Lahore bombing

I had not heard of the group Jamaat-ul-Ahrar, which claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing in Lahore that killed at least 65 people (evidently mostly Christians, who were intentionally targeted).  Wiki says that the group split from the main Pakistani Taliban organization (the TTP) in 2014.  It is not entirely clear from the Wiki entry exactly what Jamaat-ul-Ahrar's current relation to the TTP is.

ETA 3/28: According to the NewsHour tonight, most of the victims were Muslims.

Noted

From NYRB (Oct. 24): Malise Ruthven reviews (h/t) Akbar Ahmed's The Thistle and the Drone.

A brief excerpt:

Ahmed argues...that the acts of terror or violence directed at the U.S. or its allies are set off as much by revenge based on values of tribal honor as by extremist ideologies.... It seems fair to argue, as Ahmed does, that the values of honor and revenge inherent in the tribal systems contribute to jidahist extremism, and that by ignoring this all-important factor the U.S. has been courting disaster.

But according to Ruthven, Ahmed sees the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) as "countertribal." Anyway, RTWT.

Karzai's delusion

Several years ago I wrote a post summarizing a piece by B. Rubin and A. Rashid which argued that only a regional agreement -- i.e. one involving India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, the U.S. and its allies, and the Taliban and other 'non-state' forces -- could hope to bring at least a semi-satisfactory conclusion to the Afghanistan conflict.

Of course there has been no regional agreement -- indeed no agreement of any kind -- and now it's 2013, there has been the flow and ebb of the 'surge' of U.S. forces that Pres. Obama ordered at the end of 2009, and the overall situation, notwithstanding that there have no doubt been some success stories in some provinces, remains, in two words, not great. Or at any rate that is the only conclusion a viewer could have drawn from this piece that aired on the NewsHour last Monday.

In the discussion that immediately followed, James Dobbins said:

...we [i.e. the U.S. and its allies] are hopeful that there can be a negotiated peace with the Taliban. We see the importance of that being led by the Afghans. And Karzai is very frustrated, because, while the Taliban are willing to talk to us, they're not willing to talk to him or his government. And that's a source of deep frustration, that the future of Afghanistan might be hammered out between parties that don't include the government in Kabul. Now, I don't think the U.S. administration intends to do that. But the Taliban would like to -- would like to exacerbate tensions between us and Karzai and feed his suspicions that there are secret deals being done that he's not party to.

Forgive a stupid question, but don't the Taliban understand that the U.S. is joined at the hip with Karzai and that there is zero chance that the U.S. would strike a deal with the Taliban behind Karzai's back, no matter what sorts of statements he makes? Indeed, why doesn't Karzai himself understand this? Have Mullah Omar (or whoever is making the Afghan Taliban's decisions) and Karzai watched The Godfather too many times? Do they think that NATO and ISAF have spent more than a decade in Afghanistan for the purpose of creating conditions in which secret deals can be struck and the military-diplomatic equivalent of severed horses' heads can be left in people's beds? I realize Afghan domestic politics might have a substantial element of this (and perhaps always has), but that's less than a good excuse for harboring and/or acting on such delusions.

Update: V. Yadav has a somewhat different view. 

Are Pakistan's generals right to fear 'encirclement'?

In Steve Coll's article "Looking for Mullah Omar" in the Jan. 23 New Yorker, there is a passage (at p.52 of the hard copy) which contains a statement that I've been reading for a long time now, in one place or another and in one form of words or another:

...Taliban influence in Pashtun areas of Afghanistan has...served Pakistan's cause against India. The [Pakistani] generals fear that India will use economic aid and political support for Afghanistan to encircle Pakistan, establishing consulates and business outposts, and use these to funnel aid to separatist groups such as those fighting to achieve independence for the Pakistani province of Baluchistan. The [Afghan] Taliban offer a counterforce in this proxy struggle.

