NATO supplies through the country. In addition, there are secular political forces in play — from the MQM in Karachi to the Baloch rebels in Quetta — that could tip the balance in areas now considered relatively safe for transporting supplies to Afghanistan.

The United States is becoming increasing reliant on Pakistan, just as Pakistan is becoming increasingly unreliable. There are no quick fixes to the problem, but the first step in addressing it is to understand the wide array of threats currently engulfing the Pakistani state.
cloud_zhou - 2009/5/16 14:58:00
The military operation against Taliban forces in Pakistan’s greater Swat region entered its 19th day on May 15. While military operations continue throughout Swat district as well as in the adjacent districts of Dir, Buner and Shangla, the main developments related to the counterjihadist offensive were political in nature. Pakistan’s government is cognizant that it needs to be able to ensure public support for the counterinsurgency operations — especially in the wake of the displacement of over a million people — and focus on complementing the military operations with humanitarian and political outreach.

A lack of military and economic resources, especially in the wake of the refugee crisis, is placing tremendous strain on the state. Therefore, both the outcome of the fighting and the ability of the government to hold ground gained in the fighting remain in question.

Curfew was relaxed for a few hours in key areas — especially in Mingora, the district headquarters of Swat — allowing tens of thousands of civilians, previously unable to leave the war zone, to flee the fighting. Even though the political and economic costs of displacing a large number of people is very high, the logic behind getting as many people out of the war zone is twofold. It is a potential means of limiting collateral damage while allowing the army to use massive force to degrade as much of the militants’ capability as possible. For this reason, Pakistan’s military is working to encircle the militants and trap them in a given area.

This approach is difficult to pull off, especially given the Taliban’s modus operandi is to avoid open combat in the face of overwhelming conventional force. This explains reports that Taliban fighters are shaving their beards to blend in with the civilians trying to get away from the fighting. The terrain and the availability of space also make it possible for the fighters to escape the battle zone. But if a significant number of the belligerents can be forced to fight in a given area, then conventional firepower could yield some major successes.

Beyond the battlefield, Pakistani army chief Gen. Ashfaq Kayani will present a briefing of the operation to members of Parliament, which is intended to garner broader political support for the offensive. Several senior officials (including Cabinet members and senior army commanders) issued statements that there is no time frame for the operation, which indicates the difficulties that the security forces face in their attempts to dislodge the Taliban from their strongholds in the area.

Lawmakers have called for the government to prepare for post-operation normalization efforts. This is key because, in the past, the militants were able to resume their activities after the end of security operations due to the halfheartedness of the offensive and especially because there were no moves to fill the political security vacuum once the army pulled out. With the failure of the peace agreement and the undertaking of a major offensive this time around, there is even more pressure on Islamabad to ensure it can retain areas cleared of militants.
cloud_zhou - 2009/5/20 12:31:00
Pakistani Information Minister Qamar Zaman Kaira on Monday denied a claim, published Sunday by The New York Times, that Pakistan was adding to its nuclear arsenal. Kaira said, “Pakistan does not need to expand its nuclear arsenal, but we want to make it clear that we will maintain a minimum nuclear deterrence that is essential for our defense and stability. We will not make any compromise.”

The Times had reported that, at a U.S. Senate committee hearing on May 14, U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen had succinctly answered “yes,” without elaborating, when asked if he had seen evidence of an increase in the size of Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.

A nuclear arsenal cannot be expanded on a whim. The processes Mullen was referring to are products of years of labor to refine, modernize and expand the arsenal — work that in all likelihood has proceeded apace since before Pakistan’s 1998 tests (even if the focus after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks shifted for a time to security, safety, and command and control).

Mullen said he feels “comfortable,” based on what he knows and what the Pakistanis have told him, about the increased security measures established during the last three to four years to secure Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal.

The Pakistanis are in the middle of one of their most aggressive offensives against the Taliban in and around Swat Valley, and they expect Washington to follow through with promises of $3 billion in military aid over the next five years and $7.5 billion in civilian assistance as a reward for their efforts. Since a good amount of unchecked U.S. aid to Pakistan frequently has been diverted to corporate entities for the benefit of military commanders in the past, U.S. lawmakers are naturally poking into every nook and cranny in Pakistan to see where future funds might wind up. Of course, the last thing Washington wants is for Pakistan to use U.S. money to beef up the very nuclear arsenal the United States is attempting to keep secure from jihadists.

But Pakistan has very different priorities in mind. A big part of the reason Islamabad and Washington don’t see eye-to-eye on how to manage the jihadist problem is Pakistan’s deep-seated fear of its larger and more powerful neighbor, India. While the United States is trying to keep Pakistan focused on its northwestern border with Afghanistan, where the writ of the Pakistani state is eroding at the hands of the jihadists, the Pakistani military leadership is far more concerned with keeping most troops stationed on the eastern border with India. This is a Pakistani fact of life that will not change, no matter how much the United States attempts to reassure Islamabad over India’s military intentions.

Pakistan has been playing catch-up with India since the 1947 partition. Lacking India’s geographic strategic depth, economic foundation and political cohesion, Pakistan has based its security policy on two primary pillars.

The first involves the state’s long-standing Islamization policy, which has been used as an unconventional tool to foster militants in places like Afghanistan and Kashmir, to gain allies and fend off rivals. Since Pakistan was more likely to suffer defeat in a direct military engagement with India, it increasingly relied on proxies to keep the Indians too busy putting out fires at home to seriously entertain military options against the Pakistanis.

The second pillar is rooted in Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal — a last-resort option designed to keep the Indians at bay should the militant proxies push New Delhi’s buttons too hard. Pakistan would be quantitatively and qualitatively beaten by the Indians in a military contest, and currently it can only dream of reaching nuclear parity with India. Still, the nuclear arsenal is Islamabad’s most valued defense against Indian aggression. In fact, just six months ago, Pakistan reminded India of the nuclear threat, seeking to make New Delhi reconsider any plans for military retaliation in the wake of the November 2008 Mumbai attacks.

With Taliban and scores of Kashmiri Islamist militants now turning on the Pakistani state, it has become all too clear that Islamabad’s first defense strategy — the militant proxy project — is coming undone. Once, this strategy both ensured the integrity of the state and reinforced Pakistan’s defense of its borders. Now, the same strategy is breaking it apart.

This is not to say that the military leadership is psychologically prepared to abolish the militant proxy strategy completely. But as the security and intelligence apparatus works to sort out the “good” militants from the “bad” militants that have turned against it, the Pakistani state naturally feels pressured to ramp up its second line of defense against India.

In all likelihood, Pakistan has been modernizing and expanding its nuclear arsenal for some time. Now that concerns are being raised over Pakistan’s nuclear plans and the potential diversion of U.S. funds, aid earmarks are coming into question — and Washington will experience even more difficulty in trying to deal with the Pakistanis and instill sufficient confidence in Islamabad to sustain the offensive against the Taliban. Furthermore, Washington is bound to run into complications with India, which will demand that the United States not stand idle while Pakistan expands its nuclear capability.

But as Mullen said himself, the Pakistanis “are very protective of their nuclear weapons,” and understandably so. These days, Pakistan’s concerns about securing its nuclear arsenal don’t apply only to the Indians and the jihadists. On Monday, Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani said, “We want to tell the world in categoric terms that, with the blessing of God, Pakistan’s nuclear assets are safe and will remain safe. No one, no matter how powerful and influential, eyeing on our national assets, will succeed.” Gilani undoubtedly was referring to fears in his country that the United States might try to eliminate Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, given sufficient cause to believe that the nuclear facilities could fall to jihadist control. As we have discussed previously, such U.S. threats were made loud and clear following the Sept. 11 attacks: Pakistan was pressured to admit U.S. Special Forces into the nuclear facilities in order to stave off a crisis with both Washington and New Delhi.

As the jihadists grow stronger, Pakistan sees another crisis approaching. It therefore will try to refine, modernize and expand its nuclear arsenal as much as it can, while it can.
cloud_zhou - 2009/5/25 3:23:00
The Pakistani military is facing considerable challenges in its Swat offensive, raising doubts over whether the offensive can be extended to Waziristan as the Pakistani president is claiming. The negative effects of the military offensive are also reaching as far south as Karachi, where ethnic tensions are skyrocketing over an influx of Pashtun refugees.

The Pakistani military offensive, termed Rah-i-Rast (Right Path), against the Taliban in Swat and surrounding areas entered its 26th day May 22.

The military strategy has thus far focused on preventing the Taliban’s flight into hard-to-reach mountainous terrain, clearing Taliban strongholds in Swat and encircling the militants in the heart of Swat Valley in Mingora, a city that remains under Taliban control. Pakistani military forces have attempted to corner the Taliban in Swat from several directions: from the heavily forested Taliban hideout in Peochar in northwestern Swat, from Lower Dir to the west, from Malakand district to the southwest, from Buner to the southeast and from Shangla to the east. Thus far, some two million civilians have been displaced from the military operation in these areas.

The Pakistani military claims thus far that it has killed more than 1,000 Taliban militants, but sources on the ground say these estimates are likely exaggerated for political purposes. There is also friction within the military over these reports, as some commanders dispute that such casualty numbers should be used to track progress. These sources also claim that some areas that the Pakistani military claims have been cleared completely of the Taliban, such as Sultanwas in Buner district, still have a notable militant presence.



