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In intelligence and diplomatic circles, inside and outside Pakistan, they refer to it as the game, bland shorthand for the decades-long dance the country's military and security establishment has carried on with militant Islamist forces.
Pakistan's military has created those forces, financed them, supported them as proxies and sometimes publicly repudiated and suppressed them. Since Sept. 11, 2001, the government has assured an anxious West, and a furious India, that it opposes the militants. Yet its intelligence wing has continued to fund, arm and train those militants, and to grant them free passage over the country's borders and an unmolested habitat in its remote tribal areas.
Now, however, the game is up or so says the Pakistan military.
Things change: The state has decided to move against them, is the blunt assessment of the military's chief spokesman, General Athar Abbas.
How could his forces be anything but fully engaged, he asked. Does it make sense that the army would allow its men to be lost while hobnobbing with [Islamic] organizations? It doesn't make sense. The same organizations some are blaming [for double-dealing] are the worst hit [in attacks by militants]. Look at the number of army officers and men getting killed. How could we show our face to the men if we were not serious?
The veracity of this pledge is of vital importance to Pakistanis, of course, who are reeling from repeated suicide attacks by the Tehrik-e-Taliban, the targets of which have included mosques at prayer time and landmark hotels. Yet many Pakistanis are also angered by the sight of the nation's troops apparently engaged in battles with its own citizens.
The situation in Pakistan is also of vital interest to countries such as Canada the success of whose military mission in Afghanistan is directly affected by the help available to the Taliban in Pakistan and indeed the rest of the world, which has grown increasingly alarmed in recent months as the militants surged out of the tribal areas, claiming territory until they occupied towns just 100 kilometres from the capital city of Islamabad, mounting a threat of uncertain magnitude to the weak civilian government nominally in charge of the country's nuclear weapons.
Many close observers of the Pakistani armed forces, which doubled as the government for much of the past decade, feel there is a tangibly different quality to this engagement, now under way in both the Swat Valley and the tribal area of Waziristan.
The army may have crossed the Rubicon when it comes to relations with the Taliban. They always knew the jihadi forces were a double-edged sword but now they know they're holding the sharp end, said Rifaat Hussein, chair of the department of Defence and Strategic Studies at Qaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad.
They realize the blowback effect of jihad strategy.
Pakistan's military through its shadowy Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, or ISI has long used the ideology of jihad to recruit from the network of religious schools, or madrasas ; in the 1980s. those young men became part of the U.S.-funded mujahedeen fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
The tactic was later adapted by the ISI to send militants to cross to the Indian side of the disputed territory of Kashmir, as part of a destabilization strategy in the two nations' cold war. Through the Afghan civil war, when the Taliban seized power in the mid-1990s, the ISI funded and supported militants as a useful proxy against India's interests in Afghanistan.
And in 2002, when the Taliban were ousted from Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion in response to 9/11, many senior al-Qaeda leaders were resettled in Pakistan's tribal areas, while thousands of Taliban fighters were allowed to cross the border into Pakistan and stay. After 9/11, Pakistan's then-leader, General Pervez Musharraf, repeatedly assured the West that his military government was taking action against militants, but as has been extensively documented in recent years, his intelligence agencies were simultaneously assisting them.
This ambiguous relationship continued until this summer: When the Taliban seized territory in the prosperous Swat Valley over the past three years, the army largely stood aside, and the new civilian government eventually signed a peace deal essentially ceding control of the territory to the Taliban.
Meanwhile, the military efforts to check the spreading control of the Taliban in the tribal areas along the Afghan border have been fitful and ineffective.
As a consequence, there are many skeptics, from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton through to embittered residents of Swat. First the army ran away when the Taliban came, and let them have our village then last month they showed up and started shelling, said an angry Swat resident named Perveen like many in the Pashtun ethnic group, she uses only one name who has lived with her family in a barren, scorching refugee camp since the army operation began. It feels like a game.
The security and military establishment bristles at the suggestion it has played a double game. Gen. Abbas noted that the ISI works on state policy whatever kind of state it was, and worked with the militias because the government told it to.
Ehsan ul-Haq, a retired general who headed the ISI from shortly after 9/11, said with a scowl that those who blame the military for the country's current mess have a short view of history.
