The 9/11 Wars (68 page)

THE BATTLE FOR BAJAUR

In late November 2008, the Pakistani army fought its way into a small town called Loesam in Bajaur, the agency at the northernmost tip of the FATA which had been in part overrun by militants. Bajaur was used by al-Qaeda as an occasional haven, had been hit by repeated drone strikes and was a rear base for militants engaging US troops over the border in Afghanistan. By the time the troops had secured the town, there was not much of it left. To save it, they had destroyed it. The bazaar was a pile of rubble, almost every home had been reduced to its concrete foundations and the only building still upright was the mosque that stood in the corner of what once was the local petrol station. The population had fled, joining an estimated 200,000 refugees displaced by the fighting over previous months.
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If the scene was a desolate one, it was set in a landscape of striking natural beauty. A few hundred metres out of the ruined town men of the 25th Punjab regiment had dug trenches among stands of slim ash and birch trees. Heavy machine guns traded fire with militants who still clung to a few battered strongpoints concealed in the dry, sandy valleys that ran, half hidden, between the empty fields up into the hills beyond. Smoke from fires started in the dry grass and scattered patches of woodland by shelling drifted in long grey strands. On the horizon, distant but visible in the clear autumn air, was the long ridge that marked the Afghan frontier with a spur where Damadola, the village hit hardest by repeated air strikes over previous years and now the effective headquarters of the militants, lay. Tanks were being brought up to deal with the militants’ mortars, which were still dropping shells just a few hundred metres from where Colonel Javed Baluch, the ground commander of the operation, sat by a pink plastic telephone and ordered tea, biscuits and artillery strikes with an equal nonchalance.
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Of all the armed groups in the FATA in 2008, the Pakistani army were clearly the biggest and the best-equipped force. They had been engaged in the frontier zone since late 2001, when troops had belatedly been sent to block the escape routes from Tora Bora. Over the intervening years dozens of operations the length and breadth of the FATA had cost over 1,000 Pakistani servicemen’s lives. In late 2008, with Musharraf gone and a civilian government in place, a new series of offensives was launched. One reason was increasing American pressure on the Pakistani high command to justify the $2 billion annual subsidy from Washington for their counter-terrorist operations. Another was the international outcry after the death of Bhutto. A third, perhaps the most pertinent of all, was the unprecedented spate of attacks on the Pakistani military itself through the autumn of 2007 and on into 2008. Previously, the bombings that had killed so many elsewhere in the country had largely spared the army installations. This had changed. Of the fifty-six suicide bombings in Pakistan in 2007, thirty-six had struck military targets and in all nearly 900 Pakistani security forces and officials had died over the year. By June 2008, that total had already been exceeded.
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A final factor was the realization by senior Pakistani military personnel of quite what sort of threat militancy now posed to the country. This had been reinforced when, in September 2008, hours after President Zardari’s maiden address to parliament, a huge truck bomb exploded outside the Marriott hotel in central Islamabad, ripping away the entire façade of the building and killing fifty-four and injuring over 250. This attack, in the heart of the capital and only a few hundred metres from where the entire cabinet was dining, was a direct assault on the core of the Pakistani political and security establishment.
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For once, rather than holding back the country’s new political leadership, army commanders actively set out to build up their enthusiasm for a series of broad-ranging offensives, showing Zardari and senior politicians propaganda videos made by militants which showed adult ‘spies’ executed by recruits apparently only ten or eleven years old.
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The Bajaur operation was the first of the new offensives and was very carefully watched from overseas. The use of drones, it was widely recognized, was a tactical rather than a strategic solution to the threat to the West that emanated from the FATA, and any longer-term solution would have to come from the Pakistanis and in particular from the Pakistani army. The machinations of the ISI in Afghanistan had already shaken the faith of many in the West in the Pakistani military and security establishment, and Western powers were hoping for a show of competence and resolve in Bajaur followed by a swift extension of operations into every tribal agency along the whole border, starting with a push south through Mohmand, another into the Khyber and eventually an assault into North and South Waziristan to disrupt al-Qaeda and relieve the pressure in Afghanistan. The Pakistanis had a slower operational tempo in mind. ‘Let’s just say our agenda and that of our international friends don’t always coincide,’ said Major General Tariq Khan, who commanded the Bajaur campaign from the Frontier Corps headquarters behind the brick ramparts of the old Sikh- and British-built fort in the centre of Peshawar.

