The Battle for Pakistan

by Shuja Nawaz

  Kayani 4.0

  Kayani though was not giving up on his effort to educate his NATO colleagues and especially the Americans and their ‘logic-driven’ president. He made another attempt to recast his earlier paper and produced another concise document of just over eleven pages, double-spaced text, 18 encompassing his view of the lessons that America and Pakistan had learned in the process and presenting it as ‘our collective experience’. This comprehensive and data-backed document was presented at a NATO meeting in Seville, Spain in September 2011 and later given to Commander CENTCOM Gen. James Mattis on Saturday, 24 September 2011, during the latter’s visit to GHQ, 19 where they discussed a series of militant attacks in Afghanistan including one on the US embassy that the US felt had ISI involvement. It had been produced inside GHQ with key input from the Military Operations Directorate. The meeting with Mattis also took place in the shadow of the testimony of Admiral Mullen citing the ISI links to the Haqqani Network.

  Sources said the issue of Haqqani Network was discussed in detail during the meeting. General Kayani highlighted the fact that statements from US officials alleging Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) support for the group was disturbing cooperation between the US and Pakistan.

  The issue of cross-border raids was also discussed during the meeting. 20

  Mattis had come to Pakistan for a short visit during a whirlwind tour of the region, accompanied by journalists. His primary message was about the need to curb the Haqqanis and to convey the anger in the US about the attacks on the US embassy in Kabul the previous week as well as the truck bombing of 10 September on a NATO outpost south of Kabul in which five persons were killed and seventy-seven Coalition soldiers were wounded. Mullen had reacted to those attacks in his own testimony on Capitol Hill on 22 September.

  ‘With ISI support, Haqqani operatives planned and conducted that truck bomb attack, as well as the assault on our embassy,’ Admiral Mullen said in a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee. ‘We also have credible evidence that they were behind the June 28th attack against the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul and a host of other smaller but effective operations.’ In short, he said, ‘the Haqqani Network acts as a veritable arm of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency.’

  His remarks were part of a deliberate effort by American officials to ratchet up pressure on Pakistan and perhaps pave the way for more American drone strikes or even cross-border raids into Pakistan to root out insurgents from their havens. American military officials refused to discuss what steps they were prepared to take, although Admiral Mullen’s statement made clear that taking on the Haqqanis had become an urgent priority. 21

  Kayani immediately countered Mullen’s attack, terming it ‘unfortunate’, and ‘not based on facts’.

  ‘In the first official reaction to the slew of public statements made by various levels of the US administration against the ISI and suspected links between the Haqqani Network and the Pakistan establishment, Kayani said that he had held a constructive meeting with Admiral Mullen in Spain last week.’ 22 In a later conversation with me, Kayani recounted the friendly exchange with Mullen in Spain—something that led to his surprise and anger at the Mullen statement.

  Against the backdrop of a deteriorating situation between the US and Pakistan, Kayani apparently wanted to be seen as broadly aligned with the Americans. In his view, both sides had learned the difficulty of waging war and the greater difficulty of achieving peace, as well as the need for subordinating the military to political strategy. Here, he was using the time-tested Pakistani approach of telling the Americans what he thought they wanted to hear, using the language of the seminars at Fort Leavenworth. ‘Now we can better appreciate the need for [a] comprehensive approach i.e., clear, hold, build and transfer.’ Kayani wanted his American audience to join him in using ‘our collective experience and wisdom’ to ‘forget about past differences and opinions and be wiser on achieving a better peace’.

  He emphasized the need to build on the success of the joint CT effort against Al-Qaeda, and the shift from the surge to transition and reconciliation, reflecting a change of emphasis from the military to political strategy. For him, the way forward in Afghanistan was for ‘enduring peace based on [a] stable environment’ attained by ‘an all inclusive approach which is open to all Afghans’. He then presented the basic parameters of an approach that, in his view, would resolve the Afghanistan issue beyond 2014 and create a conducive strategic environment that would allow a hand over ‘to a “capable” Afghan Government and the ANA’. In the process of trying to attain peace, ‘achieving less which is sustainable is more important than attempting more that is not sustainable,’ he added.