We were not interested in bringing in Arabs and others to resist we weren't declaring a jihad the rest of the world was, he said. To say the ISI created a Frankenstein is not fair: We did it very professionally, and sometimes there is a cost. Others took the dividend of the Soviet defeat and we were left with the cost. He said the ISI made robust efforts to stop Taliban crossing into Pakistan in 2002.
Even had the army intended to crack down on Islamists in recent years, there was little or no public backing for such a move: Public opinion was sharply critical of any fighting done against jihadists at what seemed to be Western bidding and in particular of attacks on Pakistani Islamist groups, rather than al-Qaeda or Afghan Taliban.
Perveen and women like her had no illusions the Taliban had started slitting the throats of local leaders who opposed them within days after they took over her village but many others in Pakistan had been seduced by the Taliban's Islamist spin. A national survey by the International Republic Institute in March found that 80 per cent of Pakistanis supported the Swat peace deal.
But the events of the past few months appear to have generated a public understanding that the Islamists represent a sharp risk to Pakistan stability, and to the democratic government. The Taliban's actions in Swat where they seized more and more territory even after signing the supposed peace deal in particular have changed public perceptions.
We needed it: We needed something to happen in this country to show people their real face, Gen. Abbas said. People saw they were only interested in furtherance of their power.
Today, the military says it is close to having eradicated the Taliban in Swat and the 1.9 million people displaced can soon go home. At the same time, the armed forces have begun military operations in the tribal region of Waziristan, where much of the senior al-Qaeda leadership is believed to be based.
Here, however, the military strategy includes the use of lashkars , or local militias, and backing some militant groups headed by leaders deemed good Taliban, which in turn triggers new questions about the army's long-term plans for relations with the militants.
Sincere commitment will be a crucial ingredient in this military campaign, but the fact remains that the army has taken on an almost impossibly difficult task. The tribal area terrain where the Taliban are based is remote and wild shale hills, few roads (many of them now mined with improvised explosives) and sheer cliffs.
The Taliban fighters have proved themselves more numerous, better trained and better armed than the army's initial confident assertions predicted, Prof. Hussein said.
The border with Afghanistan is as porous as cheesecloth. And the local population is hostile to the state yet they are key to the army's strategy: Gen. Abbas said they will rely on civilians to identify Taliban members and supporters and give them up. However, few if any people will have enough faith in the army's intention to stick around to take that risk, Prof. Hussein said.
Ahmed Rashid, a leading Pakistani investigative journalist whose latest book, Descent into Chaos , is a chilling pathology report of the failure to check Islamic extremism in Pakistan, said the matter of the army's sincerity hinges on questions that remain unanswered: Will they kill or arrest the Taliban leaders; will they expel the Afghan Taliban and disable its logistical network in Pakistan; will they expel al-Qaeda; will they accept U.S. training in counter-insurgency tactics; and will they facilitate a national rapprochement with India, which would free up troops from the Indian border to engage the Islamist militants.
If they do all that, I think they can win. But they would need solid leadership from the civilian government, which he described as entirely absent to date.
The army's failure to kill or capture a single significant Taliban leader in all these weeks is causing some second-guessing; there are also obvious signs that the military's overt offensive strategy is ill-placed against an enemy of this nature.
In Gen. Abbas's own assessment, damage to most urban areas has been very light, minimal. He means this as praise for his troops, but increasingly it seems the reason for the minimal damage is the Taliban did not stick around to fight back.
A 22-year-old Taliban fighter from Mardan told The Globe last week his instructions from his commanders were to shave his beard and go home when the fighting started, that he would quietly get called back up when the army's focus had shifted.
Prof. Hussein noted that should the army broaden its approach to counterinsurgency and ultimately be successful, it could signal a major change in Pakistan. It's a huge challenge but a huge opportunity, a chance to build new institutions, a new police force, and to bring [the tribal areas] into the rest of the country, he said. It allows the periphery of Pakistan to be mainstreamed.
But here in Rawalpindi, at army headquarters, there are signs that such change comes slowly. When Gen. Abbas proffers a list of casualties for a visitor, the Taliban dead are listed in a column labelled miscreants, rather than enemies or terrorists. And while he is eager to describe his force's new view of the jihadi groups, he stops deliberately short of saying their relationship is over.
In the intelligence world, you don't break your last communication with an organization, he said. But that's not the same as training or funding.
