COAS General Raheel Sharif says that the military operation in FATA is concluding successfully. He explained that troops in the Shawal valley near the Afghan border, where many Afghan and Pakistani Taliban are holed out, are in the last stages of consolidating their control.
This is good news. Zarb-e-Azb began in uncertain circumstances in 2014. General Ashfaq Kayani had dithered over the issue, admitting that the Taliban were an “existential threat to the state”, stopping short of unleashing the full might of the state against them. But all this changed with the arrival of General Raheel Sharif who immediately determined to launch Zarb-e-Azb in FATA. However, he was thwarted by the likes of Imran Khan, Jamaat-e-Islami, JUI, and other religious parties and groups who insisted that peace talks with the Pakistani Taliban — which had failed at least a dozen times in the past — should be the preferred route to ending the Taliban menace. Matters didn’t improve when the prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, also balked at the last minute after having given the green light to Zarb-e-Azb, and authorized Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan and a clutch of mullahs to start talking to the Taliban. The Taliban exploited the disarray among policy makers in Islamabad, stretched the talks and used the hiatus to scatter like the wind from their strongholds in Mir Ali and Miranshah in North Waziristan, regrouping in the Shawal valley and across the border in Afghanistan. Six months later, the Army Public School attack in Peshawar by the Taliban dispelled doubts in the mind of the civilians and General Raheel Sharif went after the Taliban, all guns blazing.
Zarb-e-Azb has been a resounding success, despite losing the decisive element of surprise in the beginning owing to political prevarication. The Taliban have been flushed out and routed and killed. Their suicide-bomber and improvised explosive device manufacturing factories have been destroyed and shut down. Their sleeper cells in other provinces have been exposed and degraded. Statistics are at hand to prove how the number of Taliban attacks has plunged across the country. Accordingly, General Raheel Sharif is now focusing on the next stage of the multi-dimensional operation. “There is a need”, he emphasised, “as we move on from the conclusion of the large-scale kinetic operations in FATA, to look ahead and consolidate the gains for long-term stability”. This means viewing Zarb-e-Azb as an over-arching counter-terrorism plan which includes both kinetic operations in FATA and “intelligence based operations (IBOs) in the rest of the country” targeting terrorist infrastructures.
There are three dimensions to this over-arching counter-terrorism plan. The first is focused on rehabilitation of Internally Displaced Persons in FATA. The army is leaning on the government to release adequate funds for this job. The second is an escalation in the pace of IBOs across the country. This is proceeding apace in Karachi with the help of the Rangers but has created tensions between civilians and the provincial police on the one hand and the Rangers and Army on the other. The army now wants to extend IBOs in the Punjab as well but is meeting with stiff resistance from the provincial and federal PMLN governments who argue that the provincial police and CID, with intelligence from the military security agencies MI and ISI, are up to the job. The third is stricter border management to prevent cross border terrorism along both the western border with Afghanistan and eastern one with India so that the domestic anti-terrorism agenda is not disrupted by tensions along both borders, especially with India. The army is trying to pressure the Afghan Taliban to come to the negotiating table with the Afghan government in a quadrilateral dialogue for stakeholders China, America and Pakistan included. But this is not yielding swift dividends. On the India front, the military is working to close the tap of the jihadis – mainly militant breakaway rebel factions of the Lashkar-e-Tayba and Jaish-e-Mohammad – so that comprehensive peace talks with India can kick off. But this, too, is bedevilled by distrust on both sides along with disagreements between the military and civilian leadership in Pakistan over the nature, scope and pace of the process. The military thinks that the prime minister is unacceptably “soft” on India because of various opportunistic concerns. The prime minister believes the military’s DNA compels it to take an unacceptably “hard line” in changed domestic and global circumstances.
In other words, Zarb-e-Azb is a great kinetic success in FATA but is faced with serious problems in its quest to become an over-arching anti-terrorism plan across the country with ownership in the hands of the military. The civilians fear the military establishment’s deployment of Rangers and NAB to degrade the elected government in Sindh, followed by demands for a similar politico-military operation in Punjab, as a “creeping coup”. Therefore, for Zarb-e-Azb to succeed comprehensively, this fear will have to be suitably allayed.
