Daily Times

The state’s approach to insurgency in parts of the North-West Frontier Province, right now in Swat, suffers from two problems. Let’s begin with the first and the most glaring one: the frontier is all but lost. And it’s a full-spectrum failure, ranging from military reverses to political and ideological loss.
This is not a pessimistic view; it’s a realistic assessment. Consider.
What is happening in Swat is a replay of what we have seen in Waziristan, what we are witnessing in other tribal agencies, Bajaur for instance, and what we shall witness in the settled lowlands of NWFP if this tide cannot be stemmed.
The military defeat is obvious. Forget the drubbing the security forces have got in Waziristan. In Swat’s Kabal area, the so-called peace, the tense calm, is not a product of the two sides realising that neither can defeat the other and therefore both must disengage and find a solution, but the extremists holding fire because the security forces have blinked and want to resolve the issue through a jirga.
“Resolution” in all such cases means one thing: acceptance of loss of control and territory to non-state actors. As someone said, while one should never fear to negotiate, one should never negotiate out of fear.
The security forces have no response to the simple and effective weapon, the suicide bomber. Two suicide attacks, kidnappings of security forces personnel and beheadings, three of them publicly, have done two things: inflicted on the state a heavy cost of mobilisation and sent the security forces suing for peace.
The cost factor, direct and indirect, cannot be ignored. How much does a suicide belt cost? RDX is easy enough to procure; the rest — ball-bearings, nails, sharp metal pieces etc — can be got from a local machinist. This shouldn’t be more than a max of Rs10,000, RDX counted. Using a vehicle is more expensive, but even that is a fraction of the cost of a helicopter gunship flight.
This cost differential has also to be seen in relation to effectiveness. How effective has the state been in establishing its writ and taking out the militants? Has the sledgehammer killed the fly? No.
Why? As Hannah Arendt said in her essay On Violence, quoting from Vladimir Dedijer’s The Poor Man’s Power: “…in conventional warfare the poor countries are much less vulnerable than the great powers precisely because they are ‘under-developed’, and because technical superiority can ‘be much more of a liability than an asset’ in guerrilla war.”
True enough. Barry Posen spoke of the “contested zone” where hi-tech largely becomes useless in the face of a determined adversary. Students of warfare know how difficult it is to engage and win against an adversary that is difficult to identify and has the advantage of terrain, kinship bonds and internal lines of communication.
Add to this list, in this case, the fact that the security forces are fighting people who belong to the same tribes and areas from where the army and paramilitaries get a high percentage of their recruitment, that the security personnel also have the same conservative approach to religion, that the military operations are politically unpopular in the country and we have a situation that is hopeless from the perspective of the state.
At the minimum it puts tremendous strain on the organisational cohesion and operational effectiveness of the security forces. Dr Rasul Bakhsh Rais wrote an incisive piece in this space on Tuesday asking “Whose war is this?” The answer, if we go by majority opinion in this country is, America’s.
This brings us to the second problem. Even if we discount the military disadvantage the security forces have in exactly the same proportion that the militants have the advantage on the ground, we have a scary scenario: the state may be trying to do something for which it has no popular, political backing.
A double-whammy it would be. It has lost territory and control against the militants on the periphery and since its struggle is not backed by popular opinion in the country, it may have forfeited its legitimacy — or be in the process of losing it — at the centre also.
The point is that carrying out a military operation is difficult enough under the circumstances; but it is downright hopeless when the very approach is considered flawed by the people. Let’s consider the argument in favour of a political, reconciliatory approach.
One point needs clarification at the very outset. Military alone cannot deliver a solution and — as should be clear from excerpts we are carrying from Clausewitz’ On War — its use has to be part of a viable policy. In areas hit by insurgency and strife, the military’s primary function is to create space for negotiations from a position of strength.
What kind of political solution can we expect when the state has capitulated militarily before the militants? Logically, such a solution cannot be in favour of the state. There is no concept of negotiations between a victor and a vanquished. The latter simply has to accept the demands imposed on it by the former.
If this is what we mean by a political process then the best thing to do would be to pull back the army and allow the militants to take over and create their own laws and political system in the areas liberated from state control. If everyone is happy with this victory, so be it.
But let’s take this to its logical conclusion. If the rest of Pakistan is not comfortable with the system the militants want, then the logic of ending the military operation in the NWFP would take us to accepting that the state has lost the major part of its cis-Indus territories, at least west of Attock.
Once that happens and it will, going by this logic, then external actors will move into the power vacuum to neutralise an adversary they consider as a clear-and-present danger. Are we prepared to accept that?
Here’s the paradox then: the military has so far been ineffective and its presence is being criticised; but if it is pulled back, we might as well say goodbye to state control in the NWFP.
Is there a solution?
If the logic of pulling back the military is not accepted and the assumption is that it is not, unless we want the scenario presented above, then the issue that needs to be addressed is whether and how the military can be used more effectively. That issue needs to be tackled separately; it is also a tale of ironies. We shall return to it.

Ejaz Haider is Op-Ed Editor of Daily Times and Consulting Editor of The Friday Times. He can be reached at sapper@dailytimes.com.pk