The Urgent Need for a Broader Counterinsurgency Approach in the FATA

By Jonathan Winer

Asif Ali Zardari, imminently to become Pakistan’s President, faces a resurgent Taliban, ongoing terrorist attacks and a fractured political environment which makes effective responses all the harder. President Pervez Musharraf’s resignation as President on August 18 could have provided an opportunity for a coalition government to take charge on security issues. But the withdrawal on August 25 of Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) from the coalition has left Zardari’s Pakistan People's Party (PPP) weakened. Immediate political challenges include the Islamist party Jamaat-i-Islami’s efforts to have the PML-N to join its All Pakistan Democratic Movement in opposition to the secularist PPP, making it all the harder for the PPP government to take the aggressive military steps needs to combat the Taliban and al-Qaeda where they are operating in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and South Waziristan.

Located along Pakistan's northwestern border with Afghanistan, FATA consists of seven tribal agencies and six frontier regions with more than 3 million people. The FATA continues to be administered by Pakistan along an administrative scheme developed more than a century ago by the Colonial British. The people of the FATA have limited civil rights, and even more limited social services, with high poverty, high unemployment, low literacy, and an infrastructure that could charitably be called underdeveloped. Many areas remain barely subject to Pakistani rule, providing territory for criminals as well as extremists. The porous border is a narcotics smuggler’s paradise, exploited by the Taliban among others. It is also among the world's primary terrorist safe-havens, despite ongoing U.S.-Pakistani military efforts there, and the center of cross-border Taliban and al-Qaeda destabilization efforts in Afghanistan.

In the best of times, any civilian leader would have his hands full trying to gain control of the FATA, as well as of Pakistan’ two strongest institutions, the Pakistani military and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), both of whom have long-standing ties to extremist groups, including the Taliban, recurrent involvement in drug trafficking, and well-documented histories of corruption.

But these are among the worst of times in Pakistan. Hostilities between Pakistan’s security institutions and the Taliban are intensifying. On August 25, Pakistan banned Pakistan’s most important Taliban organization, the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), based in South Waziristan. The government froze its bank accounts and assets, and announced rewards for the arrest of its leaders. This move was prompted after serious assaults by militants on Pakistani governmental installations and officials. These included a bloody suicide assault on a government arms factory located in Wah, just 18 miles from Islamabad, which killed an estimated 100 Pakistani civilians, a bombing of a senior police official in Karachi, and an attack on a container truck carrying two armored personal carriers out of Karachi port leaving for a mission with NATO in Afghanistan. In the same period, Taliban militants operating in Peshawar blew up homes of a senior local official of the Awami National Party, as well as a college for women operated by the government.

According to Pakistani press accounts, the suicide attackers who blew themselves up at the Pakistan Ordinance Factories at Wah were just 15 to 16 years old, and had been trained at a terrorist camp in South Waziristan and transported up to Islamabad for the bombings. The TTP took credit for the attacks, and then promptly offered the government a cease fire, to which the government responded with the bans. According to Pakistan’s Ministry of the Interior, the TTP had been responsible for many of the other suicide bombings that have taken place in Pakistan over the past two years, which collectively have been estimated to have killed more than 4,000 Pakistanis.

This represents a strategy on the part of the Taliban to undermine government control of the FATA. Since 2004, the Taliban have reportedly killed more than 300 tribal leaders or maliks, so that many of those remaining now march to the Taliban’s drummer.

Evidence of the Taliban’s growing political confidence is the announcement in made August 26 that it had banned foreign journalists from being present anywhere in FATA or North Waziristan. Ahmadullah Ahmadi, spokesman for Taliban leader Hafiz Gul Bahadur, said in a statement that entry of all the journalists belonging to Western electronic and print media had been banned as “harmful for Islam, Muslims and the country.” The Taliban spokesman warned that journalists who ignored the ban would be punished.

In the region around Peshawar, the Pakistani military has been fighting militants in rural areas such as Bajur, said to house some 3000 insurgent forces training for combat in Afghanistan. About 400 insurgent fighters have been reported killed in these operations in August, which is also causing a substantial refugee migration estimated at involving between 50,000 and 200,000 people who have now reportedly fled Bajur and the nearby Mohmand tribal region.

