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| In mourning: Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto (l.), prayed Sunday with women whose husbands were killed in a
bomb attack on her welcome procession David Guttenfelder |
Pakistan's Army: Unprepared to tackle terrorism?
In her first statements since her return, former Prime Minister Bhutto says the bloody attack last week has hardened her resolve.
from the October 22, 2007 edition
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She expects the attacks to continue, she told the BBC this weekend, but added, "What I really need to ask myself is: do I give up, do I let the militants determine the agenda?"
Despite misgivings about the current offensive in Pakistan's mountainous tribal territories, the Army brass does not dismiss the need for action there. "The military is thinking about it very seriously," says Mr. Yusuf, who recently co-wrote a report titled "Counterinsurgency in Pakistan" for the American Enterprise Institute in Washington.
Pakistan's future threat, he says, is not from India: "The threat is an internal one for years to come."
But an array of factors plays into the Army's unwillingness to put those thoughts into decisive action.
For one, some elements of the Pakistani Army still believe the militants are a useful and manageable tool: If the West leaves Afghanistan – as many here believe it will – they will give Pakistan a means to influence events there.
Moreover, the Army is hardly designed to take them on in their own territory. Since its inception, the Pakistani Army has looked eastward to India, focusing on the plains of Punjab and sands of Sindh, from where any invasion might come – probably in columns of tanks and sorties of jet fighters.
Now it is being asked to look westward to its rugged Afghan border and wage a completely different style of warfare for which it is unprepared. "This is not what we were trained to do," asks Yusuf.
On one hand, it is the same predicament that besets the US Army, which was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan as a fighting force and has since been forced to learn the more nuanced tactics of counterinsurgency on the fly.
But America, at least, has entered its conflicts of its own accord and is fighting enemies abroad. That is not so here, says Hamid Gul, former head of Pakistan's top intelligence agency, the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI): "People think there is an American agenda … and that America has arm-twisted Pakistani politicians."
Pakistanis worry about a 'false war'
To be sure, the Taliban are viewed differently here than they are in the West, not least because they are Pakistani. While the West sees an Islamist war against its liberties, many here see a US-led war against Islam itself.
Voicing an opinion commonly heard on Pakistani streets, Mr. Gul says: "This is a false war. People are not convinced that 9/11 was done by Al Qaeda."
From this perspective, Pakistan's Muslims are being asked to kill Muslims at America's behest. In a recent speech in Washington, a Pakistani diplomat spoke of these frustrations.
"When we hear people in Washington or London say that Pakistan needs to do more, the question is: Do you understand what you're asking us to do?" asked Zamir Akram, a Pakistani foreign-policy adviser, in an address to the Middle East Institute. "Would you go into Texas or wherever on the border areas and actually kill Americans?"
For this reason, many experts do not expect the current offensive to continue. If it does, the Army "will get divided vertically," with officers remaining loyal to headquarters and the rank and file becoming increasingly alienated, says Ayesha Siddiqa, author "Military Inc.," a book about the Pakistani Army. "Cracks are appearing," she adds.
Like other analysts, she agrees that the way forward is not militarily – it is by developing the region economically over the next 15 to 20 years, undercutting the poverty and lack of education that feeds extremism.
"There is no quick solution," says Yusuf. "These tribal areas want to maintain their quasi-independence, but they also want economic development now."
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