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Pak Taliban: From A Bunch Of Suicide Bombers To A Conventional Army
By B. Raman at SAAG.
1.Like the Neo Taliban of Afghanistan, the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has evolved in less than a year from a bunch of suicide bombers to a conventional army capable of set-piece, stand and fight battles with the Pakistani Army and para-military forces. This conversion has been facilitated by the recruitment of a large number of retired Pashtun ex-servicemen living in the Pashtun tribal belt in the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and in the Malakand Division of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP). The Swat Valley and the Buner District, less than a hundred kms from Islamabad, which was occupied by the TTP earlier this week without any resistance from the local security forces, form part of the Malakand Division.
(Much of the Taliban in Afghanistan Pakistan is controlled by the Pakistan army, as proxies. If the TTP can fight set piece battles its because of the logistical and personnel support of the Pakistan military using it as a "Controlled Opposition" proxy for the Pakistan military's agenda.......to destabilize the Civilian government in Islamabad, and get back into power as national saviors of the day )
2. The agreement signed earlier this year by the coalition Government in the NWFP headed by the Awami National Party (ANP) with Sufi Mohammad of the Tehrik-e-Nifaz-a-Shariat-e-Mohammadi (TNSM), which is a constituent unit of the TTP, for the introduction of Sharia courts covers the entire Division, consisting of seven districts and not just Swat. Now that the agreement, despite strong criticism from abroad, has been got approved by Prime Minister Yousef Raza Gilani by the National Assembly and signed by President Asif Ali Zardari, the TNSM has lost no time in expanding its control to areas of the Malakand Division outside Swat. The occupation of the Buner district is the beginning. The occupation of the other districts will follow.
(Very foolish of the civilian government to negotiate and sign agreements with these types of people. It makes them look ineffective afterwards)
3. What should be of great concern to both India and the US is that the TTP, which was seen till recently as merely a collection of young suicide bombers with limited capability for territorial control and dominance through conventional forces, has started demonstrating that it has evolved into a conventional army, which can fight, occupy and administer territory. Thus, the TTP has evolved into a mirror image of the Neo Taliban. It shares with the Neo Taliban its objective of fighting for the defeat of the US-led NATO forces in Afghanistan. At the same time, it has its own independent agenda of expanding its territorial and ideological dominance to other areas of the Pashtun belt in the NWFP initially and then to non-Pashtun areas. The Neo Taliban does not approve of this independent agenda, but does not oppose it actively.
(I would hesitate to call a bunch of irregular insurgents numbering 3,000 with AK-47 an "army", that is on the thresh hold of taking over Pakistan, hardly!!!.........the Swat Taliban are "Controlled Opposition" proxies of the Pakistan military, and unless the Pakistan military have a serious need to reinvent themselves as bearded fundies who only fight as irregular soldiers against their own country and people, all of it from Lahore to Karachi, and abandon the entire basis of their present organization and professional ethos, then its very unlikely that the Swat Taliban will morph into occuppying the whole of Pakistan....which is hardly the case....what we are seeing with the Swat Taliban is a tactical move by the Pakistan military to destabilize the civilian government.........Thus the Swat Taliban can be activated or dismantled as and when the Pakistani military wish it to be the case.....From a rational civilian perspective this type of behavior is dangerous brinkmanship, but from the Pakistan's military perspectives it is business as usual........the Swat TTP is doing what it is doing because of orders from the Pakistan military)
4. The Pakistan Army headed by Gen. Ashfaq Pervez Kayani, its Chief of the Army Staff (COAS), has shown neither the will nor the inclination to counter the advance of the TTP and then roll it back. It is not Kayani’s worries about what could happen on the Indian border, which have come in the way of a vigorous response to the TTP’s military advance. It is his worries over the continuing loyalty of the Pashtun soldiers, who constitute about 20 per cent of the Army, and of the Frontier Corps and the Frontier Constabulary, which are responsible for his anxiety and keenness to make peace with the TTP. The Frontier Corps and the Frontier Constabulary consist predominantly of Pashtun soldiers recruited in the FATA and the NWFP, officered by deputationists from the Army. These units have been showing less and less inclination to fight the TTP. They have been either avoiding a confrontation with the TNSM and the TTP or in some cases just deserting and surrendering to the TTP units.
