Vic Socotra

22 February 2009

The War for Pakistan

(Map of Pakistan)

Kushal Khan was on his way to become the Sultan of Swat this morning, the Pakistani government’s District Coordination Officer in the valley, but he didn’t make it. He was snatched- along with six bodyguards- by persons unknown before reaching his new office in the bustling little town of Mingora.

The cease-fire with militants that has made the Americans so nervous is off to a rocky start.

With apologies to baseball legend Babe Ruth, Swat is a real place with a long history. Alexander the Great visited briefly at the point of the sword, and Swat was a Princely State under the British Raj. It stayed that way until 1969, when the real Sultan was cast down and out.

It is a lovely place, by all reports, and until the Taliban took over in 2008, was a popular alpine tourist destination far from the deserts of the south and steamy Karachi.

The problem, from a variety of perspectives, is that Swat is only sixty miles from the capital of Islamabad. That is less than many people here in the Washington area commute every day, and you can imagine that the prospect of the Taliban commuting to the capital has the policy-makers more than a little nervous.

Pakistan has nuclear weapons, as you may have heard. If the elected government in Islamabad goes down, there is the real possibility that they could get loose. The networks that operate the smuggling of weapons, people, technology and drugs could well be a better means of delivery than missiles.

Pakistan's Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi has dropped what he is doing to travel to Washington to explain that everything is OK. Army Chief of Staff General Ashfaque Kayani is already here for the big security review, explaining how a pact with the people allied with those who are fighting coalition forces in Afghanistan is not that big a deal, ins’hallah.

Under the terms of the cease-fire, the provincial government has agreed to impose sharia law in the Swat Valley, and permit the locals to keep girls out of school and generally carry on as they think God wills.

President Obama’s special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, has publicly expressed concern. Of course, he has also said that there is no military solution for the crisis, which is curious in light of the impending deployment of 17,000 additional troops to Afghanistan.

Pakistani officials defend the truce as the best of a line of bad choices, since the region is as good as lawless anyway, as the snatch of the Kushal Khan demonstrates.

Afghanistan is the key to the Obama Administration’s regional strategy, and since Alexander’s time, the Northwest Frontier of the Indian subcontinent has been the key to Afghanistan. The Great Game has always been played at this pivot point; the Russians probing south and the British seeking to conquer the buffer regions around the gem in the imperial diadem.

There are new actors in the Great Game, but some parts retain the traditional actors.

The land bridge to support the troops in Afghanistan goes up the Kyber Pass, which is just to the southwest of the Taliban stronghold in Swat. Most of the heavy equipment and supplies has to transit the winding roads, just as they always have. The Russians are squeezing the Manas Air Base in the Kyrgyz Republic, home to the 376th Air Expeditionary Wing and the key to air support of the international force. The Kyrgyz parliament has decreed that the base lease will expire in six months.

Peaceful, non-military supplies will be permitted to transit. But the heavy stuff will have to be imported from the south.

Consequently, US missile strikes in the Tribal Areas are way up, and the targets are shifting. There have been thirty of them since last September, and neatly crossing across the ideological divide from Bush to Obama.

The attacks have been controversial, in view of the sovereignty that Pakistan asserts but cannot enforce in the region. Since they began, the Predator and Reaper UAV’s have targeted the al Qaida leadership, when they can be identified.

The dead, this week, include Osama al-Kini and Abu Jihad al-Masri. They are implicated in the bombing of the Marriot hotel in Islamabad that killed, among others, a colleague from the Naval Reserve. They also may have helped to plan the Embassy bombings that trapped my friend the Doctor in the basement cafeteria.

That is good. Along the way, we have also killed people who may or may not have been innocent. What are the spouses and children of these men? Their drivers and seamstresses? I am not smart enough to know.

Increasingly, the targeting has migrated from al Qaida to the infrastructure supporting Baitullah Mehsud, the bastard responsible for murdering Benizir Bhutto. The result of her death was to pave the way for the election of her husband, Asif Ali Zardari, as Prime Minister.

He is no secular saint, any more than his predecessor Pervez Musharraf was. Zardari’s nick-name in back in the day was “Mr. 10%,” from a penchant he shared with former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich. Of course, I think Rod’s cut may have been larger, but no matter.

It is a dangerous game, this latest edition, since an American war in the Northwest Frontier will inflame the militants in Pakistan, who already assert that this is not a war on the Taliban, but on Islam. The struggle to maintain a democratic government in Islamabad teeters on an uneasy relationship with the Interservice Intelligence Agency with links to the radicals, growing American impatience and a thoroughly annoyed India, who suspects connections between the ISI and the Mumbai massacre.

Everything, including the nuclear weapons, are on the table.

It is a pickle. It could very well result in having to act decisively to secure the nuclear stockpile if things go south for the civilian government, and a much wider war. In this, I wish our policymakers well.

That is only the beginning of the complications. I will have to get to the network that connects Swat Valley to that of the Rio Grande tomorrow. It is really interesting.

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