Don’t mention the Afghan–Pakistan war

Site Issues 2008 Archive Room
#1

Both Britain and America are reluctant to admit it but, says Fraser Nelson, our most pressing foreign policy problem is what to do about Pakistan, a nuclear-armed state in which terrorists have taken sanctuary

At a recent dinner party in the British embassy in Kabul, one of the guests referred to ‘the Afghan-Pakistan war’. The rest of the table fell silent. This is the truth that dare not speak its name. Even mentioning it in private in the Afghan capital’s green zone is enough to solicit murmurs of disapproval. Few want to accept that the war is widening; that it now involves Pakistan, a country with an unstable government and nuclear weapons.
But in fact the military commanders know that they are dealing with far more than just a domestic insurgency. Weapons, men and suicide bombers are flooding in from Pakistan every day. Like it or not, war is being waged on Afghanistan from Pakistan.
Consider the evidence: British forces in Helmand have achieved striking success in repelling the Taleban, but they can never eliminate the enemy entirely because of the constant stream of new recruits flowing over the border from the Pakistani town of Quetta. To Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, head of Taskforce Helmand, it is a source of deep frustration. ‘When pushed out of Helmand, the opportunities are there for the Taleban to recruit, equip and retrain on the other side of the border,’ he told me when I visited two months ago.
In theory, the Pakistani government has signed up to the war on terror and is trying as best it can to help us. But in practice, it is playing a dangerous double game. The Pakistani government, army and intelligence services all have their own distinct reasons for keeping the Taleban in business. The Pakistan army effectively ceded Quetta to the Taleban six years ago, for example, hoping their brutal methods would deal with local Baluchistan separatists.
Inside the UK Ministry of Defence the name Quetta is spat out like a curse by British commanders who know they are fighting a lopsided war. ‘We have to start looking at this area as a whole battlefield, Pakistan included,’ one senior MoD source tells me. ‘Because that’s what the locals are doing. We have to think the same way.’ But they cannot admit as much in public. Handling an insurgency is one thing, but any war involving a nuclear-armed country like Pakistan is almost too frightening a prospect to consider.
Quietly, the problem of Pakistan’s terrorist-infested border areas has overtaken Iran to become the British government’s most acute foreign policy challenge. In fact, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) of Pakistan can lay good claim to be the most prolific terrorist zone anywhere in the world, thanks to its substantial al-Qa’eda camps. The London, Madrid, Bali and Islamabad bombings were all planned there. MI5 believe half the British terror suspects they are currently monitoring were originally trained in Fata camps.
The problem is becoming too big to ignore. There are an estimated 8,000 foreign militants in Fata, from Arabs to Chechens, operating sophisticated training camps with impunity.
The American failure to understand the complexity of the Pakistan problem is perhaps one of the biggest strategic errors of the war in Afghanistan. President Pervaiz Musharraf reluctantly agreed to join the war on terror, and Washington was keen to take him at his word. But as the Taleban fell, the Pakistani security establishment opened an escape hatch for the enemy by removing their troops from the border of the Fata, allowing the Taleban to relocate. The jihadis now have bases, broadcasting stations and the protection of being in a territory that is part of a nuclear-armed state. The West invaded Afghanistan to stop terrorism being given a state home. Yet al-Qa’eda is alive, well and living in Fata.
Just what to do about this is a source of deep division in Washington. Pakistan is deeply nervous about any American incursions into its territory — even if it is territory like Fata where the Pakistan army itself suffered heavy losses at the hands of the Taleban. Britain is pushing hard for a diplomatic solution, saying that no incursion can succeed without the backing of the

