Pakistan Military Assaults South Waziristan (Updated)

By Steve Hynd

The ground attack into South Waziristan that the Pakistani government and military has been telegraphing since June has finally begun. Around 30,000 Pakistani regulars, backed by Frontier Force paramilitaries,are advancing in three columns in an attempt to cut of Pakistani Taliban supply and escape routes. For now, the objective appears to be the Mehsud tribe stronghold town of Makeen.

The BBC provides a useful map with it's report and accompanying backgrounder (click for larger version).

  With an opposing force comprising between 10,000 and 20,000 Pakistani Taliban and between 500 and 1,500 foreign fighters, it may be that the Pakistani military has begun this offensive too "light". Officials say the first phase is only to establish "footholds" and that the final troop deployment will be in the region of 60,000 regulars backed by tanks, artillery, helicopter gunships and airstrikes. The operation is expected to last two months.

However, the Pakistani Taliban (TTP) forces in the area are on their own tribal ground and have had literally years to prepare defenses. Much of the area peaks at around 6,000 feet and upwards, passes are narrow and there are reports of extensive TTP bunker and tunnel complexes dug with heavy machinery in recent months. The TTP have plenty of IED bombs and even a supply of unguided artillery rockets. The terrain is far more suited to Hizboullah style tactics of "retreat to ambush" than even the parts of Lebananon where Hizboullah so seriously embarassed the Israeli Defense Force in its last assault. With nowhere to run to and winter coming in scant weeks, the TTP might yet give the Pakistani military an unexpected bloody nose even though the TTP is nowhere near as sophisticated or modern a fighting force as Hizboullah.

Still, the Pakistani army is more willing than the IDF to take casualties - and willing to create civilian casualties too. With only about 150,000 of the area's 500,000 population having fled so far, and officials publicly saying that the remainder are allied with the TTP, this is not going to be a clean operation - or one that the U.S. would ever recognise as "population-centric counter-insurgency". If Bajaur, Mohmand and the recent Swat operation are any indication it's going to look rather more like ethnic cleansing, whether by accident or design. No other Pakistani military assault has ever gotten the world attention this new attack is getting, and public opinion is going to be a factor the Pakistani military ignores at its peril. As Saba Imtiaz writes at Zeitgeist Politics:

Given how badly the IDPs crisis was managed by the government and opposition parties during the Swat offensive, one can only hope that aid agencies will be better experienced from the Swat IDPs and cope with the likely humanitarian crisis. On the other hand, as with the Swat offensive, once the South Waziristan operation is over: what will the area�s residents be left with to come back to?

This is a vicious cycle that Pakistan seems to keep repeating. Pakistan  should have learned our lesson with the Afghan war, or with the other battles that Pakistan has been fighting in the FATA region for years now, that it is as important to build an infrastructure for innocent civilians as it is to destroy the infrastructure of militant networks.

Some 13% of the army is Pashtun - like the inhabitants of South Waziristan and around 16% of the overall population. More than one observer has warned of a "trombone effect" - where the army is limited by its soldiers willingness to proceed and faces disaster if it goes beyond the point at which Pashtun soldiers and the general Pashtun population decide counter-terrorism has given way to collective punishment. Already, it is finding IED bomb attacks in its rear - on supply lines occupied by other Pashtun tribes and Taliban groups which are more focussed on fighting the U.S. in Afghanistan and with which it has spent the last two months delay frantically trying to smooth concerns and bolster peace accords.

With "fierce resistance" already reported on day one, this is not going to be an easy fight for Pakistan. The first day's fighting saw five soldiers and eleven militants killed, not the best attrition ratio by a long shot. I worry that it has bitten off more than the committed forces and army doctrine can chew. As usual, fear of India has prevented the full force of Pakistan's military, the world's sixth largest, being focussed on the most immediate threat.

Update: Gregg Carlstom has a good post, in which he worries that South Waziristan may turn out to be a kind of "Fallujah in the mountains".

Update 2: Pakistani officials are claiming their first success in capturing a TTP-held village, Kotkai, but an eyewitness in the region tells the BBC of indiscriminate airstrikes:

"There are bombs going off everywhere - you must tell the world what is happening," Sher Gul, a terrified resident of Tiarza in South Waziristan told the BBC after arriving in Dera Ismail Khan.

"My house was destroyed and many people in my village have been killed."

And a BBC crew in the town of tank, gateway to South Waziristan, found that the road refugees would use to leave the area had been closed by the Pakistani military.

Update 3: The L.A. Times points to the inevitable "whack-a-mole" factor, writing that TTP members can blend into the overall Pakistan populace with ease. And there's more than just the TTP to worry about:

a surge in attacks in the last two weeks has revealed burgeoning collaboration between Taliban fighters and militants from Punjab, Pakistan's heartland and its most populous province.

Analysts foresee the potential for a countermove that relies on Punjab militants to unleash a wave of terrorist strikes in the capital, Islamabad, and Punjab's largest cities, Lahore and the garrison city of Rawalpindi.

"In terms of difficulty, this is high up on the chart," said Khalid Aziz, an Islamabad-based defense analyst and a former chief secretary of the North-West Frontier Province, which oversees the tribal areas. "Punjab is beginning to crop up as a real issue. . . . This could be highly destabilizing."

... If there are more terrorist operations in Punjab," Aziz said, "people will forget about what's happening in Waziristan."

Update 4: report of TTP using artillery rockets in harassing fire against Pakistani army camps, injuring four soldiers.

Update 5: McClatchy spots the obvious hole in the U.S. narrative.

The offensive is limited to the part of South Waziristan occupied by the Mehsud tribe, which controls about half the 4,500 square-mile territory. It won't touch two Pakistani warlords, Maulvi Nazir and Gul Bahadur from the rival Wazir tribe, who send jihadists across the border to battle U.S., Afghan and NATO forces in Afghanistan.

And also notes problematic Pakistani military tactics:

"The forces that the army is employing is not enough," said Javed Hussain, a retired Pakistani brigadier general who served with the Special Services Group commando unit. "The important thing is that we have to avoid getting into a guerrilla war, because a guerrilla war carries on for years on end."

"They have to bring in more forces and make use of the geography," he added. "Guerrillas' safe havens reside in the mountains. In the opening moves, the army should have landed troops to secure the heights, to force the guerrillas into the valleys, where you can take them down using air-delivered and ground-delivered firepower."

So far, however, it's unclear whether Pakistan, which has a shortage of heavy-lift helicopters, has made large-scale landings on the mountaintops, Hussain said.

Update 6: An AP report says that, on day two, the Pakistani army are meeting heavy resistance from TTP fighters determined to keep the military out of the Mehsud tribe's boundaries. The army appear to be mostly relying on artillery fire and hi-altitude bombing, since TTP forces have heavily dug into high mountainsides where they can repel helicopter gunships with heavy machinegun fire. Reuters reports that the TTP are quickly conceeding even fortified strongholds on flatter ground to the Pakistani army.

This will be the last update on this post. If there's more to post I'll start a new one.