Friday, August 6, 2021
Islamabad can no longer ignore the resurgence of the Pakistani Taliban
TOM HUSSAIN
Pakistan cannot afford another conflict with Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan and has to devise a domestic political narrative that can justify a divorce from its previous policies.Six years after Islamabad declared victory in a bloody, brutal conflict with Al Qaeda-aligned Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) insurgents, it is faced with a resurgence of terrorist activity that threatens to reverse its post-war recovery.=
Parallel to the withdrawal of US-led NATO forces from Afghanistan and huge territorial gains by the Afghan Taliban, the TTP and an alliance of Baloch rebel groups have carried out more than 170 attacks since the beginning of May.
The wave of roadside bombings, ambushes and assassinations has mostly targeted Pakistani soldiers and policemen.
In July alone, the TTP claimed to have killed 56 "enemy personnel" and wounded 35 others in 26 attacks carried out mostly in the insurgents' erstwhile stomping ground in the northwest tribal areas bordering eastern Afghanistan.
Half of the attacks have been carried out in South Waziristan, the former bastion of the TTP and Al Qaeda's safehaven of choice after US forces invaded Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks.
According to local politicians, the TTP has re-established sufficient infrastructure to openly patrol pockets of territory in South Waziristan.
Its militants have also emerged from hiding in parts of North Waziristan to extort money from government contractors and issue death threats to women working for the government.
In a series of attacks starting on July 30, four soldiers were killed and a dozen wounded in attacks staged in Waziristan, while policemen providing security to polio inoculation teams in the tribal areas and settled districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province came under lethal assault on three consecutive days up to Tuesday.
On Thursday, the TTP campaign spread to the Orakzai and Khyber tribal areas, as a day-long wave claimed the lives of six soldiers, a policeman and a bystander.
There has also been a concerted campaign against Chinese nationals working in Pakistan.
In the most lethal overseas terrorist attack ever endured by Beijing, at least nine of its citizens were killed in a July 14 suicide attack on a two-bus convoy carrying engineering staff to the Dasu hydropower project in the remote northern region of Kohistan.The ongoing wave of terrorist attacks by the TTP and Baloch insurgent groups seems to have been coordinated and designed to stretch Pakistan's security and intelligence resources along its entire western flank, which borders both Afghanistan and Iran.At the beginning of the three-month onslaught of terrorist attacks, Pakistani security forces in Balochistan were struck almost daily by nationalist rebels.Many attacks involved improvised explosive devices, suggesting that the TTP had passed on bomb-making skills to the Baloch rebels as part of a tactical alliance against the Pakistani state.
In recent weeks, the attacks have shifted northwards to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, heightening suspicion in Islamabad about a prospective sharing of logistical networks by the TTP and Baloch insurgents, which carries with it the daunting prospect of the return of terrorism to Pakistan's major cities.
The recent two-front resurgence of terrorist attacks is "an ominous portent of what could lie ahead," wrote Maleeha Lodhi, a former Pakistani ambassador to Britain, the US and the United Nations.
Pakistan can ill-afford a resurgence of the conflict with the TTP. It cost the country tens of thousands of lives, brought the economy to its knees, and earned Pakistan an unenviable reputation as the global hub of terrorism.
After years of suffering and sacrifice, especially by civilian populations in northwest Pakistan, a terrorist comeback would be devastating to national morale and to its practically insolvent economy.
To date, Islamabad's response has not been encouraging. Rather than informing the public about the severity of the terrorist threat facing Pakistan, it has actively sought to downplay it and to characterise all attacks as an India-led international conspiracy against the country.
This was particularly evident after the Dasu attack, which Islamabad remains reluctant to publicly address as a major terrorist incident.
The underlying issue here is one of mindset, specifically a refusal to acknowledge past mistakes, accept responsibility for them and proactively seek to learn from them and grow in the process.
What Islamabad's declarations of "mission accomplished" in 2015 failed to say was that the TTP was down but not out.
