Afghanistan

  In 2009, the Pakistani military initially looked to counter the TTP through the ISI, building on its successful record of cooperation, and was reportedly working with local rivals to Behtullah Mehsud, including Turkistan Bhittani and Qari Zaihuddin, insurgent leaders and former TTP allies.423 The ISI provided weapons to Turkistan Bhittani in order to create a militia of men from his Bhittani tribe that would keep the TTP from advancing into the Tank district of NWFP. Hafiz Gul Bahadur,424 an insurgent leader from North Waziristan, was also seen as a potential counter to Behtullah Mehsud.425 Both Maulavi Nazir and Hafiz Gul Bahadur demonstrated that their alliances with the Haqqani Afghan insurgent network did not imperil their relationship with the ISI.426 But the Pakistani military proved unsuccessful in its attempts to put together an anti-TTP Mehsud tribal militia in 2009, although similar efforts in North Waziristan and in the Orakzai Agency were successful.427

  In response, in February 2009, Behtullah Mehsud and the TTP428 formed the United Mujahideen Council, an alliance reportedly created at the urgings of Al Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban to resist Pakistan’s efforts to divide the Pakistani insurgent leadership in North and South Waziristan.429 Hafiz Gul Bahadur’s militiamen killed at least 23 Pakistani soldiers in an ambush in June 2009, a direct betrayal of the aid given him by the ISI and thought to be a result of his role in this alliance. Behtullah Mehsud continued to murder potential rivals. Khalil Rehman, a Mehsud leader who raised a pro-Pakistan and anti-TTP lashkar in South Waziristan, was assassinated in June 2009, and his fighting men, facing a similar fate, had to be evacuated by the army along with their families to Dera Ismail Khan, outside the FATA. Qari Zaihuddin, another ISI collaborator, was assassinated by one of his own bodyguards, reportedly at the orders of Behtullah Mehsud, in June 2009.430

  The death of Behtullah Mehsud in a US UAV attack in August 2009 fractured the United Mujahideen Council alliance, creating a resurgence of old rivalries. There has been extensive infighting within North and South Waziristan and in TTP groups throughout Pakistan. Hakimullah Mehsud eventually succeeded him as the head of the TTP after an internal power struggle in which he overcame his major competitor, Rehman Mehsud.431 While Hakimullah lacks his predecessors’ political skills and multi-tribal appeal among Pushtuns, he has stronger links to Punjabi radical groups, including the “Punjabi Taliban” and anti-Shia groups residing outside the FATA.432 Qari Hussein Raess Mehsud, Behtullah’s suicide bomber recruiting and training specialist, Hakimullah’s cousin and a member of the anti-Shia Sipah-e-Sahaba, has become Hakimullah’s deputy.

  This tumult provided an opportunity for the Pakistani military to launch an offensive into South Waziristan in October 2009.433 There was widespread support for the offensive from Pakistanis following the insurgents’ attempt to impose a tyrannical rule in Swat earlier that year. Afrasiab Khattak, general secretary of the ANP, said: “dismantling militant sanctuaries in FATA and taking short-term and long-term measures to open up the area and integrate it with the rest of the country needs urgent national attention if we are to avoid the impending catastrophe.”434 The Pakistani military for the first time received reconnaissance provided by US Predator UAVs.435 Defending their strongholds along with the TTP were some one to two thousand Uzbeks. The offensive was unable to capture or kill the TTP leadership. The Pakistani insurgents responded to the October 2009 offensive asymmetrically, with a terrorist offensive throughout the country.

