Pakistan deserves America's respect and support for its fight against extremists in the country, a US Defence official said as focus sharpens on Pakistan-Afghanistan region with Thursday's release of the administration's review of its strategy for the region.
The official - speaking on background to reporters travelling with Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in Islamabad- said the United States wants Pakistan to do more to eliminate terrorists sanctuaries in North Waziristan and Pakistani military leaders consistently say they will address North Waziristan, but not yet.
In the meantime, Pakistan's military has been active elsewhere, the official said, according to a Pentagon report. The Defence official also expressed understanding of the difficulties Pakistan military is facing with prolonged anti-militant engagement and flood relief work.
The Pakistani military has moved 140,000 troops to the border area with Afghanistan, the official said, suffering many losses and wounded in the past 19 months. "Two years ago, this kind of effort, these kinds of sacrifices would be unthinkable," the official said. "There has been 19 months of sustained combat."
The Pakistani army has been active against terror groups in the Swat Valley, the Khyber tribal area, South Waziristan and Bajaur. The equivalent of seven divisions each around 20,000 strong is engaged in the region, the official noted.
Unprecedented monsoon flooding in the summer hampered military operations as the troops remained along the western border while their enablers medics, engineers, logisticians, helicopters, transport and so on shifted to flood relief operations.
The Pakistani military is stretched thin, the official noted. "They are facing the same challenge that US and coalition forces faced in Iraq, and now Afghanistan," the official said. "It's one thing to clear the geography of militant presence. It's quite another thing to render the population and the area resistant enough to militant return that you can actually withdraw the army.
Pakistan will deal with North Waziristan when it has the resources available and on its own timetable, the official said. Meanwhile, writing in The Washington Post Thursday, known analyst David Ignatius quoted a US military official as saying he worries that the Washington debate about Pakistan is becoming "hyper-focused" on a demand that the Pakistani army attack North Waziristan to stop Taliban insurgents from crossing into Afghanistan - a request he says the Pakistanis are incapable of meeting because their forces are "stretched too thin."
"We have a nasty tendency of assuming that what we care about is what the Pakistanis care about," says the US military official. He argues that the problem in Pakistan isn't that it has a secret agenda but that its army has been engaged in toll exacting campaigns. Despite the "Pakistanophobia" in Washington, senior US officials here say the Pakistanis are moving in the right direction, though slowly. One notes that the Pakistanis, despite their perennial concerns about India, now have 140,000 troops in the north-west border area, more than the United States has in Afghanistan.
"They are extended at this point as far as they can be," he says. The US military official says Washington should realise that the Pakistanis "are unable to conduct significant new operations without additional troops. That's not a criticism, it's a reality." This official notes that the Pakistani military has lost 1,500 to 2,000 soldiers fighting the extremists with three to four times that many wounded. Civilian casualties are in the tens of thousands.
If America experienced this level of casualties, he says, "we would probably call it a second American Civil War." Concern about the havens is stronger in Washington these days than among US commanders in Afghanistan, Ignatius reports about the situation along the porous border. Major General John Campbell, who leads Nato forces in eastern Afghanistan, said Wednesday at Bagram air base that closing the border "may not matter" as much as many fear because coalition forces are "pushing out" in the anti-militant campaigns on the Afghan soil toward Pakistan. "Even if the Pakistanis were to do a huge operation, they'll never shut this off," he cautioned.
In his Islamabad-datelined piece, David Ignatius warns Washington against raising the level of tensions with Pakistan and advises patience in dealing with Islamabad. "The United States has a tough-enough fight in Afghanistan as it is. One sure way to make it worse would be to escalate the quarrel with Pakistan to the crisis level, or out of frustration, to send US troops into the tribal areas.
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