Searching for a strategy to combat the Taliban
Jets and helicopters are bombing Taliban forces in Pakistan’s Swat valley and the timing can hardly be coincidental.
Thousands – possibly hundreds of thousands – of Pakistanis could be fleeing their homes this week onwards, as their President, Asif Ali Zardari, is in Washington trying to convince lawmakers he is serious about taking on Taliban militants.
Significantly, the eldest son of Maulana Sufi Muhammad – the cleric who brokered a peace deal in Swat in February – has been killed by artillery shelling.
But though that peace deal is now well and truly off the table, we just don’t know how long the army will carry on fighting its own Pashtun people, or whether this is merely tokenism, a ruse to squeeze $7.5bn out of the US Congress while Mr Zardari is in Washington.
Today’s New York Times is reporting that American officials want the Pakistanis to end their obsession with fighting a conventional land war along the Indian border, and move troops from Lahore and the east towards the Taliban heartlands.
Though even if the Pakistanis do this, any collateral damage inflicted by an army ill-suited to counterinsurgency could earn them more enemies than friends.
“The Pakistani army could make the situation worse if they just go and bomb villages” a senior British official told me this week. “But they know that.”
It is also something of a mystery whether Mr Zardari actually controls Pakistan’s army, given that General Musharraf’s military dictatorship kept Zardari in prison on corruption charges, which he has always denied, for years.
The army has little respect for the man who used to be nicknamed “Mr Ten Percent” because of the commission he allegedly took on government contracts when his late wife, Benazir Bhutto, was Prime Minister.
Though the army chief, General Kayani, has made it very clear to American and British officials that he doesn’t want to mount a coup against Zardari, and I’m told by western diplomats that the army-civilian government relationship is improving.
Still, the diplomats are hedging their bets on Zardari. I’m told the brother of opposition leader Nawaz Sharif was being courted in London last week.
Sharif has been Prime Minister before and is far closer to Saudi Arabia – which gave him exile – than Washington or London. What the dips are trying to do is groom a future leader without undercutting Zardari’s legitimacy.
“Our goal must be unambiguously to support and help stabilise a democratic Pakistan, headed by its elected President, Asif Ali Zardari” US “Afpak” representative Richard Holbrooke pointedly told Congress on Tuesday.
“I read in the newspapers that the administration is distancing itself from President Zardari in favour of his leading political opponent, Nawaz Sharif. That’s simply not true.”
I once shared a journey in a bullet proof car with Mr Sharif to one of his political rallies. We left his home outside Lahore, where his vast drawing room is guarded by two almost life-size statues of lions, while peacocks strutted across his lawn. He’s desperate to run the country again and probably will one day.
But for now, Pakistan’s army and its friends in the west are respecting the right of Zardari and his democratically elected Pakistan’s People Party to make a stab of running the place.
And because Pakistani politics is a dynastic business, Hillary Clinton made time yesterday to meet Zardari’s son, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari
– even though he’s still a student at Oxford University and just 20 years old.