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Pakistan is facing a pre-automotive security situation. Armed militants clash with government security forces in several provinces. The Taliban and al-Qaeda are making a resurgence, stirring up turmoil in neighboring Afghanistan. The suicide car bombing that killed a U. S. diplomat and four others in Karachi on March 2 underscored considerations about domestic terrorist threats. President Bush’s stop in Islamabad will target the U. S. -Pakistan relationship, while highlighting the demanding security situations facing the government of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf.
Pretty serious, some experts say. ” The security situation in Pakistan has deteriorated especially in the last nine months to a year,” says Mahnaz Ispahani, deputy senior fellow for South and West Asia at the Council on Foreign Relations. It cites a number of considerations about the government of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, adding armed clashes between insurgents and the government in the Waziristan tribal area; tribal unrest and conflicts over power resources in Balochistan province; large anti-American and anti-Musharraf protests in the North-West Frontier Province; the resurgence of the Taliban; the violent demonstrations surrounding the controversy over European cartoons; and growing sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shiites. In addition, Pakistan maintains an ongoing rivalry with India and a complex relationship with the bordering country, Iran. “The Pakistani government is in a difficult situation,” says Stephen Cohen, a senior fellow and Southeast Asia expert at the Brookings Institution. “The country is more precarious than it has been for a long time. “
“The country’s more insecure than it’s been for a long time,” says Stephen Cohen.
Experts say Musharraf’s choice to join the U.S. war on terror has placed him in direct opposition to the tribal leaders who control the provinces mostly outside government control near the Afghan border. “Through millennia, there’s been a tradition of tribal leaders being fiercely averse to any kind of government control over their territory,” says Anupam Srivastava, director of the Asia program at the University of Georgia’s Center for International Trade and Security. The historical agreement in these areas was that if there was any kind of security problem, the Pakistani government would approach the tribal leaders and let them handle it. Now, however, Pakistani troops are stationed in the region searching for Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders pushed out of Afghanistan by U.S. troops. A recent U.S. air strike against a village suspected of harboring al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri further inflamed passions in the region and brought threats of retaliation by tribal leaders. Tensions—and fears—are high across the country. “There is an insurgency building across Pakistan in isolated parts,” Srivastava says, and Pakistanis are increasingly saying the situation is unwinnable. “Either Musharraf antagonizes the jihadis, or he’s seen as a stooge of the United States,” he says.
Bin Laden and other senior al Qaeda leaders are widely believed to be hiding on the Pakistani side of the border with Afghanistan. Experts say U. S. officials are incredibly frustrated that bin Laden, after four years of persecution abroad and with a $27 million U. S. reward, “recent missile strikes across the United States do not demonstrate much confidence in the Pakistani military’s ability to do its job. ” Isfahani said.
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Many U.S. officials also suspect that catching bin Laden is not a priority for the Pakistani security services, many members of whom—especially in the border provinces—may be sympathetic to the al-Qaeda leader. “Osama is very popular in those regions, where [the security services] have had very little success in the last three years,” Ispahani says. While Pakistani security forces have helped arrest half a dozen key al-Qaeda operatives, “the continuing presence of its leaders in Pakistan indicates that al-Qaeda has a congenial place to relocate itself, close to its former bases in Afghanistan,” terrorism expert Peter Bergen wrote in the Washington Post.
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Cohen says the effectiveness of Musharraf’s forces in the northwest is limited. “Huge sections of the region are not under the control of the Pakistani government and never have been,” Cohen says. William Milam, a senior policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a former U.S. ambassador to Pakistan, agrees. “They’re trying to control an area that’s almost uncontrollable,” he says. “People just don’t understand how difficult it is,” pointing out that Pakistan has lost significant numbers of troops in fighting in the region.
Experts say Pakistan is challenging foreign fighters, but much less so when the militants are Pakistanis. “I think the Pakistanis are attacking foreign activists as much as they can: Moroccans, Egyptians and Arabs. But they don’t need to attack the locals wholeheartedly. “The Taliban, that is, the Pakistani Pashtuns,” Isfahani says. Cohen argues that the Pakistani government’s radical policy of supporting extremist teams makes it difficult to suppress them today.