The toughest fight in this offensive will be in Mingora City, where sources report some 200,000 civilians remain. Taliban militants likely numbering in the low hundreds have been reportedly digging themselves in within Mingora, taking positions on rooftops, digging trenches, planting mines and explosives and building up arsenals in preparation for an urban battle with the Pakistani military.

A large number of Taliban militants, however, appear to be on the retreat. Some have mixed in with the refugee crowd and others have retreated to the mountains in northern Swat, such as the Kalam area where Taliban militants are being confronted by local villagers. Sources in the area report that some local police have been caught aiding the Taliban’s retreat. The interior ministry has reportedly placed former Malakand Commissioner Syed Javaid Shah and former Malakand Deputy Inspector General Police Shaukat Hayat on the Exit Control List (ECL) — a government list designed to keep troublemakers in the country — for having collaborated with the Swat Taliban. Such police collaboration with the Taliban is understandable: when the Taliban move into a certain area, the police are the first targets to get hit. This was made evident even in recent weeks as several bodies of policemen have been recovered by Pakistani troops. Given their vulnerability to the Taliban and their doubts over how long the military will be able to sustain the offensive and prevent the Taliban from returning to the area, some local police can be expected to try and collaborate with both the military and the Taliban to increase their odds of surviving.

The Taliban escape route also appears to involve deal making with local tribal maliks. Taliban insurgents in Dir reportedly agreed to leave their strongholds in Asbanr and Gulabad areas that they captured in early April. The agreement was made during a tribal council late May 19 and the Taliban agreed to leave within two days. Further west in Gulnai area of Mohmand Agency bordering the Afghan border, Taliban commander Yawar Syed and several of his associates laid down their arms May 22 in a well-publicized tribal jirga deal. Such transient peace deals are what enabled the Taliban to expand their writ in the Pakistani northwest in the first place. These temporary amnesties allow the Taliban time to regroup and are subsequently broken when the conditions are ripe for a comeback.

The Pakistani military understands the difficulties in holding the territory that they have cleared thus far. For now, the military has significant public support in pursuing these militants, but they cannot sustain direct military rule in the area for too long without fueling resentment among the populace. The civil administration in these areas is far too weak to enforce the writ of the state and local law enforcement is severely demoralized and limited in strength. For these reasons, the military is relying heavily on tribal militias, called Lashkars, to keep the Taliban from returning. This is an age-old practice by the Pakistani government to control militants in the tribal belt, but Islamabad is in effect legitimizing non-state entities, which sets a dangerous precedent in an already lawless and religiously conservative area. Some of the Lashkars in Buner, Lower Dir and Kalam Valley have resisted the Taliban even without military support in recent battles. Though the will of the Lashkars is strong, they run the risk of being overrun by Taliban forces should the military prove incapable of supporting them in the long run.

Though accurate estimates on casualties are still hard to come by, sources in the area report that casualties among security personnel have increased in recent days as street battles have broken out in various urban centers of Swat. The military is encountering heavy resistance in these areas and continues to face major challenges in holding territory. Nonetheless, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari announced May 17 in a Sunday Times interview that Swat was just the start, and that the military would soon extend the war into the tribal areas of North and South Waziristan. A Pakistani source claims that discussions are underway over who would command an operation in Waziristan, with the local tribal leader Sajjad Wazir mentioned thus far. While talk of extending the offensive to Waziristan is music to Washington’s ears, STRATFOR has serious doubts over the Pakistani military’s seriousness over such an operation.

The Swat offensive has already presented a number of challenges, but Waziristan would be in another league entirely. These areas are tightly controlled by the Taliban in collaboration with local Wazir, Dawar and Mehsud tribes, while the Pakistani army maintains a small, confined presence in Zerinoor camp in Wana in South Waziristan. Though there are some pockets in Waziristan where tribal rivals to the Taliban are present, the military would have nowhere near the same level of public support in an offensive there as they do currently in Swat. South Waziristan is also the territory of Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan leader Baitullah Mehsud, who has several training camps in the area and collaborates closely with al Qaeda forces that have found sanctuary in the region and use the territory as a staging ground for attacks into Afghanistan. In addition, the Pakistani military lacks both the force strength and secure supply lines from the corps base in Peshawar to launch a meaningful offensive against fortified Taliban positions in Waziristan. The Pakistani military is unlikely to open up another front in Waziristan while the success of the Swat offensive remains in question. That said, limited operations could take place in Waziristan.

The Taliban counteroffensive also appears to be in the works. Ten people were reported dead and 80 injured (several critically) from a car bombing May 22 in Peshawar, just some 43 miles from where the military is battling militants in Swat. Taliban militants are also retreating among refugees into the heart of Pakistan in Punjab and Sindh provinces. With the Taliban under the gun in the northwest, they have an incentive to demonstrate their reach and viability through attacks in Pakistani urban centers, including Islamabad and Karachi. The influx of Pashtun refugees into Karachi has expectedly set off the Sindhi nationalists in Jeay Sindh Qaumi Mahaz (JSQM) and the local ruling Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM). These parties have long been fearful of a Taliban influx into Karachi and are holding mass demonstrations and calling on their followers to take up arms in demanding the local assembly to seal the borders of the province from the Pashtuns. STRATFOR has highlighted the volatility of Karachi in the past, and it appears that Pakistan’s main port city and supply line base for U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan is now in serious danger of destabilizing.
cloud_zhou - 2009/5/25 3:23:00
The leaders of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan will meet May 24 in Tehran, where they will discuss the growing Taliban insurgency in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. There is much for the three sides to sort out, so this meeting will barely begin to scratch the surface. But it will get the process of sorting out the regional multilateral dynamic going — ultimately helping to shape the outcome of international efforts to fight the spreading Taliban insurgency in Southwest Asia.
Analysis

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will host a trilateral summit in Tehran on May 24 with his Afghan and Pakistani counterparts, Hamid Karzai and Asif Ali Zardari. While the three leaders met some three months ago in Tehran for a regional economic summit, this is their first trilateral meeting to discuss the threat posed by a growing Taliban insurgency on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border. It also takes place in the aftermath of two similar trilateral gatherings involving the Afghan and Pakistani heads of state, one in Ankara and the second in Washington.

Two things render this particular summit significant.

The first significant aspect is that Iran is hosting it. Iran is in the process of emerging as a regional player, especially in Afghanistan, where the United States has called on Iran to play a role in the fight against the growing Taliban insurgency. Despite Iran’s participation in the U.S.-sponsored international meeting on Afghanistan held in The Hague on March 31, and despite efforts by the Obama administration to engage the clerical regime, gridlock persists between Washington and Tehran. There is no shortage of issues on which the two sides continue to clash. When it comes to Afghanistan, the Iranians are very suspicious of U.S. moves to negotiate with the Taliban and to involve Saudi Arabia (Iran’s principal regional rival) in Afghanistan. In short, Tehran would like to be able to consolidate its position in the region before becoming part of a broader international effort in Afghanistan.

The second significant aspect is that the May 24 summit involves Afghanistan’s two most important neighbors. Iran and Pakistan not only share large borders with Afghanistan, they also have a disproportionate amount of influence in the country. Due to their respective ethno-linguistic ties to Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran have played historic roles there, especially since the Islamist insurgency against the Soviet-backed Marxist Afghan regime broke out in the late 1970s. For these very reasons, if there is to be a political settlement to the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan, it will require a consensus involving Tehran, Islamabad and Afghanistan — and the process toward this end will likely be kicked off in the Ahmadinejad-Karzai-Zardari meeting.

With a growing realization within the region that the United States and its NATO allies will not find success in their struggle against the Taliban insurgency, and that they will not have a long-term commitment to the issue, the three capitals are increasingly moving toward seeking a regional solution. This is their neighborhood after all, and they certainly do not want jihadist nonstate actors undermining regional security and stability.

Of the three, the Karzai government has perhaps the least room for maneuver because it faces the biggest threat from the Taliban, which explains recent reports about an acceleration in Kabul’s efforts to reach out to Taliban chief Mullah Mohammad Omar. While the Pakistanis are not facing the same magnitude of threat as the Afghans, the rise of the Taliban on both sides of the Durand Line poses a critical threat to Pakistani national security, too. For their part, the Iranians do not want to see Taliban emirates appear in two countries on their eastern flank. Complicating the picture, Pakistan and Iran both support their preferred Taliban actors in Afghanistan, and both are fighting their own Balochi insurgencies.

The bulk of the conversations among the three presidents will focus on the threat posed by Taliban militants. In the case of Iran and Pakistan, they also will address opportunities. As Iran moves to consolidate its influence in Baghdad via Tehran’s Iraqi Shiite allies, it is very much interested in projecting power in Afghanistan, especially given the deep U.S., Pakistani and Saudi involvement there. Iran also knows that it needs all the levers it can amass for use in its wider dealings with the United States and over Iraq, and Afghanistan is a major card in Iran’s hand. For Pakistan, though Talibanization at home has weakened its bargaining power, Islamabad would like to make sure it keep its Afghan Taliban allies in Kabul to counter Pakistan’s own regional rival, India, whose influence in Afghanistan has grown considerably since the fall of the Taliban regime in 2001.

