The 9/11 Wars (79 page)

A month later, the Pakistani army announced total victory in the agency of Bajaur, nearly two years after starting operations there. The campaign was described as ‘effective’ by American officials and projected as further evidence that senior Pakistani officers had finally recognized the urgency of dealing with the internal threat posed by the militants. The previous year – 2009 – had seen a series of new efforts by the Pakistani military to take on the militant havens along the Afghan frontier. A key moment had come when groups allied to the Pakistani Taliban had moved out of the upland areas along the frontier or the various spurs of the Hindu Kush mountains and started to take ground on the fertile lowlands only a couple of hours’ drive from Islamabad. After a controversial deal with the militant leaders who had seized the valley of Swat in April 2009 which had granted the extremists the right to impose a version of
sharia
law and had provoked international fury, 52,000 Pakistani troops had spent the summer using relatively innovative tactics including some of the new counter-insurgency doctrines being implemented elsewhere to regain control of the area. Despite the attraction of their project of land reform to some communities, support for the militants in Swat had rapidly dwindled as local elders had been humiliated by young fighters, venerated local religious figures were killed and their bodies desecrated, singing and dancing banned and girls’ schools destroyed.
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In October, three divisions of troops had finally moved into South Waziristan and, by exploiting splits between militant groups and with US drones feeding intelligence to battlefield commanders, were able to force militants out of village strongholds and into remote forest or mountain camps. The same month the Pakistanis had acceded to the longstanding request of the Americans and allowed a very small number of US special forces troops – just over a dozen – to operate in the tribal areas.
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With the militants still divided by a bitter succession row following the death of Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistan Taliban, in a drone strike earlier in the year, it seemed possible that the gains made in the operations over the summer and autumn might for once be consolidated. Certainly, some communities, albeit mainly on the periphery of the tribal areas, appeared willing to take up arms themselves against the militants. Even if their primary motivation was to pursue blood feuds, their stance nonetheless indicated a degree of confidence in the government and the Pakistani military to protect them in at least the near future.
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Fighting had continued along the length of the tribal belt – though not in the critical North Waziristan – through the winter of 2009–10 and into the spring. ‘I couldn’t give the Pakistani Army anything but an “A” for how they’ve conducted their battle so far [in the FATA],’ enthused Admiral Mullen, the American chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
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Naturally in private senior defence officials and their civilian counterparts were less extravagant in their praise, but, with the progress in the FATA and the arrests of important members of the Taliban high command, it was unsurprising that some began to see grounds for optimism.

However, closer inspection revealed little reason to believe that the Pakistani security establishment had significantly reversed or even moderated its Afghan policy or that the operations in the FATA would lead to the rapid elimination of militancy, either local or international, from the tribal zones. Rather than a ‘sea change’, the arrests of so many of the Taliban high command in February 2010 could be seen more as the beginning of a new phase in Pakistan’s long-term bid to assure its influence in Afghanistan and to roll back that of its regional competitors. The arrests served several purposes at once for the Pakistani security establishment: pleasing Western allies, reminding the obstinately independent-minded Taliban leadership that their well-being depended to a considerable extent on Pakistan’s calculation of its interests, and rendering the ISI indispensable once, as looked inevitable, some kind of peace process got underway across the border. Those Taliban arrested were also those who had repeatedly showed themselves to be the most pragmatic. Though reports that the most senior amongst them had indirectly been involved in talks with the Kabul government were denied by all sides, there was evidence that all those detained belonged to a small but influential faction within the Taliban which had come to the conclusion that victory – defined as restoring the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan that had existed before 2001 – was impossible by military means alone.
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The detention of these figures, coming immediately after the London conference, where ‘reconciliation’ with the Taliban had become stated coalition policy in Afghanistan, restored Pakistan’s control over political developments and a peace process that had threatened to spin out of their control. Those on the ground in Pakistan remained sanguine about prospects for any breakthrough. As a vast $7.5 billion aid package made its way through Congress, Anne Patterson, the US ambassador in Islamabad, had cabled Washington to stress that ‘there is no chance that Pakistan will view enhanced assistance … as sufficient compensation for abandoning support to [militant] groups’ including the Taliban and Jalaluddin Haqqani’s insurgent network.
