by Shuja Nawaz
Naturally, there are nuances to this. At any given time, at least 30 % are out on leave, courses, temporary duty, etc. That means there are about 1,40,000 soldiers physically deployed in managing the LoC and the CI grid in J&K.
Shukla does not take into account Indian forces in Ladakh facing China. These figures, which sometimes are inflated by Pakistani sources, give strength to the Pakistani strategic aim of forcing India to expend massive amounts in support of its efforts to control the militancy in Kashmir. Any forces that are thus employed are not available for deployment against Pakistan proper according to the traditional Pakistani calculus.
The Pakistan Army also was involved in conventional conflicts with India, largely on the eastern border of its western wing that it claimed were victories, since it managed to avoid being overwhelmed by a much larger Indian Army and Air Force and traded territory with India along the border of West Pakistan. The Pakistani Air Force played a key role in 1965, and a limited one in 1971. Their navies played a tertiary role in these conflicts.
The regular Pakistan Army played only a tangential role in the battle of the Afghan Mujahideen against the Soviet occupation of their country. The vanguard here was the ISI Directorate, with logistical support provided as needed by frontline army formations facing Afghanistan. The army created a new corps headquarters (12 Corps) in Quetta, as a potential conventional barrier to any Soviet incursion into Pakistan, if the Soviet army was to head to the warm waters of the Gulf. Indeed, there was some resentment against the ISI by regular army officers at the vast resources being made available to the ISI without adequate controls or oversight. Many saw this as a key element in changing the traditional discipline and thinking of the army officers seconded to the ISI.
What complicated the situation was the continuation of a military dictatorship legitimized by the US and other foreign support for Gen. Zia-ul-Haq’s regime and the infiltration of senior military brass and even some lower-level officers into the administration of martial law as well as civilian departments. Not all of these seconded officers enjoyed these roles. But it certainly created a greater sense among the officer corps that they could do the job of the civilians and maybe better! After a brief interregnum of civilian rule with the untimely departure of Zia-ul-Haq another military coup d’état took place that upended Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif ’s government in October 1999, bringing in the regime of Gen. Pervez Musharraf, a former commando with enormous confidence about his ability to transform the country. He took the country into a new type of war, pitching the army and the FC against local insurgents as well as a congeries of disaffected militants from Central Asia and elsewhere in the Muslim world on the border with Afghanistan. But, the public record indicates he fought this war from afar—having been ostracized by the liberal Western order, after his coup in 1999.
Musharraf was readmitted to the comity of nations by the US and others after the terrorist attacks on the US mainland of 11 September 2001, leading to the invasion of Afghanistan. He signed up with the Coalition. The war between the Taliban insurgents and the Coalition Forces ensued and continued for nearly two decades without resolution. It led to the rapid movement of some 35,000 Pakistani regular forces, initially by Musharraf, into the borderlands of Pakistan with Afghanistan that had been left by the Pakistani forces soon after Independence in 1947.
This spawned an immediate backlash and insurgency among the tribal youth that Pakistan refused at first to recognize as such. The term ‘miscreant’ was dusted off and reissued by the ISPR Directorate, partially because it wished to minimize the nature of the conflict and partially because it failed to understand the nature of the conflict, as did its bosses at army headquarters. Many of the generals described this internal war as a ‘low-intensity conflict’ (LIC) even after their Coalition allies began to use the acronym COIN. In other words, the Pakistani military view was that all you needed was conventional force employed at a smaller scale than in a regular war against say India. They saw the fight taking place largely on the physical battlefield. And they were woefully unprepared in terms of training and equipment for this war. It would take years and many casualties for them to adjust their thinking and actions.
