President Barack Obama is about to announce his new strategy for Afghanistan, but the success of whatever option he chooses will depend heavily on Pakistan acting to stop its territory being used to attack Western forces next door. And that’s bad news, because the demands of its own domestic counterinsurgency campaign, doubts about the duration of U.S. commitment in Afghanistan and looming political instability in Islamabad have left Pakistan in no hurry to help out.
Obama’s National Security Adviser General James Jones last week visited Islamabad carrying a message from his boss to Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari. The New York Times reported Monday that in the letter, Obama urged Zardari to rally his nation behind a joint campaign against militants who fight the Pakistani government and those who fight U.S. and allied troops in Afghanistan. Obama was also reported to have demanded more decisive action against al-Qaeda leaders hiding in Pakistan’s tribal areas. In return, he reportedly offered a range of fresh incentives, “including enhanced intelligence sharing and military cooperation.”
The problem, of course, is that Obama’s letter may have gone to the wrong address. As a weak and unpopular President scarcely seen in public and now the object of growing vilification at home, Zardari is in no position to lead a popular movement against militancy, much less to redirect his army’s focus. As ever, it is the all-powerful military establishment that will make the key decisions in Pakistan.
Pakistan’s military has certainly moved decisively against those militants that pose a direct challenge to its authority on home soil. Buoyed by its successes in last May’s campaign to drive the Taliban out of the Swat Valley, it has for the past month deployed some 30,000 troops to confront the militants in their main stronghold of South Waziristan, along the Afghan border. The army has steadily cleared territory eastward, seizing some of the Pakistani Taliban’s most prized bases, but also sparking a vicious wave of terrorist attacks that continues to claim innocent lives on a near daily basis.
