It is encouraging news that the Pakistan army has taken control of Mingora, the main town in Swat, after driving out the Taliban; a month ago, this might have seemed more than anyone could hope for, amid predictions that Islamabad itself could fall to the militants in as little as six months. Admittedly, the re-taking of Swat has been done at enormous human cost, as over two million people are said to have been displaced on account of the fighting. That is a heavy price to have paid for victory—especially when it is clear that, while an important battle has been won, the larger war remains to be fought.
The core problem in Pakistan is that the vast majority in the country, while not in favour of extremism or fundamentalism (as election results have shown repeatedly), is at the same time not in favour of fighting the Taliban either, and would prefer a negotiated settlement. So when the Pakistani state takes on the Taliban in Swat, it is seen as fighting America’s war. This much has been revealed by survey work done by the Pew Research Centre. Also, as Pew has found out, as much as a third of the country continues to believe in Osama bin Laden, who is almost certainly hiding in Pakistani territory.
Faced with a country that is being recognised as the world’s No. 1 headache, the US initiative on Pak-Af looks increasingly like a long-term challenge that will test American patience and resources, and indeed its ability to engineer a “strong, stable, non-proliferating” Pakistan as the final outcome. American interlocutors, looking for international cooperation if not support, have put pressure on India to play ball by agreeing to do business with the “moderate” Taliban, by pulling back its troops and guns from the border, and perhaps even by starting the bilateral negotiations that have been at a stand-off after the Pak-organised attacks on Mumbai. The fact, however, is that there is very little that India can do to help—other than what it has already done, which is to not take advantage of the diversion of Pak troops from the Indian border to the Swat region. The Taliban problem is a Pak creation, and the solutions lie within Pakistan, not elsewhere.
Meanwhile, as recent reports have emphasised, the risk of jihadi elements getting hold of nuclear assets remains a very real one, especially since Pakistan has distributed these assets in different parts of the country as an understandable defensive tactic. There have been plenty of assurances from Pakistan as well as the United States, to the effect that the assets are securely held, but these assurances hold value only if the country itself does not fall into jihadi arms. India’s security analysts have no choice, therefore, other than to reckon with “what if” scenarios, and come up with appropriate strategies for dealing with them.