(So 80% of the Pakistani military is not Pashtun.........enough available personnel from the outside of the Frontier Province to quell the Swat Taliban, but why should they any way, if these groups are created controlled proxies by the Pakistan military and manned and often guided by Pakistani military personnel? It is true Pakistan has lost some men fighting the Taliban in FATA at the behest of American urgings and military assistance, but we do not know what are the true losses of the Pakistani military there? It is also very true that many of the Pashtun personnel of the Pakistan military are obviously not happy fighting their own kith and kin, whilst at the same time observing the Americans attack the same with drone attacks...........they can't be too happy with that, as wouldn't any self respecting people.
It is not fear which led to Kiyani seeking peace with the Swat Taliban, but because the Swat Taliban as Pakistani military proxies had achieved for the Pakistan army exactly what Kiyani wanted. The Pakistani military has never shown any disinclination to side with America and fight the Pashtuns with their ethnic sensibilities-------The Pakistan military is not as sophisticated, sensitive and nuanced as that....1971 East Pakistan, Baluchistan 1973--1977, and now NWFP FATA since 2004. The Pakistan military has never been shy of fighting its own people......this "great tradition" has not changed, even under Kiyani....It has killed more of its own people than any other military in the world.)
5. According to reliable sources in the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), it is pressure from an alarmed Kayani to reach an accommodation with the TNSM and the TTP, which set in motion the negotiations with Sufi Mohammad and the developments that have followed. The Army and the para-military forces have already conceded territorial control to the TTP in the FATA and in the Malakand Division of the NWFP. By re-locating his forces and by reducing the Army’s presence in these areas already under the domination of the TNSM and the TTP, Kayani is reportedly hoping to prevent an ingress of the Pakistani Taliban into other parts of the NWFP and beyond.
(So here is the indication that the Swat Taliban is "Controlled Opposition" proxies of the Pakistan military......it never made sense why the 800,000 Pakistan military, "The best in the world" backed by 300,000 paramilitary would surrender to 3,000 poorly armed irregular insurgents, unless.....)
6. The objectives of the TTP are presently limited to ideological unity of all Muslims in Pakistan based on the Sharia and the ethnic unity of all the Pashtuns in the Af-Pak region to wage a relentless jihad against the US-led NATO forces till they vacate Afghanistan. It has the motivation and intention to extend its ideological influence to non-Pashtun areas too, but is not yet in a position to establish territorial dominance in those areas. The Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) of Altaf Hussain apprehends that the TTP wants to set up a strong presence in Karachi, which has the largest Pashtun community in Pakistan after Peshawar.
(To quell Pashtun nationalism, and reinforce the state from the Pakistan military perspectives)
7. Confronted with the worsening ground situation in the NWFP and with the danger of a possible collapse of the strategy of President Barack Obama even before it was taken up for implementation, the US is acting like a cat on a hot tin roof. There have been understandable cries of alarm not only from Hillary Clinton, the Secretary of State, and Robert Gates, the Defence Secretary, but also from White House spokesmen. Cries of alarm and the preparation of yet another national intelligence estimate on Pakistan alone will not help. What is urgently required is a national intelligence estimate on US policy-making towards Pakistan, which has been leading it from one critical situation to another.
8. A study of the course of US policy-making would show how those Pakistani leaders who are toasted one day as frontline allies against extremism and terrorism turn out to be either accomplices of terrorism or capitulators to terrorists and extremists the next day. Pervez Musharraf belonged to the first category. Zardari belongs to the second. Despite nearly 60 years of close US interactions with the political and military leaderships in Pakistan, the US has not been able to acquire any enduring influence over policy-making circles in Islamabad.(!!!!!!!!!!!.......this is just basic shoddy analysis for a former senior intelligence officer, it misses the fundamental power play in Pakistan, but at least he is retired and no longer advising the Indian government..........The two most important players in Pakistani political life are the 2 A's... the Army and America. The USA is not some kind of innocent Pollyanna figure who is completely clueless about Pakistan,hardly) The US has very little to show in terms of changed policies in Islamabad in return for its unending pampering of successive regimes in Islamabad with the injection of more and more money and military equipment. The time has come to stop pampering, but there is a reluctance in the Obama Administration---as there was in the preceding Bush Administration--- to do so due to fears that a stoppage of US assistance and pampering may result in a failed state with the control of its nuclear arsenal falling into the hands of the jihadis.
