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Date Posted: 10-Nov-2008
Jane's Defence Weekly
Pakistan in peril: Pakistan Country Briefing, part one
An economy in meltdown and a faltering war against Islamic militants are conspiring to cloud Pakistan's future - and even threaten its survival. A fledgling democratic government and a military unsure of its role face the challenge of guiding Pakistan back towards stability. Trefor Moss reports
It is one of the scenarios that keeps foreign-policy makers awake at night. Pakistan, its economy no longer functioning, its domestic security wrecked by militant violence and civil unrest, implodes.
Unable to survive, the state splits along regional seams, which 60 years of shared nationhood, in the end, do little to hold together.
Central Asia convulses - the international mission in Afghanistan now doomed - and the world looks on, loath to intervene, as extremist groups and a now nationless military scramble to claim the fragments of Pakistan and take ownership of its nuclear weapons. Finally, in the chaos, global jihad enters the atomic age.
Pakistan's failure as a state is far from inevitable and there are various courses that such a failure might take. Yet Pakistan is in danger, and the country's politicians and its military are unsure of how best to go about saving it.
On Pakistan's northwestern border, brutalised Afghanistan - soon to enter its fourth decade of turmoil - demonstrates the price of state failure. However, the consequences of the world's sixth most populous nation following Afghanistan down the spiral of civil war and theocratic tyranny would surely be even more serious for the scale of the humanitarian disaster that would ensue, the instability it would breed across Central Asia and beyond, and for the defeat it would inflict on the US-led war on Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
To the continuing surprise of the country's security establishment, Pakistan's existential emergency has relatively little to do with India, the traditional bogeyman. From the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in late December 2007 to the destruction of Islamabad's Marriott Hotel in September, it has become increasingly clear that the internal threats to Pakistan's security are much graver than anything directed from outside.
It is an open secret that leaders of the Afghan Taliban have been hiding - often quite conspicuously - in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), which they continue to use as a base from which to attack NATO and Afghan forces across the border.
Yet the home-grown Pakistani Taliban - groups like Baitullah Mehsud's Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TeTP) and Faqir Mohammed's Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM) - are the ones who have turned their guns on Pakistan itself.
These groups, already angered by the government's support for the United States' ousting of the Afghan Taliban, became actively hostile when, for the first time, the Pakistani Army entered the FATA in 2002 and then intensified its operations in 2004 in a bid to ease the Taliban's grip on these remote areas. In doing so, the army broke one of the covenants of Pakistan's foundation in 1947: that it would never enter the FATA. Later, the decision of former president Pervez Musharraf to storm Islamabad's Red Mosque, which had become a centre for armed extremists, in July 2007 armed the militants with a further casus belli.
Since then, Pakistan has been ravaged by suicide attacks, with an estimated 1,200 civilians killed since mid-2007, and a humanitarian crisis has engulfed the FATA.
Vivan Tan, senior regional public information officer for the UNHCR in Islamabad, confirmed that "according to the government, 168,000 people have been displaced within Pakistan in NWFP [Northwest Frontier Province] from Bajaur or Swat" and that while "most of these internally displaced are living with host families or in the homes of strangers, around 27,000 are in camps scattered around NWFP".
Up to 20,000 others have fled Bajaur and, in a grim reversal of the usual flow of refugee traffic, crossed into Kunar in Afghanistan to escape the violence. However, others have placed the number of FATA refugees at nearer 800,000 and Tan concedes that the UNHCR "doesn't know what's happening in the FATA" as it is unable to operate there. She added that a further, and potentially even greater, tragedy is brewing in Pakistan, as the 1.8 million Afghan refugees still inside the country are not entitled to stay there beyond the end of 2009.
"The Afghan government is happy to receive its people," she said, "but Afghanistan's absorption capacity is reaching saturation point."
Regardless of these hardships, the militants' goals remain: to drive the Pakistani army from the tribal areas and even areas of NWFP; to govern these places with a regressive brand of Sharia law and Islamic Qazi courts; and to aid Afghan and Kashmiri militant groups, with which they are loosely associated, in their jihadi campaigns against the US and India.
Heavy price
A senior Pakistani government official who spoke to Jane's insisted that his country has paid a heavy price for its part in the US' war.
"Why shouldn't you trust Pakistan?" he asked in response to criticism that Pakistan remains lukewarm on tackling militancy. "Pakistan is the biggest victim of the war on terror. It has done the most and it has suffered the most."
Indeed, the Pakistani army has taken "around 1,500 casualties" since hostilities began in 2002, a military spokesman confirmed in late October, and has deployed 180,000 troops to the Afghan frontier (compared with the 70,000 US and NATO troops in Afghanistan and coalition losses of around 930). The military claims to have killed 1,100 militants since August alone.