This is good news. Zarb-e-Azb began in uncertain circumstances in 2014. General Ashfaq Kayani had dithered over the issue, admitting that the Taliban were an “existential threat to the state”, stopping short of unleashing the full might of the state against them. But all this changed with the arrival of General Raheel Sharif who immediately determined to launch Zarb-e-Azb in FATA. However, he was thwarted by the likes of Imran Khan, Jamaat-e-Islami, JUI, and other religious parties and groups who insisted that peace talks with the Pakistani Taliban — which had failed at least a dozen times in the past — should be the preferred route to ending the Taliban menace. Matters didn’t improve when the prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, also balked at the last minute after having given the green light to Zarb-e-Azb, and authorized Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan and a clutch of mullahs to start talking to the Taliban. The Taliban exploited the disarray among policy makers in Islamabad, stretched the talks and used the hiatus to scatter like the wind from their strongholds in Mir Ali and Miranshah in North Waziristan, regrouping in the Shawal valley and across the border in Afghanistan. Six months later, the Army Public School attack in Peshawar by the Taliban dispelled doubts in the mind of the civilians and General Raheel Sharif went after the Taliban, all guns blazing.
Zarb-e-Azb has been a resounding success, despite losing the decisive element of surprise in the beginning owing to political prevarication. The Taliban have been flushed out and routed and killed. Their suicide-bomber and improvised explosive device manufacturing factories have been destroyed and shut down. Their sleeper cells in other provinces have been exposed and degraded. Statistics are at hand to prove how the number of Taliban attacks has plunged across the country. Accordingly, General Raheel Sharif is now focusing on the next stage of the multi-dimensional operation. “There is a need”, he emphasised, “as we move on from the conclusion of the large-scale kinetic operations in FATA, to look ahead and consolidate the gains for long-term stability”. This means viewing Zarb-e-Azb as an over-arching counter-terrorism plan which includes both kinetic operations in FATA and “intelligence based operations (IBOs) in the rest of the country” targeting terrorist infrastructures.
There are three dimensions to this over-arching counter-terrorism plan. The first is focused on rehabilitation of Internally Displaced Persons in FATA. The army is leaning on the government to release adequate funds for this job. The second is an escalation in the pace of IBOs across the country. This is proceeding apace in Karachi with the help of the Rangers but has created tensions between civilians and the provincial police on the one hand and the Rangers and Army on the other. The army now wants to extend IBOs in the Punjab as well but is meeting with stiff resistance from the provincial and federal PMLN governments who argue that the provincial police and CID, with intelligence from the military security agencies MI and ISI, are up to the job. The third is stricter border management to prevent cross border terrorism along both the western border with Afghanistan and eastern one with India so that the domestic anti-terrorism agenda is not disrupted by tensions along both borders, especially with India. The army is trying to pressure the Afghan Taliban to come to the negotiating table with the Afghan government in a quadrilateral dialogue for stakeholders China, America and Pakistan included. But this is not yielding swift dividends. On the India front, the military is working to close the tap of the jihadis – mainly militant breakaway rebel factions of the Lashkar-e-Tayba and Jaish-e-Mohammad – so that comprehensive peace talks with India can kick off. But this, too, is bedevilled by distrust on both sides along with disagreements between the military and civilian leadership in Pakistan over the nature, scope and pace of the process. The military thinks that the prime minister is unacceptably “soft” on India because of various opportunistic concerns. The prime minister believes the military’s DNA compels it to take an unacceptably “hard line” in changed domestic and global circumstances.
In other words, Zarb-e-Azb is a great kinetic success in FATA but is faced with serious problems in its quest to become an over-arching anti-terrorism plan across the country with ownership in the hands of the military. The civilians fear the military establishment’s deployment of Rangers and NAB to degrade the elected government in Sindh, followed by demands for a similar politico-military operation in Punjab, as a “creeping coup”. Therefore, for Zarb-e-Azb to succeed comprehensively, this fear will have to be suitably allayed.