Human rights report threatens aid to Pakistan - washingtonpost.com

Image by Getty Images via Daylife

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, April 6, 2010; A06

ISLAMABAD -- The Pakistani army has allegedly committed hundreds of retaliatory killings and other ongoing human rights abuses in the Swat Valley since the end of its successful anti-Taliban offensive there in September, threatening billions of dollars in U.S. military and economic aid to a crucial ally in the fight against al-Qaeda and the Taliban.

New York-based Human Rights Watch said it had documented the extrajudicial execution of as many as 300 alleged Taliban supporters and sympathizers in the area around Mingora, the Swat capital, in interviews with more than 100 Swat families in February and March. A report on the alleged abuses, including torture, home demolitions, illegal detentions and disappearances, is scheduled for release this month.

Based on a continuing pattern, "we can only assume it is part of the counterterrorism effort by the security forces to shoot people in the back of the head," said Ali Dayan Hasan, the organization's senior South Asia analyst.

The Obama administration has been aware of reports of abuse since last summer, U.S. officials in Washington said, even as it has strengthened its relationship with Pakistan. Last month, the administration held a "strategic dialogue" with top Pakistani military and government officials.

Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell said Monday that "we take allegations of human rights abuses seriously" and that the U.S. military was "working with the Pakistanis" to address the situation and that progress was being made.

A senior U.S. official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said the administration has provided Congress with regular updates on the allegations since last summer as well as on steps taken to address them. "We are mindful of the legislative requirements," the official said.

Most U.S. aid to Pakistan falls under congressional restrictions requiring the administration to certify the country's adherence to human rights laws and norms. Since 2002, the United States has provided $11.6 billion in military aid and $6 billion in development assistance, according to Congressional Research Service figures. The administration has requested an additional $3 billion in combined aid for 2011.

Pakistani army spokesman Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas denied allegations of abuse, saying that the military had invited human rights groups to investigate earlier charges during the June-to-September offensive in the former Taliban stronghold. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani, he said, issued written directives ordering troops operating in Swat and other regions to respect the rule of law.

"If we are seen as becoming terrorists against the terrorists," Abbas said, "all we have gained will go up in the air." He suggested that reported killings or other abuses were the result of "scores being settled between the people and the Taliban," many of whom remain in the mountains surrounding settled areas in Swat.

Image by Cecilia... via Flickr

The army is holding about 2,500 detainees from counterinsurgency operations in Swat and elsewhere in the north and west, about 1,000 of them in Swat. The military has no judicial arm to prosecute them and has complained that Pakistan's slow-moving civilian judiciary was unable to handle them.

Hasan, of Human Rights Watch, said the military has not released the names of those being held or allowed outside access to them.

Despite the abuse allegations, the army presence appears to have the support of many Swat residents. In Mingora, members of the military could be seen rebuilding roads, schools and libraries, buying computers for women's vocational institutes and providing solar-powered streetlights to villages, in the absence of government reconstruction efforts.

The Swat offensive marked the start of several major Pakistani military operations against strongholds of the Pakistani Taliban, which the Obama administration says is tied to al-Qaeda and to Taliban forces fighting in Afghanistan. About 150,000 Pakistani army troops have been involved in operations in Swat and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas along the Afghanistan border, including Bajur and South Waziristan.

The administration has urged Pakistan to extend full offensive operations into North Waziristan, Orakzai and Khyber regions of the FATA, which it has described as havens for al-Qaeda leaders and the Taliban-allied insurgent network of Afghan commander Jalaluddin Haqqani.

U.S. officials have also worked to develop close ties with the Pakistani military, which has ruled the country for nearly half of Pakistan's 63-year existence and has an uneasy relationship with the civilian government. Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, visits Pakistan regularly, as does Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan.

Image via Wikipedia

Under a $7.5 billion, five-year economic and development aid package signed by President Obama in October, the secretary of state must certify that the military is "not materially and substantially subverting the political or judicial processes of Pakistan" -- a provision that drew sharp protests from the Pakistani military, which charged that it interferes in the country's internal affairs.

Gates, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and national security adviser James L. Jones have met with the army chief, Kiyani, as well as civilian leaders, during recent visits to Pakistan, as has Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.), who co-sponsored the new developmental aid package. An aide said Kerry had raised the human rights allegations "with senior Pakistani officials" during a trip in February.

Hasan said Human Rights Watch had investigated about a third of the abuse reports the group had received from the Mingora area and found most of them substantiated. "Certainly, some of these people are Taliban supporters and sympathizers," he said of Swat, but many are "caught in the middle."

The group has been unable to verify the military units involved in alleged abuses, as required by U.S. law before a cutoff of aid.

Related articles by Zemanta

• U.S. Seeks to Ease India-Pakistan Tensions (online.wsj.com)
• Bombs target U.S. Consulate in Pakistan (cbc.ca)
• US-Pakistan Strategic Dialogue: Can the US 'do more'? (teabreak.pk)
• Army Chief Driving Pakistan's Agenda for Talks (nytimes.com)
• Drones Batter Qaeda and Allies Within Pakistan (nytimes.com)

In Pakistan's Swat Valley, an Eid Tempered by Recent Dangers - washingtonpost.com

By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Wednesday, September 23, 2009

MINGORA, Pakistan -- Girls in bright dresses pushed each other on swings, and boys in pastel tunics played soldier with toy rifles. Neighbors hugged, families gathered and vendors sold scoop after scoop of sweet custard.

This week is the first time in three years that people in Pakistan's Swat Valley have been able to celebrate Eid al-Fitr -- the joyous three-day festival that follows the Muslim holy month of Ramadan and its daily fasting -- without looking anxiously over their shoulders for armed religious vigilantes in pickup trucks.

But the Taliban-free holiday has been bittersweet for many Swatis, still shellshocked from the summer-long army operation that drove the Islamist militants from this verdant northwest valley but also left a path of death and destruction and sent hundreds of thousands of inhabitants fleeing for their lives.

"It doesn't really feel like Eid, because we cannot forget so soon," said Sadiq Khan, a fruit seller in the town of Batkhela. "They are still finding bodies in the Swat River. We had to spend weeks in those hot tents, and some of our women had to give birth on the road as we ran from the fighting. There is too much sorrow and shame for us to celebrate."

Two months after the Pakistani army declared that people could return home from their makeshift camps and lodgings, Swat still looks like a war zone. In towns and villages leading to this regional center, dozens of buildings lie in ruins. Some were schools destroyed by the militants; others were homes and shops blasted by army shelling.

The main road through the valley winds past peach orchards, rice paddies and fragrant eucalyptus groves. But drivers must navigate a succession of military barricades concocted from boulders, trees, car parts and iron pipes. Every few miles, soldiers flag down long lines of vehicles, peer inside and check each passenger's face against photos of fugitive Taliban leaders.

