Zarb-e-Azb: Raheel Sharif’s doctrine of clarity
Special Report
Wajahat S. KhanThursday, October 09, 2014
ISLAMABAD: Days before the June 15 air strikes, which were followed by the June 30 ground offensive — official launch dates of Operation Zarb-e-Azb, the Pakistani military’s long awaited, and currently out-of-focus, campaign in North Waziristan — General Raheel Sharif looked across his long commander’s conference room table.
There was Lt. General Khalid Rabbani, the Commander of Peshawar’s XI Corps, making a serious demand: two dedicated battalions from the Special Services Group would be required for the job in the initial stages. It was a tough ask. The SSG troops are crack commandos, difficult to maintain and expensive to deploy, and were already stretched onto other assignments for counter-terrorism duties across Fata and the mainland.
Sharif shifted his gaze further down the table, and made a snap decision that would be more strategic than tactical, addressing a more junior man, the General Officer Commanding of the SSG: “Forget the battalions. The entire SSG division will be dedicated if the need arises,” said the chief of the army staff. “And so will aviation. We will do, not what we can, but what we must, to win this.”
Frankly, all of the SSG didn’t — and, logistically, couldn’t — make it to North Waziristan. But Sharif’s decision was followed in spirit, if not letter; for the first time, in the extensive ground operations that were to commence, a detachment of SSG commandos would be embedded with regular infantry units at the platoon and even section level, ‘training by doing’ with regular troops to enhance the latter’s counter-insurgency (COIN) and counter-terror (CT) capacity. Besides shaking things up in the army’s conventionally static order of battle, Sharif’s move was also a crucial morale booster: it’s not a bad deal for a regular infantryman to have fully qualified special-forces commando with jump wings by his side in the heat of battle.
Five months into the much awaited, even delayed, military operation against the militants in North Waziristan — the ‘Hotel California’ of terrorists wanted by Beijing, Washington and everyone in the middle — the Raheel Doctrine, which is a hybrid of politicking, administrating, martialing, warfare and public relations, evolves: Take a big decision, in principle; figure out the details as you go along; be ambitious about the objective yet cautious about sharing it; and always take advantage of fluidity — politically, internationally, as well as militarily — if and when possible.
Since he’s assumed office, General Sharif has had a point to prove; most military analysts had taken it as a given that he was not ‘groomed’ by his predecessor, former army chief Ashfaq Kayani, to lead the world’s sixth largest standing army; that not only made him suffer through the labelling of being ‘the prime minister’s handpicked man’, but, as local pundits had diagnosed, he was going through the ‘beginner’s dilemma’ in his first year, where he had to work extra hard to be more than just the first among equals that are his powerful corps commanders and principal staff officers; his predecessors had experienced similar problems in their starts, but they had figured it out by engineering 10-year (for Pervez Musharraf) and six-year (for Kayani) tenures for themselves.
Sharif would not have — and for those who know him, did not want — those political luxuries; his commanders, in General Headquarters and in the field formations, were eager to move out of the Rah-e-Rast and Rah-e-Nijat hangovers that had become Swat and South Waziristan; the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan had re-organised into a politically powerful and tactically potent force, despite losing Hakimullah Mehsud right around the time Sharif would be getting his fourth star; and he had one of his largest divisions, the 7th, sitting in a bunker in Miranshah, around 200 metres from where Mehsud’s residence had been, embarrassed into a self-inflicted siege, watching American drones and the Taliban play hide and seek around them, and only able to drive around once a week according to the terms of a limiting peace agreement that was in tatters anyway. Finally, 2014 was happening; there was a deadline to the Nato/Isaf drawdown that depended on securing the border, and Washington was shoving a stopwatch in Islamabad and Rawalpindi’s faces.
So, by late 2013, the Pakistan Army was looking, and ready, for some change and clarity; and its 15th chief, Sharif — never an intelligence officer, never in command on the western front, never the favourite amongst his contemporaries for the most powerful office in the land, more of an instructor than a doer, really — would bring it.
The intelligibility would come promptly, too. In the army, a “Quick Battle Order” is an immediate decision by a senior that has to be carried out by subordinates, usually always on the fly; planning is improvised, left to the men on the ground, but the essence defines the objective.
Early in his tenure, last December, General Sharif would give his first, serious QBO as army chief: A “Retaliate at Will” signal to his men in North Waziristan, who had been holed up in the tribal area, essentially blockaded, for years: that new space for action had led to a much publicised face-off in Mir Ali Bazaar, where the use of heavy firepower by quick reaction forces from Miranshah’s 7th Division against militants who had attacked a Frontier Corps check post, and were hiding among the civilian population, had ended up in a wintry media disaster for the military.
