Crosshairs -- Military Matters in Review

Officials in Afghanistan and Pakistan resent the U.S. term “AfPak” to describe the two countries, just like Americans would resent USCan or MexUS (try pronouncing them “uscan or “mexus”). But if you overlay a map of the two countries to show regions contested or owned by the Taliban, you see an inkblot that looks like AfPak.

It’s jolting to launch a surge of troops and American civilians into a new strategy in southern Afghanistan while the Pakistani government has authorized sharia law in the Swat Valley. It’s jarring to hear a Taliban spokesman rant about his appalling extremism. For openers, Muslim Khan laid out the welcome mat for militant jihadists who are fighting American and NATO troops. Next, he warned the United States and NATO that his forces would deploy to Afghanistan if we kept fighting there. To cap it off, he invited Osama bin Laden to set up shop in the Swat Valley.

The mob Khan represents intends to spread sharia law throughout Pakistan. Like Adolph Hitler did when he wrote Mein Kampf in 1925, Khan declared the Taliban mission. We must remember what the Taliban did to Afghanistan from 1996 through 2001, when they banned shaving, prohibited music and television, converted women to near-slaves, and turned the sports stadiums into public arenas for cutting off limbs and stoning women to death.

But you don’t impose a regime change just because a savage group folds the functions of cop, judge, jury and supreme court into a religion and calls it a government. The Taliban overstepped their bounds, however, when they harbored Osama bin Laden’s al Qaeda in Afghanistan. So after 9/11, we destroyed the Taliban’s effectiveness in order to go after al Qaeda. Then the Taliban began to infest Afghanistan’s southern provinces like poppy crops. So now we are surging to tame the Taliban and help Afghanistan survive. But Afghanistan is only part of AfPak.

 If Khan wins, and all of Pakistan is shackled with sharia law, we’ll face a transnational threat from the Taliban themselves, because of nuclear weapons. Pakistan has dispersed some 60 warheads throughout the country. If the Taliban take over district by district, as they recently tried with their surge from the Swat Valley into the districts of Buner, Mansehar, and Swabi, the odds are they’ll get a nuke.

 Can’t the Pakistani military stop this spreading plague? Surely, an army of a half-million, bolstered by another half-million reserves, would find no problem disposing of a few hundred guerrillas. But three questions arise.

1.  Is the army overly preoccupied with India’s reaction to the terrorist attacks against Mumbai involving Pakistan and Pakistani nationals in 2008?
2.  Does the army’s readiness for another possible conventional war against India hurt its preparedness for a counter-guerrilla war against the Taliban?
3.  Do family, ethnic and religious ties between some members of the army and Pakistani civilians involved with the Taliban adversely affect the Army’s readiness. To put it more bluntly, will the army be averse to fighting its own people?

 In response to such questions, Pakistan army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Pervez Kayani condemns such "pronouncements by outside powers raising doubts on the future of the country." He adds: "A country of 170 million resilient people under a democratic dispensation, strongly supported by the army, is capable of handling any crisis that it may confront. Victory against the terror and militancy will be achieved at all cost."

 Muslim Khan has outlined the Taliban plan, so let’s find a way to prevent it. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has said the United States does not envision sending combat troops into Pakistan, and Islamabad insists that the government doesn’t want them. Meanwhile, however, American UAVs are going after high-value targets to the southwest in Waziristan, even though Pakistan publicly complains about them.

 U.S. Predators and special operations troops in the northwest might offer one answer. It would be difficult to pinpoint targets because the districts between Swat and Islamabad are more settled than Waziristan, allowing Taliban leaders to blend with the innocents. Defusing the Pakistan-India relationship so the Pakistani army can concentrate on training locals to defend against the Taliban could provide another. That would be a difficult transformation. But no general -- from Prussian Carl von Clausewitz to American David H. Petraeus -- has ever said that war was easy. This applies especially when talking about AfPak.

 This article may be forwarded or republished on your website with attribution to Crosshairs - Military Matters in Review by Fred Edwards. Visit http://www.milmat.net for more Crosshairs.