Holding Pakistan

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Snapshot

Lions and Jackals

Haider Ali Hussein Mullick

The Pakistani military's new counterinsurgency strategy is propelling it to victory against the Taliban. But to consolidate its gains, Pakistan will need international support.

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What to Read on Fighting Insurgencies

Eliot A. Cohen

An annotated Foreign Affairs syllabus on fighting insurgencies.

Snapshot

A Substitute for Victory

Bernard Finel

A new U.S. approach to counterinsurgency could bring stability, if not victory, in Afghanistan.

Last summer, Pakistan's military launched counterinsurgency campaigns against the Taliban throughout northern Pakistan, in Bajaur, the Swat Valley, and South Waziristan. As I wrote last July, the strategy succeeded because the military was able to minimize collateral damage, maximize precision, boost troop morale, and create better intelligence networks. As a result, the Pakistani Taliban are now weakened in the north and are moving south into Pakistan's central and southern provinces of Punjab, Sindh, and Balochistan. But the military should not rush to pursue them -- instead, it must hold the territory it has already captured and, in so doing, maintain stability in the rest of the country.

Over the summer, plans to hold embattled territories were already emerging, focusing on the temporary resettlement of refugees, the creation of reconstruction teams, and the reintegration of certain Taliban leaders and soldiers. The first initiative, resettlement, was a response to the waves of refugees who fled their homes as the army moved into densely populated areas in Bajaur and Swat. To be sure, the movement of civilians out of the conflict zone had some benefits: in early campaigns, only about 20 percent of the population remained behind, most of which turned out to be Taliban supporters. This gave the military an immediate advantage in clearing and policing cities. As one military officer explained, "We wanted to drain the swamp, sanitize it, bring back the people, and then hopefully turn it into a nice lake." Although some Taliban did escape as the swamp drained, upward of 7,000 were killed or captured.

But the cost to ordinary civilians was also high. The fighting in Bajaur alone displaced 300,000 people. In the Swat Valley, the military faced an urban population of four million people interspersed with around 10,000 Taliban fighters. About two million refugees fled their homes during the battles there, and yet the government had no relief plan. "The fate of the internally displaced was the Achilles' heel of our mission," said one senior military officer involved in relief efforts. "Without protecting them, we would have no local partners, good intelligence, or popular support to carry on."

To protect civilians, military planners decided on a program of population resettlement. Locals were encouraged to move out of the war zone to temporary camps or other cities with the promise that their homes and businesses would be intact should they return when the fighting ended. Resettlement has been used in counterinsurgency operations before -- for example, in the Philippines, South Africa, and Algeria -- but has a record of limited success. This time, Pakistani officers were determined that the program would avoid the major pitfalls of previous efforts, such as the use of foreign troops, forced population transfer, and the gross mismanagement of the camps.

Even in the most successful cases of resettlement, such as the 1899 American campaign in the Philippines and the British anti-guerrilla efforts in Malaya in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the presence of foreign troops undermined the legitimacy and success of the missions. Although the Pakistani army is technically not a foreign occupying force, many Pashtuns living in the northern areas consider it one since the officer corps is predominantly Punjabi. To remedy the situation, the military assigned Pashtun officers and the paramilitary force Frontier Corps, which is mostly Pashtun, to execute resettlement programs.

Successful resettlement must also be voluntary and temporary. In South Africa in the early 1900s, British resettlement programs failed when they attempted to forcefully move entire villages. The U.S. "strategic hamlets" program -- an effort to fortify and restore communities in Vietnam in the 1960s -- effectively turned resettlement into depopulation as unhappy villagers were forced from their homes into insecure hamlets that were then targeted by the insurgents. In contrast, Pakistan's military planners were careful to assure locals who moved that the transfer to camps was temporary and promised them better infrastructure, security, and jobs upon their return if they would cooperate. Security at the camps was also sufficient; not one refugee camp was attacked by an insurgent. All this made them more inclined to move.

Still, many Pashtuns were not keen on resettling back into their war-torn homes, and many Punjabis and Sindhis -- fearing ethnic discord and Taliban infiltration -- did not want them in their provinces. Instead of resettling refugees involuntarily in their own villages, or forcing other provinces to house them, the military sent most to interim camps in the north. Those that chose to move south to cities such as Karachi, in Sindh, were forced to register. The military was able to use this information later if any refugee was suspected of cooperating with the Taliban.