Archive for the 'Pakistan' Category

Secretary Gates is again pressing Pakistan to see the Taliban and al Qaeda (one presumes he means here both the Pak-Taliban and Afghan-Taliban) as our common enemy.

RAWALPINDI, PAKISTAN — Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates made an unannounced trip here Thursday to urge Pakistan to expand its crackdown against the Taliban as well as to counter skepticism about the Obama administration’s new war strategy for Afghanistan.

But there is an increasing symbiosis between the Pak-Taliban, the Afghan-Taliban and al Qaeda, and launching strikes against one is like strikes against them all.  While Pakistan may see the Tehrik-i-Taliban as a potential enemy of the state, it still sees the Afghan-Taliban (the Quetta Shura) as its balance against India.

Myra MacDonald has an interesting article on “strategic depth” that warrants attention.  She begins by citing a Pakistani commentator, and then discusses her own personal perspective given her history in the region.  This is an extended read, but well worth the time.

Kamran Shafi has a column up at Dawn mocking Pakistan’s old strategy of seeking “strategic depth” – the idea that in the event of war with India its military would be able to operate from Afghanistan to offset its disadvantage as a small country compared to its much bigger neighbour:

“Let us presume that the Indians are foolish enough to get distracted from educating their people, some of whom go to some of the best centres of learning in the world. Let us assume that they are idiotic enough to opt for war instead of industrialising themselves and meeting their economic growth targets which are among the highest in the world. Let us imagine that they are cretinous enough to go to war with a nuclear-armed Pakistan and effectively put an immediate and complete end to their multi-million dollar tourism industry. Let us suppose that they lose all sense, all reason, and actually attack Pakistan and cut our country into half.

“Will our army pack its bags and escape into Afghanistan? How will it disengage itself from the fighting? What route will it use, through which mountain passes? Will the Peshawar Corps gun its tanks and troop carriers and trucks and towed artillery and head into the Khyber Pass, and on to Jalalabad? Will the Karachi and Quetta Corps do likewise through the Bolan and Khojak passes? And what happens to the Lahore and Sialkot and Multan and Gujranwala and Bahawalpur and other garrisons? What about the air force? Far more than anything else, what about the by now 180 million people of the country? What ‘strategic depth’ do our Rommels and Guderians talk about, please? What poppycock is this?

“More importantly, how can Afghanistan be our ‘strategic depth’ when most Afghans hate our guts, not only the northerners, but even those who call themselves Pakhtuns?”

Pakistan’s policy of seeking strategic depth in Afghanistan has been up for discussion since 9/11, when it was forced to abandon the Taliban regime it had backed to try to contain Indian influence there and give itself the space that it felt was so lacking on its eastern border. I have heard Pakistanis saying it was a stupid idea; others saying that even within the Pakistan Army there was a recognition that strategic depth nowadays was best achieved through building a strong domestic economy. Unlike 1971, when Pakistan was cut in two after Bangladesh, then East Pakistan, won independence with Indian military support,  the notion that it might be split in half by an Indian offensive pretty much became outdated when both countries announced they had tested nuclear weapons in 1998.

So is Shafi tilting at windmills? Attacking an idea that belonged to the last century?

Not entirely. Strategic depth has become ingrained in the narrative of relations between India, Pakistan and Afghanistan — so taken for granted that I remember being rather surprised myself when a subeditor, quite rightly, asked me to explain what it meant. It may no longer apply in the pure military sense of providing a space to which the army can fall back and where reserves and supplies can be stored, but as a theoretical and emotional concept it lingers.

Notice the idea of Pakistan being forced to abandon their support for the Afghan-Taliban after 9/11.  If we wish once again to force Pakistan to abandon their investment in the Taliban, half-way measures won’t do.  The AfPak theater of operations must be seen as the focal point of the battle against the transnational Islamic insurgency, and we must resource the campaign with this in mind.

Did Secretary Gates’ admonition accomplish its mission?  Not even nearly.

Pakistan’s army has said it will launch no new offensives on militants in 2010, as the US defence secretary arrived for talks on combating Taliban fighters.

Army spokesman Athar Abbas told the BBC the “overstretched” military had no plans for any fresh anti-militant operations over the next 12 months.

Our correspondent says the comments are a clear snub to Washington.

But it gets worse.  Pakistan is even worried that the buildup of U.S. troops in Afghanistan will send fleeing Taliban across the so-called border into their territory.  This is a fairly rudimentary issue to be so far and so many years into the campaign – this notion that the intent is for the Pakistanis to press the Taliban from their side while we press them from the Afghan side.

This all points to a Pakistan that still doesn’t see the Taliban as an existential threat, a Pakistan that can still use the Taliban as a balance to Indian power (however quaint the notion), and a Pakistan that simply wants to see it all go away – and believes that a cessation in military operations will accomplish this.

Prior:

Asking the question whether al Qaeda and the Taliban are in Pakistan or Afghanistan is like asking whether the water is on the right or the left side of a swimming pool.

The conversation on Pakistan versus Afghanistan presupposes that the Durand Line means anything, and that the Taliban and al Qaeda respect an imaginary boundary cut through the middle of the Hindu Kush.  It doesn’t and they don’t.  If our engagement of Pakistan is to mean anything, we must understand that they are taking their cue from us, and that our campaign is pressing the radicals from the Afghanistan side while their campaign is pressing them from the Pakistani side.

Advocating disengagement from Afghanistan is tantamount to suggesting that one front against the enemy would be better than two, and that one nation involved in the struggle would be better than two (assuming that Pakistan would keep up the fight in our total absence, an assumption for which I see no basis).  It’s tantamount to suggesting that it’s better to give the Taliban and al Qaeda safe haven in Afghanistan as Pakistan presses them from their side, or that it’s better to give them safe haven in Pakistan while we press them from our side.  Both suggestions are preposterous.