Although there is no visible sign of the armed and turbaned militants who once freely roamed Swat, enforcing Islamic laws and meting out punishment to miscreants, the specter of the Taliban hovers close. Three weeks ago, a suicide bomber detonated his explosives outside a police training center here, killing 16 recruits.

Although the 7 p.m.-to-11 a.m. army curfew has been briefly lifted for Eid, few people go out after dark and most shops remain closed until midmorning.

"There is less fear now, but people are still worried the militants will come back, so they don't feel completely free," said Shah Zia ul Haq, 40, a shop owner in Balogram whose house was partly destroyed by army shelling. "My family is still in mourning because my brother was killed when he went outside after curfew one night. We still don't know what happened to him in the dark."

The enjoyment of Eid here was also marred by a political and religious dispute over exactly when the holiday began and people could end their month of daily 15-hour fasts. Officially, Eid is declared when a national committee of Islamic scholars announces that the new moon has been sighted. But local committees in the northwest -- led by conservative clerics aligned with Afghan and Saudi religious practices -- strove to prove the moon had appeared sooner.

As a result, Swatis who obeyed the local mullahs broke their Ramadan fast on Sunday and began celebrating; others remained fasting until the government declared Eid on Monday, leading to awkward social situations, semi-opened markets and general annoyance.

"Everything is confused," said Noor Rehman, a butcher in Batkhela, where many shops were closed Monday. "Some mosques announced it was Eid yesterday, but others said we should still fast. It is because the government is too weak. We need to have one Eid to unify the country."

During three years of Taliban control here, Eid began whenever the militants said so. But their arbitrary behavior took far more abusive forms, which Swatis remember vividly. People recounted how militants bombed a girls school, dragged hashish addicts off to be whipped, beheaded a government clerk as a spy, and beat a couple who ventured outdoors and could not convince the stern moral vigilantes that they were married.

In Mingora, a once-thriving town full of banks and colleges that became Taliban headquarters, people said they dreaded passing a certain traffic circle where each morning the militants left dead bodies, often with notes pinned to them warning that no one should touch or remove the corpses for a certain number of days or hours. No one dared disobey.

"Sometimes they had no heads," said Rozi Khan, 50, a cobbler bent over a sole-less leather shoe at his customary sidewalk spot, half a block from the notorious circle. "Whenever I saw a body, I just put away my tools and went home," he said. "Things were tense all the time, and there were few customers anyway."

The atmosphere of this post-Taliban Eid in Mingora was a mix of muted celebration, religious contemplation and reemerging commercial freedom. Many shops remained closed, but Indian movie posters were back up on the walls, and young men browsed through racks of pop-music CDs where just a few months ago only recordings of Islamic chants were sold.

At the Saidu Baba Shrine, a famed sanctuary of cool white marble, a steady stream of men and boys entered all day. They knelt to wash in a stone trough of running, ice-cold spring water, then knelt again to say their Eid prayers.

A white-bearded man outside the shrine recalled the days when Swat was peaceful and full of foreign tourists who came to see its ancient Buddhist ruins, climb its green craggy hills and enjoy its bracing alpine air. He also mentioned proudly that England's Queen Elizabeth II had visited in the 1950s.

"That all seems like a dream now, like rocking on a swing with your eyes closed," said the man, a retired police officer named Sherzada. "We tell our young people about those times, but they don't believe us. I worry that our new generation has been so psychologically damaged by all this violence and disturbance that they will never be the same."

Just down the hill from the shrine, a dozen adolescent boys in new yellow and blue tunics were playing in an old cemetery. As they hid behind the jagged gravestones and jumped out in ambush, each brandished a plastic, Taliban-style assault rifle -- the hottest-selling gift item in Swat this Eid.

Special correspondent Haq Nawaz Khan contributed to this report.

In Pakistan's Swat Valley, boys – and girls – crack open schoolbooks once again

After nearly two years of Taliban rule and a recent military offensive, hundreds of students are returning to their studies. But many schools were damaged or destroyed.

By Daud Khattak | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor

Mingora, Pakistan

Hundreds of boys and girls returned to school in Pakistan's Swat Valley this month, returning to their lessons after being forced to flee fighting between the Army and Taliban. Even girls, who had been banned from school by the militants who dominated the area until April, showed up.

After nearly two years of Taliban rule and a destructive three-month military offensive, their attendance marks one of the first, tenuous signs of a return to normalcy in this northwestern area.

Many children don't have schools to return to. Instead they are studying in tents, under trees, or amid the rubble where their schools once stood. They have no desks, chairs, tables, or shade. At a middle school in Maniyar, just outside Mingora, girls used bricks from the demolished buildings as seats.

According to Fazal Ahad, an education official in Swat, 220 girls' and boys' schools were damaged or destroyed, along with 130 more in neighboring Buner and Dir districts, where fighting also took place. The total cost of damage in Swat – including of hospitals, roads, bridges, hotels, and private property – may total $2.5 billion, says Wajid Ali Khan, a provincial minister.

Refugees return – warily

Despite the damage, Swat residents are steadily returning from refugee camps and neighboring towns.

Ali, a resident of Swat whose brother was shot dead by Taliban in Mingora a few months ago, says the militants have been dealt a serious blow and will not be able to return and challenge the writ of the government.

Many are more skeptical, though, as reports swirl of Taliban sightings in Swat tehsils (subdistricts) such as Kabal, Charbagh, and Matta. The offensive killed some key Taliban leaders, such as Shahi Dauran, who had become a dreaded figure in Swat, and forced others to flee. But residents say they want to see top commanders, like Swat Taliban chief Maulana Fazlullah, arrested or killed.

Banned shops reopen; school reconstruction

Meanwhile, businesses shut down by the Taliban, such as barbershops and music stores, are slowly reopening, though more quickly in Mingora than in surrounding areas. Usman Gul, a barber from Kabal, is still too scared to start shaving beards again, a practice the Taliban had banned. Music, also considered taboo, can now be heard from shops and cafes, cars and buses.

School reconstruction will begin in September, says Gul Mina Bilal, a senior member of the province's ruling Awami National Party.

That will especially benefit girls, whom the Taliban barred from school early this year. Some 80,000 girls in Swat were getting educations, says Ziauddin Yousafzai, a school administrator. Although only a fraction of those have returned, the number of children back in school is growing. "We expect the number will grow as people continue arriving in the valley from camps and cities," he says, adding that the children seem happy to be back.

Eager students include Shama, a girl sitting on a rug under a tent at the middle school in Maniyar.

"My school was bombed by Taliban while we were living in tents in Mardan," she says. "They say it is going to be constructed soon. I'm happy that I'll get new books. I want to get education and become a teacher."

A hint of normalcy: children singing

In the mornings here and elsewhere in Mingora, schoolchildren can be heard singing the national anthem at assembly – an unbelievable sound for many people who stayed put during the days of Taliban.

