For answers to the Afghan-Pakistan conflict, ask: what would Curzon do?

David Kilcullen, the influential counter-insurgency strategist, seeks inspiration in Curzon’s experience as Viceroy of India to assess what Pakistan must do to deal with the extremist threat — and how Nato can help drive the ‘steamroller’

Britain’s eyes this week are on southern Afghanistan. US Marines have doubled Coalition troop numbers in Helmand and are moving to clear Taleban base areas as part of Operation Khanjar. A major British offensive is also underway: Operation Panchai Palang, an effort to extend Coalition control along the Helmand River valley, one month ahead of the Afghan presidential elections currently scheduled for 20 August. Though the Taleban seem so far to be mostly melting away before the Marines, they are making a determined stand against the British. They are digging in among the tactically important canal and river crossings of the central valley, where UK troops are fighting hard to dislodge them from the Nad Ali district northwest of Helmand’s provincial capital, Lashkar Gah.

During their own Afghan war, the Soviets called this area the Green Belt. They suffered heavy casualties among its complex, densely vegetated mosaic of farms, fields, villages, orchards and irrigation channels — an extremely demanding environment akin, in some places, to the Normandy Bocage of 1944. For its part, Britain has now lost 184 soldiers in Afghanistan, higher than the 179 killed in Iraq, and a number that will unfortunately rise as operations continue. Taleban deaths are much higher.

For Nato, Afghanistan will remain the military main effort in South Asia. It is an important fight which, despite its grinding difficulty, may be slowly starting to improve due to the combination of American reinforcements and the energetic leadership of the new commander, General Stanley A. McChrystal, a Special Forces officer who genuinely ‘gets’ counter-insurgency. The shift to a strategy of protecting the population, reducing civilian casualties, increasing the size and capacity of Afghan police and military forces, and the planned ‘civilian surge’ of governance and development assistance are all positive, provided the effort can be resourced and sustained. Indeed, some analysts are quietly starting to express a hope that the sharply negative trends of past years — increased violence, higher civilian casualties, a spreading and intensifying insurgency, an intractable narcotics problem and corrupt and ineffective local government — may begin to bottom out at some point in the next fighting season (conflict in Afghanistan, like its agriculture, having a very definite seasonal character). War is a complex human activity, insurgency is its most complex variant. So it is much too early to predict how the campaign will develop. But we can certainly expect continued major fighting over the summer and autumn and into the ninth winter of a very long war.

Meanwhile, across the frontier in Pakistan, another offensive is underway. And while Afghanistan is Nato’s main concern, what is happening in Pakistan is of even greater strategic importance.

Afghanistan has roughly 30 million inhabitants; Pakistan’s population and territory are more than five times larger. Two thirds of the Pashtun ethnic group, the world’s largest tribal society — one of the biggest nations without its own state and the main recruiting base for the Taleban — are in Pakistan not Afghanistan. The senior leadership of al-Qa’eda, the Afghan Taleban, and the other major insurgent factions are in safe havens in Pakistan. The Pakistani version of the Taleban has defeated the army in every major campaign since 2001, resulting in a series of face-saving ‘peace’ deals that have ceded huge swaths of territory and population to extremist control. There have been dozens of terrorist attacks within Pakistan over the past several years, and there has been a Pakistani connection in many of the most serious international terrorist attacks over the same period. The Pakistani diaspora stretches worldwide, so that events in Pakistan affect substantial immigrant populations in many parts of the world. Militancy or insecurity in Pakistan can create insecurity elsewhere.

Pakistan has more than 100 nuclear weapons, an army larger than that of the United States, an economy that was nearing collapse before the IMF bailout of late 2008 and is still in bad shape, and a weak government whose civilian leaders have proven unable to control their own national security establishment. Military institutions like the intelligence service, ISI, and some other security organisations, have complex and continuing ties to militant organisations, many of which they themselves created as proxies in the Soviet-Afghan war or as unconventional counterweights to Indian regional hegemony. Militant groups include the Afghan Taleban, religious extremist organisations, and groups like the Haqqani network centred on Waziristan in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas — a thorny hedge of mountain peaks and unsubdued tribes that has never been governed by outsiders, even since before British India extended its imperial grasp to what is now the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in the 1840s.

One of Britain’s foremost colonial administrators, George Nathaniel Curzon, Viceroy of India 1899-1905, took office in the wake of the largest frontier tribal uprising in British Indian history. The Great Frontier War of 1897 pitted British and Indian troops against tribal lashkars and religious fanatics in exactly the same places — Bajaur, Malakand, Swat, Dir — where the Pakistani army is fighting the Taleban today. Lord Curzon is well known for his observation that ‘No patchwork scheme and all our present and recent schemes: blockade, allowances, etc, are mere patchwork — will settle the Waziristan problem. Not until the military steamroller has passed over the country from end to end, will there be peace. But I do not want to be the person to start that machine.’

