Follow-Up: The US Bombing Strategy in Pakistan

Canuckistan pulls me up on yesterday's analysis on US strategy in Pakistan:

Sorry to be argumentive, but I disagree that the missile strikes are designed to crush the insurgency. By their very nature, they are not going to do that....

What the U.S. is doing in Pakistan is the equivalent of targetted assassinations. Targetted assassinations aren’t going to crush the insurgency, but they may slow it down even as they generate more anger and recruits (this isn’t a contradiction but there seems to have been a calculation made that killing leaders trumps new recruits generated by the attacks). It is also possible that the Taliban are hit as secondary targets–the real target remains al-Qaeda and, in that sense, it is an effort to disrupt operations and destabilize.

This is a useful correction, but I think it reinforces the concerns expressed in my original piece.

This US "targeted assassination" may have the effect of disrupting and destabilising Al-Qa'eda, but it also --- for those inclined to mythology --- may have the Hydra effect. Take out one terrorist with these tactics, and two may spring up in anger. As Canuckistan admits, this isn't a winning strategy in the sense of quelling once and for all the Al Qa'eda challenge, merely a perpetual attempt to keep the enemy on the back foot.

So this is the far-from-incidental effect of the operations. If there is no victory, only the ongoing battle, then there are the ongoing casualties in Pakistan who are not Al-Qa'eda or even Taliban. And if that is so, there will be no space for political calm and negotiation, only more and more hostility.

Which, I think, gives me the answer to the question put yesterday: "Can Washington’s planes take out enough bad guys before the Pakistani Government falls and internal conflict in the country becomes more violent?"

No.

The US Bombing Strategy in Pakistan

It now seems clear that US authorities are intent on pursuing a bombing strategy to crush the insurgency --- in its Al Qa'eda, Taliban, and local Pakistani varieties --- in the Northwest Frontier. It also is evident that there is a private deal between the US military and their Pakistani counterparts: Pakistan will publicly criticise but privately accept the air assaults; in exchange, the US promises not to send ground forces (which may or may not include special units) into the area.

The headlines over the possible killing of Rashid Rauf, the British-Pakistani national who was allegedly behind a plot to bomb British airliners in 2006, were a diversion from the real story. The US may be picking off some of Al Qa'eda's planners and operatives, but they are also stirring up discontent over the "collateral damage" of civilians who inconveniently get killed in the bombings. So the tragic race is run: can Washington's planes take out enough bad guys before the Pakistani Government falls and internal conflict in the country becomes more violent?

With all this in mind, here's an assessment from 18 September 2008 which seems on the mark two months later.

Last Thursday, I embarked on a new, challenging, and exciting project, working with postgraduate students at the Clinton Institute for American Studies in Dublin . Introducing a course on contemporary US foreign policy, I tried out the idea of dissecting that morning’s Page 1 story, whatever it might be, in the New York Times.

I punched in the URL and upon the large screen is the headline, “Bush Said to Give Orders Allowing Raids in Pakistan”. The opening paragraph confirmed I had more than enough for discussion, “President Bush secretly approved orders in July that for the first time allow American Special Operations forces to carry out ground assaults inside Pakistan without the prior approval of the Pakistani government, according to senior American officials.”

Well, there you go. By chance rather than design I could open the course with perhaps the most significant development in US foreign policy this year. Significant because the US Government was making clear that it was taking the war against the Afghanistan insurgency across the border into Pakistan . Even more so because the US would be fighting not just with bombs from the air but special forces on the ground. Especially so because the US would do so without the over t co-operation of the Pakistani Government.

To be blunt: on Monday, Asif Zardari finally reached his goal of becoming President of Pakistan, a country portrayed as a steadfast ally of the US in the “War on Terror”. By Thursday, Washington didn’t give, to use the academic term, “a rat’s ass” about the thoughts of Zardari. On Monday, Pakistan ’s military was portrayed as side-by-side with American counterparts; by Thursday, there was the prospect of armed clashes between the two sets of troops.

With allies like these, who needs....? You fill in the blank.

The backdrop to this story is now well-known. On 11 September 2001, the Head of Pakistan’s intelligence services, Mahmood Ahmed, was in Washington discussing co-operation with US officials. Indeed, as the planes hit the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, Ahmed was having breakfast with the chairmen of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees. Within 24 hours, discussions had become a showdown. Undersecretary of State Richard Armitage set out a seven-point ultimatum to Ahmed. When Pakistani leader Pervez Musharraf confirmation to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that the American conditions would be met, the essential alliance in the War on Terror had been established.

