Re: Al Qaeda welcomed in Swat
they issue a statement and our media put it as if that happened to the effect.
i guess swat fiasco should be finished off in 15-20 days time as it seems talibans are getting frustrated and trying to test the will of the government to the limit and the way MQM is pushing the government and ANP is helping as well as ANP has to prove in very little time it was worth it and i m sure they ANP would fail as these mountain a???s dont understand the word but kicks.
more these taliban fagotts open their mouth more they would prove the MQM and other right as they dont talk with mouth but do Sh?? .
also here is nice article i wish to share .
Daily Times - Leading News Resource of Pakistan
The army cannot operate effectively without local help and without, as I have repeatedly maintained, eroding the insurgency from the inside. But by the same token, it cannot leave its local allies at the mercy of the Taliban
Last Tuesday, I described Swat as a wicked problem (“Costly peace”; Daily Times) and tried to explain what a wicked problem is, using the framework put forward by Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber in a 1973 article titled “Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning”.
Let’s recap.
“A wicked problem is generally one that is either difficult or almost impossible to solve because of contradictory and changing requirements and where information is incomplete. To add to the degree of difficulty, a wicked problem involves complex interdependencies, such that tackling one aspect of the problem can create other problems.
“Essentially, this means that no course of action can be based on a definitive formulation because a wicked problem successfully eludes one; courses of action cannot be correct or incorrect or true or false but only relatively better or worse; every attempt is a one-shot experiment which may or may not work; stakeholders have different frames for understanding and solving the problem; there are multiple value conflicts and so on.”
The idea was to put the difficulty of tackling Swat in a perspective and to flag the point that whether the planner took route A or B, both falling on different sides of the fence, neither would be cost-free.
The other allied point, as should be clear from the lines I have quoted from the previous article, was that unlike critics the planner does not have the luxury to just criticise; he has to take a decision.
Now, with Sufi Muhammad’s speech Sunday, we have a response from the other side to one course of action the planner took. That response, given its implications and costs, should force the planner to rethink the strategy of appeasement or, as the government preferred to term it, the strategy of managing conflict.
This, again, was expected if we continue with the wicked-problem concept and the finding that every attempt to resolve a wicked problem would be a one-shot experiment.
What do we have now? To put it simply, the possibility of increasing the cost if the planner continues with this strategy. How so?
The plan looked at Nizam-e Adl as a measure that, by affording the people speedy justice (we shan’t get into the debate on what speedy justice is or can be) would (a) allow the Tehreek-e Nifaz-e Shariat-e Muhammadi to countervail the Taliban; (b) stop the fighting; (c) get the Taliban to disarm; (d) allow regular higher courts to overturn bad judgements by the qazi courts; (e) help the government establish its writ; and (f) do so without resorting to blood-letting.
In other words, the planner was thinking in terms of reducing the cost. Has the strategy succeeded?
While the fighting has stopped, primarily because the security forces are now confined to their garrisons, the other assumptions have come unstuck.
Far from countervailing the Taliban, the Sufi is speaking their lingo; the Taliban have refused to lay down their weapons; the TNSM has rejected the country’s judicial and political systems, calling the institutions “un-Islamic”; the Taliban continue with their strategy of salami slicing, moving into Buner; and this dovetails with their pro-active statements about spreading their Islam to the rest of the country.
While the rest of the country is unlikely to accept their discourse, what is dangerous about their expansion is the fact that the current “peace” is helping them consolidate their presence in the areas now under their control. The implication is that dislodging them would become increasing costly if and when the state decides to do so.
Projecting the cost of conflict into the future after the Taliban have consolidated, assuming that pacification would not work to the state’s advantage, and assuming also that the state would like to fight back and not capitulate, it should be obvious that the cost of conflict now would be less than in the future.
In other words, while the cost may be high even at this point — which is presumably why the state desired appeasement — given the inevitability of conflict in view of the adversary’s strategy of exploitation, a longer trajectory of appeasement will increase the cost of future conflict exponentially, almost to the point of becoming prohibitive.
This is why the state has to say “enough”. But saying “enough” is not a policy per se. It must be backed by an effective military and political response. What can that be?
Militarily, this “pause” should have given the agencies opportunities to identify Taliban cadres and their strongholds and allowed them to embed assets that can be useful. Intelligence should be more credible now than when most of these insurgents were in hiding.
Last time, just when Peochaar was going to fall, the coup de grace was called off for non-military reasons. That was a huge mistake and should not be repeated. Any operation must continue until the state gets the upper hand.
Getting help from local tribes is important but it will be no use if resistance leaders cannot be protected against retaliation by the Taliban. A repeat of December 2008, when the army failed to come to the help of Pir Samiullah, the Gujjar tribal leader who had raised a *lashkar *to challenge the Taliban, would be disastrous.
Samiullah had managed to get his community together in October 2008 and had fought off the Taliban. But they were looking out for him and when the opportunity came, they killed him along with 15 other fighters, captured two of his men whom they beheaded publicly. Later, they returned to dig up his grave and hung his body in a square to signal to everyone that anyone resisting them would meet such a fate.
The army cannot operate effectively without local help and without, as I have repeatedly maintained, eroding the insurgency from the inside. But by the same token, it cannot leave its local allies at the mercy of the Taliban.
Also, for this strategy to be successful the army must ensure that (a) it responds quickly and ruthlessly to any threat faced by allied tribes; and (b) it begins to network them.
As the situation stands, these tribes or leaders, wherever they may be, are operating in isolation. They face an adversary that is highly organised in terms of internal lines of communication, supplies, operations etc., even when it is operating in smaller groups.
Isolated tribes and clans can be easily taken out by the Taliban. Hence the requirement to evolve them into an organised and networked force. In Bajaur, the strategy has been more successful because the army packed the punch and did not dither in the face of high collateral damage.
Having tried course A, the state is only left with course B. But the military response is just one prong. The other is political. That is where it is important, as the army begins to clear the area in phases, for the political leaders from the ANP and the PPP to make their presence felt. The people voted for them in the 2008 elections; they must go back to their constituencies.
It will be risky but then the situation demands men, not sissies. Leaders have to lead from the front.
Finally, here is the question: where must the state focus in taking out the threat, the nucleus or the periphery? Answer: the nucleus. That is not Swat.