Clearly, there is much for the three sides to sort out, and the May 24 meeting will barely begin to scratch the surface. But it will start the process of sorting out the regional multilateral dynamic, which will play a pivotal role in shaping the outcome of international efforts to combat the spreading Taliban insurgency in Southwest Asia.
cloud_zhou - 2009/5/27 11:30:00
Pakistan’s military offensive against the Taliban has been in progress for one month. Military forces have begun intense fighting in Mingora, the Swat district headquarters, but are facing logistical challenges from the millions of internally displaced people. The military will encounter difficulties expanding its operations in South Waziristan, if the government chooses to conduct an all-out assault on the locations of jihadists.
Analysis

May 26 marks one month since Operation Rahi-i-Rast (Straight Path) was launched by the Pakistani army to retake the greater Swat region from Taliban militants. Over the weekend, the battle for regaining control of Swat district headquarters Mingora began, and intense house-to-house fighting continues inside the city. Troops are reportedly in control of several areas of the city, which explains why Tehrik-i-Taliban Swat spokesman Muslim Khan told media that the jihadists had been asked by Swat Taliban chief Maulana Fazlullah to fall back.

While Pakistani forces have had limited success in Mingora, given the Taliban move to regroup, they are still facing stiff resistance from fighters who remain holed up in the city, according to army spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas. Abbas added that it would be another 7 to 10 days before the military can clear Mingora. The commander of Peshawar-based XIth Corps, Lt. Gen. Muhammad Masood Aslam, has said that escape routes have been sealed and has demanded the unconditional surrender of Taliban forces. The key challenge for Pakistani security forces on the battleground is to prevent the escape of Taliban fighters, whose modus operandi is to escape into the countryside to fight another day. However, there are many who desire to die as martyrs, which is why the surrender call will not be successful, and such fighters are digging into their strongholds in Mingora for an intense fight.

In previous military operations in Swat, the Taliban fighters have been able to flee the battle zone only to return once the army withdrew. The terrain makes it extremely difficult to ensure a high degree of success in preventing Taliban fighters from escaping.

Elsewhere, the army claims that 90 percent of Buner has been cleared where there has been relaxation in the curfew during the daytime. The situation in Dir and Shagla, however, continues to remain in flux where there are certain areas in which curfew has been relaxed but other areas continue to be under Taliban control.

In order to restore local administrative and security structures in the cleared areas, the government has cut the training short of both police officials at the academy in Hangu and several district management group civil servants and is dispatching them to the Swat region in order to restore local governance. It will be a major challenge to bring back those governmental structures at the grassroots level because the Taliban took advantage of the vacuum to take over the region. Pakistan’s efforts to rebuild governmental organizations that will be able to withstand the Taliban’s attempts to return after the dust settles will also be difficult, especially since police with limited training will be particularly vulnerable to jihadist guerillas and suicide bombers. What this means is that the army will have to stay in the area for a considerable period of time.

Meanwhile, the army has begun limited operations in the much tougher jihadist environment of South Waziristan, which is the logical outcome of the emerging broad-based political will in Islamabad that the offensive should not stop with the Swat region but also should hit Waziristan and other troublesome areas. The timing of such an operation will depend on resources. The army likely is gradually building up an assault on the tribal region similar to what took place in the greater Swat region where it first moved into Buner and Dir and then made its way into Swat. A key difficulty in opening a second front is Pakistan does not have the troops available both to maintain a permanent presence and to fight the other battles it needs because of its deployment on the eastern border with India.

For now, however, the government has its hands full with the some 2.5 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) — a crisis much bigger than the offensive itself. An indicator of the magnitude of the problem posed by refugees fleeing from the war zones in the greater Swat region can be assessed by the United States’ move to provide assistance in terms of supplies (tents, air conditioners, power generators, etc.) to house the IDPs. Expanding the sphere of the offensive means the number of refugees will increase further — a very large pool of disaffected people who could become a support base for the Taliban.

Therefore, success for Islamabad is not just in terms of clearing and holding territories but also dealing with the humanitarian crisis.
cloud_zhou - 2009/5/30 11:51:00
A wave of suicide bombings targeting mostly police and military targets across Pakistan in the past two and half years have caused the country to resemble Iraq during the height of the Sunni insurgency in 2003-2007. But Wednesday’s bombing in Lahore — the capital of Pakistan’s largest province, Punjab – was quite different from all previous attacks. Though they did not succeed, a group calling itself the Tehrik-i-Taliban Punjab claimed responsibility for the attack, which employed a significantly large vehicle-borne improvised explosive device to target the Punjab headquarters of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate.

Compared to several previous attacks, the casualty count wasn’t that high. But the fact that jihadists attacked a major facility of the ISI — which long had cultivated jihadist forces as instruments of foreign policy concerning Afghanistan and India — marks Wednesday’s attack as an extraordinary development. Soon afterward, there was a flurry of counterterrorism activity, with the ISI (rather than regular law enforcement agencies, which normally would respond to such attacks) arresting suspected militants — including one identified as the mastermind behind the operation — and raiding their safe houses.

These countermeasures demonstrate a strong response on the part of the powerful spy directorate, which thus far has been caught in a dilemma over how to target “bad” Taliban forces (those that attack in Pakistan) while maintaining influence over the “good” ones (those that focus on attacks in Afghanistan).

The ISI’s predicament notwithstanding, Pakistan’s civilian government and powerful military establishment are in the midst of the country’s largest-ever counterjihadist offensive, in the greater Swat region. The military says it will extend the campaign to the Waziristan region, which is perhaps Pakistan’s largest jihadist hub. The decision to undertake such a major initiative stemmed from realizations among the state’s stakeholders that they risked losing large swaths of northwestern Pakistan to Taliban influence.

While there is an emerging coherence among the top-level policymakers, two key chronic issues will continue to prevent Pakistan from making decisive gains against rogue Islamist militants and their transnational allies.

First is a lack of public support, which rises from the widespread notion that Pakistan’s insurgency is a result of Islamabad fighting a U.S.-imposed war, coupled with conspiracy theories about mysterious “foreign hands” trying to destabilize the country. While such views are quite prevalent, there are strong signs that public perceptions are shifting — nudged along by each subsequent insurgent attack, especially those in major cities in the country’s core. The growing number of attacks is fostering introspection, at the levels of both society and state. In short, there is a growing realization that something is very rotten in Pakistan’s body politic.

It will be some time before this new awareness solidifies in the minds of Pakistan’s people and lawmakers, but there clearly has been an eruption of public debate over how to combat religious extremism and militancy. There is recognition that much work is required at the societal level; at the same time, the expectation is that most of the heavy lifting will fall to the authorities. This brings us back to the ISI and the challenge it faces: Making the painful shift from being a cultivator of Islamist insurgents to an intelligence service that can use its resources to fight those same non-state actors — a great many of whom are now biting the hand that fed them, as Wednesday’s attack showed.

The directorate has been cleaning house, so to speak, for some time, especially since the November 2008 attacks in Mumbai. Given the magnitude of the threat jihadists pose to Pakistan and the region, however, that would not seem to be enough. Reforming an intelligence service is an extremely sensitive and difficult task for any state. In Pakistan’s case, the challenge is only magnified by the ISI’s size, complexity, power and historical relationships with an array of Islamist militants.

On top of this, the army leadership fears — and legitimately — that any radical change to the ISI could undermine national security, to the point that Pakistan would face external threats in addition to the internal ones.

Regardless of how the Pakistanis deal with the issue of reforming the intelligence service, one thing is clear: The Pakistani Taliban have declared war on the ISI, leaving the directorate no choice but to wash its hands of them. Ultimately, if the Pakistani state wants to escape its jihadist morass, it must be guided out by the same institution that played a key role in creating the mess in the first place.
cloud_zhou - 2009/6/2 2:47:00
The Pakistani army announced Sunday that troops had secured the key Taliban stronghold at Mingora, the district headquarters of Swat in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP). Security forces also had begun trucking in relief supplies for the 40,000 residents remaining there (the actual population of the town is about 300,000) following the battle. Mingora has sustained significant damage, with most buildings and shops in the town square destroyed, according to the BBC.

The collateral damage underscores the cost of wresting control of the town from the Pashtun jihadists. Significant conventional firepower appears to have been brought to bear. More important, however, is the fact that the Pakistani military’s ability to reclaim the town — while significant — does not mean that the Taliban were defeated. Many jihadists might have been killed in the battle, but a great many are likely to have escaped.

In other words, while the Taliban might no longer control the roads around Mingora, to a great extent the countryside remains theirs, and a great many of the locals — having suffered under Islamabad’s offensive — likely remain deeply sympathetic to or even outright supportive of the Taliban. Pakistani troops have secured several other towns in Swat much as they did Mingora, but the district itself and the wider region (including the districts of Dir, Buner and Shangla) are anything but cleared of Taliban.

Pakistan has won some battles, but it has yet to address the local support for the various elements of the Taliban circulating in and around the area. This lingering support could be the reason military spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas said there was no timeline for wrapping up the offensive, after Pakistani Defense Secretary Syed Athar Ali had said operations in Swat would be completed in two or three days.

Though NWFP Information Minister Mian Iftikhar Hussain claimed that the second- and third-tier leadership of the Pakistani Taliban had been mostly eliminated, there is no way to be sure, especially when authorities have announced large cash awards for information about the locations of some two dozen leaders — dead or alive. Making sure that Taliban capabilities have been sufficiently degraded is just one major challenge Islamabad faces; there are also the far bigger issues of consolidating cleared areas and dealing with the humanitarian crisis.

