Why Pakistan Is Winning Its War & US/NATO Losing It In Afghanistan

By David Rose & Moin Ansari

In Mingora, the city of 250,000 people that was until recently the headquarters of Pakistan’s Swat valley Taliban, the shopping centre is heaving.

‘Bloody Chowk’, the crossroads where the militants used to leave the butchered bodies of their victims every night, is once again merely a mini-roundabout, surrounded by camera and shoe shops.

Further up the valley, a scenically idyllic 100-mile seam of fertility dividing the Northwest Frontier mountains, the girls’ schools that were blown up by the Taliban are reopening, with lessons taking place in tents.

Success: Pakistani army soldiers with captured militants at Lower Dir in the Swat valley

The barbers ordered to stop shaving beards on pain of death are back in business, and Mullah FM, the radio station used by the Taliban leader Maulana Fazlullah to broadcast his extremist sermons, is off the air.

Western leaders often insinuate that there is something half-hearted about Pakistan’s struggle against those responsible not only for bringing terror to Swat but providing safe havens for the Taliban fighting in Afghanistan, to say nothing of the series of devastating bombings in the big Pakistani cities.

14 Indian “Consulates” are RAW terror centers spreading sabotage across the border in Pakistan. ‘Increasing Indian influence in Afghanistan is likely to exacerbate regional tensions and encourage Pakistani countermeasures in Afghanistan or India.’ (Gen Stanley McChrystal). Central Asia Tajikistan Pakistan: RAW trail of terror from Tajik bases to Indian Consulates in Afghanistan to targets in Pakistan. “They (the Indians) have to justify their interest. They do not share a border with Afghanistan, whereas we do. So the level of engagement has to be commensurate with that,” Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi said in an extensive interview with The Los Angeles Times, when asked about India’s building up its commercial and political presence in Afghanistan.

Last month, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton suggested that some in Pakistan’s government must know the whereabouts of Al Qaeda leaders such as Osama Bin Laden, still said by some to be hiding in the frontier’s tribal areas.

Gordon Brown has repeatedly urged the Pakistanis to ‘do more’, claiming that three-quarters of terrorist plots in Britain have links to Pakistan.

Yet last week he also admitted that, across the Afghan border, some of the territory the British Army took at such terrible cost last summer is already back under Taliban control.

As I walked unmolested through the alleys of Mingora’s bazaar, his comments provoked some uncomfortable thoughts.

Swat & Malakand division map

First the good news: the Swat example shows that the Taliban are not invincible, and that it is possible to fight a counter-insurgency against them and win.

Unfortunately, however, the very reasons Pakistan appears to be doing quite well, both in Swat and in the current military operation further south in Waziristan, make the prospects of Nato success in Afghanistan more remote.

Moreover, one of the Pakistanis’ evident strengths – a clear strategic focus with operations of limited scope that tackle the enemy one area at a time – is woefully lacking in Afghanistan.

‘You have to recognise the limits of your power. When you try to attain too many objectives simultaneously, you end up attaining nothing,’ General Athar Abbas, the Pakistan army’s chief spokesman, told me.

‘If you don’t have clarity from the beginning, especially about what to do after you capture somewhere, you will run into serious problems – and that is what’s happening across the border.

‘You have to retain your successes, and the only way to do that is with popular support.’

RAW agent Bait Mehsud killed. The TTP leadership has been eliminated or arrested. Can RAW replenish the mercenaries? and continue sabotage inside Pakistan?

Life in Mingora isn’t yet back to normal: the death and destruction have simply been too great. Fazlullah used to be a chairlift operator and one of the first things the Taliban did was to blow up the Swat valley’s ski facilities.

Skirmishes continue in outlying areas and there is still a curfew. But the progress is unmistakable.

When I last visited Pakistan in June, at the height of the Swat campaign, there were more than two million internally displaced persons (IDPs) living on the scorching plains in camps and relatives’ spare rooms.

But a remarkably efficient army-led transport and reconstruction effort has meant more than 95 per cent of them have been back home for weeks.

More impressive is the fact that despite having been IDPs, and in many cases having once been in favour of the Taliban, few Swat people appear to want them back.

‘When Fazlullah started his broadcasts, he had a lot of support,’ said Shiraz Khan, a local TV cameraman. ‘Not now. Their methods have been exposed.’

One night, he said, he was woken by the shrieks of his next-door neighbour. ‘The Taliban had come to her house and, in front of her and the rest of the family, they were murdering her oldest son and her husband by cutting their throats.’

RAW attack on Peshawar, Rawalpindi Wagah border using at least one Afghan who was captured alive. Pakistan has faced terror from Delhi for over three decades

‘When you see a dead body, its cut-off head lying on its chest, it’s a truly terrible sight,’ said a local professor, who asked not to be named.