Moreover, in the rush to do the bidding of his newly rediscovered allies in the US and NATO, Musharraf and his generals immediately moved regular army units that were posted in peacetime locations near the western border into the FATA. Proximity seemed to be key to these deployments. Most of these units and formations had little operational knowledge of the frontier terrain or language and customs. For instance, 7 Division that was based in Peshawar moved its forward headquarters to Miram Shah in North Waziristan. Its training and battle assignment in all Pakistani conflicts with India had been in the southern half of Kashmir. It had no direct knowledge of the terrain or the people of FATA. As late as 2010, when I visited North Waziristan, the 7 Division officer accompanying me during my visit, who had been there for two years by then, admitted to knowing no Pashto. The army had numerous regiments that had 50 per cent Pakhtun complement and whose officers were expected to learn Pashto and were given allowances for the extra language skill. Rather than preparing and deploying those Pashto-speaking formations, the contiguous forces from Peshawar, Bannu, Kohat, etc., were pushed into FATA with an unclear mission. They found themselves, as had their predecessors in East Pakistan in 1971, as strangers in their own homeland.
It also appears that the calculations made by Musharraf and his then Finance Minister Shaukat Aziz did not foresee a long conflict and deployment. So they accepted US assistance via the CSF largely on the basis of a formula that used the marginal cost of moving troops to the border region. The related agreement signed with the US regarding the ‘Transit of US Cargo to and from the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan through the Territory of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan’ was only produced as an MoU in 2012. 2 This covered the transport of non-lethal materials, and no taxes or charges were to be collected by Pakistan. The agreement was to serve as the basis of later agreements for NATO and would only last for three years, subject to renewal. It is not clear if this was formally renewed. There is no role assigned to the Pakistani Ministry of Foreign Affairs in this MOU or its implementation, nor in an earlier agreement titled US-PK01 on the ‘Acquisition and Cross Servicing’ between the DoD of the US and the MoD of Pakistan on 9 February 2002. This agreement was ‘for the purpose of establishing basic terms, conditions, and procedures to facilitate the reciprocal provision of logistic support, [non-lethal] supplies, and services’ related to the US and allied war in Afghanistan, establishing the general principles for pricing and reimbursement, tying Pakistan to charge no more than what it paid for such services for its own operations and acquisitions. The agreement was to last ten years unless terminated by either party with 180 days’ notice. As was the case of the later 2012 MOU, this agreement was between the Pakistani MoD and the US DoD, without any defined role for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Pakistan. 3
Musharraf, who had shown a willingness to face risks as a young officer, for some reason did not appear to have visited FATA as army chief and president of Pakistan, when the insurgency was being fought there by his troops, other than visits to Peshawar to meet tribal elders. Musharraf challenges that by saying that he ‘went many times’ and even crossed the Indian LoC in Kargil. 4 Inexplicably, there is no record of his visits to FATA on the Web, or publicly available at the ISPR Directorate. A number of his subordinates said that he essentially farmed out the operational management of the army to his vice chiefs and was not a frequent visitor to GHQ.
When one of them, Gen. Kayani, became the army chief, he undertook to engage publicly with his troops in the field and to clarify their mission in a manner that helped stem the desertions and faltering initial performance of the regular military against an irregular force. Not unsurprisingly, his immediate task was to focus on the troops by declaring his first year as chief to be the Year of the Soldier and the second year the Year of Training.
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br /> Most of the army’s training had been following the grand and long campaigns of the Second World War and even as far back as the American Civil War. The lessons learned by the British in Frontier Warfare at the outset of the twentieth century had gradually been discarded in the 1970s and replaced with a different kind of mountain warfare: fighting in high snow-covered mountains in the frozen wastelands of northern Kashmir where most of the casualties were not from Indian action but from frost bite and oedema caused by the heights of the battle stations—over 15,000 feet or thereabouts. Over time, Pakistan produced a generation of army leaders who were trained in high-level strategic thinking for extended campaigns despite the fact that even the conventional wars with India had been of short duration and had their roots in political conflicts and that were ended by political agreements. All, except the case of 1971, when Pakistan lost the war to India on the battlefield and surrendered some 93,000 persons, including its entire military force in East Pakistan, the territory that became the new state of Bangladesh. The mental straitjacket of what was known as the Staff Solution to military problems came to be the Rule of the Day. Officers who came up with unusual solutions and ideas found themselves discarded in the promotion process. 5 Extended martial law also meant that there was little turnover in the uppermost ranks, leading to the promotion of favourites and creation of clones or those who had served with the senior officers in earlier postings.
