Last week, the Pakistani military launched a major operation to clear Taliban extremists from the lawless region of North Waziristan, after five years of prodding from the United States. Shuja Nawaz expects it to fail:
Pakistan still lacks any national strategy in which the government and armed forces together fight Islamist militancy and terrorism. In North Waziristan, the army is re-using the blunt force approach it has used before: clear out the local population, then use air strikes, artillery, and ground forces to clean out any insurgents that remain. This tactical, rather than strategic, approach means that the North Waziristan battle will not be definitive, but rather just another fight in Pakistan’s inconclusive long war.
To build a national strategy, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s government needs to bring the military out of what has been a long silence to share with the Pakistani public its vision of what will work. The government must then include the military’s view in a way it has not so far. In February, for example, Sharif’s administration released an embryonic National Internal Security Policy that had been prepared with no visible participation by the military and that has already hit snags in its implementation.
Hassan Abbas fears that Pakistan is underestimating the sophistication of its enemies:
Only recently, Pakistan’s security ‘wizards’ have started realizing that Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) (the really ‘bad Taliban’) benefits in many ways from logistics, infrastructure and even funding sources of ‘good Taliban.’ What Pakistan still avoids to fully acknowledge is that TTP today is a far more dangerous group than it was when it emerged in late 2007. Now, its tentacles are reaching deep into Pakistan and it has close links with the remnants of al Qaeda as well as organized crime. …
Pakistan will not be able to defeat, dismantle, and discredit the TTP through military means alone in [the Federally Administered Tribal Areas]. It should be ready to deal with them through civilian law enforcement methods inside the mainstream Pakistan, especially Punjab and Khyber Pukhtunkhwa province. Pakistan’s recent security policy brief shows little indication that it has any plans to invest in reform and modernization of its police and broader criminal justice system. Change in this arena will be the most potent sign of real shift in Pakistan’s counterterrorism policy.
And Muqtedar Khan argues that securing Waziristan should be a regional initiative, not a solo project by Karachi:
The Waziristan region in Pakistan has become a watering hole for extremists who threaten many countries. Besides Pakistan, India, Iran, and Afghanistan have strong interests in eliminating threats that emanate from this area. The problem is that most countries in the region feel that Pakistan is hunting with the hound and running with the hare at the same time. Pakistan’s intelligence is suspected of nurturing many of the same groups for geopolitical reasons even as they threaten its own stability. This perception prevents Pakistan from developing closer relations with its neighbors who have the resources, the will, and the interest to help Pakistan become terror free.
A regional coalition will make the struggle against extremism more potent, more durable and less expensive, but it will take more than deft diplomacy to achieve. Pakistan must convince its neighbors that the alleged ties between the Pakistani state and the Taliban have been severed irreparably.
The Dish 