There were holdover tensions from Pakistan ’s years of support for a liaison with the Taliban. In January 2002, Seymour Hersh of The New Yorker blew the whistle on the hundreds, maybe thousands, of Pakistanis who had fought on the wrong side and been captured by the Americans during fighting in Afghanistan . The detainees were shipped to Kunduz, from where Pakistani helicopters took them home. As US attentions turned to Iraq , the inconvenience that Osama bin Laden was also now sheltered in Pakistan ’s autonomous tribal areas as gradually accepted. Months turned into years, and President Musharraf’s attention (and that of his critics) turned to internal political/judicial matters and, eventually, the imposition of martial law.

So what has happened to re-make Pakistan from sturdy if arguably ineffectual partner of the US in regional politics and the War on Terror into obstacle to US operations? No doubt the forced handover from Musharraf to Zardari is a partial explanation; there is no sign of American faith in the reliability of the new Prime Minister, who is likely to be focused on his battle with the judiciary rather than a showdown with Al Qa’eda.

The catalyst, however, is the Bush Administration’s last roll of the dice in Afghanistan . As I noted Monday, the President’s statement two weeks ago offered both victory without substance and a challenge without an answer. If the small number of US troops being pulled with Iraq belied a long-term occupation that is increasingly out of touch with political developments, the small number of US troops being sent to Afghanistan showed that the Administration has nothing but a small bandage to slap on its new Number One Emergency Case.

An extra 9000 boots on the ground won’t cover much of the problem area in Afghanistan . At most, it will allow the US to carry out well-publicised operations to clear the Taliban from villages which are likely to vulnerable during the next counter-attack of the insurgency. Put very bluntly, in the absence of effective political and economic reconstruction, Washington has to hope that local leaders and their militias are strong enough to keep the Taliban out. It’s notable, for example, that Herat in the western part of the country is relatively stable under a local regime on good terms with Iran , while Mazar-al-Sharif in the north is “secure” because of the local but forceful presence of General Dostum.

This doesn’t add up to long-term influence, however, for the Americans and it far from signals long-term authority for the Kabul Government of Hamid Karzai. So Washington gets the worst of both worlds: potential rivals reap the benefits from the areas that they control or influence while the US carries the can for instability in other regions.

Even if European governments and other allies in NATO and the International Security Assistance Force were willing to shift a token number of soldiers to the conflict zone in the south and centre of the country, that wouldn’t offer any resolution of the underlying problems. And it certainly wouldn’t address the emerging headache for the Americans and Kabul , the insurgent violence in the east along the Pakistan border.

So, if you haven’t got the troop numbers or a meaningful plan of reconstruction to bring villages into a secure nation, what do you do? Well, you resort to those limited but hopefully effectively targeted operations that “decapitate” the opposition. That means air power and that means special operations on the ground, special operations to assist with targeting of the airstrikes and special operations to liquidate the bad guys.

It is no coincidence that the “surge” in Iraq has included recently-hyped “fusion cells”, small units of specially-trained soldiers to capture and kill insurgents. And, given the incomplete if not false impression that this has made a long-term difference in Iraq , the Americans will be trying to spread the model to the next battleground.

But even as this strategy covers up the problem of the lack of long-term troop numbers to “stabilise” Afghanistan , it ignores some fundamentals of special warfare. Even the Iraq example should be instructive: the “fusion cells” complement the cultivation of local leaders and their militias to secure a particular area. In Pakistan , where is that cultivation of leaders in the tribal areas going to take place? Well, given that the airstrikes and operations are alienating that leadership, their families, and their communities, the answer would be Nowhere. Tribal leaders have already responded by promising to raise forces to fight the US .

And here’s another lesson that it ignores. You can’t limit the effect of dropped bombs and elite forces trained to kill. Far more important than any ripples of stability you hope to get on the other side of the border are the waves of instability you set off in Pakistan . The warning of the Pakistani military leadership that it will opposed American ground incursions may be a bluff or even the Janus trick of giving a stern face of defending their people and sovereignty while privately giving another face of acceptance to the Americans. But, at a minimum, Zardari is exposed as a political leader with barely a shred of authority.