Says Abdullah, one resident: "I've been listening to the sound of morning assembly in a school close to my house for the past three days, and trying again and again to assure myself again and again that things have changed now."

Full HTML version of this story which may include photos, graphics, and related links

Trying to Heal, Pakistan Valley Fears New Battles

By JANE PERLEZ and PIR ZUBAIR SHAH

MINGORA, Pakistan — Schools have officially reopened. Soldiers stand guard at checkpoints and have established a semblance of order. Many thousands have returned here to a town that is mostly intact, if still under a military presence.

But Mingora, a battle-scarred city in the Swat Valley, remains tense. Pakistan’s efforts to restore normalcy — a vital test of the government’s resolve to stand up to the Taliban — waver between fear and hope, leaving an enduring victory over the militants a distant goal.

Beneath the surface of relative calm, there is the sense that a new and more insidious conflict may be afoot, one that could take many months to play out before the fate of this once-prosperous region is ultimately decided.

On Sunday morning, a body, hands bound with rope and shot in the back of the head, lay on the sidewalk of a main road. A note pinned to the shirt and written in Urdu gave the victim’s name, Gul Khitab, and said he was from Matta, one of the remaining Taliban strongholds. “Enemy of Swat,” it read.

Rumors abound of other bodies being dumped in the last two weeks, a signal that the army may be prepared to use extrajudicial killings to settle scores. A government employee, Murad Ali, who peered at the body, said he had seen three bodies, shot in the head, lying in similar fashion in the past six days.

Asked about the identity of the man, an army commander who stopped to look, and then moved on, said with a grin, “Maybe a bad guy.” A military spokesman, Maj. Nasir Khan, said the army was unaware of the death and did not condone extrajudicial killing.

If no one knew precisely what to make of the body, it was a clear enough sign that the conflict in Swat was not over.

To the fear and frustration of those who suffered at their hands, the top Taliban leaders remain on the loose. Taliban fighters have melted away to the periphery of Swat or to neighboring areas, like Dir, leaving soldiers and civilians alike filled with dread of when — and how — the insurgents would return.

On Friday, warning shots could be heard, as jittery soldiers, worried about suicide bombers, patrolled with hair triggers.

Three months after the Pakistani military began its offensive, many among the more than one million displaced have returned, expecting calm but still uncertain whether the military can guarantee it.

The failure to kill or capture Taliban leaders has left many here suspicious that the military is not serious about taking on the Taliban. To allay fears, the military has publicly presented four teenage boys who it says were captured by the Taliban and placed in a training camp with more than 100 other boys, all of them hostages.

The boys said they were lectured by a trainer on how the army was an “infidel” organization filled with “apostates.” The four boys said they escaped in less than two weeks.

For the moment, the military’s presence is tolerated. But the fact that soldiers are holed up in schools — the prestigious Sarosh Academy is being used as a prison for Taliban militants — does not make people happy, either.

The western part of the city remains barricaded. The many requirements to secure the peace — functioning courts and other government services — seem months away.

“One year — we’ll be lucky if we get this under control,” Atif ur-Rehman, the district coordinating officer who is one of the senior government officials in Swat, said in the garden of his residence on a hill above the town.

Mr. Rehman, the point man for foreign donors who are beginning to line up with plans for reconstructing Swat, said the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank were assessing needs based on the damage to buildings, roads and bridges after two years of periodic fighting between the militants and the army, and the three-month offensive.

The United Nations planned to help restore health and education services. The United States Agency for International Development had also offered to help.

“Their mode of working is slower than the government of Pakistan,” Mr. Rehman said of his meeting with officials at the American agency.

Whether these foreign aid programs can be done fast enough to satisfy the people who are most vulnerable to the lure of the militants is a pressing concern.

At Takhtaband, an impoverished area on the edge of Mingora, Rahim Khan described two aerial strikes by the Pakistani military around 5 p.m. on May 15, at a playground where children were playing cricket.

The strikes killed 27 people, including his mother, father and eight children, Mr. Khan said. The second raid came as relatives picked up the wounded and the dead from the first attack, Mr. Khan said.

Nearby, as he spoke, a skull was lodged in a crevice among the broken bricks, and from the smell it seemed likely that bodies were still strewn beneath them.

The strike was apparently intended for an adjacent farm that was used by the Taliban, Mr. Khan said. The farm was untouched by the attack, though six or seven Taliban were also killed in the strikes, he said.

The most bitter experience, he said, was dragging 12 of the most seriously wounded on a harrowing two-day walk to a hospital in Malakand. Some were carried on the backs of men, and others were put in wheelbarrows, he said. Six of the 12 later died, he said.

The May 15 date described by Mr. Khan corresponds to official army reports, made May 18, that heavy fighting was under way in the Takhtaband area, and that two Taliban commanders had been killed.

For most of the 20th century, Swat was a place apart in Pakistan. It was run until 1969 by a hereditary ruler, and its natural beauty of cascading rivers, towering mountains and pristine forests drew wealthy Pakistanis.

The Pakistan Tourist Development Corporation hotel reopened two weeks ago. It still serves tea in pots covered by cozies and poured into flower-patterned china cups, one of the few genteel touches to survive the traumas of the last two years.

The owner of a copy shop, Jehangir Khan, said his customers now were mostly those applying for government compensation for damaged property. “Business is equal to nothing,” he said.

Would Swat ever be the same? “It’s difficult to see,” he said. “The government never takes care of its promises.”

Pakistan Injects Precision Into Air War on Taliban

By ERIC SCHMITT

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan’s Air Force is improving its ability to pinpoint and attack militant targets with precision weapons, adding a new dimension to the country’s fight against violent extremism, according to Pakistani military officials and independent analysts.

The Pakistani military has moved away from the scorched-earth artillery and air tactics used last year against insurgents in the Bajaur tribal agency. In recent months, the air force has shifted from using Google Earth to sophisticated images from spy planes and other surveillance aircraft, and has increased its use of laser-guided bombs.

The changes reflect an effort by the Pakistani military to conduct its operations in a way that will not further alienate the population by increasing civilian casualties and destroying property. But they are also dictated by necessity as the military takes its campaign into areas where it is reluctant to commit ground troops, particularly in the rugged terrain of Waziristan, where it had suffered heavy losses.

Military analysts say the airstrikes alone cannot ultimately substitute for ground forces or for better counterinsurgency training. But they say the airstrikes have become a valuable tool for Pakistan in fighting the Taliban and Al Qaeda in sometimes inaccessible terrain.

Since May, F-16 multirole fighter jets have flown more than 300 combat missions against militants in the Swat Valley and more than 100 missions in South Waziristan, attacking mountain hide-outs, training centers and ammunition depots, Pakistani military officials said.

In conjunction with infantry fire, artillery barrages and helicopter gunship attacks, military officials say, the air combat missions reinvigorated the military campaign in Swat and have put increasing pressure on the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, Baitullah Mehsud, in South Waziristan.