Sharif would use his spin-machine to fight off the public relations flak, but would effectively evolve the game of war he had started, optically and militarily: Where possible, use the air, surgically and/or aggressively; otherwise, use the ground, and if things got messy, control the information, down to a drip feed, or even nothing; but don’t relent in momentum or lose track of the big picture. It would be an approach that would resonate, as well as help create, the way his commanders would eventually run Zarb-e-Azb.
Over the early months of 2014, in the build-up to Zarb-e-Azb (or Op ZEA, as it’s now referred to), General Sharif would fine-tune his plans, essentially on the go: belligerent, tit-for-tat air strikes that would kill in the dozens, without much of a media fallout, thanks to an all-but-official information blackout from the region; an intelligence-based strategy that would loop in the civilian government to hold up the ‘talk to those want to talk’ narrative while allowing the military to play the ‘bomb those who don’t want to negotiate’ double-game. This would be, as a senior minister in the federal cabinet recently admitted in an interview, “a brilliant farce, designed to make the civilians look civilised, the army look gung-ho and actually confuse the terrorists, as a civ-mil divide was seen in Islamabad and Rawalpindi, but not felt on the ground in Waziristan.”
But those were optical illusions, engineered to create a national consensus by what was then a healthy relationship between GHQ and Raiwind; spring would see Raheel take further advantage of the civ-mil thaw as he prepared the battlefield, merging national politics with military kinetics.
In his speeches, General Sharif’s old and new school duality became the key: first, he would show off his democratic credentials; then, he would term the terror threat as existential; then he would remind all and sundry of Kashmir, calling it the jugular vein of the land. On the ground, he would start visiting his frontline troops, gearing up junior officers and senior commanders on both fronts while homing in the message;
get ready for a long haul, casualty-heavy engagement, out west. And don’t overthink it, too much.
As evidence of his seriousness, Sharif’s air assets would provide the pre-emptive lighting and thunder.
As for his faith in the negotiations, contrary to the views about Zarb-e-Azb having kicked off mid-summer, The News has learnt that pre-operational clearance strikes, by troops from South Waziristan’s crack divisions as well as Tarbela-based special forces, saw engagements building up to the north as early as March, concentrating on targets to block the region’s southern and eastern corridors in case the militants decided to move around too much within the badlands, or too far into the mainland.
Around the same time, the joint civil-military carrot of talks and stick of bombings, all driven by creative spy-games on the ground and in the media, would start creating splinter groups: The Mehsuds would walk, the Gul Bahadurs would balk, other factions born and older ones re-born.
Raheel’s generals would start identifying pockets for military as well as public-consumption purposes; North Waziristan would be taken in stages: first, by negotiations; then by the intelligence-led split-‘em-up game; then by softening up hard targets from the air; then, by ‘strangulation’ through curfews and cordons of relevant localities; then a random or a reasonable repetition of all of the above. The Karachi Airport attack in early June would provide a mere political tipping point for what had, essentially, already begun months before: a blitz in slow motion.
When the proceedings officially kicked off, for clearance and holding purposes on the ground, the NWA would be divided up into what some call the ‘Burger Battle’: the Mir Ali, Miranshah, Boya-Degan and Dattakhel Axes would form a neat, east-to-west centre, or the patty in the middle, of North Waziristan; next would be the south, also running east to west too, from around Razmak to Shawal, which would form the lower bun; later on, the north, up to Kurram, would be the eventual dressing, followed by sealing the border, the final bun on top.
Not unambitious, the selling price to both the government and the media would be several weeks of fighting, if not months, as well as a massive flux of internally displaced people. Units on the ground would get their holidays cancelled on similar timelines. What the army would conveniently forget to tell — and everyone would be too flummoxed to ask — would be that this was only Phase One of the operation: the patty bit, to secure the centre, the semi-urban meat, of the tribal agency.
Again, Raheel’s doctrine would form this ‘tell them what they need to hear’ approach. Here in the mainland, Phase One of Zarb-e-Azb would be sold as standardised and government-issued, conducted for operational as well as PR purposes. As a military source put it: “The psycho-social goals of taking on the big areas that everyone and their cousin had heard about, like Mike 1, Mike 2, Bravo-Delta and Delta Kilo (Miranshah, Mir Ali, Boya-Degan and Dattakhel) had to be taken, publicly and proudly, and so they were.”
