The issue that is handily, wrenchingly, confounding the Pakistani military is the one that has long confounded the NATO command in Afghanistan. That issue, that problem has been canvassed well in a recent New York Times article . The issue is this: How can one separate out the enemy from the friendly citizen? No real answer apart from demonstration of intent can answer that question. And related to that: one does one demonstrate peaceful intent? We assume that violence is a wayward option. What if that peaceful detente masks subterfuge?
The game theoretic concept of a pooling equilibrium shows the mechanism whereby an enemy combatant masks his identity by falling in with a peaceful population, while maintaining his violent intent and associated means for violence. The signals, the demonstrations of intent seem peaceful while the threat of a probable hostile act remains virile. NATO allies are loathe to attack villages and seemingly innocent passersby in the tribal regions of Pakistan. Taking advantage of this tremendous trepidation, members of the Taliban (and to some extent, Al Qaeda) bleed into the maddening, restless crowds. NATO’s dilemma, then? “Shoot now and forever lose your peace.”
The problem, described in other terms: how to elicit an honest signal from Taliban that reflects their true intention, cooperative or combative. The solution to the problem, so described: designing a feasible mechanism that elicits such a signal. If the Taliban’s interests are cooperating then the equilibrium outcome should soon be seen as some sort of negotiated settlement which by definition remains stable. If the Taliban’s interests are conflicting and combative to the central governent’s interests and those of its foreign sponsors, then it becomes increasingly important to tease out some sort of informative signal. Barring that, of course, the central government can go about annihilating entire villages and regions to weed out the Taliban. As should be clear, this is hardly a option worth considering, though the reasons behind that fact are worth further consideration.
Suppose the central government in Pakistan is gaming out strategies to get the Taliban to cough up an informative signal, some noise that points with increasing certainty to some action. The government knows that members of the Taliban, are broadly mixed in with the majority peaceful (though irate) Pashtun members of the local population in the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan. Consider some strategies: The threat of physical violence won’t do. The very tribal social network within which Taliban can hide away provides an overlapping intergenerational source of recruits when one member of the social network is killed in action. Buying them off at one shot would not yield a stable equilibrium even were the government to pay out large sums of money. This is because the social network within which the Taliban is ensconced can pay off more people over a span of time with smaller sums, while any government sponsored pay-out scheme would bankrupt the (Pakistani, Afghanistani, U.S) government’s operating budget. Hence, it becomes necessary to develop some other costly signal to drive home the point that the government means work in some fashion with the Taliban.
Consider the move not made. The government cannot literally kill the entire population of the FATA with the expectation of just incidentally killing the relevant troublemakers. Apart from the well-founded moral and humanitarian reasons that stand against such an atrocity bearing on genocide, there are prudential reasons against such a move. Consider again the fact that the tribal social networks that comprise economic and social life in the region. Killing one member of family triggers tribal allegiances that ping pong back and forth between round robins of murder and seeping vengeance. A concerted effort to neutralize the Taliban would result in an intergenerational swamp of muddied violence. Islamabad would have on its hands, nothing short of a Pashtun intifada.
Secondly, consider that the Taliban are in essence a loose conglomeration of brands of bandits, who serve a vital interest for the Pakistani government. It is thought that successive government’s in Islamabad have long supported militant organizations to affect change in contested Kashmir and in high and low swathes of Afghanistan. There is the Hisb-e-Islami and the Haqqani network, thought to be responsible for a recent attack against a gathering of Afghan tribal leaders that Kabul had organized. Sirajuddin Haqqani, a high ranking former leader of the anti-Soviet mujahideen is also thought to be associated with high ranking members of Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI. Many government and private analysts think that Pakistan wants to corral the Haqqani network into a leadership position in Afghanistan after the U.S. and its NATO allies leave the region. Nevertheless, the Haqqani network could breed rabid dogs that far from biting, snatch off in one roaring surge, the hand that feeds it.
Many members of the Haqqani network may (and quite likely do) hold views that do not conduct well in Islamabad. Indeed, the Taliban are now flexing their muscles well within more conventionally cosmospolitan regions of the country, far from the region that both Islamabad and Washington consider vital to its medium to long-run interests. How is the central government to react to these bandits? Killing them, in some decimative gambit, will not do. Indeed, one might even argue that killing even one foot soldier in the Haqqani network might turn out to have negative consequences relative to the wishes of Pakistani intelligence and its political overseers. Everything turns then, on the central government’s evaluation of the relative import of the Haqqani network’s (fictive) allegiance. That is to say, the government needs to trade off the Taliban’s usefulness in one arena of strategic operations against the broader destructive consequences in another.
Pakistan needs to tradeoff its use for the Taliban in Kashmir and Afghanistan, against the existential threat that the Pakistani, Tehrik e Taliban poses against its foundering democracy. Leave India, leave Afghanistan and face up to your problems. And only then can the government even begin to design a mechanism that can yield an informative signal of the Taliban’s true interests in working with the central government of Pakistan.
So far, this considered outcome seems a flighty dream, a fanciful thought experiment bearing little resemblance to lived reality.
