February Issue 2007

Like a recurring nightmare, the perilous situation in Pakistan’s tribal belt with Afghanistan continues to present grave challenges to Islamabad’s decision-makers. In Pakistan’s capital, the nights are long and the days starved for good news from that remote frontier of trouble. Intelligence reports are piling up of heightened Taliban activity across the 2500-kilometer-long stretch of a poorly marked border. Back-to-back suicide attacks in Peshawar and Dera Ismail Khan on the eighth and ninth of Muharram, killing five policemen, including two top officials and 14 civilians, seem to suggest a whole new pattern of violence that can have wider regional implications.

For the time being, however, giving policy-makers sleepless nights, are thoughts of losing the carefully nurtured goodwill of Washington.

Senior political sources admit to the “growing edginess” in Washington’s assessment of Pakistan’s role in the fight against Taliban resurgence. Although US officials have not unfurled their litany of complaints, the volume of indirect messages has grown in the past few months, indicating more forcefully that Pakistan needs to clamp down harder on the marauding insurgents.

Senior officials, who are privy to these messages, say that there are primarily two issues raised in them: one is stronger and better intelligence and pre-emptive coordination with the Afghanistan-based US network; and the second involves pinning down the facilitators of the Taliban in Pakistan’s tribal belt.

The first issue, these officials contend, is hampered by the second.

“There was a time when Pakistan had a widespread network of informants and inside operators in these areas. This network was based on trust and mutual accommodation and was, to a great degree, cemented by the shared ideological concerns raised by the Soviet invasion of a Muslim country. After the September 11 attacks, most of this network was destroyed, and we made an institutional break with the Taliban. Now our contacts are exceedingly limited; consequently, our ability to gather information about the movements of suspected terrorists is very restricted.”

The same official also points out that Pakistan’s attempts at clipping the wings of the “facilitators” or “ideological brothers and ethnic cousins of the Taliban” are severely undermined by Islamabad’s “pro-US” leanings.

“We understand our situation, but the tribesmen do not. To them, the US is as anti-Islam as the Soviets were. If jihad against the Soviets was mandatory, it is also mandatory against the US — or all those standing by their side. Our capacity to present an ideological counter to these simple but powerful perceptions in a semi-developed hub of religious conservatism is non-existent. How the hell are we supposed to be getting pinpointed information from those who see us as enemies?” says the official. But “these constraints notwithstanding, we still have a near 80 per cent success rate in getting leads,” says the official, who gets to analyse some of the information passed on to Washington.

Despite these high-scoring percentages, Pakistan’s reduced capacity to collect and collate timely intelligence on Taliban plans agitates Washington, provoking a terse reaction from Islamabad.

“Our meetings on Afghanistan are not occasions where we sling plates at each other,” says a diplomatic source, “but neither are these truly warm and cordial conversations where everyone pats each other on the back for the good work done.” This is another way of saying, “We have problems in understanding each other’s point of view.”

One does not have to be a fly on the wall behind which these meetings are held to figure that out. There is enough public display of frustration with each other’s performance.

In recent times, a truly devastating vote of no confidence on Pakistan’s performance in stemming the tide of the Taliban at the border has come not from hostile US media, but from US-nominated deputy secretary of state and Director of National Intelligence, John D. Negroponte, who testified before the House and Senate- select committees on intelligence last month.

In detailing the threat from Al Qaeda, he said the organisation “continues to maintain active connections and relationships that radiate outward from their leaders’ secure hideout in Pakistan to affiliates throughout the Middle East, North Africa and Europe.”

He said it was “necessary” to root out the bases “the Taliban and other extremists have found in Pakistan” to end “insurgency in Afghanistan.”

The statements shook Pakistan’s policy-makers to their last bone. It was as much a study in PR disaster as it was an insult to Pakistan’s declared sensitivities. Almost parallel to the Negroponte jolt came two bills passed by the House of Representatives that packed the full range of US concerns about Pakistan and mentioned the possibility of linking future aid to the country with full cooperation against the Taliban and the extremists.

On both occasions, Pakistan expressed its deep-felt outrage and conveyed to the Bush administration how unhelpful such declarations were in keeping the lines of defence against the Taliban united.

“Here we are sacrificing our soldiers precious lives to prevent enemies of freedom from gaining ground, and there they are pontificating and urging us to do more,” says a Pakistani diplomat.

Pakistan’s foreign minister, Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri, too, could not hold back his legendary outbursts when Newsline questioned him about all the allegations that are coming Pakistan’s way, regarding the use of the tribal areas by Al Qaeda as a base for its operations. “Preposterous, ridiculous. If they have information, why don’t they tell us. And do we have to tell them what the ideological base of Mulla Omar was? Kandahar. That’s where they should look for him,” remarked Mr Kasuri.

In deference to Pakistan’s wishes, the US embassy issued a rare press release distancing the administration from the contents of the House of Representatives Bill.