There are differing views of how substantial a presence al-Qaeda and the Taliban have in FATA. In August, Ted Gistaro, the U.S. national intelligence officer for transnational threats, said that Al Qaeda had achieved safe haven status in FATA equivalent to that it had achieved prior to 9-11 in Afghanistan by making local alliances with tribal leaders and pushing government authority from the area. He also warned that they were using their space and time to plan further attacks on the west. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates disagreed, taking the point of view that Al Qaeda had limited ability to communicate or travel in FATA. Regardless of the doctrinal disputes, the fact remains that terrorists continue to be successful at regularly blowing up government facilities throughout the area.

Both the U.S. and Pakistan have an interest in maintaining day-to-day military and intelligence cooperation against terrorist targets of mutual interest, as well as between Pakistan and NATO with regard to operations in Afghanistan. The U.S. has clearly placed its interests in strengthening and stabilizing Zardari, viewing him as the U.S. once did Musharaff as the best help we can get under the circumstances.

How well is that working? On September 2, Pakistan's security forces announced they had just missed the opportunity to capture al-Qaeda's second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahiri. According to Rehman Malik, the adviser to Pakistan's prime minister on security affairs, Pakistani forces recently stormed a residence where al-Zawahiri was supposed to be, and killed his wife in his absence. No information as to whether the result was due to bad intelligence, poor operational security, poor military execution, or bad luck. Significantly, Malik emphasized the close cooperation between Al Qaeda and the Taliban in Pakistan, describing the Taliban as an extension in Pakistan of Al Qaeda.

Longer term, a new American President will have to come to grips with the reality of the findings of the GAO in its April 2008 and May 2008 reports to the Congress. The GAO found that the United States has not met its national security goals to destroy terrorist threats and close the safe haven in Pakistan’s FATA, in large part because it had relied principally on the Pakistan military to address U.S. national security goals. The GAO found al Qaeda had regenerated its ability to attack the United States from a safe haven it created in the FATA. And it found the U.S. had failed to develop a comprehensive plan for ending terrorist safe havens in the FATA, a need identified by the 9-11 Commission in 2004 and legislatively mandated in 2007. The GAO identified one reason for the failure the simple fact that no one had yet been put in charge of developing a U.S. strategy to destroy terrorist enclaves in the FATA and close the safe haven there.

The GAO reflected the reality that the U.S. and Pakistan's existing approach in the FATA, which has been almost entirely military, has failed. In recent months, Pakistan's civilian government has sought to negotiate with some tribes to end combat, withdraw the army and only use it on last resort, while promoting economic development in theory, but in practice, ceding the territory to the Taliban. An alternative would broaden U.S. and multilateral assistance to the FATA with buy-in on the Pakistani side, to provide social services and rule of law on the ground, results never before achieved in the FATA by anyone. Assistance programs can’t eliminate the injuries brought on any population by armed conflict. But they can mitigate them, and play a transformative role in giving people a stake in an alternative to Talibanism.

In July, Senator Joe Biden, the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (and since then the Democratic Vice Presidential nominee), introduced legislation with his Republican counterpart on the Committee, Richard Lugar (R-IN), under which the U.S. would triple non-security aid to Pakistan to $1.5 billion annually, for a ten year period, to build schools, clinics, and roads, especially in the FATA. That aid would be unconditional, and was reported favorably out of the Foreign Relations Committee in the final days before Congress adjourned for summer recess. Security aid, by contrast, now at $1 billion a year, would be tied to performance. Senators Biden and Lugar would also seek a broader engagement with the Pakistani people, not just the Pakistani government. As former U.S. Ambassador to Pakistan Wendy Chamberlin testified before the Foreign Relations Committee, in June, the non-military aid program the U.S. previously put into place “is at best having little impact, or worse, breeding resentment among the population” given its miniscule size in relations to military support.

The Pakistan-Afghanistan border is and will remain a formidable counter-insurgency challenge for the long-term, a term measured in many years, not many months. The Biden-Lugar initiative, ideally supported by many other countries, could bolster moderate political forces in the FATA and help the government of Pakistan build some popular support in the FATA for the Pakistani state itself through the novel mechanism of providing the area with a steady stream, over a decade, of non-narcotics revenues. To continue with the past military approach alone, unsupported by other activities, is to court catastrophe.

Yet to ignore the urgent military realities, and the existing safe haven is also suicidal. As the Los Angeles Times reported in late August, some senior U.S. military officials are debating "whether the U.S. should act on its own against extremists operating in Pakistan's northwestern tribal regions." If there is anything riskier than relying on Pakistan officials to carry out effective military action without the U.S., it could only be trying to operate in the foreign, ungoverned badlands of the FATA unilaterally. Efforts to rebuild mutual trust remain ongoing. They are certainly needed.

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