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Equally, the Pakistanis’ declaration of victory in the FATA also appeared very premature. There were plenty of signs that any respite would be temporary. Only 600 of an estimated 10,000 militants in South Waziristan were thought to have been killed, and, more importantly, most of the multitude of groups that had sprung up over previous years remained mobilized. Baitullah Mehsud’s successor, Hakimullah Mehsud, was first declared dead with ‘90 per cent certainty’ by American officials and then embarrassingly shown to be alive when he surfaced in a video. As in Afghanistan, the ‘clear’ phase of counter-insurgency operations was proving much simpler than the ‘hold’ and ‘build’. Indeed, the problems of governance posed in southern Afghanistan and those in the FATA had much in common. As outlined in previous chapters, the problems in the FATA were, like those underlying all Islamic radicalism, a complex mesh of international and local factors reaching back decades, if not centuries. They were thus likely to take decades, if not centuries, to unpick, and it seemed unlikely that the Pakistani civilian government or military, both increasingly mired in ongoing internal power struggles, had either the will or the capacity to do so. Simply changing the name of the North West Frontier province to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, as was done with some fanfare in April 2010, certainly was not likely to make much of a difference. By the late spring of 2010 there were already signs of low-intensity guerrilla-style war against the Pakistani army in the FATA with ambushes, IEDs and other tactics developed and honed in Afghanistan or other theatres of the 9/11 Wars killing an increasing number of soldiers and paramilitaries.
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It was also looking increasingly likely that Pakistan might suffer a generalized durable insurgency in areas well beyond the FATA along the lines of the violence that had half-paralysed countries in the Maghreb and beyond in the 1990s. Spring 2009 had seen an appalling surge in violence in Punjab. The Sri Lankan cricket team had been attacked in Lahore, then a police training centre, then a Barelvi mosque. The bombings and
fedayeen
-style assaults, by which a heavily armed squad of fighters attacked well-defended targets in the near certain knowledge that they would be killed, continued through the summer and the autumn.
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In October, there was an unprecedented assault on the military’s general headquarters in Rawalpindi followed by a triple assault on police offices and training centres in Lahore, which killed more than thirty. The attacks continued in the west of the country – over 100 died in a bombing in Peshawar that coincided with the arrival of Hillary Clinton, the American secretary of state, in Pakistan on October 29 – but it was the quickening tempo and growing intensity of violence outside the FATA and its immediate environs which was most striking. In all in 2009, 3,025 people died in terrorist attacks in Pakistan, almost exactly the number of victims of the September 11 attacks. The strikes had continued through the spring of 2010.

As worrying as the level of violence was the identity of those behind the attacks. Investigations revealed the perpetrators of the violence to be part of fragmented, dynamic and ad hoc networks composed of militants from a range of different organizations. The process of internationalization of local Pakistani groups, highlighted earlier, had continued since the death of Bhutto and the terrific violence of 2008. Though many had once been focused exclusively on sectarian strife, Kashmir or fighting in Afghanistan, other groups had become patched into a range of new contacts among the Pakistani Taliban and its offshoots or even al-Qaeda itself.
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Much of the collaboration between these various elements remained tactical – the Pakistani Taliban had reserves of suicide bombers, the Punjabi groups had safehouses and sanctuaries, for example, so individuals from the two networks frequently joined forces – and was not therefore evidence of any solid linkage. However, they did share a vision of the Pakistani government and security establishment as enemies. The steady ideological convergence between groups and the simultaneous organizational fragmentation of Pakistani radical militant organizations over the course of the 9/11 Wars was a particularly dangerous combination which made effective counter-terrorism extremely difficult. It also revealed – in microcosm – the nature of modern Islamic militancy more generally.

The critical element within both the Algerian and the Egyptian insurgencies of the 1990s and during the previous decade of the 9/11 Wars had been the rejection of extremism by local populations. The good news was that, by the end of 2009 and early 2010, there was some evidence that popular sentiment in Pakistan was finally turning against the militants and their violence. In 2005, about half (52 per cent) of Pakistani Muslims expressed confidence in bin Laden to do the right thing in world affairs; in 2010 only 18 per cent shared this view, and levels of disapproval of suicide bombing – 80 per cent – were the highest in the Islamic world.
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Even in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa/North West Frontier province some polls showed that support for bin Laden had fallen dramatically.
