Al-Qaeda may have been cut down in Afghanistan, but it is growing in Pakistan’s border area
Jul 17th 2008
THE Taliban Hotel has changed clientele. The abandoned Afghan homestead, close to the border with Pakistan, had long been used by insurgents as a resting place on their way to fight in Afghanistan; now it accommodates a contingent of American and Afghan soldiers.
This newest link in the chain of American border outposts is something of a fluke. The Americans discovered its importance only last September, when a patrol ran into a group of insurgents and found that the nearby hilltops provided good observation and electronic listening posts into Pakistan’s ungoverned region of North Waziristan. “After three weeks there we decided we couldn’t leave,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Michael Fenzel.
So now his men of the 1-503rd Airborne battalion are overseeing the construction of a new government and police compound, and a “cultural centre” that will be turned into a mosque. The Americans are trying to win over surrounding villagers with the promise of roads, construction jobs and government services. They are also hoping to organise a jirga, or council of elders, with tribesmen from both sides of the frontier to pacify the area.
This is a very different way of conducting military business than when the Americans first got to Afghanistan in 2001. Then the emphasis was on killing or capturing terrorists. Lots of civilians were killed in bombing raids. But as the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan worsened in 2006 and Iraq slid towards bloody anarchy, American forces overhauled their tactics. The counter-insurgency manual issued in 2006 says their first task is to “protect the population”, assist economic development and improve governance in order to isolate the insurgents. American troops are no longer enjoined to “find, fix, finish” but to “clear, hold, build”. These methods are proving helpful. But there are too few troops, whether foreign or Afghan. And they can do little about the sanctuary on the other side of the border.
These days Pakistan’s tribal belt along the frontier with Afghanistan makes up the world’s most worrying reservoir of jihadists, containing an opaque mixture of Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, Pakistani sectarian extremists, Kashmiri militants and foreign fighters of all colours. Mixed in among them are al-Qaeda’s senior leaders who, in the view of American officials, act as “force multipliers”—a small cadre, perhaps numbering only in the hundreds, who provide technical expertise, training, ideological rigour and sometimes funds.
All have been protected by the honour code of the Pushtun tribes, with whom foreign fighters have forged close relations since the days of the anti-Soviet jihad. Some of the foreigners have taken local wives, and many Pushtun warriors have embraced the ideology of global jihad.
The Pakistani tribal belt is less of a haven for al-Qaeda than Taliban-ruled Afghanistan had been before 2001. Yet it is secure enough, says last year’s threat assessment by America’s intelligence agencies, to provide al-Qaeda with many of the advantages it once derived from its base across the border in Afghanistan: a place to regroup its senior lieutenants, broadcast its propaganda, train a new generation of militants and plan fresh attacks around the world. Among those believed to be hiding in the tribal areas is Abu Khabab al-Masri, famous for being in charge of experiments with chemical and biological agents in which dogs were killed on video.
The Afghan insurgency is intensifying year by year; in May and June this year it was deadlier for Western troops than the Iraqi one. The Taliban and al-Qaeda are tantalisingly close to hand, yet distressingly hard to reach.
Pakistani forces, some of whose outposts are within shouting distance of American positions, play an ambiguous role: sometimes they turn a blind eye to the insurgents, and sometimes they help the Americans spot them. Relations between commanders on both sides of the border have usually been cordial. But ask American officers whether they regard Pakistan as a friend or a foe, and many reply: “Both.”
On June 10th American jets killed 11 members of Pakistan’s Frontier Corps during bombing raids against insurgents on the border of Afghanistan’s Kunar province. Five days later, after a brazen Taliban attack on Kandahar prison that freed 1,000 inmates, including about 400 Taliban, Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, threatened to send his forces into Pakistan. His officials claim Pakistani intelligence was behind a recent attempt to kill him.
American soldiers do sometimes fire into Pakistan, and special forces and the CIA work together to gather information on the big fish across the frontier. Once in a while missiles go off from American unmanned aircraft or ground artillery to strike at wanted men. American officers recognise that, even with the best will of the world, the Pakistani army would struggle to keep control of its remote frontier. The question these days is how hard it is trying.
When Pakistan was founded as a Muslim state at the partition of British India in 1947, the colonial border arrangements were left largely unchanged. The frontier with Afghanistan was always fuzzy. A strip of mountainous territory on the Pakistani side, carved out by the British as a buffer zone, remained as autonomous tribal lands whose population had few of the rights accorded to other Pakistani citizens.
