As things fall apart around us, it is a struggle to make sense of any of it. Hold your head or cover your face or curl up in the fetal position, escape is impossible.It’s there in the newspapers, on news channels, the streets, homes and offices: the graphic, almost ghoulish, intersection of war and politics in this country. And nobody, not one person screeching on TV or expounding in private, is truly able to explain what is happening.
After months of a quasi-siege of the Baitullah Mehsud network’s lairs in South Waziristan, the army has finally moved in. We were told, in private and sometimes on the record, that there were around 10,000 militants there who needed to be killed or captured. But where have they gone? The ISPR’s figures don’t add up; a dozen killed here, a handful captured there, a few score killed or injured elsewhere.
Strongholds of the militants have fallen and been retaken by the army, but it sure doesn’t seem like there is an army of 10,000 militants waiting to fight to the death.
Have the militants done the equivalent of circling the wagons in a small area? Or have they laid elaborate defences to trip up the army and escaped elsewhere?
I can’t help but recall a short, telling exchange at a briefing in Islamabad on the eve of Operation Rah-i-Nijat. The army official was confident that the militants couldn’t flee to Afghanistan because there is a strip of land between the Mehsud strongholds and the Pak-Afghan border where troops were lying in wait to snare the militants.
Yes, but could they not escape via North Waziristan, asked one of the country’s better-informed militancy analysts. If there was an answer, I didn’t hear it and the briefing moved on.
A central problem of the military operations undertaken in the last year and a half is now becoming apparent: the TTP militants have fanned out in so many parts of Fata and northwest Pakistan that the army may be trapped in a dangerous game of whack-a-mole.
Swat, Malakand division, Bajaur, Mohmand, Khyber and now South Waziristan — that’s already a long list of areas in which operations have been undertaken. But, from a security point of view, the alarming thing is that after each area the army enters, new threats begin to be pointed out elsewhere.
Even as the operation in South Waziristan continues, fears have been raised about a ‘second base’ of the militants in Kurram and Orakzai agencies. We have seen this before; during Operation Rah-i-Rast in Malakand division, South Waziristan was pointed out as the ‘centre of gravity’ of militancy. Before that, during the operations in Bajaur and Mohmand, other areas were similarly pointed out.
It is too soon to say, but the army must be aware of the possibility of being dragged into a quagmire, a situation in which it is forced to fan out across Fata and NWFP to deny the militants a ‘base’ but unable to do anything about the militants’ preferred tactic of striking at the soft underbelly of the state inside the country’s cities and towns.
Of course, a counter-insurgency was always going to be a drawn-out, messy affair and these are early days yet, but given the sub-optimal nature of the state it’s not clear if a sequential approach to counter-insurgency can win this war. By sequential I don’t just mean a series of military operations in various parts of the country, but the other crucial element of a successful counter-insurgency: counter-terrorism measures, especially in the cities and towns.
At the moment, the intelligence and law-enforcement agencies seem simply overwhelmed by the wave of violence in Pakistan’s cities and they are playing a desperate game of catch-up. The government of the day will always get the blame for these failures, and to an extent that is correct, but the fact is the issue goes deeper than that: the state itself is not geared towards effective, let alone adequate, counter-terrorism measures.
The militants will know that if they can sustain a wave of terrorist violence across the country, pressure will build on the army and the government in the weeks and months ahead for ‘peace talks’ and ‘deals’ that will once again give the militants’ breathing space in their tribal strongholds. But strengthening the intelligence, surveillance and law-enforcement planks to stop, or at least slow down, the wave of violence is not just a matter of throwing more resources at the problem.
More resources are needed, absolutely, but time and time again knowledgeable analysts point to something else: the lack of will in the army to call a spade a spade and to discard its prioritisation approach, wherein it only regards those groups which are directly, repeatedly and ferociously attacking the state as a threat that needs to be tackled immediately.
If evidence for this was needed, it came during that same briefing on the eve of Operation Rah-i-Nijat. The Laskhar-i-Taiba, we were told, was being deliberately conflated with Al Qaeda as part of an Indian plan to get the state here to do something about a problem that bothered the Indians the most.
There was an acceptance that south Punjab did pose some problem and the correct approach of using civilian agencies rather than the army to fight it was admitted, but you can’t help but wonder: how genuinely can we be fighting all elements of the toxic brew of militancy in the country today when the army is still trotting out the Indian propaganda line?
And the obvious corollary: how can we expect to win this war if we aren’t fighting all the pieces in the militancy jigsaw? Have a look at the names and domiciles of the militants blamed for the current wave of violence in the country. At least half, if not a majority, of them are Punjabi, not tribal.
The army can grimly march from one tribal agency to another for years, give its troops the best counter-insurgency training possible, get all the equipment it needs, but it will never win this war until it recognises the enemy for what it is: deadly, complex, hydra-headed and capable of growing elsewhere even as parts of it are hacked off.
