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US/PAKISTAN: New Gov’t Needs Aid, Leeway to Address Terror Front

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Apr 24 2008 (IPS) - With the intelligence community and Congressional investigators warning that the greatest threat to the United States is developing in the tribal areas along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, appeals for the George W. Bush administration to reassess its “global war on terror” and Pakistan’s place in it are growing.

In particular, U.S. policymakers should place more confidence in plans by Pakistan’s newly elected, civilian-led government to deal with tribal leaders, including those associated with the Pakistani Taliban and other Islamist forces, in the country’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), according to critics.

In addition, Washington should be prepared to provide substantially more aid to Pakistan, particularly development assistance for FATA, which, these analysts argue, has not been given nearly the attention that it deserves.

“There is a very narrow window of opportunity here to make the strategic shift in American policy toward Pakistan that many of us have been arguing for since 2005,” said Brian Katulis, a South Asia specialist at the Centre for American Progress, a predominantly Democratic think tank, who just returned from Pakistan after extensive consultations with leaders in the new government, including regional authorities who have been negotiating with Taliban and tribal leaders in the frontier areas.

“We’ve diverted too many of our resources to Iraq and not paid enough attention to events in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” he said. “This is where the central front in the war on terror is; it isn’t in Iraq.”

That assessment was implicitly endorsed by none other than the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, earlier this month when, asked by Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chair Joseph Biden whether U.S. security interests were better served by going after al Qaeda along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border or al Qaeda in Iraq, he chose the former.

(His military counterpart in Baghdad, Gen. David Petraeus – who was nominated Wednesday to become head of the U.S. Central Command that includes Pakistan and Afghanistan, as well as Iraq – declined to give an opinion.)

Indeed, the appeal for a major policy change in Southwest Asia comes amid growing concern, especially in the intelligence community, that al Qaeda’s use of FATA as a safe haven during the past several years has enabled it to reconstitute much of its training and planning capabilities, including its capacity to mount a direct attack on the U.S. itself.

Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director Michael Hayden last month called al Qaeda safe havens a “clear and present danger to Afghanistan, to Pakistan and to the West in general, and to the United States in particular,” while the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Adm. Michael Mullen warned at the same time, “If I were going to pick the next attack to hit the United States, it would come out of the FATA.”

The assessment was in turn echoed in what the New York Times called a “searing” report released last week by the Government Accountability Office (GAO), Congress’ investigative arm, that accused the Bush administration with failing develop a comprehensive strategy to prevent – let alone decisively defeat – the al Qaeda leadership that fled to Pakistan after U.S.-led forces chased it out of Afghanistan more than six years ago.

The report, which was based on intelligence reports and interviews with U.S. diplomats and military and intelligence officers, found that Washington had relied too heavily on President Pervez Musharraf and the Pakistani army to deal with al Qaeda and that virtually all of the nearly six billion dollars in aid Washington had provided to help Pakistan fight al Qaeda and the Taliban in the tribal areas had gone to the military, while only a tiny fraction was earmarked for economic and other forms assistance for the largely Pashtun population there.

In fact, according to Stephen Cohen, a Pakistan specialist at the Brookings Institution, the Pakistani military “played a double game… Its intelligence services supported the Taliban, while only reluctantly going after the al Qaeda forces embedded (in the FATA).”

But it was a series of ceasefires negotiated between the military government under Musharraf and Taliban leaders since 2005 that enabled both al Qaeda to rebound and the indigenous armed Islamists to extend their operations beyond FATA into the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), and even as far as Islamabad itself. Those ceasefires broke down last year.

Despite February’s elections and the transition to civilian rule, the Bush administration has been reluctant to distance itself either from Musharraf, whose powers may be significantly reduced by the new parliament, or from its faith in predominantly military means to go after al Qaeda and its local allies in FATA.

Indeed, in the month that followed the elections, Washington sharply increased the number of pilotless Predator attacks it carried out in FATA against al Qaeda and other suspected terrorist targets. At the same time, U.S. military commanders reportedly urged more aggressive actions, including cross-border artillery strikes and raids by small groups of Special Forces, against selected targets.

But fears of a strong backlash by the new government, led by the heads of the two leading parties, the Pakistan People’s Party and the Pakistan Muslim League (N), Asif Ali Zardari and Nawaz Sharif, respectively, as well as Prime Minister Yousef Raza Gilani, have persuaded the administration to take a more cautious attitude for now.

The government, which also includes the Awami National Party (ANP), a secular Pashtun party that displaced military-backed Islamist parties in the February elections in NWFP, has made clear it believes negotiations, significantly increased development aid, and legislation designed to end FATA’s colonial status and eventually integrate it with the rest of Pakistan offer the most effective strategy for turning the population there against al Qaeda and indigenous extremists.

That strategy has already produced new ceasefire accords, the most recent announced Thursday with Baitullah Mehsud, the most notorious leader of the Pakistani Taliban, who reportedly concluded an agreement with the NWFP government.

While the precise terms of the accord were not released, White House spokesperson Dana Perino expressed scepticism. “We have been concerned about these types of approaches because we don’t think they work,” she said before the ceasefire announcement.

But Washington should be more supportive, according to Barnett Rubin, a Southwest Asia expert at New York University, who stressed that the new government’s negotiating efforts should not be compared with past ceasefire agreements negotiated by the military which, he said, “provided nothing for the people living in those areas.”

“The people who are engaging in these negotiations on the government side are people who have a long record of opposing the Taliban, much longer than the military,” said Rubin. “Their actual political goals are much closer to our interests than the military’s. We should show more confidence in them and support them.”

“(The government) wants a ceasefire to incorporate those areas into the mainstream of Pakistan,” he said. Combined with governmental reforms and a major increase in development aid targeted on the people rather than army, that strategy would give “local people… much more of an incentive to align with the government than (they had) under Musharraf,” he added.