And, in Pakistan with its recent history, what do you think that means? I’m guessing that it leaves only the Pakistan military, whichever way it chooses to play the hand with the Americans, as the only significant force in the country with a symbolic and real modicum of power. If Zardari protests this, the prospect of his overthrow emerges. If he accepts his emasculation, he is no more than an irrelevant figurehead. Either way, it’s an effective coup.

I’ve only seen one commentator reach back for the historical parallel. In 1969/70 the Nixon Administration, frustrated at the mobility of the Vietnamese insurgency, starts the airborne demolition of Cambodia . Eventually that tearing apart of the Cambodian “sanctuary” took the ground from under the country’s leadership, and Prince Sihanouk was overthrown. The eventual victors who promised to restore sovereignty and dignity? The Khmer Rouge.

It’s not an exact replay of history, and Pakistan may not have to be reset to Year Zero. Neither, however, does the American strategy offer any advance. Seven years after promising that it would pursue the War on Terror to preserve the security and sovereignty of those were “with us”, Washington is now shredding that assurance.

Fact x Importance = News (19 Nov): Camp X-Ray, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan-Pakistan, and Somalia

TORTURE AND CAMP X-RAY: HERE'S ONE FOR THE OBAMA IN-TRAY

The New York Times reports, "Military prosecutors have decided to file new war-crimes charges against" Mohammed al-Qahtani." It continues, "The decision will put additional pressure on the incoming Obama administration to announce whether it will abandon the Bush administration’s military commission system for prosecuting terror suspects."

No kidding. Al-Qahtani may have been dubbed the "20th hijacker" for the media (a tag that has been used for others like Zacarias Moussaoui) but the real headline issue is that he was the poster boy for the "enhanced interrogation" techniques pushed through --- without legal sanction --- by the Bush Administration. The issue of how far to go in questioning him was one of the test cases for the series of Administration memos in 2002 that set aside the Geneva Conventions and tried out methods, authorised by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, such as "prolonged isolation, sleep deprivation, forced nudity, exposure to cold, involuntary grooming...[and] requiring him to dance with a male interrogator and to obey dog commands, including 'stay,' 'come' and 'bark'".

A Pentagon inquiry in 2005 found that the techniques were "degrading" and "abusive". Possibly in light of the fear that the case had been compromised by the not-quite-torture approach, the military without explanation dropped charges against al-Qahtani in May 2008.

IRAQ: AL-MALIKI TRIES TO SELL THE STATUS OF FORCES AGREEMENT

Keeping up his part of the bargain with the US Government, the Iraqi Prime Minister made a 12-minute speech in support of the agreement signed on Sunday by his Cabinet.

Perhaps more importantly, Ayatollah Sistani refrained from a full endorsement of the agreement on Tuesday: “Any agreement that doesn’t win national consensus will not be acceptable and will be a reason for more suffering for Iraqis.”

Reports that Iran had privately shifted to support the agreement were not borne out, at least in public, on Tuesday. A Foreign Ministry spokesman said, “We have to wait. Please allow us to make our stance after it is finalized.” The Speaker of the Parliament (and probably Presidential candidate in 2009) Ali Larijani did not wait, however, saying, that the US "was seeking to turn Iraq into one of its states....The Iraqi Parliament should keep on resisting.”

IRAN: POLITICAL AND LEGAL UNCERTAINTIES

A series of stories to ponder from and about Tehran:

The Iranian Parliament confirmed the new Interior Minister, Sadeq Mahsouli, by a 138-112 margin despite questions about his wealth. He replaces Ali Kordan, who was dismissed by the Parliament after the revelations of his faked doctorate from Oxford University.

In Baghdad, US forces have detained an Iranian who they claim is a senior member of the Quds Forces of the Revolutionary Guards. They allege not only that he was smuggling weapons but also carrying cocaine.

Meanwhile, Jahan News is reporting that Hossein Derahkshan, a prominent blogger who also writes for The Guardian of London, has been arrested on charges of spying for Israel.

AFGHANISTAN-PAKISTAN: ALL IS WELL, REALLY

From the Washington Post: "A rise in Taliban attacks along the length of a vital NATO supply route that runs through this border town in the shadow of the Khyber Pass has U.S. officials seeking alternatives, including the prospect of beginning deliveries by a tortuous overland journey from Europe."