Loftily titled, “US Strategic Relationship with Pakistan Stronger Than Ever,” the press release goes the extra friendly mile over the provisions in the first piece of legislation considered by the new US Congress, H.R. 1 — Implementing the 9/11 Commission Recommendations Act of 2007. It says, “While the Administration supports the underlying intent of H.R. 1, the US Administration has serious concerns with several of the bill’s provisions and does not support the bill in its current form.” Ringing music to Pakistan’s ears, it repeats the standard kudos to its ally for its commitment to cooperating with US counter-terrorism efforts and commits the Bush administration to opposing provisions in H.R. 1 that would “restrict assistance to Pakistan based on a certification requirement that the Government of Pakistan is making all possible efforts to combat the Taliban in areas bordering Afghanistan.” Earlier, Pakistan had strongly raised the issue of “allegations” contained in Mr Negroponte’s testimony with Richard Boucher, deputy assistant secretary of state for South and Central Asia, who was visiting Islamabad at the time.

“What we told Mr Boucher was immediately registered. We set the record straight on several misinformed perceptions of the testimony,” said a foreign office official. In another display of Pakistan’s frustration, the US ambassador was called to the foreign office and a demarche made to him when NATO forces attacked a Pakistani post in North Waziristan, killing one security personnel.

These efforts to “set the record straight” are also meant to dispel the damaging image of a government being treated as a doormat by rough-neck US policy-makers. Sources close to the army’s top brass say that during the last meeting of the corps commanders the border situation came under close scrutiny and feelings were expressed openly about Washington not giving enough credit to Pakistan for its achievements in the war against terrorism.

But, even then, no Pakistani official is willing to say with any measure of certainty that the Bush Administration’s inner intelligence and military circles are likely to ease the pressure on Pakistan. If anything, they feel that the pressure will grow. This sounds strange considering that apart from the tripartite commission, intelligence outfits bilateral coordination and close cooperation at the embassy level, Pakistan now has six of its army representatives, headed by a brigadier, sitting in Kabul, along with NATO, ISAF, US and Afghan counterparts looking at intelligence reports on a minute-to-minute basis. The arrangement is called Joint Operations Information Center.

There are several reasons why this close coordination at the operational level will not be able to break the choke-hold of suspicion gripping Washington-Islamabad ties over the happenings in the tribal areas.

The first reason is the ground realities. Pakistan’s deployment of forces in the troubled spots of North and South Waziristan have been grossly undermined by attacks by NATO on targets inside Pakistan. The militants are far more determined to fight it out than they were a year ago. The carrots of the peace deal in North Waziristan have been shown to be rather limited because of the reluctance on the part of NATO forces across the border, to accept it wholeheartedly.

The local warlords, who initially showed some interest in finding a way out for holed-up extremists, have now lost out to the hardliners, who have always been, opposed to any dialogue with the administration. According to intelligence reports reaching Islamabad, in some cases, the local Taliban have practically taken over neighbourhoods under pressure from, or in connivance with, powerful foreign militants and are ruling large chunks of land.

Some intelligence assessments suggest there is a dangerous symbolism inherent in the daring act of targeting security personnel in all the four suicide attacks last month — one in North Waziristan, one in Islamabad’s Marriott Hotel and two in Peshawar and D.I. Khan. One intelligence official was of the view that these acts were much more than reprisals. “These were statements from the militants that any attempt to expand the security network in these areas will be met with deadly suicide attacks and this battle can be brought right to the heart of Islamabad,” says an intelligence source.

Pakistan will face tough choices once summer sets in and coffin-clad suicide bombers, about 2,000 of them, reportedly get ready to turn the heat on NATO under US command. Even the remotest dithering by Pakistan in responding to the needs — not always correctly assessed — identified by the NATO office to combat the Taliban this summer will cast a long shadow over the bilateral trust being managed through institutional frameworks like the Joint Operations Information Center.

The other factor enhancing the possibility of a spanner flying in the works of Islamabad’s coordination with its allies relates to the deepening of the American influence in Afghanistan. Unlike Iraq, the US is not even remotely considering the possibility of reducing their presence in Afghanistan.

A summary of the broad range of activity being planned for Afghanistan speaks of long-term plans rather than an impending exit strategy. The administration is going ahead with a request to the Congress for $10.6 billion in additional assistance for Afghanistan in next two years. Of this, $2 billion will be used for reconstruction and economic assistance and $8.6 billion for the Afghan national security forces. So far, the US has spent $14.2 billion in reconstruction and security assistance to Afghanistan since 2001, out of which $9 billion was earmarked for security assistance starting in 2001. The local commanders request for an additional 30,000 troops has already found initial backing from US Defence Secretary Robert Gates.

And this presence is not just security driven. In other areas, the US is involved in projects that will take years to complete and necessitate a US presence in Afghanistan. Of the several multinational projects underway to build hydro and electrical power systems, one is a multi-donor, electric power project scheduled to be finished in 2009. Just to put US strategic aims in Afghanistan into perspective, the purpose of this project is to provide Kabul and the northern cities with electricity imported from Central Asia. This project is being pursued in the larger context of infrastructurally developing and integrating Afghanistan with Central Asia.

Clearly the US will try to physically eliminate any attempts to undermine its presence in Afghanistan and will not wait for consensus to emerge before striking at troublemakers, which in this case happen to be on both sides of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. Therein lies the gravest danger to the already threatened stability in Pakistan’s north-west, and even to the country’s urban centres. The militants know that more money and more troops mean more killings in Afghanistan. Consequently, they are repositioning themselves in areas where they can inflict more damage. They are prepared for a bloody summer, as are NATO forces. But is Pakistan ready to bear the backlash when the bugles begin to blare? In Islamabad, the question remains unanswered.