Beating back the Taliban and wrapping up operations in Swat is not just about restoring the writ of the state and the ability to deliver essential services to more than 3 million people who have been uprooted by the counterinsurgency campaign — one of Islamabad’s more immediate challenges. Because the state had a very thin presence in the restive northwest to begin with (a situation the Taliban exploited to gain control of large swaths of territory), the situation is not simply a matter of restoring normalcy. Instead, the government is, in many ways, starting from scratch. Its success or failure in the tasks at hand will have consequences far beyond the towns and villages of Swat.

Although it is certainly critical, the greater Swat region is not the only Taliban safe haven in Pakistan that needs to be reclaimed in what is now a bona fide Pakistani war against Islamist militants. The Taliban are present in many other areas: The two Waziristan agencies in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas are very likely the most defensible jihadist sanctuary. Pakistani troops are carrying out limited operations in South Waziristan, which elicited an assault by scores of Taliban fighters on a Frontier Corps paramilitary base near the town of Jandola on Sunday.

Though Pakistani forces are able to repel these guerrilla-style attacks on remote outposts, the bigger threat comes from suicide bombings targeting key security installations in major cities, such as the attack a few days ago in Lahore that targeted a key facility of the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate. Waziristan is considered the launch pad for many of these large-scale bombings — and since the Pakistanis are still fighting in Swat and likely will not be able to expand the offensive meaningfully into Waziristan anytime soon, urban bombings are likely to continue.

Expanding operations would also mean a rapidly increasing number of refugees — a major factor preventing the Pakistanis from striking on multiple fronts at the same time. Public support for the counter-insurgency efforts has improved, but a majority of Pakistanis remain ambivalent about the use of force — a situation that easily could complicate matters with so many internally displaced people. Swat, therefore, is a crucial test of the state’s ability to undermine the Taliban, whose tentacles spread across Pakistan and beyond in southwest Asia.

The claimed successes of the current campaign are only the beginning. The conventional offensive in Swat likely was necessary, given the strength of the Taliban’s hold on the region, but the real trick in fighting the insurgency will involve Islamabad’s ability to reach out to the locals, creating a bulwark against Taliban attempts to exploit sentiments among the people whose lives have been disrupted.

Essentially, Islamabad’s “success” this weekend was a step, and a necessary one. But it was only one step in a much more complicated process. The battle, as they say, has only just begun.
cloud_zhou - 2009/6/7 2:58:00
Pakistan’s release of prominent militant leader Hafiz Muhammad Saeed could help it deal with its Taliban insurgency in the short term, but it will complicate relations with India, and ultimately will not help matters with the insurgency, either.
Analysis

Pakistani authorities have said that they are keeping a close eye on Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, according to a June 5 report from India’s official Press Trust of India news agency. Saeed founded and led the proscribed group Jamaat-ud-Dawah (the successor to Lashkar-e-Taiba, or LeT), the group seen as being behind the Mumbai attack in November 2008. The Lahore High Court in Pakistan ordered Saeed’s release on June 2, saying there was not enough evidence to link him to the Mumbai attack. While the government in Pakistan’s core province of Punjab has said it would appeal the decision, both India and the United States have spoken out against the move.

The U.S. reaction was not very strong, suggesting Pakistan is using the offensive in Swat as a lever to keep Washington from opposing the release too vocally. India, on the other hand, has been more voluble in its opposition to Saeed’s release, and has announced arrests of key associates of Saeed allegedly planning fresh attacks in India. At the same time, New Delhi realizes that while Islamabad has yet to meet India’s expectations in terms of taking action against those responsible for the Mumbai attack, the Pakistanis are embroiled in a very difficult situation with the jihadist insurgency on their own soil.

From Islamabad’s point of view, while it is dealing with India and the United States on the issue of transnational Islamist militancy, it has a much more immediate concern on the home front in the form of Pakistan’s largest-ever counterjihadist offensive in the Swat region in the North-West Frontier Province. Islamabad faces a great challenge in terms of preventing the Taliban from staging large-scale attacks in major urban areas of Punjab — such as the one May 27 that targeted the provincial headquarters of the country’s main intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate, in the provincial capital of Lahore. The Pakistani security establishment faces a major dilemma in deciding how to combat the jihadist forces that have gone rogue while simultaneously maintaining influence over those that have not.

As a Kashmiri Islamist militant group that has continued ties with the Pakistani state and simultaneously maintains relations with the al Qaeda-led transnational jihadist network and pursues goals independent of Islamabad, Saeed’s movement is at the center of this issue. While the Pakistanis want to maintain influence on JuD as a long-term asset against India, Islamabad has been forced to crack down on the group and its allies within the security apparatus because of their role in the Mumbai attack.

Although Islamabad’s influence over the group has eroded over time, a key difference between JuD and other Pakistani militant groups is that, unlike the Pashtun jihadists, JuD it is not staging attacks in Pakistan. This means JuD could help Islamabad with its struggle against rogue Islamist militants in the immediate term. The security establishment could use Saeed’s release, which resulted from an internal struggle among various institutions of the state (in the government, judiciary, army and intelligence sectors), to help counter the Talibanization of Punjab. This is critical to making sure the jihadists remain contained in the northwestern Pashtun areas.

Though a champion of the Kashmiri cause and a major player in the Kashmiri Islamist militant landscape, JuD is dominated by Punjabis and is based in Punjab. A Punjabi himself, Saeed could use his influence to undermine Punjab-based jihadist groups like Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Jaish-e-Mohammed, which are playing a key role in facilitating Taliban attempts to make inroads into the province. It should be kept in mind that JuD has ties to certain Pakistani Taliban factions and that Saeed has criticized the Swat offensive, which is why the nature of any assistance the group could offer remains unclear. Should Saeed and his movement decide to work with the government, they will not do this simply because they oppose undermining the Pakistani state; instead, they will do so as a means to gain respite from the international crackdown they face, and to enhance their own political fortunes in Pakistan.

With JuD’s assistance, the Pakistani state could thus gain some tactical advantage over the rogue jihadists. In the longer term, however, this ultimately would lead to the empowerment of Islamist forces that may not fight the state, but still wish to change Pakistan into a more radical Islamist state. And any efforts on the part of Islamabad to collaborate with groups like JuD will make matters worse with India and the United States. Pakistan cannot fight every single jihadist group operating from its territory, but aligning with some to fight others will only cause international tensions. And in any case, the days when the jihadist entities were nothing more than proxies of Islamabad are long gone.
cloud_zhou - 2009/6/7 3:13:00
There is no doubt that the Taliban currently have the initiative in Afghanistan, but the movement has a long way to go before it can effect a decisive victory. While the Taliban need not evolve from insurgent group to conventional army to achieve that goal, they must move beyond guerrilla tactics, consolidate their disparate parts and find ways to function as a more coordinated fighting force.
Analysis

The United States is losing in Afghanistan because it is not winning. The Taliban are winning in Afghanistan because they are not losing. This is the reality of insurgent warfare. A local insurgent is more invested in the struggle and is working on a much longer time line than an occupying foreign soldier. Every year that U.S. and NATO commanders do not show progress in Afghanistan, the investment of lives and resources becomes harder to justify at home. Public support erodes. Even without more pressing concerns elsewhere, democracies tend to have short attention spans.

At the present time, defense budgets across the developed world — like national coffers in general — are feeling the pinch of the global financial crisis. Meanwhile, the resurgence of Russia’s power and influence along its periphery continues apace. The state of the current U.S.-NATO Afghanistan campaign is not simply a matter of eroding public opinion, but also of immense opportunity costs due to mounting economic and geopolitical challenges elsewhere.

This reality plays into the hands of the insurgents. In any guerrilla struggle, the local populace is vulnerable to the violence and very sensitive to subtle shifts in power at the local level. As long as the foreign occupier’s resolve continues to erode (as it almost inevitably does) or is made to appear to erode (by the insurgents), the insurgents maintain the upper hand. If the occupying power is perceived as a temporary reality for the local populace and the insurgents are an enduring reality, then the incentive for the locals — at the very least — is to not oppose the insurgents directly enough to incur their wrath when the occupying power leaves. For those who seek to benefit from the largesse and status that cooperation with the occupying power can provide, the enduring fear is the departure of that power before a decisive victory can be made against the insurgents — or before adequate security can be provided by an indigenous government army.



Let us apply this dynamic to the current situation in Afghanistan. In much of the extremely rugged, rural and sparsely populated country, a sustained presence by the U.S.-NATO and the Taliban alike is not possible. No one is in clear control in most parts of the country. The strength of the tribal power structure was systematically undermined by the communists long before the actual Soviet invasion at the end of 1979. The power structure that remains is nowhere near as strong or as uniform as, say, that of the Sunni tribes in Anbar province in Iraq (one important reason why replicating the Iraq counterinsurgency in Afghanistan is not possible). Indeed, it is difficult to overstate the unique complexity of the ethnic, linguistic and tribal disparities in Afghanistan.

The challenge for each side in the current Afghan war is to become more of a sustained presence than the other. “Holding” territory is not possible in the traditional sense, with so few troops and hard-line insurgent fighters involved, so a village can be “pro-NATO” one day and “pro-Taliban” the next, depending on who happens to be moving through the area. But even village and tribal leaders who do work with the West are extremely hesitant to burn any bridges with the Taliban, lest U.S.-NATO forces withdraw before defeating the insurgents and before developing a sufficient replacement force of Afghan nationals.



