After several days of crying that the end is near, the White House finally came up with a celebrity (swine flu) victim, a presidential aide who had traveled to Mexico with the president a fortnight ago and started coughing when he got home. He didn't actually get very sick; this flu so far is mild stuff and the aide is already back at work. There was no need to worry about the president himself; he has no symptoms. Besides, even if he dies he'll only be gone for three days.
I'll miss Wes when he, like we R-Burgers, is interred....
The answer to why Pakistan's mighty army seems impotent against Taliban insurgents is that it is more mafia than military
No institution dominates Pakistan like its army. The armed forces account for 20% of Pakistan's national budget, totalling $5bn last year according to official statistics. But the actual figure, already staggering for a country with high levels of illiteracy and malnutrition, is likely to be much higher. The army has been practically unaccountable since the very foundation of the country -- last year's figures were the first it has publicly released since 1965.
Those aren't the only imposing figures. It has some 650,000 active soldiers and another half million in reserve, and internal discipline -- strict loyalty to the high command among the rank and file -- is very high.
Every one of Pakistan's democratically-elected civilian leaders has been forced to abdicate by the army. A general has directly ruled the country for 34 of its 62 years of existence.
With this vice-like grip on power, many are wondering how a rural insurgency armed with basic weapons has managed to overrun so much of the country. The answers have much to do with the Pakistan army itself.
Part of the problem is that the army is equipped for a conventional war against its historical adversary to the east, India, and not the type of insurgency being waged by the Taliban on the frontier to the west. Its operations in the tribal areas have been imprecise, leading to the destruction of many thousands of civilian lives and livelihood. Up to a million are believed to have been displaced by the conflict.
"Collateral damage always strengthens the Taliban, it helps them get more public support," says Abdul Hakim (not his real name), a journalist from Dir, a tribal agency, next to the Swat valley, in which the Taliban are slowly moving.
But there have been only limited, poorly-coordinated attempts to re-engage with communities devastated by armed operations against the Taliban. As a result the Army and government authorities have sheepishly ended up signing peace deals with the Taliban over the past four years. They have all consistently broken down, the Taliban using the lull in hostilities to regroup and rearm.
The most recent peace deal, over the Swat valley, is on the verge of collapse owing to continued Taliban operations in neighbouring areas.
There are lingering doubts about the Army's resolve to combat the Taliban too, as has been suggested when it initially sent up a lightly armed squad of paramilitaries to fight the Taliban in the Buner valley, just below Swat, even though the region is close to the nation's capital.
Another factor is the fact that many of the army's soldiers involved in operations are Pashtun like the Taliban. This has left the high command nervous about tackling the insurgents head-on for fear of causing rifts within the ranks. Although far from a mutiny, many soldiers have refused to fight their fellow tribesman or have surrendered and deserted.
But that has not prevented the army from engaging in operations that have been highly destabilising for tribal Pashtun communities in the affected areas. People fleeing the conflict in Swat and Bajaur, a tribal agency to the west on the border with Afghanistna, told me they felt that the army was, in fact, targeting them and not the Taliban. Some argued this was because the army feared Taliban reprisals. Others insisted they were being targeted because of their support for the Pashtun nationalist Awami National party, which runs the North West Frontier province government.
The truth of rumours such as these, common in Pakistan, are difficult to quantify. But one need not look to rumours to understand why the Pakistan army has failed to defeat the Taliban.
The army has a long history of strategic incompetence stretching back to the very first war the country fought with India in 1948. On that occasion, tribal militants from the regions now in open insurrection against Pakistan flooded into Indian-controlled Kashmir. After overwhelming Indian soldiers there, they promptly went on a binge of rape and looting while the army looked on.
Actually there were no Indian soldiers in Kashmir. The Gilgit Scouts and their British officers rose up against the Maharajah and went over to Pakistan, the tribal raiders faced no opposition. However they were so busy looting, raping, abducting women (including Catholic nuns) that they reached Srinagar after Indian troops and were driven back. Nehru made the mistake of going to the UN instead of prosecuting the war, allowing Pakistan to retain a portion of Kashmir.