Thus, July onwards saw the media-tap being opened: weapons caches, IED-factories, suicide-bomb training academies, literature and graffiti; the usual benchmarks of the newly captured badlands were displayed and aired. Success was declared with a thick skin, too; no heads of high-value targets were displayed on pikes, even as tough questions were raised about ‘safe passage granted’ to the ‘Good Taliban’ — those groups that are considered assets of the military intelligence apparatus, like the fearsome Haqqani Network — versus the ‘Bad Taliban’ i.e. factions at war with the Islamic Republic and its forces.
Meanwhile, Raheel’s course-mate, the retired yet high-profile Major General Athar Abbas, would, willingly or otherwise, come to the new chief’s aid by blaming the old chief, Kayani, for not having been decisive enough about North Waziristan, drawing a distinction between the inaction of the old guard and the dynamism of the new. Others would also chime in, agreeably. This would not be the first time in the summer when the former chief would be thrown under the bus, by sources privy or powerful, to separate Kayani’s regime from the incumbent one with a semi-colon of confidence.
But then, more politics happened. By late summer, the Dharnas started; Imran Khan and Tahirul Qadri came to town, and the General Headquarters got pulled in — dutifully or otherwise — into the messy war of attrition that was launched by the cricketer-cleric combine — with what some would allege was operational advice from friends in high places, even as high as Rawalpindi and Dubai — against the Nawaz Sharif regime. All evidence of the military’s involvement in the scrimmage remained anecdotal.
The storm was weathered and piloted through by General Sharif, who kept calm and quietly changed the batting order at Aabpara, stemming possibilities of extensions and/or de-notifications (Army code for officer/s being fired) by playing fair, even tweeting his way out of the mess.
Yet, here was Zarb-e-Azb, with its Phase One hardly over, and a crisis threatening Pakistan’s polity becoming the national front and centre. The operational patty — taking on the major localities running from Bannu in the east to the border in the west — was not yet fully grilled before Islamabad started heating up. Thus, optically, Op ZEA went straight to the backburner of the national conversation. A popular daily ran the headline “Zarb-e-Azb: The Forgotten War”, as parliament, not precision air strikes, became the key phrases of drawing rooms and news studios.
Meanwhile, the drone programme, suspended for several months since last winter, would restart; the border with India would start heating up as a new thaw with New Delhi would set in; and the Afghans would remain suspended in their own political deadlock, creating doubts about the future of US forces on the ground in Afghanistan, which always makes dollars and sense in Pakistan. But these would be gaps, mere distractions that Raheel and his men would take advantage of on in the ravines of Waziristan. For, come this autumn, Zarb-e-Azb continues to roll on, into its second, more decisive phase.
“No time sensitivity please, this isn’t fast food,” explained an officer from Peshawar’s XI Corps, involved in ground operations in North Waziristan. “This is fine dining, a 20 course dinner, and right now, you’re on the fourth or fifth course. If you want to enjoy your meal, you will need the evening off.”
Soldiers love food metaphors and, like journalists, they don’t like deadlines. While a Dharna-affected Pakistan has led to the national limelight moving away from Zarb-e-Azb, the ambitiously named (“Strike of the Prophet’s Sword”), even overdue military foray into North Waziristan — ground zero for the many terror groups which operate in the region — the Pakistani military has taken advantage of the broader political space carved out for it as a natural consequence of the ongoing anti-government crisis to figure the way forward for this war, as well as hone and enhance its own counterinsurgency (COIN) and counterterrorism (CT) skill sets.
“There’s more elbow room on the dining table today than we had earlier in the year,” said the officer, pushing the war-as-a-meal symbolism. “It’s not relevant how the extra political leverage was created, but it’s very relevant how we will utilise it in [Zarb-e] Azb.”
Translated, troops on the ground as well as their generals in General Headquarters now clearly reckon that Op ZEA (the Army’s new abbreviation for Zarb-e-Azb) is a long-term, ambitious engagement.
The campaign is going to haul beyond this winter, as new towns one may never have heard off — Tapi, Spalgha, Panda — are captured to ring across the national conversation; it’s going to extend into stages, with just the clearing and holding bit taking up to “a couple, maybe more, years”, according to an officer, before the building and transferring to the civilian-run administration even begins. Interestingly, there are abstract views about the return date of the internally displaced local population back into North Waziristan (generally, senior officers in the Army are not too keen on IDPs returning soon).