Simon Jenkins, who has always been grumpy about the US-UK intervention in Afghanistan since October 2001, is now even grumpier:

The error of Afghanistan is far more serious than the error of Iraq. If the resulting insurgency is now exported to Pakistan, both errors will seem peccadillos. Pakistan is the sixth largest state in the world, and nuclear-armed.
The awful prospect is that Obama and Brown may feel too weak to learn from Iraq and pull back. They will blunder on, not to a clean defeat but to something far worse, a war of attrition whose poison will spread across a subcontinent.

SOMALIA: YOU MIGHT WANT TO TAKE A GLANCE

While everyone is riveted by The Pirate Story off the Somalian coast, Martin Fletcher in The Times of London offers a potent reminder of how the War on Terror has brought further disruption, destruction, and even chaos to the country:

There are several insurgent forces, but one of the most powerful is the Shabab - a group of virulently anti-Western jihadists that has now eclipsed the Islamic Courts movement of which it was once part.

Somalia's nightmare may be only just starting. President Yusuf predicts wholesale slaughter if the Shabab seize Mogadishu. Diplomats fear that the Shabab will wage all-out war with other insurgent forces, including those of the Islamic Courts, for control of the country once Ethiopian troops - the common enemy - are withdrawn.

Fact x Importance = News: The Stories We're Watching

Top Story of the Day: Hillary or Nicolas?

Nope, it's not Senator Clinton, who may or may not be the next Secretary of State.

Nor is it the Global Financial Summit --- yet. Although President Bush welcomed the guests last night, the serious talkin' doesn't start until today. And even then, given the relatively low profile the US will have --- the Bush Administration is almost paralysed, and the Obama folks have chosen to stay in the background --- it will be up to the Europeans to make the running.

No, the surprise headline for this morning is the rocket that French President Nicolas Sarkozy sent to Washington. Or, rather, the US missiles that he is trying to hand back to President Bush.

In talks with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, Sarkozy "joined Russia in condemning the Pentagon's plans to install missile defence bases in central Europe yesterday and backed President Dmitri Medvedev's previously ignored calls for a new pan-European security pact".

The New York Times spectacularly misses the significance, somehow deciding that it lies in "Russia Backs Off on Europe Missile Threat". Russia's feint at putting missiles on its western borders was a political manoeuvre, and to the extent that it has brought Sarkozy away from (or reinforced his existing opposition to) US missile defence, it's worked.

The French President's statement isn't a detachment of Europe from the US. His proposal is that the Organization for Security Cooperation in Europe, to which both Russia and the US belong, discuss the security pact next summer.

It is, however, a distancing of France from not only missile defence but the US-preferred attempt to expand NATO's reach. That is going to prompt an immediate tangle between France and governments such as Czechoslovakia, which are still clinging to the US missile defence plan, but I suspect Sarkozy is looking to Germany for backing. And I think --- with a smile --- that will put a marker down for British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.

All in all, the timing of Sarkozy's announcement should add a bit of political spice to the financial talks in the US today.

Under-noticed Story of the Day: Food rather than Rockets

The sad ritual is again being played out on the Israel-Gaza border. The Israelis have made tank raids across the border, and Palestianian groups have lobbed rockets into southern Israel. The Israelis send out their Government spokesmen and, as few US and British media outlets will speak to a Hamas representative, the narrative of Tel Aviv standing firm against Hamas-backed terror gets another paragraph.

The far-from-insignificant story behind the story is the effects of the Israeli blockade on Gaza. On Wednesday, Juan Cole highlighted a UN report that it is running out of food to distribute in the besieged area. The Washington Post in cautious terms --- "residents are warning of a humanitarian crisis because Israel has sealed the territory's borders" --- has now picked up on this, but it is The Independent of London that highlights the impact:

The Israeli blockade of Gaza has led to a steady rise in chronic malnutrition among the 1.5 million people living in the strip, according to a leaked report from the Red Cross.

Speculation of the Day: Obama and Gitmo

William Glaberson in the New York Times pens the analysis that Barack Obama's "pledge to close the detention center is bringing to the fore thorny questions under consideration by his advisers". Significantly, however, this is no comment from the Obama camp.