(American interference in Pakistan as with its interference in many other Third World countries has been negative, since the 1950's:
The Americans weren't pampering Pakistan when they destabilized the Ayub Khan regime 1965-69. The Americans weren't pampering Pakistan when they toppled the Bhutto regime in 1977 using the military. The Americans weren't pampering Pakistan when they wiped out the entire top brass of the Pakistan military for pursuing the nuclear program against America's and Israel's wishes. The American's weren't pampering Pakistan when in 1990 they basically abandoned Pakistan with the Pressler Amendment.......and so on, the sheer amount of political interference, where prospective political figures have to have private one to one meetings with the American ambassador in Islamabad.)
9. Unfortunately, the situation in Pakistan has reached a stage where the outcome---ultimate jihadi control of the State and its nuclear arsenal--- may be the same whatever the US does----whether it continues pampering or stops doing so. It is a thankless dilemma. It is easy to criticize the US strategy or the lack of it, but difficult to suggest a viable alternative. The starting point of an alternative strategy has to be a cordon sanitaire around the areas already under the control of the TTP and a crash programme for the economic development of the Pashtun areas not yet controlled by the Taliban. Obama’s plans to spend billions of dollars in the areas of the FATA already under the control of Al Qaeda and the Taliban would produce no enduring results except to waste the US taxpayers’ money. This money should be better spent on immunizing those areas where the influence of the Taliban has not yet spread.
(Better still instead of giving money to the Pakistan central government, why not give a greater % of the money to state governments in all of Pakistan for development and to fight terrorism...that might be more effective)
10. An equally important point of the strategy should be to step up the US Predator strikes in the FATA and to extend them to Swat in order to keep the Al Qaeda and Taliban elements running for cover all the time and make it difficult for them to plan new strikes and get them executed.
( That would do great wonders for the fragile civilian government in Islamabad......The Obama administration did talk about attacking Baluchistan with drones but the idea was shelved, because of the implications on the weak civilian government.
If the Swat Taliban are proxies of the military, staffed by ex-Pakistan military and regulars, and directed by the Pakistan military against Pakistan, to regain power, operating inside Pakistan against Pakistan as a pose to American soldiers in Afghanistan, than an attack on such an entity would be severely received by the regular Pakistan military, America's main buddy in Pakistan. Drone attacks in FATA are carried out with the aid of the Pakistani army in FATA, and the facilitation of Pakistani military bases in Baluchistan for such a purpose)
11. The third point of the strategy should be to restore to the Intelligence Bureau of Pakistan its original role of primacy as the internal intelligence and internal security agency of Pakistan. Over the years, the IB has been reduced to the position of a powerless appendage of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) and its top ranks militarized through the induction of serving and retired military officers. This has to be reversed.
(This sounds like a good idea. Have a domestic intelligence agency that is run by the Ministry of the Interior which is wholly civilian, non-military, and in addition have the ISI attached to the FM, and again shorn of its military component. The Core problem for Pakistan is the ISI, and its numerous misadventures to secure Pakistan's interests........usually ends up the other way. The ISI was created by the British in 1948, and operates as an annex of British and American intelligence, it certainly is not some free wheeling Third World agency with its own set of "great ideas". By doing such things, Pakistan's civilian governments can be strengthened against the schemes of the ISI and their foreign masters)
12. These are medium and long-term measures, which would take time to produce results. The questions requiring an immediate response is how to protect Pakistan from itself. How to stop the advance of the Taliban? How to confront it ideologically? For this purpose, the US needs objective allies in Pakistan. It has none so far. It has been working through opportunistic allies in the army and the political parties. They will accept all the money from the US, but will not produce results.
