“They are definitely reactive, not proactive,” a Western defence official has said of the Pakistani military, according to a report in the New York Times on Wednesday.The Pakistan Army still has a long way to go in training and adopting a new counter-insurgency doctrine, another Western military official told the newspaper. The militants and their Al Qaeda allies have taken advantage of the disarray to spread their attacks and influence on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. “The whole system of government is in jeopardy and the people are confused,” Mehmood Shah, a retired brigadier who served as secretary of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas until 2005, said of the region.
Government paralysed: “The government is absolutely paralysed,” he added. “It will take some time for them to turn the tables.” Today, by nearly all accounts, the government is caught in a double bind, adds the report.
Western officials, according to the newspaper, insist that if left alone, the militants and their Al Qaeda allies are more dangerous, because they can exploit the freedom of movement and the territory to train and plot more attacks in Pakistan, Afghanistan and even farther abroad.
The lack of focus and leadership in the government has left police, bureaucrats, tribal officials and the military reluctant to act, Shah said, even in the face of increasingly brazen assaults. Clashes are reported almost daily, he said, and the attacks are almost always initiated by the militants. They have increasingly expanded from their early aim of fighting US forces in Afghanistan to waging an insurgency inside Pakistan itself.