Can Pakistan Survive?

Our drone strikes in Pakistan’s Tribal Districts have been effective in targeting and eliminating Islamist militant leaders, albeit with “collateral” civilian casualties along the way. But there probably isn’t a single voting Pakistani who supports this effort, even when the militants killed are equally determined to bring down the government in Islamabad to replace it with a severe, Sharia-driven theocracy led by Taliban insurgents.

The Pakistani conviction of the good doctor who aided the United States in locating bin Laden is very popular in Pakistan. Our entering Seal team’s entering Pakistani territory (however good the reason) plus our drone strikes have also radicalized Pakistani voters pretty much the same way we might feel if Mexico mounted drone strikes in our western border states or sent its covert army unit to cut down U.S.-based arms suppliers about to smuggle guns to the drug cartels operating all over Mexico. This radicalization has further destabilized a country that could easily self-destruct from internal factionalsim, and the notion of a military take-over (knowing that the military too has sympathies towards radical Islamic elements) is not that far from becoming a reality.

Nowhere is the instability more evident that in Pakistan’s largest city, Karachi (above), a teaming and steaming metropolis of 13 million residents that serves as the country’s major seaport as well as its financial capital. It is also a lawless city where terrorist can hide in plain sight (e.g., Osama bin Laden), where the intelligence community (the nation’s Inter Services Intelligence agency – the ISI – Pakistan’s equivalent of the CIA with a touch of FBI thrown in for good measure) and local police department are well-known to have exceptionally close and supportive connections with the regional Taliban, who are sworn to replace the current secular government with their own vision of religious leadership. It is a city where professional hit men are known to roam the city, offering a professional killing for an average cost of about $700.

As the financial capital and because of many institutions of higher learning which are located here, this is also a city where exceptionally educated people mingle with the destitute, desperate and disparate. Corruption has decimated any meaningful semblance of sustaining a functional city, but as Karachi goes, so goes Pakistan. That fact that the capital city of Islamabad openly acknowledges that the government is sorely absent from the Tribal Districts (actually, the Federally Administered Tribal Areas), including North and South Waziristan (fractious and equally ungovernable Balochistan lies to the immediate south), suggests that severe militancy is concentrated only in this region. But rampant instability and insurgent attacks in fact take place over the entire nation, and the realities in Karachi suggest that this city may actually be at the heart of it all.

That militants are able to operate openly and freely in Karachi is an indicator that the entire nation is teetering on the brink of total collapse, a particularly dangerous reality given their rather significant storehouse of missiles and nuclear warheads and a history of sharing the underlying technology to rogue nations like North Korea and Iran. A collapsed Pakistan would spread its pernicious disease to the entire region, threatening an already-dysfunctional Afghanistan, a desperate Bangladesh and even their relatively stable “enemy to the south,” India.

One wag has expressed that our efforts at embracing Pakistan as an ally in the fight against Taliban and other Islamist terrorism has become more akin to breaking up with a bad girlfriend, who has spent years openly cheating on us… or like trying to kill cockroaches by stepping on them whenever we seem them emerge from the cracks. Neither strategy has been particularly effective, and as we press our losing cause in Afghanistan with “effective” anti-Taliban drone strikes in Pakistan, we seem to be arming the proselytizing militants with actions and statements that makes their radical recruiting efforts that much more effective, generating an increasing positive sentiment towards extremists even among less-accepting voters, strongly moving away from the U.S. position.

The latest news? “A suspected U.S. drone strike in northwestern Pakistan on [the] morning [of June 4^th] killed 15 militants and wounded three others, a local government official said, the third such deadly attack in as many days… The drone fired at least six missiles at a militant compound near the town of Mir Ali in the North Waziristan region near the Afghanistan border, government official Muhammad Amir told CNN… North Waziristan is one of seven districts in Pakistan's tribal region. The area is widely believed to be the operating base for the Haqqani [Taliban] network and other militant groups that have attacked international troops in neighboring Afghanistan… [The June 4^th] attack is the 21st suspected drone strike in Pakistan this year. U.S. officials rarely discuss the CIA's drone program in Pakistan, though privately they have said the covert strikes are legal and an effective tactic in the fight against extremists.” CNN.com, June 4^th. Wonder who really won this one? And if Pakistan does fall, what happens to those nukes?

I’m Peter Dekom, and the good news on the effectiveness of this drone strike is only punctuated with the bad news of the overall impact of our policies in the region.