  After years of urging greater Pakistani military action against the insurgents, the US supported the new policies. Large-scale security assistance, over two billion dollars since 9/11, provided encouragement.436 COL Patrick McNiece, USA, deputy intelligence director of ISAF, said in 2008: “Pakistan’s leadership knows the FATA problem is their problem, not India or the US.”437 In October 2009, US Central Command combatant commander GEN David Petraeus paid tribute to what he called “heartening work by the Pakistan military and Frontier Corps in the past six months. . . . Following a two-division operation, the Frontier Corps cleared the majority of the Swat valley. Some 80–85 percent of internally displaced persons have returned. Pakistan is determined to hold and build, not clear and leave.”438 The US contributed to Pakistan’s increased capabilities through intelligence sharing and aid, including an expanded training program. US special operations forces, through a “train the trainers” program, started to retrain the Frontier Corps as a counter-insurgency force. US aid provided them and the army with equipment they had previously lacked, such as lightweight body armor. The army benefited from the provision of helicopters and air assault training. The police and the civilian institutions required to restore governance after the insurgents have been forced from an area, in contrast, have made less improvement, although some US aid funding is being channeled to the Frontier Police.439 The $750,000,000 US aid program targeted at the FATA, suspended in January 2009 due to the insurgency, has had uncertain results in helping assure local stability and has not been matched by Pakistani political reforms that could reduce the appeal of the insurgency.440

  In November-December 2009, the Pakistani military started a buildup for potential military action against insurgents in the Khyber and Orakzai areas.441 However, Afghan insurgent groups based in Pakistan still have an effective sanctuary and are not being targeted by Pakistani military actions.442 Pakistan responded to repeated US urging to move against these groups with increasing hostility.443 Nor have the groups in Pakistan that had their origins in the Kashmir insurgency been targeted.444 This policy shows that to the ISI, the military, and many Pakistani elites, including those on the left that have no love for either the army or Islamists, the Afghan insurgents and even some Pakistani insurgents are not seen as the enemy. They believe that the threat to Pakistan stems from the fact that the 2001 US-led intervention in Afghanistan displaced Al Qaeda but also the pro-Pakistan Afghan Taliban regime in Kabul and so preempted the emergence of a “moderate Taliban” that would have provided, in their view, peace for Afghanistan and thus security for Pakistan. Few Pakistanis want to cooperate with the US-led actions against the Afghan insurgents that are not seen as threatening the future of their own country and may help Afghanistan being used by countries hostile to Pakistan to encircle it when the US again inevitably disengages from the region.445 Former US Ambassador Teresita Shaefer said at a talk in Washington: “To many in Pakistan, the conflict on the western border is the ‘American War,’ forced upon them by Musharraf’s cooperation with the US war on terror.”446

  In the final analysis, the Pakistani military’s goals reflect their internal political concerns rather than ending insurgencies. General Ashfaq Kiyani, army chief of staff since 2007, has repeatedly stated that the military’s focus remains the threat from India, not the insurgencies.447 Despite the changes seen in 2009, Pakistan has demonstrated a limited capability to clear and hold areas and follow this up with effective efforts to win over the local population to the side of the government. Despite US aid and the hard-bought lessons of campaigns since 2004, the Pakistani military (and intelligence) are still far from waging an effective counter-insurgency campaign. The army’s use of firepower and creation of internal refugees has led to widespread hardship. They are conscious of the cost to legitimacy in killing or displacing Pakistani civilians and appearing to be the tools of the US in a global war against Muslims and yet are powerless to avoid this collateral damage. The military remains reluctant to take offensive action because if they again fail as they did in South Waziristan in 2004–05, it will look even weaker, both in terms of domestic politics and in its competition with India. Political concerns over the military losing popularity by being seen to be fighting the Americans’ war against their fellow Pakistani citizens have also limited their willingness to use force against the insurgents. Along with collateral-damage concerns from the UAV attacks, the Pakistani military was able to use nationalist concerns to rally support against US oversight provisions in the Kerry-Lugar aid package passed in October 2009.448 In 2009, as Pakistan’s civilian gov
ernment showed itself unable to solve the problems affected the lives of Pakistanis, the military’s political prestige began to increase again. Pakistan faces the prospect of the cycle of political instability continuing.

  The Ongoing Insurgency

  Since the 2008 election, the Pakistani government has wanted to distance itself from the policies of former president Musharraf, seen as siding too much with the US and Pakistan’s insurgents and religious radicals, all highly unpopular. President Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of Benazir Bhutto, and the Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) government have resumed moves toward reconciliation with India, improving ties with the US, rapprochement with Kabul (he attended Karzai’s second inauguration in November 2009), and ending the Afghan insurgents’ sanctuary in Pakistan. New Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani announced that it would be a “problem” if Pakistan concluded any negotiations with insurgent groups that was not also fair and advantageous to Kabul.