Though wary, Western observers were heartened by the apparent will shown by the Pakistanis. Fears of a repetition of the deal-making that had marked previous such operations appeared unfounded. By the time they had fought their way into Loesam, the Pakistani army had sustained hundreds of casualties in Bajaur and still seemed determined to continue fighting.
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They appeared also to have inflicted heavy losses, not always a feature of previous campaigns. A pilot of one of the ageing but effective Cobra helicopter gunships recently supplied by the Americans and deployed in the operation described watching the militants running for cover or simply standing firing as he turned his Gatling guns on them. ‘Often you can see their faces, and the first few dozen or so bothered me,’ the thirty-eight-year-old told the author. ‘But when you’ve killed hundreds, you stop worrying.’
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Commanders on the ground said they had already killed around 1,000 militants so far.
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With the security of the West so intimately bound up with their actions and attitudes, it was natural that the Pakistani military as an institution would be the focus of much interest, frustration and bewilderment as the first decade of the 9/11 Wars had worn on. Early on, interest had mainly been in the political role played by the army, as was to be expected during a period of military rule. With Musharraf gone, the focus had become the capacity of the Pakistani army and in particular its ability and desire to implement the new counter-insurgency lessons from Iraq that were being introduced in Afghanistan. A slew of papers from Washington think-tanks and articles in specialized periodicals analysed the Pakistani army’s multiple failings, most due to its orientation towards fighting conventional battles against India. Neither before nor after the departure of Musharraf was there much analysis of the Pakistani army and its relationship with Pakistani society as a whole. This was a mistake as the degree to which the military reflected other social, political, cultural and economic developments within the nation as a whole went a long way to providing an answer to many of the questions that Western strategists found themselves continually posing about the competence, will and worldview of their allies. This was certainly true of the ISI’s Afghan strategy, as noted above. It was true too of the attitude of the military as a whole to operations in the tribal areas. The ISI did not exist in a vacuum. Staffed largely with officers drawn from the military on temporary attachment but with some civilian staff, it had, of course, developed its own institutional culture but represented that of the army more broadly too. The ISI’s collective understanding of Pakistan’s security interests did not diverge in any significant way from that of most Pakistani soldiers or indeed from most Pakistanis. The most obvious example was the glaring gap between how ordinary Pakistani officers who had nothing to do with the intelligence services viewed the enemy they were engaging in the FATA and how that enemy was viewed in the West.

Publicly, in Bajaur as elsewhere, officers and soldiers were careful to hide any misgivings about who they were fighting and why. ‘I just need to think about what these guys do to prisoners, the decapitations and everything, and I am happy pressing the trigger,’ said the helicopter pilot who had killed hundreds. For Colonel Javed Baluch, calling in the artillery fire in Loesam, the militants were ‘enemies of my country and undermining our security’. Major General Tariq Khan insisted that, ‘when our troops come into contact with the militants, they do not see them as Pakistanis or brother Muslims or whatever. They see them as the enemy.’ Khan admitted that there were some who ‘had doubts’. These, he said, were ‘those who have not come into contact with the reality on the ground’. But the situation was complex and, whatever the rationalizations employed, so were the views and sentiments of many of those troops deployed into the FATA. Firstly, many of those engaged in Bajaur and elsewhere were paramilitaries from the Frontier Corps, recruited from the same tribes and often families as the militants and, as repeated incidents of desertion or disobedience to orders had shown, steeped in much of the same culture, ideology and worldview as their peers who had chosen a different way of getting paid, getting some prestige and getting to carry a gun. The attitude of regular soldiers too revealed a significant degree of sympathy for their enemy. All ranks routinely referred to the enemy as ‘miscreants’ – a far less loaded term than terrorists or even militants – and saw them as misguided rather than necessarily malevolent. ‘They are our brothers who have been led astray and brainwashed,’ said Colonel Mohammed Nauman Saeed, who ran the rear base of the Bajaur operation in the local administrative centre of Khar. ‘But we have to fight them for the sake of our country as a whole.’ Nauman would not be drawn on who was responsible for the brainwashing. Others, speaking privately, were more forthcoming. After giving a lecture on al-Qaeda at GHQ in Rawalpindi, the author was reprimanded by several officers of colonel and higher rank for repeating the ‘lies of the Western establishment’ about bin Laden’s organization. Talking about the militants in Pakistan, their views were very clear. Those against whom their comrades were fighting in the FATA had been led astray by India, the CIA or ‘the Jews’, they said.