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Pakistani military, which is geared up to fight India, not to track down insurgents. And anyway, after years of failed policy, and being played like a fiddle by President Musharraf, America is losing patience. The Pentagon provided helicopter gunships to Musharraf that were intended for fighting the Taleban — only to see them used to mow down separatists in the Baluchistan province.
America is increasingly taking matters into its own hands. First came the attacks from the unmanned drone aircraft, then the occasional missiles into known al-Qa’eda camps. Last month saw a further escalation. The US Air Force sanctioned an air strike targeted at militants, but it killed 11 members of the Frontier Corps — the Raj-era defence force which is supposed to be keeping the militants in check. The Americans refused to apologise despite demands from Pakistan that it do so. The Frontier Corps’ uselessness, says the Pentagon, led to a 50 per cent rise in cross-border attacks. ‘They’re pretty much tribals themselves,’ said Dan McNeill, an American general who stepped down as head of Nato forces in Afghanistan last month.
General McNeill has a point. The Fata is an ideal home for al-Qa’eda because it is so extraordinarily undeveloped. It has intentionally been left as a black hole, with no laws and no rights. Its penal system is the Frontier Crimes Regulation introduced by the British Raj in 1901 to repress unruly tribesmen. This suited Pakistan’s purposes well. Men were granted the vote in 1996 but Pakistan political parties are banned from operating here. It was the ideal conduit for America to ship arms to the mujahideen in the 1980s. Now, it is an ideal breeding ground for militias.
Like so many of the world’s problems, Fata can be traced back to a Brit with a map and a marker pen — Sir Mortimer Durand — who drew the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Afghanistan and Pakistan have never agreed on where it is and anyway the border is ignored both by the Taleban and the dozen other militant groups understood to be crossing it every day. Its sole significance for the jihadis is that it is a line beyond which no American or Brit can chase them.
But this is what looks likely to change. In Barack Obama’s visit to Afghanistan last weekend, the message of the would-be next president was that he would not be quite so squeamish about taking the fight over this border. ‘If Pakistan cannot or will not act, we will take out high-level terrorist targets like bin Laden if we have them in our sights,’ he said. He later concluded that, ‘If we don’t get a handle on that border region, we are going to continue to have problems,’ explicitly placing Pakistan as part of the problem.
Mr Obama said he would send two more brigades to Afghanistan. John McCain, his Republican rival, said he would deploy three — some 10,000 men. So one can tell which way American policy is heading. Rather than a retreat from Afghanistan, there will be a Rhineland-style American military presence there designed to last for a generation. The question is whether to wait for the Fata, Waziristan and other border areas to be policed properly — or just to go in and get the bad guys.
Another character will play a large part in this decision: General David Petraeus, author of the successful ‘surge’ strategy in Iraq. His next job is running US Central Command, overseeing both the Afghanistan and Iraq conflicts. Even before he was formally appointed, he let it be known he had started talks with Pakistan about their counter-insurgency operations.
The idea of American incursions into Pakistani territory deeply unnerves Britain, and has even been discussed in Cabinet. ‘It would be a disaster — I don’t even want to think about the consequences,’ one minister tells me. But the Foreign Office regards such talk as far-fetched. For his part, Mr Miliband is putting a marker down. ‘There is no military solution to the problems of the Fata,’ he said in a speech recently.
Yet the omens point towards a deterioration. The Afghan government has openly accused Pakistani intelligence of being behind a failed attempt to assassinate Hamid Karzai, its President, and claims to have mobile phone records to substantiate this.
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For his part, Mr Karzai has said Afghan troops are prepared to chase militants into Pakistani territory if they flee to Fata — which caused uproar in Islamabad. Such claims and counter-claims dominate the press in Kabul and Islamabad.
Pakistan may buckle first. Yousuf Raza Gilani, its new Prime Minister, will lay out plans to hunt the foreign militants in Fata on Monday. Everyone knows his government’s writ does not extend there, but his speech will be a welcome gesture. A firmer sign of progress was the arrest last Sunday of a senior Taleban commander. Whatever information he yielded must have been fruitful because a few hours later, just after midnight, a guided British precision missile landed in a Helmand village and killed Abdul Rasaq, the third Taleban leader to be killed by the British in as many weeks.
It is accepted by Britain, America and all in the Nato operation that the word ‘Afghanistan war’ is insufficient to describe the problem. The troops I spoke to on my visit to Helmand were fond of the toothpaste tube analogy: squeeze a problem from one end, and it comes out the other. The Taleban have not been defeated, they have simply been moved — and over a border where Nato troops cannot follow. The original objective of depriving al-Qa’eda of a base can only be met by sorting out Pakistan and its badlands. This realisation does not make the task any easier.
A century ago, Britain left the puzzle of the Fata unsolved. Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, then described its border as ‘the razor’s edge on which hang suspended the modern issues of war and peace, of life and death to nations’. As Britain and America brace themselves for the next phase of this expanding Afghan conflict, there will be plenty of time to reflect on how frighteningly true these words remain.

#4

Taliban attempts to spark Afghan-Pakistan border incident
By Bill RoggioJuly 12, 2008 10:27 AM

A cross-border incident that resulted in Pakistani and Afghan security forces casualties was launched by the Taliban with the intent to “to spark a border incident,” the International Security Assistance Force reported.

“Insurgents simultaneously fired at targets in Afghanistan and Pakistan on the evening of July 10,” ISAF reported in a press release. Afghan police in Paktika province and a Pakistani military unit along the border in South Waziristan reported taking mortar fire at the same time, the US military stated. Eight Pakistani soldiers and four Afghan police were reported wounded in the initial attack.

The US military determined the origin of mortar fire to have started at two points inside Afghanistan and returned fire with artillery and a laser-guided GBU-13 bomb dropped from an F-15. The US fires were “verified to have hit the origins of insurgent fire.”

The initial reports of the incident were confused, and focused on the attack inside Pakistan. News reports speculated that the US military launched a Predator air strike or artillery attack on a Pakistani military outpost.

