Pakistan in Media

The Wall Street Journal
MAY 15, 2009
(From THE FAR EASTERN ECONOMIC REVIEW)
By Jeff M. Smith

Back in 2007, commentators were sounding the alarm that Pakistan was approaching a precipice. A lot has changed in two years. Pakistan's problems then -- protesters clogging the streets of Islamabad demanding President Musharraf's resignation, and sporadic Taliban raids on coalition forces in Afghanistan -- were but a glimpse of the danger ahead. No one could have imagined the speed and intensity with which the Taliban and their allies have since spread east from their sanctuary in the Hindu Kush mountains to threaten an invasion of the Pakistani capital.

Pakistan's deepening disorder coincides with the release of the Obama administration's new "Af-Pak" strategy. Unfortunately, President Barack Obama's "new" approach is wholly inadequate -- at least as regards Pakistan. Its drafters have attempted to approach an intractable problem by marginally improving a strategy -- providing billions of dollars of aid -- that has proved ineffective for the better part of seven years. Part of this dissonance may be attributed to an insufficient appreciation of the gravity of the threat. Part is due to a poor understanding of the strategic priorities of the Pakistani state itself. After all, in the words of United States' Special Representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke, "If Afghanistan had the best government on earth, a drug-free culture and no corruption it would still be unstable if the situation in Pakistan remained as today."

Everyone is familiar with Pakistan's combustible mix of nuclear weapons, underhanded intelligence services and terrorist safe-havens. It's long been clear that al Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban have been using Pakistani territory as a safe-haven to conduct attacks on coalition forces in Afghanistan. But it was not until recently, with the rise of the Pakistani Taliban or Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), a young and zealous new army of Pakistani Pashtuns formed in 2005, that the Pakistani state has come under threat, presenting the U.S. with a foreign-policy challenge with no peer. The TTP has swarmed out of Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) into the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) and the "settled" valleys of Pakistan's east.

Former foot-soldiers from the Afghan civil war of the 1990s, they have invaded the Swat Valley and Buner Province (60 miles from Islamabad) in recent weeks, bringing them within reach of the Punjab-Pakistan's political, cultural and economic heartland, and the domain of its nuclear-weapons arsenal. A brazen attack on a police compound outside Lahore in March, only 20 miles from the Indian border, demonstrated that there is no limit to their reach within Pakistan. Analysts are particularly concerned that their eastward march could bring them in contact with the Kashmiri insurgent groups that operate out of Pakistan's northeast, such as Lashkar e-Taiba, infamous perpetrators of the terrorist attacks in Mumbai.

Islamabad's response to this "mortal" threat has been tepid -- and impotent to date. Several military offensives by the army have been repelled or ineffective (several thousand Pakistani soldiers have been killed) and a series of ill-conceived peace deals have only provided the Taliban more land and breathing space. Only the government has honored them. A series of tribal lashkars or local militias formed to oppose the Taliban have failed. The TTP have overturned the traditional tribal hierarchy, beheading tribal elders and granting mullahs unprecedented authority (in Pashtun culture, mullahs historically occupy the bottom of the social ladder). The group has destroyed centuries-old Sufi shrines, symbols of the moderate form of Islam traditionally practiced in Pakistan. They have declared open season on girls' schools and government sympathizers and jeopardized NATO's favored supply route to Afghanistan, where three quarters of the coalition's supplies pass.

Their successes have created ample breathing space for al Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban to conduct operations with impunity: Pakistani Interior Minister Rehman Malik recently broke with official denials and admitted that "10,000 foreign militants" had taken refuge in the tribal areas. Perhaps most worryingly, the TTP's young and zealous chief, Baitullah Mehsud, has threatened to take his jihad to the steps of the White House in an attack that will "amaze everyone in the world." Meanwhile, the Taliban has solidified its relationship with al Qaeda. What was once an uneasy truce has been transformed into an enduring partnership. Local Taliban commanders now jockey to host bin Laden in their newly liberated territory in Pakistan. "Like a brother [al Qaeda] can stay anywhere they want," announced Taliban spokesman Muslim Kahn from Swat Valley. "We will help them and protect them."

Several government leaders in the NWFP, headed by the secular Pashtun Awami National Party (ANP), have either capitulated to the TTP, taken to hiding or fled the country. The rest have been brutally murdered. Once thought of as a potential secular bulwark against the Taliban, the ANP is a defeated force. The acting ANP president, Haji Adeel, laments: "Our children were killed. The government had lost its writ. Schools [were] burnt and infrastructure destroyed . . . we [have] suffered great losses." Islamabad, however, insists the "peace deals" are working.

Finally, a dark shadow hangs over the slow disintegration of Pakistan. For apathy and negligence are not the military's only sins in this sad story. Insurmountable evidence points to complicity in the Taliban's resurgence from Pakistan's army and the directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI). The army chief of staff has been overheard referring to specific Taliban commanders as "strategic assets." The U.S. has intercepted calls from ISI officials tipping off Taliban militants to American tactics and air-strikes. Hamid Gul, former chief of the ISI, proudly roots on the Taliban from the sidelines.

Secretary of state Hillary Clinton has rightly charged the Pakistan government with "basically abdicating to the Taliban and the extremists." The question is, why? Why has Pakistan refused to take this existential challenge seriously? And why has the army maintained links to the Taliban and refused to confront them with force? We are familiar with the historic links between the Pakistan and the Taliban; the U.S. helped fostered them in the Afghan-Soviet war. But why now, when the Taliban have set their sights on their own patrons and brutally murdered thousands of Pakistani civilians and officers, would Pakistan resist confronting this terrorist menace?

It is certainly not due to a lack of capability, as Pakistani officials regularly claim. It's true that Pakistan has a 1,800-mile militarized border with a neighbor against which it has fought three wars. And defending this border does demand a great deal of the military's resources.