Our failure to learn from mistakes

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There have been allegations by Kabul that Pakistani forces have carried out air strikes in the Barmal district of Afghanistan's Paktika province. Taliban's spokesperson Zabiullah Mujahid has alleged that four locations in Barmal district had been target resulting in the death of 46 people.

Pakistan's Foreign Office has, however, denied such allegations, instead saying that an intelligence-based operation has been carried out against terrorists in "border areas". Pakistan maintains that terrorist attacks emanating from across the border have been a grave threat.

Just two days before the allegations of attack in Barmal, a group of heavily armed TTP militants had stormed a security outpost in South Waziristan that resulted in the martyrdom of 16 Pakistani soldiers. There is thus likelihood that this deadliest attack in recent months on Pakistani security forces may have triggered a military response.

The allegations from Kabul also coincided with a high-level Pakistani political delegation sitting on the negotiating table with their Taliban counterparts in the Afghan capital to figure out the complexity of the issue of cross-border terrorism that surrounds and overshadows everything else between the relations of the two countries.

In geopolitics, geography predominantly dictates the type of politics that any two states may engage in. For over four decades now, Pakistan has showcased a lackluster Afghan policy and the classic example of that is the current event - a day on which a political dialogue was held and allegation of air strikes surfaced simultaneously. Afghanistan has used asymmetric warfare to defeat two superpowers.

History tells us that Afghans have proved time and again that small battle field victories by a much bigger enemy can be turned into strategic defeat. But we are not the enemy of Afghanistan, we are a brotherly country that not only shares border with them but their deep concerns also.

Something is not right, for us to not have a workable Afghan policy - one that prevents us from accepting that Afghanistan is a sovereign state; and living under the yoke of Westphalian principles we must remain shackled as a state when it comes to initiating a military response. Has Afghanistan not proved that with them no kind of deterrence works specially deterrence by punishment as they are the people who don't stop hoping and willing to die?

Pakistan's state response, though I haven't heard of it but I assume it will be based on the fact that doing nothing means capitulating to TTP's aggression and such a weakness would invite more attacks. But the big question is the right management of this asymmetric challenge emanating from Afghanistan. Should our response be through conventional military power on a sovereign country based on our assessment of any future threats developing from there? Striking a balance between defensive and offensive measures for managing asymmetric threat is not only a challenge for Pakistan but for the entire world in the 21st Century. In the case of Pakistan, it becomes more critical as it comes from a state with whom we share a huge border that is porous.

I remember writing a few months ago about how Russia faced a similar threat from its south western region when it started expanding in the eastern region of Siberia in the early 20th Century. What Russia did was construct over 240 fortified outposts manned by Cossacks to prevent any infiltration towards their eastern border. That brought relief in the lives of locals who came back to the abandoned lands and started living a normal life. Not by punishment but denial we should also create the much-needed deterrence against the TTP threat emanating from Afghanistan.

Military training teaches us that for any strategy that is hoping to work, it must correctly identify the core area, the area of the greatest vulnerability of the targeted country - its centre of gravity. Needless to say our country's greatest vulnerability today is the lack of 'political will'. We would not want any non-state actors to hit us at a time when politics in Pakistan is all over the place. Autocracy in Pakistan is already being judged by the outside world for lack of tolerance, violations of human rights, political oppression and strong curbs on public freedom and liberty.

Military response to the asymmetric threats provides short-term tactical gains but result in long-term problems. Ask Britain, the Netherlands and Canada that provided combat troops for NATO when it took over in 2005 the responsibility to fight in Afghanistan. Having no experience of conducting counter-insurgency operations, these countries learnt value lessons at an unintended cost when their ordeal ended and the NATO combat operations finally ended in Afghanistan in 2014.

Even one can write about the cost Russia paid for its military response to the Chechnya's threat in the 90s, as despite over 200,000 death Chechens kept visiting the Russian heartland. These examples show us that fighting a war against a tactic rather than developing a clear plan to defeat a strategy can play in the hands of the enemy.

Even the 9/11 attack and the disproportionate US response show how such a response creates new dilemmas such as military interventions, preemptive wars, homeland defence and peacekeeping and peace promoting operations. All of them are avoidable if you don't respond to a tactics but demonstrate patience to create a sound strategy to deal with it.

It is famously said "give a small boy a hammer and he will find that everything he encounters need pounding" or in other words "if the only tool you have is a hammer, you will treat everything as if it was a nail". In my humble opinion the best tool to utilise to work with Afghanistan is diplomacy and that can only come from politicians who conduct politics on the basis of formulation of a sound government that has the popular approval of the people. Those that imagine that a military response can create more security must realise that paradoxically it creates more insecurity.