Council on Foreign Relations (cfr.org)
Pakistan's New Generation of Terrorists
Author: Zachary Laub, Associate Writer
Updated: November 18, 2013
Author: Zachary Laub, Associate Writer
Updated: November 18, 2013
- Introduction
- Terrorist Groups
- The Pakistani Taliban
- The Changing Face of Terrorism
- Counterterrorism Challenges
Introduction
Pakistani
authorities have long had ties to domestic militant groups that help advance
the country's core foreign policy interests, namely in connection with
Afghanistan and India. Since Islamabad joined Washington as an ally in the post-9/11 "war on
terror," analysts have accused Pakistan's
security and intelligence services of playing a "double game,"
tolerating if not outright aiding militant groups killing NATO troops in Afghanistan. Pakistan denies
these charges.
Concerns
about Pakistan's commitment to counterterrorism heightened in May 2011, when
U.S. commandos killed al-Qaeda mastermind Osama bin Laden at a compound not far
from Islamabad. Leadership elements of al-Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban
have made Pakistan's
semiautonomous tribal areas their home, where they often work with a wide
variety of Islamist insurgent groups like the Haqqani
Network. Some groups have used Pakistan
as a staging ground for attacks in Afghanistan, while others have
pursued domestic targets, including schools and houses of worship, as well as
organs of the state.
The
numerous terrorist groups operating in Pakistan have tended to fall into
one of the five categories laid out by Ashley J. Tellis, a senior associate at Carnegie Endowment
for International Peace, in a January 2008 Congressional testimony:
- Sectarian: Religiously motivated groups such as the Sunni Sipah-e-Sahaba and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and the Shia Tehran-e-Jafria that are engaged in violence within Pakistan
- Anti-Indian: Groups focused on the Kashmir dispute that operate with the alleged support of the Pakistani military and the intelligence agency Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Muhammad, and Harakat ul-Mujahadeen
- Afghan Taliban: The original Taliban movement and especially its Kandahari leadership centered around Mullah Mohammad Omar, believed to be based in Quetta
- Al-Qaeda and its affiliates: The global jihadist organization founded by Osama bin Laden and led by Ayman al-Zawahiri;
- The Pakistani Taliban: A coalition of extremist groups in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), led by Mullah Fazlullah
Other
militant groups fall outside of Tellis' framework, including secessionist
groups such as the Balochistan Liberation Army in southwest Pakistan.
 |
| Source: Pakistan Crisis Guide |
But
with greater coordination among groups, experts say, lines have blurred. The
Haqqani Network, a semiautonomous faction of the Taliban and a U.S.-designated
Foreign Terrorist Organization, is emblematic of the complex interrelations
among militant groups in both Pakistan
and Afghanistan.
A 2011 report from the Combating
Terrorism Center (CTC), an independent research institution based at the
U.S. Military Academy at West Point, characterizes the group as a "nexus
player" with ties to Pakistan's
ISI, al-Qaeda, and Uzbek militants, among others. "For the past three
decades, the Haqqani Network has functioned as an enabler for other groups and
as the fountainhead (manba) of local, regional, and global
militancy," write Don Rassler and Vahid Brown in the report. The group's
leading financier and emissary, Nasiruddin
Haqqani, was killed near Islamabad in
November 2013 under uncertain circumstances; three other senior leaders were killed in U.S. drone
strikes in the two years prior. Sirajuddin Haqqani, Nasiruddin's elder brother,
leads the group.
Supporters
of the Afghan Taliban who sought refuge in Pakistan's tribal areas morphed
into a distinct entity following the Pakistani army's initial incursion into
the semiautonomous region in 2002. In December 2007, about thirteen disparate
militant groups coalesced under the umbrella of Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), also known as the Pakistani
Taliban, led by Baitullah Mehsud of South Waziristan.
Pakistani authorities accused him of orchestrating the assassination of former
prime minister Benazir Bhutto in December 2007. Short-lived ceasefires signed
with Islamabad
in 2008 and 2009 provided opportunities for the Pakistani Taliban to regroup
and make territorial gains, analysts say.