Our friend Michael Yon has penned a must read at the Small Wars Journal entitled Arghandab and the Battle for Kandahar.  Myra MacDonald of Reuters picks up on Michael’s assessment and makes a salient point.

… let’s assume for the purposes of argument that Pakistan does not drop its resistance to tackling Afghan militants in its border regions. (Pakistan argues it cannot tackle everyone at once and has its hands full fighting the Pakistani Taliban; its critics say it is hedging its bets ahead of any eventual U.S. withdrawal, when it might want to use groups like the Haqqani network and the Afghan Taliban to counter Indian influence in Afghanistan.)

At that point, a major U.S. military success in Afghanistan could be the only way to break the stalemate. An in that light, Yon’s focus on the Arghandab River Valley becomes essential reading.

We’ll return to Myra’s point momentarily.  Michael performs far-reaching analysis, from use of the Russian experience in Afghanistan (The Bear Went Over the Mountain) to the revised tactical directive issued by General McChrystal (ROE).  Michael doesn’t weigh in himself on the ROE.  He does honestly point out that the ROE will cause additional casualties.  Petraeus also confesses that Afghanistan will get bloodier than it is now.  It will so for more reasons than simply adding more troops (or better said, it could be less bloody than it is going to be).

The question is not whether there is ROE.  Michael points out that the Russian ROE turned the population completely against them because they essentially had no ROE.  We do, we did, and we will in the future.  The question is more nuanced than that.  I am aware from a number of sources the nature of combat and other operations in Fallujah in 2007 (and at other points in the campaign for Anbar), and the ROE were more robust than currently in place in Afghanistan; or in other words, McChrystal’s tactical directive is more restrictive than the ROE in effect while the Anbar Province was being won by the U.S. Marine Corps.  In order to believe that the revised tactical directive is beneficial to the campaign one must believe that the ensuing casualties for which it is at least a contributing cause will be less in the long run than if a more robust ROE were in place with its accompanying increased force protection.  We’ll see.  Troop morale and public opinion mean everything to the campaign.

Michael continues by pointing out that the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan is fictitious.  Taliban cross with impunity through this imaginary border, and the coming battle will be for Afghanistan’s South.

In Helmand, the fight is serious, and friendly troops are spread far too thinly. Some experts believe that focusing on Helmand before securing Kandahar was a strategic error. Most districts in Kandahar are said to be under Taliban control or heavy influence. Some areas of the south are under complete, uncontested Taliban control …

The Taliban want Kandahar and are in a good position to get it. The year 2010 likely will mark a true Battle for Kandahar, though it probably will not be punctuated by the sort of pitched battles we saw in places like Mosul and Baghdad. This remains unknown.

Armies from at least three countries have ventured into the Arghandab River Valley: British, followed by Soviets, and more recently Canadians; all were unsuccessful.

Michael compares and contrasts the Russian campaign with the coming U.S. and ISAF operations, and then rehearses a bit of recent history for us.

The enemy is not defeated, but our people were now operating among them. U.S. casualties continued during the next three months but there are indications that the enemy is today in disarray. The enemy became afraid to sleep indoors where they might be killed by an airstrike—or by U.S. soldiers, who have a tendency to burst in during periods of maximum REM sleep. The Taliban were terrorized and began sleeping in the orchards at night, rigging homes with explosives, which they arm at night. (I’ve heard similar reports from Pakistan. Pakistanis have said that drone strikes are demoralizing and terrorizing the Taliban, and though drone strikes are controversial, some Pakistanis want to see the strikes increased.)

And so we have a dilemma even in Michael’s account.  These episodes of bursting in by U.S. Soldiers came to an end with McChrystal’s tactical directive, and the drone strikes into Pakistan which have so disheartened the Taliban don’t have an analogy with the ROE in use by Soldiers and Marines in Helmand and elsewhere in Afghanistan.

But Michael points out that fresh troops are indeed on the way, and that’s good.  More force projection is needed.  But I have titled this the battle for Kandahar and Helmand because the fight cannot be disentangled from Helmand any more than it can be from Pakistan.  Population centric COIN doctrine has driven us to Kandahar, but leaving Helmand alone is not an acceptable solution given that the Taliban train there, raise their support there, and take refuge in its scattered towns.

The Marines left the operations in Now Zad improperly resourced and thus the Taliban fighters garrisoned there escaped.  Marja is next, and the Marines’ claim is that “We won’t leave anywhere else uncovered. We won’t go anywhere we can’t clear, we won’t clear anywhere we can’t stay and we won’t stay anywhere we can’t build.”  Helmand and Kandahar may be seen as coupled, with operations in one place affecting operations in the other.

True enough, Pakistani Army operations on the imaginary side of the border mean something.  Back to Ms. MacDonald’s point, I have previously said that:

The conversation on Pakistan versus Afghanistan presupposes that the Durand Line means anything, and that the Taliban and al Qaeda respect an imaginary boundary cut through the middle of the Hindu Kush.  It doesn’t and they don’t.  If our engagement of Pakistan is to mean anything, we must understand that they are taking their cue from us, and that our campaign is pressing the radicals from the Afghanistan side while their campaign is pressing them from the Pakistani side.

Advocating disengagement from Afghanistan is tantamount to suggesting that one front against the enemy would be better than two, and that one nation involved in the struggle would be better than two (assuming that Pakistan would keep up the fight in our total absence, an assumption for which I see no basis).  It’s tantamount to suggesting that it’s better to give the Taliban and al Qaeda safe haven in Afghanistan as Pakistan presses them from their side, or that it’s better to give them safe haven in Pakistan while we press them from our side.  Both suggestions are preposterous.