The Pakistani government had broadcast its intention in mid-2014 to launch the decisive counterterrorist assault on the TTP's remaining territorial strongholds in the tribal areas, particularly in North Waziristan and Khyber.
Naturally, the leadership of the TTP and their Al Qaeda allies knew what was coming, and most of them relocated across the adjacent border into eastern Afghanistan along with more than 6,000 fighters.
From their new bases in Nangarhar province, the TTP continued to harass Pakistani security forces in the northernmost tribal area of Bajaur, but its networks within Pakistan had been so disrupted by intelligence-based counterterrorism operations that it did not threaten the populous hinterland.
The operational capabilities of the TTP were also deeply compromised by internal rifts, which prompted many influential commanders to form breakaway factions, among them the founders of the Afghanistan-based chapter of Daesh.
Nonetheless, it was merely a matter of time before the TTP and other Afghanistan-based insurgent groups fighting the Pakistani state got their act together.
Six years on, however, Islamabad remains publicly obsessed with foreign bogeymen instead of saying publicly what it needed to say in 2015 in order to avert a terrorist comeback when the US inevitably pulled out of Afghanistan: the Afghan Taliban and the TTP are two sides of the same coin.
Behind closed doors in parliament on July 2, the chief of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency told this to political party leaders and MPs in as many words.
Pakistan’s leaders face difficult decisions about its longstanding and convoluted relationship with the Afghan Taliban, which analyst Hamid Mir justifiably suspects is using the TTP to counteract Pakistani pressure for it to suspend its campaign to seize power in Afghanistan.
If, as powerful army chief of staff General Qamar Javed Bajwa has said on several occasions since February, Pakistan wants to enjoy "normalised" relationships with its neighbours and the wider international community, it should not expect them to be willing to "bury the past and move forward".
Before that can happen, Pakistan's competing political elites and institutions have to stop fighting each other and devise a domestic political narrative to justify a divorce from the Taliban and other extremist outfits that continue to make the country a target of sanctions imposed by the US and multilateral organisations like the Financial Action Task Force.
Yes, the domestic and international political blowback of such a divorce would be considerable and the terrorist response would be terrible, particularly in the short term.
But the alternatives — decades more of terrorist attacks, economic stagnation and increased geopolitical isolation — would be far worse.
https://www.trtworld.com/opinion/islamabad-can-no-longer-ignore-the-resurgence-of-the-pakistani-taliban-48956
How Pakistan Could Become Biden’s Worst Enemy
By Michael Hirsh
The United States is banking on Islamabad to broker successful peace talks with the Taliban. That’s not likely to happen.In a gamble pitting hope against history, U.S. President Joe Biden and his team are banking that the resurgent Taliban will agree to a negotiated peace deal in Afghanistan and the militant group’s longtime state sponsor, Pakistan, will press them to share power with the Afghan government. But many experts say such hopes are delusional, and history will likely triumph in the end: Pakistan and the Taliban leadership—which is still headquartered in Pakistan—will continue to have each other’s backs on the battlefield as well as at the negotiating table. In short, Pakistan wants the Taliban to win—or at least is unwilling to do much to prevent this from happening. “Pakistan is supporting the Taliban’s offensive. Without Pakistani logistical support, the Taliban could not undertake the massive nationwide attack it is pursuing,” said Bruce Riedel, who served as a senior advisor on South Asia and the Middle East to four U.S. presidents. “The ISI [Pakistan’s powerful intelligence service] is already pleased it has ejected all the foreign troops from Afghanistan. The goal now is to induce panic in the Afghan government and army.” The Biden team’s argument is that, even with the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, neither the Taliban nor Islamabad desire a repeat of the bloody history that led up to 9/11: Taliban atrocities, sanctions, massive refugee flows, and international isolation for both countries. Taliban leaders and Pakistani officials have said so themselves recently, as has the United States’ lead