Is the Pakistan-Taliban 'game' at an end? - The Globe and Mail
Pakistan's military has created those forces, financed them, supported them as proxies and sometimes publicly repudiated and suppressed them. Since Sept. 11, 2001, the government has assured an anxious West, and a furious India, that it opposes the militants. Yet its intelligence wing has continued to fund, arm and train those militants, and to grant them free passage over the country's borders and an unmolested habitat in its remote tribal areas.
Now, however, the game is up or so says the Pakistan military.
Things change: The state has decided to move against them, is the blunt assessment of the military's chief spokesman, General Athar Abbas.
How could his forces be anything but fully engaged, he asked. Does it make sense that the army would allow its men to be lost while hobnobbing with [Islamic] organizations? It doesn't make sense. The same organizations some are blaming [for double-dealing] are the worst hit [in attacks by militants]. Look at the number of army officers and men getting killed. How could we show our face to the men if we were not serious?
The veracity of this pledge is of vital importance to Pakistanis, of course, who are reeling from repeated suicide attacks by the Tehrik-e-Taliban, the targets of which have included mosques at prayer time and landmark hotels. Yet many Pakistanis are also angered by the sight of the nation's troops apparently engaged in battles with its own citizens.
The situation in Pakistan is also of vital interest to countries such as Canada the success of whose military mission in Afghanistan is directly affected by the help available to the Taliban in Pakistan and indeed the rest of the world, which has grown increasingly alarmed in recent months as the militants surged out of the tribal areas, claiming territory until they occupied towns just 100 kilometres from the capital city of Islamabad, mounting a threat of uncertain magnitude to the weak civilian government nominally in charge of the country's nuclear weapons.
Many close observers of the Pakistani armed forces, which doubled as the government for much of the past decade, feel there is a tangibly different quality to this engagement, now under way in both the Swat Valley and the tribal area of Waziristan.
The army may have crossed the Rubicon when it comes to relations with the Taliban. They always knew the jihadi forces were a double-edged sword but now they know they're holding the sharp end, said Rifaat Hussein, chair of the department of Defence and Strategic Studies at Qaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad.
They realize the blowback effect of jihad strategy.
Pakistan's military through its shadowy Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, or ISI has long used the ideology of jihad to recruit from the network of religious schools, or madrasas ; in the 1980s. those young men became part of the U.S.-funded mujahedeen fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan.
The tactic was later adapted by the ISI to send militants to cross to the Indian side of the disputed territory of Kashmir, as part of a destabilization strategy in the two nations' cold war. Through the Afghan civil war, when the Taliban seized power in the mid-1990s, the ISI funded and supported militants as a useful proxy against India's interests in Afghanistan.
And in 2002, when the Taliban were ousted from Afghanistan after the U.S. invasion in response to 9/11, many senior al-Qaeda leaders were resettled in Pakistan's tribal areas, while thousands of Taliban fighters were allowed to cross the border into Pakistan and stay. After 9/11, Pakistan's then-leader, General Pervez Musharraf, repeatedly assured the West that his military government was taking action against militants, but as has been extensively documented in recent years, his intelligence agencies were simultaneously assisting them.
This ambiguous relationship continued until this summer: When the Taliban seized territory in the prosperous Swat Valley over the past three years, the army largely stood aside, and the new civilian government eventually signed a peace deal essentially ceding control of the territory to the Taliban.
Meanwhile, the military efforts to check the spreading control of the Taliban in the tribal areas along the Afghan border have been fitful and ineffective.
As a consequence, there are many skeptics, from U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton through to embittered residents of Swat. First the army ran away when the Taliban came, and let them have our village then last month they showed up and started shelling, said an angry Swat resident named Perveen like many in the Pashtun ethnic group, she uses only one name who has lived with her family in a barren, scorching refugee camp since the army operation began. It feels like a game.
The security and military establishment bristles at the suggestion it has played a double game. Gen. Abbas noted that the ISI works on state policy whatever kind of state it was, and worked with the militias because the government told it to.
Ehsan ul-Haq, a retired general who headed the ISI from shortly after 9/11, said with a scowl that those who blame the military for the country's current mess have a short view of history.
