Search for leaders in Pakistan's civil war

Ralph Peters:

OUR diplomats and generals can't understand why Pakistan's million- man military avoids confronting the Taliban as the extremists tear into the country's flesh.

Admiral Michael Mullen, our chairman of the Joint Chiefs and a superb officer, spends almost as much time in Islamabad as in Washington. And his Pakistani hosts make endless promises.

But nothing much happens as the Taliban and their allies gobble territory. This week's "offensive" to retake Buner province -- almost within shouting distance of Pakistan's capital -- is a relatively small-scale operation.

Even Richard Holbrooke, our junkyard dog among diplomats, can't get the Pakistanis off the dime. Our best and brightest shake their heads: Don't the Pakistanis want to save their country?

For a big part of the answer, look to our own history. Along the Indus River, 2009 looks worrisomely like 1861 did on the Potomac.

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I'm not comparing the heroic soldiers of our Confederacy with Taliban fanatics, but there's a crucial point here that our emissaries miss: Many senior Pakistani officers just don't want to fight against "their people."

Although Pakistan's officer corps draws on all of the country's provinces and territories, the army's heart really has only two chambers. The senior officers who form the military's center of gravity come from Punjab, a populous east-of-the-Indus state with old martial traditions.

But a crucial minority of the army's top performers come from the tribal lands west of the Indus that have always produced warriors. They're Pashtuns. So are the Taliban.

We ignore such fundamental considerations, failing to note that the extended family of a general or colonel with a name such as "Afridi" or "Khattack" is rooted in the mountain valleys that always embraced fundamentalist Islam.

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The Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate and Military Intelligence are deeply poisoned by pro-Taliban elements and those who view the Taliban as useful. But the regular army continues to struggle over its identity and purpose.

The generals don't want to fight a civil war. Yet, that reluctance may be what will bring about a catastrophic civil war. To defeat the Taliban would take a lot of killing. Pakistan's military could do it. But it would be bloody and hard. And part of the military doesn't want to do it.

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The best for which we may hope is that Pakistan will somehow muddle through. But the country's crisis is worsening -- despite recent local moves against the extremists. The military is the key to saving Pakistan but, increasingly, the army's a house divided.

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Usually revolutions succeed when the army does not have the stomach for stopping them. This usually happens at the capitol steps and not in the hinterlands. Pakistan has the capacity to defeat the Taliban, what has not been demonstrated to date is whether it has the will. What it is beginning to understand is that if does not defeat them, the rest of the world probably has the will to do so. Letting the religious bigots get control of Pakistan nukes is not acceptable to much of the world including the US and India. If the Pakistan government lets the Taliban come to power, the country will finally see the war with India that it fears as well as the US and NATO.