Interviews with Pakistani fighter pilots and senior commanders offered a rare window into this other air war — a much larger but less heralded campaign that runs parallel to the three dozen secret missile strikes carried out this year by Central Intelligence Agency drones in Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas.

The air force’s new tools and tactics have several sources. The air force has without fanfare accepted some American assistance, like sophisticated surveillance equipment and high-grade images.

But sensitive to anti-American fervor in the country, Pakistani officials have refused most outside aid, developing a small corps of ground spotters largely on their own, and occasionally tapping the Internet for online assistance.

Pakistani officials are urging the Obama administration to lease Pakistan upgraded F-16s, until its own new fighters are delivered in the next year or two. This would allow Pakistani pilots to fly night missions, impossible with their current aircraft.

Pakistan has argued that it needs the more advanced versions of the F-16 to more effectively battle the Taliban insurgency. In the past, American officials raised concerns that Pakistan’s arms purchases and troop deployments were geared mainly to bolstering its ability to fight its traditional enemy to the east, India. “Of course, there is a real threat from India,” Air Chief Marshal Rao Qamar Suleman, Pakistan’s air force chief of staff, said in an interview at his headquarters here. “But right now we have to tackle the threat from the militants.”

Nearly every day in the past few months, Pakistani warplanes have pummeled militant targets in the contested Swat Valley and South Waziristan. The campaigns are a big change from operations in Bajaur last fall.

“The biggest handicap we had in Bajaur was that we didn’t have good imagery,” Air Chief Marshal Qamar said. “We didn’t have good target descriptions. We did not know the area. We were forced to use Google Earth.

“I didn’t want to face a similar situation in Swat,” he said.

In advance of the Swat campaign, the air force equipped about 10 F-16s with high-resolution, infrared sensors, provided by the United States, to conduct detailed reconnaissance of the entire valley.

The United States has also resumed secret drone flights performing military surveillance in the tribal areas, to provide Pakistani commanders with a wide array of videos and other information on militants, according to American officials.

In most cases, officials said, the Pakistani Army provides target information to the air force, which confirms the locations on newly detailed maps. Identifying high-value targets through the use of army spotters or, in some cases, a new, small group of specially trained air force spotters, the air force was able to increase its use of laser-guided bombs to 80 percent of munitions used in Swat, from about 40 percent in Bajaur, Air Chief Marshal Qamar said.

Another change was the mass evacuation of civilians. About two million people were displaced, sometimes with only a few hours’ notice, as part of an effort to get civilians out of conflict areas to reduce their casualties.

Some American officials voice skepticism about Pakistani claims of success. “We don’t have access to battle-damage assessment or the information on the actual strike execution, so we cannot make a qualitative comparison of what the intended effect was versus the actual effect,” said an American adviser, who spoke on condition of anonymity, to avoid jeopardizing his job.

Officials of human rights organizations say the military has not been able to eliminate all civilian casualties from airstrikes and ground fire, but they agree that the numbers are down.

“Certainly, the level of civilian casualties in this phase of the conflict has been lower than in previous operations in the tribal areas,” said Ali Dayan Hasan, senior South Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch, based in Lahore, Pakistan.

The air force still operates under limitations. Because the F-16s are equipped to fly only by day, the militants move and conduct operations at night. Indeed, not one of the 21 main militant leaders in Swat has been killed or captured, Pakistani officials acknowledge. In addition, the Pakistani jets cannot be refueled in midair, as American fighters can, limiting how long they can remain over a target area.

In South Waziristan, as the army mulls a ground war, the air force continues to attack militants’ hide-outs and training camps as well as storage caves and tunnels with 500-pound and 2,000-pound bombs.

“We’re still developing our plans for South Waziristan,” Air Chief Marshal Qamar said. “We are preparing to ramp up. I think Baitullah Mehsud is getting the message, and the message is, if he keeps doing these things, we’ll hit him.”

Landowners Still in Exile From Unstable Pakistan Area

By JANE PERLEZ and PIR ZUBAIR SHAH

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Even as hundreds of thousands of people stream back to the Swat Valley after months of fighting, one important group is conspicuously absent: the wealthy landowners who fled the Taliban in fear and are the economic pillar of the rural society.

The reluctance of the landowners to return is a significant blow to the Pakistani military’s campaign to restore Swat as a stable, prosperous part of Pakistan, and it presents a continuing opportunity for the Taliban to reshape the valley to their advantage.

About four dozen landlords were singled out over the past two years by the militants in a strategy intended to foment a class struggle. In some areas, the Taliban rewarded the landless peasants with profits of the crops of the landlords. Some resentful peasants even signed up as the Taliban’s shock troops.

How many of those peasants stayed with the militants during the army offensive of the last several months, and how many moved to the refugee camps, was difficult to assess, Pakistani analysts said.

But reports emerging from Swat show that the Taliban still have the strength to terrorize important areas. The army continues to fight the Taliban in their strongholds, particularly in the Matta and Kabal regions of Swat, not far from the main city, Mingora, where many refugees have reclaimed their homes.

In those regions, the Taliban have razed houses, killed a civilian working for the police in Matta and kidnapped another, worrying counterinsurgency experts, who fear that the refugees may have been encouraged by the Pakistani authorities to go back too soon.

The rebuilding of Swat, a fertile area of orchards and forests, is a critical test for the government and the military as they face Taliban insurgencies across the tribal belt, particularly in Waziristan on the Afghanistan border.

In a sign of the lack of confidence that Mingora was secure, the Pakistani military declined a request by the Obama administration’s special envoy to Pakistan, Richard C. Holbrooke, to visit the town last week.

There was nervousness, an American counterinsurgency expert said, that the plans by the Pakistani authorities to build new community police forces in Swat would not materialize quickly enough to protect the returning civilians, who are also starved of basic services like banks and sufficient medical care.

“There is no apparatus in place to replace the army,” said an American counterinsurgency official. “The army will be the backstop.”

About two million people have fled Swat and surrounding areas since the military opened its campaign to push back the Taliban at the end of April. The United Nations said Monday that 478,000 people had returned to Swat so far, but it cautioned that it was unable to verify the figure, which was provided by the government.

Assessment trips by United Nations workers to Swat scheduled for Monday and Tuesday were canceled for security reasons, and the United Nations office in Peshawar that serves as the base for Swat operations was closed Monday because of a high threat of kidnapping, a spokesman said.

The landlords, many of whom raised sizable militias to fight the Taliban themselves last year, say the army is again failing to provide enough protection if they return.

Another deterrent to returning, they say, is that the top Taliban leadership, responsible for taking aim at the landlords and spreading the spoils among the landless, remains unscathed.

