Thesis on "Military Intervention and Peacekeeping"

Thesis 15 pages (4328 words) Sources: 10 Style: MLA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Military Intervention and Peacekeeping

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, April 19, 2009 -- A potentially troubling era dawned Sunday in Pakistan's Swat Valley, where a top Islamist militant leader, emboldened by a peace agreement with the federal government, laid out an ambitious plan to bring a "complete Islamic system" to the surrounding northwest region and the entire country (Constable).

Speaking to thousands of followers in an address aired live from SWAT on national news channels, cleric Sufi Mohammed bluntly defied the constitution and federal judiciary, saying he would not allow any appeals to state courts under the system of sharia, or Islamic law, that will prevail there as a result of the peace accord signed by the president Tuesday.

Richard C. Holbrooke, the U.S. special envoy to the region, said in an interview broadcast Sunday on CNN that the decision by insurgents to keep fighting in spite of the peace deal should be a "wake-up call to everybody in Pakistan that you can't deal with these people by giving away territory as they creep closer and closer to the populated centers of the Punjab and Islamabad" (Constable)

The evidence suggests that the extremist forces have drawn the opposite lesson from their victory in Swat and are gearing up to carry their armed crusade for a punitive, "hatred-of-women" form of Islam into new areas. There have been numerous reports of Taliban fighters entering districts south and west of Swat, where they have brandished weapons, bombed and occupied buildings, arrested aid workers, and killed female activists (Constable).

In the northwestern town of Mardan, insurgents attacked girls' schools, forced CD shops to close, ordered barbers not to shave beards and bombed the office of a nonprofit aid agency, killing a female worker. Taliban commanders accused the agency of "propagating obscenity." Taliban fighters occupied the Buner district for several days, closed a religious shrine and burned DVDs in the streets. They then toured the region in a convoy of trucks, even entering a secured army area while displaying heavy weapons (Constable).

"The inescapable reality is that another domino has toppled and the Taliban are a step closer to Islamabad," the Pakistan-based News International newspaper warned last week.

Inside "The Tank" -- The Joint Chiefs Secure Pentagon Briefing Room

"Gentlemen, given yesterday's article from the Washington Post, Pakistan is wobbling on the edge of a deep precipice, and we have to face a reality: the United States and the multi-national coalition will not remain passive as a Pakistan with WMD's falls into the deep void. As you know our intervention plans for Pakistan are modeled on the initiative by Coalition forces in Operation Desert Storm as well as the American forces in Iraq to arm and support Sunni militias in Anbar province in the campaign against the Al Qaeda in Iraq. The current GO date is set for November, 2010.

The Department of Homeland Security has worked up the following background and strategic brief that will serve as planning information we will all need to make the intervention successful, including options -- both military and other."

Greatest Risk to the U.S.

Terrorism is currently the preeminent threat to U.S. And Coalition national security. Pakistan is currently the frontline in the battle against terrorism, as its tribal areas have become a safe haven for al Qaeda and the Taliban. Pakistani efforts in the war on terrorism have suffered due to a lack of resolve and military capabilities, as well as a general distrust of the United States. To combat and diminish the threat posed by al Qaeda and the Taliban, the Coalition must pursue a strategy of constructive engagement and unconditioned inducements (Minor).

The consequences of a possible intervention into Pakistan are extremely unpredictable. The alleged al-Qaeda militants are embedded in complex tribal networks in a remote mountainous area. Military action could inflict severe casualties and damage to these traditional communities and inflame anti-American sentiment across Muslim Pakistan. It might accelerate the disintegration of the U.S.-backed Pakistani government which currently possesses nuclear weapons. The Pakistani military have steadfastly opposed direct American intervention for many years (Hayden).

However, plans have been drawn up by the U.S. military's Special Operations Command for deploying Special Forces troops in Pakistan's frontier regions for the purpose of training indigenous militias to combat forces aligned with the Taliban and Al Qaeda (Van Auken).