The seven districts of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) are run at arm’s length by the president’s office through the governor of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and the “agents” he appoints among tribal elders. FATA has been one of Pakistan’s most neglected regions. Income per person is half the (already low) national average.
Successive Pakistani governments have encouraged the tribes to emphasise their Islamic rather than their Pushtun identity. Pakistan (together with America and Saudi Arabia) supported the anti-Soviet jihad and later it backed the Taliban. Afghanistan, it felt, offered “strategic depth” in case of war with India.
President Pervez Musharraf made an abrupt U-turn by co-operating with America in toppling the Taliban in 2001, but although he sent the army into FATA to hunt the remnants of al-Qaeda, he allowed the Taliban to regroup. Apologists say Mr Musharraf could not take on too many enemies and had other things to worry about. Critics retort that he deliberately sought to destabilise Afghanistan or, more charitably, that he hedged his bet because he feared America would soon withdraw.
Pakistan’s military campaign hurt al-Qaeda, at least for a time. Intercepted letters from Ayman al-Zawahiri and other al-Qaeda figures, written in 2005, complain of weakness, shortage of funds, difficulties communicating with the outside world and the ever-present fear of arrest or assassination. Nevertheless al-Qaeda proved hard to separate from the Taliban, and the Pakistani army suffered painful losses in the ensuing clashes. In 2006 Mr Musharraf agreed to a truce. All this left both al-Qaeda and the Taliban stronger than before; worse, the Taliban acquired a Pakistani branch that spread violence and radicalism across the country. Last December Benazir Bhutto, a Pakistani opposition leader, was killed in an attack for which the Americans blamed the Pakistani Taliban.
Mr Musharraf thus finds himself attacked by Americans for failing to curb militants, and by militants (and many Pakistanis) for being an American stooge. After eight years of military rule, Pakistanis earlier this year voted the opposition into power. But the country is still confused, even in denial, over the threat from militants.
Sounding the retreat
Events in South Waziristan, the largest of the tribal agencies, are particularly worrying. Last month the Pakistani army invited journalists on a rare visit to the area to see how it had dealt with the tribal redoubt of Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Tehrik-i-Taliban, the umbrella group of the Pakistani Taliban. In January the army told some 200,000 people to leave their homes before sweeping through with attack helicopters, artillery and tanks.
A few days after the journalists’ visit, Mr Mehsud summoned them back to the region to demonstrate that he remained in charge. The Taliban leader, surrounded by hundreds of long-haired fighters, denied accusations that he had ordered the killing of Ms Bhutto, blaming Mr Musharraf instead. He said he would not agree to stop cross-border attacks: “Islam does not recognise frontiers and borders.”
Pakistan’s prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, insists that his new civilian government must be left to deal with extremism in its own way. He says the government will fight terrorists vigorously, but has to regain the support of a sceptical public. The tribal areas need to be integrated into the rest of the country both politically and economically in order to isolate extremists. Peace deals have already been signed in the “settled” areas of NWFP, but Mr Gilani insists that “no talks will be held with anyone refusing to lay down arms.”
All this sounds very similar to what the Americans are trying to do across the border in Afghanistan, yet they are not reassured. It is the army, not the government, that is in charge of the talks, and the Americans fear that it will surrender control to the Taliban and al-Qaeda, as it has done in the past. And the talks will do nothing to improve matters in Baluchistan, the seat of the main body of Taliban leaders known as the “Quetta Shura”, that runs the most intense front of the insurgency in the southern provinces of Kandahar and Helmand, apparently untroubled by the Pakistani authorities.
America would like to see Pakistan adopt some of its counter-insurgency methods to strengthen its grip on the tribal areas, and is offering about $750m over five years for social and economic development in FATA. But the Pakistani army seems reluctant to change its thinking. Having lost about 1,000 soldiers since 2001 and had 250 of its soldiers captured by Mr Mehsud’s fighters, it is tired and demoralised. NATO says the number of cross-border infiltrations has risen sharply this year.
One bit of hopeful news was the rout of Islamist parties in NWFP in the recent election, where the winner was the secular Pushtun nationalist party, the Awami National Party, which opposes the militants. But the provincial capital, Peshawar, is surrounded by armed groups, prompting a paramilitary operation to stop the city falling into their hands. The province’s chief minister, Ameer Haider Hoti, claims that past Pakistani governments had built up armed factions as a tool of foreign policy. Now, he says, “this monster was created, and nobody knows how to handle it.”