Musharraf himself had been very critical of martial law:
First, whenever the army gets involved with martial law, it gets distracted from its vital military duties. Military training and operational readiness suffer. Second, when we superimpose martial law and place the military over the civilian government, the latter ceases functioning. When martial law is later lifted, the civilian functionaries remain ineffective. Their growth is stunted. Last, I learned that whatever the law, civil or military, the poor are always victims of oppression. The rich and the powerful generally remain above the law. 6
His actions as COAS and president over time ran counter to these liberal instincts as he inducted more and more army officers into the civil services and spent more time playing the politician on the basis of the military’s latent coercive power rather than a broad base of political support. His successor, Kayani, had to recall most of the army officers from civilian posts after taking over and forbade meetings of serving officers with politicians, including President Musharraf.
Extended military rule fostered the formation of closed kinship networks of officers who had served with each other or belonged to the same arm or service groups. Group-think took root and prevented the kind of massive transformation of military thought and operation that was needed to cope with the new warfare, inside Pakistani territory, against its own people, against fellow Muslims who said they were fighting in the name of Islam.
Potentially adding to the difficulty was the infusion into the military of deeply conservative Islamic thinking and the formation of Pir Bhai networks of spiritual bands that included civilians and military men and threatened the discipline and rank order of the military. This began in the Zia-ul-Haq period, but appears to be extant to some extent even today, according to those who follow these networks. (I received examples from serving and retired military officers citing instances of behaviour that was unacceptable in military circles, e.g., senior officers opening the door for a junior officer who outranked them in the Pir Bhai network. Or, an officer refusing to take part in a water-crossing exercise because it was ‘unIslamic’ for him to wear shorts that exposed his knees, according to the regimental maulvi! The commanding officer who had to deal with this intransigence had to read the riot act to both the maulvi and the officer concerned and reassembled the entire regiment to watch the officer try to swim across the canal water obstacle the next day in his shorts!)
The Tablighi Jamaat, a proselytizing group, had already penetrated the upper echelons of the military. Two DGs of the ISI and some corps commanders had been members of this group and, like their colleagues, they favoured others from their own group. Members of the group were duty-bound to take leave of absence to do missionary work each year at home or abroad. These issues bedevilled the military’s operations and processes. The army did take steps to reduce the visible aspects of some of these trends, but at the same time, the use of Islamic symbolism in signage inside cantonments remains a visible reminder of the difficulty of removing the powerful role of religion in the army. It also tried to identify some radicalized officers and purged them from the ranks. But as recruitment became urbanized and broad-based, it was difficult to totally remove this potential threat.
‘Learning by Doing’
In the absence of formal training methodologies and doctrines for fighting the insurgency epitomized by the TTP and the Baloch nationalist groups, the military improvised on the run. Field commanders learned on the job, often at a high cost in terms of men lost or wounded. Some of them shared their experiences with others. More often than not, the experience was lost during rotations. These rotations started initially for one year at a time and then were extended to one and a half years and eventually to two years at a time in FATA, according to Kayani’s DGMO Maj. Gen. Javed Iqbal. 7 The army had calculated by 2010 that some 80 per cent of all operations since 2001 had taken place in the previous two years. All this had occurred at a time when Pakistan faced massive flooding that temporarily took away military resources in aid of civil power to help with the flood relief work. While infantry regiments undertook the brunt of the COIN work, they received support from armour, engineering and other services in holding cleared areas and participating in rebuilding work.