Moreover, Op ZEA is being seen as an eventually strategic game-changer for the region, which culminates with laws enacted, roads built, model villages constructed and borders sealed to buffer the endangered (Pakistan) from the embroiled (Afghanistan), finally de-hyphenating the American-manufactured security equation that is Af-Pak.
With key built-up areas (the towns of Mir Ali, Miranshah, Boya-Degan and Dattakhel) now taken, on-the-fly operations, air strikes, explosives/ordnance hunts and firefights continue, even as Phase Two of the operation officially begins.
Minor operations will also roll on through the so-called ‘non-fighting season’ of winter. “Why fight an unconventional war via the conventional ways,” asked an officer in explanation, further claiming that “we are geared up for the cold, but they [militants] are the ones who melt away when the chill arrives.”
Expect Shawal — a rugged no-man’s-land nestled between South and North Waziristan, with narrow alpine valleys and jagged peaks that rise up to 18,000 feet, as the next obvious target. Already being softened by both Pakistani air strikes as well as the CIA’s drones (which are back with a vengeance, though both sides have insisted in background conversations that Langley’s drone targeting is independent of Pakistani coordination), it’s where many militants have fled to since the fighting began, in earnest, last spring. The plan, simply, is to pound the locality hard and then take it by next spring. Thus, there is a long-term, almost relaxed, pace to the army’s operations, resonant in conversations on the ground in Waziristan and in the GHQ.
“The key difference in fighting COIN [counterinsurgency] in a foreign land versus your own land is time and legitimacy,” explained an infantry officer stationed in Waziristan for months. “Foreign forces are expeditionary forces, always running behind schedule. They are subjected to a time window and legitimacy problem. We are not.”
Yet, despite of the military’s can-do swagger, serious questions remain about Zarb-e-Azb, the foremost being: why now, and not earlier?
“Strategic restraint”, explained one officer, referring to the criticism generated around the beginning of the operation by the remarks of the former army spokesperson, the retired Major General Athar Abbas, about former Chief of Army Staff Ashfaq Kayani’s recalcitrance to launch an operation in the north soon after a 2010 campaign secured South Waziristan. Early summer saw those remarks create shockwaves against ‘Canny Kayani’, demarcating his style and intentions as clearly different from the incumbent Army Chief Raheel Sharif.
But, the officer continued, the pre-operational waiting game had more nuance to it: “Fata is not in a vacuum. The time Kayani took was for decisions that were linked to the Americans, to the Afghans, to 2014 and even to our own fatigue...Yes, we chose to remain under siege in North Waziristan, barely able to move. Yes, it was embarrassing. But those same bases where we were holed up for years are now providing the perfect jump-off points to launch full-scale offensives, are they not? So there is a dividend of patience we are enjoying operationally in North Waziristan.”
Other questions also arise. Have all the militants groups been unequivocally targeted, as the suave spokesperson of the Army, Major General Asim S. Bajwa, claims with his now famous “all colours and hues of terrorism will be eliminated” statements?
Moreover, that leads to another, even more serious question: Is this operation the real deal, the much awaited ‘clean sweep’, or a temporary push by the military to meet pending deadlines, like that of US/NATO/ISAF’s 2014 drawdown? Or worse, yet another ticked box to land defence deals while keeping the pot that is South Asian security simmering for attention and aid?
Like anyone else, soldiers don’t like being asked tough questions. But many officers on the ground admit that the “Haqqani Question” remains as unanswered for them as it does for the rest of the world: Where did the region’s deadliest militant faction, once cited as the “veritable arm” of Pakistan’s intelligence apparatus by an American military commander, and widely assumed to be based in North Waziristan, disappear to? Kurram? Quetta? Rawalpindi? Safe passage across the border?
Irrelevant, they say. What’s relevant is that a primary objective of counterinsurgency has been achieved: space, long ceded, has now been denied. The capacity of all and sundry groups to operate from the tribal agency has been reduced, as the rug of establishment — the ability to base — has been pulled from under them.
Yet, this was not always the case. In the initial stages of the campaign, when The News interviewed officers operating in North Waziristan, there was a lack of clarity about who to hit and who to spare. The situation earlier this summer, for example, with Hafiz Gul Bahadur — long considered a ‘Good Taliban’ tied up in a peace agreement since 2007/8 with the army was, as one officer put it, “dicey”. There were “mixed variables” that would not let the military unleash upon the southwest into Dattakhel and other areas dominated by Bahadur’s forces. Thus, those areas became safe havens, even as the operation continued elsewhere in the tribal agency.