(To deal with the Taliban problem involves first and foremost dealing with the Pakistan military and its fundamental culture of political interference inside Pakistan since the creation of Pakistan, and its various misadventures abroad which have negative blow back effects there after without fail)
13. The objective allies have to be found in the Pashtun community. All the talk in Washington DC about their being good Taliban and bad Taliban is ridiculous. But there are good Pashtuns and bad Pashtuns. The US should urgently identify the good Pashtuns and encourage and help them to take up the fight against the Taliban ideologically. After the elections in Pakistan in March last year, I had pointed out that the ANP, which came to power in Peshawar, was a party of good Pashtuns and that the US should work through it, forgetting its past links with the Communists in Afghanistan and the erstwhile USSR. I was given to understand that a couple of ANP leaders did visit Washingtin DC, but beyond that nothing further was done. Now the ANP-led Government in Peshawar has conceded ideological victory to the TNSM in Swat. Despite this, the US should persist with cultivating it and other good Pashtun elements in parties such as the Pakhtoonkwa Milli Awami Party (PMAP) of Mehmood Khan Achakzai. They constitute the progressive component of the Pashtun community and they need to be strengthened and encouraged to counter the Taliban. The present US policy of depending on repeatedly failed elements in the Army and in the mainstream political parties is not working. The regional Pashtun forces have to be encouraged to take up the fight against the Taliban.
(I would certainly welcome greater USA emphasis on local state civilian politicians who are effective, rather than corrupt Pakistani politicians in the Central government, with the generals. However I would question whether American officials inherently prefer dealing with clean effective leaders in Pakistan, or the greasy corrupt ones with the military.........This is the main issue here between Pakistan and America, and fundamental American foreign policy in the region.
Since the Munro doctrine, and into the 1980's in the Reagan era America has always preferred their South American client state leaders as some what "Colorful"...........this is related to issues of racism, and domination......the "greasy diego" is corrupt and of a lower order, and as such deserves leaders of that caliber. In addition it was deemed that some how corrupt leaders are therefore due to their character more easily "managed' for American interests. All that changed in the 1990's, when increased South American emigration to the USA illegally, and South American narcotics flooding into the country necessitated a policy change. Since that time the USA has backed, or recognised ''cleaner" and more effective South American leaders who deliver for the common people, without feeling insecure or developing neurosis about them (Hugo Chavez not withstanding). The USA finally understood, after 170 years of the Munro Doctrine that what was good for South America could also be good for America. Since that time in the 1990's there has been a marked decline in negative American intervention in America's back yard.
However this change of policy by America should not be defined purely by American terms.............aggressive clean local nationalists leaders who were not corrupt, within South America, conscious of negative American involvement have also contributed to this change in relationship between the USA and the rest of Central and South America.
This is where we need a real change with Pakistan/America relations. Zardari backed into power by the USA/UK is proving to be an embarassment purely because of Zardari himself a small time crook who married big, and a few other lucky breaks, never the less a small time gangster when all is said and done................First and foremost America needs to ditch him immediately, and than coopt, better local Pakistani leaders from Pakistan.....its a nation of 180 million, with 20% from the population being Middle class, if they can bypass the traditional colonial era elite that most certainly will be helpful for Pakistan as a nation. Its a win win situation if America has the will to grasp it.)
14. The survival of Al Qaeda in the FATA and the rise and spread of the TTP are due to support from large sections of the Pashtun community. The resistance to them has to come from the Pashtun community. It cannot come from the likes of Zardari, Gilani and Kayani.
(Wrong again B Raman!!!!!!!! "al-Qaeda" does not exist, and the Taliban exist ONLY because of the good grace of the Pakistani military who think they can use it for certain objectives of theirs in Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Some what romantic and naive to think that Third World insurgency movements are created purely through class oppression and peoples will to struggle. Somewhere along that romantic narrative state intervention and support, covert or overt turns such movements into a reality......the backing of the Pakistan military, in the case of the Taliban, without their backing they simply could not exist)