The question is whether Pakistan’s current operation (President Asif Zardari launched a new offensive against the Taleban in April) is the military steamroller finally going into action, or whether this is another patchwork scheme. Oddly, it may turn out to be both — a patchwork steamroller.

The latest operations began in April, perhaps not coincidentally, during a visit by Zardari to Washington, where US leaders had been heavily criticising Pakistan’s half-hearted performance. The Pakistani Taleban had been steadily expanding their control across Malakand Division (the northern third of North-West Frontier Province) and, after heavy-handed army operations in Swat, Bajaur and Mohmand in 2008, had gained control of Swat through the latest in a long line of peace deals. Though the deal was initially popular in Pakistan, public opinion shifted when the Taleban committed some very public atrocities against the local population, and then moved into Buner, a settled district only 100 kilometres from Islamabad. From being a remote threat in an ethnically distinct backwater with a history of extremism (back in 1901, Curzon called the frontier tribes the last remaining ‘first-class fanatics’ in the world), the Taleban suddenly menaced mainstream Pakistan.

Since then, the Pakistani army has certainly shown that it can fight. Militants have been pushed out of Buner and Swat, the town of Mingaora has been recaptured (and extensively damaged), the Taleban have been driven back into Dir, and the army is preparing an offensive against militant strongholds in Waziristan. Pakistan has lost dozens of troops in the fighting, killed hundreds of Taleban, and reversed the tide of militant takeover — at least temporarily.

Yet this is not quite Curzon’s steamroller. The Pakistani army lacks a true counter-insurgency doctrine. It treats the conflict like a conventional offensive: applying he avy-handed tactics that have repeatedly backfired, turning local populations against the military. Pakistan has no equivalent of Provincial Reconstruction Teams, the civil-military governance and development organisations that have proved so effective in Iraq and Afghanistan as a temporary bridge between military operations and the return of civil administration. While the army can temporarily clear areas, it cannot hold them: the police are intimidated, under-equipped, underpaid and often outgunned by the Taleban, and as troops move from Swat to Waziristan, Taleban re-infiltration into currently ‘cleared’ areas is highly likely. And the governance and administrative structures needed to build on security successes are entirely lacking.

Things are scarcely better in terms of humanitarian relief. Almost two million refugees were displaced by the Swat fighting, and though many moved to stay with relatives, large refugee camps developed across Malakand, adding to the half-million refugees displaced by previous fighting. In the camps, limited humanitarian assistance was provided by Pakistan’s small Emergency Response Unit, a military organisation created after the Muzaffarabad earthquake. International donors, including Britain and the United States, promised assistance but much international aid has failed to materialise. Meanwhile, extremists filled the gap. Groups like al-Khidmat, the charity arm of a political party aligned with the Taleban, and Jamaat ud-Dawa, the charity front for the terrorist organisation Lashkar e-Tayyiba, have been delivering humanitarian assistance to refugees but also radicalising some. Many are now returning to Swat, though there is little to return to.

Pressed in Swat, the Taleban have hit back outside the main area of military operations, with mass-casualty bombings, kidnappings and other terrorist attacks on civilian and military targets in Peshawar, Islamabad, Lahore, Karachi and elsewhere. In part, these are revenge attacks, but they also serve the strategic purpose of drawing off troops who, instead of participating in the main offensive, are now needed to guard and garrison vulnerable points. This saps military resources, which have never been adequately focused on the problem — until recently less than 20 per cent of the Pakistani army was engaged in the fight against internal extremists, while more than 80 per cent was deployed in the east against a possible conventional threat from India.

Taleban fighters are also beginning to flow into Afghanistan, moving across the frontier into eastern Afghanistan as the pressure increases, into areas where they will become an increasing problem for Nato. A friend, commanding a small Special Forces base right on the Afghan side of the frontier, told me recently that every night, when the sun goes down, the mountain passes fill with Taleban moving across into Afghanistan to continue the fight. And as Pakistani forces push into Waziristan and closer to the frontier, they will find the going increasingly difficult — this area and its people are some of the toughest in the world.

As in Afghanistan, it is far too early to discern the likely outcome of the current fighting in Pakistan. At least some members of Pakistan’s feudal elite appear to have grasped that the main threat to their society comes from internal extremism rather than from India. But without a genuine, full-spectrum counter-insurgency doctrine this realisation may be too little, too late.

For Britons and Americans watching the hard-fought progress of our Coalition troops in Helmand, the harsh reality is that Nato could do everything right in Afghanistan and still lose the broader regional campaign against terrorism if Pakistan fails to contain its internal militants. This makes the fight in Pakistan, and finding means to help Pakistanis help themselves, the most important battle in the world.

Dr David Kilcullen, author of The Accidental Guerrilla (Hurst/Oxford 2009), served in Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2006 and 2008 as Special Adviser for Counterinsurgency to the US Secretary of State. This article reflects solely his own views.