Taliban or Rawliban?
By Riaz Haq
CA
The Taliban have mounted major terrorist assaults in Kabul and Peshawar this week, claiming over a hundred innocent lives in just one day. The Kabul bombing targeted the UN because of the organization's role in organizing the country's presidential election on Nov. 7 -- a second-round runoff that insurgents have threatened to disrupt by killing election workers. The Peshawar attack targeted the Meena Bazar full of women shoppers, maximizing civilian casualties. As a result, the bulk of the loss of civilian lives occurred on the Pakistani side.
Significant differences in the organizations, objectives, strategies and tactics are beginning to emerge between the Afghan and the Pakistani Taliban with the intensification of violence on both sides of the border. The Afghan insurgents generally have shown greater concern about avoiding civilian casualties, according to a report in the Wall Street Journal. Unlike the Pakistani Taliban who deliberately target to maximize civilian deaths, the main targets of the Afghan Taliban have been the foreigners who they see as occupiers, not the ordinary Afghan civilians.
The long-running insurgencies on both sides of the border usually operate independently. Pakistani and Afghan Taliban leaders occasionally cooperate, but the differences in their objectives, strategies, tactics and targets point to the possibility of different sources of support and funding for the two organizations.
The Pakistani Taliban movement grew out of some of the Afghan Taliban that took refuge in Pakistani tribal areas on the border following the 2001 US-led invasion of Afghanistan.
Organizationally distinct from the Afghan group, Pakistani Taliban emerged in 2002 in response to the Pakistani Army's incursions into the tribal areas to hunt down militants. In 2008, Pakistani security forces clashed with pro-Taliban militants in the tribal area near Peshawar, jeopardizing peace talks between the militants and the government. With the recent dramatic rise in horrific suicide bombings in Pakistan this year, the Pakistani military has undertaken a major offensive in South Waziristan to flush out the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan militants and stop the daily carnage in Pakistani cities and towns. There is good organization, effective planning, working supply lines, significant funding, and the fierce resistance by the TTP greeting the Pakistani military onslaught in South Waziristan, raising strong suspicions of Indian Intelligence agency RAW's involvement with the Pakistani Taliban in the current crisis.
There are strong indications that the Indian security and intelligence establishment has finally launched the covert war in Pakistan that they have been planning for about a year. The Indian officials have been seething since last year because of their inability to "punish" Pakistan following the Mubmai terrorist attacks that they blamed on Pakistan. They shelved the idea of lightning air strikes strategy dubbed "Cold Start" against Pakistan for fear of sparking a major war. But they have continued to talk about covert actions by Indian agents to destabilize and balkanize Pakistan. Former RAW chief B. Raman has argued that India appoint a covert ops specialist as the new head of RAW. He said last December that “at this critical time in the nation’s history, RAW has no covert action specialists at the top of its pyramid. Get a suitable officer from the IB or the Army. If necessary, make him the head of the organization.”
Vikram Sood, another former top spy in India, has elaborated on India's covert warfare options to target Pakistan in the following words: "Covert action can be of various kinds. One is the paramilitary option, which is what the Pakistanis have been using against us. It is meant to hurt, destabilize or retaliate. The second is the psychological war option, which is a very potent and unseen force. It is an all weather option and constitutes essentially changing perceptions of friends and foes alike. The media is a favorite instrument, provided it is not left to the bureaucrats because then we will end up with some clumsy and implausible propaganda effort. More than the electronic and print media, it is now the Internet and YouTube that can be the next-generation weapons of psychological war. Terrorists use these liberally and so should those required to counter terrorism."
K.C. Verma, a former IB official and a RAW outsider, was appointed earlier this year as the new head of RAW. This choice appears to have been made at the suggestion of intelligence hawks like B. Raman to appoint an outsider, in spite of significant resistance from within the agency. Mr. Verma has been tasked with rapidly building strong covert ops capabilities within RAW. It is not a coincidence that the terrorist attacks in Pakistan have dramatically increased since Verma took the reins of RAW.
Indians have demonstrated that they have the strong motives and the means to hurt Pakistan. They have established a powerful presence in Afghanistan along the border with Pakistan and deployed significant resources to carry out a very violent covert war inside Pakistan, and they appear to have now found the opportunity among the willing allies in the Pakistani Taliban faction in Mehsud tribe.
Given the strong probability of Indian involvement in the current crisis, the Pakistani security and intelligence establishment cannot rely on counterinsurgency operations alone to stop the civilian carnage on Pakistani streets. The counter-insurgency operations must be supplemented with serious efforts to cut off support and funding for the TTP, and disrupt the Indian intelligence network operating out of Afghanistan. It will require superior intelligence and significant counter-intelligence operations, as well as an effective diplomatic offensive to put pressure on India to stop its covert war being waged on Pakistani soil.