Today, the two primary sources of power in Afghanistan are the gun and the Koran — brute force and religious credibility. The Taliban purport to base their power on both, while the United States and NATO are often derided for wielding only the former — and clumsily at that. Many Afghans believe that too many innocent civilians have been killed in too many indiscriminate airstrikes.

So it comes as little surprise that popular support for the Taliban is on the rise in more and more parts of Afghanistan, and that this support is becoming increasingly entrenched. For years, U.S. attention has been distracted and military power absorbed in Iraq. Meanwhile, a limited U.S.-NATO presence and a lack of opposition in Afghanistan have allowed various elements of the Taliban to make significant inroads. This resurgence is also due to clandestine support from Pakistan’s army and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) directorate, as well as proximity to the mountainous and lawless Pakistani border area, which serves as a Taliban sanctuary.

But the Taliban still have not coalesced to the point where they can eject U.S. or NATO forces from Afghanistan. Far from a monolithic movement, the term “Taliban” encompasses everything from the old hard-liners of the pre-9/11 Afghan regime to small groups that adopt the name as a “flag of convenience,” be they Islamists devoted to a local cause or criminals wanting to obscure their true objectives. Some Taliban elements in Pakistan are waging their own insurrection against Islamabad. (The multifaceted and often confusing character of the Taliban “movement” actually creates a layer of protection around it. The United States has admitted that it does not have the nuanced understanding of the Taliban’s composition needed to identify potential moderates who can be split off from the hard-liners.)

Any “revolutionary” or insurgent force usually has two enemies: the foreign occupying or indigenous government power it is trying to defeat, and other revolutionary entities with which it is competing. While making inroads against the former, the Taliban have not yet resolved the issue of the latter. It is not so much that various insurgent groups with distinctly different ideologies are in direct competition with each other; the problem for the Taliban, reflecting the rough reality that the country’s mountainous and rugged terrain imposes on its people, is the disparate nature of the movement itself.

In order to precipitate a U.S.-NATO withdrawal in the years ahead, the Taliban must do better in consolidating their power. No doubt they currently have the upper hand, but their strategic and tactical advantages will only go so far. They may be enough to prevent the United States and NATO from winning, but they will not accelerate the time line for a Taliban victory. To do this, the Taliban must move beyond current guerrilla tactics and find ways to function as a more coherent and coordinated fighting force.

The bottom line is that neither side in the struggle in Afghanistan is currently operating at its full potential.
To Grow an Insurgency

The main benefits of waging an insurgency usually boil down to the following: insurgents operate in squad- to platoon-sized elements, have light or nonexistent logistical tails, are largely able to live off the land or the local populace, can support themselves by seizing weapons and ammunition from weak local police and isolated outposts and can disperse and blend into the environment whenever they confront larger and more powerful conventional forces. In Afghanistan, the chief insurgent challenge is that reasonably well-defended U.S.-NATO positions have no problem fending off units of that size. In the evolution of an insurgency, we call this stage-one warfare, and Taliban operations by and large continue to be characterized as such.

In stage-two warfare, insurgents operate in larger formations — first independent companies of roughly 100 or so fighters, and later battalions of several hundred or more. Although still relatively small and flexible, these units require more in terms of logistics, especially as they begin to employ heavier, more supply-intensive weaponry like crew-served machine guns and mortars, and they are too large to simply disperse the moment contact with the enemy is made. The challenges include not only logistics but also battlefield communications (everything from bugles and whistles to cell phones and secure tactical radios) as the unit becomes too large for a single leader to manage or visually keep track of from one position.

In stage-three warfare, the insurgent force has become, for all practical purposes, a conventional army operating in regiments and divisions (units, say, consisting of 1,000 or more troops). These units are large enough to bring artillery to bear but must be able to provide a steady flow of ammunition. Forces of this size are an immense logistical challenge and, once massed, cannot quickly be dispersed, which makes them vulnerable to superior firepower.

The culmination of this evolution is exemplified by the battle of Dien Bien Phu in a highland valley in northwestern Vietnam in 1954. The Viet Minh, which began as a nationalist guerrilla group fighting the Japanese during World War II, massed multiple divisions and brought artillery to bear against a French military position considered impregnable. The battle lasted two months and saw the French position overrun. More than 2,000 French soldiers were killed, more than twice that many wounded and more than 10,000 captured. The devastating defeat was quickly followed by the French withdrawal from Indochina after an eight-year counterinsurgency.
The Taliban Today

In describing this progression from stage one to stage three, we are not necessarily suggesting that the Taliban will develop into a conventional force, or that a stage-three capability is necessary to win in Afghanistan. Not every insurgency that achieves victory does so by evolving into the kind of national-level conventional resistance made legendary by the Viet Minh.

Indeed, artillery was not necessary to expel the Soviet Red Army from Afghanistan in the 1980s; that force faced and failed to overcome many of the same challenges that have repelled invaders for centuries and confront the United States and NATO today. But in monitoring the progress of the Taliban as a fighting force, it is important to look beyond estimates of “controlled” territory to the way the Taliban fight, command, consolidate and organize disparate groups into a more coherent resistance.

The Taliban first rose to power in the aftermath of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and before 9/11. They were not the ones to kick out the Red Army, however. That was the mujahideen, with the support of Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United States. The Taliban emerged from the anarchy that followed the fall of Afghanistan’s communist government, also at the hands of the mujahideen, in 1992. In the intra-Islamist civil war that ensued, the Taliban were able to establish security in the southern part of the country, winning over a local Pashtun populace and assorted minorities that had grown weary of war.



This impressed Pakistan, which switched its support from the splintered mujahideen to the Taliban, which appeared to be on a roll. By 1996, the Taliban, also supported by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, were in power in Kabul. Then came 9/11. While the Taliban did, for a time, achieve a kind of stage-two status as a fighting force, they have never had the kind of superpower support the Viet Minh and North Vietnamese received from the Soviet Union during the French and American wars in Vietnam, or that the mujahideen received from the United States during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan.

But elements of the Taliban continue to enjoy patronage from within the Pakistani army and intelligence apparatus, as well as continued funding from wealthy patrons in the Persian Gulf states. The Pakistani support underscores the most important of resources for an effective insurgency (or counterinsurgency): intelligence. With it, the Taliban can obtain accurate and actionable information on competing insurgent groups in order to build a wider and more concerted campaign. They can also identify targets, adjust tactics and exploit the weaknesses of opposing conventional forces. The Taliban openly tout their ties and support from within the Afghan security forces. (Indeed, a significant portion of the Taliban’s weapons and ammunition can be traced back to shipments that were made to the Afghan government and distributed to its police agencies and military units.)

Moreover, while external support of the Taliban may not be as impressive as the support the mujahideen enjoyed in the 1980s, the Karzai government in Afghanistan is far weaker than the communist regime in Kabul that the mujahideen took down. In addition, as a seven-party alliance with significant internal tensions, the mujahideen were even more disjointed than the Taliban. Indeed, the core Taliban today are much more homogeneous than the mujahideen were in the 1980s. The Taliban are the pre-eminent Pashtun power, and the Pashtuns are the single largest ethnic group in Afghanistan. In addition, the leadership of Taliban chief Mullah Omar is unchallenged — he has no equal who could hope to rise and meaningfully compete for control of the movement.

While the Taliban continue to exist squarely in stage-one combat, the movement is increasingly becoming the established, lasting reality for much of the country’s rural population. For ambitious warlords, joining the Taliban movement offers legitimacy and a local fiefdom with wider recognition. For the remainder of the population, the Taliban are increasingly perceived as the inescapable power that will govern when the United States and NATO begin to draw down.

On the other hand, the Taliban’s ability to earn the loyalty of disparate groups, coordinate their actions and command them effectively remains to be seen. Monitoring changes in the way the Taliban communicate — across the country and across the battlefield — will say much about their ability to bring power to bear in a coherent, coordinated and conclusive way.
cloud_zhou - 2009/6/7 3:16:00
Al Jazeera on Wednesday broadcast an audio message from Osama bin Laden, in which he focused on the state of affairs in Pakistan. Although messages from bin Laden and other al Qaeda leaders frequently have mentioned Pakistan, none has devoted so much attention as this one to events there. This is somewhat surprising, considering that jihadists have reached their highest levels of success over the past two years in Pakistan.

Bin Laden’s message arrives amid a serious campaign by Pakistani military forces to root out jihadist fighters in the northern Swat district. The fact that such military force is being applied shows how successfully Taliban fighters have entrenched themselves in Pakistan’s northwest — and also how serious the threat has become for Islamabad. Bin Laden’s message attempted to highlight that success in order to bolster support among Pakistanis for al Qaeda Prime’s message.

In the recording, bin Laden continued to criticize the intrusion of foreign forces, the blocking of the spread of Sharia and the plight of 3 million residents who have been affected by anti-jihadist military operations in the Swat region. He accused the United States, Israel and India of conspiring against Pakistan, and he claimed that Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and army chief Gen. Ashfaq Kayani are fighting against Islam instead of against Pakistan’s true enemies — namely, India. This statement plays on the fears of many Pakistanis, who view India as a much greater strategic threat than militant Islamists fighting from within the state — the same argument the Pakistani military makes to Washington about its reluctance to redeploying troops from the eastern border to deal more effectively with the jihadist threat in the west. By playing on this fear, bin Laden is trying to undermine the Pakistani government’s judgment and prevent greater military pressure from being applied against jihadists.