If it continues, the landlords’ absence will have lasting ramifications not only for Swat, but also for Pakistan’s most populated province, Punjab, where the landholdings are vast, and the militants are gaining power, said Vali Nasr, a senior adviser to Mr. Holbrooke, the American envoy.

“If the large landowners are kept out by the Taliban, the result will in effect be property redistribution,” Mr. Nasr said. “That will create a vested community of support for the Taliban that will see benefit in the absence of landlords.”

At two major meetings with the landlords, the Pakistani military and civilian authorities requested that they return in the vanguard of the refugees. None have agreed to do so, according to several of the landowners and a senior army officer.

“We have sacrificed so much; what has the government and the military done for us?” asked Sher Shah Khan, a landholder in the Kuz Bandai area of Swat. He is now living with 50 family members in a rented house about 60 miles from Swat. Four family members and eight servants were killed trying to fight off the Taliban, he said.

At one of the meetings, Mr. Khan said he had asked the army commanders to provide weapons so the landlords could protect themselves, as the landowners had in the past.

The military refused the request, he said, saying it would fight the Taliban. Yet Pakistani soldiers had failed to protect his lands, he said. Twenty of his houses were blown up by the Taliban after the army ordered him and his family to leave their lands on two hours’ notice last September, he said.

A letter he sent last month to Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the head of the Pakistani military, asking for compensation has gone unanswered, he said. In the meantime, one of his tenants called asking if he could plant crops on Mr. Khan’s property. He refused but had little idea what was happening back home, Mr. Khan said.

Other landlords are equally frustrated. The mayor of Swat, Jamal Nasir, fled after his father, Shujaat Ali Khan, regarded as the biggest landlord in Swat, narrowly avoided being killed by the Taliban. Mr. Nasir, a major landowner himself, now stays in his house in Islamabad.

The top guns of the Taliban are still in Swat, or perhaps in neighboring Dir, Mr. Nasir said. “These people should be arrested,” he said. “If they are not arrested, they are going to come back.”

Another landlord, Sher Mohammad, said he was still bitter that the army refused to help as he, his brother and his nephew fought off the Taliban last year for 13 hours, even though soldiers were stationed less than a mile away. Mr. Mohammad was hit in the groin by a bullet and lost a finger in the fight.

At one of the meetings with the military in Peshawar, Mr. Mohammad, a prominent politician with the Pakistan Peoples Party, said he told the officers that he was not impressed with their performance.

“They said, ‘We will protect you,’ ” he recalled. “I said, ‘We don’t trust you.’ ”

Pakistani Pledge to Rout Taliban In Tribal Region Is Put on Hold

By Joshua Partlow
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, July 27, 2009

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- Soon after Pakistan launched its offensive against the Taliban this spring, President Asif Ali Zardari declared that the mission would go beyond pushing the Islamist militia out of the Swat Valley. "We're going to go into Waziristan," he said.

More than two months later, that still has not come to pass. Instead, the planned invasion of South Waziristan, a Taliban and al-Qaeda sanctuary along the Afghanistan border, has been delayed by the refugee crisis spawned by fighting in Swat, an overstretched military unwilling to let its guard down with India and the difficulty in isolating the Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud, according to Pakistani and American officials.

Pakistan's military has blockaded the tribal district and bombed it from the air, and it insists that the ground assault will proceed. But as the clock ticks, military analysts worry that fighting in the mountains will be more difficult as the weather turns cold in the fall. The delay has raised questions about Pakistan's commitment to waging war against Taliban fighters the state has nurtured in the past.

"It's an insane dream to expect anything different from the Pakistani government," said Ali Wazir, a South Waziristan native and a politician with the secular Awami National Party. "The Taliban are the brainchildren of the Pakistan army for the last 30 years. They are their own people. Could you kill your own brother?"

Mehsud is believed to be responsible for the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, as well as many of the recent suicide bombings in Pakistan. American officials, however, said they have not urged Pakistan to launch the operation because of the scope of problems in the Swat Valley, where 2 million refugees were displaced by the ongoing military operation there.

"Baitullah Mehsud is a dreadful man, and his elimination is an imperative. However, the first imperative is to secure the areas the refugees are going back into," Richard C. Holbrooke, the U.S. envoy to the region, said in an interview.

Although Holbrooke said it could be beneficial to have simultaneous offensives -- the U.S. Marines on the Afghanistan side of the border and the Pakistani army in the tribal regions to the east -- the greater concern is unfinished business elsewhere. "Why would I push them to start an offensive when they have 2 million people they have to protect first?" Holbrooke said.

The Pakistani military operation against the Taliban was planned to unfold in three phases, starting in April with the Frontier Corps paramilitary force moving into areas around the Swat Valley, the former tourist destination where the Taliban seized control. The following month, two Pakistani divisions, or about 40,000 soldiers, led a ground operation into the valley. They have since regained control, although fighting continues and the Taliban leadership there remains largely intact. The third and most difficult phase was to be a ground operation into South Waziristan.

But the offensive in Swat pushed some 2 million people from their homes, and the fighting damaged hundreds of schools, homes and businesses. The military now must orchestrate the return of thousands of refugees each day along with rebuilding and trying to prevent the Taliban from returning, as it has done in the past. The Taliban overwhelmed the police before the operation and residents are skeptical about whether the military can keep control.

American officials are concerned that the Pakistani military might not stay in Swat long enough to ensure residents' safety. "Failing to hold in Swat would be a calamity," said a U.S. official in Pakistan, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "I hope they're thinking about it in terms of a plan and not on a timetable."

One Pakistani diplomat said American officials are not happy with the level of coordination involved in providing money and services to the returning refugees. "In their heart of hearts, I think they feel that Pakistan will mess up the repatriation," the diplomat said. "They feel . . . probably they'll go overboard, they won't resettle them, and you'll have a potential quicksand where you'll breed another strand of terrorist resistance."

Pakistani officials insist that they are focused on the refugees and that they do not want to rush into opening new fronts against the Taliban. Pakistan has already launched two operations into South Waziristan in recent years that failed to dislodge the Taliban. Since 2007, more than 2,200 Pakistani soldiers, police and intelligence officers have been killed in Swat and the tribal areas, and more than 5,300 have been injured.

"We would not like to do anything haphazardly. If you open so many fronts at the same time, then the danger is you will not achieve success on any front. So we would like to move with utmost circumspection," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Abdul Basit. The tribal areas are "a different ballgame and we need to understand how difficult it is."

Part of the reason the Pakistani government is wary about launching the Waziristan operation is that there is little appetite to remove more troops from the 140,000-strong force that mans the eastern border with India. Two brigades have already left to join the Swat operation. "That leaves us very little," a Pakistani intelligence official said.

