Pakistan, US play waiting game
By Abubakar Siddique
Think of Pakistan and Afghanistan as a giant chessboard. General Stanley
McChrystal, commander of United States and North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO) forces in Afghanistan, and General Ashfaq Parvez Kiani, head of the
Pakistani army, sit on its opposing ends.
And both men are waiting for each other to make the next move.
The two allies await each other's promised offensive against Taliban
strongholds in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Washington has encouraged Pakistan to
move its forces into North Waziristan, where powerful Afghan Taliban commander
Jalaluddin Haqqani and an assortment of Pakistani, Arab and Central Asian
militants wield tense control.
But regional expert and author Ahmed Rashid tells RFE/RL that the Pakistanis
are unlikely to move into North Waziristan until
they see the outcome of NATO's much-talked-about offensive in the southern
Afghan province of Kandahar.
Perceptions in Islamabad are shaped by this spring's smaller NATO offensive in
Marjah - a key insurgent and smuggling crossroads in Afghanistan's southern
Helmand province. Marjah's capture by coalition troops has failed to end the
local Taliban's campaign of assassinations and intimidation, which keeps local
people wary of the Afghan government and has stalled the coalition's
rehabilitation and development projects.
'Worrying the Americans'
Rashid says Islamabad sees the Marjah offensive as unsuccessful and this colors
its reading of the current situation and its plans for action.
"Why should Pakistan endanger its forces and commit more forces in what is
already, according to them, a losing military campaign?" he asks. "And this
obviously is worrying the Americans enormously because Kandahar can't be a
success unless you stop some of the recruits and logistics and weapons and
manpower that are being shunted into Afghanistan by the Afghan Taliban [from
Pakistan] in support of their resistance to the Kandahar offensive."
Former Afghan interior minister Ali Ahmad Jalali questions the notion that the
two campaigns are tightly interlinked. He says that Kandahar and North
Waziristan require distinct military interventions.
Jalali, a professor at Washington's National Defense University, suggests that
Kandahar is still under tenuous Afghan government control but Pakistan's North
Waziristan region is the de-facto headquarters for al-Qaeda and allied
extremists.
"What is needed in Kandahar is to establish full control of the government so
that it can protect the population and deliver services," he says. "While in
Waziristan, it's totally different. You have to remove the bases of extremists
and terrorists who are launching attacks not only in Pakistan but mostly across
the border in Afghanistan."
Indeed, full government control is the declared aim of the slowly unfolding
Kandahar campaign. Speaking to tribal leaders in Kandahar on June 13, Afghan
President Hamid Karzai urged them to cooperate fully with a sustained operation
to clear the region of insurgents and criminals.
"I want your cooperation in this operation," Karzai told Kandahari elders. "It
is something definite and I won't accept any excuses."
'Pivotal' campaigns
Julian Lindley-French, a military affairs expert who closely watches
developments in the Afghan theater, tells RFE/RL that this summer's military
campaigns in Afghanistan and Pakistan are "pivotal".
Lindley-French, a professor of military operational science at the Royal
Military Academy of the Netherlands, suggests that a successful US-led NATO
campaign in Kandahar would compel Pakistanis to go against extremist havens
inside their country.
"The first critical step for the coalition is to make sure that the space it
effectively seeks to control is under its control," he says. "[This is] because
all other elements of the campaign, be they political military or whatever -
stabilization, governance, rule of law, justice - they all flow from that.
"It would also extend the writ of the Afghan government and will give some of
the discussions that took place in the peace jirga [council] some
chances of traction on the ground."
McChrystal, the man in charge of Western military efforts in Afghanistan, says
that he has a cooperative relationship with Kiani, the Pakistani military
chief. In an interview with RFE/RL's Afghan and Pakistani services last week,
McChrystal said the two sides regularly coordinated their operations, which has
recently led to progress on the long and porous border between the two
countries.
'Complex effort'
McChrystal says coalition forces have killed or captured a significant number
of Haqqani network commanders in the southeastern Afghan province of Khost
across the border from North Waziristan. But he says that the coalition is not
pressuring Kayani to go after Haqqani's stronghold in North Waziristan.
"There is not a large pressure from me to kick off operations in northern
Waziristan," he says. "I speak to General Kiani frequently and in-depth and we
talk about each other's campaigns and syncing them.
"I've been very pleased and impressed with the work that he has done. He has a
complex effort going in multiple areas: southern Waziristan, Orakzai, Bajaur,
Swat Valley. So I am confident that his timing and his focus is good and it
works well with ours."
But Jalali, the Afghan military expert, suggests that even regular operational
cooperation is not tantamount to strategic cooperation. He says that regional
powers, in particular Islamabad, are vying for a future role in Afghanistan
because they sense an imminent US withdrawal from the country. As he announced
a major troop surge in Afghanistan last year, US President Barack Obama also
announced he would begin withdrawing forces in July 2011.
"If the United States stays in this area for a long time, then that will be
different," Jalali says. "If it is going to leave, Pakistan would like to have
some of these [extremist] elements as allies. And they do not want to alienate
some of these forces just for the sake of Washington, which is about to leave
the area - or the perception is ... that it is about to leave this area."
Such perceptions prompt Western analysts to read Pakistani intentions with
great suspicion. Islamabad vehemently denied claims made in a controversial
London School of Economics "discussion paper" last weekend that Pakistan's
Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) "orchestrates, sustains and strongly
influences" Afghan insurgent networks.
Wake-up call
Speaking to RFE/RL's Radio Mashaal, Pakistani military spokesman Major General
Athar Abbas even rejected claims that the report was based on in-depth
interviews with unidentified insurgent commanders.
"Those are not credible sources and can't substantiate themselves in the open,"
he said.
Rashid, Pakistani author and long-time observer of Islamist militancy in South
Asia, says that the rising internal threat from extremists might give Pakistan
reasons to move into North Waziristan. He suggests that the recent high-profile
attacks in Pakistan's most affluent and populated eastern Punjab province by
the so-called Punjabi Taliban should serve as a wake-up call for Pakistani
leaders.
"The fact is that many of these Punjabi groups are hanging out in North
Waziristan and you can't tackle these Punjabi groups without first tackling the
issue in North Waziristan," Rashid concludes.
This summer, observers will be closely watching to see whether McChrystal and
Kiani can team up and turn the tables on extremists both have publicly
described as their common enemy - or whether they will continue to play an
unending, unwinnable chess game.
Copyright (c) 2010, RFE/RL Inc. Reprinted with the permission of
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