A new strategy to fight Taliban in Pakistan

By S.P.SETH

The Taliban in Pakistan have regrouped after their leader, Baitullah Mehsud, was killed in an American missile attack. In the Swat valley, where they suffered serious setbacks in Pakistani military operations, they have since staged a number of suicide attacks killing many innocent people.

And they have also blown up a number of NATO supply trucks meant for the troops across the border in Afghanistan.

In other words, they are back in business, if they were ever out of it. The wishful thinking that Pakistan military can eradicate the Taliban is at the core of the problem.

In Swat, the military apparently had popular support. But the displacement of people from their homes did much to erode popular support. Now many of these displaced people have been pushed back to their homes. However, they lack economic opportunities compounded by lack of security. The Taliban still seem able to run havoc at a time and place of their choosing.

Which brings us to the fundamental question: is there a military solution to the Taliban insurgency? Obviously, the answer, based on experience so far of the Pakistani military operations, has to be in the negative.

Which doesn’t mean that a military response to the Taliban threat is entirely redundant. What it means is that the military response needs to be reworked and retooled. And it needs to be integrated with reworking the country’s civilian system.

Regarding the first: considering that the greatest danger to the state comes from the Taliban, the country’s military establishment, its force structure, military doctrine and national ethos need a complete overhaul to reflect the existential threat from the Taliban insurgency.

What it means is that Pakistan’s obsession with a security threat from India is in need of a fundamental reassessment. If that were done, all sorts of possibilities will open up.

First: it will de-emphasize the religious factor in Pakistani polity and identity. Pakistan sees its identity as a Muslim state in opposition to Hindu India, even though India is a secular state with around 160 million Muslims— almost as many as in Pakistan.

Because Pakistan was created out of India as a Muslim state, the religious politics of undivided India was externalized with the country’s partition in 1947. And that remains a constant in Pakistan’s politics, with that country’s never-ending quest for security against an Indian threat.

If Pakistan were to get out of this mind-set, it will become easier to rework the country’s military profile, with more emphasis on fighting the Taliban insurgency.

Second: with the reorientation of the military profile to fight insurgency, there will be considerable scope to reduce military expenditure designed to fight a conventional war with India.

Third: any credible movement in Pakistan to revise its military profile, now focused on an Indian threat, will open up vast opportunities of fruitful cooperation between the two countries in all directions—trade, cultural, political, military exchanges and so on. This will have a flow on effect on all aspects of national life.

However, any reorientation of Pakistan’s military strategy will not work by itself unless it is combined with a simultaneous effort to rebuild society.

Pakistan is plagued with mass illiteracy as there is not much left in the national coffers for education or other nation-building activities, with military hogging the lion’s share of the national resources.

The religious schools (madrasas) have cropped up everywhere with their free tuition and boarding, and a strict diet of Islamic education.

No wonder, Pakistan has so many young students from these madrasas lining up to become Taliban activists and martyrs. With such over-supply, they are even able to supplement the Afghan Taliban on their murderous course.

In a country where people, by and large, have no hope, the call for Jihad appears to have a transcendental message of rising above all “petty” worldly considerations and aim straight for martyrdom and paradise.

Therefore, to create an alternative message of hope, Pakistan’s establishment not only needs to revise its military profile to focus on the Taliban insurgency, but also to combine it with rebuilding the country’s social infrastructure.

And in this, Pakistan will be able to get considerable support and aid from the international community.