this article gives a different spin:
In Depth
Afghanistan
Analysis
Turning point in Afghanistan: Is Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf really going to take on al-Qaeda?
Last Updated July 23, 2007
By Robert Sheppard, CBC News
Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf is a reluctant warrior. (Anjum Naveed/Associated Press) It was not an auspicious beginning. At least 16 Pakistani soldiers were killed and more than a score wounded in two separate ambushes last week as Pakistan's military government finally moved to take on the Taliban, al-Qaeda and the unruly warlords sheltering in the virtually lawless territories bordering Afghanistan.
The attacks and the sporadic suicide bombings that reached even into the capital, Islamabad, were a vivid reminder of the many past failures when Pervez Musharraf's government attempted to eradicate the country's heavily armed warlords and their fundamentalist followers.
But they were also stark punctuation to the fact that Musharraf's 10-month-long "peace accord" with the frontier bosses of North and South Waziristan — a policy he had appeared to be staking his government's survival on — had fully unravelled.
However reluctantly (though with Washington's clear approval), Pakistan has now embarked on a kind of pincer movement against the Taliban and al-Qaeda remnants sheltering along the border areas with Afghanistan.
As it moves in from the south and east, the U.S. and NATO forces are expected to advance from the north and west, probably mostly through air strikes, in a giant squeeze play, or at least a battle on two distinct fronts.
How this will work out, of course, is anyone's guess. This is a region that has been in an almost constant state of war for at least 30 years (many will say an eternity) and pretty much defeated all outsiders.
But Musharraf's move is nonetheless an important U-turn in the fight against extremism in that part of the world, not to mention a battle he has been trying desperately to avoid.
What's more, it coincides with two other related developments — the U.S. National Intelligence Estimate last week that raises the spectre of a resurgent al-Qaeda in these same border territories, and a British all-party report that seems designed to lay the groundwork for a longer, more involved NATO focus on Afghanistan.
Taken together these may reflect a turning point in how the war in Afghanistan is to be waged.
Musharraf's gamble
Until just last week, Musharraf had been defending his ceasefire with the tribal chiefs and even talked about attempting to revive it after they called it off. The September 2006 pact was the deal by which Pakistan would pull its military out of the tribal regions in return for local leaders policing their own militants and reining in outsiders.
The deal had kept at least a partial lid on extremist violence in mainland Pakistan but it has also been blamed for a huge resurgence in al-Qaeda's fortunes in the territories. No less an authority than New York University's Barnett Rubin has stated that "The main centre of global terrorism is in Pakistan," by which he was referring to the tribal territories bordering Afghanistan. This was the theme amplified by last week's National Intelligence Estimate as well.
Within Pakistan, the trigger for the change of heart over the tribal areas pact was the government siege and eventual attack on Islamabad's controversial Red Mosque earlier this month, to rid it of several hundred armed extremists.
Many, if not most, of the young students who had been holed up in the mosque, exchanging fire with security forces, had come from the fundamentalist religious schools and mosques in the tribal regions, local observers said. The attack on the mosque, which eventually left more than 100 dead, unleashed a wave of anti-Musharraf violence and demonstrations in these remote areas and, so far at least, one spectacular suicide bombing in Islamabad itself.
The reaction in turn underscored the pincer movement Musharraf is facing on his own home front: journalists, judicial activists and pro-democracy groups had been demonstrating actively for some time now trying to ensure a peaceful transition from Musharraf's eight-year military rule, and limits on his power. Backing him had been many of the smaller, religious parties who he had been counting on to help extend the constitutional basis for his regime and who had direct links to the fundamentalists who are now turning against him.
Musharraf's reluctance to take on the fundamentalists directly is understandable from his point of view. He has survived at least three assassination attempts by extremists, he has not wanted to turn his army on his own people, and his senior intelligence and military staffs are, by many accounts, riddled with officers who are sympathetic to at least some of the aims of the Islamic fundamentalists.
What's more, though he has a nuclear-tipped military that is over half a million strong and, some say, is one of Pakistan's few truly national institutions, he may not have the right military tools — the helicopter gunships and air strike capabilities — to take on the Taliban and al-Qaeda in their tribal stronghold, senior U.S. intelligence officials have said.
Developing or borrowing those tools would likely mean a closer alliance with American, British or NATO forces to help take the fight inside Pakistan's territories, which is politically very problematic for a proudly Islamic country like Pakistan.
The NIE report
Another harbinger of change last week was the release of the National Intelligence Estimates, an annual event, by U.S. security officials.
This highly abbreviated summary of what the combined U.S. intelligence community feels is the biggest threat facing America these days received widespread news coverage because it raised the spectre of a resurgent al-Qaeda, and even Osama bin Laden, preparing for another strike.
In the U.S. press, the NIE summary was largely played as a critique of the White House priorities to focus on Iraq and Iran as the big threats when Afghanistan and the adjacent Pakistan tribal territories were turning out jihadists by the tens of thousands annually.
And while this is true, it's also usually the case that these announcements are often highly orchestrated and filtered through upper reaches of the bureaucracy, either to buttress the administration's policies or prepare for a change in direction.
In this case, the backdrop seems pretty obvious: the war in Iraq is lost, neither the American military or the public have much stomach to tough it out there any longer and a deciding point is coming, possibly as soon as the fall.
But Washington can't just walk away from the global fight against terror — that would send the worst message to its enemies and allies around the world — so it needs a new target: Afghanistan and the al-Qaeda hideouts in Pakistan's tribal frontier.
Musharraf's (forced) about-face was clearly welcomed by Washington, which obviously didn't think much of his now aborted appeasement pact, even though the White House supported it publicly all these months. Frances Fragos Townsend, who heads the Homeland Security Council at the White House, was quoted in the New York Times on the pact, saying bluntly: "It hasn't worked for Pakistan. It hasn't worked for the United States."
By some accounts there are as many as 100,000 al-Qaeda-related jihadists in Pakistan and Afghanistan at the moment, which is many times the estimate for Iraq, where local sectarian rivalries seems to be at the root of much of the violence.
And as Britain's most senior generals reportedly told the new Labour prime minister last week, the consequences of failure in Afghanistan are far greater than Iraq because it could lead to an Islamist government taking power in Pakistan and controlling its nuclear arsenal.
Britain's take
The warnings by Britain's generals, made public by Lord Inge, the retired chief of the defence staff, echo the sombre and detailed assessment by an all-party committee of British MPs.
Britain has upwards of 7,000 military personnel in Afghanistan, more than double the number it has in Iraq, and the defence committee report envisions a long and involved commitment to the region, which should be of interest to Canadians, in that our own military commitment there is supposed to conclude in 2009.
(Incidentally, the full committee report quotes British Gen. David Richards as noting that the Canadian-led Operation Medusa, a big military foray against the Taliban, "was a reasonably close run last year" and that if Kandahar had fallen, the neighbouring provinces where the British and Dutch are based would likely have fallen as well because of the symbolic importance of Kandahar to the local Pashtun people.)
The British defence committee report concludes that while the fight for Afghanistan is not failing, there have been setbacks — among them, too many Afghan civilians being killed and still too much corruption in the Afghan security forces. But the most important factor is that there are too few troops on the ground to win and that "some of our NATO allies" — though specifically not Canada, it points out — "are leaving us in the lurch."
The all-party report follows on the heels of the British government's decision to significantly upgrade its diplomatic and aid presence in Afghanistan, along with its military one, and seems designed to send a clear message to its NATO partners, one that will surely be heard in Canada's Parliament: It is: We Brits are in this for the long haul. Who is with us?
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