SWATTING the Taliban? Pakistan's Strategic 'Dilemma'
By Matthew Hulbert for ISN
Despite the media-catching headlines rightly afforded to Afghanistan following its shambolic (if entirely predictable) electoral chaos in August, Pakistan still remains by far the biggest problem confronting the international community in South Asia. The recent death of Pakistan Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud caused by US strikes in the SWAT offers telling insight into some of the potential opportunities – and tremendous challenges – Pakistan faces if it is to wrestle back large swathes of its territory from Islamic extremists and become a serious counter terrorism player. A failed state scenario is currently a little far-fetched, but both the West and regional powers should make no mistake: Without a fundamental change in its political course, Pakistan will remain on the brink.
Opportunity or crisis?
Despite recent 'victories' to wrestle back territory previously ceded to the Taliban in the SWAT valley after the militias had crept within 60 kilometers of Islamabad, the Pakistan military is unlikely to carry its fight against the Taliban much further – even though the Taliban is currently undergoing its own internecine tussle about who should succeed Mehsud. NATO was hoping that Pakistani Army Chief Ashfaq Parvez Kayani would use this moment to turn the tide against the Taliban, not just against its Pakistani variant in South Waziristan but also against al-Qaida and the and external pageHaqqaniand external pageHekmatyar networks in North Waziristan. In effect, Pakistan had a small window of opportunity in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) to start changing the dynamics of the game in South Asia against the Taliban and toward the West.
The problem with this line of argument is that it totally overlooks the regional political realities in play. The main reason why Pakistan scored some strategic success in the SWAT region was because they temporarily shifted a large number of troops away from the border of their traditional enemy, India. This resource realignment was an emergency stop-gap measure taken when the Taliban was bearing down on Islamabad, not a fundamental reappraisal of Pakistan's strategic priorities. Admittedly, this SWAT success provides some 'good news': The Pakistan military clearly has no interest in allowing the Taliban to take Islamabad or acquire any keys to Pakistan's nuclear arsenal.
Strategic mismatch
But the ‘bad news’ is that the strategic objective of the Pakistan military and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) still rests with using jihadist groups to offset India's growing regional ambitions and act as a hedge against any long-term US exit strategy from Afghanistan. The military-intelligence elite are gambling that jihadists still serve the broader strategic purpose of balancing Pakistan's power against Indian influence in South Asia and unsettling hostile interests in Kabul, including the supposed specter of a 'Greater Afghanistan' one day bearing down on Islamabad.
Ongoing instability across the frontier keeps Afghanistan, India and US positions unsettled but also undermines the autonomy of the Pakistan civilian government in the FATA while notionally buttressing the praetorian power of the military. It also offsets not only alleged Iranian-Russian designs to undermine Pakistan's influence in Afghanistan, but also the potential dismemberment of the Pakistani state – a strategic aim that the so-called US-Indian-Afghan alliance supposedly shares, according to key sections of Pakistan's military-intelligence elite.
While experts do not entirely dispute the fact that domestic jihadi cells in Pakistan are an annoyance, they mistakenly believe that these pests can still be tactically contained through a blend of occasional fighting, peacemaking and widespread arrests followed by multiple releases. This perspective persists despite the fact that a dangerous number of fronts have now been opened against the Pakistani state, ranging from the Balochi's in the south to various Pashtun groups in the north. Ultimately, what the military might notionally offer as a bulwark against nuclear catastrophe or Islamic coup, it continues to take away by persistent support of terrorist groups.
Even if President Zardari had the institutional capacity to take the fight to the Taliban beyond the SWAT valley, any serious push against jihadist groups could easily prompt major domestic backlash, given increasing grassroots support for Islamist groups caused by rising fear or misguided allegiance. This would expose Zardari's fragile coalition government to further attacks from his main political rival, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N), which could seize the opportunity to accuse him of buckling to Indian pressure to reign in jihadists. India is not only still smarting from the 2008 Mumbai bombings, but has increasingly vocalized its concern about the prospect of fresh attacks. In effect, dealing with the Taliban isn't merely a problem of military recalcitrance, but one of extreme political sensitivity in Pakistan and South Asia writ large.
Changing the game
Until western policymakers understand this overall mindset it will be difficult for them to deliver the kind of strategic guarantees Pakistan wants to shift its counterterrorism offensives from a process of political window-dressing into a long-term strategic reality. This raises the awkward, but critical question of what Pakistan will want to engage in this process, and what the international community can realistically deliver.
