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Jewish World Review April 17, 2009 / 23 Nisan 5769 The Pakistani dilemma By Caroline B. Glick
This week has been yet another bad week in Pakistan. On Monday Pakistani
President Asif Ali Zardari officially surrendered the Swat Valley — an
immense district in Northwest Pakistan that encompasses seven provinces — to
the Taliban when he signed a regulation implementing Islamic Sharia law in
the area. Following the government's capitulation in Swat, the Taliban now
controls eighteen out of Pakistan's thirty provinces in its northwest and
Federally Administered Tribal Areas that border Afghanistan. Only two
provinces remain under full government control.
With its new territory, the Taliban now controls the lives of some 6.5
million Pakistanis. For their part, the civilians live in a state of
constant terror. Since the Taliban took control of Swat in February,
executions, public floggings, bombings of girls' schools, restaurants, video
and music stores have become routine occurrences. As a merchant in Swat's
main village of Mingora told the Wall Street Journal, "We are frightened
by this brutality. No one can dare to challenge them."
And with just sixty miles now separating the Taliban from the capital city
of Islamabad, the Taliban are well positioned to continue their march across
the country. Indeed, the Taliban appear unstoppable.
The Pakistani government, for its part, seems both unwilling and incapable
of taking concerted action to destroy Taliban forces. Again according to the
Wall Street Journal, Taliban fighters are flooding the Swat Valley with
thousands of veteran fighters from Afghanistan and Kashmir and setting up
training camps throughout the areas. Moreover, they are recruiting — both
through intimidation and persuasion — still more thousands of locals to join
their lines.
A further sign of government capitulation came on Tuesday when Pakistan's
Supreme Court released Maulana Abdul Aziz, the leader of the Lal Masjid or
Red Mosque in Islamabad from house arrest. In 2007 Aziz used his al
Qaida/Taliban affiliated madrassa to incite an Islamist takeover of the
Pakistani capital. It took then president Pervez Musharraf three months to
forcibly take over the Red Mosque. Arguably, Musharraf's actions against
Aziz and his followers were the ultimate cause of his political downfall
last year.
According to the online Long War Journal, over the past year, the government
has signed capitulation agreements with all of Aziz's Taliban and al Qaida
allies and returned control of the mosque/madrassa complex to the jihadists.
At the time of Aziz's attempted overthrow of the Musharraf government and
since, the Red Mosque became emblematic of the jihadist war to take over the
nuclear-armed state. Aziz's release in turn symbolizes the current
government's willingness to surrender.
For their part, US strategists appear despondent in their assessments of the
situation in Pakistan, and its impact on NATO's capacity to stabilize the
security situation in neighboring Afghanistan. US Army General David
Petreaus, who is responsible for the war in Afghanistan and Pakistan has
called the Taliban an "existential threat" to the Pakistani state. David
Kilcullen, who advised Petreaus on his successful counter-insurgency
campaign in Iraq and now advises the White House, warned last week that
Pakistan could fall within six months. The growing consensus in Washington
— particularly given the recent unification of command of Taliban forces in
Afghanistan and Pakistan under the so-called Council of United Holy Warriors
and their open collaboration with al Qaida — is that Pakistan is a far
greater danger than Afghanistan.
The US's assessment of the threats emanating from Pakistan and Afghanistan
has been largely the same under both the Bush and Obama administrations. In
both cases, the US has identified Taliban/al Qaida acquisition of nuclear
weapons as a primary threat to US security that must be prevented. Both have
also asserted that the unimpeded operation of al Qaida training camps in
Afghanistan/Pakistan is a grave threat to US and global security.
Then too, the US's strategy for contending with these challenges has been
similarly focused for much of the past eight years. The US has sought to
militarily and politically defeat the Taliban/al Qaida in Afghanistan by
fighting them on the battlefield and cultivating democracy. In Pakistan, the
US has sought to defeat the Taliban by strengthening the Pakistani
government mainly through financial assistance to its civilian and military
budgets.
In recent years, the US has also worked to decapitate Taliban/al Qaida
leadership through targeted assassinations inside Pakistan carried out by
unmanned aircraft. Under the Obama administration the US has declared its
intention to maintain these strategies but expand them by increasing the
number of soldiers in Afghanistan and by increasing its civilian assistance
to the Pakistani government to $1.5 billion per year.
Unfortunately, the US's efforts in Pakistan to date have failed miserably
and there is little cause to believe that expanding them will change the
situation in any significant way. Both under Musharraf's military
dictatorship and under Zardari's civilian government, the Pakistanis have
failed to stem the Taliban's advance.
