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Pakistan army seen making progress in Swat operations

* Pakistan army cannot hunt jihadists quickly while undermining their support base: analysis

By Khalid Hasan

WASHINGTON: With the capture of the highest hill in Swat and the silencing of a radical radio station, the Pakistani security forces have shown the first sign of progress in several months against Islamist militants in the northwest of the country.
According to Stratfor, a news intelligence service, the government cannot allow Taliban-style militants to control territory in the NWFP. The Pakistani army is capable of regaining control over the main towns in the district. However, this area because of its demography, culture and the domestic political situation will, in the long run, allow for a post-crackdown revival of Islamist militancy. Despite being a tourist resort, Swat and the adjacent predominantly Pashtun districts are known for the fiercely conservative mixture of religion and tribalism in their local culture. It is quite similar to the culture in Pakistan’s tribal regions.
Stratfor believes that encouraged by their comrades’ successes in the tribal belt, jihadists’ ability to strike at the army in Punjab and the ongoing political turmoil in Pakistan, the Tehreek-e-Nifaz Shariat-e-Muhammadi (TNSM) decided to move to the next level: challenging the writ of Islamabad and trying to establish a state-within-a-state. From Islamabad’s vantage point, such behaviour might be tolerable in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, but in Swat, the militants crossed a red line, and their gains had to be reversed. This is why the situation in Swat is getting a more robust response than the negotiations Islamabad is pursuing in Waziristan. Pakistan knows that unless militancy is stopped in Swat, it will not be able to keep the heartland along the Indus Valley secure from the chaos that reigns in the mountainous Pashtun areas on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border. Pakistan faces massive problems in realising that objective. The terrain favours the militants and just as the Taliban melted away into rural areas after the US invasion of Afghanistan only to re-emerge later, their counterparts in Swat are likely to do the same.

Hunting jihadist:

According to the analysis, the Pakistan army cannot hunt the jihadists quickly while undermining their support base. Thus, a military operation will be tantamount to winning a battle but not the war, though the army is desperate for a visible and immediate victory. Ultimately, the Pakistani’s objective - maintaining the tribal area as a buffer zone between jihadist chaos and civilisation as the Pakistanis know it - will be difficult to achieve. In many ways, that buffer has already broken down, given that the districts in the NWFP that run along the tribal belt are already undergoing Talibanisation. Swat is the flashpoint for the next level of insurgency, a militancy with underlying roots and causes that go well beyond Swat and thus will not be quashed even if Pakistani forces crush the TNSM and kill Maulana Fazlullah.

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