Between The Hammer And The Anvil Marshmallow

The NY Times reports back from Obama's central front in the war on terror:

Pakistan Makes a Taliban Truce, Creating a Haven
By JANE PERLEZ

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — The government announced Monday that it would accept a system of Islamic law in the Swat valley and agreed to a truce, effectively conceding the area as a Taliban sanctuary and suspending a faltering effort by the army to crush the insurgents.

The concessions to the militants, who now control about 70 percent of the region just 100 miles from the capital, were criticized by Pakistani analysts as a capitulation by a government desperate to stop Taliban abuses and a military embarrassed at losing ground after more than a year of intermittent fighting. About 3,000 Taliban militants have kept 12,000 government troops at bay and terrorized the local population with floggings and the burning of schools.

Just to review - the Taliban, and Al Qaeda members, fled to Waziristan and the Northwest Frontier area of Pakistan after the US led overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.  But what about this movement into the Swat Valley?

Announced by the government of the North-West Frontier Province after consultation with President Asif Ali Zardari, the pact echoed previous government accords with the militants across Pakistan’s semi-autonomous tribal areas in North and South Waziristan.

Those regions have since become a mini-state for Qaeda and Taliban militants, who are now the focus of missile strikes by remotely piloted American aircraft. On Monday, what was thought to be a drone strike in Kurram, a separate area close to the Afghan border, killed 31 people, Pakistani intelligence officials said.

Analysts are now suggesting that the drone strikes may be pushing the Taliban, and even some Qaeda elements, out of the tribal belt and into Swat, making the valley more important to the Taliban.

So Obama is going to commit more troops to Afghanistan with the result that the Taliban will be pushed even deeper into Pakistan, further destabilizing that government?  Any day now!

I am not normally a big advocate for quagmire and stalemate but if the choice is between allowing the Taliban to preserve a toehold on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border or forcing an answer to the question of whether the Pakistani government is strong enough to survive a Taliban migration, well, maybe stalemate and quagmire have overlooked virtues.

A new US Institute for Peace study outlines a path to victory in Afghanistan.  From Reuters:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The drive to stabilize Afghanistan must focus on cultivating local leaders, better training of Afghan troops and police, and pressing Kabul to fight corruption, a report by a U.S. think tank said on Tuesday.

Security in Afghanistan should be rethought to address failures in the seven years since the ousting of the Islamist Taliban after the September 11 attacks, the report published by the U.S. Institute of Peace says.

The top-down approach at nation-building that is focused on the central government in Kabul has not worked well because it ignores Afghanistan's decentralized history, said the U.S. Congress-funded institute's report, titled "Securing Afghanistan."

"The weak nature of the Afghan state, the inadequate level of international forces, and the local nature of the insurgency require building a bottom-up capacity to complement national forces," it said.

The press release does not advocate a continuing stalemate:

The United States and its international allies must re-examine their core objectives in Afghanistan, it says. The first objective should be to eliminate the use of Afghanistan and Pakistan as a base of operations for international terrorist groups (like al Qa'ida) and their allies (like the Taliban).

VOX POPULI:  From the original Times article, discussing the popular will in Pakistan:

Sherry Rehman, the government information minister, said the deal should not be seen as a concession. “It is in no way a sign of the state’s weakness,” she said. “The public will of the population of the Swat region is at the center of all efforts, and it should be taken into account while debating the merits of this agreement.”

In legislative elections a year ago, the people of Swat, a region that is about the size of Delaware and has 1.3 million residents, voted overwhelmingly for the secular Awami National Party. Since then, the Taliban have singled out elected politicians with suicide bomb attacks and chased virtually all of them from the valley. Several hundred thousand residents have also fled the fighting.

