Droning on against al-Qaeda

The New Republic has an excellent article up now looking at the increasing use of drone bombers in Pakistan. Authors Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann highlight a number of interesting points in their analysis of the program, which has undoubtedly eroded the capabilities of Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda network in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

In 2007, the sitting White House launched just three drone attacks in Pakistan, but in 2008 the pace of the bombings increased dramatically to 34. For 2009, the Obama administration has already pulled the trigger on 16 such attacks, and dozens more seem imminent as the assassination program emerges as the chief U.S. instrument for fighting bin Laden’s organization in Pakistan.

The attacks, and their civilian casualties, have of course produced political backlash in Pakistan in general -- but not so much in the tribal badlands formally called the Federal Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA), where the strikes have taken place. From the article:

• The one place the drone strikes do seem popular is in the FATA itself. The Aryana Institute for Regional Research and Advocacy, a Pakistani think tank that does work in the tribal regions, found that more than half the people it polled in the FATA say the drone strikes are accurate and are damaging the militant organizations. Fewer than half said that anti-American sentiment in the area had increased due to the drone attacks. This is perhaps less surprising than it might initially seem; if a bunch of heavily armed religious nutcases took over your neighborhood, you too might not mind if occasionally they were whacked by mysterious missiles falling from the sky, whatever their provenance.

Beyond the Valley in Pakistan

The Pakistani military appears poised to deliver a blow to Taliban fighters holed up in Swat Valley, which has seen a massive refugee exodus. The picture of how the battle is unfolding day to day is murky at best. There are few, if any, journalists in the area, and neither the Pakistani army nor the Taliban can be expected to provide honest accounts.

The eventual outcome is already clear nonetheless. In the days ahead, Pakistani troops will overrun the Taliban positions in Mingora, the valley’s main town. Taliban survivors of the assault will scatter and begin to regroup for a counterpunch. Pakistan now has an insurgency on its hands, and so it will go like this for as long as one side or the other is willing to keep up the fight.

But the battles in the counter-insurgency campaign Pakistan is now undertaking distract from the real mission the government must launch, i.e. bringing the tribal territories where the Taliban were born under government control. The military will have a role in that to be sure, but the real work to be done is in development of this desperately poor region.

For decades the central government of Pakistan has allowed tribal rule of its territories bordering Afghanistan. Islamabad has granted the tribal territories government support such as roads and basic services but without demanding that the societies who benefit from this state support adhere to systematic rule of law like the rest of the country. That’s why you see the occasional news of a public stoning in the tribal territories, where the central government usually leaves law and order to tribesman rather than police and courts. Nuclear Pakistan allows, even encourages, a huge swath of the country’s population to languish in underdevelopment and backwardness. This must end if Pakistan is to escape the fate of failed states.

There are many voices in Pakistan and even the West who may balk at the idea of judging an entire society’s way of life as “backwards” and consider it an imperial insult. To that I would say: Bullshit. There are societal norms we can all agree are good. Things like low infant mortality, literacy and longevity. These development indicators all point in the wrong direction in tribal societies and have throughout time. There is an enormous body of scholarship documenting this truth. Read Nonzero by Robert Wright and Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond for a start if you need convincing that romantic notions of tribalism serve only to perpetuate human suffering.

The reasons why Pakistan has preserved its tribalism are part cultural, part economic and part strategic. Regardless, the result of brooking tribalism for decades amounts to a social and political disaster for all involved. The people in the tribal territories of Pakistan live in some of the deepest poverty found in Asia or the Islamic world. And the militancy bred there now threatens to undo much of the rest of the country’s progress, hence the fleeing of more than a million Pakistanis from Swat, a formerly bucolic tourist destination.

The Pakistani military can and must defeat Taliban forces on various battlefields in the months and years ahead. But no number of military victories can solve the root problem. To civilize the tribal territories will require a massive act of well-intentioned statecraft along with a completely altered political view from Pakistan’s leadership on what the country will be in a future time, when perhaps the residents of Swat have returned home.

Damage Done

The American Civil Liberties Union is quite right to cry foul at President Obama’s refusal to release more than 2,000 photos documenting detainee mistreatment at U.S. military prison facilities in the early years of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"The Obama administration's adoption of the stonewalling tactics and opaque policies of the Bush administration flies in the face of the president's stated desire to restore the rule of law, to revive our moral standing in the world and to lead a transparent government,” said ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero. “This decision is particularly disturbing given the Justice Department's failure to initiate a criminal investigation of torture crimes under the Bush administration.”

