Why Pakistan's Delaying its Waziristan Push

Well, not to say I told you so, but …

Pak­istan will need months to pre­pare for a ground offen­sive against the Tal­iban in their South Waziris­tan strong­hold on the Afghan bor­der, a senior army com­man­der said on Tues­day, cit­ing equip­ment shortages.

…

“It’s going to take months,” and pos­si­bly beyond the com­ing win­ter, [Lt. Gen. Nadeem] Ahmed said, when asked how long it would take for those con­di­tions to be met and for the army to move in on the ground. He said mil­i­tary lead­ers would decide on the timing.

Some U.S. offi­cials have expressed con­cern that Pak­istan will lose momen­tum if it puts off the offen­sive for too long.

Uh, huh. I see.

If you’ll recall, I flicked at this pos­si­bil­ity when I wrote my ini­tial post­ing on Baitullah’s death (and he is almost assuredly d-e-a-d after more than a week of radio silence). I said at the time, “I sup­pose the hope is that with Mehsud dead, the Pak­ista­nis could say progress has been made and the pres­sure from the Amer­i­cans could be deflected.” And that’s exactly what seems to be hap­pen­ing. Now that the “bad” Tal­iban leader has been smoked, Pak­istan is claim­ing it’s too much to go into Waziris­tan now. (Despite the fact that they’ve had about 10 weeks of air strikes — pin­pricks, really — already.) The “good” Tal­iban lead­ers, Mul­lah Nazeer and Hafiz Gul Bahadur, despite hav­ing an uneasy alliance with Mehsud, were never tar­geted by the Pak­istani Army. And it looks like they’re not going to be now.

And why should they be? They’ve never signed on to Mehsud’s pro­gram of attacks inside Pak­istan, pre­fer­ring to sup­port each other, al Qaeda and go after NATO and allied troops in Afghanistan. With Mehsud gone, a potent rival is elim­i­nated, they know to keep their attacks lim­ited to the Afghan side of the bor­der and Pak­istan can get back to the usual busi­ness of cut­ting deals with the mil­i­tants and build­ing up its “strate­gic depth” in its strug­gle with India. Nazeer and Bahadur are assets. Mehsud was off the reservation.

There are other fac­tors, how­ever. Never one to let an oppor­tu­nity to grab for gear go to waste, the Pak­istani Army is claim­ing the delay is because it’s lack­ing the right kind of equip­ment — par­tic­u­larly Cobra attack heli­copters. Ahmed report­edly “urged Hol­brooke to help Pak­istan obtain Cobra attack helicopters.”

“In addi­tion to Cobras, Ahmed cited ‘short­falls’ of pro­tec­tive gear, intelligence-gathering and night-vision equip­ment, and pre­ci­sion weapons.” These are all weapons that could go a long way toward mod­ern­iz­ing Pakistan’s capa­bil­ity against, oh, say, India, as well. The U.S. isn’t so keen on that, as Wash­ing­ton has tried to get Pak­istan to stop obsess­ing over India for years now and focus on the mul­lahs with guns in their backyard.

Also, there’s also the pos­si­bil­ity the mil­i­tary is push­ing back against the civil­ian government. Back in mid-June, Owais Ghani, the gov­er­nor of the North­west Fron­tier Province and in charge of the tribal areas, sur­prised the mil­i­tary by announc­ing the push against Mehsud and Waziris­tan. I’ve heard Army Chief Gen. Ash­faq Parvez Kayani was furi­ous with the civil­ian gov­ern­ment for get­ting so far out front, but said noth­ing at the time. Now, Ahmed is likely empha­siz­ing that the mil­i­tary will make its own deci­sions on who and when to fight, not some elected official.

That said, I have also opined that going into Waziris­tan so soon after Swat would be a mis­take:

That’s not to say the mil­i­tary should never go into Waziris­tan; it’s just that going into it too soon before the gains of Swat have been con­sol­i­dated would risk the progress there, as [Nicholas] Schmi­dle explains. “In some ways,” he writes, “Swat and South Waziris­tan today are like Afghanistan and Iraq in 2003: Rush­ing into the lat­ter would almost cer­tainly jeop­ar­dize suc­cess in the former.”

So there you go. The Pak­istani mil­i­tary is drag­ging its boots, just as I thought it would. It’s using its usual request/demands for mil­i­tary aid as a rea­son for the delay, with the unspo­ken corol­lary that if the aid doesn’t come, nei­ther will the offen­sive and — oh, no! — Pakistan’s nukes might fall into the hands of al Qaeda. (Pak­istan long ago mas­tered the art of nego­ti­at­ing by point­ing a gun to its own head.) And it’s using the whole sit­u­a­tion as an oppor­tu­nity to push back against the politicians.

Man, you gotta admire the gen­er­als’ abil­ity to make use of a situation.