Fighting in South Waziristan also poses a much greater challenge than in Swat. More than 400,000 people live in the tribal district, which is a bit larger than Delaware. Baitullah Mehsud commands about 10,000 to 12,000 fighters, including 4,000 foreign fighters, according to Pakistani intelligence officials. He pays his foot soldiers $60 to $80 a month, higher than the average local policeman's salary. Al-Qaeda, meanwhile, has increased its focus on uniting the Taliban and other radical Islamist groups in the fight against Pakistan, betting its success on the survival of the Taliban, according to intelligence officials.

"It will be longer and bloodier," another intelligence official said of the fight against Baitullah Mehsud. "He's been made into someone 10 feet tall."

Mehsud's stature has grown in part because of recent decisions by other Taliban commanders, such as Maulvi Nasir and Hafiz Gul Bahadur, who once cooperated with Pakistan but have announced their intention to fight security forces. Their representatives said they have been outraged by missile strikes from unmanned American aircraft. Instead of being able to rely on rival Taliban commanders to assist the army, the drone attacks have unified them against the state, intelligence officials said.

To add to the tactical problems, it is unclear whether the army would be greeted in South Waziristan with the same degree of public support it enjoyed in Swat. The government there has angered Mehsud tribesmen by arresting people and shutting down businesses under regulations that allow punishment based on tribal affiliation.

The initial stages of the South Waziristan operation have begun. Pakistani aircraft, along with unmanned American planes, have attacked Mehsud's territory in recent weeks. Soldiers have deployed into neighboring North Waziristan and have imposed an economic blockade, trying to withhold food and supplies from the Taliban, said a U.S. defense official in Washington.

The official said Pakistan likely wants "to make sure they have everything working in their favor before they actually pull the trigger on a ground assault."

"It's the hardest nut to crack," the official said. "There's no doubt about that."

Staff writer Karen DeYoung in Washington and special correspondent Haq Nawaz Khan in Islamabad contributed to this report.

The Afghan Triangle: Kashmir, India, Pakistan

Graham Usher

(Graham Usher is a writer and journalist based in Pakistan and a contributing editor of Middle East Report.)

The Association of Parents of Disappeared Persons protesting in Srinagar, Indian-administered Kashmir. (Faheem Qadri)

The Pakistani army’s operation in the Swat Valley in northwest Pakistan is the most sustained in five years of selective counterinsurgency against the local Taliban. The toll already is immense: 1.9 million internally displaced, including tens of thousands housed in tents on parched plains; 15,000 soldiers battling 5,000 guerrillas; and more than a thousand dead, mainly militants according to available counts but also soldiers and of course civilians.

The war has not been confined to Swat. In revenge for losses there, the Pakistan Taliban has unleashed a torrent of attacks in Peshawar, Lahore, Islamabad and other cities, killing scores. “You know it’s serious this time: the scale of the army’s campaign confirms it. You fear the war is at your door,” said Sajjad Ali from Mardan, a city adjacent to Swat.

The war is the fruit of a failed peace process, denounced by the United States as an “abdication” that had allowed the Taliban to within 60 miles of Islamabad. In February, the provincial government had proffered a localized form of Islamic law in Swat in return for the Taliban disarming and recognizing “the writ of the state.” The insurgents observed their commitments only in the breach, which included the slaughter of their opponents. In May the army “reinvaded” Swat.

Pakistanis historically have been hostile to campaigns against the Taliban, casting them as “America’s war.” But not this time: The army, the civilian government and most Pakistanis, including the largest opposition party, support the Swat offensive. “The atrocities of the Swat Taliban galvanized public opinion,” says Maleeha Lodhi, a former ambassador to the US. “It produced a coincidence of military resolve, political consensus and strong public support. And because the US was not seen as calling the shots in any pronounced way, this helped the government pursue a very aggressive policy.”

The public support manifests as a spontaneous, generous solidarity. In cities like Mardan, Peshawar and Swabi, people have literally opened their homes to the refugees. In vast tent cities near the banks of the Indus, volunteers deliver food, clothes, utensils and shelter. The relief work, involving all parts of Pakistani civil society, is led by the Islamic charities.

One such charity is Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD). Last December the Pakistani government banned JuD and arrested its amir, Hafiz Saeed, following the JuD’s designation as a terrorist group by the United Nations. Saeed founded Lashkar-e-Tayaba (LeT), the Pakistani jihadi group that India alleges was behind the attack in Mumbai in November 2008. In Pakistan, it is widely assumed that JuD and LeT are one and the same organization. On June 2, the Lahore High Court ordered Saeed’s release on the grounds that the state had supplied “insufficient” evidence to warrant his detention. India responded by saying that the decision raised “serious doubts over Pakistan’s sincerity in acting with determination against terrorist groups and individuals operating from its territory.” India has since conditioned any return to peace negotiations with Pakistan on the latter taking action against LeT and other jihadi groups.

For the Obama administration—which has cast Taliban and al-Qaeda “sanctuaries” in Pakistani tribal areas bordering Afghanistan as the “single greatest threat” to America—the enigma is whether Pakistan’s military establishment is friend or foe in America’s war against Islamic militancy. “I’ve rarely seen in my years in Washington an issue so hotly disputed internally by experts and intelligence officials,” ceded Richard Holbrooke, President Obama’s point man for “Af-Pak,” when asked that question in February.

The dispute in Washington about how to perceive the Pakistani army runs along two colliding tracks. Track one says the army is a friend. Even before Swat, the Pakistani army had lost 1,000 men to Taliban and al-Qaeda guerillas in the tribal areas. Pakistan’s premier military intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), had “rendered” more than 600 al-Qaeda suspects into CIA hands, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, alleged mastermind behind the September 11, 2001 attacks. Currently the Pakistani army is fighting the Taliban not only in Swat but also the tribal areas of Bajaur, Orakzai, Mohmand, Khyber and South Waziristan.

Kashmiri children watching cricket near an excavation site in Budgam, near Srinagar, Indian-administered Kashmir. (Faheem Qadri)

Track two says the army-ISI combination is a foe. It allows Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar and his Shura council free run in Pakistan’s Balochistan province from where they direct the insurgency in Afghanistan. It shelters Afghan Taliban commanders like Jalaluddin and Sirjuddin Haqqani in North Waziristan. And it supplies money, arms and training to jihadi groups fighting the Indian army in Indian-occupied Kashmir, including the “banned” LeT.

The two tracks collide because both, in part, are true. The army is combating the Pakistan Taliban and its jihadi allies in Swat and elsewhere, seeing their spread as a danger to Pakistan’s integrity as a state. One hundred and twenty thousand soldiers have been mobilized to fight them. But 250,000 remain rooted on the eastern border facing the Indian army, and primed by organizational formation, weaponry, ideology and ethos to a vision that defines India, not the Taliban or al-Qaeda, as the “strategic enemy.” That vision must change if Pakistan is to defeat the enemy at home.

