Experts Explain the Threats Facing Afghanistan and Pakistan to Lawmakers

Experts yesterday outlined three important things lawmakers should know as the United States fights Taliban militants and al Qaeda terrorists inside Afghanistan and Pakistan and along the two countries’ borders.

First is the nature of each country’s Taliban. The United States along with the Afghan and Pakistani governments do not fight one Taliban enemy, especially in Pakistan.

“In effect, there is not one monolithic Pakistan-based Taliban insurgency, but many localized insurgencies,” Joshua T. White, a research fellow at the Center on Faith & International Affairs, told the Subcommittee on National Security and Foreign Affairs of the House’s Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Peter Bergen, a terrorism expert with the New America Foundation, agreed, adding that Taliban forces and al Qaeda are closer than ever before despite disagreements.

“Yes, there are local groups of the Taliban operating for purely local reasons,” he said, “but the upper levels of the Taliban on both sides of the Afghan/Pakistan border have morphed together ideologically and tactically with al Qaeda.”

One indicator of this is the rise of suicide bombings administered by the Taliban, a tactic learned from watching al Qaeda perfect it in Iraq.

Bergen believes this means that any attempt to create an “Awakening” movement will be much more difficult in Afghanistan than it was in Iraq.

This also means there is no “one size fits all approach” to fighting the Taliban, according to White. The U.S. military therefore needs different strategies in different regions to fight many insurgencies with different demands, all operating under the name Taliban.

Second, there are not enough security forces in either Afghanistan or Pakistan to take and hold territory.

In Afghanistan, according to Bergen, “The relatively low number of soldiers means that American and NATO forces can clear the Taliban out of areas but can’t hold many of those cleared areas and then rebuild them, the critical sequence in any successful counterinsurgency.”

One western diplomat in Kabul Bergen spoke to likened these campaigns to “mowing the lawn,” because as time passed American and NATO forces had to go back into the same areas to once again rid them of Taliban and al Qaeda militants.

White sees much of the same thing across the Pakistan border.

“It now seems evident that the [Pakistani] government needs a well-equipped stabilization force which can hold territory after regular army units withdraw to their barracks,” he said.

Finally, all three witnesses questioned the wisdom of President Barack Obama’s decision to intensify missile strikes inside Afghanistan and Pakistan using unmanned aerial vehicles known as Predator drones.

“By setting a high priority on the use of aerial drone strikes to disrupt al Qaeda activities,” White testified, “the United States makes it politically difficult for the elected government in Islamabad to take firm action against Taliban groups which target NATO forces in Afghanistan, or even the Pakistani state itself.”

A June 2008 poll conducted in Pakistan, cited by Bergen, confirms this. Fifty-two percent of the people surveyed blamed the United States for the violence in their country while just 8 percent blamed al Qaeda.

Bergen told lawmakers they need to rethink missile strikes lest they unintentionally send Pakistanis into the arms of Taliban recruiters and further upset the ground the Pakistani government stands on.

The U.S. government must also worry how televised images of the carnage associated with American missile strikes in Afghanistan and Pakistan plays in the Muslim world, cautioned Professor Paul R. Pillar, director of Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program.

“Images from the conflict have damaged images of the United States elsewhere, especially in portions of the Muslim world where U.S. military operations and collateral damage and casualties resulting from them are seen as further inclination of an American inclination to inflict harm on Muslims,” Pillar said.