‘The people supported the Taliban because they felt the state was not giving them justice. But now they are finished.’

The army is still in Mingora, but responsibility for law and order is back with the police.
‘The community is helping us with information,’ said Qazi Farooq, the district chief.

He said that ‘regular police work’ had led to the capture of dozens of militants, 60 of whom have already been charged in the criminal courts with crimes including murder and blowing up bridges.

In the remoter areas, ‘lashkars’ – tribal militias – have been formed to root out the last Taliban. If only the British Army had encountered similar reactions in Helmand, Afghanistan.

Pakistan defeats the Indian sponsored TTP: RAW supported Uzbeks Tajiks purged in South Waziristan FATA

Last Friday, when I visited a new IDP centre established at a cricket ground in Dera Ismail Khan on the South Waziristan border, I heard the main reason why starkly expressed.

The IDPs there come from the same Pathan tribe, the Mehsuds, which is also the main source of the local Taliban.

But having been brutalised in a similar fashion to the people of Swat, several men told me they were ready to work with the army to ensure that its gains were maintained once they went home.

‘The thing is this,’ said Mohammed Qasar, a farmer from the district of Lada. ‘If the army treat us well, we will co-exist with them, because ultimately we are Pakistanis. The soldiers are our people, too.’

And there, alas, is the rub. The new counter-insurgency buzzword for Gordon Brown and Nato’s commanding general in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, is ‘protecting the population’ in order to consolidate gains.

But honorable as that intention may be, no Afghan Pathan will ever describe the British or US troops as ‘our people’. Whatever their avowed policy, Nato troops will always look like occupiers.

In Pakistan, the fact that the army is being deployed inside its own country is a possible source of weakness.

This imposes a delicacy that is often not appreciated: it is, in the words of one general, ‘a pretty big deal’, and in order to rely on public support, it has had to wait until the Taliban’s outrages have become manifest before launching operations.

But having got that backing, it has become a source of strength.

Meanwhile, General Abbas cited a further stupefying sign of Nato’s apparent absence of strategic co-ordination.

In the name of the new ‘protection’ strategy, the US has this autumn been withdrawing from its posts on the Afghan side of the frontier, including those in Paktika, the province next to South Waziristan.

‘It will create a vacuum,’ he said, ‘and if militants escape from Waziristan, what can we do? We cannot fire on them when they cross the border.’

For years, Nato chiefs have accused Pakistan of failing to deal with the Taliban’s safe havens in Pakistani territory. Now, in one of the more bitter ironies of this ever-lengthening war, that role has been reversed.

US army morale down in Afghanistan: Study

Morale has fallen among US soldiers in Afghanistan because of the rising violence there and the long and repeated deployments for troops after eight years of fighting in the country, according to a new U.S. Army report released Friday.

The report summarizes two surveys of U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan taken earlier this year. New statistics from the Army also show suicides are up in the entire service. Produced every two years by the Army’s Mental Health Advisory Team. “Soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan continue to face stress from multiple deployments into combat but report being more prepared for the stresses of deployments,” Lt. Gen. Eric Schoomaker, the Army Surgeon General told reporters Friday.

Not surprisingly, the report showed that soldiers with multiple deployments, three or four tours of duty to Iraq or Afghanistan, had much lower morale and more mental health problems than those soldiers who have one or two combat deployments. Increased time at home, however, resulted in improved morale among troops sent back to the field. The updated survey of soldiers in Afghanistan found post-traumatic stress syndrome and depression in soldiers at the same levels of the survey in 2007, but still about double that of the 2005 survey results: 21.4 percent in 2009, 23.4 percent for 2007 and 10.4 percent in 2005, according to the report.

In Iraq, where the survey has been done every year, lower numbers were attributed to the decrease in combat action there. The 2009 numbers showed 13.3 percent of soldiers suffering from mental health problems, compared to 18.8 percent in 2007 and 22 percent in 2006.

Army officials said that with the push of more than 20,000 additional troops into the Afghan theater of battle over the last few months, there have been fewer mental health professionals in the field to help. Army officials said the ration was about one mental health professional for every 1,120 soldiers.

To combat the falling morale and lack of mental health professionals in the field, Army officials said the service needs to more than double the number of mental health providers and hopes to have at least 65 more of those providers in the field by December, making the ratio one for every 700 soldiers. The mental health assessment teams also conducted interviews with soldiers and found a drop in unit morale in Afghanistan to about half of what it was in 2007 and 2005, when about 10 percent surveyed gave top ratings to unit morale. In 2009, that number was 5.7 percent. The report also showed soldiers are seeing more difficulty at home with an increasing number reporting they are getting or considering getting divorced, according to the report.

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