What evidence is there that India has actually tried to "encircle" Pakistan via aid to the Karzai government, setting up "business outposts," etc.? I know that India funded an elaborate road-building project or two in Afghanistan but I don't follow developments closely enough to know the answer to the question. Fears of 'encirclement,' however, can become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The news today that the Pakistani prime minister is urging the Afghan Taliban to enter peace talks with the Afghan government (which have been in the 'feeler' stages for a while) may indicate that the proxy-against-perceived-encirclement strategy is becoming less attractive and that Pakistan is beginning to realize that its interests will be served if the Afghanistan war comes to some kind of a settlement.

On Baluchistan, btw, I have bookmarked this piece by Akbar Ahmed (h/t The Yorkshire Ranter), but haven't yet read it.

Quote of the day

Peter Tomsen, in the Fall 2011 World Policy Journal (p.89):

A more realistic and tougher American policy towards Pakistan should take into account a number of regional geopolitical trends.... Duplicating a geopolitical pattern in the 1990s, the closer the predominantly Pashtun Taliban get to the Amu Darya River, dividing Afghanistan from the former Soviet Stans, the more Russia, Central Asian states, India, and Iran will coordinate to assist Afghan Tajik, Uzbek, and Hazara anti-Taliban resistance groups.... Counterproductive results of Pakistan's proxy wars in Afghanistan will also be felt at home as Pakistan surrenders the extensive regional economic benefits an Afghan peace accord could deliver to Pakistan.

-----
There's also some other interesting material in the same issue, e.g. "Kenya: Phoning It In" (on the transforming effects of money transfers by cell phone in Kenya -- pp. 8 and 9 of the hard-copy issue).

Kabul bombing is further evidence of changing Taliban tactics

Here.

Digging out an old proposal: a UN 'contact group' for Pakistan, India, and Afghanistan

Back in December '08 I blogged about an article by B. Rubin and A. Rashid [link will be added later] that advocated setting up a UN contact group to facilitate dialogue between India and Pakistan on the issues of Kashmir and Afghanistan. They argued that steps toward resolving some of Pakistan's anxieties about its borders (presumably in both the legal and practical senses) could help reduce Pakistan's motives -- or more specifically, the motives of parts of its army and intelligence service -- to support the Afghan Taliban and other militant groups.

Some relevant aspects of the situation, of course, have changed since Dec. '08. For one thing, U.S.-Pakistan relations have deteriorated (in light of the drone campaign and the killing of bin Laden, among other things), and the U.S. has suspended some military aid to Pakistan. But the future of Afghanistan, especially after the last U.S. combat forces have left, remains as much an open question now as it was at the end of '08. Pakistan's connections with the Afghan Taliban, via elements of the army and ISI, have also not ceased, as far as I'm aware. The Kashmir problem remains, of course, unresolved (btw, the UN has had a small military observer, a/k/a peacekeeping, force along the Line of Control since 1949. The UN spent $16 million on it in 2010-11 according to its website). So if the proposal for a UN contact group made sense in Dec. '08, it would seem still to make sense. The UN has a lot on its plate, to be sure, but that in itself is not a good reason for not adding one more item (double negative, sorry).

Scale back the drones

The death of OBL offers an opportunity to change some U.S. approaches in Pakistan and Afghanistan, starting with a reduction in drone strikes.

From the Democratic Individuality blog:

According to neocon foundations, the drones kill 5 civilians for every “Taliban." The Pakistan government says the number is 600 innocents for every “Taliban.” But even the neocon figure is bad enough....
Perhaps it is no wonder that starving crowds in Pakistan chant “death to Obama” or that Obama’s ratings in the Arab world, according to the Pew foundation (cited by Andrew Sullivan last week), are near the same dismal level as George Bush’s. The need for a redirection of policy could not be more glaring.

Critique of drone strikes: W. Post

Here.

Is U.S. national security really at stake in Afghanistan? If not, we should get out

I was more-or-less inclined to give Pres. Obama the benefit of the doubt, at least for a while, when he announced the so-called Afghan surge in December of last year. He argued that the mission was vital to U.S. national security and that the commitment of 30,000 additional soldiers was designed to stop the Taliban's momentum and give the Afghan security forces the necessary time to increase their capacity.

