Attacks show an emboldened insurgency in Iraq, Pakistan

By Lee Keath

It has been a week of stunning advances by Islamic militants across a belt from Iraq to Pakistan. In Iraq, jihadi fighters rampaged through the country's second-largest city and swept farther south in their drive to establish an extremist enclave stretching into Syria. Pakistan's largest airport was paralyzed and rocked by explosions as gunmen stormed it in a dramatic show of strength.

More than a decade after the U.S. launched its "war on terrorism," Islamic militant groups are bolder than ever, exploiting the erosion or collapse of central government control in a string of nations — Syria, Iraq and Pakistan — that are more strategically vital than the relatively failed states where al-Qaeda set up its bases in the past: Somalia, Yemen and 1990s Afghanistan.

Most galling to Washington, the crumbling state power has come in countries that the United States has spent billions of dollars trying to strengthen during the past 13 years.

Policy failings by those governments have contributed to giving militants an opening.

Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki has alienated the country's Sunni community, which feels sidelined by his Shiite-led government. That has pushed some Sunnis into supporting the militants and has undermined the military, which includes many Sunnis.

Pakistan's authority always has been tenuous in its rugged, tribal-dominated and underdeveloped northwest, near the Afghan border — and for years that was where militant groups, from al-Qaeda to the Taliban, operated. Now, the Pakistani Taliban have expanded to develop a strong presence in the country's largest city, Karachi, where the airport attack took place and where police are gunned down almost daily.

The Afghan Taliban won a diplomatic victory of its own when the U.S. freed five Taliban detainees last month in a swap for the release of the only remaining U.S. prisoner of war in Afghanistan, Army Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl.

U.S. policies have shrunk its options in all these regions. American forces left Iraq more than two years ago without winning agreement on a longer presence from Maliki's government. Combat troops are on their way out of Afghanistan by the end of the year, which could have a similar effect as the Afghan government takes the lead in fighting the Taliban insurgency.

In Syria, the Obama administration has resisted calls to more strongly arm and finance rebels fighting against President Bashar Assad, in part because of fears of inadvertently aiding Islamic radicals rather than moderate forces. As a result, better-armed and better-funded extremists have risen to prominence anyway.

"A common theme is the inability of the international community ... to help local actors, local leadership to create more viable institutionally based societies, especially on the security side," said Salman Shaikh, director of the Brookings Doha Center in Qatar.

As a result, "weak and fragile states" have been unable to create "viable political systems of government, a political culture which is able to manage diversity and pluralism, and a security environment which is there to ... protect rather than to intimidate and impose order," he said.

Nothing illustrates the potential for Islamic militants to rearrange the region's map more than the rise of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which this week took over much of Mosul then swept into the Iraqi city of Tikrit, farther south.

This year, it captured the Syrian provincial capital of Raqqa, where it imposed strict Shariah rule, carrying out executions in public squares, smashing liquor stores and extracting "taxes" from local businesses. It captured the Iraqi city of Fallujah in January and has now seized the bigger prize of Mosul.

Pakistan presents a host of separate, complicated issues for the United States.

A nominal ally against al-Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban, its military-backed governments have bristled at U.S. pressure to fight militants in the border regions and have railed against American drone strikes on insurgent hideouts.

During the weekend, militant gunmen stormed Karachi's airport and while the fighters ultimately were killed, the attack — and another in the city afterward — illustrated the confidence of the Pakistani Taliban, which claimed responsibility along with the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan.

In a country that touts itself as a homeland for Muslims, authorities are reluctant to denounce an ideology championing Islam.

So militants often are viewed not as enemies but as misguided Muslims, Pakistani journalist Zahid Hussain said.

"The narrative is basically controlled by the radicals in Pakistan, and that is their biggest victory," he said.