Its hopeless – and I’ll tell you why. Right now, both the political leadership as well military high command don’t have any combined single coherent policy about how to deal with this menace. They all seem to be going in all different directions.
And this part of the report is very significant
[quote]
They have good weaponry and a better communication system (than ours),” said a senior official. “Even the sniper rifles they use are better than some of ours. Their tactics are mind-boggling and they have defences that would take us days to build. It does not look as though we are fighting a rag-tag militia; they are fighting like an organised force.
[/quote]
Two important conclusions can be drawn from this
(i) a half a million plus strong army does not have a matching capability in terms of weapon and communication systems against militants. Whatever happened to millions of dollars that US has poured into the program to upgrade the fighting capabilities of Pak army against talibans?
(ii) army does not have any ground intelligence presence in that region. If there are taken aback by militants’ tactics & their defences, then obviously army is only relying blindly on brute force rather than measuring up the enemy beforehand & chalking up a comprehensive strategy before moving in for the kill.
Brute force alone will never crush this militancy. Both Israel in occupied lands and US in Iraq, realized this fact, changed their tactics, put more emphasis on the use of ground intelligence and went after individual high profile targets to break the network of the resistance and that’s exactly what Pak army needs to do as well.
What these talibans have to lose against army? nothing. When push comes to shove, they vacate their positions and go to safer areas, re-group and stage a comeback again. That’s probably what’s going to happen in Bajour too. Swat is a case in point. Talibans routed that area earlier this year. Army fought them out, handed the control back to civilians, then the militants started tinkering with it again. Now just couple of days ago, there was a news item in Dawn that talibans handed over the control of areas in Swat to army as part of the jirga piece deal – what bull crap is this? Are they defeated? No – they can comeback anytime they want. Army won’t stay out there forever.
I am surprised that an army which boasts about being the architect of the so-called afghan jihad and takes credit for bringing down the Soviet empire, is completely clueless when facing against the same guys whom its been nurturing & training for the past 20 yrs.