The Pakistani military and Inter-Service Intelligence agency (ISI) have
refused to divert their resources away from fighting India and towards
fighting the Taliban. They have refused to take any concerted action against
terrorist groups, including al Qaida that openly operate on Pakistani soil.
Against the wishes of the US, they have continued to surrender territory to
the Taliban in the framework of "peace accords." And still today, the
Pakistani government and military openly oppose US military action on
Pakistani territory, preferring to allow the Taliban to take over the
country to permitting the US to help the Pakistani military defeat them.
What the situation in Pakistan clearly exemplifies is the fact that
sometimes there are no good options for contending with international
security threats. Once Pakistan became a nuclear power in 1998, the US lost
much of its ability to pressure the Pakistani government and military.
Washington understood that if it pushed too hard, the Pakistanis could opt
to abandon the West and collaborate with the Taliban and al Qaida which by
then were not only openly operating from Pakistani territory after having
taken over Afghanistan with Pakistani support two years earlier. They were
also attacking US targets — including the 1998 attacks against the US
embassies in Kenya and Tanzania.
Since the Sept. 11 attacks demonstrated just how dangerous jihadists in
Pakistan/Afghanistan are to global security, it has been clear that
Pakistan's nuclear arsenal is a primary threat to global security. For eight
years, the US's chosen methods for staving off the threats have effectively
served as little more than holding actions because Pakistan's governments
have been both unable and unwilling to wage successful military or political
campaigns against the Taliban and al Qaida.
Musharraf believed that he could play a double game of at once helping the
US in Afghanistan and sheltering al Qaida and the Taliban in Pakistan. The
Zardari government, which exerts little control over the military and the
ISI, has simply expanded and intensified Musharraf's policy of capitulating
to the jihadists. Due to the Taliban's current control over the territories
bordering Afghanistan, Pakistan is no longer in a position to support NATO
operations in Afghanistan. And in the meantime, the advancing Taliban forces
in Pakistan itself place Pakistan's nuclear weapons and materials in
unprecedented jeopardy.
Given the failure of the US's political strategies of securing Pakistan's
nuclear arsenal by supporting Pakistan's government, and fighting the
Taliban and al Qaida in Afghanistan, it is becoming apparent that the only
sure way to prevent the Taliban/al Qaida from taking control over Pakistan's
nuclear weapons is to take those weapons out of commission.
The US has two basic options for accomplishing this goal. It can send in
forces to take control of Pakistan's nuclear installations and remove its
nuclear arsenal from the country. Or, it can destroy Pakistan's nuclear
installations. Both of these options — which are really variations of the
same option — are extremely unattractive. It is far from clear that the US
military has the capacity to take over Pakistan's nuclear arsenal and it
also unclear what the ultimate effect of a military strike against its
nuclear arsenal would be in terms of lives lost and areas rendered
uninhabitable due to nuclear fallout.
The only other option that is discussed by US strategists today is that
India may serve as deux ex machina and destroy Pakistan's nuclear arsenal
itself. Reasonably believing that India would be the first target for
Pakistan's nuclear weapons — which Pakistan built in order to threaten India
— US military strategists do not expect India to sit back and wait for the
US to defend it against a Taliban/al Qaida-ruled nuclear-armed Pakistan.
For India however, the calculation is not as clear as one might assume. New
Delhi knows it can expect for the US to support the imposition of various
political and military sanctions against it if it were to attack Pakistan's
nuclear arsenal. Consequently, it is possible that Washington's
unwillingness to make a tough but necessary call may mean that no one is
willing to make it.
The situation in Pakistan of course is similar to the situation in Iran.
There, as Iran moves swiftly towards the nuclear club, the US on the one
hand refuses — as it does with Pakistan — to make the hard but essential
decision to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear power. And on the other
hand, it warns Israel daily that it opposes any independent Israeli
operation to prevent Iran from becoming a nuclear-armed state. That is, the
Obama administration is forcing Israel to weigh the specter of a
nuclear-armed Iran against the threat of an abrogation of its strategic
alliance with the US in the event that it prevents Iran from becoming a
nuclear power on its own.
In both Pakistan and Iran, the clock is ticking. The US's reluctance to face
up to the ugliness of the options at its disposal will not make them any
prettier. Indeed, with each passing day the stark choice placed before
America and its allies becomes ever more apparent. In both Pakistan and
Iran, the choice is and will remain seeing the US and its allies taking
swift and decisive action to neutralize nuclear programs that threaten
global security, or seeing the world's worst actors successfully arm
themselves with the world's most dangerous weapons.
JWR contributor Caroline B. Glick is the senior Middle East Fellow at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, DC and the deputy managing editor of The Jerusalem Post. Comment by clicking here.
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