After
a U.S.
drone strike killed Baitullah in August 2009, his cousin and deputy Hakimullah
Mehsud assumed leadership of the TTP. Hakimullah was reportedly prepared to
take part in imminent peace talks with Islamabad
when he was killed in a U.S.
drone strike along with a top deputy in November 2013. But analysts say the
prospects for peace talks were dim. Hakimullah declared war against the state,
saying in October 2013: "Pakistan's
system is un-Islamic, and we want it replaced with an Islamic system. This
demand and this desire will continue even after the American withdrawal [from Afghanistan]."
Stephen Tankel, scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for
International Peace, notes that if talks had been allowed to fail, Pakistani
public opinion would have turned more decisively against the Taliban rather
than the United States,
whom many blame for the insurgency's resilience.
A
shura council chose hard-liner Mullah Fazlullah as Hakimullah's successor shortly after
his death. Fazlullah, who gained infamy for ordering the assassination attempt
on Pakistani schoolgirl and activist Malala Yousafzai, rejects
talks with the government. Analysts question whether Fazlullah can maintain
TTP cohesion as the first emir from outside the Mehsud tribe.
The
predominantly Pashtun group draws membership from all of FATA's seven agencies
(see this interactive
map of the area) as well as several settled districts of Khyber
Pakhtunkhawa in the northwest. The TTP has declared jihad against the Pakistani
state, seeks to control territory, enforces sharia, and fights NATO forces in Afghanistan.
"We will target security forces, government installations, political
leaders, and police," Asmatullah Shaheen, head of the shura council that
selected Mullah Fazlullah, told Reuters, adding, "We will not target civilians,
bazaars, or public places. People do not need to be afraid."
It's
difficult to assess the size of the Pakistani Taliban. "There are not
reliable estimates of how large the TTP is, largely due to challenges associated
with even defining the borders of the group and the loose-knit nature of how it
is organized along either subtribal or subregional lines," CTC's Rassler
says.
The
Pakistani Taliban has targeted security forces and civilians alike; among its
most audacious attacks have been bombings of Islamabad's
Marriott Hotel in September 2008, which killed at least sixty people, and Peshawar's Pearl
Continental Hotel in June 2009, in which seventeen were killed. TTP expressed
transnational ambitions when it claimed responsibility for a failed bombing in New York's Times Square
in May 2010.
The
Punjabi Taliban, a loose
conglomeration of militant groups of Punjabi origin, gained prominence
after major 2008 and 2009 attacks in the cities of Lahore,
Islamabad, and Rawalpindi. The network has both sectarian
and Kashmir-oriented aims. It has chafed at the Pakistani Taliban's central
leadership, Jane's Intelligence Review reported in late August 2013, but
is uniquely capable of "mount[ing] complex operations in urban
environments," particularly in Punjab,
Pakistan's most
populous and politically significant province.
The
Haqqani Network, whose operations straddle the porous Afghan-Pakistani border
known as the Durand Line, has proven a valuable ally to the Pakistani Taliban
in some of these pursuits. The Haqqanis have not only fought alongside the TTP
and Afghan Taliban in Afghanistan,
but have also served as influential mediators between the TTP and Islamabad. Pakistan has
long been a supporter and beneficiary of the Haqqanis, according to CTC. The
network has helped Islamabad manage militant
groups in FATA, and provided leverage against India
in the struggle over Kashmir. Pakistan sees the Pashtun group, which has been
among the most lethal to NATO forces in Afghanistan, as a potential source
of leverage after the scheduled withdrawal of coalition troops at the end of
2014.
Violence
in Pakistan
has been on the rise, particularly since 2007, as terrorist groups have
targeted political leaders, the military and police, tribal leaders, minority
Shia, and schools. Though virtually unheard of a decade ago, suicide bombings
have become ubiquitous in recent years—a reflection of al-Qaeda's influence,
experts say. Three such attacks were documented in 2002 and 2003 combined; at
the trend's peak in 2009 there were seventy-six attacks, and there were
thirty-seven in the first ten months of 2013, according to the New Delhi–based South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP).
Besides
providing militant groups in Pakistan
with technical expertise and capabilities, al-Qaeda also promotes cooperation
among them. CTC's Rassler wrote in 2009 that al-Qaeda "assumed a role as mediator and coalition builder among various Pakistani
militant group factions by promoting the unification of entities that have
opposed one another or had conflicting ideas about whether to target the
Pakistani state."
