North Waziristan : The Final Frontier
By Sherry Rehman
Karachi, Pakistan
There is an unoriginal saying in Pakistan that if you can’t defeat your enemy, befriend him. This is particularly true about the tribal areas that border Afghanistan, where in six agencies, the army is in the middle of an unprecedented military offensive against the assorted militants that franchise out of these badlands. Overturning a complex web of tactical alliances and cease-fire pacts in the Waziristans, Pakistan has gone in with conventional fire-power and the controversial overhang of US pilotless drones. The cornerstone of security policy here is to attack militants close to Al Qaeda, but spare armed syndicates that protect Pakistan’s flanks.
Turbulence on the terrorist radar in the border zone between Afghanistan and Pakistan has led to Washington putting out ill-advised strategic leaks about a possible military intervention within Pakistan’s borders. The heart of the problem is a contested view on what will alter the dynamics of declining US-NATO successes in the Afghan theatre. North Waziristan, and what the Pakistan army is able to do, there seems to have become the litmus test for relations between Islamabad and Washington. After the Faisal Shehzad bomb attack in Times Square, Washington’s pressure on Islamabad to act against the anti-US Taliban operating out of North Waziristan Agency has mounted to a new high. Islamabad pleads capacity constraints while the US cites commitment gaps.
The stakes are high all round. After the failure to build institutional structures in Afghanistan and to install governance or central authority, for Washington, the test of US-NATO ground offensives in the south and Loya Paktiya is now being linked to Pakistan’s push on the Haqqani-led groups from NWA. The Obama presidency needs a game-changer in a theatre where despite a COIN strategy that focuses on population safety, success eludes its best brains and muscle.
Despite a massive offensive in Marjah, the expected Taliban reversals have not held ground. In Washington’s view Pakistan is holding its punches for the Taliban it may need when the US exits Afghanistan, while pounding targets that challenge the writ of its own state. But for Pakistan this is an existential battle for its stability and survival.
The imperative to act against terrorist and sectarian groups in the Punjab, in Balochistan, and of course the Khyber-pakhtunkhwa are long overdue. After the massacre of nearly a hundred Ahmadis in Lahore last week at the hands of banned sectarian outfits, the compulsion to act against entrenched extremist groups is compelling. In the Punjab, the provincial government needs to go in with a police-run counter-terror sweep against militants embedded in the warrens of its cities. The federal government needs to back up this action with pro-minority legislation to show support for the targets of extremist offensives. None of these requires the military to act, but all such actions will see heightened terrorist attacks on civilians and military alike. This is something that government will have to drill and brace for.
The challenge in NWA is that Islamabad does not have the military or civilian capacity to open all fronts at the same time. Caught in the cross-hairs of a blighted strategic endgame, a growing terrorist threat, a tanking economy, and Indian posturing on the east, the military option for North Waziristan cannot be a hair-trigger decision. The terrain itself has sobered the ambitions of several empires, including the British, the Russian and now perhaps, even the American.
At the same time, despite impressive successes in other tribal agencies, the Pakistan Army faces a 50000 –strong critical mass of armed guerrilla combatants in NWA. They have learnt to avoid set-piece battles. After army operations in surrounding restive areas, a hardened assortment has sought sanctuary there.
From the TTP that attack Pakistan, to the Haqqani-groups that don’t, and the Punjab-jihadist outfits like Let and Lashkar-i- Jhangvi, Lashkar Zil, Al Qaeda veterans and Salafists, all the hard-core and the desperate are said to be holed out there. Islamabad’s fear is that if it shoves a mailed fist into this hornet’s nest, maintaining the fragile consensus against terrorism at home will be as difficult as protecting its cities from blowing up as sitting soft targets.
This will be no shock and awe exercise that can be switched off with a remote control device. Pakistan has already lost over 3000 people in two years as a result of backlash terrorist attacks and taken an economic hit of $35 billion. The second question is: will the US be around to even hold down the hammer to Pakistan’s fist when its army swoops down on this final frontier for targeted strikes at Al Qaeda strongholds like Mir Ali? The military’s tactical advantage, in any counterinsurgency initiative in mountainous terrain, is to pincer and that run through mountains higher than 8000 feet, are legendary for affording escape routes to Afghanistan, so without the obvious rush to block contiguous border conduits from NATO commanders in Afghanistan, the whole exercise will lead to enemy-dispersal in hospitable terrain. Given the asymmetry in border check-posts on both sides of the Durand Line, it is unlikely that any flush-out of the Waziristans is possible. If NWA is grand central for terrorists, then Afghan border provinces provide their strategic depth. For the whole terrorism endeavor to turn tide, it is actually the US-NATO that will have to pull weight on its own side. Pakistan too will have to step up border checks and review unwritten peace deals with tribal leaders that play too many sides.
The third key question is how long can the Pakistani Army stay bogged in the agencies it has actually secured? What capacity do we have for a civilian build, hold and transition component to the project? Once again, before pressuring Pakistan with escalating a war that the US itself cannot manage now in Afghanistan, huge governance commitments like ROZ assistance will have to roll off the US machine. Why expect Pakistan to do more than reverse the tide of the Taliban in some areas, when Washington has not been able to broker a new post-insurgency model for Afghanistan? Pakhtun alienation is not a concern for exiting nations, but it has huge potential for blowback in Pakistan, where Karachi is host to five million Pakhtuns, mostly undocumented in the formal sector.
What will help is a phase-by-phase plan for securing the area, holding it until the tribes that have been terrorized by the Taliban are able to return and do business. Secondly, while lessons are useful, Waziristan is not Malakand. The elites in the tribal areas have been marginalised by the Taliban for a much longer time, yet will resist governance models that diminish their pre-Taliban political powers. The military will have to stay in Waziristan until the police and FC in that area is strengthened by quantum proportions, the tribal leadership prepared for critical reforms and political activity by mainstream parties. FATA reform will only work if introduced incrementally, and the government’s recent announcements if implemented will be a very brave start. At the federal level, security sector reform is critical to this project, because peace deals with militants that promise not to attack government installations at one time almost always have turned against the hand that fed it. As a temporary tactical move that gives one flank relief doing an operation where defeat is not an option, there is some use to neutralizing militants to focus on the first-line enemy, but never in the long-run. Tribal lashkars too fall into that category. The state must start assuming charge of security.
The politics of a military operation are never easy. No military relishes fighting inside its own borders, and no civilian, elected government embraces the use of force as a first, or even second option. The government has put its full weight behind the operations, despite the costs that invariably accrue from such initiatives. As a result, Pakistan now has its own generation of lost people, human tragedies, economic crises, internal strife and political instability.
While the military presses an offensive in Orakzai agency, there will be little room to divert forces for anything more than strategic strikes on NWA areas where the terrorists cluster. Pakistan must dismantle Al Qaeda as well as the India-centric jihadist outfits as a priority. It also must allow Kabul to form its own stable government and hope for a friendly partner. But it will need Pakhtun reconcilables to maintain stability from Afghan border provinces after the expected US troop drawdown in 2011, and seeking more than surgical raids in NWA is asking too much. Pakistan must act decisively against terrorists, but on its own game-plan.
( Sherry Rehman is Member of the National Security Committee in Parliament, and former Federal Minister for Information of Pakistan)