In hindsight, perhaps I did not think hard enough about a couple of basic issues: (1) how closely is stopping the Taliban's momentum etc. linked, in a practical sense, to the goal of disrupting and defeating al-Qaeda?; and (2) if the answer to (1) is "not very closely," then why is the U.S. committing so many resources to fighting the Taliban in the first place? Put more simply: would it make it any real difference to U.S. national security if the Taliban re-took the essential levers of power (such as they are) in the country and re-established themselves as the government in Kabul? I am more and more inclined to think the answer is no it wouldn't, in which case it becomes more and more difficult to justify the current U.S./ISAF policy.

In a recent post on his blog, Stephen Walt writes:

As our numbers fall [i.e., when U.S. troops start to be drawn down, starting presumably some time in 2011], the Taliban will regroup, Pakistan will help rearm them covertly, and the struggle for power in Afghanistan will resume. Afghanistan's fate will once again be primarily in the hands of the Afghan people and the nearby neighbors who meddle there for their own reasons. I don't know who will win, but it actually won't matter very much for U.S. national security interests. [emphasis added]

If who wins doesn't matter very much for U.S. national security interests, then I, for one, will find it increasingly hard to watch on the NewsHour those photos and names of U.S. military personnel who have been killed. I'm willing to stipulate that the Taliban leadership is a nasty and repressive lot and that a victory for them would be bad (to put it mildly) for Afghan democrats (small "d") and for women, among others. But the sacrifice of American lives at the scale on which it is occurring can only be justified if American vital national security interests are at stake. If, as Walt suggests, the U.S. is eventually going to concoct a fig-leaf peace settlement and then persuade ourselves that we won (if, indeed, this is the best possible outcome given current conditions), it would probably be better to get out right now.

Historical analogies are easy to misuse, and I have been wary of analogies between Afghanistan and Vietnam. (After all, the misuse of historical analogies contributed to the U.S. getting into Vietnam in the first place.) However, it's worth recalling that whatever one thought of the 1973 Vietnam peace agreement, it was never in the cards that, once U.S. forces had left Vietnam, they would be re-introduced to prevent the 'fall' of Saigon. The Kissinger-Nixon strategy of pursuing "peace with honor" -- hugely costly in terms of Vietnamese and American lives, and costly too for the Cambodians and Laotians -- appears pointless (indeed, flatly immoral) in retrospect. Walt is worried that we have forgotten this piece of history (among others). I continue to be wary of historical analogies when they are mobilized for use in policy debates, but one can be wary of analogies and at the same time acknowledge that there is some wisdom in Santayana's dictum that those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.

David Rohde interview

I caught part of this on the radio this afternoon. Click here.

Operation Moshtarak

On Thursday ISAF and Afghan forces raised the Afghan flag over the central market in Marjah (the town in Helmand province that has been the focus of this latest operation). This symbolic act means relatively little in itself, as a U.S. brigadier general obliquely acknowledged in an interview on the NewsHour Friday evening when he said that more remains to be done to clear the area of IEDs etc.

The real question, though, is whether Operation Moshtarak will eventually be able to claim some kind of long-term success, or whether the Taliban will just return to the area after the 'surge' begins to wind down in 2011. (This is one of a number of questions raised by V. Yadav at DofM a while back.) The operation so far has cost the deaths of 14 ISAF soldiers and twice that many Afghan civilians. Especially in view of this, it will be regrettable, to say the least, if it turns out that this operation does not have lasting effects. I'm not necessarily arguing it won't, I'm saying the overall situation is such that one has to worry about this.

Let's hope that those who have lost their lives in this operation have died for something more lasting and significant than the raising of a flag over a town's central market. Let's hope that the Afghan 'surge' will turn out to do what its proponents claimed it would. The jury is still very much out.

A civilian nuclear deal with Pakistan?

