the forgotten remembered war

Pakistan

We sort of forgot about this whole front for a long while, busy as we were with that mustache guy and trying to arrange his hanging (we like mustaches on our villainous dictators I guess). But I sort of looked at the situation back in 2002 and said there are two places that if we had to invade, I would have been okay with, in the sense that it would depose some ruthless, corrupt, and dangerous regimes to our national security (supposing that an invasion was the best possible course to achieve that goal in the first place, and that this was indeed a plausible goal to achieve. These are poor justifications on their face for war, but at least having appropriate targets makes them marginally useful). Saudi Arabia. And Pakistan.

And when you get a list like this of the sort of mess that has become of the Pakistani military-intelligence community and operations after a few years of US "aid", it looks like maybe there's a point to that. I don't think it would be easy to claim that their military is incompetent. They do have long-standing security concerns from India and from various insurgent campaigns along the Afghani border, both of which imply that there's no shortage of hot zones in which to get training. For another thing, very few countries' militaries are going to look competent waging any prolonged counter-insurgent campaign. At least not without also having considerable political and propagandized control in the region already, something it's not clear that Pakistan has, since it's been effectively ceding territory for a while to various "moderate" extremist groups.

Pakistan has basically been conducting operations against insurgents that operated in that area for decades, raiding into Afghanistan against other Afghanis and the Soviet military. We should be able to conclude that these presented options are potentially valid concerns. But one crucial reason to consider would be that we're basically asking the Pakistani local commanders to turn against people that they've been helping in some form for decades. Without a demonstrative reason that such people will be harmful to local Pakistani security on their own account (and instead be harmful to the "distant" government to the South in Islamabad). I find it hard to believe that it would be easier for local commanders to be fighting against mujaheddin warriors that they may have helped, trained, or supplied, at the behest of an even more distant and strange American led coalition, all while having legitimate security concerns raised by being seen to cooperate with either side.

We at least have the advantage of having a government in place in Pakistan which is more democratically valid than that of the past several years (one could argue the same is true of our own government, given the sorts of things I've been reading that our own government did). They did just reinstate a couple of the judges that lawyers, lawyers of all people, were marching over last year. I'm not sure why this government is necessarily seen as less helpful, other than it isn't now led by a military clown who appeared intent on maintaining his own authority. And therefore would accept money in exchange for occasionally dropping some high explosives on people he doesn't have any real interest in fighting. At least this way, if the Pakistani people are actually interested and convinced that fighting the Taliban is crucial to their nation, they might actually get behind the process and demand some accountability from their armed forces. It seems more likely that they will be content to mix in some negotiation. Which is fine by me. I'm not sure it would be best to create an atmosphere of desperation in a country with nuclear warheads.