Bin Laden also compared the refugees affected by the Swat conflict to the Palestinian refugees and 9/11 operatives, who he said had been pushed into action by their oppression at the hands of Western forces and under Western-friendly regimes. This discussion underscored worries that some of the 3 million Swat refugees might go on to join jihadist groups and wage more attacks against the state. Finally, bin Laden portrayed the military operation in Swat as an effort to stamp out of Sharia law — a contentious issue for many conservative Pakistanis — and appeal to a broader audience of Muslim listeners who are not necessarily sympathetic to jihadist tactics.

The utility of bin Laden’s media campaign goes only so far. Bin Laden and the rest of al Qaeda’s apex leadership have been constrained chiefly to the role of an ideological force, relying on others to operate on the actual battlefield. This shift, from the physical to the ideological battlefield, came about mainly because al Qaeda was forced onto the defensive by ground and aerial strikes in Pakistan that have killed dozens of its operatives. Al Qaeda’s financial and communication networks have been severely affected during the U.S.-led war against jihadists, which in turn has greatly undermined the organization’s ability to operate effectively. Al Qaeda Prime has not demonstrated an ability to carry out attacks successfully beyond the South Asia region — and even there, it must depend on affiliates, such as the Pakistani Taliban faction led by Baitullah Mehsud and groups like Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, to conduct operations.

The ability of the Pakistani Taliban and their jihadist allies to undermine the authority of the Pakistani state and foster anarchy in many parts of the country certainly works in al Qaeda’s favor, which benefits from Pakistan’s inability to control large swathes of territory. But while Pakistan has become the poster child for jihadist success, al Qaeda Prime’s role in that success has declined in recent years, as other groups have assumed the mantle of leadership in the jihadist movement.

Domestic groups that enjoy more local support than the largely foreign-born al Qaeda members have adopted the tactics and ideology of al Qaeda,. This has been a significant factor in their success. But bin Laden and al Qaeda Prime also have extremely limited capabilities: Many Pakistanis doubt the organization’s very existence, viewing it as a Western fabrication designed to undermine Islam in the region.

So, while bin Laden has released a message that attempts to cash in on the jihadist advances made in Pakistan in recent years, his group’s significance has declined significantly as other organizations have gained prominence. These other jihadist groups pose a significant threat to Pakistan — a country that is attractive in their eyes at least partly because of its nuclear arsenal. But al Qaeda must work through its local allies to undermine the Pakistani state, as it attempts to create anarchy on a regional level. The success of al Qaeda’s allies will be linked to the effectiveness of Pakistani security forces in maintaining security, while waging an offensive against Taliban forces in the Swat district and other areas that are largely under jihadist control.
cloud_zhou - 2009/6/7 3:16:00
A senior Pakistani army commander said June 3 that troops likely will have to remain in the Swat region for at least a year. This statement is an acknowledgment that the battle for Swat is far from over. In truth, taking Swat back from Taliban control is the easy part of the Pakistani army’s mission; the work that must be done to hold the province could create a whole new set of problems.
Analysis

A senior army commander overseeing Pakistan’s counter-jihadist offensive in the Swat region in the country’s North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) said that troops likely will have to stay in the area for at least a year, The Washington Post reported June 3. Maj. Gen. Ijaz Awan said the army hoped that some 2,500 police officers would return to Mingora by the end of the month, and in the meantime, commanders are working with local government officials to set up community police organizations. Awan added that security forces are continuing to target areas still under the control of the Taliban and are gearing up for a major battle in the town of Kabal (some 25 miles west of Mingora).

Despite the Pakistani army’s gains against the Taliban during the counterinsurgency operation (called Rah-i-Rast, or Straight Path), it will be quite some time before the offensive in Swat comes to an end. More important, however, is the acknowledgment that troops will have to remain in Swat for a year or more. This comes as no surprise, considering that local governance structures — which were very thin to begin with — have withered because of the rise of the Taliban and the army’s various attempts to take back the district. It will be up to the federal and provincial governments to restore governance and security (in the form of local police and paramilitary forces) at the local level. In many ways, this will require starting from scratch; the district’s longstanding lack of governance and security is one reason why the Taliban were able to take the area so easily.

Retaking the district — when that happens — will be only half the job. The hard part will be holding the district. Given the physical damage to the infrastructure in Swat from the fighting and years of neglect, reconstruction will be required — particularly before resettling the approximately 3 million people uprooted from their homes by the counterinsurgency operation. Additionally, it will take months (if not years) to get essential services fully brought back online. Efforts are underway to bring in bureaucratic administrators and build a local law enforcement agency, but the severely under-armed, underpaid and demoralized police will be prime targets for Taliban attacks.

The army will take the lead in rebuilding efforts in Swat — and this could create problems. Having the men in uniform, rather than local political leadership, running things or at least leading rebuilding efforts in the district — even in the interim — can create public backlash. If mishandled, a prolonged military presence in the area runs the risk of being perceived locally as an occupation.

Currently some 15,000 troops are participating in the offensive. But in non-combat day-to-day security activities, there will be a need for additional forces, especially given the number of towns and the geography of the area. Since the XIth corps and XIIth corps are already stretched thin enough in NWFP/Federally Administered Tribal Areas and Balochistan respectively, troops will have to be pulled from among the six corps in Punjab. This brings up the issue of ethnicity; troops from outside the province could be viewed as an outside force occupying the area, along the lines of what happened in the lead up to the 1971 secession of then East Pakistan.

There is also the matter of the limits a long engagement in Swat will put on the Pakistani army. If the army has to stay in the Swat area for too long, it will be prevented from launching offensives in other areas under Taliban control, particularly the Waziristan region. Assuming additional troops are brought in, each area will then absorb those forces for a prolonged period of time —especially in places (like Waziristan) which are autonomous and lack the usual local government structures like those previously found in Swat and other parts of NWFP. For now, however, the major task is to make sure that the roads and towns that have been secured do not become the target of Taliban fighters hiding in the mountainous countryside. A prolonged army presence in the district gives the Pashtun jihadists a target-rich environment in which to launch suicide bombings and more conventional guerrilla attacks, which in turn will hamper reconstruction and development efforts.
cloud_zhou - 2009/6/7 3:20:00
Pakistani forces are continuing to take out Taliban strongholds June 1 in the Swat region of northwestern Pakistan. With the Swat district headquarters, the city of Mingora, under control, the military is beginning to expand operations to other Taliban strongholds. The main question is whether the military will be able to consolidate the gains it has made against the militant Islamist fighters while carrying out increasingly difficult operations.

Analysis



Pakistani forces continued rooting out Taliban strongholds in the Swat region June 1, a day after the military announced it had successfully wrested control of Mingora, the district headquarters of Swat in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), from Taliban hands.

A relatively small number of Taliban forces had settled in inside Mingora to fight Pakistani forces. STRATFOR received reports early in the offensive that these militants were planting mines and explosives, digging trenches and stockpiling weapons and ammunition in preparation for the onslaught. But the militants who remained in Mingora were outnumbered and unable to withstand the military’s concerted conventional assault. The Taliban fighters who had fled Mingora were unable to rejoin, supply or otherwise support the militants still in Mingora, who ultimately were defeated by Pakistani forces.

When it became clear that Taliban reinforcements were cut off from Mingora, Taliban commanders began calling on their compatriots to focus their attention on attacks in other parts of Pakistan, particularly in urban areas of Punjab province. The May 27 bombing directed at the Inter-Services Intelligence agency headquarters in Lahore was partly indicative of this call to action, though local Taliban forces have long been attempting to escalate attacks in this critical province.




The Pakistani military’s focus on conventional warfare and severe inexperience in counterinsurgency have long contributed to its weakness against the jihadist insurgency. However, the military exhibited operational success when it cut off Taliban supply lines to Mingora by encircling the city from Lower Dir to the west, from Malakand district to the southwest, from Buner to the southeast and from Shangla to the east. This both narrowed the potential escape routes for the remaining fighters and prevented their compatriots from aiding the remaining resistance in the city. By isolating the remaining hard-line fighters, the military was able to bring overwhelming conventional firepower to bear. While the operation certainly was not without consequence, it was an important demonstration of strategy and might against entrenched Taliban forces in an urban area.

The Pakistani military has Mingora under control for now and is making efforts to clear surrounding towns, but the overall Swat offensive is clearly far from over. The operations under way aim to flush out remaining Taliban strongholds in Swat, while a number of Taliban are taking cover in the neighboring districts of Dir, Buner, Malakand and Shangla and have blended in with the refugees.

Pakistani forces have retained the initiative and are pushing outward into the more mountainous northern regions of Swat, where a number of Taliban are believed to be holed up. As of June 1, the military was conducting operations in the valley of Kalam, about 56 miles north of Mingora. The military also is moving into a Taliban stronghold called Charbagh, a town located about 12 miles north of Mingora. The military reportedly has set up checkpoints to surround Charbagh from the north and south in the towns of Khwazakhela and Manglawar, respectively. Military forces reportedly are also shelling Taliban positions in Kabal, east of Mingora, and lower Malam Jabba, located to Mingora’s west. However, it will become increasingly difficult for regular troops and special forces to move deeper into mountainous Taliban strongholds like Kalam, especially as they are also trying to hold their ground in villages that have already been cleared without increasing the number of deployments in the Swat region.