Anxious to keep the momentum going — which had been built after they took Miranshah and Mir Ali — junior officers were getting impatient, too. As were the Americans, who restarted the drone programme mid-summer in zones like Dattakhel, where the Pakistani military was not yet fully engaging. Meanwhile, the locals had their own gripes: if the Dawars of Miranshah and Mir Ali were being targeted, why not the troublesome Wazirs of the southwest, too? If the Uzbeks were being hit, what about the Arabs? And the Afghan-centric groups, as well as suddenly “friendly” sub-commanders, who were retaining positions of safety in areas as south as Razmak?
Not any more. “GB [Gul Bahadur] is on the run, and it’s because we’ve decided to go for him... This whole ‘agreements’ and ‘proxy’ business makes life difficult in a full-fledged op,” said an infantry officer involved in the campaign.
“It isn’t like the old days,” confirmed a senior staffer in GHQ. “If I play double games with my juniors today, lives are affected tomorrow. We can’t be lying to ourselves when we are under a rocket-propelled grenade RPG attack that’s coming from the village of a so-called friendly fighter...Grays are becoming black and white for us when it comes to terrorism. Ten years of war can do that. Zarb-e-Azb is helping clean the slate for the Army.”
War is so fluid, this line of argument continues, that you can’t really pick one target or forego another when it comes to the heat of a contemporary joint-forces COIN operation and/or CT battle out in the badlands. As for the theories about the militants’ movements or migrations? Officers admit that it has happened before, and may well have happened again, though with some irreverence:
“With the Haqqanis, it’s a damned if we do and damned if we don’t narrative,” explained an officer involved in clearance operations. “Plus, some things are simply above our pay grade...But I’ll tell you something: We haven’t seen the Haqqanis being bussed out of here. We haven’t gotten orders saying ‘Don’t shoot at Haqqani, but do shoot at X, Y and Z’. That’s just not on. Not in a war like this one.”
A senior officer in GHQ had an even more candid take on the Haqqani question: “Of course, there are favourites. Every intelligence agency in the world works with bad guys. The CIA doesn’t work with Santa Claus, does it? Nor do our agencies...But forget the agencies for a minute, and look at the big picture. Look at how the state is committing itself. Look at the resources we’ve spent and lives we’ve lost for this area, and tell me if we can be blamed for a simple policy that works for us: that we won’t take everyone on at the same time...No, sir, we won’t. Now, even the Americans are understanding this policy.”
As for assessing gains and losses, amidst criticism from what one officer termed the “non-elimination mantra of the media”, that is the reproachful contemporary analysis that blames the Army for either having given enough warning signs to militants based out of North Waziristan to move out of the area before ground operations began in earnest — or worse, a safe passage — operational officers The News interviewed came up with broad, but similar, themes.
In a counterinsurgency, they surmised, a standing opposition in a pitched battle is a fantasy; so don’t expect big gains to be propped up on a regular basis. In the build-up and initial stages of the operation, officers admit, a lot of armed groups fled because they had better local intelligence — and, unlike Swat, more local help — than the Army. Officers also stressed the “success” of the massive aerial bombing campaign — which started in early spring and killed in the twenties and thirties whenever negotiations broke down or retaliation was in order.
Officers also emphasise that gains have to be measured in terms of ‘non-events’, too: The impressive capacity of the militants — improvised explosive device (IED)-manufacturing facilities, ordnance caches and distribution networks, for example — which was uncovered had to be understood before it was dismantled.
“Accumulated over three decades of a terror-driven economy, with wholesale markets of weapons and IEDs and sophisticated smuggling and storage links, cutting off Tango supply lines that run into the mainland was a major achievement,” claimed an officer involved in clearance operations, referring to the codename given to Taliban and other combatants by the Fata-based officers.
The fact that there has been little or no terror blowback in the mainland, Dharnas and all, with the Pakistan Muslim League - Nawaz’s “Fortress Punjab” not yet breached, despite promises of revenge attacks by militants — always an area of concern for the Lahore-centric government — is evidence of attainment too, claims this Army-driven perspective. The recent Quetta Airport/PAF Base attack, even the attempted mutiny to capture a Pakistan Navy frigate in Karachi, are seen as successfully quelled outliers in this line of argument.
“Zarb-e-Azb cannot be judged on a scoreboard, but a pendulum,” explained an officer who has conducted several ground operations in the larger campaign. “It’s about time versus space. We may have the momentum, but the enemy has the time. The key, for us, is to have both.”
[End of Part 2 of a series of special reports on Operation Zarb-e-Azb by the newspaper’s National Security Editor. Tweet to him at @wajskhan]