Jul 17th 2008
THE Taliban Hotel has changed clientele. The abandoned Afghan homestead, close to the border with Pakistan, had long been used by insurgents as a resting place on their way to fight in Afghanistan; now it accommodates a contingent of American and Afghan soldiers.
This newest link in the chain of American border outposts is something of a fluke. The Americans discovered its importance only last September, when a patrol ran into a group of insurgents and found that the nearby hilltops provided good observation and electronic listening posts into Pakistan’s ungoverned region of North Waziristan. “After three weeks there we decided we couldn’t leave,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Michael Fenzel.
So now his men of the 1-503rd Airborne battalion are overseeing the construction of a new government and police compound, and a “cultural centre” that will be turned into a mosque. The Americans are trying to win over surrounding villagers with the promise of roads, construction jobs and government services. They are also hoping to organise a jirga, or council of elders, with tribesmen from both sides of the frontier to pacify the area.
This is a very different way of conducting military business than when the Americans first got to Afghanistan in 2001. Then the emphasis was on killing or capturing terrorists. Lots of civilians were killed in bombing raids. But as the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan worsened in 2006 and Iraq slid towards bloody anarchy, American forces overhauled their tactics. The counter-insurgency manual issued in 2006 says their first task is to “protect the population”, assist economic development and improve governance in order to isolate the insurgents. American troops are no longer enjoined to “find, fix, finish” but to “clear, hold, build”. These methods are proving helpful. But there are too few troops, whether foreign or Afghan. And they can do little about the sanctuary on the other side of the border.
These days Pakistan’s tribal belt along the frontier with Afghanistan makes up the world’s most worrying reservoir of jihadists, containing an opaque mixture of Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, Pakistani sectarian extremists, Kashmiri militants and foreign fighters of all colours. Mixed in among them are al-Qaeda’s senior leaders who, in the view of American officials, act as “force multipliers”—a small cadre, perhaps numbering only in the hundreds, who provide technical expertise, training, ideological rigour and sometimes funds.
All have been protected by the honour code of the Pushtun tribes, with whom foreign fighters have forged close relations since the days of the anti-Soviet jihad. Some of the foreigners have taken local wives, and many Pushtun warriors have embraced the ideology of global jihad.
The Pakistani tribal belt is less of a haven for al-Qaeda than Taliban-ruled Afghanistan had been before 2001. Yet it is secure enough, says last year’s threat assessment by America’s intelligence agencies, to provide al-Qaeda with many of the advantages it once derived from its base across the border in Afghanistan: a place to regroup its senior lieutenants, broadcast its propaganda, train a new generation of militants and plan fresh attacks around the world. Among those believed to be hiding in the tribal areas is Abu Khabab al-Masri, famous for being in charge of experiments with chemical and biological agents in which dogs were killed on video.
The Afghan insurgency is intensifying year by year; in May and June this year it was deadlier for Western troops than the Iraqi one. The Taliban and al-Qaeda are tantalisingly close to hand, yet distressingly hard to reach.
Pakistani forces, some of whose outposts are within shouting distance of American positions, play an ambiguous role: sometimes they turn a blind eye to the insurgents, and sometimes they help the Americans spot them. Relations between commanders on both sides of the border have usually been cordial. But ask American officers whether they regard Pakistan as a friend or a foe, and many reply: “Both.”
On June 10th American jets killed 11 members of Pakistan’s Frontier Corps during bombing raids against insurgents on the border of Afghanistan’s Kunar province. Five days later, after a brazen Taliban attack on Kandahar prison that freed 1,000 inmates, including about 400 Taliban, Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai, threatened to send his forces into Pakistan. His officials claim Pakistani intelligence was behind a recent attempt to kill him.
American soldiers do sometimes fire into Pakistan, and special forces and the CIA work together to gather information on the big fish across the frontier. Once in a while missiles go off from American unmanned aircraft or ground artillery to strike at wanted men. American officers recognise that, even with the best will of the world, the Pakistani army would struggle to keep control of its remote frontier. The question these days is how hard it is trying.
When Pakistan was founded as a Muslim state at the partition of British India in 1947, the colonial border arrangements were left largely unchanged. The frontier with Afghanistan was always fuzzy. A strip of mountainous territory on the Pakistani side, carved out by the British as a buffer zone, remained as autonomous tribal lands whose population had few of the rights accorded to other Pakistani citizens.
