Blowback in Pakistan

The New York Times’ Eric Schmitt and Jane Per­lez, who con­tinue to do some great report­ing out of Pak­istan, write on the unin­tended con­se­quences of the numer­ous air strikes the United States con­tin­ues to rain down on Pak­istan and Afghanistan.

What’s hap­pen­ing? While the drone strikes and raids by the Pak­istani army are effec­tive at reduc­ing al Qaeda’s global reach, the cells are dis­pers­ing into the coun­try­side where they threaten Pakistan’s sta­bil­ity. Pak­istan is com­plain­ing that these attacks may make Wash­ing­ton safer, but Islam­abad is in dan­ger. And if Pak­istan were to fall to al Qaeda backed Islamists, that’s obvi­ously a bad, bad thing.

Now, some of this com­ing from the Pak­istani side is a reflec­tion of their domes­tic polit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion. The drone attacks are deeply unpop­u­lar because they kill civil­ians, which makes sense enough. But, “the jihadist Franken­stein mon­ster that was cre­ated by the Pak­istani Army and the Pak­istani intel­li­gence ser­vice is now increas­ingly turn­ing on its cre­ators,” said Bruce O. Riedel, a for­mer CIA analyst.

Al Qaeda and other mil­i­tant jihadis are adapt­ing to the chang­ing envi­ron­ment. They’ve given up train­ing camps, for exam­ple, and started using mobile train­ing teams. And al Qaeda is still using Web sites and chat rooms to recruit young men from the Mid­dle East, North Africa and Cen­tral Asia to come to the region. Their ener­gies are increas­ingly aimed at desta­bi­liz­ing Pak­istan, renew­ing the strat­egy of Sayyid Qutb, who called on jihad against the “near enemy” (in his case, the Egypt­ian gov­ern­ment) before attack­ing the “far enemy” (Israel and the United States.) It was Aya­man al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden and Abdul­lah Azzam who turned the idea on its head and decided to go after the “far enemy.”

The lat­est evi­dence of this is in the Swat Val­ley, one of Pakistan’s most beau­ti­ful spots, which has been ceded to the Pak­istan Tal­iban after the Army agreed to a truce. It is now a sanc­tu­ary for the groups, indi­cat­ing that Pak­istan has lost the will to fight these guys.