negotiator, Zalmay Khalilzad. “The Taliban said they do not want to be a pariah state,” Khalilzad said Tuesday at the Aspen Security Forum. “They want to be recognized. They want to receive assistance.” But this rhetorical moderation doesn’t square with the facts on the ground. Despite presenting themselves as diplomats on the world stage since peace talks with the Americans began in 2020, the Taliban are resuming their brutal past practices as they move into major Afghan cities, such as Kandahar (Afghanistan’s second biggest city after Kabul), Lashkar Gah, and Herat. This week, even the U.S. government acknowledged that reality. “In Spin Boldak, Kandahar, the Taliban massacred dozens of civilians in revenge killings,” the U.S. Embassy in Kabul tweeted on Monday. “These murders could constitute war crimes; they must be investigated & those Taliban fighters or commanders responsible held accountable.” Over the past decade or so, Pakistan supported the Taliban even in the face of a U.S.-led, 46-nation coalition backing up the elected Afghan government in Kabul. That policy is less likely to change now, with the U.S. military and NATO leaving and the Afghan government under assault and losing credibility fast. And faced with a hostile, aggressive India under its nationalist prime minister, Narendra Modi, Pakistan is more motivated than ever to support Islamist insurgents in Afghanistan seeking to counterbalance New Delhi’s influence in the region. Islamabad fears a strong Afghan government aligned with India and the West could spell the encirclement of Pakistan. Peace talks, meanwhile, appear to be going nowhere, since neither the Taliban nor Afghan President Ashraf Ghani are willing to negotiate with each other, with each side claiming legitimacy as rightful rulers. In the middle of it all sits Pakistan, which still has significant—if waning—influence with the Taliban, since it harbors many of the group’s leaders and their families. In a series of talks in Washington this week, Pakistani National Security Advisor Moeed Yusuf said he reached a “meeting of minds” with his U.S. counterpart, Jake Sullivan, on the need for a political settlement. “We will not accept a forceful takeover” of Afghanistan, Yusuf asserted. Yet that is what the Taliban intend, some longtime observers say, and Islamabad is not likely to stand in their way. “It’s frankly idiotic to think that this is somehow a softer, gentler Taliban than the one of 2001. If anything this is a harder, harsher Taliban,” said former U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan Ryan Crocker. “After 20 years in the wilderness, the Taliban are finally getting their game back. They’re not interested in talking to anybody unless it’s about terms of surrender for the Afghan government.” The Biden administration appears to believe it can avoid this outcome through negotiation. Sullivan tweeted after his July 29 meeting with Yusuf that the two “discussed the urgent need for a reduction in violence in Afghanistan and a negotiated political settlement to the conflict.” Little else has been said by the Biden administration about its discussions with Islamabad. But U.S. officials did not deny Yusuf’s contention, made in a meeting with reporters on Wednesday, that all Sullivan asked for was Pakistan help “get all these actors in one room to have a sincere conversation,” as Yusuf put it.“The Biden administration seems to have reached the conclusion that Pakistan will not, or cannot, pressure the Taliban,” said Husain Haqqani of the Hudson Institute, a former Pakistani ambassador to Washington. Biden has not even bothered to call Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan on the phone. And the evidence is Pakistan continues to engage in the double game it has long played: pleading for an international settlement while quietly backing the Taliban on the ground. “Pakistan is not going to turn its back on the Taliban. Why would it do so now that the Taliban have ‘won’ thanks to Pakistan’s own unrelenting efforts?” said Christine Fair, a political scientist at Georgetown University. “What is the U.S. willing to do now that it wasn’t willing to do when Pakistan’s proxies were murdering our soldiers and civilians and those of our partners in Afghanistan?” Some experts believe Islamabad genuinely would prefer an outcome where the Taliban agree to become part of a coalition government. In the past, the Pakistanis have worked to get the Taliban to the peace table, said James Dobbins, who served as special U.S. representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Pakistani civilian officials are also increasingly concerned the