Jockeying for Kashmir

For the last 61 years the fight has been fought, mostly, in and for Indian-occupied Kashmir (IoK): the territory Delhi and Islamabad have contested since the 1947 partition cleaved them into two states—and Kashmir into “Pakistani” and “Indian” parts. Sometimes (1947, 1965, 1971, 1999) the war has been hot. More often it has been waged via Pakistani proxies against a standing Indian military. Since 1989, it has been channeled through a low-intensity, Pakistan-backed separatist-Islamist insurgency that has killed 50,000 people and incurred an Indian military occupation three times the size of America’s in Iraq and three times as lethal.

Of all the jihadi groups the ISI nurtured in IoK, the LeT was the deadliest, but there were others. Their collective purpose was to “bleed India” until Delhi surrendered IoK to Islamabad. Pre-9/11, the collaboration was overt. LeT and other jihadi groups recruited fighters throughout Pakistan, but particularly from southern Punjab. They launched hundreds of guerilla attacks on Indian soldiers and civilians and fought alongside the Pakistani army in the 1999 invasion of Kargil, the last time the two armies went head to head inside Indian Kashmir.

In December 2001, India charged LeT with attacking its parliament in Delhi, bringing the two countries to the brink of nuclear war. Under American pressure, General Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s then-military dictator, banned the LeT and other jihadi groups. Moves against the militants in 2002 seemed like bluffs at the time. In fact, they were the beginning of a slow change. Steered by Washington, Islamabad and Delhi went from nuclear brinkmanship to a truce across the armistice line in Kashmir. In 2004, Musharraf began a peace process or “composite dialogue” with India predicated on the oath “not to permit any territory under Pakistan’s control to be used to support terrorism in any manner.” What had commenced as a feint by Pakistan’s military establishment was hardening into policy.

The ISI demobilized thousands of jihadi fighters in Pakistani-occupied Kashmir (PoK). Some of their camps were moved inland, including, ironically, to the Swat Valley. Six army divisions (about 80,000 to 100,000 men) were repositioned from the eastern border with India to the western border with Afghanistan, where the army was becoming embroiled in its first clashes with the Pakistan Taliban. Under the command of General Ashfaq Kayani (now army chief of staff), the ISI was reformed, with the more Indo-phobic and jihadi officers purged. Guerilla infiltration into IoK slowed to a trickle.

Some of the army’s senior officers believed that because both Pakistan and India had become nuclear powers, hot war was no longer an option. More importantly, many generals were convinced that the army would not be able to preserve its preeminent position in the Pakistani state or defend its enormous corporate interests in the economy without sustained growth which would require peace with India. Musharraf was the leading proponent of this new thinking. In 2004, he authorized Khurshid Kasuri, the civilian foreign minister at the time, to open “back-channel” negotiations with India on a possible settlement for Kashmir, one that would in essence give Islamabad an honorable exit from what had become an unwinnable war.

Over the next three years a deal took shape: Demilitarization would neutralize the two Kashmirs, open borders would unite them, and a form of self-government or autonomy would partly satisfy the Kashmiri aspiration to self-determination. The army agreed to the nucleus of this draft agreement with the proviso that the Kashmiris vote on it. “This was to allow the army to give up historic positions without appearing to,” said Hasan Rizvi Ashkari, a military historian.

The back channel ran aground in the storm that wrecked Musharraf after his illegal sacking of Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry in March 2007. Many fear that the attacks in Mumbai may have sunk prospects for a Kashmir agreement forever. But the progress of the discussions had suggested that the military was open to a resolution and had taken steps in that direction. “When the Kashmir camps were initially dispersed, the boys [fighters] were told that it was just a temporary measure because of 9/11,” a senior jihadi leader told the BBC in 2008. “Then the arrests and disappearances started. The boys realized fundamental changes were underway and quietly slipped away beyond the control of the Pakistani authorities.” This is what happened in the Swat Valley where jihadi cells joined forces and lent enormous firepower to local Islamist groups demanding shari‘a law. The pattern was repeated in the southern Punjab and Islamabad.

Police paramilitaries in downtown Srinagar during a city shutdown called by separatists. (Liz Harris)

Deprived of support from their old (state) godfathers, the “youngest and most radicalized members” were drawn to new groups, says historian Ahmed Rashid. They “joined up with al-Qaeda and the Pakistan and Afghan Taliban in the tribal areas on the border with Afghanistan. They embraced the global jihad to fight US troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, and later attacked the Pakistan government.” Rashid believes this al-Qaeda, Taliban and jihadi nexus is the motor driving much of the violence that has rocked Pakistan, Afghanistan and India in recent years, including Mumbai, the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in December 2007, and the recent wave of attacks in Pakistani cities.

In other words, after 2004 many LeT and other jihadi cadres ceased focusing their militancy exclusively on India or Kashmir. They fragmented and morphed into multiple cells with ties to al-Qaeda and other Pakistani Sunni sectarian groups, sometimes acting in alliance, sometimes autonomously, but together having an outreach that included Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Kashmir, Iraq, Europe and beyond. The ISI was loath to cut ties with groups over which it did maintain some sway, like the old LeT-JuD nexus. Nor was the ISI inclined to abandon entirely the proxy war strategy in IoK before a settlement had been reached. “If we did that, Kashmir would go cold and India would bury it forever,” said a senior army general in 2005.

IoK has warmed. In 2008 there were 41 militant infractions across the armistice line, double the 2007 total. The upward curve has continued in 2009, with several skirmishes between the two armies. For the first time since 2004, LeT cadres have publicly surfaced in the southern Punjab, proselytizing for jihad. Seminaries and schools are acting as recruiting centers, with the traffic in students moving in both directions between the Punjab and the tribal areas. Funerals in both provinces eulogize “martyrs” in Kashmir and Afghanistan.

None of this could happen without the knowledge of the ISI. Militant activity increased in the twilight between the end of Musharraf’s military rule and Pakistan’s new civilian government. Yet the new militancy seems to have little to do with the mass demonstrations for independence that shook IoK in the summer of 2008, or with insurgent violence there, which remains low. It has more to do with Afghanistan or, more precisely, with India in Afghanistan.

India’s Regional Dominance

Pakistan has been worried by India’s widening footprint in Afghanistan since the Bonn conference in November 2001, where Afghan factions came together to determine their country’s post-Taliban future. The Afghan Taliban was purged from any interim government headed by Hamid Karzai, and replaced by forces loyal to the Northern Alliance (NA). The NA had opposed the Taliban regime before 9/11 and fought with US troops to topple it. India, Iran and Russia were its main sponsors; Pakistan and Saudi Arabia supported the Taliban. Neither the Taliban nor Islamabad was invited to Bonn. “This was our original sin,” said Lakdar Brahimi, the UN’s envoy in Afghanistan, who chaired the conference.

India remains one of Karzai’s few champions. And Afghanistan is seen to be very much within Delhi’s sphere of regional influence. India has four consulates and has given the Afghan government $1.2 billion in aid: a huge investment for a country that is 99 percent Muslim and with which India shares no border. Delhi has built the new national parliament in Kabul, runs the Afghan electricity and satellite systems and has helped train its army and intelligence forces, the latter staffed by many ex-NA commanders.