"Operations are ongoing in Bajaur [in FATA] and Swat [in NWFP]," the spokesman explained. Meanwhile, the government source lauded the Bajaur operation as "a success story where our security forces have restored the writ of the government with the help of the locals".
This assessment of the war, however, does not reflect the psychological toll that this internal conflict has taken on the Pakistani military.
"The armed forces have become demoralised during this war," said Farhana Ali, an associate international policy analyst at the RAND Corporation.
"Officers don't wear their uniforms publicly; they don't put military licence plates on their cars. This is astonishing for a country with such a proud military tradition."
Shuja Nawaz, author of Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army and the Wars Within, agrees. "There was a drop in morale in the last years of Musharraf's regime because of the opprobrium surrounding Musharraf's extra-constitutional acts," he said. Though Musharraf stood down as army chief in November 2007 and quit as president nine months later, his legacy has been to damage what has always been Pakistan's most respected institution. Nawaz pointed out that of 56 suicide bombings carried out in Pakistan in 2007 over 30 were directed at the military. "This was something completely new to them," he explained, "to be attacked in their own country. That shocked them."
At the heart of Pakistan's difficulties is the inability of the military to move away from its traditional role - one it has always embraced - as the nation's defence against India. "There is a big mental hurdle," said Nawaz. "The Pakistani army still thinks that all you need is good infantry training and you can take on anything. But this is not a low-level conflict - as they think - but a counterinsurgency campaign."
Even Pakistan's backers in Washington have come to see the army's failure to transform itself into a counterinsurgency force as a serious problem, asking why they should be paying to upgrade Pakistan Air Force F-16s when other equipment, such as helicopters, would be more useful for fighting militants. "They are still lacking in equipment and training: the Pakistani military is still a conventional force," said Nawaz. "The doctrinal shift [towards becoming a counterinsurgency force] has not occurred - there's been a lot of learning by doing."
At the end of October, a group of 32 US trainers finally began instructing senior members of Pakistan's 80,000-strong Frontier Corps after lengthy negotiations. However, the presence of US officers on Pakistani soil - even in a non-fighting capacity - has proved so controversial that the scheme is unlikely to be expanded significantly.
Afghan ambivalence
The Pakistani military's fixation on its role as a bulwark against India also governs the country's Afghanistan policy - one which has variously baffled and infuriated political and military figures in the West. What has shocked them more than anything is that Pakistan has never really ended its pre-9/11 support for the Taliban; the supporting of jihad in Kashmir and Afghanistan is too entrenched an element of the country's foreign policy. As the situation in Afghanistan steadily worsened throughout 2007 and 2008, it seemed ever more alarming that Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) - the military's counterespionage agency - should be in cahoots with the same terrorists it was ostensibly fighting inside Pakistan.
"There is no sign of the army's sympathy with the Afghan Taliban decreasing," said Ahmed Rashid, author of Taliban and Descent Into Chaos. "There has been no round-up of the Taliban so far - the army's operations in FATA are not in the areas where the Taliban is strongest."
"There is tremendous ambivalence towards the Afghan Taliban in both the government and the military," agrees Nawaz, "because a fairly substantial segment of them - the Haqqanis and perhaps also [Hezb-e-Islami leader Gulbuddin] Hekmatyar - have not taken up arms against the Pakistanis. It is the only domestic version of the Taliban - Baitullah Mehsud and his franchisees - they are willing to sort out."
India is of course the key to understanding the ISI's ongoing support for the Afghan Taliban. There is little doubt that India, increasingly resurgent in Central Asia, has been manoeuvring for influence in Afghanistan - traditionally Pakistan's strategic backyard. It has opened a string of 'consulates' in the country, despite having few citizens there to administer, and has enacted a policy known as the 'grand bargain' whereby it is spending USD750 million in developmental aid in Afghanistan.
The basis for "the ambivalence towards the Taliban in both the government and the military [is that] they see Afghanistan becoming somewhat hostile to Pakistan and are concerned by Indian involvement there", explained Nawaz.
"This adds to the paranoia - the prospect of a hostile border to the east and the west. They see the Taliban as representing the Pashtun majority of Afghanistan and that after the US disappears, the Taliban will be back in charge."
Similarly, Pakistan has never reconciled itself to Afghan President Hamid Karzai because Karzai is a Pashtun leader who, unlike the Pashtun Taliban, does not owe his power to Islamabad.
