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Further Reading

Pashtun Taliban Insurgency - Pakistan's Strategy

Pakistan fears an independent Afghan state aligned with India. Pakistani elites would prefer to see Pashtun ambitions externalized, in the pursuit of power in Afghanistan, rather than turned inward, in the pursuit of greater autonomy, or even independence for Pashtunistan.

Pakistan entered into a Faustian bargain with extremist militant groups. Since Zia ul-Haq's days, a great infrastructure that spews out fighters had been built up by the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), the Army and the bureaucracy, streatching along the border with Afghanistan from Balochistan to the end of the North West Frontier Province. For years, the ISI worked closely with the groups in training Pakistan's own network of militants to protect the country's interests in neighbouring Afghanistan and later to fight the conflict in Kashmir. At little expense, these groups helped provide Pakistan with "strategic depth" in Afghanistan, and then tied down hundreds of thousands of Indian troops in Kashmir.

The jehadi talent developed in the anti-Soviet conflict was redirected to Kashmir (among other places). The departure of the Soviets from Afghanistan and the rise in militancy in Kashmir came in the same year - 1989. Before 1990, the Kashmir Valley was relatively free of violence. When the mujahedeen were victorious in Kabul, yhey were redirected toward Kashmir. Since 1996, after the Taliban takeover in Kabul, militant Islamic groups from Pakistan and Afghanistan have taken over the struggle in Kashmir.

The level and exact nature of Pakistan's continued involvement in Afghanistan since the Soviet defeat is unclear. Many observers claimed that Pakistan continued to provide military support to its favorite mujahideen, especially to longtime ally Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. In 1993 it seemed the change of government in Pakistan that brought Benazir Bhutto to power, perhaps with the encouragementof Washington, led to Pakistan's withdrawal of support to Hekmatyar. The sudden appearance in October 1994 of the Taleban prompted numerous reports that Pakistan was behind that group's striking military success, including victory over the forces of Hekmatyar.

Hizb-i Islami's leader - former anti-Soviet mujahideen commander Gulbuddin Hekmatyar - is alleged to have been involved in the Afghan narcotics trade since the 1980s. While the Taliban are loyal predominantly to the Pashtun cause, Gulbuddin Hikmetyar's Hizb-i Islami Gulbuddin movement seems geared less to its purported brand of radical Islam than to simply regaining power for its veteran mujahiddin leader. For both, Al Qaeda is rather less of an ideological brother and more of a cash-rich and well connected support structure, particularly given the antipathy of Afghans towards the Arabs.

Because the Taliban and its leadership in Kandahari was central to Pakistan's strategy in Afghanistan, just as Kashmiri militants are with respect to India, the Government of Pakistan refrained from attacking them in any decisive fashion. Musharraf's decisions in this regard since 2001 reflected the consensus among the senior commanders of the Army and, thus the preferences of the military-dominated state. Islamabad's main concern is indigenous militants in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

Successive Pakistani governments have taken turns fighting them, appeasing them, playing one militant group against the other, or using them to make trouble in Kashmir and Afghanistan. Pakistan would concentrate most of its military forces on the Indian border, not the Afghan border. Despite having approximately 80,000 to 100,000 troops in the FATA, including Army and Frontier Corps (FC) units, the Government of Pakistan's authority in the area continued to be challenged. One of the reasons why al-Qaida was able to find safe haven in northwestern Pakistan after the rout of the Taliban in Afghanistan was that most of Pakistan's military resources were concentrated near the Indian border during the first half of 2002.

Militant groups "went rogue" after President Musharraf threw in his lot in with the Americans post-9/11, and increasingly operate outside the control of Pakistan's intelligence services. The militant groups had derived influence from their affiliations with powerful fundamentalist political parties in Pakistan, but as the militants were driven underground the political parties became less of a brake on their actions.

The Pakistani military - most notably the army - is designed to fight India, the world's second-most-populous nation and Pakistan's neighbor to the east. But large formations of conventionally trained troops are not going to help in the tribal areas. Rather, the Pakistani army learned the hard way that the tribal areas require a classic counterinsurgency campaign.

On 13 January 2002, in an attempt to defuse tensions with neighboring India, Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf promised to crack down on militants suspected of committing acts of violence against India. In a nationally televised speech, Musharraf also called on India to begin talks with Pakistan but he warns that any attempt to cross the Pakistani border will be met with "full force." In a widely anticipated speech, General Musharraf, said he will not permit terrorist activities on Pakistani soil. He outlawed two Pakistan-based separatist Kashmiri groups, Jaish-e-Mohammed and Lashkar-e-Toiba, which India blamed for the December 2001 deadly attack on its parliament. The Pakistani leader said his country's dispute with India over Kashmir should not be used as a pretext by extremists in Pakistan.

In June 2002, hostilities between India and Pakistan escalated, bringing the region close to war. However, American-brokered talks secured agreement by Pakistan to stop militant incursions into India-administered Kashmir. Subsquently, factions fighting Indian forces in Kashmir have become increasingly Islamist, emphasizing religious over nationalist objectives. Levels of violence have declined since the start of peace talks in 2004.

The FATA region is nominally under Pakistani control, but it's administered under the Frontier Criminal Regulation originally put in place by the British. Overall literacy in the region is about 18 percent, with the female literacy rate at 3 percent. With the exception of some countries in Africa, the region has the highest rates of infant and maternal mortality in the world.

In 2002, Pakistan moved regular forces into the tribal areas for the first time. Meanwhile, US and coalition forces were driving the Taliban and their al Qaeda allies out of Afghanistan. The Pakistanis tried to stop the flow of Taliban fighters and also to prevent the displacement of al Qaeda elements from Afghanistan into Pakistan. They were not able to do that. The Pakistani army was regarded as an occupying force in the tribal areas. The effort to maintain order and keep militants out of the tribal areas backfired, and the army became a factor in the increasing violence in the region.

Some analysts in Pakistan and elsewhere maintain that solving the FATA problem requires bringing the tribal areas under the full control of the central Pakistani state, and facilitating major economic development. By 2009 the new government of Asif Zardari appeared to agree.