Taliban, having been legitimized by U.S. negotiators, are no longer controllable and may even inspire anti-Islamabad militants across the border. “I think there’s no real reason to doubt that their preferred solution is a government that includes the Taliban and so is pro-Pakistan but is sufficiently balanced that it enjoys international legitimacy,” Dobbins said. “But they’re not prepared to strong-arm the Taliban to get this.” Pakistan’s reasons for supporting the Taliban are clear and strategic, dating back to the end of the Cold War, Crocker said. Pakistan and the United States were allied against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and helped train the Afghan resistance, which largely consisted of Islamist militants. After the Soviets withdrew in 1989, the United States left as well, leaving the Pakistanis with a civil war on their border. Pakistan felt it had no choice but to support the then-dominant Taliban, which Islamabad eventually came to view as a valued Islamist offset to Indian influence. “After 9/11, we came back, and the Pakistanis said, ‘We’re glad you’re back and money is flowing back in, and we’re happy to work with you against al Qaeda. But if you think we’re going to turn on the Taliban and make them our mortal enemy, you’re crazy,’” Crocker said. “‘At the end of the day, you Americans are going home, and we’re still going to be here. That’s what you guys always do. So you can bet we’re hedging our bets.’” Still, some Pakistani civilian officials fear they may have helped create a monster in the Taliban that will no longer answer to Islamabad and is spreading its extremist ideology back across the border. Perhaps inspired by Taliban gains, attacks inside Pakistan by the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, an Islamist terrorist group, have increased in recent weeks. The Pakistani military and Inter-Services Intelligence agency have long harbored such hostile Islamist militants in their tribal regions, including the Pakistani Taliban, with which Islamabad maintains a tenuous and sometimes mistrustful relationship, fearing terror acts against Pakistan itself. Mosharraf Zaidi, a Pakistani columnist, said many Pakistani officials have begun to express such fears publicly, and although Pakistan is hardly innocent, Americans tend to overstate the degree of control exercised by the Pakistani military and intelligence service. “Pakistan can’t control its own capital city much less Afghanistan,” he said. Many experts expect a bloody civil war where Afghan moderates, deemed U.S. puppets, are slaughtered wholesale and women and girls are denied the rights they were granted under the U.S. occupation. Already, there is a mass exodus of interpreters and other U.S-allied Afghans seeking special immigrant visas. Beyond that, the Taliban have never really severed their relationship with al Qaeda despite promising to do so, and the terrorist group is likely to find a new harbor in Taliban-controlled parts of Afghanistan. Khan, the prime minister, certainly doesn’t want the bad publicity associated with such an outcome, but he himself has said curtailing India’s threat is paramount in Pakistan’s strategic considerations. Washington has long known of Pakistan’s two-faced behavior, but U.S. reluctance to push Pakistan too hard is rooted in a singular fear: Pakistan is a nuclear-armed state. To isolate Pakistan and identify it as a supporter of terrorism could easily create a nightmare much worse than what happened in the late 1990s, when a Pakistani smuggling network enabled Libya to obtain nuclear weapon designs. Even more frightening to Washington is the prospect that an unstable, isolated Pakistan could fracture, and extremists might get hold of the country’s nuclear weapons. And even U.S. leverage, when used, has proven limited—and is even less effective now that a rising China has increased aid and investment in the face of U.S. hostility toward Beijing; for China, the “economic corridor” with Pakistan is one of the biggest pieces of its massive Belt and Road Initiative. Overall, U.S. military aid to Pakistan decreased by 60 percent between 2010 and August 2017 “without a significant impact on Pakistan’s behavior,” a 2018 Brookings Institution study reported. As a result, both Washington and Islamabad appear to be playing a game of diplomatic pretense. “In a dream world,” Crocker said, “a negotiated settlement would be great, but that isn’t going to happen, so the Pakistanis are safe in saying that’s what they’re pushing for.”
https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/08/06/pakistan-taliban-biden-afghanistan-worst-enemy/