  ‘Given the above guidelines, it has to be determined whether to reconcile or not? And if yes, then with whom, a select group or all? Once that has been determined by Afghanistan and ISAF, Pakistan is prepared to help. However, the extent of this help should be correctly appreciated. We can facilitate but not guarantee. Ultimately it will remain Afghan responsibility,’ said Kayani. 23

  How to translate these goals into an operating strategy? Kayani thought geography and history were two major constraints. (1) 2611 kilometres of the Afghanistan–Pakistan border over rough terrain was a major hurdle. (2) The division of Pashtun tribes by the border based on the Durand Line and Easement Rights of tribes people across the border without visas (under locally issued rahdari or travel permissions, or often without such permission by local authorities) created obstacles, rooted in historical custom, to managing the porous border. A further constraint was the dire economic situation of Pakistan, with low growth and massive floods affecting some 21 million persons, which meant diversion of 70,000 troops from fighting terrorism and militancy to providing flood relief and rehabilitation.

  He then went into the challenges for the Pakistan military. An army of some 500,000 had over 150,000 deployed on the western border abutting Afghanistan, and another 80,000 facing India. (The total number of Pakistan’s deployed forces roughly equalled the total ISAF deployment of forty-eight countries per Kayani’s calculations.) Another 10,000 were committed to UN Peacekeeping duties. Citing the Pakistan’s army’s ‘Tail to Tooth ratio’, that is the quantum of fighting forces relative to those who provided support and logistics, only 30 per cent of the force ought to be deployable. In fact, Pakistan had over 40 per cent of its force deployed, stretching its resources. The forward deployments in Pakistan were averaging thirty months, compared with six months for ISAF soldiers, according to Kayani. The army’s budget was also stretched. Even at a relatively low $6,000 per soldier per annum, it had a hard time meeting its operational needs with a total budget of $2.5 billion, Kayani stated, making the point that over the previous decade the military budget had declined from 4.5 per cent to 3 per cent of the GDP, and from 37 per cent of the budget to 14 per cent. ‘Our argument is not to seek military aid but to improve our economy so that we can sustain the war against terrorism,’ he added, as a code that became the mantra of succeeding Pakistani military leaders, especially Gen. Qamar Javed Bajwa, even as they continued to seek or accept US funding and military aid.

  All this was a preamble to a series of tables and charts indicating the size and number of military operations over time versus the rising tide of suicide bombings inside Pakistan. The Pakistan military had lost by that time some 11,000 dead or wounded due to the blowback from its operations, while the overall casualties in the country resulting from terrorist attacks was 40,000. Kayani then cited the ratio of 1 officer to 10 soldiers killed in action. This was a fact noted by a number of American military leaders, such as Gen. Petraeus and Gen. McChrystal, especially the loss of nine Pakistani generals, including one three-star. The ISI also came in for attacks by terrorists, losing 250 dead or wounded in attacks on three of its five regional headquarters inside Pakistan. Against this background, Kayani pointed to the success of the operations in Swat that cleared the region of terrorists within four months and helped evacuate and then re
habilitate some 2 million inhabitants, challenging his American readers: ‘Do we have a comparable example?’

  From the particular, he zoomed out to the general again, placing Pakistan’s security calculations in ‘a broader regional context’ that involved ‘a stable and peaceful Afghanistan on our west’ and also ‘peace and stability on our eastern border with India’. He recognized India again, as he had done in Kayani 3.0, as an ‘important neighbour’ and an ‘emerging power with potential to influence global politics’. Noting Pakistan’s ‘limited military potential, essentially defensive in nature’, he stated that the Indian military capability was ‘Pakistan specific’. But Pakistan was ‘committed to resolving outstanding issues with India and line in peace with dignity’. Ending with a Yoda-like statement with chosen capital letters: ‘BIG POWER is about SIZE but GREAT POWER is about CONDUCT. We wish India to be a GREAT POWER.’