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But the bad news was the levels of support for militants, of all kinds, which still remained. A shift from around one in four having a positive view of the Taliban and al-Qaeda in 2008 to under one in six over the same period still meant tens of millions of people continued to consider Mullah Omar, bin Laden and other extremists as people who were, at the very least, making a positive overall contribution to local regional and world affairs. The issue of public sentiment towards such figures was closely linked to another important question posed by broader social developments in Pakistan: would the new urban middle classes, especially the lower middle classes recently lifted from relative poverty, swing towards a more pro-Western, liberal, secular and democratic position as they expanded or in another direction? Here too there was little ground for optimism. Elsewhere in the Islamic world, the lived experience of radical violence had led to its rejection. However, that rejection had frequently been accompanied by a consolidation of a new social conservatism, an attraction to ‘mild’ Islamism, a reaffirmation of a non-violent but intolerant Muslim identity and a profound anti-Americanism. There appeared to be little reason to expect any difference in Pakistan.
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In late spring 2010, according to Pew Research, 85 per cent of Pakistanis favoured the segregation of men and women in the workplace, 83 per cent favoured stoning adulterers, 80 per cent favoured lashing thieves or amputating their hands, and 78 per cent supported the death penalty for apostates. Overall, nine out of ten said it was a good thing that Islam played a big role in the political life of the country and almost two-thirds saw the US as an enemy.
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A survey of under-thirties found that only a third now believed democracy was the best system of governance, a third preferred
sharia
law, while 7 per cent thought dictatorship was a good idea.
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A fierce nationalism also continued to strengthen. This manifested itself both internally – 89 per cent of respondents in the Pew Survey said they were Pakistani before being a member of their ethnic group – and externally – an incident in September 2009 that saw US troops crossing the border into South Waziristan from Afghanistan provoked an extraordinary outpouring of rhetoric about infringed sovereignty and the right of Pakistan to be ‘respected’ on the world stage.
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The intensifying drone strikes continued too to provoke anger, particularly as it was widely and wrongly thought that they did not have the sanction of the Pakistani government. Very large numbers of civilians and soldiers continued to believe that Indians or even the US or Israel were running the militants in the FATA and now also in the Punjab to deliberately weaken Pakistan.
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One American diplomatic cable noted: ‘America is viewed with some suspicion by the majority of Pakistan’s people and its institutions … We are viewed at best as a fickle friend, and at worst as the reason why Pakistan is attacking its own.’
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Much of the nation’s vastly expanded media – considered ‘unbiased’ by 76 per cent of Pakistanis – continued to peddle half-truths and prejudice. A fairly typical headline in the
Nation
, one of the better local English-language newspapers, revealed that Benazir Bhutto had been assassinated by a special death squad formed by former US Vice President Dick Cheney and headed by General McChrystal.
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No doubt partly as a result of the slew of sensationalist and poorly sourced reporting, when asked what was the greatest threat to their country, nearly three-quarters of Pakistanis in 2010 identified India, less than a third chose the Taliban and only 3 per cent pointed to al-Qaeda.
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Inevitably, these kind of sentiments continued to spill over into the security establishment’s strategic vision. So too did the widespread ambivalence towards the militants now active from the FATA to the eastern frontier. In March 2010, Shahbaz Sharif, the brother of opposition leader Nawaz Sharif and chief minister of the Punjab, pleaded with the Taliban to leave the province alone as his administration shared their aim of opposing ‘foreign [i.e. American] dictation’.
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When in May over ninety Muslims from the minority Ahmedi strand, considered heretics by the intolerant and orthodox, were killed in a series of bombings, the attacks went without comment by many of the country’s politicians and were only reluctantly criticized by others. The global financial crisis had revealed the structural weaknesses of the Pakistani economy that had been obscured by the boom of the Musharraf years and now imperilled the hard-won advances made by many people. With the economy continuing to deteriorate, in part because of the appalling security situation but also due to a lack of electricity to run factories and agricultural equipment, Zardari’s poll ratings plummeted, and the mild Islamo-nationalist rhetoric of Sharif brought him approval levels of up to 89 per cent.
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A projected crackdown on the militants in the Punjab stalled in the face of a row between the government and the opposition.
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Politicians even campaigned alongside well-known extremist leaders. This may have been deeply cynical, selfish and even immoral but made good pragmatic political sense given that polls had revealed that Lashkar-e-Toiba, the best known of the local militant groups, were seen favourably by at least a quarter of the national population and by over a third of people in the Punjab.
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Few other groups had Lashkar-e-Toiba’s popular base or connections to the security establishment, but there was no doubt the militants in general retained significant political clout and legitimacy. Though under undoubted pressure, the myriad militant groups existing across the whole of Pakistani soil were showing little significant weakness. The summer promised to be bloody, in Pakistan as in Afghanistan.