Pakistani Taliban on the Move
The BBC reports that the peace deal between the Pakistan government and the Pakistan Taliban forces in the Swat valley isn’t stopping the Taliban from advancing:
Dozens of militants have been streaming into bordering Buner to take over mosques and government offices. Buner is part of the Malakand region, which has just seen the implementation of Sharia law under the peace deal. But the Taleban have mainly operated in Swat, where they fought the army from August 2007 until this year’s deal.
Under the deal the Taleban were expected to disarm.
I think it’s increasingly becoming clear that the “Pak” side of the “Af-Pak” equation is a more objectively troubling situation. Pakistan has nuclear weapons and even besides the nukes is a fairly large and important country. Rather than a situation in which Pakistan matters because events there impinge on events in Afghanistan, I think it’s the case that Afghanistan primarily matters at this point because of its impact on Pakistan.
21 Responses to “Pakistani Taliban on the Move”
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April 22nd, 2009 at 9:41 am
American Taliban (i.e. Dick Cheney, John Yoo) on the move as well.
April 22nd, 2009 at 10:07 am
Israel makes Pakistan a lot more difficult to manage. The difference between Tamil terrorism, which we don’t care about and Al-Qaeda terrorism which is a US obsession is that the Tamils don’t target the US. Al-Qaeda targets the US for reasons that all resolve to actions the US has to take to maintain a small-population majority Jewish state in opposition to the mainstream sensibilities of its region.
So the US interest in Pakistan isn’t just to keep it stable, which is relatively easy.
The US interest in Pakistan is to keep it stable while simultaneously fighting to suppress Al-Qaeda and groups that are ideologically similar. But these groups that are ideologically similar to Al-Qaeda have a real base of support.
The US forcing or bribing Pakistan to fight groups that have substantial popularity hopefully won’t but looks like it may result in the collapse of Pakistan as a state.
We have to add this to the cost of US support for the maintenance of a Jewish majority state in Pakistan. Switch to advocacy of a South Africa style soft landing away from Zionism and the US disputes with Al-Qaeda and the Muslim world would resolve. Then the US could stop these processes that are leading to Pakistan’s breakup today.
April 22nd, 2009 at 10:18 am
typo: Jewish majority state in Palestine
April 22nd, 2009 at 10:28 am
We have to add this to the cost of US support for the maintenance of a Jewish majority state in Pakistan.
It may be noted that such a state is unlikely to be established in the near future.
April 22nd, 2009 at 10:28 am
Never mind, he caught it.
April 22nd, 2009 at 11:07 am
The strategic problem is multifold. It can be understood that the border badlands are never going to be under the kind of control that would make everyone comfortable. The question becomes whether the more important border — the one that separates Badland Af-Pak from Pakistan & Afghanistan — can be maintained. Let’s call it a rigidly defined area of doubt and uncertainty when it comes to the projection of state power. (The Pakistani army really doesn’t want to fight it out there. Too much at stake, and still nursing its wounds from the last mess in Waziristan.)
And of course, there’s always the issue of how it might affect India, whether through Kashmir or brazen ‘mainland’ attacks like the one in Mumbai.
April 22nd, 2009 at 11:28 am
Based on this trend on how they are moving into Pakistan… next summer is going to get from bad to worse over there…. it’s scary.. they will be very close to Islamabad and much closer to India
April 22nd, 2009 at 12:21 pm
[...] light of this, Matt Yglesias argues that “it’s increasingly becoming clear that the ‘Pak’ side of the [...]
April 22nd, 2009 at 12:40 pm
all i know is that the taliban is just An Hour Away from the capitol of Pakastan, and Obama need to step his game up
http://rawdawgb.blogspot.com/2009/04/hour-away.html
April 22nd, 2009 at 1:17 pm
I love how the BBC is so surprised that the Taliban isn’t disarming. You can’t disarm the Taliban. That would mean disarming the Pushtun.
How do you tell an entire ethnic group whose identity in large part rests on its abilities as a fighting force that they can’t have their rifles and their other Soviet toys?
Are we planning on banning cricket in the subcontinent next?
April 22nd, 2009 at 1:29 pm
If we are concerned about the nuclear weapons, I doubt the Punjabi-dominated military is going to let them fall into Taliban (Pashtun-dominated) hands. Yes, there are Pashtuns in the ranks of the Pakistani Army, which is one of the reasons the Army has been so reticent of taking their own people on. But the upper echelons of the Army are mostly Punjabi. If the Army believed it had no choice, I could see it opening a drive similar to what Sri Lanka is now doing to the Tamil Tigers. Of course, the civilian casualties would be enormous in such an endeavor by the Pakistani Army, as is proving to be the case in Sri Lanka.
April 22nd, 2009 at 2:00 pm
[...] that Pakistan is the more important half of the Af-Pak clusterfuck, and today he comes out and says it. I’ve been beating around that bush for a while now too. Recently, however, I’ve been [...]
April 22nd, 2009 at 3:22 pm
Blaming Israel for Al Qaeda is a complete canard and fabrication. Al Qaeda has its goals and Israel is just one of many means to an end. If Israel ceased to exist today, Al Qaeda would still have plenty of excuses to attack the western world and its leading member. For them, all of the Arab world must be subjugated under Sharia in a Sunni salafist dominion, as a beginning. Then, the rest of the world. Please stop trying to pretend that these guys aren’t serious about their goals, even if they aren’t as much of a threat as GWB liked to make them.