On the other hand, as in Afghanistan the Taliban have been able to exploit the weakness and corruption of the central government:

Many of the poor who have stayed in Swat, which until the late 1960s was ruled by a prince, were calling for the Shariah courts as a way of achieving quick justice and dispensing with the long delays and corruption of the civil courts. The authorities in the North-West Frontier Province, which includes Swat, argued that the Shariah courts were not the same as strict Islamic law. The new laws, for instance, would not ban education of females or impose other strict tenets espoused by the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The new accord, they said, would simply activate laws already agreed to by Benazir Bhutto in the early 1990s when she was prime minister. Similarly, the principle of Shariah courts in Swat was also agreed to by Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in 1999. In both cases, the courts, though approved, were never put in place.

A Pakistani official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the official did not have permission to speak publicly, said that the government’s acceptance of the courts was an attempt to blunt efforts of the Taliban to woo Swat residents frustrated by the ineffective judiciary.

“The Taliban was trying to take advantage of the local movement and desire for a judicial system,” the official said. The official insisted that the Obama administration, informed of the accord, “showed understanding of our strategy.”

[END OF THREAD]

Comments

[bad]

Weakness and corruption in central government has gone viral.

[bad]

The world's press has documented Hillary as a liar. Do world leaders have any confidence in her statements as they meet? And she represents Obama.

Good grief.

[kim]

Everybody seems to be ignoring a root cause. Saudi money to madrassahs. Watcha gonna do about dat, O Boy?
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[kim]

I don't know about these last two, yet, but 'end of thread' ain't workin'.
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[bad]

Gibbs says Obama will lay out his plan for Afghanistan soon.

Will that be before or after Geithner's revelations....

[narciso]

As usual, Hanson, sums it up on both the domestic and foreign fronts

[kim]

I'm still simmering over Obama's promise last week that Geithner's plan would be laid out 'in great detail'. Hogwash. Now was it a deliberate lie, knowing there was no detail? Was it an ignorant lie, believing that the plan would be detailed? Or was it a stupid lie, believing that there was detail when there wasn't. None of these choices is confidence inducing. Send in the clowns, indeed.
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[vnjagvet]

Another policy unravelling under WonderZero. There seems to be a pattern developing this past month.

I wonder if he breaks out the columns from the Dem Convention and a praetorian guard for the signing today.

[narciso]

It's distressing, but sadly not surprising except for how quickly it's going

[ajacksonian]

Then there is the other little problem of getting troops supplied. With the Taliban/al Qaeda in virtual control of the two main overland supply routes, the US is working with a very slender logistics tail that can be cut. This requires not only the bottom-up approach, but the lateral-oblique approach that would be worthy of any hopeychanginess... not that the current POTUS can find his policy with both hands on his backsides. I took a page from the last successful western general to go through the area and reformulate what to do... not that anyone cares about that.

As far as I know this is the first President to not care about a declared war of the US and divert funds from fighting to domestic concerns. That is not the way to win a war, and if war spending was supposed to be the thing that saved the US economy from FDR's depredations, then why is it, exactly, that we aren't fighting more heavily and wasting money in that, instead of trying to go socialist on the banks, auto companies, etc.? Apparently we are trying to lose the war and the Nation from the inside... and just where are all the chickenhawk crowers, these days? Signed up yet, the lot of them?

Silly, me... that would mean sticking to stated principles oneself instead of castigating others for not having ones you support. Almost like they were hypocrites, or something and could never do anything positive for the Nation. Poor dears, needing a Nannystate to care for them with such sweet arsenic...

[narciso]

One is reminded with the whole Chuchill bust brouhaha, than young Winston fought and reported on the fight against the Mullah of Malakand, in the Swat Valley, 111 years ago
(re; Charles Allen's God's Warriors)

[narciso]

I was listening on the Radio, about what the Taliban rules, now being imposed in the Swat Valley, and previously in Afghanistan are like. Women must wear burkas, they can only be outside with a male relative, they
can not be seen from a balcony, upper windows should be blocked, so they cannot be seen. Their voices should not be heard, and no high heeled shoes, that might alert
men to the their presence. These people need to be kickstarted into the 20th Century, and I have just the candidate to do it. Instead we have a pampered African Luo prince, who seems to take these social
arrangements for granted.

[kim]

Can't let this thread die without a reference to the Sultan of Swat.
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