This is the largest military operation ever conducted in Swat, and public morale is high for now, but the Taliban are a patient, resilient force and are capable of regrouping and reclaiming lost territory. The Taliban have demonstrated this ability a number of times in Afghanistan, where they have drifted back into towns previously cleared by NATO troops. Moreover, while the Pakistani military has touted the killings of several midlevel commanders, the senior leadership of the Taliban in Swat remains at large.

There are no indications yet that Pakistan will divert more forces from its eastern border with India to reinforce operations in the northwest. This poses a considerable dilemma, as the military has a strategic interest in capitalizing on its current levels of public support to expand the offensive into far more challenging Taliban strongholds farther south in the tribal badlands of North and South Waziristan. Public support in the Swat area is indeed swinging toward the military for the time being. Locals say they are now able to speak openly against the Taliban, which they did not dare to do in previous months. The local populace also has renewed confidence in the military’s will and ability to stand up to the Taliban.

The big question that remains, then, is whether the military will be able to consolidate the security gains made thus far, develop efficient local security and governance to hold the territory against encroaching Taliban, and do the necessary developmental work to restore the livelihoods of some 3 million internally displaced persons (IDPs) forced from their homes by the fighting. Many IDPs are living temporarily in schools and other government buildings or are staying with friends and relatives. Still, the lower-income families who have no choice but to live in very poorly equipped refugee camps that the military has set up are ideal targets for the Taliban’s recruitment efforts, which likely will intensify in the wake of the Swat offensive as the group attempts to replenish its ranks.

The military also knows it will become harder for its forces to remain in the Swat region in the long term. Public discontent over the military presence is likely to increase, and challenges elsewhere will demand the military’s attentions. Operations are under way to bring in local administrators and accelerate the training of local police forces to secure the villages that have been cleared of Taliban thus far, but these police units are already extremely demoralized, underequipped and underpaid, and they will continue to be the primary targets of Taliban forces seeking to retake the territory. Islamabad’s long-term commitment to fighting the deeper sources of public discontent will therefore be critical to Pakistan’s ability to halt the Talibanization process.

With much work to be done in Swat and surrounding areas in the near term, any talk of a similar large-scale offensive in South Waziristan should be met with skepticism. Military and government officials alike are issuing contradictory statements on how quickly the Swat offensive can be wrapped up so the military can shift its focus farther south to Waziristan. The Waziristan operation is still in the planning stages and, while some preliminary skirmishes are taking place in South Waziristan, no clear or unified decision appears to have been made on expanding the military offensive in a meaningful way beyond the Swat region.
cloud_zhou - 2009/6/10 9:44:00
Satellite image of the Pearl Continental Hotel located in Peshawar, capital of Pakistan’s North-West(, 下载次数:28)


Summary

A vehicle-borne improvised explosive device (VBIED) detonated on the evening of June 9, killing at least 12 people and injuring approximately 50 people. Conflicting media reports have made it difficult to make a clear assessment of the situation, but the events have striking similarities to prior attacks in Pakistan since September 2008.
Analysis

An attack using a suicide vehicle-borne improvised explosive device (VBIED) was launched against Peshawar’s five-star Pearl Continental Hotel June 9. Media reports estimate that at least 12 people were killed (including three foreigners) and as many as 50 wounded. But judging from the photos of the scene, the number of casualties will likely increase as authorities dig through the rubble of the hotel’s west wing and recover additional bodies.

Just after 10 p.m. local time, witnesses reported hearing gunfire, followed by the blast of the VBIED. As is usually the case in such attacks, the reports on the exact sequence of events have been conflicting. However, the VBIED was able to get past the vehicle checkpoint and gain entrance to the compound, lending credence to reports indicating that the guards at the checkpoint were engaged with small arms fire and the explosives-laden truck was able to get through the checkpoint and pull around to the back of the west wing of the hotel before exploding.



From a tactical standpoint, this attack was very similar to the recent bombing attacks against the ISI office in Lahore on May 27 and the bombing of the Marriott in Islamabad on Sept. 20, 2008. But, unlike those two attacks, the attack team was able to overcome the security measures and deliver the VBIED next to the targeted building. The amount of explosives used in this attack was only a fraction of the amount used in the Marriott attack. The crater in the Marriott attack was over 30 feet deep and some 60 feet across, compared to an initial report of a crater that is six feet deep and 15 feet across at the Pearl Continental. Since the attack team was able to defeat security at the perimeter, a device the size of the one used in the Marriott bombing would have been structurally devastating to the Pearl Continental and far more deadly. Incidentally, the Pearl Continental in Peshawar has significantly more standoff distance than the Marriott in Islamabad. That means that had security measures operated as designed (as they did in the Marriott case), the damage to the hotel would have been minimal and the death toll far lower.

The time of the attack is also of interest. Attacking a hotel in the evening hours means that there is going to be the maximum number of people located in the building. Not only will most of the guests be back from their daytime meetings, but outsiders often come to hotels for social functions in the evening. If the attackers had waited until the middle of the night to attack, all the people socializing at the hotel in the evening would have left. The Marriott bombing also occurred in the evening, at about 8 p.m.



In many past hotel attacks, in locations ranging from Jakarta to Taba,VBIEDs have been driven into the front entrance of the hotel. This was not the case at the Pearl Continental, and in fact, the driver actually drove past the front entrance to get to the spot where the VBIED was detonated. From the location of the seat of the blast, which was in the parking lot on the west side of the building behind the front wing, it appears that either the driver of the VBIED did not intend to target the front entrance of the hotel, or he somehow could not negotiate the right-hand turn required to bring the vehicle in front of that entrance. (Remember that in Pakistan, like in the United Kingdom, vehicles obey left-hand traffic and therefore the truck would have entered using the left-hand entrance and lane of the driveway. This would have required a 90-degree right turn to get to the front entrance.) However, the truck that was reportedly used in the Pearl Continental, a Hyundai Shehzore, is fairly maneuverable compared to the large truck used in the Marriott attack, and the Shehzore probably could have negotiated such a turn.

This raises the possibility that the location of the blast could have been intentional and that there was someone staying in a room on that side of that wing that the attackers wanted to target. Remember that many corporate and government overseas travelers are advised to avoid taking rooms at the front of the hotel, precisely because of past VBIED attacks. This could also have been an effort to counter that advice and go after more international travelers. It will be interesting to watch the victims to see if there was such a high-value target among those killed. Another possibility is that the attacker just took the path of least resistance and simply intended to detonate the vehicle as soon as he got in close proximity to the building with no specific part of the building in mind. There are also unconfirmed reports that the truck dropped off a team of gunmen who attempted to storm the building, but it is unclear how successful they were if these reports are true.



Another factor to consider is that the attackers were able to assemble the VBIED and transport it to the attack site (which is within a high security zone and is located next to residence of the commander of Peshawar-based XIth Corps — the Pakistani Army unit playing the lead role in the region) without being detected despite heightened security in Pakistan and authorities specifically on the lookout for VBIEDs. This indicates that either the group did an outstanding job of surveillance and knew precisely where the government checkpoints were going to be between their safe house and the target — or they had an inside source that provided that information to them. There are also reports that the attackers were disguised as deliverymen, which may also have helped them move through the city.

In the final analysis, either the attackers did a better job planning and executing this attack than they have other recent attacks, the security forces assigned to the hotel failed miserably, or the attackers had some degree inside assistance — or a combination of the three. In any event, the VBIED got to the target and past the security measures designed specifically to thwart such attacks.
cloud_zhou - 2009/6/12 12:47:00


Summary

The Pakistani military is attempting to finish its counteroffensive in the Swat Valley against the jihadists and realize they must move quickly from Swat to Waziristan to crush the jihadist threat. The army is off to a rocky start in its conflicts with the local tribes, which underscores the difficulties that the army faces in its attept to reclaim Waziristan. The ongoing efforts will bear considerable scrutiny as the military attempts to adapt what it learned from the Swat campaign and tailor its efforts to the local political and tribal landscape.
Analysis

Pakistani military forces are still trying to clear the Swat region of Pashtun jihadists, and have engaged in heavy fighting with Taliban militants over the past few days on a new front on the southern border between the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). Attack helicopters and artillery have been used to strike in the Janikhel and Bakakhel areas of Frontier Region (FR) Bannu, where 100 militants, including a key commander, Sher Alam, have reportedly been killed. As many as 800 Taliban fighters are believed to have arrived in the area from Razmak and Miramshah in North Waziristan to fight Pakistani troops. This development follows the limited attacks by the Pakistani army in the nearby South Waziristan region — the main hub of the jihadist insurgency raging in the country.

The army action in FR Bannu is likely a key initial part of the preparations for a major offensive in Waziristan. Such action is a tremendous challenge to pull off, considering the weak capabilities of the state and the logistical difficulties on the ground. Islamabad realizes that it cannot afford to allow Pashtun jihadists and their domestic and foreign allies to continue to use Waziristan as a staging area to strike at the very core of the country and undermine the counterjihadist offensive. Therefore, Pakistan has begun to make preparations toward an assault on the jihadist sanctuary in Waziristan, which will likely develop slowly.

Pakistan’s government said several weeks ago that it would expand its counterjihadist offensive from Swat to Waziristan. While the Swat-based Taliban group has focused on consolidating their emirate in the areas of the old Malakand division, the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) led by Baitullah Mehsud, headquartered in South Waziristan has teamed with Punjabi Islamist militants to stage high profile commando-style suicide bombings, especially in major urban cities in the province of Punjab. The June 9 attack on the largest 5-star hotel in the NWFP’s capital, Peshawar, is the latest attack and comes in response to the country’s largest counterjihadist offensive in the greater Swat region.