That there is an indigenous insurgency (the so-called ten dollar Taliban) that bootstraps to the real religiously motivated fighters is irrelevant.  We had to fight our way through this group in Iraq too, and it is the nature of these insurgencies.  Complaining about it is acceptable – but using it as an excuse to abandon the campaign is not.  That every contact isn’t with Arabic or Chechen or Uzbek jihadists is irrelevant.  That doesn’t mean that Afghanistan is not a central front in the transnational insurgency called Islamic Jihad.  The Taliban are important inasmuch as they gave and would continue to give safe haven to globalists.

For this reason the campaign in Afghanistan must be successful.  Pakistan will take their cue from us and follow our lead.

As we discussed in Pakistan Crumbles, the Pakistan Taliban have melted away into the mountains of the Hindu Kush in the face of the Pakistani military offensive against them.  More detail:

… there are those in the diplomatic circles of Islamabad who say the Pakistani military leadership would soon realize that the troops in South Waziristan are actually chasing shadows because the TTP militants have simply melted into the vastness of the inhospitable surrounding territory. It appears that the militants in Waziristan, headed by the Pakistani Taliban – the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan – are bent on a long-term insurgency against the security apparatus. Although tough resistance was expected from up to 10,000 well-trained Taliban guerrilla fighters from the mainly ethnic Pashtun Mehsud tribe of South Waziristan, the military operation has been relatively proved easy so far, to the surprise of many. Fighting small rearguard actions, the Taliban deserted their bunkers and posts in the major towns, leaving space for the troops to occupy. An intelligence official overseeing the spying operations in Waziristan has been recently quoted as saying that many groups of Taliban were spotted moving to Shawal, a remote and inaccessible area near the Afghan border. Dense forests and ravines make the Shwal valley in North Waziristan a perfect terrain for a lethal guerrilla war. “Our troops will not enter the area, at least for now. It is a very difficult area”, the intelligence official was further quoted as saying.

Other Taliban fighters have slipped away into at least four other tribal districts – Orakzai, Mohmand, Bajaur and Kurram – where the TTP controls large swaths of territory. “The militants started to shift their kin and cattle, and ammunition to other tribal districts after the government announced an operation in South Waziristan in May”, said the intelligence official on condition of anonymity. However, according to Javed Hussain, the former commander of Pakistan’s elite commando force – Special Services Group (SSG), the force involved in the offensive is too small to block the secondary routes and traditional smuggling channels used by the Taliban to flee. The troops have so far focused on securing the main town along the three main roads and the bases lost to the Taliban in previous encounters during their three-pronged operation, he added. And the Pakistani government maintains that forcing the Taliban militants to flee has been a success, pointing out the rebels have lost dozens of training facilities, including one to groom suicide bombers. But intensified suicide bombings and raids on civilian and sensitive military installations across the country in recent weeks definitely tell a different story. Security experts in Islamabad are of the view that the Taliban militants’ ability to hit at will has not been minimized – over 300 people killed in such attacks in October 2009 bear testimony to this.

Azam Tariq, a Taliban spokesman, has already vowed to orchestrate a long guerrilla war by early next year, after an end to the snowfall that blocks the important passes, making the movement across the mountainous South Waziristan region of around 6,620 square kilometers very difficult. Analysts, therefore, warn that the Taliban strategy could have dangerous consequences for the Pakistani forces as the militants might regroup and return to South Waziristan with more force and make the troops continually bleed with deadly ambushes, raids and roadside bombings. The Taliban circles say the TTP militants are applying the same strategy which they were trained to use by the Pakistani security forces against the Indian army in Jammu & Kashmir during the 1990s. That included a pattern of not confronting a regular army once it was mobilized; rather, the militants dodged it and opened a new front far from the point of the army’s concentration. And much the same has happened in Pakistan over the past month, with a string of deadly suicide bomb attacks in various parts of the country, including in Peshawar, the capital of North-West Frontier Province (NWFP).

The Shawal area is a historical staging point for attacks into Afghanistan, and is considered to be a no-man’s landdue to the terrain and inhospitable conditions.

Under-resourcing the campaign, failing to cut off escape routs, failing to engage in the chase, ceding the rural terrain to the enemy, and under-estimating the longevity of the fight.  These are all errors in judgment made by U.S. strategists too.

Yet another bungled attempt to defeat the insurgents … yet another opportunity crashes and burns.  So much for the Pakistani military offensive in Waziristan.  As a concluding thought, Shawal is just South of Parachinar where it is theorized that UBL resides.

The enemy doesn’t feel threatened in this region, a place right on the Afghanistan – Pakistan border.  Does it make any sense to continue to ask the question why we are in Afghanistan?

Pakistan’s military offensive against the Taliban in Swat has not produced the desired effect, as commander Maulana Fazlullah and many of his fighters have escaped the region (Fazlullah is in Afghanistan).  Much the same thing is happening with the Taliban in Waziristan as a result of the Pakistani offensive there.

On Tuesday, the military escorted journalists on a tour of the area, where it closely restricts access, showing piles of things they had seized, including weapons, bombs, photos and even a long, curly wig. “It all started from here,” said Brig. Muhammed Shafiq, the commander here. “This is the most important town in South Waziristan.”

But lasting success has been elusive, tempered by an agile enemy that has moved easily from one part of the tribal areas to the next — and even deeper into Pakistan — virtually every time it has been challenged.

American analysts expressed surprise at the relatively light fighting and light Pakistani Army casualties — seven soldiers in five days in Sararogha — supporting their suspicions that the Taliban fighters from the local Mehsud tribe and the foreign fighters who are their allies, including a large contingent of Uzbeks, have headed north or deeper into the mountains. In comparison, 51 Americans were killed in eight days of fighting in Falluja, Iraq, in 2004.

