The Weekly N&C for September 29th, 2008

The Worst Place on Earth to Fight

The world is full of remote places, desolate outlands, and high mountains little touched by road or even pathways, but perhaps none is as important right now as the swath of land that sits perched along and above the South Eastern edge of Afghanistan. If one crosses the little-demarcated and often ignored Durand Line that is presumed to be the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, the land rises and the clock turns back to a time before nations. Except that outside the mindset of the inhabitants, nations play at drawing lines across the map, lines of supposed sovereignty backed claims in distant capitals and cast as an essential part of easily-wounded national pride.

At issue here is in part the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and more specifically the Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA) of Pakistan, a place I often cite as “ungoverned and ungovernable” in its current organization. To be clear, we are not speaking of a small place, a district or a borough. It is rough, mountainous land crossed only in part by roads and those that exist were in the main built with the imagined goal of getting across the FATA to somewhere else. To attempt to travel through it by air is almost as bad, with helicopters choking on dust in the “lowlands” and starved of air for fuel amongst the peaks. To those experienced with the lands north of the Durand Line, the Hindu Kush one would know is harsher terrain, but only slightly, and the population present is far greater in number and hostility to outsiders.

The population is uncounted at this time. The Government of Pakistan last conducted any meaningful census in its 1997 estimate, and came up with roughly 5,700,000 people. A more reasonable number, albeit a guess, is that the population today is somewhere over 8 million people. Again quoting the Government of Pakistan, here are a couple of measures of the place: a Literacy Rate below 18%; only 43% of the population there has access to clean drinking water. Did I mention the place is lousy with modern small arms and support weapons from thirty years of near-constant instability in the region?

Furthermore, when looking at just how inhospitable the human terrain is there, if one is not immediately familiar with the “segmentary lineages” in the study of tribalism one had best set aside time for Philip Carl Salzman's Culture and Conflict in the Middle East or in the very least see this review thereof. Professor Salzman is a specialist in nomadic cultures, but much of that which forms the basis of his understanding is applicable to the sort of primordial tribal culture that defines the way of life in the FATA. If a small and inadequate summary would be allowed here, let it be said that so long as loyalties are determined by an individual’s proximity in the clan and that allegiances can change day for night depending on the presence of a perceived “outside” threat, it is a fool’s task to attempt to define to said populace anything like a “nation” having superseding sovereignty or authority. In some small deference to that thought, neither the British Empire nor the successor state of Pakistan has ever attempted to do anything other than loosely administer the FATA. They both depended on the threat of reprisal under the Frontier Crimes Regulations (which while contested, remains in the body of Pakistani Law) and even when Pakistan promulgated its Constitution, it expressly disallowed any Act of Parliament to be binding or enforceable in the FATA. In practice, this means that the FATA is a place where the law is defined by the Maliks (tribal chiefs). The Territorial Sovereignty of Pakistan is enforced, as it were, by the presence of a Frontier Corps of locally-recruited forces officered by Pakistani Army regular commanders. Given the obvious loyalty issues of such a force, when push comes to shove Pakistani regulars are deployed as well, but even then it is difficult at best for the government to enforce much of anything.

Don’t fault them overmuch as men in the field, however. When the confused and confusing dictates from Islamabad do come into alignment with reality, these forces are able to take some fairly decisive actions. Operations by the regular Army in the North-West in August and September have been and are substantial efforts (and seem to have engendered some substantial counterattacks as well).

Where it *is* fair to fault them is in the utter fabrication that the Army generals have engaged in when reporting casualties, and the absurd operational goals that up until this latest campaign have made the objective of military action little more than knocking a few tribal heads and then cutting deals. This latter is nothing more than Salzman’s understanding of how tribes deal with each other writ on a national scale and does virtually nil toward making the situation different the next time around. Considering that these very tribes are also the prime troublemakers in the Taliban insurgency on both sides of the Durand Line, one can well understand that such inconclusive results are utterly maddening to the Afghan and NATO commanders who are faced with the same bunch as their primary foes.

A fairly straightforward summary of the situation creating those frustrations, the Pakistani Army’s efforts to fight on that ground, and the appallingly poor results the soldiers and negotiators have gotten up to this point is presented by Bill Roggio at The Long War Journal, with a very fine map of how much control over the NWFP and FATA the Taliban and their allies have gained.

One last item of background, if one would so indulge the reminder, is that the Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF; a separate American command) and NATO forces in Afghanistan are dependent to a great extent on one port (Karachi, Pakistan) and two corridors of transportation across Pakistan for all heavy transport logistics. Those two corridors (and we have spoken of the concept of corridors and their vulnerability before) pass through the NWFP and in part through the FATA. The route security for both corridors is entirely a Pakistani Army matter, so when things happen that make the Government of Pakistan unhappy with the U.S.A. or NATO it is entirely unimportant that Pakistan can not functionally defend its own sovereignty along the border with Afghanistan. If that easily-wounded national pride comes to the fore in Pakistani thinking, they just close the border crossings and withdraw route security and the corridors collapse. They don’t have to “shoot at American helicopters”, and frankly they aren’t capable of doing much of that and living to see the next dawn; they can ground most every helicopter from fuel shortages until (and if) the Americans open another corridor.

So when discussions turn to matters like *this* press conference by the U.S. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, there is a bit of pouring oil on the waters going on. When you add in an appearance on American CNN television by Pakistan’s President, Asif Ali Zardari, saying *this* then it should be pretty clear to all observers that some band-aids for wounded national pride have been delivered. Lastly, when *this* is placed out in casual Open Source, if not widely publicized, then there is a whole lot of “give the Pakistani Army (and their new national President) a chance to show things are different this time” happening.

There is talk of joint Afghani-Pakistani border patrols in the wind. Good luck with that, but if it does come to pass it would at least be a step in the right direction.

The Government of Pakistan, and the oligarchy of the rich families and the generals that really decide how things are done in the main part of the country, may yet see that what has come to be in the NWFP and the FATA is an even bigger threat to Pakistan than it is to Afghanistan. *Any* more such ill-considered “Marriott Hotel” hotel bombings anytime soon by the Taliban-and-allies would probably tip the scales that way for good.

If not, then right, wrong, or indifferently, come January of 2009 the United States of America inaugurates a new President who has said he will take the War on Terror inside Pakistan for real. If the Zardari administration doesn’t find a way to make some serious gains between now and then, it would be a fair wager that the new American Administration will have a whole lot more to talk about with the governments of Afghanistan and India than they will with that of Pakistan.

That puts this all on a timer, gentlemen. It is time to tighten up the puttees and get out hunting the enemies-within of the Land of the Pure. Pride, that glorious Sindhi and Punjabi pride, and the future of your nation likely depend on it.

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End notes – none presented (links embedded).