We were not interested in bringing in Arabs and others to resist we weren't declaring a jihad the rest of the world was, he said. To say the ISI created a Frankenstein is not fair: We did it very professionally, and sometimes there is a cost. Others took the dividend of the Soviet defeat and we were left with the cost. He said the ISI made robust efforts to stop Taliban crossing into Pakistan in 2002.
Even had the army intended to crack down on Islamists in recent years, there was little or no public backing for such a move: Public opinion was sharply critical of any fighting done against jihadists at what seemed to be Western bidding and in particular of attacks on Pakistani Islamist groups, rather than al-Qaeda or Afghan Taliban.
Perveen and women like her had no illusions the Taliban had started slitting the throats of local leaders who opposed them within days after they took over her village but many others in Pakistan had been seduced by the Taliban's Islamist spin. A national survey by the International Republic Institute in March found that 80 per cent of Pakistanis supported the Swat peace deal.
But the events of the past few months appear to have generated a public understanding that the Islamists represent a sharp risk to Pakistan stability, and to the democratic government. The Taliban's actions in Swat where they seized more and more territory even after signing the supposed peace deal in particular have changed public perceptions.
We needed it: We needed something to happen in this country to show people their real face, Gen. Abbas said. People saw they were only interested in furtherance of their power.
Today, the military says it is close to having eradicated the Taliban in Swat and the 1.9 million people displaced can soon go home. At the same time, the armed forces have begun military operations in the tribal region of Waziristan, where much of the senior al-Qaeda leadership is believed to be based.
Here, however, the military strategy includes the use of lashkars , or local militias, and backing some militant groups headed by leaders deemed good Taliban, which in turn triggers new questions about the army's long-term plans for relations with the militants.
Sincere commitment will be a crucial ingredient in this military campaign, but the fact remains that the army has taken on an almost impossibly difficult task. The tribal area terrain where the Taliban are based is remote and wild shale hills, few roads (many of them now mined with improvised explosives) and sheer cliffs.
The Taliban fighters have proved themselves more numerous, better trained and better armed than the army's initial confident assertions predicted, Prof. Hussein said.
The border with Afghanistan is as porous as cheesecloth. And the local population is hostile to the state yet they are key to the army's strategy: Gen. Abbas said they will rely on civilians to identify Taliban members and supporters and give them up. However, few if any people will have enough faith in the army's intention to stick around to take that risk, Prof. Hussein said.
Ahmed Rashid, a leading Pakistani investigative journalist whose latest book, Descent into Chaos , is a chilling pathology report of the failure to check Islamic extremism in Pakistan, said the matter of the army's sincerity hinges on questions that remain unanswered: Will they kill or arrest the Taliban leaders; will they expel the Afghan Taliban and disable its logistical network in Pakistan; will they expel al-Qaeda; will they accept U.S. training in counter-insurgency tactics; and will they facilitate a national rapprochement with India, which would free up troops from the Indian border to engage the Islamist militants.
If they do all that, I think they can win. But they would need solid leadership from the civilian government, which he described as entirely absent to date.
The army's failure to kill or capture a single significant Taliban leader in all these weeks is causing some second-guessing; there are also obvious signs that the military's overt offensive strategy is ill-placed against an enemy of this nature.
In Gen. Abbas's own assessment, damage to most urban areas has been very light, minimal. He means this as praise for his troops, but increasingly it seems the reason for the minimal damage is the Taliban did not stick around to fight back.
A 22-year-old Taliban fighter from Mardan told The Globe last week his instructions from his commanders were to shave his beard and go home when the fighting started, that he would quietly get called back up when the army's focus had shifted.
Prof. Hussein noted that should the army broaden its approach to counterinsurgency and ultimately be successful, it could signal a major change in Pakistan. It's a huge challenge but a huge opportunity, a chance to build new institutions, a new police force, and to bring [the tribal areas] into the rest of the country, he said. It allows the periphery of Pakistan to be mainstreamed.
But here in Rawalpindi, at army headquarters, there are signs that such change comes slowly. When Gen. Abbas proffers a list of casualties for a visitor, the Taliban dead are listed in a column labelled miscreants, rather than enemies or terrorists. And while he is eager to describe his force's new view of the jihadi groups, he stops deliberately short of saying their relationship is over.
In the intelligence world, you don't break your last communication with an organization, he said. But that's not the same as training or funding.
Is the Pakistan-Taliban 'game' at an end? - The Globe and Mail