  He concluded by reiterating the need for a stable and peaceful Afghanistan as a necessary end condition. Quoting the Economist of 3 September 2011, ‘there can be no return to the innocence of September 10th 2001—and sadly no end to the vigilance’, Kayani added. ‘In our fight against terrorism we shall remain mindful that at the end of the day our children should live in a better world.’

  Kayani badly wanted to stand in the same corner as the US. But the US kept redrawing the boundaries of that room, changing commanders and strategies in Afghanistan. The relationship with Pakistan was on the downswing again. It is not clear how widely Kayani 4.0 was shared by Mattis in the US system. Nor did Kayani share it widely with civilian counterparts in Pakistan. Army commanders did employ the document in PowerPoint presentations with counterparts in NATO. A senior army officer in Pakistan acknowledged that they tried to engage a number of times after the Mattis meeting with their US counterparts but did not get much traction. A number of senior diplomatic and administration officials in Washington did not recall seeing the document, including senior Trump administration officials who were dealing with the new president’s critique of Pakistan as a bad partner. Other events in the region overshadowed this attempt by Kayani to right the floundering US–Pakistan relationship.

  US military commanders did not view Pakistan very favourably in the wake of repeated attacks on their forces by militants they believed were getting support from Pakistani-based Taliban commanders. The roller coaster that had reached its apogee in 2010 was hurtling downward, and would reach a seemingly irretrievable condition by the time the disruptive force of President Trump arrived on the scene in 2017. And like Ground-Hog Day, the earlier arguments of 2010 and 2011 would be repeated by both American and Pakistani leaders, without much success in convincing each other that they meant well and were indeed committed for the long haul to protecting Afghanistan.

  Internally, Pakistan was undergoing a massive shift in the nature and capacity of its army, from a conventional force to one that was fighting an existential battle against internal militancy and terrorism, generated by domestic forces but in some cases abetted by external or foreign-based actors. Its politics was also changing from alternating rule by the two leading dynastic parties to a new, unproven populist leader with strong Islamist leanings and a huge energized youth following in the shape of Imran Khan. The Battle for Pakistan was not over. Critical in its success was to be the speed and nature of the change in the Pakistan military, paradoxically a potential partner as well as powerful foe of the over-weaning US influence in the region. It was significant therefore that PM Khan took both the army chief and the DG-ISI with him on his first visit to Washington DC in July 2019, to indicate that they spoke as one and to help lay the foundation for a new and improved US–Pakistan relationship and to rejuvenate the Pakistani military.

  11

  Transforming the Pakistan Army

  ‘Successful, resource-efficient counterinsurgency campaigns have by their nature tended to be low-profile precisely because they dealt with the issue discretely and with political sensitivity.’

  —Emile Simpson 1

  Pakistan has fought numerous external wars with its bigger neighbour, India. The biggest lesson from those encounters appears to be that Pakistan must have a proactive defence that will allow it to protect its territory while making India pay a heavy price in case it ever invades Pakistan. Hence, its forward nuclear posture and support of irregular warfare to keep India busy in Kashmir. And its ambivalence in the war inside Afghanistan that remains a bone of contention with the US.

  Its military has learned much from its internal wars since 9/11. It has much more to learn if it is to reorient its role inside the country as well as change its relationships with neighbours, near and far. In that context, the words of a young captain from the Royal Gurkha Rifles, a thinking warrior in the mould of another Gurkha Rifles officer, Bill Slim, whose campaign and memoir of his battles in Burma during the Second World War are still providing lessons to aspiring soldiers across the world, ring true for the seemingly endless wars raging in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The challenge for Pakistan has been to transform not only its fighting forces but also the foundational thinking that has informed its military operations and organizations for decades. Only then will it be able to win the Battle for Pakistan.