The ACLU and other civil rights activists have mainly voiced concern over the domestic legal and political implications of withholding the photos. But the Obama White House appears to be at least as equally worried about international reaction in making its decision. Top Pentagon officials have apparently convinced the president that airing such photos may inflame anti-American sentiment in the Muslim world and make U.S. troops less safe than they already are in combat zones. The administration’s thinking on reaction in the Muslim world is as wrongheaded as its domestic calculation, however.

True, the Pentagon leadership is correct in anticipating that such photos will enrage many Muslims who see them. But the Muslims who would do harm to U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan are already enraged, and there is no use in making any effort at placating the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan or the Shi’ite militias and Sunni insurgents in Iraq. Members of these various camps have brought us lately things like school poisonings in Afghanistan and bombing carnage in Iraq so severe that the hitherto slow return of refugees has all but stopped.

What will the rest of the Islamic world outside radical circles think? We can guess. By all accounts the photos contain images that would offend anyone who values human rights, regardless of faith. To suggest that the Islamic world in general is so reactionary that it cannot handle a frank disclosure of misdeeds by the United States on human rights is an insult to Muslims and a contradiction of Obama’s pledge for a new approach by the United States towards followers of Islam around the world.

For one, probably nothing in those photos will shock anyone familiar with detainee treatment in, say, Egypt, Algeria, Syria or Iran. Most of the abusive practices done by the United States are already widely known in those countries and elsewhere in the Islamic world. And U.S. human rights abuses pale in comparison in many regards to the past and present abuses of some predominantly Islamic nations.

In other words, they can handle it. And the Obama administration must open up further on this issue now and in the future if it is indeed serious about having a better relationship with the Islamic world. Withholding the photos will only increase suspicion and resentment towards the United States from the Muslim world, deepening a gulf already too wide.

Taliban at the Gates

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton is absolutely right in saying the Taliban gains in Pakistan pose an “existential threat” to the government in Islamabad. The dangers of the Taliban grabbing more territory go deeper than simply the obvious threat of anti-government guerillas inching towards Islamabad.

Taliban gains in Pakistan reflect the increasing weakness of Pakistan’s civilian government, led by President Asif Ali Zardari. Civilian governments have never done well in Pakistan, where the military is effectively a state of its own that sometimes works with civilian governments – and sometimes not. In 1999, for example, the Pakistani military brought the country to the brink of nuclear war with India while the civilian leadership sat largely uninformed on the sidelines. Western diplomatic intervention helped avert that disaster. Shortly thereafter, of course, military commander Pervez Musharaff took power in a coup. Many in Pakistan, and some in Western capitals, welcomed the move at the time, because the 1999 crisis showed that the civilian government essentially was not a player any more.

Zardari is looking less and less like a player these days as the Taliban extends its control in parts of the country. Taliban fighters are unlikely to storm Islamabad. But their (many) sympathizers and supporters within the Pakistani military and its intelligence wing, the ISI, are likely to get ideas about toppling the civilian government with a coup so long as the Taliban keeps growing stronger.

Bullets and Ballots

Afghan and allied officials in Kabul are struggling to come up with a plan to go forward with nationwide presidential elections Aug. 20, despite a worsening insurgency that has left whole swaths of the country in the hands of the Taliban. India’s ongoing vote offers a model. Indian authorities have staggered balloting for parliamentary elections in five stages over the course of a month. The plan is designed in part to deal with the difficulties of up to 714 million voters going to the polls. But the approach also allows security forces to concentrate in specific trouble spots. Indian authorities staged the first round of voting Thursday in areas where Maoist insurgents are active. Rebels attacked more than a dozen polling stations in election violence that left at least 17 dead, but overall the initial vote was widely considered a success in India. Balloting in Indian Kashmir, the scene of another long-running insurgency, will be a key test of the approach as it unfolds in the coming weeks. U.S., European and Afghan officials should pay close attention to how the election goes from a security perspective in Kashmir in the days ahead, especially since many of the militants in Kashmir originate from Pakistan, just as they do in Afghanistan.