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India-Pakistan
Lions and Jackals
2009-07-16
Pakistan's Emerging Counterinsurgency Strategy
by Haider Ali Hussein Mullick

Two months ago, the Taliban were 60 miles from the capital of nuclear-armed Pakistan. Four weeks later, the Pakistani military, using helicopter gunships, fighter jets, and special forces, destroyed Taliban strongholds, pushing them north -- and nearly three million refugees south -- out of the Swat Valley. Behind the operation's success lies a new hybrid counterinsurgency strategy that is emerging in Pakistan -- the strengths and weaknesses of which will be crucial for both Islamabad and Washington over the long term.
The good news is that the Taliban, like al-Qaeda before it, is its own worst enemy -- the more successful they are, the more they unite the opposition to fight them. When the Talibs were just blowing up stuff in the frontier and in Afghanistan, the Pak elites didn't care. When they stole a march from Swat towards the capital, the Pak army found the gumption to fight them. Now the Talibs are on the run.
The new approach emerged from dissatisfaction with the Pakistani army's previous half-hearted struggles against the Taliban. Up through the summer of 2008, officers had been relying on the military's typical strategy of "out-terrorizing the terrorist," but the model was flawed. The army would do an excellent job of clearing Taliban-held areas but was reluctant to maintain a presence in them afterward. Generally, it preferred to pull back to its bases and outsource post-conflict security to inept local police and politicians. But resident forces were typically unable to provide security, and the government would often negotiate with the local Taliban, granting them asylum and allowing them to return.

This usually ignited a vicious cycle of blow up, patch up, and blow up. The worst part of the cyclical violence, according to a senior army official, was "the corrosion of troop morale," especially when officers were referred to as "America's mercenaries." Junior officers were suffering from battle fatigue, unwilling to continue fighting an unpopular war against their own people with no conclusive victory.
Posted by:Steve White

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