This will require, at a minimum, three core pillars of regional strategic guarantees, greater emphasis on supporting Pakistan’s democratic credentials, and a continued, but far more conditional support for the army to affect positive change. None of this will be easy.
The first move will be for the US to make clear its long-term political commitment to Pakistan (a factor that continued US-Indian nuclear cooperation makes less than concrete from Islamabad’s perspective). US drone attacks on Pakistani soil haven’t exactly helped in this regard, nor has the West’s strategy of stepping up military efforts in Afghanistan without fully considering the implications for Pakistan.
This would need to be followed by concerted diplomatic efforts to resolve the disputes over Kashmir in the east and the Durand line in the west in order to shore up the FATA – efforts that would require India and Pakistan toning down their strategic rivalries in each respective theater. Such solutions would have sharp detractors on either side of the lines (not least the ISI and Indian Research Intelligence Wing who have fought a 60 year ‘covert’ war over such territories), but until more formal demarcations are made it will be nye on impossible to stabilize the region. This approach would need to be underwritten by broader strategic guarantees as to Pakistan’s territorial integrity not only from the US but from other states with significant interests in the region such as Russia, China, Saudi Arabia and Iran.
The main domestic pillar, and thrust of western policy must be to work with Pakistan's civilian government to fight extremism; the other, to help purge the military of extremist sympathizers and to incentivize it to stop providing support for insurgency campaigns.
Aid will of course be a key ingredient. The West must increase funding and use it to develop institutions rather than individuals - as the current squabbles between Zardari and former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif attest. More importantly, aid must be targeted at core issues, ranging from energy security to food shortages, rising unemployment and mass poverty amidst a badly failing economy. This focus on basic issues is the only way Pakistan's political leaders could demonstrate genuine leadership and offer credible alternatives to the harsh dogma of the Taliban. It would also help civilian institutions begin to slowly rebalance the scales of power with the military.
Meanwhile, the military itself must face stringent conditionality requirements on aid tied to long-term (rather than ‘set piece’) counterinsurgency activities. Countering the Taliban rather than India should be the order of the day for Kayani. Pakistan must also be made aware that a failure to act now could come with grave implications later should major terror attacks continue to be exported from Pakistani soil. India would be hard to reign in, even though large sections of the Pakistan military would like nothing more than to give up the fight against fellow Muslims in the tribal areas to redeploy against the traditional Hindu enemy in the east. This would come with disastrous implications for US strategy on the Af-Pak border.
Bad time for political expediency on Af-Pak
Ironically, much of this change, particularly on a regional level, is highly unlikely to occur unless Pakistan sees a drastic domestic deterioration amid sharpened insurgency attacks. China, India, Iran and Russia would be far more likely to cooperate on the Af-Pak problem if they saw any credible prospect of a nuclear-armed Pakistan falling into the hands of Islamic extremists.
The threat of nuclear terrorism also provides an obvious temptation for the US to start shifting its political focus in South Asia by downgrading Afghanistan to a ‘benign threat’ compared to the growing international terror risks in Pakistan. This move would not only open up greater political possibilities to negotiate with the Afghan Taliban, but it would also allow the US to proffer modest definitions of success. Rolling out the 'mission accomplished' banners might be a step too far, but as President Obama has made clear, stopping al-Qaida from launching attacks on the West is ultimately the US' overriding policy concern in the region.
This would of course be a chimera. The West's road out of Kabul does not exclusively run through Islamabad or vice versa. In the long run, the only real solution to political instability and associated terrorist threats in South Asia is one of comprehensive state-building measures both in Pakistan and Afghanistan; if nothing else, the eventual terms set by Kabul have to be symmetric with those set by Islamabad if the Taliban is to be quelled. Lowering the bar of politically acceptable outcomes in one will inevitably raise it in the other.
Thus, whether the West likes it or not, Pakistan remains its enormously flawed, yet strategically crucial, ally in South Asia. As long as western policy is predominately focused on how to extract itself from Afghanistan rather than the deep-seated problems in South Asia (particularly Pakistan), any number of threats – from loose nukes and intrastate war to extraterritorial terrorism – could manifest in calamitous ways.
Fleetingly 'swatting' the Taliban is a good start, but much remains to be done if Islamabad is to become a bulwark of regional stability and a serious agent of pest control, eradicating international terrorism rather than acting as one of its foremost incubators.