By Rahul Bedi, IANS
The suicide bomber attacks in Pakistan’s garrison town of Rawalpindi at the weekend in which 35 people, mostly army and intelligence personnel, were killed, will no doubt energise the US into putting together its two-pronged strategy to contain the mounting military and psychological successes of the Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
The US is concerned over the deteriorating security situation in Pakistan and the setbacks its army has suffered in countering the successes of the jedadi groups.
“The bottom line is there’s no question that we Americans have a stake in Pakistan,” US Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte said shortly after President Pervez Musharraf imposed an emergency on Nov 3.
Consequently it is allocating around $ 350 million over the next five years to augment the 85,000-strong paramilitary Frontier Corps (FC) by raising at least eight additional battalions or around 8,000 personnel and upgrading its overall insurgency fighting skills through enhanced training, superior firepower and greater mobility.
This phase of creating a specialised anti-insurgency force has already been operationalised with around $52 million allocated last year and $92 million more in 2007 to the FC stationed in the restive North West Frontier Province and Balochistan.
Pentagon spokesman Geoff Moreall said last week that the US was of the view that in Pakistan’s tribal regions it was more effective to work with a locally recruited force than to work with the army. The latter is not viewed with the same respect in that part of the country as the FC, he added.
But the more dire aspect under consideration by desperate US military planners is raising, training and arming a Mujahideen force or militia from amongst “friendly” and “soft” Taliban from Pakistan’s seven turbulent Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) adjoining Afghanistan, to counter the rampaging jehadis and radical Islamists.
The US has reportedly been encouraged by a similar strategy of recruiting local tribesmen being pursued in Iraq’s Anbar province that is believed to be proving efficacious.
The reasoning is that being locally recruited, these militia members understand the enemy and hence are better equipped to neutralise the crippling insurgency.
Military analysts say the controversial plan appeared to be borrowing heavily from the British colonial administration’s policy of raising local militias in the FATA from amongst local tribesmen with the fundamental assumption that they were better equipped to deal with their war-mongering brethren.
According to this worrisome proposal – a frightening retread of America’s decade-long strategy of “sponsoring” the Mujahideen to evacuate the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan 1979 onwards – prepared by the US Special Operations Command and revealed recently by the New York Times, this scheme is reportedly under serious consideration by the US Central Command in Tampa, Florida.
It results from Washington’s anxiety to stem the steady march of Islamists from their FATA strongholds – better known as “unsettled” areas – to occupy territory in Pakistan’s hinterland or “settled” areas like the picturesque Swat Valley adjoining Pakistan’s capital Islamabad.
A large proportion of the occupation by jehadis has been achieved without a fight, with the local security forces either surrendering or simply refusing to engage insurgents.
All this has given rise to fears in Pakistan and outside that if not speedily contained, the Islamic insurgents could not only seize control of larger swathes of territory and impose Shariat law but also threaten the country’s nuclear assets – despite feeble assurances recently by Musharraf regarding their safety.
Anticipating such an apocalyptic situation, Morrell on Nov 14 declared in Washington that the US military was looking at alternative routes to send supplies to its troops in Afghanistan in the event of a “political crisis” in Pakistan rendering this route unavailable.
“The US military sends 75 percent of its supplies for Afghanistan through, or in the skies over, Pakistan, including 40 percent of the fuel for the troops,” the U.S. Defence Department said.
Other than American soldiers, these supply lines also sustain troops from NATO states that comprise the International Security Assistance Force.
“In light of the fact that there is civil unrest in Pakistan, in light of the fact that there is a state of emergency in Pakistan, we feel it is responsible, given the importance of the Pakistani supply lines to our operations in Afghanistan, to have a contingency plan,” Morrell added.
It would be worth remembering at this juncture that the roots of present day Islamic jihad in Kashmir, Pakistan, Central Asia and North Africa were part of a deep, collaborative enterprise mastermined in the 1970s by the US – shamed by its defeat in Vietnam – to contain the Soviet Union during the Cold War era.
Thus began the US love affair with Islamists in which short-term profit motivated all parties concerned, but the deadly ramifications of which are haunting the world today.
(Rahul Bedi is a security analyst. He can be contacted at [email protected])