Again at war with India, in 1965, the better-equipped Pakistan army lost more ground, and tanks, than its adversary. But perhaps the army's darkest moment was the 1971 war that lead to the creation of Bangladesh. That conflict saw Pakistan troops involved in widespread acts of extermination against the indigenous Bengali population of what was, at the time, known as East Pakistan.
Yahya Khan said "Kill three million of them and the rest will eat out of our hands.". The Pakistani Army is exceptionally good at killing civilians. Not even the Nazi SS killed so many (up to three million estimated) in so short a time
The Hamoodur Rahman Commission held in Pakistan following that war found large swathes of the high command to be deeply negligent -- the commander of Pakistani forces in East Pakistan, the report revealed, was involved in sexual misconduct even as his troops were killing, and being killed, on the battlefield.
In 1999, an ambitious Pakistani general by the name of Pervez Musharraf devised the tactically brilliant, but strategically near-suicidal, plan to invade Kargil, an Indian mountain post in Kashmir. That gamble nearly led to nuclear war, and almost certainly led to a military coup later that year.
There was nothing tactically brilliant about Kargil. The Pakistanis took over some observation posts normally vacated in winter. By crossing the LOC they forced the Indian Army to act. The entire Pakistani Northern Light Infantry were wiped out.
How does one explain these failures? There can be no one explanation. But if there is an overriding message from these debacles, it is that the army is ill-equipped to defend the state because it has captured much of the bedrock of the state to which it is totally unaccountable.
According to Ayesha Siddiqua, in her seminal study, "Military Inc", the army's private business assets are worth around £10bn and it owns a handsome share of the country's business and land. The generals, as a result, appear to be more interested in leveraging control over businesses, properties and politics.
Yet, the army's power is such that although Pakistan's private media have a commendable record of criticising the country's civilian politicians, criticism of the men in uniform is rare -- save during periods of crisis under direct military rule, like the dismissal of the chief justice in 2007.
It would be unfair, however, to criticise the army without acknowledging the pivotal role played by its greatest patrons -- the United States, and, to a lesser extent, China. Since the 1950s, both countries have lavished military and political support on the Pakistan army.
"Nobody has occupied the White House who is friendlier to Pakistan than me," is what US President Richard Nixon told Pakistan's then military dictator, Yahya Khan, at a 1970 dinner in Washington, on the eve of the murderous war in East Pakistan. More recently, former President George Bush's praise for Pervez Musharraf has become the stuff of folklore.
The army has been rewarded by its foreign patrons despite its incompetence and unaccountability. In the process, civilian political life has been grotesquely stunted, leading the democratic process to be replaced by a crude kleptocracy where non-military leaders represent personal dynasties and not the people.
Is it any wonder, then, that the army struggles to find a concerted strategy for defeating the Taliban?
Posted by: john frum ||
05/03/2009 12:43 ||
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I could never, ever, figure out why the U.S. government favors Pakistan and gives its corrupted leaders money. I still can't. During the Cold War it might have made some sense but even then it did more to alienate the Indians than anything else and India, as the world's largest democracy, should be our primary concern. And then there's China. Did guys like Nixon fear that without U.S. aid the Paks would fall under the sway of the Chicoms? Dunno but it's a good bet the Paks wouldn't have nukes if it wasn't for the Chicoms and by helping the Paks we seem to be helping the Chicoms in their war against India. Then there's the excuse that we need the Paks to help us fight the Taliban. But without the Paks there would be no Taliban. Maybe if we just stopped giving them money they would all starve. What a puss pocket. What a curse.
Posted by: Abu Uluque ||
05/03/2009 15:28 Comments ||
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#2
logistics
Posted by: Frank G ||
05/03/2009 15:59 Comments ||
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Pakistan's military has lost every conventional war. It's far better at guerrilla wars.
Finally, we are told, the Pakistani military has gotten serious about the threat that militants pose to its country. The Army is now fighting back for real, sending troops to dislodge the jihadists who had spread out of the Swat Valley. We hear this from Pakistani commanders, of course, but also from civilian leaders as well as from U.S. officials, including the secretary of defense, Robert Gates. In an interview with me for CNN, Gates said, "I think the movement of the Taliban so close to Islamabad was a real wake-up call for them."