Ali further points out that some unknown actor is clearly funding and supplying the Pakistani Taliban and that the Pakistanis reflexively suspect India.
"Not to point the finger at India," she said, "but it's India with its involvement in Afghanistan that makes Pakistan feel insecure." Thus, when the Indian embassy in Kabul was attacked in July, Pakistan's ISI was accused of orchestrating the strike.
The appointment of a new head of ISI, Lieutenant-General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, in September raised hopes that General Ashfaq Kiyani, the army chief who replaced Musharraf in 2007, was working to 'rein in' the agency.
However, Nawaz said it would be wrong to see the ISI as a rogue operator. When the ISI works with the Taliban to undermine NATO in Afghanistan, "it only happens because the government wants it to happen", he said. A new and interesting factor is that new ISI chief Lt Gen Pasha was the previous director-general of military operations in the FATA and was therefore the man spearheading military operations against the Pakistani Taliban, if not their Afghan equivalents.
Gen Kiyani himself has also been viewed as a stabilising influence, having promised to keep the army out of politics after the demoralising Musharraf years and to return it to its professional roots. "At least Kiyani has been to FATA," Nawaz said. "Musharraf never went there a single time."
The assassination of Benazir Bhutto produced an outcome that few initially anticipated: the ascent of her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, to the Pakistani presidency.
Strategy review
"Many believe that Musharraf's resignation could be an improvement but that remains to be seen," Ali said. "Zardari is seen as a poor politician. And there has been an increase in suicide attacks since he came to power."
Nawaz, meanwhile, sees the new civilian administration as having "already frittered away the first months of their government", with new thinking on how to solve the Taliban problem in short supply.
"I don't think the government has a strategy," Rashid agreed. "The army has a strategy but it's keeping it to itself; I have no idea what it is. But there is no political strategy behind the military campaign in terms of bringing FATA into the mainstream."
In what was seen by some as a significant step towards formulating a workable and coherent plan, Pakistan's upper and lower houses of parliament unanimously approved a resolution calling for an "urgent review" of the country's security strategy on 22 October. Foremost among the resolution's 14 points was that emphasis should be placed on dialogue with Pakistani (though not foreign) militants. Critics of the initiative said that it offered nothing new.
"I really don't think that the 14-point resolution will make any difference," said Rashid. "It's counter to the policy [of military action] that's being run by the army."
The announcement of a separate initiative to arm local militias, or lashkars, in the FATA with AK-47s bought from China, which coincided with parliament's 14-point plan, was further evidence to Rashid of the lack of coherence in the approach to the war. "It shows you how disjointed the whole thing is," Rashid said, "that this should have been announced by [Pakistani] officials in Washington. It never once came up in the parliamentary debate."
Furthermore, arming the lashkars would be hugely dangerous, he argues. "I was shocked by that. It's hugely negative. This will prompt a civil war in the tribal areas; it's an utter disaster."
He added that thoughts of recreating Iraq's 'Sunni Awakening' by arming tribesmen in the FATA - thus empowering them to fight the Taliban themselves - are completely misguided. Inter-tribal relations in the FATA are notoriously complex, he pointed out, and these areas cannot be compared to Anbar province in Iraq, where the Sunni Awakening took place. The government source nonetheless defended the arming of lashkars as a promising strategy on the grounds that local tribes "are weary of the obscurantist version" of Islam preached by extremists.
However, the security crisis in Pakistan is in danger of being seen as a Gordian Knot, which no solution is able to cut through.
"The negotiation process will not be successful," said Ali, "but there are political reasons for the government, which is under pressure, to continue with the façade: that the country does not have the stomach for this war and the army does not have the resources to continue with it."
She added that "the Taliban use [negotiation] as propaganda and to buy time"; meanwhile, the military, pressing ahead with its operations in Bajaur and Swat, is "very weary of the negotiation process".
Certainly, previous attempts to negotiate with the insurgents suggest that a peace deal will be elusive. The military brokered a deal with militants in Waziristan in 2006 and in doing so "made a serious mistake", according to Nawaz.
"The military was not operating from a position of strength or even as equals," he said. "In terms of the Pashtun code, they were surrendering."
The deal unravelled when the Taliban declared the agreement void - after the military had pulled back from the area. An earlier government-sponsored deal in Waziristan also failed, as did peace talks in Swat in early 2008. The collapse of this accord resulted in the heavy fighting which still continues today. However, even the US - which poured scorn on Pakistan's attempts to deal with the Taliban - now concedes that deals will have to be struck, with new CENTCOM commander General David Petraeus endorsing Afghan approaches to Taliban leaders in late October. "But when Pakistan initiated peace dialogue with the Taliban we were told not to do that," the government source ruefully recalls.
