The West has just about concluded that the government in Islamabad has become useless as an ally in fighting terrorists. They have lost all control of the FATA regions along the border, and according to Afghanistan and India, their intelligence service is working for the enemy. The attacks coming out of Pakistan have begun including Pakistani armed forces, which led to the US killing a number of them as they ran back across the border after a failed ambush. Pakistan protested the deaths, but the US released video showing soldiers fleeing American gunships in Afghanistan — where they didn’t belong.
This isn't an invasion but the Pakistanis are certainly nervous about reports of just hundreds of NATO troops being moved to the border.
It might seem like these rumors are correct given our commitment to reinforcing Afghanistan this year:
Although there are no brigade-sized units that can be deployed quickly into Afghanistan, military leaders believe they can find a number of smaller units such as aviation, engineering and surveillance troops that can be moved more swiftly, said the official, who requested anonymity because the discussions are private.
The moves are expected to happen within weeks rather than months, the official said.
But I dare say we won't invade Pakistan. But U.S. troops on the border will allow us to support intelligence and limited special forces presence across the border, to be sure. We aren't about to invade. Even several more brigade wouldn't give us the force levels needed to invade Pakistan's frontier areas.
But we could be on the verge of kicking off what I've called a Lexington Campaign that accepts that Pakistan does not control their territory:
If we can't get Islamabad to control the frontier area, it is time to bypass Islamabad and deal directly with the tribes who don't recognize the control of Islamabad in the first place. We cannot allow the fictions of sovereignty to keep us from defending ourselves from fanatics who straddle the gray boundary that lies between reality and international law.
Using limited military assets such as special forces and drones to back civilian armed assets such as the CIA or contract personnel (with either former or seconded special forces from Western countries, or perhaps even hiring security companies to provide the personnel) or even Arab special forces that would live and work inside the frontier areas, we may be able to turn the frontier tribes against the jihadis who target us.
We should be able to start at the Afghan-Pakistan border and extend the network of anti-al Qaeda tribes toward the interior of Pakistan.
It will, I think, be an attempt to create a FATA Awakening by trying to get the tribes of the frontiers to work with us, bypassing the theoretical sovereign in Islamabad in favor of deals with de facto leaders of the tribal forces. As I noted earlier in the year, our war is no longer restricted to Afghanistan. It is a Taliban Campaign that straddles the Afghan-Pakistan border and we can't pretend the border matters to us when it clearly does not matter to our jihadi enemies.
We won't let fictional Pakistani sovereignty in the tribal areas prevent us from going after al Qaeda. This will get ugly. But hey, even the anti-Iraq War side says we have to fight here and deal with Pakistan. I hope they have the guts to stand by their convictions.