“That’s what bothers me,” an American intelligence officer said. “Where are they?”

The Pakistani military says it has learned from past failures in a region where it lost hundreds in fighting before. It spent weeks bombing the area before its 30,000 troops entered. It struck alliances with neighboring tribes.

But the pending campaign was no secret, allowing time for local people and militants to escape, similar to what happens during American operations in Afghanistan.

“They are fleeing in all directions,” said a senior Pakistani security official, who did not want to be identified while discussing national security issues. “The Uzbeks are fleeing to Afghanistan and the north, and the Mehsuds are fleeing to any possible place they can think of.”

Rather than fight the Pakistan military in a conventional operation, the Pakistan Taliban have declared a guerrilla operation against them.  The proliferation of bombs and terrorist attacks against Pakistanis and their own infrastructure, combined with an almost pathological preoccupation with India and a host of other conspiracy theories, almost surely contributes to the troubling (and pathetically amusing if not so serious) results of a recent poll of Pakistanis.

A majority of Pakistanis see the United States as a greater threat to their country than traditional arch-rival India or the dreaded Taliban, a new opinion poll has revealed.

According to Gallup Pakistan’s poll, 59% of more than 2,700 people surveyed across the country consider the US a threat. “Eighteen percent believe India is the threat while 11% say the Taliban are a threat,” said Gallup Pakistan chairman Ijaz Shafi Gillani. He said the survey findings show that some of the most vocal anti-Taliban groups were equally opposed to the US. Some Pakistanis believe that if the US is committed to eradicating militancy, it should try to solve the Kashmir issue to help Islamabad move its troops from the eastern border with India to fight the Taliban in the northwest.

The poll group said Pakistanis were suspicious that Washington was working to control Islamabad’s strategic assets. “Earlier, anti-Americanism was confined to supporters of right-wing groups. But over the years, young, educated Pakistanis, left activists, people you’d normally expect to be pro-American modernists have turned against America,” said columnist Sohail Qalandar.

The trouble doesn’t stop there.  There are serious internal political challenges soon to be faced within Pakistan and its Army.

Pakistan’s civilian and military leaders are tangling in a series of political confrontations that could lead to a constitutional crisis or worse after the New Year, officials in both Islamabad and Washington tell NBC News.

With the tenor and volume of debate rising over America’s commitment to Afghanistan, that struggle is complicating U.S. strategy to stabilize the Afghanistan-Pakistan border.

It’s not only that dozens are dying every week in suicide bombings or that there are concerns that the Pakistani military will not be able to hold the territory it has won in hard-fought battles in South Waziristan. The more profound issue, say Pakistani and U.S. officials, is the fate of President Asif Ali Zardari, who is engaged in a seemingly never-ending battles with the country’s powerful military and intelligence establishments.

On Nov. 2, legislators opposed to Zardari, along with the military and intelligence community, thwarted an attempt by his Pakistani People’s Party to hammer through an extension of the National Reconciliation Ordinance.

The innocuously named law, pushed through at the behest of the U.S. in 2007, froze criminal prosecutions against Zardari, his late wife, Benazir Bhutto, and their allies … on Nov. 2, other parties in the PPP-led coalition, along with the parliamentary opposition and the military, thwarted Zardari. Analysts in Pakistan and the U.S. say there is no chance the NRO will be renewed by the deadline, and in fact, Prime Minister Yusef Reza Gilani said this week it’s dead.

One potential issue is whether Zardari has presidential immunity for any crimes committed before he was elected. He may have it for his time in office, but it’s uncertain that he does for any crimes alleged before he assumed office … U.S. officials are said to be alarmed by the development.

The Army figures significantly in this power struggle, in that the campaign against the Taliban will recede in importance and a refocus on India will occur if a power shift occurs.  Zardari has driven the campaign against the Taliban, and without him the Army likely won’t continue the operations – at least, not to the same extent.

At the same time that Pakistan is undergoing internal turmoil, the salient American question is why we are focused on Afghanistan when the danger is in Pakistan.  Strange question indeed, when pressure from either side of the imaginary thing called the Durand line causes the Taliban to flee to the opposite side.  Even raising the question about Afghanistan is tantamount to telling Pakistan, already crumbling, that their best military efforts against the Taliban will be met with nothing on the Afghan side when the Taliban relocate.

With Pakistan in deep trouble, we are telling them that they are the key to defeating the globalists and in the same breath that we intend to abandon them to that very enemy.  Pakistan is crumbling within and harbors neurotic conspiracy theories about the threat America poses, while America is planning to place even more pressure on them to perform because we are searching for an exit strategy from Afghanistan.  These are not good days for Pakistan.

From Dawn:

PESHAWAR: Maulana Fazlullah, one of the most wanted Taliban leaders, has told the BBC that he has escaped to Afghanistan and is planning new attacks on Pakistani forces.

Fazlullah was said by officials to have been wounded or killed in July, during the operation in Swat.

‘I have reached Afghanistan safely,’ he told BBC Urdu. ‘We are soon going to launch full-fledged punitive raids against the army in Swat.’

The BBC reporter in Peshawar who spoke to the Taliban leader said the voice was recognisably Fazlullah’s — he has a very distinct way of pronouncing words. ‘I have spoken to him on several occasions and met him twice.’

Fazlullah was calling from an Afghan number and sounded in good spirits when he called on Monday.

He issued a warning to the North-West Frontier Province’s Information Minister Mian Iftikhar Hussain and said his fate would be like that of Najibullah, the Afghan president who was captured and hanged by Taliban in 1996.