A little over a year ago, in December '08, I had occasion to write:

"One aspect of a [U.S.] diplomatic strategy might be to offer Pakistan a nuclear deal similar to the U.S.-Indian nuclear deal, on condition that Pakistan take a more vigorously constructive and helpful stance toward the U.S./NATO position in Afghanistan. Now that the A.Q. Khan network has stopped functioning [I might have been premature in this judgment], even if Khan himself remains something of a revered figure in certain Pakistani quarters, there is no principled reason to deny Pakistan the same sort of nuclear arrangement that India has with the U.S. (Concerns about the long-term stability of the civilian government, however, admittedly might be a complicating factor.)"

I was therefore interested to read Christine Fair's recent op-ed column ("Pakistan Needs Its Own Nuclear Deal," Wall Street Journal, Feb. 11; available on her website) in which she proposes "a conditions-based civilian nuclear deal" between the U.S. and Pakistan. She writes:

"This deal would confer acceptance to Islamabad's nuclear weapon program and reward it for the improvements in nuclear security that it has made since 2002. In the long shadow of A.Q. Khan and continued uncertainty about the status of his networks, it is easy to forget that Pakistan has established a Strategic Plans Division that has done much to improve safety of the country's nuclear assets."

What would Pakistan have to do in return?

"First, Pakistan would have to provide the kind of access and cooperation on nuclear suppliers' networks identified in the Kerry-Lugar-Berman legislation. Second, Pakistan would have to demonstrate sustained and verifiable commitment in combating all terrorist groups on its soil, including those groups such as Lashkar-e-Taiba that Pakistan often calls 'freedom fighters' acting on behalf of Kashmir and India's Muslims."

Although recognizing that this proposal would be hard to sell in both capitals, Fair thinks it is worth "putting...on the table now."

Unlike the linkage schemes I criticized here as overly ambitious, this one appears to make some sense. Recently, however, there has been increased cooperation between Pakistan and the U.S., especially in the area of intelligence sharing and related matters (see Karin Brulliard and Karen DeYoung, "Greater U.S. pressure led to Pakistan arrests: new level of cooperation emerging in struggle against Afghan Taliban," Wash. Post, Feb. 19, p.A1). As reported on the NewsHour today, Pakistani officials say that almost 15 senior and mid-level Afghan Taliban figures have been captured recently. If this sort of cooperation continues, the need for a nuclear deal may become less pressing. But it's hard to know whether it will continue.
P.s. Jim Walsh offers a somewhat different (i.e. more skeptical) view of Pakistan-U.S. intelligence cooperation.

'Behind Taliban lines'

The Frontline program of this title, which aired last night, is worth watching; the second half of the program (also worth watching) dealt with Pakistan's public schools, mentioned earlier here.

Drones -- again

Vikash Yadav at Duck of Minerva argues that a leadership decapitation strategy via drone strikes is not effective against the Taliban and associated networks in Pakistan. He says it creates only temporary disruption and causes civilian casualties. But this raises a question I just asked in comments there: what other military strategy against the Pakistani Taliban is available to the U.S.? This may be a case where doing nothing is preferable to doing something ineffective, but persuading the CIA and Pentagon of that would, I suspect, prove to be difficult.
Update: Yadav's reply is now up at the DofM comment thread.

Update on the attack in Khost

The murkiness of the situation on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border has only been underscored by the claims of responsibility and involvement by both the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban in the recent attack on the CIA base. The attack, as Christine Fair said on the NewsHour tonight, appears to have been aimed at decreasing the CIA's ability to carry out drone strikes in North Waziristan, the home of the Haqqani network. Thomas Johnson, on the same NewsHour segment, suggested that the Haqqani network might have "outsourced" the attack to (elements of) the Pakistani Taliban. Johnson also said that the degree of insurgent infiltration of the Afghan police and army, and of interpreters, has been underestimated. Fair had interesting things to say about Hakimullah Mehsud, current head of the Pakistani Taliban. They were both speaking rather quickly and my TV was misbehaving, so I later went to the NewsHour website and listened to the segment again. (Easier to follow that way.)
Further update: See the front-page articles in Wash Post of Jan.10.

