Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [264]
By July 2009, the Inspector-General of Police in the NWFP, Malik Naveed Khan, said that 2,500 elite police had been trained, and had contributed to a great improvement in the situation. The police were also training and equipping special community police to defend their areas against the Taleban – ‘not like lashkars, because these are chosen, armed and controlled by us, so there is no risk of them changing sides or becoming dacoits’. He said that, thanks to all this, the increase in pay and the sense of new determination from the top, police morale had improved enormously over the previous few months. Above all, though, he said, the change in mood was due to the Swat operation, and the transformation of civil – military relations which it reflected.
As of the summer of 2008 these had been as bad as could well be imagined. The politicians’ views of the army have already been described. A retired colonel of my acquaintance exploded in response:
Those bastards! If we are supporting the militants in secret, how come more than 1,500 of us have been killed fighting them? It is the politicians who are running scared and doing deals with the militants. They just don’t know who they are more scared of, Washington or the Taleban. So they run to Washington and whine and grovel, and then they come back and order us to fight harder. Then when we do and people are killed, they get scared of their voters and put all the blame on us. They declare a truce and start peace negotiations again with the Taleban, and all the gains we have made at God knows what cost in lives go up in smoke. For months now, Kayani [General Ashfaq Kayani, chief of the army staff in succession to Musharraf] has been asking for clear political support for military operations and from all the ANP and most of the PPP has got nothing but shuffling excuses. Are you surprised we have military coups in this country?
A senior serving officer speaking in Peshawar in August 2008 was more measured:
We have never received clear political backing for military operations against the Taleban because no one is willing to take responsibility for civilian deaths and displacement. After all, it is not easy for any government to take responsibility for creating hundreds of thousands of refugees among its own people. But I must say that this was also true of Musharraf, not just of the civilian politicians who have taken over. That is also why we need special anti-terrorism forces which don’t cause so much collateral damage as the army, because we are trained for full-scale war and don’t really know how to do things any other way, though of course we try to keep civilian casualties as low as possible.
Another problem to which the general drew attention was the unreliability of the Frontier Corps, the locally recruited paramilitary police, or khassadars, and the Frontier Constabulary, who are supposed to patrol the line between FATA and the NWFP.
The Frontier Corps men are linked to local tribal society. That is why they are essential, because they know what is happening, so provide vital intelligence. Also, using non-Pashtun troops is very unpopular, as we found in 2004. But the problem is that they hate killing their own people, above all when many people say that this is for the sake of America. If enough of them are killed by the militants, they will often fight back; but they have been fighting for five years now and are very tired and becoming demoralized. As for the khassadars and the Constabulary, they are now useless. They just sit in their posts and do nothing.
This tension between local knowledge and local loyalty is an old one. The British, who created the units out of which the Frontier Corps was formed, fully recognized the desirability of using local troops whenever possible, and most of the troops stationed in the region were in fact locally recruited. This also meant that the British faced repeated mutinies and desertions