Meanwhile, frustration at what it perceives as the impunity enjoyed by the Afghan Taliban in the FATA has led the US to pursue an undeclared tactic of using Reaper and Predator unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to bomb high-value targets inside Pakistan. The most recent of these attacks in late October was the 12th such strike in the space of 10 weeks, Pakistan claimed. The US even risked a boots-on-the-ground incursion in early September with an attack on a village in South Waziristan.
"This policy will not work; they do not have permission to do this," said the government source. "It will have a negative impact. We should strengthen our information-sharing and then Pakistan can carry out the military operations [inside Pakistan] instead of the US doing this."
The US' reluctance to share this kind of information is symptomatic of the erosion of trust being fed by the perception that Pakistani agents are still in league with the Taliban. However, some efforts have been made to improve communication, the meeting of Gen Kiyani and Lt Gen Pasha with the US military leadership aboard USS Abraham Lincoln in August being the most notable example. The US Department of Defense did not offer comment on its Pakistan policy.
Any military or political initiatives could in any case be rendered academic by the meltdown of Pakistan's economy.
The country is currently grappling with power shortages, high unemployment and soaring fuel and food prices. Inflation is running at around 25 per cent. The deteriorating security picture has scared away investors and prompted the flight of capital.
Economic meltdown
Unable to stem the economic slump, in late October the government was finally forced to approach the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to secure an immediate cash injection of around USD4 billion as part of a three-year loan worth up to USD10 billion. Attempts to tap into the sovereign wealth of traditional allies, such as China or the Gulf states, have so far proved unsuccessful. "It's a huge blow to the government that they haven't been able to muster any money," said Rashid. "It weakens Zardari significantly that he couldn't even get financial support from friendly countries."
A share of the responsibility for Pakistan's financial plight rests with the US, which has provided over USD11 billion in military aid largely at the expense of development projects. This oversight has been compounded by the fact that military aid has not translated into success on the ground.
"I don't think [military aid money] was well spent," said Nawaz. "They were just covering costs, not upgrading [the army's] equipment or improving their capabilities. The US has been very niggardly in equipping Pakistan for the fight."
A serving officer complained to Jane's in early October that only around USD500 million had been spent on equipment, with soldiers in the field still lacking night-vision goggles and often using antiquated technology. "Too little of [the US aid money] has trickled down," agreed Ali. "We need to make Pakistan accountable for the money, but we also have to hold others, like the US, accountable. Night-vision goggles and basic equipment are more important than F-16s."
A bill sponsored by US senators Joe Biden and Richard Lugar and passed by the Senate in August should finally begin to address this, as the legislation earmarks USD1.5 billion annually for development projects in Pakistan for the next five years.
Without further international backing, though, Pakistan will struggle to remain afloat, never mind overcome the challenges that confront it.
"Pakistan doesn't have resources for economic activity in [the FATA]," argued the government source. "There are people waging this war [on behalf of the Taliban] who are just doing it for money: they are mercenaries because of the poverty and unemployment in those areas. If those people are given economic opportunities and employment, that's one way to address this."
Much of the burden must fall to Pakistan itself, however, and in particular the military and the government. In Crossed Swords, Nawaz observes that in Pakistan the government is the authority while the military is the power. The only way out of the mire will therefore be one that both institutions endorse.
"The crucial thing is for the military and the civilian administration to operate in some kind of partnership - and I just don't see that happening," said Rashid. "But neither can tackle this on their own. If its two main institutions can't work together, then the country runs the risk of failure."
Ali believes that the military is still too bruised by the Musharraf years to contemplate staging another coup any time soon, and that this gives Zardari a window of opportunity in which to convince the nation that the war is indeed in Pakistan's own best interests.
Nawaz insists that the government needs "to give the military a role and not leave it to the military to define one for itself" - a failing which has led to the contradictory strategies that have been pursued so far.
The government source takes the end of Musharraf's near nine-year rule as grounds for hope.
"I am optimistic because under a democratic government you have varied tools to address the issues," he says. The civilian administration, he insists, has an "elaborate plan" for developing the FATA and stabilising the country. But it all comes down to overseas support.
"This is where the West and other stakeholders should come forward to help and provide generous assistance," he said. "So far, there have been promises but what has come through is just plain military support."
Now is the time for the world to deliver on those promises of aid, he concludes. Otherwise, in the future, there might not be a Pakistan to help.