Citing unnamed military officials, the newspaper reports that the proposal would "expand the presence of military trainers in Pakistan, directly finance a separate tribal paramilitary force that until now has proved largely ineffective and pay militias that agreed to fight Al Qaeda and foreign extremists" (Van Auken).

The prevailing and primary interest of the U.S. is the national security and protection of its citizens. Former U.S. Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte identified the religious fundamentalist group al Qaeda as the single greatest terrorist threat to the United States and its interests. The July 2007 National Intelligence Estimate revealed that al Qaeda's central leadership "in the past two years has been able to regenerate the core operational capabilities needed to conduct attacks in the Homeland." In addition to regenerating its core capabilities, al Qaeda is working "more efficiently as a beacon for other terrorist organizations around the world" (Minor).

Next Al Qaeda Attack From Pakistan

Mike McConnell, Director of National Intelligence, stated that a future al Qaeda attack on the U.S. "most likely would be planned and come out of the [al Qaeda] leadership in Pakistan" Dr. Rohan Gunaratna described the Afghanistan/Pakistan border as a "terrorist Disneyland."

The Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in Pakistan contains numerous terrorist training camps, many of which are associated with al Qaeda. Dr. Gunaratna indicated that the 30-40 terrorist groups training in Afghanistan prior to the attacks on 9/11 have subsequently moved to the FATA. The survival of the Taliban in the FATA has been "singularly responsible for the continuing regeneration of al Qaeda as an organization because it has permitted the leadership and the operatives of this terrorist group…to safely 'dissolve' into a larger environment either that is hospitable to them directly or that protects them by disguising their presence amidst a larger pool of Taliban adherents." Pakistan therefore represents the front line and a vital component in the U.S. war on terrorism (Minor).

Options

Among the many options suggested are, as already mentioned, sending in U.S. Special

Forces first to secure and then protect that country's nuclear weapons. Sending in a more substantial force would follow. This would help secure Pakistan's "core" before "retaking" regions controlled by Islamic fundamentalists. (Hartung).

While the Pentagon admits to only about 50 U.S. troops currently stationed in Pakistan as "advisors" to the Pakistani armed forces, that number would swell substantially under the proposed escalation. The Times cites a briefing prepared by the Special Operations Command that claims the beefed-up U.S. forces would not be engaged in "conventional combat" in Pakistan. It quotes unnamed military officials as acknowledging, however, that they "might be involved in strikes against senior militant leaders, under specific conditions" (Van Auken).

In other words, American Special Forces units would be used to carry out targeted assassinations and attacks on strongholds of Islamist forces.

In addition to the plan to recruit and train new paramilitary militias in the frontier region, Washington has developed a $350 million program to train and equip the existing 85,000-member Frontier Corps, a uniformed force recruited from among tribes in the Pakistan border region (Van Auken).

Key Objectives

The U.S. has several key objectives in Pakistan for the short-, medium-, and long-term. In the short-term, the U.S. must continue to work with Pakistan to combat terrorism and reduce the power of both al Qaeda and the Taliban. If the U.S. is successful in diminishing the threats posed by al Qaeda and the Taliban, the mid-term objectives of ensuring the stability and self-determination of Afghanistan and Pakistan will be more easily realized. With the achievement of stable and self-determined Afghanistan and Pakistan, the long-term U.S. objectives can more readily be obtained. The long-term goal of the U.S. is to have partners in the region who seek to marginalize al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations, as well as to maintain and promote stability in the region (Minor).

Current Concerns

The most likely possible dangers are these: a complete collapse of Pakistani government rule that allows an extreme Islamist movement to fill the vacuum; a total loss of federal control over outlying provinces, which splinter along ethnic and tribal lines; or a struggle within the Pakistani military in which the minority sympathetic to the Taliban and al-Qaeda try to establish Pakistan as a state sponsor of terrorism (Kagan and O'Hanlon).

All possible military initiatives to avoid those possibilities are daunting. With 160 million people, Pakistan is more than five times the size of Iraq. It would take a long time to move large numbers of American forces halfway across the world. And unless we had precise information about the location of all of Pakistan's nuclear weapons and materials, we could not rely on bombing or… READ MORE

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