The seven districts of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) are run at arm’s length by the president’s office through the governor of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and the “agents” he appoints among tribal elders. FATA has been one of Pakistan’s most neglected regions. Income per person is half the (already low) national average.
Successive Pakistani governments have encouraged the tribes to emphasise their Islamic rather than their Pushtun identity. Pakistan (together with America and Saudi Arabia) supported the anti-Soviet jihad and later it backed the Taliban. Afghanistan, it felt, offered “strategic depth” in case of war with India.
President Pervez Musharraf made an abrupt U-turn by co-operating with America in toppling the Taliban in 2001, but although he sent the army into FATA to hunt the remnants of al-Qaeda, he allowed the Taliban to regroup. Apologists say Mr Musharraf could not take on too many enemies and had other things to worry about. Critics retort that he deliberately sought to destabilise Afghanistan or, more charitably, that he hedged his bet because he feared America would soon withdraw.
Pakistan’s military campaign hurt al-Qaeda, at least for a time. Intercepted letters from Ayman al-Zawahiri and other al-Qaeda figures, written in 2005, complain of weakness, shortage of funds, difficulties communicating with the outside world and the ever-present fear of arrest or assassination. Nevertheless al-Qaeda proved hard to separate from the Taliban, and the Pakistani army suffered painful losses in the ensuing clashes. In 2006 Mr Musharraf agreed to a truce. All this left both al-Qaeda and the Taliban stronger than before; worse, the Taliban acquired a Pakistani branch that spread violence and radicalism across the country. Last December Benazir Bhutto, a Pakistani opposition leader, was killed in an attack for which the Americans blamed the Pakistani Taliban.
Mr Musharraf thus finds himself attacked by Americans for failing to curb militants, and by militants (and many Pakistanis) for being an American stooge. After eight years of military rule, Pakistanis earlier this year voted the opposition into power. But the country is still confused, even in denial, over the threat from militants.
Sounding the retreat
Events in South Waziristan, the largest of the tribal agencies, are particularly worrying. Last month the Pakistani army invited journalists on a rare visit to the area to see how it had dealt with the tribal redoubt of Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Tehrik-i-Taliban, the umbrella group of the Pakistani Taliban. In January the army told some 200,000 people to leave their homes before sweeping through with attack helicopters, artillery and tanks.
A few days after the journalists’ visit, Mr Mehsud summoned them back to the region to demonstrate that he remained in charge. The Taliban leader, surrounded by hundreds of long-haired fighters, denied accusations that he had ordered the killing of Ms Bhutto, blaming Mr Musharraf instead. He said he would not agree to stop cross-border attacks: “Islam does not recognise frontiers and borders.”
Pakistan’s prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, insists that his new civilian government must be left to deal with extremism in its own way. He says the government will fight terrorists vigorously, but has to regain the support of a sceptical public. The tribal areas need to be integrated into the rest of the country both politically and economically in order to isolate extremists. Peace deals have already been signed in the “settled” areas of NWFP, but Mr Gilani insists that “no talks will be held with anyone refusing to lay down arms.”
All this sounds very similar to what the Americans are trying to do across the border in Afghanistan, yet they are not reassured. It is the army, not the government, that is in charge of the talks, and the Americans fear that it will surrender control to the Taliban and al-Qaeda, as it has done in the past. And the talks will do nothing to improve matters in Baluchistan, the seat of the main body of Taliban leaders known as the “Quetta Shura”, that runs the most intense front of the insurgency in the southern provinces of Kandahar and Helmand, apparently untroubled by the Pakistani authorities.
America would like to see Pakistan adopt some of its counter-insurgency methods to strengthen its grip on the tribal areas, and is offering about $750m over five years for social and economic development in FATA. But the Pakistani army seems reluctant to change its thinking. Having lost about 1,000 soldiers since 2001 and had 250 of its soldiers captured by Mr Mehsud’s fighters, it is tired and demoralised. NATO says the number of cross-border infiltrations has risen sharply this year.
One bit of hopeful news was the rout of Islamist parties in NWFP in the recent election, where the winner was the secular Pushtun nationalist party, the Awami National Party, which opposes the militants. But the provincial capital, Peshawar, is surrounded by armed groups, prompting a paramilitary operation to stop the city falling into their hands. The province’s chief minister, Ameer Haider Hoti, claims that past Pakistani governments had built up armed factions as a tool of foreign policy. Now, he says, “this monster was created, and nobody knows how to handle it.”
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