Indian officials have long accused Pakistan of seeking to destabilize India by supporting armed militants launching attacks on the country. For example, the December 13, 2001 attack on the Indian Parliament, which claimed the lives of twelve people, provoked a series of vivid accusations from India, accusing Pakistan of being responsible. Ispahani says militant teams are using Pakistan as a base to attack India, and that while Musharraf’s government “doesn’t inspire it, it doesn’t mitigate it either. “Milam says it’s conceivable that “ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence, an intelligence branch of the Pakistani military] has interfered in India, but I don’t think there’s a coordinated plan to destabilize India. “Cohen, however, says Pakistan still feels vulnerable militarily vis-à-vis India and will urge the United States to press New Delhi to respond to one of its many proposals for negotiations over the disputed province. of Kashmir, claimed through both countries.
Milam says it’s conceivable that “the ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence, an intelligence branch of the Pakistani military] has interfered in India, but I don’t think there’s a coordinated plan to destabilize India. “
Pakistan has long supported Islamic militants who oppose the Indian presence in the disputed territory of Kashmir. India remains concerned about this support, which experts say has lessened—but not stopped—in recent years. The militant camps are still in the province, Cohen says. “That’s a force [Pakistanis] can turn on [against India] whenever they want to,” he says. Milam describes the Kashmiri jihadis as “creatures of the ISI,” which supplied them with weapons and looked the other way as they crossed the Line of Control to launch attacks on Indian-controlled Kashmir. And, Ispahani says, after the devastating earthquake in Kashmir last fall, Musharraf inadvertently helped increase the militants’ status by appealing to them to help with relief efforts. “The [militant groups] became a very big player in post-earthquake reconstruction,” Ispahani says.
Experts say Pakistan’s leaders have deemed it vital to worry about Afghanistan. This policy of “strategic depth” led them to inspire – or at least not suppress – teams of Pashtuns from Pakistan who had close ties to their fellow Pashtuns in Afghanistan. There are millions of Pashtuns in Pakistan’s “Pashtun belt,” which stretches across a wide swath of territory stretching from China to Iran. The not unusual Pashtun sentiment in this sparsely populated region has made it a haven for resurgent Taliban, Cohen says. . However, the resurgence of the Taliban may also be the result of politics; After 9/11, despite his cooperation with the United States, Musharraf “wanted to keep the Taliban as a strategic option in case Afghanistan descended back into civil war and chaos,” Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid wrote in the Washington Post.
Recently, U.S. and Afghan officials have become increasingly vocal in their criticism of Pakistan for a wave of suicide attacks that has hit Afghan provinces bordering Pakistan in recent months. More than thirty attacks have killed some 100 people—including U.S. soldiers, a Canadian diplomat, and NATO peacekeepers—as well as dozens of Afghan civilians. Members of the resurgent Taliban in Pakistan are blamed for the attacks. Experts say the Taliban has developed, quite openly, an infrastructure in Pakistan that includes recruiters, trainers, safe houses, and people who arm suicide bombers. “The suicide bombers are being recruited in [the city of] Karachi, not just the rural areas,” Ispahani says. They are then trained in safe houses in Quetta and Chaman in Balochistan, Rashid writes. During a state visit to Pakistan in February, Afghan President Hamid Karzai gave Musharraf detailed dossiers on suicide bombers and trainers and asked for help in stopping the attacks against Afghanistan.
Some experts say the relationship has frayed recently. After the unprecedented closeness of the post-9/11 alliance, a series of events have lessened confidence on both sides. These include the failure to catch bin Laden, the continuing attacks on Afghanistan, and the revelations in early 2004 of A.Q. Khan’s illicit nuclear network. Khan, Pakistan’s most prominent nuclear scientist, operated a secret a nuclear network that sold sensitive nuclear expertise and technology around the world. The revelations rocked the international community and raised serious questions about the Pakistani government’s role in the network. Pakistani officials placed Khan under house arrest but have denied the United States access to him—a continuing source of frustration to U.S. intelligence officials.
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