SPIEGEL: Isn’t stability more important than democracy for a country like Pakistan?
[GEN. David] Petraeus: Both would be best, of course. As you may have heard, several of us met with General Kayani and we got the impression that Pakistan increasingly recognizes the extremists in western Pakistan as an existential threat to their country. They are very keen to carry out the operations themselves. And there’s significant effort on the part of the US and other countries to provide assistance that can enable Pakistan to do just that.
In his interview with der Spiegel, GEN Petraeus showed a nuanced understanding of the difficulties of Iraq, but not so much Afghanistan—his constant invocation of al-Qaeda as the primary driver of the insurgency as but one example. Even so, it is important that he recognizes the need for Pakistan to take the lead in rooting out the extremists in the FATA: in just the last few months alone, 1,000 militants have supposedly died fighting the Pakistani security forces—while several dozen Pakistani troops have died as well (Pakistani losses since 2003 or so are also near 1,000).
Similarly, it is no secret that sloppy raids into Pakistan will only fuel more extremism, in part because with the right incentives the locals will rise up on their own to fight back the Taliban. The American refusal to allow Pakistan to solve its own problems is a serious failure of policy—even with the understanding that limited troop movements might have actually helped some time ago. Right now, however, U.S. attacks on Pakistani soil serve only to undermine the Pakistani government’s own policies in the FATA, which thus far have shown remarkable progress.
Even so, there are thousands of refugees fleeing the fighting. This was true in January, and it is true now, in September. In fact, those refugee movements have formed the underpinning of many of the cease-fires, which were at least in part meant to provide “space” for farmers to return to their homes so they don’t starve during the winter.
From a long-term perspective, both the U.S. and Pakistani strategies are incomplete. The U.S. seems to want only to “decapitate” the insurgency, with no mind to why the insurgency gains in popularity; similarly, the Pakistanis seem to want only to enforce the old Collective Punishment system instituted by the British under the Frontier Crimes Regulation—a policy that can be successful for the short run but is ultimately empty. Writing off tribesmen in the FATA as wishing to remain isolated and backward is a mistake. Many feel that way because their only relationship with the outside has been deeply exploitative and confrontational. Reversing that—moving toward a constructive engagement—is perhaps the only way to permanently undermine the presence of extremism in the borderlands.
This post was written by...
Joshua Foust – author of 1771 posts on Registan.net.
Joshua Foust is a Fellow at the American Security Project and the author of Afghanistan Journal: Selections from Registan.net. His research focuses primarily on Central and South Asia. Joshua is a correspondent for The Atlantic and a columnist for PBS Need to Know. Joshua appears regularly on the BBC World News, Aljazeera, and international public radio. Joshua is also a regular contributor to Foreign Policy’s AfPak Channel, and his writing has appeared in the New York Times, Reuters, and the Christian Science Monitor.