What's Happening in Pakistan?
I posted a few days ago a warning from British generals about Afghanistan that stated that if Afghanistan were to fail and fall back to warlords and extremists, Pakistan would follow it into disintegration and Islamists would likely come to power there.
However, since then, the fallout from the assault on the Red Mosque has been producing several attacks on Pakistani troops, with another ambush being reported today. If John Robb is right, Pakistan may just unravel without any assistance from Afghanistan.
The emerging open source insurgency in Pakistan may have found its plausible promise: to defeat the Pakistani military establishment. Here's how it developed.
The first incident was the assault on the Red Mosque in Islamabad (which militants claim took the lives of 1,500 people, mostly students). This incident fixed the target of the insurgency (the Pakistani military and not NATO next door in Afghanistan). It also generated sufficient motivation for violence. The second has been a series of examples of successful attacks against the Pakistani military. Specifically, suicide-bomb attacks against military targets (at a recruitment center, a convoy, a patrol, and several checkpoints -- with over 100 killed).
With a plausible promise in place, all that is needed is a pool of new groups to participate. That may already be present. The intrepid Syed Shahzad, of the Asia Times, reports that there is a host of rapidly growing networks of insurgents outside of the control of traditional groups (which makes them relatively immune to government coercion/negotiation):
I’m still not certain that if Afghanistan goes down the tubes that Pakistan must follow it, but I do know if Pakistan goes down, the situation in Afghanistan quickly turns to hopeless for NATO.
And it always bears mentioning that we’re talking about a nation with a functioning nuclear weapons program and a known history of trafficking in proscribed technology related to that program. Not that this wasn’t a dangerous place before, but it is moving rapidly to become the most dangerous place in the world and for the world.