Trefor Moss is JDW Asia Pacific Editor, based in London
http://www.janes4.com
Date Posted: 10-Nov-2008
Jane's Defence Weekly
Pakistan in peril: Pakistan Country Briefing, part one
An economy in meltdown and a faltering war against Islamic militants are conspiring to cloud Pakistan's future - and even threaten its survival. A fledgling democratic government and a military unsure of its role face the challenge of guiding Pakistan back towards stability. Trefor Moss reports
It is one of the scenarios that keeps foreign-policy makers awake at night. Pakistan, its economy no longer functioning, its domestic security wrecked by militant violence and civil unrest, implodes.
Unable to survive, the state splits along regional seams, which 60 years of shared nationhood, in the end, do little to hold together.
Central Asia convulses - the international mission in Afghanistan now doomed - and the world looks on, loath to intervene, as extremist groups and a now nationless military scramble to claim the fragments of Pakistan and take ownership of its nuclear weapons. Finally, in the chaos, global jihad enters the atomic age.
Pakistan's failure as a state is far from inevitable and there are various courses that such a failure might take. Yet Pakistan is in danger, and the country's politicians and its military are unsure of how best to go about saving it.
On Pakistan's northwestern border, brutalised Afghanistan - soon to enter its fourth decade of turmoil - demonstrates the price of state failure. However, the consequences of the world's sixth most populous nation following Afghanistan down the spiral of civil war and theocratic tyranny would surely be even more serious for the scale of the humanitarian disaster that would ensue, the instability it would breed across Central Asia and beyond, and for the defeat it would inflict on the US-led war on Al-Qaeda and the Taliban.
To the continuing surprise of the country's security establishment, Pakistan's existential emergency has relatively little to do with India, the traditional bogeyman. From the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in late December 2007 to the destruction of Islamabad's Marriott Hotel in September, it has become increasingly clear that the internal threats to Pakistan's security are much graver than anything directed from outside.
It is an open secret that leaders of the Afghan Taliban have been hiding - often quite conspicuously - in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), which they continue to use as a base from which to attack NATO and Afghan forces across the border.
Yet the home-grown Pakistani Taliban - groups like Baitullah Mehsud's Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TeTP) and Faqir Mohammed's Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM) - are the ones who have turned their guns on Pakistan itself.
These groups, already angered by the government's support for the United States' ousting of the Afghan Taliban, became actively hostile when, for the first time, the Pakistani Army entered the FATA in 2002 and then intensified its operations in 2004 in a bid to ease the Taliban's grip on these remote areas. In doing so, the army broke one of the covenants of Pakistan's foundation in 1947: that it would never enter the FATA. Later, the decision of former president Pervez Musharraf to storm Islamabad's Red Mosque, which had become a centre for armed extremists, in July 2007 armed the militants with a further casus belli.
Since then, Pakistan has been ravaged by suicide attacks, with an estimated 1,200 civilians killed since mid-2007, and a humanitarian crisis has engulfed the FATA.
Vivan Tan, senior regional public information officer for the UNHCR in Islamabad, confirmed that "according to the government, 168,000 people have been displaced within Pakistan in NWFP [Northwest Frontier Province] from Bajaur or Swat" and that while "most of these internally displaced are living with host families or in the homes of strangers, around 27,000 are in camps scattered around NWFP".
Up to 20,000 others have fled Bajaur and, in a grim reversal of the usual flow of refugee traffic, crossed into Kunar in Afghanistan to escape the violence. However, others have placed the number of FATA refugees at nearer 800,000 and Tan concedes that the UNHCR "doesn't know what's happening in the FATA" as it is unable to operate there. She added that a further, and potentially even greater, tragedy is brewing in Pakistan, as the 1.8 million Afghan refugees still inside the country are not entitled to stay there beyond the end of 2009.
"The Afghan government is happy to receive its people," she said, "but Afghanistan's absorption capacity is reaching saturation point."
Regardless of these hardships, the militants' goals remain: to drive the Pakistani army from the tribal areas and even areas of NWFP; to govern these places with a regressive brand of Sharia law and Islamic Qazi courts; and to aid Afghan and Kashmiri militant groups, with which they are loosely associated, in their jihadi campaigns against the US and India.
Heavy price
A senior Pakistani government official who spoke to Jane's insisted that his country has paid a heavy price for its part in the US' war.
"Why shouldn't you trust Pakistan?" he asked in response to criticism that Pakistan remains lukewarm on tackling militancy. "Pakistan is the biggest victim of the war on terror. It has done the most and it has suffered the most."
Indeed, the Pakistani army has taken "around 1,500 casualties" since hostilities began in 2002, a military spokesman confirmed in late October, and has deployed 180,000 troops to the Afghan frontier (compared with the 70,000 US and NATO troops in Afghanistan and coalition losses of around 930). The military claims to have killed 1,100 militants since August alone.
