The United States military would like to strike Taliban targets inside Pakistan with ground forces:
Senior American military commanders in Afghanistan are pushing for an expanded campaign of Special Operations ground raids across the border into Pakistan’s tribal areas, a risky strategy reflecting the growing frustration with Pakistan’s efforts to root out militants there.
The proposal, described by American officials in Washington and Afghanistan, would escalate military activities inside Pakistan, where the movement of American forces has been largely prohibited because of fears of provoking a backlash. ...
In announcing the results of a review of the strategy in Afghanistan, Obama administration officials said they were considering expanded American operations to deal with threats inside Pakistan. They offered no specifics.
In interviews in Washington and Kabul, American officials said that officers were drawing up plans to begin ground operations to capture or kill leaders from the Taliban and the Haqqani network. American officers say they are particularly eager to capture, as opposed to kill, militant leaders, who they say can offer intelligence to guide future operations. ...
In interviews, the officials offered a more detailed description of two operations since 2008 in which Afghans working under the direction of the C.I.A. — a militia called the Paktika Defense Force — crossed the border into Pakistan.
These militias have also been used closer to the border inside Afghanistan to interdict Taliban coming across to shoot at our side.
Pushing a buffer zone into Pakistan--with or without Pakistan's cooperation--has long seemed like an option to me:
[We] may have an opportunity to use a post-Westphalian Lexington Rule to fight al Qaeda in Pakistan.
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.
I hope we can limit the use of our regular forces inside Pakistan to avoid confrontations with Pakistani border forces. Special forces from America and allied nations to bolster, support, and lead irregulars from Afghanistan that operate inside Pakistan would be better. Even better would be to get support from Pakistani tribes to use their own militias and private armies to help us fight al Qaeda and the Taliban whether or not the Pakistani government will cooperate.
We shall see if we can pressure Pakistan into letting us operate even a bit on the ground inside their own country. This is sensitive and we haven't done much in the past despite the need, in recognition of that sensitivity. But when our enemies don't respect the border, we have to weigh whether we can win by unilaterally respecting the border. We managed this in Iraq, for the most part, but the Pakistan Taliban represent a much bigger source of support for our enemies inside Afghanistan than we faced in Iraq. And we had more capable local forces in Iraq, from the military to the government (however inadequate they seemed at many times in the war, they were good enough).
There are risks either way. Whose patience is more important to maintain right now? Pakistan's public or America's public?
UPDATE: NATO denies that America is pushing for special forces raids inside Pakistan. Could be narrowly true. But that still leaves a lot we could do short of sending our special forces into Pakistan. The need is there. How we meet the need could be up in the air.