The Mehsud-led Pakistani Taliban leadership, along with their transnational al-Qaeda allies, want to be able to keep Pakistan’s security forces off balance and thus prevent them from expanding the offensive beyond Swat. Conversely, the Pakistanis realize that if they are going to get ahead of the curve in their war against jihadism, they have to move from Swat to Waziristan — and quickly. That said, the government and the army know all too well the great risks to expanding the offensive, given the dire economic situation in the country, critical weakness in the intelligence apparatus, lack of counterinsurgency capabilities to effectively fight an “industrial-strength insurgency” and most importantly, the millions of displaced people amid limited public support.

While Pakistan’s civil and military leadership understands the importance of hitting the nerve center of the Pashtun jihadists — and they have seen a certain degree of success in the northern rim of the tribal badlands in the agencies of Bajaur, Mohmand, and Khyber — Pakistani forces are spread thin in the more crucial southern rim, particularly the Waziristan region. It should be noted that the Pakistani army went into the autonomous FATA (in the South Waziristan region) for the first time since the creation of the region in the spring of 2004, under U.S. pressure in the wake of the jihadist war.

Since then, the offensives that the army has conducted were unsuccessful because of the inability of the security forces to dislodge the militants. Consequently, the army had to withdraw after making ill-fated peace deals, which only facilitated the rise of Mehsud and his TTP. Furthermore, the NWFP districts that run along the two Waziristans, North and South, fell to Taliban influence in the last five years, which overwhelmed local law enforcement agencies. Essentially, this means that in order to mount a serious offensive, the army has to essentially redeploy around the Waziristan region from scratch, and the fighting in FR Bannu is part of this strategy.



The fighting in the Janikhel and Bakakhel tribal areas in FR Bannu began after the abduction of several hundred people from nearby Razmak Cadet College last week. The kidnapped people were released but security forces demanded that local tribes hand over people believed to be involved in the incident. More importantly, the Pakistani army wanted to replace the local Khasadar security forces operating British-era security outposts with regular army troops, which was fiercely opposed by the tribes who want to maintain the practice of the Khasadars working with the tribes to ensure security in the area.

The resistance put up by the tribes led to the army using force, which is an unusual development. The Pakistanis have avoided the alienation of the tribes in order to prevent the Pashtuns from turning into Talibs. In fact, the Pakistanis need the tribes to help them develop anti-Taliban militias. That the army decided to take action against the tribes in FR Bannu is an indicator that the Pakistanis are willing to incur a certain degree of social risk to try and go after the Waziristan-based Taliban. Besides, such militias in areas like the northern part of Dir in the NWFP are playing a critical role to help the Pakistani army flush out the jihadists; the FATA is a different story.

The system of tribal maliks in the autonomous tribal areas has been severely undermined by the mullahs or commanders of the Taliban or both. In addition, the Taliban have exploited the deeply conservative culture and tribal desire of autonomy as a means to incite revolt against the state, especially its army, which is further exacerbated by the dozens of U.S. unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) strikes that have occurred in the area. Therefore, those tribal maliks that still possess some authority are likely to oppose the army, if for nothing else than to avoid getting caught up in the war between Islamabad and the Taliban, which is what is currently taking place in FR Bannu.

While the FATA is virtually open stomping grounds for the Taliban, the situation in the FRs — six small administrative enclaves on the border between FATA and the adjacent NWFP districts — is more complex. The semi-tribal FRs are physically located inside the FATA agencies — FR Dera Ismail Khan and FR Tank in South Waziristan, FR Lakki Marwat split between North and South Waziristan, FR Bannu in North Waziristan, and FR Kohat and Peshawar in Orakzai. Administratively, however, they have been kept distinct from the FATA agencies, a complex arrangement that worked well for the Pakistani state for some five decades until the U.S.-jihadist War.

These areas are on the eastern ends of the tribal agencies bordering the settled districts of the NWFP with whom they share their names. This is why the tribal leaders in the FRs are likely to have greater influence than their counterparts, who are located deeper into the agencies of FATA and closer to the border with Afghanistan — areas under the control of the Taliban. The government is likely trying to use this situation to its advantage in order to come in and set up shop. A key goal is to establish supply lines in these parts, which would otherwise be long and run through areas that are hostile or autonomous or both. The lengthy alternatives ran between the Waziristan region and the XIth Corps based in Peshawar and the other garrisons in the NWFP.

FR Bannu, FR Lakki Marwat, FR Tank and FR D.I. Khan are the natural staging grounds from any sustained campaigns against the de facto Taliban emirate headquartered in the Waziristan region. But fighting with the tribes in the FR Bannu region clearly shows that the army is off to a rocky start, which underscores the major challenges that the army faces in its efforts to take back Waziristan.

Waziristan will be more difficult than Swat because it is far more remote. Swat had a certain degree of state infrastructure (albeit very thin) because it was formally incorporated into the NWFP. But Islamabad has virtually no presence in Waziristan because of its historical autonomous status dating back to British rule. The autonomous status worked well, so long as there was no challenge from transnational jihadist forces.

The ongoing efforts will bear considerable scrutiny as the military attempts to adapt what it learned from the Swat campaign and tailor its efforts to the local political and tribal landscape. Indeed, early efforts may also be attempts to validate certain tactics and operational principals intended for the wider Waziristan campaign, and to apply lessons learned from the offensive in Swat.
cloud_zhou - 2009/6/27 15:20:00
A Pakistani soldier stands on a truck at the site of a suicide blast in Muzaffarabad in Pakistani-co(, 下载次数:23)


A suicide bomber struck a Pakistani military vehicle in Muzaffarabad on June 26, killing two soldiers and wounding three. The first such attack against Pakistani forces in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir, the bombing could affect the careful balance of power along the contentious Pakistani-Indian border. It also sends a message from the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan that it can strike wherever it pleases.
Analysis

A Pakistani military vehicle in Muzaffarabad, in Pakistani-administered Kashmir, was hit June 26 by a suicide bomber. Two soldiers were killed and three injured. Shortly after the attack, a spokesman for Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) claimed responsibility.

It was not an exceptionally violent attack for Pakistan proper, and such attacks are carried out frequently in Indian-administered Kashmir by groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) — which was responsible for the November 2008 attacks in Mumbai — and Jamaat-ud-Dawah (JuD). Pakistan controls a number of militant groups in Kashmir that wreak havoc along the Line of Control to keep India off balance.

But the June 26 attack was the first on Pakistani forces in the region carried out by elements loyal to Baitullah Mehsud’s TTP, the very Islamist militant group that is challenging Pakistan’s control over large swaths of its northwestern territories.

The successful deployment of a suicide bomber in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir likely will have two immediate consequences. While sending the message that the TTP can strike at Pakistani forces wherever it pleases (an ability also emphasized by recent attacks in Lahore), it could also exacerbate tensions between Pakistan and India.



Although the TTP may be suffering losses on its home turf because of Pakistan’s military efforts in Swat and Waziristan, it is trying to keep the military off balance by exploiting Pakistan’s bigger military liability — its border with India. Pakistan has been asking the United States to get India to scale down its forces along the border so that Islamabad can redeploy troops to fight the Taliban in the west. The Indians have flatly rejected the idea, believing Pakistan could use it as an opportunity to ramp up Kashmiri militant activity.

With the June 26 attack, the Indians have to deal not only with the Pakistani-backed groups, but also with a potential shift in the security environment on the Pakistani side, which will make New Delhi even more adamantly opposed to scaling down its military presence. This means any Pakistani designs to redeploy troops from its eastern border to its western one most likely will not be realized, denying Islamabad the ability to devote more resources to the Taliban fight. Clearly, it is in the TTP’s best interest to make relations between Pakistan and India as contentious as possible. Heightened tension would prevent Pakistan from redeploying troops from the Indian border to northwestern Pakistan to reinforce its escalating military operations in South Waziristan and consolidate its gains in Swat.

And the June 26 bombing is unlikely the last TTP attack in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir. Situated in an isolated valley five hours from Islamabad by car through winding mountain roads, Muzaffarabad is not a feasible destination for a single suicide bomber traveling from inside Pakistan. It is much more likely that the TTP already has people on the ground in the region, having leveraged its alliance with Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), a Punjab-Kashmiri militant group that was once under Islamabad’s control. This would give the Pashtun-dominated TTP an entry into Pakistani-controlled Kashmir.

This raises yet another question for the Pakistanis: Who can they trust among the Kashmiri militants? Any attack like the June 26 bombing will warrant close investigation by Pakistan to determine who is responsible for attacking its troops. This could raise uncomfortable questions about how much allegiance Kashmiri groups have — or do not have — to Islamabad.

It also complicates Pakistani efforts to exert control over groups such as LeT and JuD and more rebellious groups such as the TTP. With Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence directorate losing its grip over these militant assets and LeT crossing over into the realm of transnational jihadists (as evidenced by the Mumbai attacks), the potential for these groups to work with enemies of the state like the TTP is much higher.

Essentially, Pakistan is stuck between fighting an Islamist militant insurgency in the west and hedging against its traditional rival, India, in the east. It is a weakness the TTP has exploited by conducting a relatively simple, cost-effective attack that announces its presence and diverts Pakistan’s attention to the east.
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