Recall that when examining the issue of focus on Afghanistan versus Pakistan I observed:

The conversation on Pakistan versus Afghanistan presupposes that the Durand Line means anything, and that the Taliban and al Qaeda respect an imaginary boundary cut through the middle of the Hindu Kush.  It doesn’t and they don’t.  If our engagement of Pakistan is to mean anything, we must understand that they are taking their cue from us, and that our campaign is pressing the radicals from the Afghanistan side while their campaign is pressing them from the Pakistani side.

Advocating disengagement from Afghanistan is tantamount to suggesting that one front against the enemy would be better than two, and that one nation involved in the struggle would be better than two (assuming that Pakistan would keep up the fight in our total absence, an assumption for which I see no basis).  It’s tantamount to suggesting that it’s better to give the Taliban and al Qaeda safe haven in Afghanistan as Pakistan presses them from their side, or that it’s better to give them safe haven in Pakistan while we press them from our side.  Both suggestions are preposterous.

This isn’t about nation-states and imaginary boundaries.  When we think this way we do err in that we superimpose a Western model on a region of the world where it doesn’t apply.  This is about a transnational insurgency, and it’s never better to give the enemy more land, more latitude, more space, more people, more money, and more safety.  Any arguments to this effect are mistaken at a very fundamental level.

It’s an inconvenient truth, that the demarcation of countries doesn’t mean anything to the extremists.  The objection (to the campaign for Afghanistan) that we should focus on Pakistan where the hard line Taliban and AQ are located is a canard, and the escape of Fazlullah demonstrates it all over again.  The best way to pressure  the extremists is to do it from the Afghan side, avoiding the messy interference in a sovereign nation (Pakistan) while also ensuring them that we are serious about our commitment.

Briefly revisiting Matthew Hoh’s arguments against involvement in Afghanistan, he (perhaps unwittingly) parrots the talking points of the political left.

I find specious the reasons we ask for bloodshed and sacrifice from our young men and women in Afghanistan.  If honest, our stated strategy of securing Afghanistan to prevent al-Qaeda resurgence or regrouping would require us to additionally invade and occupy Western Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, etc.  Our presence in Afghanistan has only increased destabilization and insurgency in Pakistan where we rightly fear a toppled or weakened Pakistani government may lose control of its nuclear weapons.  However, again, to follow the logic of our stated goals we should garrison Pakistan, not Afghanistan.

There are so many errors in judgment and contradictions in this brief diatribe that it’s difficult to know where to begin.  There is another version in the same family of objections to counterinsurgency in the tribal areas of Afghanistan, this flavor being best described by Tim Lynch when he states of COP Keating at Kamdesh:

This is a perfect example of the attrition warfare mindset which is ingrained in most of our military officers.  Owning the field of battle post fight is a measurement of success in conventional military operations. It is irrelevant in the context of a counterinsurgency.  The only relative measurement of success is how much of the population is on your side.  In the battle for FOB Keating the population was never on our side – they were apparently the ones who attacked us – so why were we even there in the first place? I don’t know the answer but will bet a months pay that we are soon out of Nuristan Province.  As I have said many times before the instability in Nuristan is financed by gem smuggling syndicates which is an Afghan problem.  We have no solutions to offer the Nuristani people except to leave them alone which is all they want anyway.

Well, not exactly.  The COP was there to interdict the flow of fighters from Pakistan into Afghanistan, and Tim should be interested in doing that since he believes that al Qaeda is safely garrisoned in Pakistan and will never be allowed in Afghanistan again (to be fair, Tim is not allied with Hoh in his advocacy of complete disengagement from Afghanistan, but the arguments are similar enough that they must be addressed together).

But do you see the contradictions here?  On the one hand, the real al Qaeda / foreign fighter problem is in Pakistan (or so it is alleged), and our focus should be there rather than Afghanistan.  On the other hand, when it comes to being deployed in Afghanistan (including along the Pakistani border), the question arises “why are we in Afghanistan to begin with?”

The conversation on Pakistan versus Afghanistan presupposes that the Durand Line means anything, and that the Taliban and al Qaeda respect an imaginary boundary cut through the middle of the Hindu Kush.  It doesn’t and they don’t.  If our engagement of Pakistan is to mean anything, we must understand that they are taking their cue from us, and that our campaign is pressing the radicals from the Afghanistan side while their campaign is pressing them from the Pakistani side.

Advocating disengagement from Afghanistan is tantamount to suggesting that one front against the enemy would be better than two, and that one nation involved in the struggle would be better than two (assuming that Pakistan would keep up the fight in our total absence, an assumption for which I see no basis).  It’s tantamount to suggesting that it’s better to give the Taliban and al Qaeda safe haven in Afghanistan as Pakistan presses them from their side, or that it’s better to give them safe haven in Pakistan while we press them from our side.  Both suggestions are preposterous.

This isn’t about nation-states and imaginary boundaries.  When we think this way we do err in that we superimpose a Western model on a region of the world where it doesn’t apply.  This is about a transnational insurgency, and it’s never better to give the enemy more land, more latitude, more space, more people, more money, and more safety.  Any arguments to this effect are mistaken at a very fundamental level.

In Connection Between the Taliban and al Qaeda we discussed the first hand account by David Rohdes of the New York Times after he was kidnapped by the Afghan Taliban, transported to Pakistan, spent time among both Afghan and Pakistan Taliban, and then finally escaped some seven months later.  His experience, coupled with data we had previously cataloged and analyzed, is convincing and compelling evidence of the hardened and more extremist theological alignment of the Taliban, and thus of their alignment with transnational insurgents and global actors such as al Qaeda.