  Emile Simpson served three tours in Afghanistan and took to heart the lessons of war from his perspective as a junior officer, captured in a slim volume that was described by no less an authority than Sir Michael Howard as a befitting ‘coda to Clausewitz’. His comment about COIN exposes the inherent weakness of conventional military thinking that does not recognize that all military action is, in fact, political at heart and you cannot separate the military from the political domain. Indeed, the non-kinetic aspect must take precedence over the kinetic approach rather than the other way around.

  Observing the Pakistan Army in action in the field and in its training institutions brings me in accord with Simpson. There is less likelihood of victory in the traditional sense on the battlefield. Rather, victory encompasses success in a broader ‘battlespace’ that extends beyond the physical field of military conflict into the heart of societies, economies, and political systems. Until you can alter the landscape in which the insurgent or militant operates, and be prepared to understand, accept and accommodate differences of opinions and purpose, there is no clear-cut victory. Neither is there a linear relationship between the use of force and the achievement of political outcomes, a lesson that both the Soviet Union and the US learned over time.

  Since the 2001 US and Coalition invasion of Afghanistan and the move of Pakistani forces into the borderlands with Afghanistan, Pakistan has been learning these lessons the hard way. It has been forced to adjust to new realities and learn by doing. The transition has been less than smooth. The Pakistani military, and especially the Pakistan Army, still is in many ways a traditional organization, bound by the broad structures and experiences of its predecessor, the British Indian Army. It has attempted to reorganize piecemeal, but there has been little impetus internally for a wholesale rethinking of the nature of the military force that Pakistan needs going into the middle of the twenty-first century.

  It is large, around 500,000 strong, and fairly immobile. Rather than seeking a radical transformation, it has added layers of modernity over crusted layers of outmoded structures and thinking.

  Over the seventy-plus years of independence, it has changed, as needed, largely in reaction to the types of conflicts it became involved with. Hence, it adopted a makeshift COIN approach in 1971 against what it termed ‘miscreants’ in East Pakistan that badly missed the political dimension of the conflict and allowed a larger conventional Indian army to throttle it with the aid of the local Mukti Bahini of ex-Pakistan Army Bengalis and trained guerrillas operating from bases in India. In Balochistan, in the 1970s, it adopted more conventional tactics, using air power, with assistance from the Shah of Iran who lent it helicopters, and cordon-and-clear operations against local tribesmen, some of whom sought refuge and training in Afghanistan and oth
er sites. Baloch nationalism still simmers.

  Via the ISI, it also became a party to the struggle inside Kashmir, helping train and equip Islamist fighters and militants who infiltrated and injected themselves into the battle between Kashmiris and the huge Indian military and paramilitary force that was sent to quell the insurgency in Kashmir. This approach was predicated on the idea that India could be made to pay for its hostility towards Pakistan with a War of a Thousand Cuts, by forcing India to deploy large numbers of troops against a small and elusive enemy in Kashmir. The actual numbers of Kashmiri militants fighting on the Indian side of the LoC in Jammu and Kashmir is much debated. According to Ajai Shukla, a former commanding officer of the famous Hodson’s Horse cavalry regiment, and now a leading Indian defence analyst:

  The most accurate militancy figures are from the J&K Police CID [Criminal Investigation Department of Jammu and Kashmir] in Srinagar, which—at 300 militants currently—is slightly higher than the army figure. I would go by the CID figure. It is twice what it was since Burhan Wani’s killing. And that is even though some 400 local militants have been killed in this period.

  Shukla adds:

  The figure for total Indian military presence in J&K is pretty straightforward. As is well known, there are eight infantry divisions—8, 28, 19, 25, 10, 26, 29 and 39—deployed on the LoC and ‘working boundary’ in Ladakh, Kashmir and Jammu regions. At 18,000 troops per division, that is 1,44,000 soldiers. In addition, there are 5 Rashtriya Rifles formations—Kilo Force, Victor Force, Romeo Force, Uniform Force and Delta Force—deployed in the CI grid, at about 10,000 soldiers per ‘Force’, that is another 50,000 soldiers. The total adds up to a little bit short of 2,00,000 soldiers.