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The Afghanistan- Pakistan Theater PDF

161 Pages·2010·1.6 MB·English
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The Afghanistan- Pakistan Theater Militant islaM, security & stability EditEd By daveed Gartenstein-Ross & Clifford d. May FDD PRESS A division of the FOUNDATION FOR DEFENSE OF DEMOCRACIES Washington, D.C. Copyright © 2010 by FDD Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First Edition For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to: [email protected], or Permissions, FDD Press, P.O. Box 33249, Washington, D.C. 20033 ISBN: 978-0-981-97123-0 Joshua T. White’s chapter “Pakistan’s Islamist Frontier: Islamic Politics and U.S. Policy in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier” is adapted from his 2008 monograph of the same title, with permission of the publisher. © 2008 by the Center on Faith & International Affairs at the Institute for Global Engagement. Daveed Gartenstein-Ross’s chapter “Religious Militancy in Pakistan’s Military and Inter- Services Intelligence Agency” is adapted from his article “Fixing Our Pakistan Problem” in the Spring 2009 issue of the Journal of International Security Affairs, with permission of the publisher. © 2009 by JINSA. Cover art: Michal Baranski / Shutterstock Cover design: Spark Design / www.sparkdesign.net Also by the Authors Edited by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross & Clifford D. May From Energy Crisis to Energy Security (FDD Press 2008) By Daveed Gartenstein-Ross My Year Inside Radical Islam (Tarcher/Penguin 2007) Homegrown Terrorists in the U.S. and U.K.: An Empirical Examination of the Radicalization Process (FDD Press 2009, with Laura Grossman) Terrorism in the West 2008 (FDD Press 2009, with Joshua D. Goodman & Laura Grossman) tAble of Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction by Daveed Gartenstein-Ross 1 1 An Assessment of Pakistan’s Peace Agreements with Militants in Waziristan (2004-2008) 7 Hassan Abbas 2 Pakistan’s Security and the Civil-Military Nexus 18 Shuja Nawaz 3 Religious Militancy in Pakistan’s Military and Inter-Services Intelligence Agency 29 Daveed Gartenstein-Ross 4 Pakistan’s Islamist Frontier: Islamic Politics and U.S. Policy in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier 41 Joshua T. White 5 Afghanistan’s Flawed Elections: Implications for the Insurgency 75 C. Christine Fair 6 The Drug-Conflict Nexus in South Asia: Beyond Taliban Profits and Afghanistan 90 Vanda Felbab-Brown 7 Rough Terrain: The Human Terrain System in Afghanistan 113 Vanessa Gezari 8 The Enemy: Understanding and Defeating Jihadist Ideology 126 Sebastian Gorka The Contributors 143 Index 147 ACknowledgments this book is largely a product of the Foundation for Defense of Democra- cies’ (FDD) 2009 Leading Thinkers policy workshop on Afghanistan and Pakistan. This workshop brought together an impressive array of thinkers representing a true diversity of perspectives, including experts with significant regional expertise, leading academics, military strategists, former intelligence operatives, members of the media, and the ambassadors of Afghanistan and Pakistan. At times participants found great areas of agreement, at times their differences led to sharp exchanges; but the conversation was never dull. All of the contributors to this volume attended the Leading Thinkers confer- ence, and we would like to thank them first. This book would not have been possible without the excellent chapters we received from Hassan Abbas, C. Christine Fair, Vanda Felbab-Brown, Vanessa Gezari, Sebastian Gorka, Shuja Nawaz, and Joshua T. White. We are grateful to Toby Dershowitz and Alan Mairson of The Dershowitz Group and FDD’s Sara Westfall for their thoughtful work on this book’s layout and design. Melissa Newberg did excellent work fact-checking the chapters, and Tara Vassefi contributed an important final read through the manuscript to uncover remaining grammatical and typographical errors. Gregg Carlstrom of Al Jazeera English also helped to ensure the quality of the final manuscript through his excellent work as our outside reviewer. This book is a product of the passion, dedication, and intelligence that many at FDD have devoted to the organization’s significant projects. Though there are many we could name, we would like to single out executive director Mark Dubowitz and senior vice president of communications and operations Bill McCarthy for their tireless efforts. We thank the Li Ka Shing Foundation for its generous support for our Leading Thinkers conference series, and this book. And we also extend our heartfelt thanks to Bill Nixon, CEO of Policy Impact, and to his talented staff, for all of their support and effort. Bill is truly an enlightened and visionary Washington figure, and we are grateful for his abiding friendship. —Daveed Gartenstein-Ross & Clifford D. May vii Introduction military operations in Afghanistan are heating up as I write this. Press accounts suggest that NATO operations in Marjah have met with early success1—but the key question in this theater has always been what happens after an area is cleared of insurgents. To that extent, the Obama administration has trumpeted a revised strategy for approaching a war in which the U.S. has been embroiled for more than eight years. But observers across the political spectrum agree that military operations alone are not enough to secure Afghanistan against a powerful insurgency; and moreover, any analysis of the war in Afghanistan that ignores the key role played by Pakistan will offer an incomplete picture. A broader perspective is needed, and this book brings together top minds who can help to provide it. Afghanistan was supposed to be “the good war,” in contrast to the U.S.’s war in Iraq. By 2003, the military was telling American officials that the Taliban were a “spent force,” and CIA specialists and Special Forces units alike were being reassigned to the Iraq theater.2 To say that those early proclamations of victory were premature is an understatement. The failures of the U.S.’s Afghani- stan policy over the past eight years should be familiar to most readers, including the diversion of resources to Iraq, international forces that were “poorly config- ured” for counterinsurgency,3 lackluster attempts at reconstruction, continuing 1

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Taliban factions in South Waziristan and parts of Afghanistan. tional capabilities and neutralizing key figures—and the operation was very.
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