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.

Who Controls Pakistan’s Nukes?

Pakistani leaders in recent days have gone out of their way to assure Washington that the country’s nuclear weapons are in safe hands, i.e. out of the reach of the Taliban and their confederates in al-Qeada. No one in Washington should find much comfort in this. Elements of the military establishment supposedly controlling Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal are openly sympathetic toward the very Islamic militants now battling the government for control of territory inside the country. The civilian government in Islamabad in fact is hoping for a return to the supposed Taliban truce. That "truce" essentially ceded whole portions of the country to fundamentalists brazenly vowing to host followers of Osama bin Laden, who has already made attempts to get a hold of a Pakistani nuclear weapon.

In other words, Pakistan’s nukes are already in the wrong hands, because the government may not be willing or able to fully ensure they are not gotten by militants increasingly thick on the ground in Pakistan after them. This has been the case for some time, as we know from the alarming disclosures of proliferation profiteering by Pakistan’s leading nuclear scientist, A.Q. Khan. How much worse the situation can get remains to be seen. But it is a safe bet to assume that whatever nuclear safeguards the Pakistani government has in place are eroding along with the breakdown of law and order surrounding Taliban advances.

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.