Over those months, I came to a simple realization. After seven years of reporting in the region, I did not fully understand how extreme many of the Taliban had become. Before the kidnapping, I viewed the organization as a form of “Al Qaeda lite,” a religiously motivated movement primarily focused on controlling Afghanistan.

Living side by side with the Haqqanis’ followers, I learned that the goal of the hard-line Taliban was far more ambitious. Contact with foreign militants in the tribal areas appeared to have deeply affected many young Taliban fighters. They wanted to create a fundamentalist Islamic emirate with Al Qaeda that spanned the Muslim world.

But questions remain.  There are some (not identified in this article) that have weighed in saying that Rohdes is merely offering perspective or speculation, not facts.  There are others who have gone on record with analyses (parsing the Taliban into many different factions) that seems at the outset to cast doubt on Rohdes’ observations, at least, in a normative sense.  Myra MacDonald, for instance, outlines the main insurgent groups in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and weighs in questioning whether some of them share the global aspirations as al Qaeda.  In this same analysis she links Vahid Brown writing for Jihadica who even questions whether the Taliban and al Qaeda may be diametrically opposed.

Mullah Omar’s Afghan Taliban and al-Qa’ida’s senior leaders have been issuing some very mixed messages of late, and the online jihadi community is in an uproar, with some calling these developments “the beginning of the end of relations” between the two movements.  Beginning with a statement from Mullah Omar in September, the Afghan Taliban’s Quetta-based leadership has been emphasizing the “nationalist” character of their movement, and has sent several communications to Afghanistan’s neighbors expressing an intent to establish positive international relations.  In what are increasingly being viewed by the forums as direct rejoinders to these sentiments, recent messages from al-Qa’ida have pointedly rejected the “national” model of revolutionary Islamism and reiterated calls for jihad against Afghanistan’s neighbors, especially Pakistan and China.  However interpreted, these conflicting signals raise serious questions about the notion of an al-Qa’ida-Taliban merger.

We covered the al Qaeda rejection of the nationalistic model for jihad in The Globalization of Jihad in Palestine, and there is no question that the infighting between insurgent groups can become deadly.  It’s this supposed rift between factions of the insurgency that the U.S. administration wants to exploit.

… the Obama administration has indicated that it intends to make a fresh attempt to engage more moderate Taliban groups in talks with the Afghan government – in a determined effort to woo at least some of them away from the fighting that is claiming increasing numbers of American and other Nato forces’ lives.

Mullah Mutawakkil, once a confidant of the one-eyed Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammed Omar, was held at a US base in Kandahar in 2002 after he gave himself up to American troops.

Now he is being politely wooed by a stream of senior US officials who make discreet visits to his villa, which is guarded by armed police, to hear his thoughts on what the Taliban mood is like and whether any of its leaders are ready for talks.

A soft-spoken and intelligent man who was one of the Taliban regime’s youngest ministers, Mullah Mutawakkil is cautious about what can be achieved, but even so his thinking is music to tired Western ears.

He believes that the Taliban would split from what he called their al-Qaeda “war allies” if a deal was within reach. Speaking to The Sunday Telegraph in the guest room of his Kabul home, he insisted that a settlement to end the war was possible – and that it would be the West’s best chance of stopping terrorists from turning Afghanistan back into their base again.

“If the Taliban fight on and finally became Afghanistan’s government with the help of al-Qaeda, it would then be very difficult to separate them,” he warned.

But there is, he says, another option. Taliban leaders are looking for guarantees of their personal safety from the US, and a removal of the “bounties” placed on the head of their top commanders. They also want a programme for the release of prisoners held at the notorious Bagram US air base in Afghanistan, and at Guantanamo Bay.

In return, he says, the Taliban would promise not to allow Afghanistan to be used to plan attacks on America – the original reason for American invervention (sic), and the overriding aim of US policy in the region.

A Morton’s Fork to be sure.  Settle with Taliban who might bring back al Qaeda safe haven, or send more troops in what may prove to be an increasingly unpopular war.  But perhaps not.  Perhaps the choice is clearer.  Commenter Amm Sam at Jihadica offers a clear and unvarnished view of the debates between the globalists and the nationalists.

The Taliban’s statements of late have to be understood in the context of the US debate on what strategy to pursue in Afghanistan. Mullah Omar is trying to influence the debate by signaling to the Obama Administration that they aren’t a threat – but should we take Mullah Omar’s word for it? Of course not. If you look at the discourse of the Taliban, from spokesmen and commanders to the footsoldiers quoted in David Rhodes’ excellent 5-part NYT series, you see that the Taliban as a semi-coherent movement has drifted into the global jihadist perspective over the last several years. They are still primarily focused on the region, but less so now than ever.

Only now do we see this shift from Omar in the heat of Washington deliberations on Afghanistan.

In fact, the Haqqani group, the Taliban who held foreign al Qaeda fighters in such high esteem in the Rohdes account with the New York Times, is operationally allied with Mullah Omar who is said to be ready to jettison al Qaeda’s presence after a return to power.

Most violence in the province has been linked to the Haqqani network, which operates out of havens on both sides of the porous Afghanistan-Pakistan border and has taken responsibility for dozens of attacks around Afghanistan.

The group was founded by Jalaluddin Haqqani, who made his name as a leader of the Islamist uprising against the Soviet occupation in the 1980s. More recently, the militants introduced the use of suicide bombings to Afghanistan.

Sirajuddin Haqqani, Jalaluddin’s son, said his fighters didn’t want to capture heavily populated areas because the operations would likely result in significant casualties among insurgents and civilians. Still, he made clear his group had no intention of abandoning its focus on Khost. “Every now and then we want to carry out coordinated group attacks,” he said.

