The Political Conundrum!

Asif Ali Zardari, imminently to become Pakistan’s President, faces a resurgent Taliban, ongoing terrorist attacks and a fractured political environment which makes effective responses all the harder. President Pervez Musharraf’s resignation as President on August 18 could have provided an opportunity for a coalition government to take charge on security issues. But the withdrawal on August 25 of Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) from the coalition has left Zardari’s Pakistan People's Party (PPP) weakened. Immediate political challenges include the Islamist party Jamaat-i-Islami’s efforts to have the PML-N to join its All Pakistan Democratic Movement in opposition to the secularist PPP, making it all the harder for the PPP government to take the aggressive military steps needs to combat the Taliban and al-Qaeda where they are operating in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and South Waziristan.

Located along Pakistan's northwestern border with Afghanistan, FATA consists of seven tribal agencies and six frontier regions with more than 3 million people. The FATA continues to be administered by Pakistan alone an administrative scheme developed more than a century ago by the Colonial British. The people of the FATA have limited civil rights, and even more limited social services, with high poverty, high unemployment, low literacy, and an infrastructure that could charitably be called underdeveloped. Many areas remain barely subject to Pakistani rule, providing territory for criminals as well as extremists. The porous border is a narcotics smuggler’s paradise, exploited by the Taliban among others. It is also a center for terrorist safe-haven, despite ongoing U.S.-Pakistani military efforts there, and for cross-border destabilization efforts in Afghanistan.

In the best of times, any civilian leader would have his hands full trying to gain control of the FATA, as well as of Pakistan’ two strongest institutions, the Pakistani military and Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), both of whom have long-standing ties to extremist groups, including the Taliban, recurrent involvement in drug trafficking, and well-documented histories of corruption.

But these are among the worst of times in Pakistan. Hostilities between Pakistan’s security institutions and the Taliban are intensifying. On August 25, Pakistan banned Pakistan’s most important Taliban organization, the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), based in South Waziristan. The government froze its bank accounts and assets, and announced rewards for the arrest of its leaders. This move was prompted after serious assaults by militants on Pakistani governmental installations and officials. These included a bloody suicide assault on a government arms factory located in Wah, just 18 miles from Islamabad, which killed an estimated 100 Pakistani civilians, a bombing of a senior police official in Karachi, and an attack on a container truck carrying two armored personal carriers out of Karachi port leaving for a mission with NATO in Afghanistan. In the same period, Taliban militants operating in Peshawar blew up homes of a senior local official of the Awami National Party, as well as a college for women operated by the government.