Pakistani COIN has a definite rhythm to it: increase military pressure in an area then, when things are near a breaking point, sign a peace agreement with insurgent leaders (or their proxies), according to which the insurgents promise to stop attacking Paksitan military and government forces/facilities, stop cross border operations into Afghanistan, stop creating parallel governmental administrations, and to stop harboring foreign fighters. In return, Pakistan promises to send its regular troops back to the barracks and demilitarize the area (this is an average account – each is a bit different).
As Bill Roggio reported in The Long War Journal, the latest in this series of peace accords was signed recently in the Orakzai tribal agency. In the future, I hope to write a comparative analysis of these peace negotiations and their effectiveness (to include the one signed in Afghanistan with the insurgents in Musa Qala). The conventional wisdom (at least outside of Pakistan) is that these negotiations are a bad idea: they legitimize the enemy and give them freedom of movement, basically ceding territory to the enemy. This wisdom is supported by both the vehemence and hyperbole with which it is stated and the cold hard fact that cross-border attacks surge after agreements are penned. But is this wisdom justified? In order to approach the question more objectively you need to consider the counter-factual; “what would have happened had the agreements not been penned?”
In the recent case of Orakzai, things had gotten pretty bad. The Pakistani Taliban (the local head of the violent Islamist hydra) had created a parallel administration that provided security, justice (to include the trial and public execution of six locals found guilty of “anti-social” activities on June 24th) and policy formation and implementation (as when it banned NGO’s and girl’s schools, then enforced the ban by burning the houses of locals who collaborate with NGO’s or support girl’s education). Proponents of the conventional wisdom seem to suggest that the alternative to peace deals is aggressive military action. But aggressive military action alone won’t solve the situation in Pakistan any more than it has for us in Afghanistan (and as I wrote yesterday, the situation in Pakistan is probably worse than that it is in Afghanistan). I doubt that aggressive action in Orakzai would have done much more than force the Taliban to go elsewhere and further distress the population. I know every single peace deal has been flawed, but I remain ambivalent about its place in the tool-kit. We are too quick to assume that whenever something goes badly that someone is to blame (either through intent and/or incompetence). This is what I meant a couple of days ago about our psychological bias towards conspiracy. While these is more than enough incompetence (my hypothesis of choice) and malintent to go around in Pakistan, it is also true that they are shambling in the right general direction [and to go back to yesterday’s discussion, ceteris paribus our military would do a better job, this would not offset the disastrous effects of our overt presence on Pakistani soil].
Pakistan pursues peace deals in part due to weakness of power (it lacks the forces to sustain military pressure across the entire FATA); in part due to weakness of will (it does not want to risk civil war); in part because it hopes to use Afghanistan as a release valve for its most radical and violent malcontents; and in part because it knows that COIN requires the full engagement of all its diplomatic resources. Over the years the military portion of PK COIN capability and strategy has improved (thanks to experience and a lot of help from us), let us hope that the new administrations in the NWFP and Islamabad improve the diplomatic (and economic & informational) portion as well.