Adam Cohen in the NewYork Times has a more substantial development. Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, in my opinion one of the most honourable men in Congress, is not going to let President Obama rest in indecision on issues such as Camp X-Ray, surveillance, and other civil rights issues:

Mr. Feingold has been compiling a list of areas for the next president to focus on, which he intends to present to Mr. Obama. It includes amending the Patriot Act, giving detainees greater legal protections and banning torture, cruelty and degrading treatment. He wants to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to restore limits on domestic spying. And he wants to roll back the Bush administration's dedication to classifying government documents.

Negotiation of the Week: Talks with the Taliban?

As violence escalates in Afghanistan, The Independent of London reported on Thursday: "The Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, will today brief Gordon Brown on talks being held with the Taliban with the aim of ending the conflict in his country."

This is a continuing development. Karzai and the Pakistani Government are now pressing the option of discussions with the "moderate" Taliban. Western governments are not necessarily averse to the idea, with US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates saying it should be considered. However, with the Bush Administration in a no-win position --- it gets no credit if talks eventually succeed under an Obama-led effort and it takes the rap if the discussions collapse before 20 January --- this story will be carried forward by folks outside the US.

Fact x Importance = News: Pakistan

There have been a swirl of news stories in the last 72 hours about the conflicts in Afghanistan and the Northwest Frontier of Pakistan. Beyond the escalation in bombings and shootings, the most significant may offer clues to future US policy.

These three articles, in particular, raised eyebrows. On Tuesday Antony Loyd in The Times of London and , Ben Farmer in The Daily Telegraph, and Jane Perlez and Pir Zubair Shah in the New York Times reported that they had found "Taliban maps, manuals and propaganda...at training camps in Pakistan showing the sophistication of the insurgent's operations in the country's tribal areas". Perlez and Shah wrote of "tunnels [that] stretched for more than half a mile and were equipped with ventilation systems so that fighters could withstand a long siege. In some places, it took barrages of 500-pound bombs to break the tunnels apart." Loyd's dramatic narrative spoke of a map "which is not the work of a renegade gunman resistant to central authority; it is the assessment of a skilled and experienced fighter, and begins to explain how more than 400 Pakistani soldiers have been killed or wounded since August in Bajaur". It was Farmer, however, who offered the chilling sentence: "Britain and America...believe that Ayman al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's deputy, has been in Bajaur."

With respect to Perlez/Shah, Loyd, and Farmer, the significance of their reports was not their discovery. It is not surprising, given the porous Afghan-Pakistani border, that Taliban --- many of whose leaders were educated in Pakistani madrassas --- would be in the Northwest Frontier. And it would be a very poor, or foolhardy, fighter who would wander around without a map or a few leaflets to try and win converts to the cause. No, the significance of the stories is in the answer to the question: how did reporters for two British newspapers and the top print outlet in the United States suddenly make the same discovery?

Because all the reporters were taken there by the Pakistani military, who were at hand to emphasise (in the exact same words in the two articles), "There were students here taking notes on bomb-making and guerrilla warfare." Loyd took his piece further with the help of an "eminent Pakistani political figure": "Al-Qaeda and the Taleban...set up a joint headquarters in 2004 as an 'Islamic emirate' in North Waziristan, headed by Sirajuddin Haqqani, an Afghan Taleban commander." The tribal areas were "today the same as Afghanistan was before September 11 - controlled by foreign and local militants who fight a war on both sides of the border.”

So the Pakistanis, having lost more than 400 soldiers in fighting in the Northwest Frontier since August, have launched a PR campaign to establish the need for further and, presumably, more aggressive operations. It's not just a question of Pakistani troops, however.

Note Perlez's reference to tunnels which can only be blown apart by 500-pound bombs. The military branch with the majority of those bombs is not the Pakistani Air Force; it's their American counterparts. While it was Pakistanis who took the Western journalists to Bajaur, there should be no doubt: this is also part of an American campaign to justify continuing "hot pursuit" operations into the Northwest Frontier, even at the cost of civilian casualties.

And even at the possible cost to the Pakistani Government. A notable absence in all three stories was any comment from members of the Zardari Administration, unless Loyd's mysterious "eminent political figure" happens to be the Prime Minister in disguise.

Increasingly, it's looking like US forces are working with Pakistani military, who in turn are distinct from the purported political leaders of Pakistan. The implications of that co-operation, and effective internal split in the Pakistani ruling elite, may be far more significant than any more tunnels that intrepid Western journalists happen to "discover".