U.S.-NATO: Facing the Reality of Risk in Pakistan [复制链接]

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.