Maybe. It was only a few years ago that Husain Haqqani, a former Pakistani diplomat who recently became ambassador to Washington, wrote a brilliant book arguing that the Pakistani government--despite public and private claims to the contrary--continued "to make a distinction between 'terrorists' ... and 'freedom fighters' (the officially preferred label ... for Kashmiri militants)." He added: "The Musharraf government also remains tolerant of remnants of Afghanistan's Taliban regime, hoping to use them in resuscitating Pakistan's influence in Afghanistan." The Pakistani military's world view--that it is surrounded by dangers and needs to be active in destabilizing its neighbors-- remains central to Pakistan's basic strategy.
While President Musharraf broke with the overt and large-scale support that the military provides to the militant groups, and there have continued to be some moves against some jihadists, there is no evidence of a campaign to rid Pakistan of these groups. The leaders of the Afghan Taliban, headed up by Mullah Mohammed Omar, still work actively out of Quetta. The Army has never launched serious campaigns against the main Taliban-allied groups led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar or Jalaluddin Haqqani, both of whose networks are active in Pakistan. The group responsible for the Mumbai attacks, Lashkar-e-Taiba, has evaded any punishment, morphing in name and form but still operating in plain sight in Lahore. Even now, after allowing the Taliban to get within 60 miles of the capital, the Pakistani military has deployed only a few thousand troops to confront them, leaving the bulk of its million-man Army in the east, presumably in case India suddenly invades. And when the Army does attack the Taliban, as it did a couple of years ago in the same Swat Valley, it bombs, declares victory and withdraws--and the jihadists return.
The rise of Islamic militants in Pakistan is not, Ambassador Haqqani writes, "the inadvertent outcome of some governments." It is "rooted in history and [is] a consistent policy of the Pakistani state." The author describes how, from its early years, the Pakistani military developed "a strategic commitment to jihadi ideology." It used Islam to mobilize the country and Army in every conflict with India. A textbook case was the 1965 war, when Pakistan's state-controlled media "generated a frenzy of jihad," complete with stories of heroic suicide missions, martyrdom and divine help.
Pakistan was created as an Islamic state, with a population that shared little geographically, ethnically and linguistically. The country's rulers have maintained power using religion as an ideology. And then the region's geopolitics--the tensions with India and the battle against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan--helped create deep links between the Pakistani military and Islamic militant groups. The Pakistani military has lost the wars it has fought via traditional means. But running guerrilla operations--against the Soviets, the Indians and the Afghans--has proved an extremely cost-effective way to keep its neighbors off balance.
Has this all changed? The ambassador's book, "Pakistan: Between Mosque and Military," marshals strong evidence that, at least until recently, the Pakistani military made the pretense of arresting militants in order to get funds from Washington. But it never shut down the networks. "From the point of view of Pakistan's Islamists and their backers in the ISI [Pakistan's military intelligence]," Haqqani writes, "jihad is on hold but not yet over. Pakistan still has an unfinished agenda in Afghanistan and Kashmir."
The book concludes by telling how Pakistan's military has used the threat from these militant groups to maintain power, delegitimize the civilian government and--most crucial of all--keep aid flowing from the United States. And the book's author has now joined in this great game. Last week Ambassador Haqqani wrote an op-ed claiming that Pakistan was fighting these militant groups vigorously. The only problem, he explained, was that Washington was reluctant to provide the weapons, training and funds Pakistan needs. He has become a character out of the pages of his own book.
In truth, Haqqani is a smart and honorable man with an impossible job. In its first months, Pakistan's democratic government has been overruled by the generals every time it has asserted its authority. If Washington hopes to change Pakistan's world view, it will have to take a much tougher line with the military while supporting the country's civilian leaders, whose vision of Pakistan's national interests is broader and less paranoid, and envisions more cooperation with its neighbors. The $15 billion Biden-Lugar bill, designed to help develop Pakistan's civil society, is a big step in that direction.
Perhaps, as Haqqani's op-ed implies, the strategy of the past six decades has suddenly changed. But I recall what Warren Buffett once called the four most dangerous words in investing: "This time it's different."
Posted by: john frum ||
05/03/2009 00:00 ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
Pakistan's military has lost every conventional war. It's far better at guerrilla wars.