With no systematic surveys of the opinions of the half million men of Pakistan’s fighting forces, there was little empirical evidence that could help gauge quite how widespread such views were. This had long been a problem. The stories about Western analysts counting the beards on group pictures of senior Pakistani army officers were sadly not apocryphal. ‘It is simply very difficult to know,’ admitted one Western intelligence officer.
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Signs that a minority within the Pakistani military were increasingly drawn to radical Islamism had been there for many years. Not only had there been the relatively well-publicized involvement of military personnel in plots to kill Musharraf and a range of other violent acts, but there were also several much less well-known incidents of officers refusing to obey orders to fight militants, some as early as 2002.
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Then there was the small but significant number of former military personnel, mainly NCOs and junior officers, who had joined violent outfits such as Lashkar-e-Toiba on leaving the military or, in some instances, had actually left the army in order to pursue ‘the jihad’. Put together, these various elements often provoked claims that the entire Pakistani military was increasingly contaminated by extremism.

Yet, as with the broader analysis of the country as a whole, the focus on the most radical elements underplayed the impact of the much more significant general trends within Pakistani society – the growing mild Islamism, the social and political conservatism, the increased religiosity, the cultural turn towards the Middle East – on the army’s institutional culture, worldview and understanding of Pakistan’s interests. All militaries are institutions that are representative of the societies that produce them so it was inevitable that many if not all these elements would be present in the Pakistani army too. Indeed, various further factors meant that many of these trends were not simply represented within the army but
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One was historic: as the first decade of the twenty-first century passed, men who had joined the army during the Islamicization programmes introduced by General Zia when he had been in power during the 1980s had started reaching senior rank in significant numbers. Twenty-nine brigadiers appointed to general rank in January 2006 had been from ‘the class of 1978 or 1979’, and the proportion of officers who had served their early years and thrived sufficiently to climb the command hierarchy under Zia was rising with each passing wave of retirements.
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A second factor was the long hiatus, due to American sanctions imposed in 1990 and lifted in 2001, in overseas training for Pakistani officers in the USA.
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Many Pakistani officers serving in 2008 had simply never had any real contact with the West. Most had never travelled outside Pakistan. Nor, unlike in previous periods, were many likely to travel independently to Europe or America. This was partly because, like their civilian counterparts, most army officers appeared more likely to prefer, in the polarized and often hostile climate created by the 9/11 Wars, other destinations but also because they simply lacked the funds. A further factor in the over-representation of ‘Middle Pakistan’ in the army was that recruiting patterns had shifted over recent decades, and whereas, in the first decades after independence, army officers had been drawn almost exclusively from the wealthy landed elite, by the 1980s and 1990s they were increasingly drawn from the urban lower middle class. By 1998, 42 per cent of officers, an over-representation of at least a third, came from cities.
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A decade later, the proportion was even higher. They were educated in government schools or on scholarships to the more elite educational institutions, and their fathers were bureaucrats, pharmacists, engineers, teachers or indeed lower-ranking servicemen. Several of the students on the grass in the Bahauddin Zakariya University in Multan had said they wanted to be army officers. This, of course, had consequences that were naturally broader than the determination of the choice of a few hundred officers’ holiday destinations. The origins of this new mass of officers were in the ‘emerging urban centres’, which were, as the historian of the Pakistani army Shuja Nawaz has noted, ‘the traditional strongholds of the growing Islamist parties and conservatism associated with the petit bourgeoisie’.
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This meant that when one colonel, at the end of a diatribe against Bush, Blair, Israel, the Indians and the West in general, said, ‘We are the army of the nation,’ it was a statement that was more accurate than many in Europe and America cared to think.