:: OP-ED

Waziristan: Pak Army forgets lessons of the Raj

Indranil Banerjie

Oct.21 : "From the time of our earliest dealings with the Wazirs and Mahsuds these tribes have presented a most difficult problem and one which still awaits a satisfactory solution." This was the conclusion of a confidential report compiled by the British Indian Army headquarters in 1921 after approximately 69 years of intermittent warfare in Waziristan.

Curiously, the same conclusion could well have been penned by the Pakistani Army top brass as it commenced its latest offensive in that very area last week. Approximately two divisions worth of Pakistani troops supported by artillery, air power and tactical information provided by American military drones pummelled into the heart of Mehsud country in South Waziristan from three axes beginning last Saturday. This was perhaps the 11th attempt by the Pakistani Army to subdue the South Waziristan Agency (SWA) since 2001.

The aim is to destroy the core of the Tehrik-e-Taliban-Pakistan (TTP), a radical Islamist organisation that seeks to cleanse Pakistan of the American presence and impose Sharia in the country. The TTP is spread across several of Pakistan’s tribal agencies and some districts of the North-West Frontier Province. The outfit has demonstrated a capacity to carry out terrorist strikes in Punjab and attack the Pakistani Army, which is viewed as collaborating with the infidel Americans.

The core of the TTP is made up of members of the Mehsud tribesmen who live in the mountains and valleys of South Waziristan. The Mehsud heartland comprises the towns of Makin, Kanigoram and the lands around these two settlements. The undisputed chief of the TTP, Baitullah Mehsud, was killed near a place called Laddah in this area by a missile fired from a US drone on August 5 this year. He had, however, groomed a second-tier leadership comprising, among others, of Hakimullah Mehsud, the present leader of the TTP, and commanders Qari Hussein Mehsud (suicide squad chief), Wali-ur-Rehman Mehsud (local commander) and Maulvi Azmatullah. These men have vowed to fight on.

The Mehsuds, the British had learnt over almost a century of fighting, never quite give up. "Relying on the inaccessibility of their country, the Waziristan tribes have for centuries defied the power of the rulers of India and Afghanistan, and on more than one occasion in the past they engaged and defeated the invading armies of the Moghuls. Their character, organisation and instincts have made them independent and strongly democratic, so much so that even their own maliks (elders) have little real control over the unruly spirits", observed one British officer almost a century ago.

Not much has changed with the Mehsuds. South Waziristan remains the poorest and most backward in all of Pakistan. The valleys are in the most part stony and barren, while the higher reaches are mostly fit only for pasture. Their men have been fighting since Americans, Saudis and the Pakistanis launched the Afghan jihad in the early 1980s. Waziristan was the main area from where the Mujahideen were launched into neighbouring Afghanistan. The Soviets have long gone but the Mehsuds still send their men to fight in Afghanistan and in recent times against Pakistani security forces.

The Pakistani Army is faced with the unenviable task on tasking on the Mehsud in his own country. After a string of defeats that entailed fearsome casualties, the Pakistani Army has now launched what it calls the final offensive. Some commentators in the Pakistani media have dubbed it the "mother of battles" of the Frontier. The question is whether the Pakistani Army can do what the British Indian Army could not achieve after a hundred years of intermittent warfare in Waziristan?

British India’s involvement with Waziristan began in 1849 with the absorption of the Sikh Empire. The Waziris had hated the Sikhs who had collected taxes from them and had no intention of succumbing to the British. Trouble began in 1850 when several Waziri tribes got together and began raiding British-controlled towns in the plains.

Faced with these annoying attacks on their authority, the British did not know quite what to do. Initially the British employed what they called a "closed border" policy which was basically one of non-interference. The British maintained their forces in the towns of Bannu and Tank in the plains, and from time to time led what was called "butcher and bolt" operations against the Waziris. The second most successful was the "modified closed border" policy, which avoided establishing permanent military garrisons in the agency by raising local Lashkars headed by British officers to manage the tribes. The least successful was the "forward" policy, used first during 1895-1901 and then during 1923-47, which entailed the permanent posting of British forces in the tribal lands.

The first phase of the "forward" policy in Waziristan was prompted by the tribal jihad launched against the British for demarcating the Durand Line, which effectively divided Pashtun lands. This was when British troops learnt that "the Wazirs and Mahsuds operating in their own country, can be classed among the finest fighters in the world... they seldom allow a tactical error to go unpunished." The second phase of the "forward" policy was instituted after the third Anglo-Afghan War, and the constant revolts by the Waziri tribesmen. Permanent military garrisons were established in the towns of Ramzak, Jandola and Wana. These are the same garrisons from where the Pakistani Army is now launching its latest anti-Mehsud offensive.

The problem, as scholars like Dr Stephen Cohen and others have observed, is that the Pakistani military does not understand the concept of counter-insurgency and simply calls it "low-intensity conflict". In its Waziristan operations between 2004 and 2006, some analysts believe the Army lost as many as 3,000 men. Even then they were eventually forced to retreat.

Col. Yahya Effendi (Retd) of the Pakistan Army, scion of a distinguished martial family, pointed out in a widely-read paper: "The Pakistan Army over the years has been trained conventionally against India, and it is clueless about unconventional frontier warfare. The lessons learnt from the British in Waziristan, and elsewhere in FATA, have been erased from the Army’s institutional memory... and Waziristan perforce is serving as the new instructional campus for the Pakistan Army." The latest offensive is clearly going to prove a very costly refresher course.

Indranil Banerjie is a defence and security analyst based in New Delhi