What are Pakistan’s strategic options in North Waziristan

A war that includes Haqqanis has all the potential of keeping alive on Pakistan’s western border.

What happened at Mir Ali in North Waziristan Agency (NWA) last week was not an operation. It was a calibrated reprisal to the attack on an army post and convoy. The ISPR claimed eliminating over 30 Uzbeks and Turkmen, who had found residence there, and were culprits behind these dastardly acts. Hafiz Gul Bahadur, the chief of the militant group in control of the NWA, had warned people of the area to vacate immediately after Hakimullah Meshud’s death because of fears of similar reprisals for Taliban actions that were likely to ensue in the following days. Very few left.

According to a news report: “The foreigners residing in North Waziristan have multiplied the difficulties of their host tribesmen. People of Mir Ali are becoming bitter and inhospitable towards well-entrenched Uzbek fighters who were living in the neighbourhood(s) as paying guests.” This mix of part business and part mutual succour to sustain the business is what has skewed the dynamics of this war. Not only is the state guilty of tolerating foreign groups within its boundaries, it strangely has remained sanguine about these foreign groups providing a convenient shelter to militants — the state’s own direct threat that found its way into the NWA when flushed out of South Waziristan. The quid pro quo may have been the relative quiet of the NWA and the safety of Pakistan’s co-located military and paramilitary troops even as a conglomerate of militants lived alongside. It remains a complicated muddle.

It is important to understand the underlying dynamics that have resulted in this enigmatic calm. It began with the talk of a ‘hammer and anvil’ operation as a coordinated military effort to squeeze the space away from the groups that had entered Pakistani tribal regions after US operations in Afghanistan. Neither the hammer nor the anvil was in actuality ever enacted. The war against terror remained two separate wars; one fought in Afghanistan by the US/Nato, and the second within Pakistani territories as a combined mix of counter-terror and counter-insurgency operations. Pakistan maintained about 800 posts on its side of the Afghan border to check unauthorised movement across the border, while Nato/Isaf gradually reduced its presence to only 80 posts on the Afghan side. This mismatch of strategies and lack of coordinated action only bred mistrust and then distrust. Pakistan, as the junior partner, remained mostly on the reactive, waiting to see how the bigger actors in Nato/Isaf played their hand; what remained their intent, declared and real; were Pakistan to play by the apparent, would that suck Pakistan into greater harm; so on, and so forth. What seemed deliberate dither was, in fact, caution borne out of insecurity.

In the absence of transparent strategies and assurances that could alleviate Pakistan’s concerns, Pakistan developed its own play and its own timelines which, at the minimum, secured its own interests. Self-preservation became the defining need. Any notions of an offensive geopolitical design in Afghanistan became an irrelevant thought for a Pakistan that was consumed by its own complications. Other nations, such as India, the US and China found ‘strategic depth’ in Afghanistan instead. Pakistan considered it more appropriate to mind its own house and borders; a patently defensive mould.

What were Pakistan’s timelines? The following was assumed: when and if a peace process begins in Afghanistan, it will invariably result in the Afghan Taliban’s engagement with Kabul. As a spin-off, it could either encourage the militants on our side to follow suit, or, at the least, disconnect them from their nexus with the Afghan Taliban, as the Pakistani state pondered its options of a dialogue or an armed action. Either way, the militants and the Pakistani state will make their final choice; the militants separated from their larger umbrella, and the state freed from its dominating concern of unnecessarily sucking the full spectrum of militant presence in NWA, including those who have largely kept peace with Pakistan, and the Haqqanis, whose only focus has been Afghanistan. If, however, the state were to begin its operation in North Waziristan with the nexus between the two intact, the Afghan Taliban are certain to be sucked in the vortex. The state will still succeed with its immense potential, but would render itself to far greater strategic injury because of the ‘time’ and ‘effort’ it will need to give to a resulting consequence.

The Haqqanis populate four adjoining Afghan provinces on the Pakistan border. A war that includes the Haqqanis has all the potential of keeping alive on Pakistan’s western border even if the rest of Afghanistan and Pakistan have found peace. This unwanted war will keep Pakistan embroiled in debilitating operational deployments and operations on its borders, long after 2014 when all the rest have gone home. When it should have been the moment for Pakistan to fight its internal war against residual sentiment of radicalism, extremism and militancy in its societal midst, Pakistan would still be too engaged in finding peace on its borders. This would be a certain recipe of pushing Pakistan further back in time even as the rest find peace and spur along merrily.

That was the plan. However, a different dynamic and timeline is in play in Afghanistan. The peace process hasn’t even begun; courtesy the impasse between Hamid Karzai and the US over the Bilateral Security Agreement, and the politics of the upcoming April 2014 elections. In an unchanged strategic environment, the Haqqanis remain fixed in NWA, as does the nexus between them and other militants on the Pakistani soil. Any operation now will instinctively cause both to close ranks further and fight the war against Pakistan as a common war. That would be a strategic blunder. What has all this time been facing away from Pakistan would reverse course towards Pakistan. An operation in North Waziristan isn’t a simple proposition. There are strategic consequences that Pakistan will do well to heed. Pakistan must wait for the strategic context to change in Afghanistan before embarking on any elaborate operation in the agency. To that end, it needs to initiate engagement with Afghanistan and the US to trigger changes that will ease its own strategic options. Misconceived inaction behind poorly coined cliches — Afghan-led, Afghan-owned — has proven to be a sure recipe to deliver a stunted strategic context and threats that remain vibrant and undiluted.

Published in The Express Tribune, December 28^th, 2013.

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