"Operations are ongoing in Bajaur [in FATA] and Swat [in NWFP]," the spokesman explained. Meanwhile, the government source lauded the Bajaur operation as "a success story where our security forces have restored the writ of the government with the help of the locals".
This assessment of the war, however, does not reflect the psychological toll that this internal conflict has taken on the Pakistani military.
"The armed forces have become demoralised during this war," said Farhana Ali, an associate international policy analyst at the RAND Corporation.
"Officers don't wear their uniforms publicly; they don't put military licence plates on their cars. This is astonishing for a country with such a proud military tradition."
Shuja Nawaz, author of Crossed Swords: Pakistan, Its Army and the Wars Within, agrees. "There was a drop in morale in the last years of Musharraf's regime because of the opprobrium surrounding Musharraf's extra-constitutional acts," he said. Though Musharraf stood down as army chief in November 2007 and quit as president nine months later, his legacy has been to damage what has always been Pakistan's most respected institution. Nawaz pointed out that of 56 suicide bombings carried out in Pakistan in 2007 over 30 were directed at the military. "This was something completely new to them," he explained, "to be attacked in their own country. That shocked them."
At the heart of Pakistan's difficulties is the inability of the military to move away from its traditional role - one it has always embraced - as the nation's defence against India. "There is a big mental hurdle," said Nawaz. "The Pakistani army still thinks that all you need is good infantry training and you can take on anything. But this is not a low-level conflict - as they think - but a counterinsurgency campaign."
Even Pakistan's backers in Washington have come to see the army's failure to transform itself into a counterinsurgency force as a serious problem, asking why they should be paying to upgrade Pakistan Air Force F-16s when other equipment, such as helicopters, would be more useful for fighting militants. "They are still lacking in equipment and training: the Pakistani military is still a conventional force," said Nawaz. "The doctrinal shift [towards becoming a counterinsurgency force] has not occurred - there's been a lot of learning by doing."
At the end of October, a group of 32 US trainers finally began instructing senior members of Pakistan's 80,000-strong Frontier Corps after lengthy negotiations. However, the presence of US officers on Pakistani soil - even in a non-fighting capacity - has proved so controversial that the scheme is unlikely to be expanded significantly.
Afghan ambivalence
The Pakistani military's fixation on its role as a bulwark against India also governs the country's Afghanistan policy - one which has variously baffled and infuriated political and military figures in the West. What has shocked them more than anything is that Pakistan has never really ended its pre-9/11 support for the Taliban; the supporting of jihad in Kashmir and Afghanistan is too entrenched an element of the country's foreign policy. As the situation in Afghanistan steadily worsened throughout 2007 and 2008, it seemed ever more alarming that Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) - the military's counterespionage agency - should be in cahoots with the same terrorists it was ostensibly fighting inside Pakistan.
"There is no sign of the army's sympathy with the Afghan Taliban decreasing," said Ahmed Rashid, author of Taliban and Descent Into Chaos. "There has been no round-up of the Taliban so far - the army's operations in FATA are not in the areas where the Taliban is strongest."
"There is tremendous ambivalence towards the Afghan Taliban in both the government and the military," agrees Nawaz, "because a fairly substantial segment of them - the Haqqanis and perhaps also [Hezb-e-Islami leader Gulbuddin] Hekmatyar - have not taken up arms against the Pakistanis. It is the only domestic version of the Taliban - Baitullah Mehsud and his franchisees - they are willing to sort out."
India is of course the key to understanding the ISI's ongoing support for the Afghan Taliban. There is little doubt that India, increasingly resurgent in Central Asia, has been manoeuvring for influence in Afghanistan - traditionally Pakistan's strategic backyard. It has opened a string of 'consulates' in the country, despite having few citizens there to administer, and has enacted a policy known as the 'grand bargain' whereby it is spending USD750 million in developmental aid in Afghanistan.
The basis for "the ambivalence towards the Taliban in both the government and the military [is that] they see Afghanistan becoming somewhat hostile to Pakistan and are concerned by Indian involvement there", explained Nawaz.
"This adds to the paranoia - the prospect of a hostile border to the east and the west. They see the Taliban as representing the Pashtun majority of Afghanistan and that after the US disappears, the Taliban will be back in charge."
Similarly, Pakistan has never reconciled itself to Afghan President Hamid Karzai because Karzai is a Pashtun leader who, unlike the Pashtun Taliban, does not owe his power to Islamabad.
