NEIGHBOURHOOD WATCH Has Af-Pak strategy led to civil war in Pakistan?

It is a measure of the intensity of US pressure that the Pakistan army appears finally to have begun serious counter-insurgency operations in the tribal areas of Pakistan. This is part of the overall US Af-Pak strategy of containing the Taliban and related militancy to the Pashtun areas, which straddle the Afghan-Pakistan border. The US intent is to weaken the Taliban and allied militants to the point they can be contained, at least temporarily, by the Afghan and Pakistan militaries respectively, allowing the US to scale down its regional presence to one of minimal support for counter-insurgency and the conduct of the ongoing battle against al-Qaida. If this can ever be achieved, it will be called victory.
On the Afghan side, strategy-implementation is led by the US forces and nuanced by the linkages between the US, NATO and the estimated 500,000 foreign nationals working in civilian nation-building roles. On the Pakistan side the US is at one remove, seeking to implement strategy through the brute tool of the Pakistan army.
In the Rah-e-Haq 4 operations that are unfolding in the districts of Buner, Dir and Swat, and in similar operations that occurred earlier in Bajaur, it is possible to see the way in which the Pakistan army is seeking to subvert American intentions in the continued pursuit of its own interests. A useful point of departure to understand this is the Pakistan army’s operations in Bajaur, which began in September 2008 in the wake of the Islamabad Marriott bombing. Fearful of significant combat losses, and worried about the loyalty of its soldiers, the army used air strikes, helicopter gunships and artillery to pound militant positions and flatten towns and villages. When this phase of the conflict was over in late February 2009, the regional commander, Major General Tariq Khan, flew journalists to observe the piles of rubble that had once been the homes of the people of Bajaur. Khan claimed that the Taliban were defeated in Bajaur and that the whole of the FATA would be back in the hands of the Pakistan state by the end of 2009. Three months later, these claims are exposed as hubris. The Taliban are back in de facto control of most of what remains of Bajaur. To assert state control over the whole of the FATA in the next seven months now seems unlikely.
The unfolding operations bear hallmarks of the Bajaur operation. The use of air strikes, helicopter gunships and artillery again form the centrepiece and the price is being paid by the peoples of these districts. Most estimates suggest that more than two million people may be internally displaced from Pakistan’s tribal areas.
One element of the strategy, however, appears different. The Pakistan army has reportedly airlifted troops into the Peochar valley in order to surround the Pakistan Taliban Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammedi (TNSM) leadership of Maulvi Fazlullah. If confirmed, and if Fazlullah and his commanders are not spirited away, this will mark a stepchange in Pakistan army operations. It will also expose the myth of the army’s inability to move against militants. In theory, no force on earth could have better counterinsurgency credentials than the Pakistan army, which for decades has trained, supported and sometimes fought alongside militants. Nor can the Pakistan army’s claim to be under-resourced be seen as anything other than an appeal to Washington for more funding.
So, making sense of what is taking place in Pakistan’s tribal areas requires revisiting the fundamentals. There is, as yet, no move against the Afghan Taliban on the Pakistan side of the border, no increase in useable intelligence about the Afghan Taliban being provided to the US or NATO, and no reduction of pressure on NATO supply lines through Pakistan. There is also no move against the Haqqani or Hekmatyar networks, nor against the core of militants and terrorists in the FATA, particularly in North and South Waziristan. Bajaur was flattened and much of its population driven out, but Bajaur has not been held or brought under the writ of the Pakistan state.
Moreover, following Bajaur and earlier operations in the FATA, the army cannot have been unaware of the humanitarian refugee catastrophe, which would result from the failure to properly prepare for the deluge. Is it too cynical to suggest that the army has forced the refugee crisis knowing (as in Sri Lanka) that there will be an international clamour to end the fighting?
The huge unknown, hanging over all these events, is the likely scale and nature of the backlash against the Pakistani state. If, as some believe, a powerful ‘Deobandi complex’ is now taking shape in Pakistan involving militants, religious movements, religious and conservative political parties, Islamist sympathizers, and perhaps some within the army and ISI, then the ‘Af-Pak’ strategy may be seen to have precipitated the first phase of a civil war in Pakistan.
The writer is a professor at the
Pakistan Security Research Unit,
University of Bradford