  But Zardari’s lack of support within his own PPP and from the nation as a whole has limited his ability to govern. This began when he had to go against his post-inaugural pledge and seek aid from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. His main political rival, Nawaz Sharif, and the military have voiced disapproval in the form of a resentful nationalism. Continued military control of Pakistan’s national security policy and its Afghanistan policy has appeared beyond Zardari’s capability to change. However, his first year in office did see some changes. In Quetta, Taliban leadership figures adopted a low profile. The improved intelligence flow within the military also suggests that there are still people in the FATA who will provide intelligence that can be used against the TTP and other insurgent groups. It shows that the FATA has not been overrun just yet. Soon after Zardari’s election, the new army chief, General Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani, stated that he wanted to take the army out of politics, at least at the visible level, giving them more freedom to operate and less limited by the political costs of counter-insurgency operations.

  As a result of this limited headway, there was no halting of US Predator UAV operations against Al Qaeda and Pakistani insurgent targets in the FATA upon Zardari’s election. According to unconfirmed reports, there were more armed Predator UAV attacks in Pakistan in the first nine months of the Obama administration than the entire Bush administration, although the base for the Predator operations was moved from Pakistan, at Shamsi in Baluchistan, to Afghanistan after protests from the Pakistani government.449

  According to unconfirmed reports, improved targeting information based on HUMINT supplied from Pakistan has reduced the occurrence of collateral damage incidents that have been the source of much tension in the past. According to unconfirmed reports, the UAV campaign that eventually succeeded in killing TTP leader Behtullah Massoud in 2009 required 14 months, 16 missile attacks, and up to 207–323 collateral casualties.

  Pakistan has reportedly insisted on policies limiting the Predator attacks to the FATA and has blocked US proposals for attacks on targets in Baluchistan and the NWFP. The Predator attacks are politically highly unpopular in Pakistan, and limiting them to the FATA, where the laws of Pakistan do not apply, appears a way to reduce the stigma of collaborating with a foreign country in attacks on its own citizens. Pakistan only permits Predator attacks on Pakistani insurgents and “foreign” Al Qaeda leadership, restricting their operations. Attacks on Afghan insurgents in Pakistan, including the Taliban’s Quetta shura with headquarters in Baluchistan or the Haqqanis whose headquarters are in the FATA, were apparently forbidden. Despite its improved cooperation with the US and Afghanistan in 2008–10, the Pakistan military has never moved against or tried to prevent the functioning of the Afghan Taliban leadership or its support network, and this includes preventing Predator strikes on them. US demands that Pakistan change this policy were seen as part of an assault on Pakistan’s national sovereignty and were resisted by the military. The Pakistani military are unwilling to pay the costs in turning against policy tools that they continue to believe are valuable to their national security policy in Afghanistan and elsewhere. All of these policies suggest that in 2009, the Pakistani military saw the Pakistani Taliban and at least some of the insurgents in Pakistan as a threat while they continued to see the Afghan Taliban and insurgents as strategic assets.

  Pakistani insurgent groups that had their origins in the cross-border insurgency in Kashmir, despite their more recent ties to transnational terror attacks outside Pakistan as well as internal terrorism, also seem to be tolerated. This includes groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, accused of having carried out the terrorist attack in Mumbai in 2008. Shabaz Sharif, who runs the Punjab provincial government, and his brother, the former prime minister and current leader of the opposition, Nawaz Sharif, both have refused to crack down on radical groups in the Punjab and have maintained links with some of their leaders such as Hafiz Saeed of Lashkar-e-Taiba.450 In this case, it reflects their long-standing relationship with Islamic radicals and parties that have functioned, in many cases, as political allies. The Pakistan military may still believe that they can be controlled as in the past.