New blog on Pakistan; F. Kagan analysis of Waziristan campaign

Via Charli Carpenter: the Pakistan Conflict Monitor.

Also, a couple of weeks ago the Wash Post's Walter Pincus summarized an analysis of the Waziristan campaign produced by Frederick Kagan and others connected with Am. Enterprise Institute. The paper emphasizes the Pakistani army's successful pre-campaign efforts to negotiate deals with tribal leaders and groups who might otherwise have actively opposed the current campaign against the Mehsud group in South Waziristan. (Despite my general dislike of AEI, this analysis, judging from the Post article, seems well-informed.)

The S. Waziristan campaign...

...has begun. In a remark made to the Wash. Post back in June, the Pakistani army spokesman predicted the effort to pacify the region would be "a long haul."

Frontline: 'Obama's War'

Everyone should see this program, which aired this evening. If you missed it, you can go to the PBS website and watch it online.

I'm not going to write at great length about it, but of the various disquieting aspects -- and there were several -- perhaps the most disturbing was to hear the Pakistani Interior Minister and the Army spokesman deny that the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network are even in Pakistan (let alone that the ISI, the Pakistani intelligence service, has been supporting them). And then to hear, after that, Richard Holbrooke say he was sure the Pakistanis know these groups are a threat to them as well as Afghanistan. Know they're a threat? The Pakistani officials don't acknowledge they're even in the country!

"Obama's War" is a well-done, informative piece of journalism, with the scene shifting between Helmand province, Kabul, Islamabad, and Washington. The counterinsurgency position in the current debate, about which I had lots of doubts to begin with, seems even less persuasive to me after watching this. I don't think that's because the program is unbalanced but because the difficulties involved become so evident, particularly in one moment in which a Marine, with an inadequate interpreter, interacts with some local people in Helmand. He asks for their help and they reply: "how can we help you? We don't even have swords. If you can't defeat the Taliban with all your weaponry, then we can't help you." Their reply mostly misses the point -- he wasn't asking for their military help -- but it underscores the difficulties involved in what is euphemistically called "cross-cultural communication" as well as the broader difficulties of entrusting this kind of mission to well-meaning but -- to the local population -- very foreign young men with guns. You can't overgeneralize from one encounter, but the effect nonetheless is very sobering.

Wazirstan update

An interesting analysis by the BBC's M. Ilyas Khan considers why the Pakistani army has not yet launched the operation in S. Wazirstan that seemed imminent this past summer.

He settles on two main reasons:

"Any action against the Baitullah Mehsud group [i.e. the Taliban group that was led by the late Baitullah Mehsud] in South Waziristan could draw in to the conflict militant groups based in the Wazir tribal areas of South and North Waziristan.

These groups are part of the al-Qaeda affiliated Haqqani network and have peace agreements with the [Pakistani] army.

They have so far concentrated exclusively on fighting inside Afghanistan, and many analysts consider their activities central to the army's perceived security interests in Afghanistan.

Any hostilities with them may harm these interests, analysts say.

Another reason may well have been the so-called Kerry-Lugar bill which promises $1.5bn (£0.95bn) in annual aid to Pakistan for the next five years. [This bill is for non-military aid and has been passed by both houses of Congress. It contains various conditions, some of which apply to U.S. security assistance as well as civilian aid. -- LFC]

The bill, which has been in the works for well over a year, has become hugely controversial recently due to some clauses that the military look upon as detrimental to its interests.

Last week, the army publicly denounced the bill at a time when the government was defending it, thereby sparking a rift within the political establishment....

But while the army considers its options for a re-think, attacks such as the one on its central headquarters in Rawalpindi on 10 October indicate that the options it has are indeed limited, and time is running out."

And throughout all this, the majority of the Pakistani army remains stationed, as far as I'm aware, on the border with India, unable to contribute directly to any operations in the west.