The
Taliban, meanwhile, has become ever more entrenched in Pakistan, building a
nationwide network by finding common cause with terrorist groups that target the
Shia and the Pakistani state while establishing roots—and a lucrative criminal enterprise—in
Karachi. Pakistani paramilitary Rangers launched a campaign in September 2013
to address the city's criminal and terrorist groups, reportedly arresting over 1,500 suspects in a month. Meanwhile, Pakistan's political parties advocated
negotiations with the Taliban in part to stave off even higher levels of
violence in Punjab and other populated areas,
Tankel writes. SATP reported 2,745 civilians and 601 security forces killed in
terrorist violence in the first ten months of 2013—roughly on pace with the
prior two years.
Counterterrorism Challenges
Pakistani
security forces have at times struggled to muster the capacity and will to
confront domestic militants, even though the army and police are increasingly
targeted by militant groups. Some experts say that since the bloody encounter between Pakistan's
security forces and militant Islamic students in Islamabad's Red Mosque in 2007, some groups
previously under state patronage broke away. In October 2009, militants
attacked army headquarters in Rawalpindi
and held around forty people hostage for over twenty hours. Such attacks
heralded a new period in army and ISI relations with many of these militant
groups, analysts say.
Even though the Pakistani army and the ISI have been more willing to go after militants, analysts say they continue to form alliances with groups such as the Haqqanis that they can use as a strategic hedge against India and Afghanistan. In a September 2011 congressional testimony, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen referred to the Haqqani network as a "strategic arm of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency." Pakistan's security establishment has denied these charges.
The
revelation in May 2011 that Osama bin Laden had been hiding in a compound
around the corner from the Pakistan
military academy at Kakul raised new questions about the ISI's commitment to
counterterrorism. CIA director Leon Panetta said the agency ruled out
partnering with Pakistan
on the bin Laden mission out of concern that it would be compromised. President
Asif Ali Zardari, writing in the immediate aftermath of the operation, said
allegations that Pakistan
harbored terrorists amounted to "baseless speculation."
The
CIA has conducted an extensive
targeted killing campaign to supplement Pakistani counterterrorism efforts,
particularly in the rugged, remote terrain of North and South
Waziristan. U.S.
drones are currently launched from Afghan soil, but it's unclear whether this arrangement will continue after the scheduled U.S. withdrawal
in 2014. If the targeted killing program is called off, veteran intelligence
analyst Bruce Riedel argues, "Al-Qaeda will regenerate rapidly in Pakistan. Its allies
like the Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba will help it to rebuild. The ISI will
either turn a blind eye or, worse, a helping hand." The program's
detractors have questioned the United
States' ability to distinguish between
militants and civilians, and argue that strikes may contribute to
radicalization in the frontier provinces.
Prime
Minister Nawaz Sharif, who began an unprecedented third term in June 2013, has
railed against U.S.
drone strikes as an affront to Pakistani sovereignty while advocating for talks
with the TTP. Yet, the International Crisis Group notes, "Ample evidence
exists of tacit Pakistani consent and active cooperation with the
drone program." Pakistan's
leadership seeks greater say over targeting, the ICG says, "often to
punish enemies, but sometimes, allegedly, to protect militants" with whom
the security services have cooperative relations—including elements of the
Haqqani Network and Taliban.
Drone strike casualty estimates as of November 18, 2013. (Courtesy
New America Foundation) .
Meanwhile,
Pakistan's
own counterterrorism efforts have come under the scrutiny of human rights
observers. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch charged security forces
with torture, extrajudicial killings, arbitrary
detention of tribal-area residents, and the enforced disappearance of "journalists, human rights
activists, and alleged members of separatist and nationalist groups." A new legal framework awaiting Parliament's approval would
relieve an overwhelmed criminal justice system by establishing new federal
courts equipped to handle terrorism cases, advocates say. But critics caution
that the law would codify prolonged, warrantless detentions by the state.
Jayshree
Bajoria and Jonathan Masters contributed to this report.
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