The Redhunter

Rules of Engagement (ROE) agreed to since 2001 have stated that US forces can cross into Pakistan up to 6 miles if they are in "hot pursuit" of retreating Taliban/al-Qaeda attackers. That appears out the window with this order. It should be, or should be treated as such by American forces. If not, then there will most assuredly be an event of 'confusion' and a very hot battle with disastrous results.

Even this, it appears, is now out the window.

In his second post, Schippert quotes a Reuters story in which it looks like the Bush Administration may have thrown in the towel, at least as far as using overt acts of force is concerned.

The Bush administration is unlikely to use commando raids as a common tactic against militant safe havens in Pakistan due to the high-stake risks to U.S. policy in the region, officials and analysts say.

Bush approved a U.S. commando assault in Pakistan's South Waziristan on Sept. 3, without Islamabad's permission, as part of a presidential order on clandestine and covert operations, officials and sources familiar with the matter said.

Bush's authorization for the use of ground forces without Pakistani approval was part of a larger ramp-up in U.S. strikes against militant safe havens along the shared border with Afghanistan.

As the rest of the Reuters story makes clear, the reason we have been raiding into Pakistan is that the latter has been completely unwilling or unable to do anything about the terrorists in their country. U.S. officials grew frustrated with the enemy having a sanctuary, and decided to do something about it.

How Did We Get Here?

In the past seven years we have tried to persuade, bribe, threaten, and cajole the Pakistanis into doing something about the terrorists in Waziristan. As indicated earlier, they have tried but failed.

Part of the reason they have failed is that they're not entirely enthusiastic about the job. The reason for that is that far too many Pakistanis are sympathetic to al Qaeda and/or the Salafist tradition within Islam("Islamists"). It's not so much that they are "anti-American", though they are that too, but that they are Islamist. It is well known that the ISI (InterServices Intelligence, their version of the KGB, and basically a state within a state) is run through with Islamists. Given that the secret police (essentially what they are) are always very influential in such societies, we should not be surprised that not many people want to do much about al Qaeda, the Taliban, and their allies.

This was not what Pakistan was supposed to be. Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the "father of the nation", had in mind a secular state.

The story is of course quite complicated, but essentially the country started down the path to where it is today under the rule of General Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, who ran the place from 1977 until his death in a mysterious plane crash in 1988. He instituted Sharia law and long story short we now have massive Saudi (read Wahhabist) funding of Pakistani Madrassas. The Muslim Brotherhood is also active in the country.

Andy McCarthy outlines the whole sad story in an excellent piece published after Benazir Bhutto's assassination in which he starts off with a few arresting statistics:

A recent CNN poll showed that 46 percent of Pakistanis approve of Osama bin Laden.

Aspirants to the American presidency should hope to score so highly in the United States. In Pakistan, though, the al-Qaeda emir easily beat out that country's current president, Pervez Musharraf, who polled at 38 percent.

President George Bush, the face of a campaign to bring democracy -- or, at least, some form of sharia-lite that might pass for democracy -- to the Islamic world, registered nine percent. Nine!

That gets your attention.

No doubt the number of Pakistanis who support al Qaeda goes up and down, so who knows what the number is now. Nevertheless, the "real Pakistan", he says, is not a pretty place

The real Pakistan is a breeding ground of Islamic holy war where, for about half the population, the only thing more intolerable than Western democracy is the prospect of a faux democracy led by a woman -- indeed, a product of feudal Pakistani privilege and secular Western breeding whose father, President Zulfiquar Ali Bhutto, had been branded as an enemy of Islam by influential Muslim clerics in the early 1970s.

The real Pakistan is a place where the intelligence services are salted with Islamic fundamentalists: jihadist sympathizers who, during the 1980s, steered hundreds of millions in U.S. aid for the anti-Soviet mujahideen to the most anti-Western Afghan fighters -- warlords like Gilbuddin Hekmatyar whose Arab allies included bin Laden and Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, the stalwarts of today's global jihad against America.

The real Pakistan is a place where the military, ineffective and half-hearted though it is in combating Islamic terror, is the thin line between today's boiling pot and what tomorrow is more likely to be a jihadist nuclear power than a Western-style democracy.

Ouch. That's a reality wake up.

For a dissenting view see Max Boot's The Real Real Pakistan, in which he disagrees with McCarthy and says that the reason we're not liked over there because of our past support for dictatorships. I side with McCarthy, but Boot is no dummy and does make good points.

What are We to Do?

While additional troops from both the United States and our (mostly unwilling) allies are to be desired, this issue with sanctuary in Waziristan illustrates why Afghanistan is so difficult to win. While the insurgency in Iraq receives support from Syria and Iran, the insurgents there could never rely on those countries as absolute sanctuaries and still conduct a meaningful war in Iraq. Said another way, the insurgency there was winnable in Iraq alone without going after them in Iran or Syria. In Afghanistan it's not clear that it's winnable without destroying their bases in Pakistan.

Further, it's clear that any such drivel such as "we need to engage in hard-headed diplomacy" with the Pakistanis "on a basis of mutual respect" or that "we need to pressure the Pakistanis" that we hear, whether from Barack Obama or John McCain, can be dismissed out of hand. Anyone who thinks that the problem can be solved by diplomacy of any sort isn't paying attention.

Get out a map. We can't even get to Afghanistan except through Pakistan. According to Schippert, this time writing at ThreatsWatch, "70% of the NATO supplies reach the forces in Afghanistan" through the Khyber Pass, which is on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The Point is that everything we do with Pakistan is like walking on eggs - if we lose Pakistan, or annoy them enough so that they shut off access through their country, we're going to have a heck of a time keeping anything going in Afghanistan.

I don't think there is a short-term solution. The best we can do is clandestine raids and try to buy what militias or local leaders ("warlords" as they're sometimes called in the press) that we can. We probably won't win in this area until we make progress in the overall war on jihadism. And that's too big a subject for this post, but one I've addressed elsewhere; look under "Categories" at right.

Schippert at the Threatswatch, agrees

However, the ultimate solution to the defeat of al-Qaeda in Pakistan is one centered on a popular civilian rejection of al-Qaeda and the Taliban where they lay in Pakistan's tribal areas along the Afghanistan border. This was how al-Qaeda was defeated in Iraq, and decisively so. The central question is how can we (to ideally though not assuredly include Pakistani forces) protect the citizens and their villages in order to embolden them to stand up against the terrorists? We need to identify who they are and how we can gain their trust - and be prepared to do what's necessary to keep it, just as we did in Iraq. But even more fundamentally, do enough of them actually even want to?

He's basically arguing along the lines of Walid Phares that it's a War of Ideas. I think there's a lot of merit to that.

But on the whole subject of Afghanistan and Pakistan, I'm open to all ideas.