WASHINGTON - With the United States
intelligence community and Congressional
investigators warning that the greatest threat to
the US is developing in the tribal areas along the
Afghanistan-Pakistan border, appeals for the
George W Bush administration to reassess its "war
on terror" and Pakistan's place in it are growing.
In particular, US policymakers should place
more confidence in plans by Pakistan's newly
elected, civilian-led government to deal with
tribal leaders, including those associated with
the Pakistani Taliban and other Islamist forces,
in the country's Federally Administered Tribal
Areas (FATA), according to critics.
In
addition, Washington should be prepared to provide
substantially more aid to Pakistan, particularly development
assistance for FATA,
which, these analysts argue, has not been given
nearly the attention that it deserves.
"There is a very narrow
window of opportunity here to make the strategic
shift in American policy toward Pakistan that many
of us
have been arguing for since 2005," said Brian
Katulis, a South Asia specialist at the Center for
American Progress, a predominantly Democratic
think-tank, who just returned from Pakistan after
extensive consultations with leaders in the new
government, including regional authorities who
have been negotiating with Taliban and tribal
leaders in the frontier areas.
"We've
diverted too many of our resources to Iraq and not
paid enough attention to events in Afghanistan and
Pakistan," he said. "This is where the central
front in the war on terror is; it isn't in Iraq."
That assessment was implicitly endorsed by
none other than the US ambassador to Iraq, Ryan
Crocker, this month when, asked by Senate Foreign
Relations Committee chair Joseph Biden whether US
security interests were better served by going
after al-Qaeda along the Afghanistan-Pakistan
border or al-Qaeda in Iraq, he chose the former.
(His military counterpart in Baghdad,
General David Petraeus - who was nominated last
week to become head of the US Central Command that
includes Pakistan and Afghanistan, as well as Iraq
- declined to give an opinion.)
Indeed,
the appeal for a major policy change in Southwest
Asia comes amid growing concern, especially in the
intelligence community, that al-Qaeda's use of
FATA as a safe haven during the past several years
has enabled it to reconstitute much of its
training and planning capabilities, including its
capacity to mount a direct attack on the US
itself.
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
director Michael Hayden last month called al-Qaeda
safe havens a "clear and present danger to
Afghanistan, to Pakistan and to the West in
general, and to the United States in particular",
while the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
Admiral Michael Mullen, warned at the same time,
"If I were going to pick the next attack to hit
the United States, it would come out of the FATA."
The assessment was in turn echoed in what
the New York Times called a "searing" report
released this month by the Government
Accountability Office, Congress' investigative
arm, that accused the Bush administration with
failing develop a comprehensive strategy to
prevent - let alone decisively defeat - the
al-Qaeda leadership that fled to Pakistan after
US-led forces chased it out of Afghanistan more
than six years ago.
The report, which was
based on intelligence reports and interviews with
US diplomats and military and intelligence
officers, found that Washington had relied too
heavily on President Pervez Musharraf and the
Pakistani army to deal with al-Qaeda and that
virtually all of the nearly US$6 billion in aid
Washington had provided to help Pakistan fight
al-Qaeda and the Taliban in the tribal areas had
gone to the military, while only a tiny fraction
was earmarked for economic and other forms of
assistance for the largely Pashtun population
there.
In fact, according to Stephen
Cohen, a Pakistan specialist at the Brookings
Institution, the Pakistani military "played a
double game ... Its intelligence services
supported the Taliban, while only reluctantly
going after the al-Qaeda forces embedded [in the
FATA]."
But it was a series of ceasefires
negotiated between the military government under
Musharraf and Taliban leaders since 2005 that
enabled both al-Qaeda to rebound and the
indigenous armed Islamists to extend their
operations beyond FATA into the North-West
Frontier Province (NWFP), and even as far as
Islamabad itself. Those ceasefires broke down last
year.
Despite February's elections and the
transition to civilian rule, the Bush
administration has been reluctant to distance
itself either from Musharraf, whose powers may be
significantly reduced by the new parliament, or
from its faith in predominantly military means to
go after al-Qaeda and its local allies in FATA.
Indeed, in the month that followed the
elections, Washington sharply increased the number
of pilotless Predator attacks it carried out in
FATA against al-Qaeda and other suspected
terrorist targets. At the same time, US military
commanders reportedly urged more aggressive
actions, including cross-border artillery strikes
and raids by small groups of Special Forces,
against selected targets.
But fears of a
strong backlash by the new government, led by the
heads of the two leading parties, the Pakistan
People's Party and the Pakistan Muslim League
(Nawaz), Asif Ali Zardari and Nawaz Sharif,
respectively, as well as Prime Minister Yusef Raza
Gillani, have persuaded the administration to take
a more cautious attitude for now.
The
government, which also includes the Awami National
Party, a secular Pashtun party that displaced
military-backed Islamist parties in the February
elections in NWFP, has made clear it believes
negotiations, significantly increased development
aid and legislation designed to end FATA's
colonial status and eventually integrate it with
the rest of Pakistan offer the most effective
strategy for turning the population there against
al-Qaeda and indigenous extremists.
That
strategy has already produced new ceasefire
accords, the most recent announced last Thursday
with Baitullah Mehsud, the most notorious leader
of the Pakistani Taliban, who reportedly concluded
an agreement with the NWFP government. However,
less than a week later, this was reported to have
broken down.
Indeed, at the time, White
House spokesperson Dana Perino expressed
skepticism. "We have been concerned about these
types of approaches because we don't think they
work," she said. But Washington should be more
supportive, according to Barnett Rubin, a
Southwest Asia expert at New York University, who
stressed that the new government's negotiating
efforts should not be compared with past ceasefire
agreements negotiated by the military which, he
said, "provided nothing for the people living in
those areas".
"The people who are engaging
in these negotiations on the government side are
people who have a long record of opposing the
Taliban, much longer than the military," said
Rubin. "Their actual political goals are much
closer to our interests than the military's. We
should show more confidence in them and support
them."
"[The government] wants a ceasefire
to incorporate those areas into the mainstream of
Pakistan," he said. Combined with governmental
reforms and a major increase in development aid
targeted on the people rather than army, that
strategy would give "local people ... much more of
an incentive to align with the government than
[they had] under Musharraf," he added.
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