 By Hassan Abbas
The government of President General Pervez Musharraf faces policy failure in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan. Taliban forces and their sympathizers are becoming entrenched in the region and are aggressively expanding their influence and operations (especially in Tank, Dera Ismail Khan and Swat Valley in North-West Frontier Province - NWFP).
| There's a flurry of these articles in the international press in recent days: Fred has posted another one just today. As Fred says, this is a situation we at Rantburg have known about for quite a while, but the rest of the world is beginning to realize that Perv is all hat and no cattle. |
A lethal combination of Musharraf's political predicament and declining public support, a significant rise in suicide attacks targeting the army, and the reluctance of soldiers in the area to engage tribal gangs militarily, further exacerbates this impasse.
| The Pak army hasn't been willing to engage tribal gangs for since, oh, forever. The army hasn't been able to beat the Indians, it can't liberate Kashmir, it can't run an economy, and it can't make the trains run on time. It serves merely as a jobs center for Punjabi elites, and so it really hasn't done anything to merit public support. |
Observing this, many militants associated with local Pakistani jihadi groups have moved to FATA to help their "brothers in arms" and benefit from the sanctuary.
| The roaches generally seek refuge behind the baseboard. |
In the midst of this, election season is descending on Pakistan, with Musharraf seeking re-election on Saturday to be followed by parliamentary polls. This has consequences for Pakistan's policy in the FATA region as it will predictably revert to "peace deals" in the short term, leading to a lowering of the number of military checkpoints in the area.
If history is any indicator, this will help Talibanization in the region and provide more opportunities to the Inter-Services Intelligence to indirectly support some Taliban commanders sympathetic to Pakistan's objectives.
| And here the author gets it right: what this is, in the end, is how the ISI is going to continue to run the parts of Pakistan it can influence. The Talibunnies will be their major tool, and that combined with Punjabi tribal loyalty will let the ISI stir the pot. What it does in the end is destroy Pakistan as a nation, but that won't matter to the ISI. |
Overall, this will likely reduce trouble in downtown Islamabad, but the Pakistan-Afghanistan border area will remain on fire.
| What it means most of all is that Pakistan is well on the road to no longer being considered sovereign: it's going to be an association of killers, thugs and rustic tribes all competing for influence, land and bodies in the region, guided by an assortment of Taliban number threes and ISI career-climbers. That in turn is going to make it easier for President Guiliani, Romney, Clinton, Thompson or McCain to whack Pakistan hard in the next phase of the WoT. If the central government can't control the border regions, then it's no longer a sovereign and useful government. The Bush Doctrine will be expanded and extended in coming years because our next Presidents have no choice: it's either kill the terrorists in Pakiwakiland or wait for them to arrive in the U.S. We're not Britain and we're not France, so we'll not wait for the terrs to come to us. We'll view the Northwest Frontier and the FATA as a target-rich version of the Old Wild West, with the understanding that the Talibunnies can never be as honorable as the native Indians were. |
Poor coordination between the Pakistani army and the Western coalition in Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai's failure to make Afghanistan a functional state, and the abundance of drug money in southern Afghanistan are some of the important variables in this context. Additionally, Musharraf admits that the crisis in the area is increasingly turning out to be a Pashtun insurgency.
| It'll be the Pashtuns versus the Punjabis in the not-too-distant future. When the Balochis and Sinds join in to thump the Punjabis, Pakistan will at that moment cease to exist. |
However, the factors that "limit" Pakistan's effective clampdown on all things Taliban in FATA remain linked to its fear about increasing Indian influence in Afghanistan if the Taliban are comprehensively defeated, and the lack of Pakistani public support for anything that appears to be done in pursuance of the US-led global "war on terror". These perceptions significantly affect the morale of army commanders and soldiers operating in the region.
| It would be hard to blame the non-Pashtun tribes in Afghanistan from coming under Indian influence, wouldn't it? Unlike the Paks, the Indians appear to be reasonable, rational, technologically advanced, business oriented, and results motivated. In other words, the Indians have figured out how to make things work in the modern world while maintaining their own culture, and rational Afghanis will want to use India as a model as they try to build their own little part of the world. The 'Land of the Pure' will feel threatened and surrounded, of course, but then they always feel that way. |
Musharraf has largely failed to make a strong case to his people about the need for strong military action against the Taliban in FATA. He has often called this policy as being in the "national interest", but has not convincingly explained how the army alone defines the national interest.
| Indeed one of the current sticking points is how Perv is going to keep Army influence where it is today, since the Army has demonstrated itself to be adept at losing wars, territory and world influence, and not too good at making the country work. Pak citizens, if they would take a moment and consider it, would see that Perv is really no better than a Galtieri or a Stroessner. What Perv and the military have done has been to hold the country back in the same way the Argentine generals held their country back; meddling, preening, and spouting off while the country tanks and the people suffer. Countries like that take decades just to get back what they've lost while the rest of the world moves on. And just like general-thugs elsewhere, Perv and his cronies have to have enemies to keep everyone from ganging up on them. Perv and the ISI created the Taliban to extend their reach into Afghanistan, and the Taliban has come back to bite them. |
More so, Pakistanis have seen the military defining such interests too often in the past with devastating effects for the state, and interpret Pakistan's current fight against the Taliban in terms of succumbing to US demands and interests.
| We certainly have an interest in fighting the Taliban since we remember just who the Talibunnies sheltered. But if the Paks really think that this is a situation of America's lackeys versus the freedom fighters, they're invited to join the Taliban. Assuming we don't blow the place up at some point, they can regress to the 8th century while the hated Indians move smartly into the 21st. |
With this backdrop in view, this analysis outlines what is happening today in each of the seven tribal agencies in FATA and what the implications are for Pakistan, Afghanistan and the United States.
| What follows is a detailed analysis of each agency (region) within the FATA. Lots of inside baseball but worth reviewing if you want to know what's going on. |
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