The Afghan Army and police and the US military have repelled a series of attacks in the border provinces of Paktia, Paktika, and Khost over the past three weeks. The Taliban are attempting to destabilize the eastern region and overrun Afghan government centers and Coalition bases. Attacks in the east are up by more than 40 percent from last year, according to the US military. More than 200 Taliban fighters have been killed during the clashes. Many of the attacks have originated from Pakistan.

Tensions along the ill-defined, rugged border have escalated since the Pakistani government initiated its latest round of peace accords with the Taliban and allied extremists in the tribal areas and settled districts in the Northwest Frontier Province. Peace agreements have been signed with the Taliban in North Waziristan, Swat, Dir, Bajaur, Malakand, Mohmand, and Khyber. Negotiations are under way in South Waziristan, Kohat, and Mardan. The Taliban have violated the terms of these agreements in every region where accords have been signed.

#5

CIA Cites Pakistan Spy Agency’s Ties to Militants
Report: CIA Confronted Pakistan Officials About Its Spy Agency’s Deepening Ties to Militants
The Associated Press

NEW YORK

The CIA has confronted senior Pakistani officials with evidence showing that members of the country’s spy service have deepened their ties with some militant groups responsible for a surge of violence in Afghanistan, possibly including the suicide bombing this month of the Indian Embassy in Kabul, The New York Times reported.

A top CIA official traveled to Islamabad this month with new information about ties between Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency and militants operating in Pakistan’s tribal areas, the newspaper said on its Web site late Tuesday. Its sources were American military and intelligence officials it did not identify.

The Times said the CIA assessment pointed to links between the ISI and the militant network led by Jalaluddin Haqqani, which American officials believe maintains close ties to senior figures of al-Qaida in Pakistan’s tribal areas.

The CIA has depended heavily on the ISI for information about militants in Pakistan despite long-standing concerns about divided loyalties within the Pakistani spy service, which had close relations with the Taliban in Afghanistan before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The visit to Pakistan by the CIA official, Stephen R. Kappes, the agency’s deputy director, was described by several American military and intelligence officials in interviews in recent days, the Times said. Some of those who were interviewed made clear that they welcomed the decision by the CIA to take a harder line toward the ISI’s dealings with militant groups.

Pakistan’s prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, is in Washington meeting with Bush administration officials. In an interview broadcast Tuesday on the PBS-TV’s “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer,” Gilani said that to say that some in the ISI are “sympathetic to the militants, this is not believable. … We will not allow that.”

CIA spokeswoman Marie Harf refused to comment on the Times report late Tuesday.

The newspaper said it was unclear whether CIA officials have concluded that contacts between the ISI and militant groups are blessed at the highest levels of Pakistan’s spy service and military or are carried out by rogue elements of Pakistan’s security apparatus.

Kappes made his secret visit to Pakistan on July 12, joining Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, for meetings with senior Pakistani civilian and military leaders, the Times said.

The meetings took place days after a suicide bomber attacked the Indian Embassy in Kabul, killing dozens. Afghanistan’s government has publicly accused the ISI of having a hand in the attack.

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

Copyright © 2008 ABC News Internet Ventures

#6

Musharraf shat himself on 9/11, realising that if he did not abandon Pakistan’s support for the Taliban and their ilk his country would suffer the consequences from America. So he did a back flip and sucked up to the US but subsequently has appeared to play a double game. Pakistan has undoubtedly made a significant contribution to tracking down and capturing some serious Al Qaeda types, but at the same time elements in Pakistan, notably the ISI http://www.fas.org/irp/world/pakistan/isi/ , have been up to their necks in supporting the same crew http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/washingtondc/la-fg-isi1-2008aug01,0,4370408.story

The problem isn’t so much that Pakistan is a duplicitous nation run by duplicitous people, but that the structure of its government, military and intelligence agencies divides power so that the ISI in particular can continue to pursue its interests whether or not they agree with the national interests as expressed by the national government, which after all is essentially a military dictatorship with a facade of democracy. Nobody is really in control of everything.

It may be only a matter of time before Taliban type elements get power in Pakistan, which should make things interesting. Probably more for India than anyone else in the short term, just to add to the existing tensions between India and Pakistan http://www.thenation.com/blogs/dreyfuss/341370 It might well produce the first nuclear exchange.

These are the sort of people who should be supported by the rest of the world to put Pakistan on a better path, even if they are lawyers, http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/protesting-pakistani-lawyers-close-in-on-the-capital/2008/06/13/1213321603286.html instead of supporting Musharraf, who responded to the lawyers’ attempts to uphold lawful rule by jailing many of them http://abajournal.com/news/5000_pakistan_lawyers_reportedly_arrested/

For conspiracy theorists, or maybe people who are just unusually well informed
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO111A.html

If Dubya was really serious about pulling out all stops in his war on tourists, he would have invaded Pakistan rather than Iraq, to squeeze the seriously dangerous elements which fled there after Afghanistan was invaded.