Shooting Oneself in the Foot in Swat

How not to con­duct an effec­tive counter-insurgency (COIN) campaign:

ISLAM­ABAD — Thou­sands of pan­icked res­i­dents on foot and crammed in buses, vans and trucks fled Swat val­ley north of Pakistan’s cap­i­tal Tues­day fol­low­ing the break­down of a frag­ile truce between gov­ern­ment forces and the Taliban.

Author­i­ties lifted a cur­few for a few hours to allow res­i­dents to evac­u­ate as the mil­i­tants took con­trol of Min­gora, the main town of the val­ley, which lies about 100 miles from Islam­abad. Mian Iftikhar Hus­sain, the infor­ma­tion min­is­ter for North West Fron­tier Province, which includes Swat, said he expects as many as 500,000 to flee in the near future.

Khushal Khan, head of the local admin­is­tra­tion, urged res­i­dents to leave their homes before evening as fight­ing between the army and mil­i­tants broke out once again. Pakistan’s mil­i­tary has been fight­ing the Tal­iban in Swat after each side accused the other of fail­ing to honor the terms of a peace accord struck in Feb­ru­ary to end the con­flict in Swat in return for the impo­si­tion of Sharia law.

Look, I know things are tough in Swat, Buner and Dir. But this is just not the best way to go about calm­ing things down. Unfor­tu­nately, this seems to be the Pak­istani military’s M.O. for deal­ing with mil­i­tants (when it isn’t cut­ting “peace” deals with them, of course): Dis­place a pop­u­la­tion, go into the area with heavy weapons, artillery and air strikes and then let the pop­u­la­tion come back to ruined houses, destroyed mar­kets and dead inno­cents who didn’t have the means to flee. Need­less to say, after spend­ing a few weeks in a tent city and then return­ing to your town that’s been shelled into smithereens, the aver­age Pak­istani vil­lager will not be sym­pa­thetic to the government’s posi­tion. Putting up with the Tal­iban might seem a small price to pay if that’s the alternative.

Yes, the Tal­iban in Pak­istan have to be con­fronted and dealt with. And yes, any effec­tive COIN strat­egy will involve bul­lets fly­ing and men dying. But the fight­ing has to be accom­pa­nied by eco­nomic devel­op­ment and the build­ing of local government’s capac­ity. The Pak­ista­nis have done almost noth­ing in these are­nas. (In part because they’re prac­ti­cally broke and most of the $10 bil­lion in U.S. aid since 9/11 has gone to the Army.)

Every­one seems to pre­sume this offen­sive against mil­i­tants was because Adm. Mike Mullen, chair­man of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, dropped in at Rawalpindi and stiff­ened Pak­istan Army Chief Ash­faq Kayani’s spine. If this is true and this bull­dozer strat­egy is what has resulted, then the Amer­i­cans have learned noth­ing from Iraq. It was the door-kicking and mas­sive pushes into cities from 2003–2006 that fueled a lot of the Iraqi insurgency.

Watch Al Jazeera English’s report below:

Mean­while, a sui­cide bomber killed five troops near Peshawar by run­ning a car into the back of a jeep at a police checkpoint.