Pakistan civil war becomes more complex

Dawn:

JUST as the army finally swung into action in Buner and Dir, yet another front has opened, this time in Karachi. With the Baloch insurgency assuming ever more serious proportions, Pakistan is now under threat from three different directions.

The recent eruption of ethnic violence in Karachi hardly came as a surprise. For weeks, tension had been building up, and there was much talk of a civil war between Karachi’s Pakhtuns and the MQM. The trouble first started nearly two years ago when a number of political party workers, including those of the ANP, were killed on May 12 — in what appeared to be ethnically motivated clashes — when the movement to restore the chief justice was at its height.

So predictable were the current clashes that one would have thought Zardari or Gilani would have come to the city to try and defuse tensions. This is what leadership is about. Pity there’s not much of it around to anticipate problems. Our preferred management style is to wait for crises to assume critical mass before we even notice.

Meanwhile, what of the most serious threat Pakistan faces today? From news reports, it seems the Frontier Corps has achieved some initial success against the Taliban. However, this needs to be backed up by political action. Unfortunately, the ANP-led coalition government in the NWFP seems unable to come to grips with the insurgency, preferring retreat to resolve.

But finally, the government and the army seem to be united on the need to face the militant threat. After weeks of drift and dither, the state is trying to claw back the space it had ceded to the Taliban without a fight. The odd thing is that our soldiers are not being backed with the kind of public support they need and deserve.

In any war, the enemy is not accorded a public platform from which to bombard the civilian population with its propaganda. In Pakistan, we have the bizarre situation where terrorists like Muslim Khan can appear on TV and threaten the state, while justifying the Taliban’s violence and cruelty. This causes confusion, and results in the kind of ambiguity that has characterised the war thus far.

One problem facing the army is that once it has liberated an area from the terrorists, it cannot stay forever to make sure the killers do not return. This is the job of the police and the paramilitary forces. But these forces are too weak and demoralised to take on the task. Over the last few months, they have seen scores of their colleagues murdered in the most gruesome ways by militants who are far better armed and trained.

More importantly, they have not received the political or public support they deserve. While it is easy enough to mock their lack of success, the fact is that they have not been trained or armed for the task that has been thrust upon them. Despite years of ethnic and sectarian terrorism, successive governments have consistently neglected to build up the morale and discipline of the police and the paramilitary force.

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The police and the militia need the kind of training that the US gave the Iraqis. It turned the situation around there and it could do so in Pakistan too. They need to redirect their assets toward internal security and dealing with insurgents of all types. They also need a counterinsurgency doctrine that can be passed down to all levels. What the writer is hinting at is that the army is going to find itself in whack a mole mode after they chase the enemy from its current location.

Hat tip to Graham.