Meanwhile, US and Coalition assistance had begun arriving, in the shape of military supplies, as well as forensic facilities in Islamabad, equipped by the US, UK and Australia, according to DGMO Iqbal. The ISI was given the lead role in this area. These facilities helped counter a rising tide of Improvised Explosive Device (IED) attacks that emerged as a response to the increased military operations in FATA. A key element that Iqbal noted was that the officer-to-soldier casualty ratio was high, 10:1, indicating that officers led from the front. Kayani also echoed this sentiment and shared it with his ISAF counterparts frequently. Iqbal and his director, Brig. Waseem Ashraf, also from the FF Regiment, gave me a breakdown of Pakistan Army deployments in the field and in different parts of the country that were largely reflected in the September 2011 document handed by Kayani to Gen. James Mattis of CENTCOM. Some 147,000 Pakistani troops were on the western border, out of a total of 480,000. Some 37,000 were deployed in North Waziristan but had not been launched into a clearing operation. These included 10,000 members of the FC, locally recruited but commanded by regular Pakistan Army officers.
By 2010, the Pakistan Army had had 11,037 casualties, including 7,684 killed in action, much larger than the combined total of Coalition and especially American casualties inside Afghanistan (though civil and military Afghan casualties were much higher). The running joke was that ISAF stood for ‘I See Americans Fight’, since many of the members of the Coalition were operating under severe constraints imposed by their respective governments and chose not to engage in battle with the enemy!
Yet, Pakistan operated with limited weapon systems. Gunship helicopters were the most effective for providing mobility and firepower in the rugged terrain of FATA, in an area that was missing roads. A total of twenty-nine Cobra helicopters had been provided to Pakistan by the US after 9/11, much less than Pakistan had demanded and needed. Brig. Ashraf confirmed that the Cobras, despite their limitations, had been extensively used, flying some 6,010 sorties in 2009 and 4,190 in 2010. The Pakistan Army struggled to keep maintenance at a high level, some 75 per cent, compared with the 50–60 per cent that is considered normal. Compounding the difficulties was the fact that ISAF had pulled troops back from the Pakistan–Afghanistan border to guard the cities. At the lower level in the Pakistan Army, the call was to prepare for clearing operations in North Wazirist
an, using a cordon-and-search method. But the green light was not given during Kayani’s tenure.
In an effort to come up with a makeshift COIN strategy, the army was trying to introduce the concept of Quick Impact Projects in the FATA region. Since the civil administration had been decimated and local Tribal Maliks targeted by the Taliban, the army was trying to initiate the building of roads and water projects, funded by the US and the UAE. The latter especially assisted with works in Swat, South Waziristan and Bajaur. The US aid extended also to intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, albeit very slowly, and in the use of night-vision devices. Although, the first batch of night-vision goggles were vintage models that did not operate effectively on full-moon nights, and the American ODRP sought to take an inventory of the devices regularly so they had to be withdrawn from service too frequently. This was eventually changed, but the policy of checking on the location of the devices (the US feared they might be moved to the Indian border!) reflected the short leash on which the US commanders wanted Pakistan to operate.
The FC provided a necessary but much neglected component of the battle against militancy in FATA. Its advantage was that it was comprised of locals and most of the time the 59 Wings (roughly equivalent to a regiment each), supported by a limited three squadrons of armour. According to a retired armour officer, old T-59 tanks were manned by crews from the FC and trained by the Pakistan Armoured Corps. It was the first time that tanks were deployed in COIN operations (Shangla, Dir, Bajaur) and proved to be very effective not only in leading the advance but also in Casualty Evacuation (CASEVAC) and resupply of infantry since they could run the gauntlet of fire. Some were repeatedly hit by Rocket-Propelled Grenades (RPGs) and survived to fight on. Taking a cue from this, when the Pakistan Army went into Waziristan, tanks were an essential component of the combat teams and much feared by the militants. They have traversed terrain that was previously considered untankable, and operated at heights of 6,000–7,000 feet. Some seventeen artillery batteries also had a permanent presence in some 616 posts. FC presence was continuous and often within their tribal boundaries. Some thirty-four tribes from FATA were represented in the FC. Although, unlike the regular Pakistan Army, their battlefield rotations were not to peacetime locations inside Pakistan but to other parts of FATA. In effect, the FC was fighting nonstop since 2001! As the Deputy IG Brig. Usman explained to me, since 2008 they had become the spearhead of the anti-terror operations.
