By Fester:
Eric Martin at Obsidian Wings is arguing against the "Afghan Taliban will threaten Pakistani stability" argument for an expanded US presence in Afghanistan. He makes several good points, but I want to highlight one and supplement it with what we know about insurgencies and guerrilla warfare. Eric looks at the reason for the long-standing Pakistani support for the Afghan Taliban and the limits of capacity on the Taliban:
The Taliban have long been on the receiving end of Pakistani government largess. They have been cultivated as a proxy and ally useful in terms of creating a strategic redoubt in case of conflict with India, and in further establishing an anti-Indian front in the region. In fact, much of their tenacity and success in Afghanistan today (and previously) is attributable to the ongoing support of their Pakistani patrons.
That is the nature of the Afghan Taliban: a local phenomenon benefiting from the generosity of foreign benefactors. As such, the Afghan Taliban enjoys limited reach and power - especially if it were to actually turn on those same foreign benefactors. Along those lines, what exactly are the Afghan "state's resources" that are supposed to threaten Pakistan (whose military and security forces are far more numerous, vastly better equipped, well trained, etc)? The Afghan state (and various militant factions) have limited economic and military resources - and much of what they have comes from...Pakistan.
The Afghan society, much less its weak central state, has very few resources, even when one includes drug smuggling revenue flows. The central government can raise less than a billion dollars per year in local revenue, the rest of its expenditures on a large scale counter-insurgency force makes the Kabul government a pauper and a kept client to its international funders. The Taliban government in the 1990s was a more expansive government with a more credible claim to having an overwhelming if not monopolistic market position on the use of violence. Yet, their national budget was minimal.
One may say that the Taliban has shown an ability to fight to a strategic draw lavishly equippped and funded foreign forces despite being outspent 100:1 and thus they are fighting a more cost-effective and efficient style of warfare. This style of warfare then would be transferrable to non-Afghan environments and threaten the Pakistani government's stability and reach in Punjab and Sindh. That argument would be attractive, but wrong.
Guerrillas and insurgents have a comparative advantage in information while the counter-insurgents often have the advantage in firepower. It is the information advantage that allows a guerrilla force to successfully fight and survive despite being massive out-spent. I wrote about this dynamic a few years ago in regards to Iraq:
The second great problem [ed: of counterinsurgency] is an information gathering, analyzing and dissemination problem. Insurgents operate within a population that in most instances the insurgent looks, sounds, and acts like except for when they are carrying out attacks. Identifying friendly individuals from neutral individuals and then from hostile but non-shooting at you individuals and finally identifying actual insurgents and their direct logistic support systems is a pain in the ass in the best of times.
The classical solution to this problem is a variant upon the protected relocation, strategic hamlet, and area barriers strategies. These are all the same category of solution to the information sorting problem, and the new Petreaus counter-insurgency doctrine [big PDF] as well as the �oil-spot� counter-insurgency strategy are extensions of these concepts.....
The Taliban and Pashtun tribal fighters who are shooting at US and ISAF forces are only successful because they are able to meld back into their local environment. The local civilian populations don't think the Taliban are a bunch of douchebags; instead they think the militant bands that we label Taliban provide some decent public goods of non-corrupt predictability that the Kabul government has not been able to provide.
However that non-douchebag status would be in severe doubt if the Taliban attempted to overthrow the Pakistani government. We have seen with the foreign Sunni jihadis how quickly a previously effective guerrilla force can be rolled out once the local population has collectively decided that the foreign presence is composed of a bunch of counter-productive douchebags. That same dynamic would be in play if Pashtun fighters from either Pakistan or Afghanistan home bases attempted to fight a prolonged state-toppling guerrilla war in the Punjab or the Sindh. The locals don't look, sound, or act like the guerrillas who would be attempting to conduct an out of area offensive without the covering sea of the population. This analysis is much weaker in the NWFP and FATA areas that are Pashtun dominated, but the Pashtuns are a marginal group within Pakistan's whole.
Strategically offensive guerrilla warfare is pretty damn close to being an oxymoron.
Hi Fester,
ReplyDeleteI agree on the whole with what you are saying. I do have a quibble though with your implicit view of the Pashtun being geographically limited. The Pushtun form a very large minority (> 3 million) in Karachi which is the commercial heart of Pakistan. They form significant minorities in several major cities in Punjab and form the majority in Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan. They are also well represented throughout Pakistan in the transportation and security sectors (they seem to have cornered the market as security guards in Islamabad). So the reason for their non-threat is not because they are geographically limited. However, if the Taliban become a source of instability in Pakistan it will be through acting as a focus for anger at the mismanagement and corruption of the military-political establishment. It won't be through any appeal to Pushtun nationalism. And that is an entirely different kettle of fish.