Hard choices in countering insurgency and terrorism along Pakistan's North-West frontier.

• Author: Weinbaum, Marvin G.
• Position: Report

Pakistan seems constantly to be struggling with multiple crises and tough choices. Relations with neighboring India are never far from a boiling point as Pakistan's government finds itself alternating between pursuing negotiations with its traditional nemesis and defending itself against charges by New Delhi of abetting terrorists. Endemic ethnic, regional and sectarian grievances threaten national cohesion and often force the Pakistani government to choose between accommodation and suppression. With an economy reeling from the sharp global downturn, Pakistan has had little alternative but to accept the hard terms imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other creditors for more disciplined economic policies. Pakistan's leaders are also faced with having to satisfy demands from the United States and international community that they crush the same domestic extremist groups that they, in turn, are anxious to retain because these groups have long served Pakistan's interest as proxy forces in Kashmir and Afghanistan.

But Pakistan's most difficult decisions during the last several years have involved militants operating in the country's tribal borderlands and districts of its North-West Frontier Province (NWFP). In countering the threat presented to the state by indigenous Taliban and their allies, the Islamabad government has wavered on whether to seek political conciliation or use force. The intensified military engagement that commenced against the region's Islamic extremists in May 2009 brought into focus the difficult counterinsurgency choices that Pakistan's civilian and military leadership have to make in deciding the kind of state and society they are prepared to promote and defend.

Such decisions would present a challenge to the strongest of governments but in recent years, Pakistan has had to confront its extremists with an unpopular military-dominated leadership followed by a civilian government lacking public confidence and respect. Pakistan's leadership has been selective in determining who are its enemies and allies and has fostered strong doubts about its sympathies and determination. It is clear, however, that the choices Pakistan makes in addressing the forces of militancy and extremism emanating from the northwest borderlands will strongly influence the chances for a stable, moderate democracy. These choices will also shape Pakistan's relations with regional neighbors and its international partners and benefactors. More directly, emerging policies in its frontier areas serve as a critical test of the strategic relationships between Pakistan and the United States in countering global terrorism and the insurgency in Afghanistan. Sustaining this partnership also confronts the United States with many hard choices of its own.

ROOTS OF INSURGENCY IN PAKISTAN

The Pakistani government has always had a tenuous grip on the country's tribal northwest, the part of its frontier with Afghanistan comprising seven tribal agencies. Inherited from British colonial rule over India, the Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA) remained loosely governed and underdeveloped. With the creation of Pakistan in 1947, the area continued to be subject to laws established by the British, and an administrative system dependent on maliks (local traditional leaders) and government agents typically employing bribes and threats. Little was done to integrate the tribal agencies into the mainstream of Pakistan's politics or society. Many residents of this economically depressed tribal belt migrated to Pakistan's largest city, Karachi, in Sindh, or went abroad in search of employment.

In recent decades, the tribal agencies and much of the NWFP have undergone a political transformation. New power relationships have supplanted traditional style leadership and older tribal norms have given way to radical influences. Pakistan's Pashtun borderlands, once absorbed with traditional intramural concerns and contestations among local tribes, have become less insular. The process of change began during the Afghan jihad in the 1980s when Pakistan's border became the breeding and launching ground for the Afghan mujahideen fighting the Soviet army and the communist regime in Kabul. The process continued with covert Pakistani military and political support for the Afghan Taliban who emerged in 1994. An infusion of money, guns and ideology gave status to politicized mullahs leading radicalized, uneducated and unemployed young men. The transition was accelerated by the arrival of thousands of Afghan Taliban, Arabs and Uzbeks who found sanctuary in Pakistan from the American military campaign in Afghanistan in 2001 and 2002.

By 2003, a loose alliance of tribally-affiliated and personally-linked militant extremist groups had begun to identify itself as the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP). These groups drew heavily from local grievances and, as Joshua White describes, were "woven deeply into the fabric of local and regional politics." (1) But they have also shared a determination to implement a strict Islamic agenda and oppose an international military presence in Afghanistan. The Pakistani Taliban soon formed networks linking them to their Afghan counterparts, leaders of Al Qaeda and many extremist groups throughout Pakistan.

The Taliban's growth as an insurgency in Pakistan strengthened beginning in 2004 when heavy pressure from Washington to cut off infiltration into Afghanistan led Pakistan's President Pervez Musharraf to order tens of thousands of troops into North and South Waziristan. Efforts by Pakistan's premier military security organization, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), to exercise control over this area destroyed much of their remaining traditional structures. Over the next several years, a TTP presence was felt in most of the remaining tribal agencies and then in adjoining districts of the NWFP in the so-called settled areas. Hundreds of tribal leaders fled or were killed by the militants. Initially, at least, the Musharraf government was ambivalent toward the new breed of leadership promoting the spread of adherence to Shariah law. Often they were to be preferred over those traditional leaders more inclined to enlist in a Pashtun nationalist cause that could threaten Pakistan's territorial integrity.

As a movement that intertwined political objectives and religious objectives, the Taliban drew the support of those local populations in the tribal agencies feeling deprived by the federal government of expected economic and infrastructure improvements. Local anger in districts of the NWFP was especially directed at the incompetence and corruption of police and provincial officials. Many residents held strong resentments toward predatory local landowners and moneylenders. An Islamic judicial system that promised to be more just and timely also attracted many locals toward the TTE Young men in both the tribal agencies and the NWFP, with little interest in or knowledge of the Taliban's ideology, could be lured into the TTP by money and increased stature among their peers.

STRATEGIES AGAINST INSURGENCY

Until May 2009, the Pakistani government was reluctant to view the Pakistani Taliban as a full-fledged insurgency within its borders posing a serious challenge to the state. While Islamabad had earlier acknowledged the militants' progress in creating parallel authority in the FATA, they viewed the Taliban as a threat to be contained, not defeated. Military actions against the Taliban were typically incomplete, inconclusive and, at times, appeared insincere. The absence of a sense of urgency and the frequently accommodating policies of the Pakistani government and military toward the militants naturally brought into question the will and capacity of the Pakistani leadership regarding the insurgency.

The Pakistani army's preferred approach to retaining influence across the tribal belt was by using tribal and personal rivalries to divide the Taliban. Attacks by the militants against government posts and the ambush of army units were met with sometimes punishing raids against militants but operations were usually short-lived and the larger military campaigns concluded with negotiated cease-fires. (2) These agreements usually ceded local control to the militants in exchange for promises to halt attacks on army personnel and installations and refrain from trying to spread their influence into more populated areas. But no means were provided to enforce deals, and the Pakistani government accepted at face-value pledges by militants that they would also curtail their assistance to the Afghan insurgency. Pakistan's approach to finding a political solution had...