Raymond Barrett

Sunday Business Post
By Raymond Barrett

A series of coordinated attacks against Pakistan’s security forces last week left around 50 people dead. In Lahore, the capital of the Punjab province, militants linked to the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan group attacked three separate police facilities using automatic rifles and grenades, while suicide bombers also targeted a police station in the northern city of Peshawar.

Over 150 people have been killed across the country in recent weeks, in an escalation of violence challenging the authority of both president Asif Ali Zardari and the Pakistani army.

The violence – including a rocket attack which killed three Pakistani soldiers and wounded four at a military camp in a remote tribal area last Friday – comes as the military prepares a major assault on militant strongholds in the Waziristan region along the Afghan border – also believed to be the hiding place of Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden.

While targeting civilians and politicians is not unusual – former prime minister Benazir Bhutto was killed in a suicide attack in 2007 – directly confronting the security forces in such a brazen manner has been interpreted as a warning to the military ahead of its planned offensive against the ‘Pakistani Taliban’.

Since 2001, the Pakistani army has lost over 3,000 soldiers fighting militants within its borders.

But the recent violence has also focused attention on the long-standing links between Pakistan’s military and a rainbow of militant Islamic groups over the last decades.

During the 1980s, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency channelled weapons and money to Afghan mujahedeen after the Soviet invasion, and facilitated an influx of foreign fighters (backed by the US and Saudi Arabia) – out of which blossomed the al-Qaeda network.

Until today, the Pakistani army is believed to maintain links with Kashmiri militants at home and the Taliban in Afghanistan, in order to maintain ‘strategic depth’ in its ongoing struggle for regional supremacy with India.

Arif Rafiq, a regional specialist who writes the Pakistan Policy Blog, told The Sunday Business Post last week that the ‘Pakistani Taliban’ should not be seen as a homogenous group, and that the Pakistani military played certain factions off against the other to pursue its strategic goals.

However, he said that ‘‘the army has lost control of a large segment of the militants inside Pakistan who have developed a mind of their own,” he said.

The turmoil in Pakistan also highlights the dominant position of the armed forces, widely regarded as a ‘shadow government’ in their own right.

Not only do senior military officers often act independently of politicians regarding security affairs, the military runs its own multibillion dollar network of banks, insurance companies and cement factories, and is the largest property owner in the country.

Successive administrations in Washington have tried to alter this capricious balance of power – a weak civilian government competing against a powerful officer elite.

Only last week, an aid package to Pakistan – US$7.5 billion over five years – was passed by the US Congress, with a proviso demanding increased control of the military by elected officials.

However, there are strong historical factors that seem to ensure the pre-eminence of the military. Pakistan’s population of 170 million is both ethnically diverse and often impoverished.

This has resulted in numerous insurgencies against the central government since independence in 1947.

Baluchi separatists in the west and the Pashtun tribes of the Federal Administered Tribal Areas have little loyalty to Islamabad, and have turned to violence in the past – creating the need for a strong military to hold the country together.

Thus, when it comes to countering this violence, the answers appear to l ie with the nation’s generals, rather than its politicians.