Now, that doesn’t excuse Israel’s actions regarding the Palestinians in any way. It is just weak to conflate the two and blame every problem in the Arab world on that situation. It is a great excuse by the people making the argument, but it has little to do with the core reasons. Saudi Arabia doesn’t abuse women because Israel exists. The Taliban didn’t ban music because Israel exists.
April 22nd, 2009 at 3:41 pm
Greg, it’s true the Pushtun have always been armed in some way. I used to regret not having made it to the arms bazaar in Dera back before the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
But, they didn’t always have RPGs, mortars, and large caliber weapons. My gut feel is that most clans would agree that these are beyond what’s needed to handle their vendettas.
But, you’re probably right in that the Taliban consider their arms essential for devouring Pakistan one region at a time. Without getting too much into who’s to blame for this mess, I foresee a day when the boys in the ISS come to regret the day they organized the Talibs into a movement… just before they’re beheaded.
April 22nd, 2009 at 5:54 pm
The odds of the Taliban or Al Qaeda taking over Pakistan are pretty damn small. Like Matt says, it’s a big country with nuclear weapons and a real military.
While the population may support SOME form of Sharia law, that does NOT mean they support the Taliban or Al Qaeda, even though they view those groups more highly than they did George Bush.
What is more likely to happen is that some version of the Pakistani government may end up having to take on some of the radical Islamist parties into the government while marginalizing the armed groups. Eventually there might even be a civil war of some sort.
But it’s unlikely to end up with Pakistan being fully militant Islamist with nukes. Not any time soon anyway and long before then the US would take out their nukes.
April 22nd, 2009 at 6:28 pm
If you put the pieces of the puzzle together, what you find is that the concept of the nation state is under increasing challenge. If the nation state happens to be an Afghanistan, Pakistan or Somalia, internal forces of disruption hasten it toward a failed state. If the nation state is relatively small but aspiring to prosper, such as Iceland or Ireland, fast acting financial contagions rock its economy. And even for the mighty US, oceans do not guarantee the insularity that they once did. It’s time for a new world order.
April 22nd, 2009 at 8:03 pm
Keep in mind that a lot (if not most) of Pakistan’s shit is
A. Self-created, and
B. Problematic for us to deal with.
For example, the Taliban aren’t a result of American support for Israel – they’re a result of the ISI in the late 1980s and early 1990s training a bunch of war orphans and radical religious students in border-area madrassahs, then unleashing them on Afghanistan in order to bring Afghanistan into Pakistan’s orbit as “strategic depth”. They focused on the most radical and Islamist of groups, because ISI took in a ton of low-level fanatics back in the 1980s in order to get an anti-Soviet organization going, whereupon those guys rose up in the organization.
Couple that with the training of border radicals for the Kashmir fight, and the longstanding pro-Islamist bent in the officer corps training process in Pakistan, plus a conservative rural population (don’t confuse that with the Taliban and Waziristani radicals, though, since they are different in customs and things like respect for women’s education).
April 22nd, 2009 at 8:04 pm
To add-
There’s not a lot we can do on the “Pak” side of the “Af-Pak” situation, aside from the border attacks and money support.
April 22nd, 2009 at 11:21 pm
Re: But it’s unlikely to end up with Pakistan being fully militant Islamist with nukes. Not any time soon anyway and long before then the US would take out their nukes.
That’s what they said about Cambodia and Germany as well. Never underestimate the power of a small band of man who knows how to appeal to the latent evil within mankind.
And by the way, Hack, if Israel goes out of business then where do you propose the Jews move to? And don’t say “America”- the Jews of Israel, rightly enough, will not stoop to share a country with the likes of bank-robbing smack addicts like you.
April 23rd, 2009 at 12:11 am
I see this claim that Al-Qaeda aims to put the Muslim world under a Sunni caliphate a lot. That strikes me as a fabrication. I’ve never heard that goal expressed in any Al-Qaeda communication.
9/11 didn’t aim to put the world under a Sunni caliphate after converting the Muslim world. 9/11 aimed at retaliating against the US for 1) Supporting Israel against the Palestinians 2) Bribing Egypt’s government into unpopularly abandoning the struggle against Israel, which led directly to the personal torture of Al-Qaeda’s number two member. 3) Israel’s and then the US’ attacks on Lebanon 4) The crippling of Iraq, including massive deaths caused to civilians by war and sanctions, seen, at least arguably correctly, as motivated by Israeli strategic concerns 5) Stationing troops in Saudi Arabia, which is made far worse by the fact that these troops represent Zionism’s greatest patron.
I’m not even sure how there can be an argument about this. Most people in the Muslim world oppose Zionism, the US is the most important defender of Zionism, and Zionism’s defense imposes huge costs on Muslims. That causes a major increase in the amount of hostility between the Muslim world and the US.
The idea that US relations with the Muslim world would be the same if not for this major disagreement is delusional. You can say relations would not be perfect even if there was no Israel, but you have to concede, unless you are crazy, that relations would be substantially better.
I say better enough that 9/11 wouldn’t have happened. Which means better enough that the US now would not be undertaking policies in Pakistan that may cause that country to fail.
Other than Zionism, there is no dispute between the US and the Muslim world that generates a militant response.
April 23rd, 2009 at 12:12 am
Hector:
If the United States gets a black president, or becomes majority Hispanic, where do you think white Americans should move?