Ali further points out that some unknown actor is clearly funding and supplying the Pakistani Taliban and that the Pakistanis reflexively suspect India.
"Not to point the finger at India," she said, "but it's India with its involvement in Afghanistan that makes Pakistan feel insecure." Thus, when the Indian embassy in Kabul was attacked in July, Pakistan's ISI was accused of orchestrating the strike.
The appointment of a new head of ISI, Lieutenant-General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, in September raised hopes that General Ashfaq Kiyani, the army chief who replaced Musharraf in 2007, was working to 'rein in' the agency.
However, Nawaz said it would be wrong to see the ISI as a rogue operator. When the ISI works with the Taliban to undermine NATO in Afghanistan, "it only happens because the government wants it to happen", he said. A new and interesting factor is that new ISI chief Lt Gen Pasha was the previous director-general of military operations in the FATA and was therefore the man spearheading military operations against the Pakistani Taliban, if not their Afghan equivalents.
Gen Kiyani himself has also been viewed as a stabilising influence, having promised to keep the army out of politics after the demoralising Musharraf years and to return it to its professional roots. "At least Kiyani has been to FATA," Nawaz said. "Musharraf never went there a single time."
The assassination of Benazir Bhutto produced an outcome that few initially anticipated: the ascent of her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, to the Pakistani presidency.
Strategy review
"Many believe that Musharraf's resignation could be an improvement but that remains to be seen," Ali said. "Zardari is seen as a poor politician. And there has been an increase in suicide attacks since he came to power."
Nawaz, meanwhile, sees the new civilian administration as having "already frittered away the first months of their government", with new thinking on how to solve the Taliban problem in short supply.
"I don't think the government has a strategy," Rashid agreed. "The army has a strategy but it's keeping it to itself; I have no idea what it is. But there is no political strategy behind the military campaign in terms of bringing FATA into the mainstream."
In what was seen by some as a significant step towards formulating a workable and coherent plan, Pakistan's upper and lower houses of parliament unanimously approved a resolution calling for an "urgent review" of the country's security strategy on 22 October. Foremost among the resolution's 14 points was that emphasis should be placed on dialogue with Pakistani (though not foreign) militants. Critics of the initiative said that it offered nothing new.
"I really don't think that the 14-point resolution will make any difference," said Rashid. "It's counter to the policy [of military action] that's being run by the army."
The announcement of a separate initiative to arm local militias, or lashkars, in the FATA with AK-47s bought from China, which coincided with parliament's 14-point plan, was further evidence to Rashid of the lack of coherence in the approach to the war. "It shows you how disjointed the whole thing is," Rashid said, "that this should have been announced by [Pakistani] officials in Washington. It never once came up in the parliamentary debate."
Furthermore, arming the lashkars would be hugely dangerous, he argues. "I was shocked by that. It's hugely negative. This will prompt a civil war in the tribal areas; it's an utter disaster."
He added that thoughts of recreating Iraq's 'Sunni Awakening' by arming tribesmen in the FATA - thus empowering them to fight the Taliban themselves - are completely misguided. Inter-tribal relations in the FATA are notoriously complex, he pointed out, and these areas cannot be compared to Anbar province in Iraq, where the Sunni Awakening took place. The government source nonetheless defended the arming of lashkars as a promising strategy on the grounds that local tribes "are weary of the obscurantist version" of Islam preached by extremists.
However, the security crisis in Pakistan is in danger of being seen as a Gordian Knot, which no solution is able to cut through.
"The negotiation process will not be successful," said Ali, "but there are political reasons for the government, which is under pressure, to continue with the façade: that the country does not have the stomach for this war and the army does not have the resources to continue with it."
She added that "the Taliban use [negotiation] as propaganda and to buy time"; meanwhile, the military, pressing ahead with its operations in Bajaur and Swat, is "very weary of the negotiation process".
Certainly, previous attempts to negotiate with the insurgents suggest that a peace deal will be elusive. The military brokered a deal with militants in Waziristan in 2006 and in doing so "made a serious mistake", according to Nawaz.
"The military was not operating from a position of strength or even as equals," he said. "In terms of the Pashtun code, they were surrendering."
The deal unravelled when the Taliban declared the agreement void - after the military had pulled back from the area. An earlier government-sponsored deal in Waziristan also failed, as did peace talks in Swat in early 2008. The collapse of this accord resulted in the heavy fighting which still continues today. However, even the US - which poured scorn on Pakistan's attempts to deal with the Taliban - now concedes that deals will have to be struck, with new CENTCOM commander General David Petraeus endorsing Afghan approaches to Taliban leaders in late October. "But when Pakistan initiated peace dialogue with the Taliban we were told not to do that," the government source ruefully recalls.
