WASHINGTON: A new and classified American military proposal outlines an intensified effort to enlist tribal leaders in the frontier areas of Pakistan in the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban, as part of a broader effort to bolster Pakistani forces against an expanding militancy, American military officials said.
If adopted, the proposal would join elements of a shift in strategy that would also be likely to expand the presence of American military trainers in Pakistan, directly finance a separate tribal paramilitary force that until now has proved largely ineffective and pay militias that agreed to fight Al Qaeda and foreign extremists, officials said. The United States now has only about 50 troops in Pakistan, a Pentagon spokesman said, a force that could grow by dozens under the new approach.
The proposal is modeled in part on a similar effort by American forces in Anbar Province in Iraq that has been hailed as a great success in fighting foreign insurgents there. But it raises the question of whether such partnerships can be forged without a significant American military presence in Pakistan. And it is unclear whether enough support can be found among the tribes.
Can’t really comment about this stuff with any expertise whatsoever, but I would worry about long-term consequences of empowering local tribal chiefs. They’ve proved again and again to be fair-weather friends. But perhaps rewarding those that collaborate with what these areas have always needed — infrastructure and investment — and waving around a very big stick would work.
The sense one gets from people who track FATA/NWFP developments is that the situation is more the result of botched policy than a too-powerful enemy, partly because the ISI wants to keep channels to the Taliban open for when the Americans leave Afghanistan, and partly because when the army *does* launch its periodic crackdowns it does so rather clumsily, creating more resentment against the government. It doesn’t sound similar to the Iraq situation at all. The Taliban aren’t carpetbaggers here, but have been entrenched for decades, and share ethnic/tribal/marriage ties with locals. Not sure how a strategy to mobilize “tribes” against “outsiders” could work in this context – who would be armed to fight whom? The army has a hard enough time getting conscripts from these areas to fight “their own.” Just creating rival militias might lead to an Algeria-type situation and increase killings and not solve anything.
Barnett Rubin’s http://icga.blogspot.com/2007/11/memo-to-media-supporting-musharraf-is.html“ rel=”nofollow”>comments some days ago may be relevant here:
When the U.S. demanded that the military join the “War on Terror,” it responded by sending in the army and arresting some Arabs and Uzbeks, while leaving the Taliban able to operate in Afghanistan. When the U.S. finally demanded more action, Islamabad claimed that the local Pashtuns supported the Taliban and that therefore military action alone would not work. Instead they reached an agreement with government-controlled “tribal leaders” in South Waziristan to control militant activity. Some in the Pakistani government sincerely hoped this agreement would work. It did not. Trying to regain control of the tribal agencies by reviving the tribal leadership is like trying to reconstitute the Mediterranean out of bouillabaisse. (My apologies to Marseille.)
Pashtuns in the tribal agencies are constantly sending messages complaining of how the militants are terrorizing them, how they don’t want to be used against Afghanistan, and how they are being blamed for the covert actions imposed on them by the Pakistani military. A few days ago, after I gave a lecture at Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, two students from NWFP came up to me in a very agitated state, with the same protests, that Pakhtuns are not Taliban and that this “terrorism” had been imposed on them. These areas are ripe for political leadership that would oppose both the militants — absorbing many of the youths they are recruiting — and military rule. But creating conditions for such leadership to develop would require not sending in the military to bomb and shell the tribes, but legalizing political parties and social organizations (which are outlawed in the tribal agencies) and enabling the people of the tribal agencies to exercise self-government. Rather than give up its own power, the military balances the militants and the weakened tribes.