  Pakistan and Afghanistan: The Influence from the US, China, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and India

  In 2009, the incoming Obama administration, seeking to differentiate its policies from those of its predecessor, started referring to “AfPak” as a conjoined entity, reflected in the appointment of Ambassador Richard Holbrooke as the special representative to both countries. The Obama administration would, rightly or wrongly, view Afghanistan and Pakistan as representing a single conflict, militarily and diplomatically. But while the US has troops on the ground in Afghanistan and a great deal of leverage with the government in Kabul, the US cannot fight the war in Pakistan, and its ability to affect governmental actions is limited. For Pakistan, whose relations with Afghanistan have usually emphasized hostility or conflict, this was an unfamiliar context. Relations with the US, China, and Saudi Arabia have been traditionally been what geopolitically mattered most to Pakistan, with India and, to a lesser extent, Iran as competitors for what is seen as the vital issue of political control and influence in Pakistan’s neighbor Afghanistan.

  US policy regarding Pakistan after 2001 concentrated on assuring mutual cooperation in capturing foreign Al Qaeda members. In this matter, Pakistan did cooperate, as reflected by the arrests of several terrorist leaders. But in so doing, the displaced Afghan and emerging Pakistani Talibans were largely ignored by the Pakistani security services or, indeed, were encouraged by the Pakistani government, military, and civilian political parties, especially the pro-Musharraf MMA and religious organizations. They were perceived as potentially being valuable tools of Pakistani strategy as their predecessors, the Afghan and Kashmiri insurgents, had been in the 1980s and ’90s. The US concentration on capturing “foreign,” non-Afghan or Pakistani, Al Qaeda terrorists (in which Pakistan acquiesced) allowed Al Qaeda to replace their losses with skilled Pakistanis who had access to both the support networks created by the ISI to support the conflicts in Afghanistan and Kashmir and those running through Pakistani ethnic communities worldwide, especially in the UK and US, plus they had the added advantage of effective “immunity” in Pakistan through their links with the security services, who were not interested in sending their countrymen to Guantanamo. The post-9/11 rhetoric by Musharraf inspired Washington by raising expectations of a restoration of effective civil governance and the hopes of a regional peace that would mean the end of state support for the Kashmir insurgency. These hopes were instead eclipsed by the reality of Pakistan’s Afghanistan policy firmly in military control, who continued to tolerate if not support the Afghan and Pakistan Talibans, the Taliban culture, and their infrastructure of support, effectively circumventing any headway gained by the apprehension of Al Qaeda members.

  China, on the other hand, has been distant from supporting the current government in Kabul, instead focusing on supporting Pakistan, a long-standing friend. China is Pakistan’s third-l
argest foreign direct investor, exceeding the US. Trade between China and Pakistan more than tripled in 2001–06. A free-trade agreement came into force in 2007. In 2008, both Musharraf and Zardari went to Beijing, appealing for help with Pakistan’s economic crisis. That both came away with little to show for their efforts did not undercut China’s continuing importance to Pakistan.

  Chinese policies toward both Afghanistan and Pakistan are shaped by its interests in security and economic access in central Asia, as has been seen by the creation and operation of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), which both countries have participated in, Afghanistan as a guest and Pakistan as an observer.451 In 2009, the Obama administration sought additional involvement from China in Afghanistan as well as in Pakistan on security issues.452 While China has not opposed the coalition effort in Afghanistan and has, from its position on the Security Council, enabled UN actions there, it has tended to see Afghanistan’s stability undercut by the West’s insistence on creating a new Afghanistan in their own alien image and sidelining those Afghans that have the potential to provide peace; while these have not been explicitly identified, Chinese diplomats have seen the conflict in Afghanistan as a result of neo-imperialist attitudes.453 China’s Afghanistan policy appears largely to follow their Pakistani friends’ goals in Afghanistan, although China has been willing to cooperate with Russia and India on Afghanistan rather than attempt to exclude them.454 While China would ideally prefer that the US have a limited role in central Asia, ensuring its own access to the region’s energy, resources, and markets, a stable Afghanistan would also feed into China’s economic interest, even if it meant allowing a US foothold. US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates expressed concern over China’s voracious demand for new sources of energy and willingness to employ “coercive diplomacy.”455 This has the potential to affect future Chinese policy toward Afghanistan.