Meanwhile, frustration at what it perceives as the impunity enjoyed by the Afghan Taliban in the FATA has led the US to pursue an undeclared tactic of using Reaper and Predator unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to bomb high-value targets inside Pakistan. The most recent of these attacks in late October was the 12th such strike in the space of 10 weeks, Pakistan claimed. The US even risked a boots-on-the-ground incursion in early September with an attack on a village in South Waziristan.
"This policy will not work; they do not have permission to do this," said the government source. "It will have a negative impact. We should strengthen our information-sharing and then Pakistan can carry out the military operations [inside Pakistan] instead of the US doing this."
The US' reluctance to share this kind of information is symptomatic of the erosion of trust being fed by the perception that Pakistani agents are still in league with the Taliban. However, some efforts have been made to improve communication, the meeting of Gen Kiyani and Lt Gen Pasha with the US military leadership aboard USS Abraham Lincoln in August being the most notable example. The US Department of Defense did not offer comment on its Pakistan policy.
Any military or political initiatives could in any case be rendered academic by the meltdown of Pakistan's economy.
The country is currently grappling with power shortages, high unemployment and soaring fuel and food prices. Inflation is running at around 25 per cent. The deteriorating security picture has scared away investors and prompted the flight of capital.
Economic meltdown
Unable to stem the economic slump, in late October the government was finally forced to approach the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to secure an immediate cash injection of around USD4 billion as part of a three-year loan worth up to USD10 billion. Attempts to tap into the sovereign wealth of traditional allies, such as China or the Gulf states, have so far proved unsuccessful. "It's a huge blow to the government that they haven't been able to muster any money," said Rashid. "It weakens Zardari significantly that he couldn't even get financial support from friendly countries."
A share of the responsibility for Pakistan's financial plight rests with the US, which has provided over USD11 billion in military aid largely at the expense of development projects. This oversight has been compounded by the fact that military aid has not translated into success on the ground.
"I don't think [military aid money] was well spent," said Nawaz. "They were just covering costs, not upgrading [the army's] equipment or improving their capabilities. The US has been very niggardly in equipping Pakistan for the fight."
A serving officer complained to Jane's in early October that only around USD500 million had been spent on equipment, with soldiers in the field still lacking night-vision goggles and often using antiquated technology. "Too little of [the US aid money] has trickled down," agreed Ali. "We need to make Pakistan accountable for the money, but we also have to hold others, like the US, accountable. Night-vision goggles and basic equipment are more important than F-16s."
A bill sponsored by US senators Joe Biden and Richard Lugar and passed by the Senate in August should finally begin to address this, as the legislation earmarks USD1.5 billion annually for development projects in Pakistan for the next five years.
Without further international backing, though, Pakistan will struggle to remain afloat, never mind overcome the challenges that confront it.
"Pakistan doesn't have resources for economic activity in [the FATA]," argued the government source. "There are people waging this war [on behalf of the Taliban] who are just doing it for money: they are mercenaries because of the poverty and unemployment in those areas. If those people are given economic opportunities and employment, that's one way to address this."
Much of the burden must fall to Pakistan itself, however, and in particular the military and the government. In Crossed Swords, Nawaz observes that in Pakistan the government is the authority while the military is the power. The only way out of the mire will therefore be one that both institutions endorse.
"The crucial thing is for the military and the civilian administration to operate in some kind of partnership - and I just don't see that happening," said Rashid. "But neither can tackle this on their own. If its two main institutions can't work together, then the country runs the risk of failure."
Ali believes that the military is still too bruised by the Musharraf years to contemplate staging another coup any time soon, and that this gives Zardari a window of opportunity in which to convince the nation that the war is indeed in Pakistan's own best interests.
Nawaz insists that the government needs "to give the military a role and not leave it to the military to define one for itself" - a failing which has led to the contradictory strategies that have been pursued so far.
The government source takes the end of Musharraf's near nine-year rule as grounds for hope.
"I am optimistic because under a democratic government you have varied tools to address the issues," he says. The civilian administration, he insists, has an "elaborate plan" for developing the FATA and stabilising the country. But it all comes down to overseas support.
"This is where the West and other stakeholders should come forward to help and provide generous assistance," he said. "So far, there have been promises but what has come through is just plain military support."
Now is the time for the world to deliver on those promises of aid, he concludes. Otherwise, in the future, there might not be a Pakistan to help.
Trefor Moss is JDW Asia Pacific Editor, based in London
http://www.janes4.com
