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C H A P T E R 3 Counterinsurgency The Myth of Sisyphus? EJAZ HAIDER THIS CHAPTER gives an overview of the major military operations conducted by the Pakistani state over the past decade in the country’s insurgency-hit northwest. The focus is on military campaigns that could be best described as counterterrorism military operations (CMO), but there are references to issues broader than just the operational headaches that military commanders faced in conducting a war against elusive adversaries in one of the most difficult operational terrains in the world, Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) bordering Afghanistan. In early April 2002, two brigades from the Pakistan Army’s XI Corps were first deployed to the Tirah Valley in Khyber Agency and later to the Shawal Valley in North Waziristan Agency, both located in FATA. The induction, in addition to the standard deployment in the tribal areas of the paramilitary Frontier Corps (FC) wings, was meant to check the movement of al-Qaeda militants slipping into FATA following the American assault in Tora Bora in Afghanistan and, where and when necessary, to conduct selective operations against them. The military units were meant to boost the FC and generally wave the flag of Pakistan. The military deployed its troops in the area without any battle inoculation or training for conducting operations in such a difficult terrain against an adversary that was merged with the population. After starting poorly from this point, the military has learned on the job and done well in capturing physical space in the FATA; it did not do nearly as well in incorporating a broader counterinsurgency (COIN) agenda. Moreover, there is much greater need to improve counterterrorism (CT) efforts dealing with operations conducted by the police forces, especially in the urban centers. Such operations require a different set of priorities and measures that Pakistan has largely failed 63 64 Chapter 3 to take over the last decade. This reinforces the importance of coordination between various aspects of CT, lest even the gains made in one sector are reversed due to tardy performance in another. The Pakistan Military’s Many Challenges Given that the Pakistani military’s traditional threat lies on the eastern border with India, there was very little logistics infrastructure on the western front to support large-scale operational deployments of the kind Pakistan has had to undertake since 2004 and the kind of war it has fought since then. The only other time Pakistan had established active forward-defended localities in the tribal agencies through formal deployment was after the December 1979 Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. But at the time there were no additional elements added to army’s XI Corps, which operated with its own two divisions.1 During the 1980s, army troops were based in all the tribal agencies , so it is a popular misconception that Pakistan deployed its regular troops in FATA only in 2002. That said, this deployment was a conventional one and the army had no internal threat in FATA and did not conduct any operations in its own territory. Its posts along the border with Afghanistan were defensive in nature, and the control of the area was also meant to launch into Afghanistan the mujahideen, who were trained in FATA. Pakistan, the mujahideen, and the ‘‘free world’’ were on the same side against the Soviets. At the time of the initial deployments in 2002, no one seemed to have realized that the al-Qaeda elements with the support of indigenous groups would come to dominate FATA or that, consequently, Pakistan was on its way to becoming a victim of a full-fledged insurgency that has since also resulted in hundreds of terrorist attacks across the country, targeting both civilians and security personnel. Since then, however, the XI Corps has become the largest formation of the Pakistan Army, subsuming under its operational command elements from other corps. Currently it has some eight-division strength beefed up by enhanced numbers of paramilitary FC whose total strength now exceeds fifty thousand troops is under the total control of the XI Corps.2 While the exact order of battle and number of lower formations and the actual fighting elements are not a matter of public record, according to one available estimate, 140,000 army regulars and 30,000 FC personnel were deployed in FATA and its adjacent Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) province in 2010 (Mullick 2010b, 7). As events unfolded, the military saw itself facing rising numbers of battlehardened insurgents whose knowledge...

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