An American military official who recently served in eastern Afghanistan said the U.S. had intercepted communications suggesting the Haqqani leadership was closely coordinating its activities in Khost with Mullah Omar, the Taliban’s leader, who is believed to be in Pakistan. “It’s a division of labor, with each group focusing on a different part of Afghanistan,” the official said.

The official said some U.S. intelligence officers suspect that the Haqqani leadership had offered to conquer Khost in exchange for a promise from Mullah Omar that the family would be allowed to rule large swaths of eastern Afghanistan if the armed group eventually retook control of the country.

And it’s now believed that the Taliban and / or al Qaeda are helping the Gaza insurgents to fabricate much more sophisticated bombs for use in their terrorist efforts.  The battles between certain factions of the Taliban and al Qaeda must be seen as internecine spats – as intramural struggles.  They don’t represent a terminus.  They are quite public debates over strategy and tactics rather than policy and doctrine.  It’s important not to conflate one with the other.  Believing that any faction of the Taliban would actually risk their lives to battle al Qaeda because of the former’s focus on the region and the focus of the later on the globe is not only unwise, it is profoundly bad logic.

As for David Rohdes, everything and everyone else takes second place (or less) to direct, first hand knowledge to someone who has been there and seen these things first hand.  Rohdes is now in the position of being a subject matter expert – perhaps the foremost and most knowledgeable one in the world.  Rejection of his analysis because it creates discomfort for one strategic option (i.e., separating the “good” Taliban from the bad) is paramount to rejection of the preeminent scholar in the field of study.  From his time with the Taliban, Rohdes has earned the equivalent of a Doctorate in Jihadist Islamic studies in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Finally, the fact that certain jihadi web sites may be “abuzz” with emotion over a coming split between the Taliban and al Qaeda simply isn’t important.  It’s as irrelevant and insignificant as the silly and gross exaggerations of U.S. and NATO casualties inflicted by the Taliban at the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan (Voice of Jihad).

One of the good aspects about blogging with really smart readers is that I get to let some of them do the writing.  Consider TSAlfabet’s comment concerning McChrystal Releases Counterinsurgency Guidance and Requests More Troops.

OK, let’s just cut right to it.

The heart of the problem is that the U.S. has been and continues to be unwilling to do what it says it is going to do to protect itself and that is why we are having problems in A-stan.

To elaborate: the U.S. got hit on 9-11 and we declared, as a sort of Corollary #1, that we would retaliate against and pursue those responsible wherever they could be found.

The U.S. did, in fact, go after AQ and the Taliban in Afghanistan and pretty much took care of the initial problem. The INITIAL problem. Predictably, however, AQ scattered like roaches. Some to Pakistan, some to Iran, some to Yemen, etc.. Rather quickly they found a more-or-less willing host in Pakistan where they could re-group, re-fit, re-form and re-commence their war against the U.S.

Did the U.S. then employ Corollary #1 against Pakistan? No, we did not. And we still refuse to do so. Same for Iran who hosts AQ leadership and has been actively at war against the U.S. since 1979.

I am sure that there are many cogent arguments as to why the U.S. cannot employ Corollary #1 against P-stan and Iran, but once the U.S. has surrendered the principle or otherwise limited its application, say, to only those countries that are too weak to defend themselves such as A-stan and Iraq, then we are in an untenable position.

To close the circle, the reason that we are struggling in A-stan is because we refuse to eliminate the havens in P-stan where the enemy takes refuge. Same as the Soviets. Without that vital sanctuary, AQ and the Taliban collapse and become a primitive curiosity, dwelling in remote caves, a threat to no one except perhaps the local goat population.

COIN is nice and good and McCrystal’s document is all nice talk, but it is not serious. We are willing to allow our military to die and suffer in A-stan because we will not go after the P-stan sanctuaries. (Sorry, little decapitation strikes with Predators do not count). In so doing, we violate a primary rule of counter-insurgency: cut off the insurgent’s base of supplies and support. If the Paks don’t like it, then they can pull some divisions off the Indian border and exercise the proper control over their own territory that a sovereign nation is obligated to do. Otherwise, the U.S. is coming in and wiping out every camp and stronghold. We are not staying to occupy, but we will ensure that AQ is going to spend all of their time re-building and re-constituting rather than attacking into A-stan (or New York, for that matter). As soon as our intel says there is a whiff of AQ in an area, we go back in and wipe them out again. It will become clear to the local population (and potential recruits) that enrolling in or supporting AQ and the Taliban is a death warrant and is the losing side. (If a villager knew that he would be paid well for reliable information on AQ whereabouts AND that the bad guys would promptly get whacked as a result, we might have more good intel than we could handle).

Until such time as the U.S. goes after the enemy in its base of operations, we are just swimming in quicksand.

Consider his comment within the context of the recent targeting of Baitullah Mehsud.  Of course, I had issued a clarion call to assassinate the bastard, since I (correctly) saw him as the strong man who held the Tehrik-i-Taliban together in their protection of al Qaeda.  Baitullah (if he is indeed dead) is in hell now, and that’s just fine with me.  But make no mistake about it.  Drink a glass of wine to his demise, but this is neither the end of the Taliban nor the Tehrik-i-Taliban.

TSAlfabet has recommended some serious action against states that harbor enemies.  But it appears that we cannot even take the minimalist approach with some of them.  Talk about talk with the reconcilable Taliban has been noisome, while the head of the snake, Mullah Omar, sits with his shura in Quetta, Pakistan.  Where are the CIA drones?  Where are the black operations to target him?  Why hasn’t serious pressure been brought to bear on Pakistan?

Consider the situation.  Mullah Omar is the head of the Afghan Taliban who are fighting and killing U.S. troops in Afghanistan.  Pakistan is willingly giving him sanctuary.  Pakistan has even dropped their supposed war against the Tehrik-i-Taliban which was begun with such fanfare and artillery fire.  Do you doubt it?

