Daily Times

Retired Major General Athar Abbas’s remarks in a BBC interview suggest that, despite the success of population-security measures and the development of a counterinsurgency doctrine, the military’s top leader in Pakistan resisted the implementation of a true population-centric counterinsurgency strategy, opting instead to focus on a ‘transition’ exit strategy. It was not until after the transition approach collapsed amidst the retirement of ex-Chief of Army Staff (COAS) General Kayani that counterinsurgency, and the utility of force in securing the will of the population, was embraced by General Raheel Sharif’s strategic leadership. A particularly important series of policy mistakes occurred well in advance of the build up to the military operation itself. The orientation of the armed forces away from counterinsurgency, the failure to establish a political settlement before operation and other controllable policy choices in the pre-military-operation period all led to enormous difficulties including the settlement of the Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). Thus, by the time of the operation, these policy choices had become almost like structural constraints and the failures had a snowballing effect, suggesting policy corrections were far more urgently reviewed.

Time will tell whether the threat of an insurgency after the military operation of North Waziristan was an avoidable policy failure or whether the structural conditions surrounding the occupation made such an outbreak inevitable. Several policy mistakes, in particular the deployment of too few troops, a lack of comprehensive political and military planning for the operation, the failure to establish a comprehensive national counterinsurgency policy and overly aggressive proxy militant war, greatly exacerbated rather than ameliorated various structural problems. More fundamentally, structure and policy choices interacted at all levels to explain the military operation.

The unavoidable conditions that military forces encounter today in North Waziristan are a divided society devastated by years of militant invasions and misrule, and the last government’s political context, which made the challenges of a successful military operation difficult. This structure apparently constrained and delimited the options open to army policy makers but, even within those narrow limits, Nawaz Sharif’s government has now made many choices that enhance the chances of success. In military operations involving action against terrorists, the relevance of the laws of war, often now called international humanitarian law, is problematic. In the ‘war on terror’, the use of armed force in North Waziristan especially raises three questions — is the law applicable to such operations? Should it be applied in situations different from what was envisaged in treaties? And are detainees ‘prisoners of war’? A difficulty in applying the law is that governments usually view terrorists, like rebels in civil wars, as simple criminals. Treating the law cavalierly causes problems. The law, however imperfect, is irreplaceable. The phrase ‘hearts and minds’ is generally associated with a less coercive approach to counterinsurgency, which emphasises the importance of using ‘minimum force’ in order to win the ‘hearts and minds’ of the people. The questions are whether the military approach in North Waziristan does involve high levels of force, and is it fought within the law without leading to human rights abuses? Pakistan’s counterinsurgency campaign in North Waziristan did not deploy the same levels of coercion that were used by US forces in Afghanistan but, nevertheless, considerable levels of coercion were used, which hopefully will not prevent winning the hearts and minds of the local people.

The various interpretations of hearts and minds leads to confusion about what degree of consent should be expected from the people and the implication of this for the use of force. While the term hearts and minds does not accurately represent Pakistan’s experience of counterinsurgency, the military has been generally more political and less coercive in its approach to counterinsurgency in North Waziristan than the more conventional US approach in Afghanistan to counterinsurgency.

Pakistan’s approach to counterinsurgency has silenced the recent pressure of the US counterinsurgency doctrine but there are still considerable differences in the Pakistan and US approach to counterinsurgency, which has led to different tensions in the relationship between these allies. The hearts and minds description of the Pakistan approach to counterinsurgency may be useful in public relations terms but it undermines the theory as a guide to operations because it can be interpreted in such divergent ways. The future maybe is to consider more carefully and practically specific policies that determine the contexts and circumstances where deployment of force is legitimate. The three requirements of counter-insurgency theory include demonstrating ‘political will’ to defeat the insurgents as the key to victory, the importance of the battle for hearts and minds of the affected population and the importance of civil-military coordination to bring together all the elements of a successful counterinsurgency campaign.

Similarly, four problems are identified with ‘classical’ counterinsurgency theory. First, the counterinsurgency theory emphasises the role of the government in defeating insurgency but does not draw attention to the tensions this can create between the political and military elites, and the possible consequences for democracy. Second, the theory is found to be ambiguous and open to highly divergent interpretations, in particular on the use of force. Third, there is a tendency to over-generalise from historical experience, which does not do justice to the complexity of Pakistan’s particular conflicts. Fourth, this leads to a tendency to apply ‘lessons’ that are not appropriate to the context. Counterinsurgency as winning hearts and minds and using minimum force has been subjected to intensifying attack. The result has been a swing from over-sanitised narratives of the primacy of winning hearts and minds, towards revisionist accounts of relentless coercion and the narrowly coercive role of the army.

It can be argued that, if North Waziristan is anything to go by, the essence of the government’s counterinsurgency victories lay neither in winning hearts and minds per se, nor in disaggregated and least coercive tactics per se. Rather, it lay in population and spatial control in which the interaction of both was embedded. In North Waziristan, military tactics during the most critical campaign phases counterpoised punitive and reward aspects of counterinsurgency in order to persuade people’s minds to cooperate, regardless of what hearts felt. This makes the case for avoiding artificial contrasts between winning hearts and minds and a ‘coercive’ approach, and insists instead for a new orthodoxy focusing on mutual dialogue during successful phases of counterinsurgency.

The Pakistan army prides itself as among the best in the conduct of counterinsurgency operations. Drawing on the lessons it learnt during its war against terrorism, it believes that it has discovered ways of waging wars among the people that enable it to use force effectively but with discrimination, distinguishing between the ‘guilty’ few and the ‘innocent’ many. No aspect of counterinsurgency has been more problematic and controversial than the doctrine of minimum force. This common law principle provides ambiguous guidance for military and intelligence forces quelling unrest and has become the subject of intense scholarly debate in the present era. Interestingly, the argument divides academics into two broad camps. One group sees minimum force as the vital element of a largely successful, uniquely military approach to counterinsurgency. The other claims that the legal principles never really restrain security forces. Many critics consider Pakistan’s approach to counterinsurgency as unique and particularly successful.

The writer is a professor of Psychiatry and consultant Forensic Psychiatrist in the UK. He can be contacted at fawad_shifa@yahoo.com