India’s most ambitious Afghan project is a new highway, routed across the western border to the Iranian port of Chabahar, that circumvents landlocked Afghanistan’s need to use Pakistani ports to the Gulf; Islamabad deems these trade and energy corridors vital to its economic future. For the Pakistan army, the highway’s importance is clear: India seeks to consolidate an alliance with Iran in western Afghanistan to counter Pakistan’s influence in eastern Afghanistan. This is a continuation of the pre-9/11 war in a post-9/11 infrastructure, with India, Iran and the Karzai government on the one side, and Pakistan and the Afghan Taliban on the other. “The army feels under siege,” says Ayesha Siddiqa, a military analyst.

In 2004, the Bush administration tilted US South Asia policy toward Delhi, lured by the size of India’s markets and its potential role as a strategic “counterweight” to China, Pakistan’s closest regional ally. In 2008, the US signed an agreement that allows India to buy civilian atomic technology, including nuclear fuel, from American firms, even though Delhi is not a signatory to the non-proliferation treaty. Pakistan was granted no such privilege; on the contrary, it is denounced as a rogue for developing the bomb by stealth and for the proliferation activities of its former top nuclear scientist, A. Q. Khan. Some in Congress want aid to Pakistan tied to US access to Khan for questioning.

For all the fabled “chemistry” between Bush and Musharraf, since 9/11 Washington has treated Islamabad as a gun for hire, providing certain weaponry and around $2 billion a year in exchange for securing supply lines for US and NATO forces in Afghanistan and for fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda in the tribal areas. By cooperating in these ways, the army may have hoped that its interests would be taken into account in the post-invasion reconstruction. Yet unlike Iran or India—and despite the services or sacrifices rendered—Islamabad was given no say in the formation of the Afghan government or in its nascent military forces. This strengthened Pakistani perceptions that Musharraf and his army were mercenaries fighting “America’s war.” The Taliban, by contrast, were deemed Afghan or at least Pashtun nationalists resisting a foreign, colonial and anti-Muslim occupation.

These realities help explain the army’s selective counterinsurgency in the tribal areas. In Bajaur, Mahmond and to a lesser extent South Waziristan, the army has often been ruthless in campaigns against the Pakistan Taliban. This is partly revenge for the killing of Pakistani soldiers. But there is also the perception (and, the army insists, evidence) that “Pakistan’s enemies” are fomenting the militancy. A commander in Bajaur says many of those captured or killed by the army are Afghans, including Tajiks or Uzbeks, while the tribal areas are almost exclusively Pashtun. The inference is obvious. Some “insurgents” are “agents” working for Afghan intelligence and/or India.

In North Waziristan, on the other hand, the preferred policy is to negotiate ceasefires with tribal militants who openly provide fighters and arms to Afghan Taliban commanders like the Haqqanis. Unlike the Pakistan Taliban, these tribal militants do not attack the Pakistani army other than to avenge US drone attacks. “They’re our people; they’re not our enemies,” says an ISI officer.

A Pakistani analyst—who declined attribution—says these dual policies explain the enigma of the Pakistan army. It will act against those who threaten the state, such as the Taliban in Swat and al-Qaeda-linked militants elsewhere. But it will not act against those who, like the Afghan Taliban, seek only a haven from which to fight American and NATO troops in Afghanistan. In fact, “The ISI has retained its links to the Afghan Taliban because it wants to use them as a bargaining chip in Afghanistan,” says the analyst. “The Pakistan army wants to have a bigger say in whatever new regional dispensation America is planning. The view within the army and ISI is if the Afghan Taliban is abandoned, this would strengthen the Afghan government, as well as India in Afghanistan, at Pakistan’s expense.”

A Fork in the Road

Prior to his election, Barack Obama was clear on the link between peace in Kashmir and war in Afghanistan. “If Pakistan can look towards to the east with confidence, it will be less likely to believe its interests are best advanced through cooperation with the Taliban,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs in 2007. Ensconced in the Oval Office, the president now dismisses Islamabad’s focus on Delhi as paranoia. “The obsession with India as a mortal threat to Pakistan is misguided [because] their biggest threat right now comes internally,” he said in April 2009.

The shift seals a “new” American policy toward Pakistan that marks more continuity than change with Bush’s second term. Under Obama, US drone attacks into the tribal areas—inaugurated by Bush—have continued and may be extended to other areas of Pakistan. Whatever good will Obama hoped to generate through increases in civilian aid has been wiped out by the increase in Pakistani deaths by American rockets.

The Pakistan aid bill before Congress, although promising a “deeper, broader, long-term engagement with the [Pakistani] people,” could be as conditional as anything tendered by Bush. Military aid is not to be tied only to fighting the Taliban and al-Qaeda but may require Pakistan’s pledge not to support “any person or group that conducts violence, sabotage or other activities meant to instill fear or terror in India.” Some members of Congress want aid to Pakistan linked to moving troops from the eastern border with India to the western border with Afghanistan.

American policy towards Kashmir also reveals India’s widening influence in Washington. In an intensive lobbying effort, Delhi made clear to Obama that his envoy would be shunned if any link were made between Kashmir and Af-Pak. It worked. In a trip to Islamabad in April, Holbrooke refused to even say “Kashmir.” And while in Delhi, he was effusive about India’s “critical role” in the region without which “we cannot settle Afghanistan and many other world problems.” The implication was that Kashmir, clearly, is not among them.

This Indian-American axis presents Islamabad with a fork in the road. One way goes back. The ISI again could try to bleed India via surrogates in Afghanistan and Kashmir in the hope that its regional concerns will be addressed, above all a final status for Kashmir and recognition of its western border with Afghanistan. But such a strategy would likely fail; pursuing foreign policy objectives through guerilla violence rarely worked in the past. It simply creates conditions of friction that al-Qaeda, the Taliban and jihadi groups can exploit to keep 80 percent of Pakistan’s military manpower and hardware pinned down on India rather than on them or the tribal areas. Mumbai and the Taliban’s conquest of Swat are two examples of just how useful a diversion this can be.

The alternative is to go forward and insist that Kashmir, Afghanistan and Islamic militancy are regional problems requiring regional solutions. India is right to insist that Pakistan go after those nationals and groups implicated in Mumbai and other attacks in India with the same vigor as it is currently going after the Pakistan Taliban in Swat. But equally Delhi must recommence serious negotiations to resolve Kashmir and other outstanding water and land disputes with Islamabad.

On such bases Pakistan and India could come together to agree to terms for coexistence in a neutral and neutralized Afghanistan. For economic, energy and geopolitical reasons, both nations have an interest in their roads crossing in Kabul. But the road must start in Kashmir.