Author: Jonathan S. Landay
Publication: McClatchy Newspapers
Date: April 17, 2009
URL: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/v-print/story/66368.html
A growing number of U.S. intelligence, defense
and diplomatic officials have concluded that there's little hope of preventing
nuclear-armed Pakistan from disintegrating into fiefdoms controlled by Islamist
warlords and terrorists, posing a greater threat to the U.S. than Afghanistan's
terrorist haven did before 9/11.
"It's a disaster in the making on the
scale of the Iranian revolution," said a U.S. intelligence official with
long experience in Pakistan who requested anonymity because he wasn't authorized
to speak publicly.
Pakistan's fragmentation into warlord-run
fiefdoms that host al Qaida and other terrorist groups would have grave implications
for the security of its nuclear arsenal; for the U.S.-led effort to pacify
Afghanistan; and for the security of India, the nearby oil-rich Persian Gulf
and Central Asia, the U.S. and its allies.
"Pakistan has 173 million people and
100 nuclear weapons, an army which is bigger than the American army, and the
headquarters of al Qaida sitting in two-thirds of the country which the government
does not control," said David Kilcullen, a retired Australian army officer,
a former State Department adviser and a counterinsurgency consultant to the
Obama administration.
"Pakistan isn't Afghanistan, a backward,
isolated, landlocked place that outsiders get interested in about once a century,"
agreed the U.S. intelligence official. "It's a developed state . . .
(with) a major Indian Ocean port and ties to the outside world, especially
the (Persian) Gulf, that Afghanistan and the Taliban never had."
"The implications of this are disastrous
for the U.S.," he added. "The supply lines (from Karachi to U.S.
bases) in Kandahar and Kabul from the south and east will be cut, or at least
they'll be less secure, and probably sooner rather than later, and that will
jeopardize the mission in Afghanistan, especially now that it's getting bigger."
The experts McClatchy interviewed said their
views aren't a worst case scenario but a realistic expectation based on the
militants' gains and the failure of Pakistan's civilian and military leadership
to respond.
"The place is beyond redemption,"
said a Pentagon adviser who asked not to be further identified so he could
speak freely. "I don't see any plausible scenario under which the present
government or its most likely successor will mobilize the economic, political
and security resources to push back this rising tide of violence.
"I think Pakistan is moving toward a
situation where the extremists control virtually all of the countryside and
the government controls only the urban centers," he continued. "If
you look out 10 years, I think the government will be overrun by Islamic militants."
That pessimistic view of Pakistan's future
has been bolstered by Islamabad's surrender this week for the first time of
areas outside the frontier tribal region to Pakistan's Taliban movement and
by a growing militant infiltration of Karachi, the nation's financial center,
and the industrial and political heartland province of Punjab, in part to
evade U.S. drone strikes in the tribal belt.
Civilian deaths in the drone attacks, the
eight-year-old U.S. intervention in Afghanistan and U.S. support for Pakistan's
former military dictatorship also have sown widespread ambivalence about the
threat the insurgency poses and revulsion at fighting fellow Muslims.
"The government has to ratchet up the
urgency and ratchet up the commitment of resources. This is a serious moment
for Pakistan," said Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., the Senate Foreign Relations
Committee Chairman, on April 14 in Islamabad. "The federal government
has got to . . . define this problem as Pakistan's."
Many Pakistanis, however, dismiss such warnings
as inflated. They think that the militants are open to dialogue and political
accommodation to end the unrest, which many trace to the former military regime's
cooperation with the U.S. after 9/11.
Ahsan Iqbal, a top aide to opposition leader
and former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, said the insurgency can be quelled
if the government rebuilds the judicial system, improves law enforcement,
compensates guerrillas driven to fight by relatives' deaths in security force
operations and implements democratic reforms.
"It will require time," Iqbal told
McClatchy reporters and editors this week. "We need a very strong resolve
and internal unity."
Many U.S. officials, though, regard the civilian
government of Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari as unpopular, dysfunctional
and mired in infighting. It's been unable to agree on an effective counterinsurgency
strategy or to address the ills that are feeding the unrest. These include
ethnic and sectarian hatreds, ineffective police, broken courts, widespread
corruption, endemic poverty and a deepening financial crisis, they said.
Pakistan's army, meanwhile, is hobbled by
a lack of direction from the country's civilian leaders, disparaged for its
repeated coups and shaken by repeated defeats by the militants. It remains
fixated on India to ensure high budgets and cohesion among troops of divergent
ethnic and sectarian allegiances, U.S. officials and experts said.
Many officers and politicians also oppose
fighting the Islamist groups that Pakistan nurtured to fight proxy wars in
Afghanistan and Kashmir, and because they think the U.S. is secretly conspiring
with India to destabilize their country.
Alarm rose in Washington this week after the
parliament and Zardari agreed to impose Islamic law in the Swat district,
where extremists have repelled several army offensives; closed girls' schools;
and beheaded, hanged and lashed opponents and alleged criminals.
The government's capitulation handed the militants
their first refuge outside the remote tribal area bordering Afghanistan, and
less than 100 miles north of Islamabad. Taliban fighters also advanced virtually
unopposed from Swat into the Buner district, 60 miles north of Islamabad.
Buner is close to a key hydroelectric dam
and to the highways that link Pakistan to China, and Islamabad to Peshawar,
the capital of the North West Frontier Province, much of which is already
under Taliban sway.
Many U.S. officials and other experts expect
the militants to continue advancing.
The Taliban "have now become a self-sustaining
force," author Ahmed Rashid, an expert on the insurgency, told a conference
in Washington on Wednesday. "They have an agenda for Pakistan, and that
agenda is no less than to topple the government of Pakistan and 'Talibanizing'
the entire country."
Iqbal, the adviser to Sharif, disagreed. While
militants will overrun small pockets, most Pakistanis embrace democracy and
will resist living under the Taliban's harsh interpretation of Islam, he said.
"The psychology, the temperament, the
mood of the Pakistani nation does not subscribe to these extremist views,"
Iqbal said.
The U.S. intelligence official, however, said
that Pakistan's elite, dominated since the country's independence in 1947
by politicians, bureaucrats and military officers from Punjab, have failed
to recognize the seriousness of the situation.
"The Punjabi elite has already lost control
of Pakistan, but neither they nor the Obama administration realize that,"
the official said. "Pakistan will be an Islamist state - or maybe a collection
of four Islamic states, probably within a few years. There's no civilian leadership
in Islamabad that can stop this, and so far, there hasn't been any that's
been willing to try."
Several U.S. officials said that the Afghanistan-Pakistan
strategy that President Barack Obama unveiled last month is being called into
question by the accelerating rate at which the insurgency in Pakistan is expanding.
The plan hinges on the Pakistani army's willingness
to put aside its obsession with Hindu-dominated India and focus on fighting
the Islamist insurgency. It also presupposes, despite doubts held by some
U.S. officials, that sympathetic Pakistani military and intelligence officers
will sever their links with militant groups.