From Reuters:

Inadequate assistance was allowing militant groups to operate in camps and communities housing hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis displaced by an offensive against the Taliban, an aid group said on Wednesday.

About 2 million people have fled the military’s push against the Taliban in Pakistan’s northwest, most since an offensive began in the Swat valley in May. Those numbers are expected to swell further as the offensive is widened.

U.N. officials said this week that only about 30 percent of a $543 million aid appeal it launched in May in a bid to avert a long-term humanitarian crisis had been met. Aid group Refugees International said the slow pace of help had created a vacuum which militants and other “political actors” were filling.

“Jihadist groups are present, leading an international agency to suspend its visits in some camps on Fridays and Saturdays as ‘these are the days the jihadists distribute their assistance’,” the Washington-based group said in a report on Wednesday.

How to lose a counterinsurgency campaign.  Displace millions of civilians, refuse to stay around and prevent the insurgents from coming back once the operations conclude, and then allow the insurgents to prevent the aid organizations from coming in and providing assistance.  Furthermore, allow the insurgents themselves to provide the aid that the government and NGOs should be providing.

There you have it.  How to lose a counterinsurgency campaign.  On another front, Peshawar is a war zone.

A deadly hotel bomb in Pakistan’s Peshawar underscores its shift from safe metropolis to besieged city where shop keepers are afraid to stock Western films and few foreigners dare to visit.

Up until a few years ago the northwest frontier town stirred up images of romance and intrigue, sitting on a historic trading route to Afghanistan and enticing tourists with bazaars, forts and ancient mosques.

Now kidnappings, killings, intimidation and scores of deadly blasts linked to Taliban militants have terrified Pakistanis and foreigners alike, with seven bombs in the past month alone killing nearly 50 people.

“Peshawar is now a dangerous city,” said Sharafat Ali Mubarak, president of the provincial chamber of commerce.

“Let me make it clear — even local people are not safe here.”

There you have it.  How to lose a counterinsurgency campaign.  Let the insurgents take charge.  It looks like the idyllic heaven that the Pakistan Army claims for the North West Frontier Province and FATA hasn’t materialized.

Rich Lowry with National Review is encouraged at the signs of tribal uprising against the Pakistan Taliban.  The Captain’s Journal is far less encouraged.  We have pointed out that Baitullah Mehsud specifically targeted tribal elders in his rise to power, killing some 600 elders after they spoke out against him.  Mehsud has globalist intentions, and now the distinction between al Qaeda and the Tehrik-i-Taliban has been all but erased.  The Taliban fighters shout to passersby in Khyber “We are Taliban! We are mujahedin! “We are al-Qaida!”

Philip Smucker recently observed that al Qaeda has essentially chosen Baitullah as their front man in Pakistan, and further observed that:

Most Afghanistan-Pakistan insurgent groups, led by Mahsud and Mullah Omar’s Afghan Taliban, have not officially adopted the “al-Qaeda” brand name, but they have essentially sworn their allegiance to bin Laden, say leading experts on the terror network.  They claim that al-Qaeda has learned from the mistake of going into business under its own name in Iraq and it prefers, instead, to remain behind the scenes, protected by local gunmen on the one hand, but capable of influencing the fight against US and foreign “infidels” in South Asia on the other hand.

This alliance knows no borders, and hence it’s pointless to refer to the campaign as Afghan, Pakistan or otherwise as pertaining to nation-states.  Syed Saleem Shahzad has recently described the safe haven that al Qaeda has created for itself throughout the Hindu Kush.

The Eastern Hindu Kush range, also known as the High Hindu Kush range, is mostly located in northern Pakistan and the Nuristan and Badakhshan provinces of Afghanistan.

This chain of mountains connects with several smaller ranges, such as Spin Ghar, the Tora Bora, the Suleman Range, Toba Kakar, and creates a natural corridor that passes through the entire Pakistani tribal areas and the Afghan border provinces all the way to the Pakistani coastal area in Balochistan province.

By 2008, al-Qaeda had taken control of the 1,500-square-kilometer corridor – something it had planned to do since fleeing Afghanistan when the Taliban were defeated by US-led forces in December 2001.

Al-Qaeda decided then to build a regional ideologically motivated franchise in South Asia to thwart the strategic designs of Western powers in the area.

While US forces were vainly trying to hunt down al-Qaeda in the Tora Bora mountains, the group was focused on establishing links with organizations such as the Jaishul al-Qiba al-Jihadi al-Siri al-Alami and Jundallah in the Pakistani tribal areas and organizing the recruitment of Pakistanis and Afghans to those organizations. The underlying reason for doing this was to destroy the local political and social structures and in their place establish an al-Qaeda franchise.

The plan worked. Today, in many parts of the Hindu Kush corridor, centuries-old tribal systems and their connections with the Pakistani establishment through an appointed political agent have been replaced by a system of Islamic warlordism.

The old breed of tribal elders, religious clerics and tribal chiefs, loyal to Pakistan and its systems, has been wiped out, to be replaced by warlords such as Haji Omar, Baitullah Mehsud, (slain) Nek Mohammad and (slain) Abdullah Mehsud. They are all al-Qaeda allies, and allow al-Qaeda freedom of movement in their areas within the corridor.

Al-Qaeda members from abroad also use the corridor to enter the Pakistani tribal areas.

This sounds very much like our observation in Games of Duplicity and the End of Tribe in Pakistan, and serves as an even more recent warning that the desired tribal military action against the Taliban probably won’t materialize.  Dead elders, a separate political system, a separate legal system, and terror plus patronage have almost ensured that if the Taliban are to be defeated, it won’t be at the hands of indigenous fighters.