In Pakistan, corruption and floods are keeping al Qaeda fat and happy

By Haider Ali Hussein Mullick
Best Defense chief Pakistan correspondent

I just got back from my third trip to Pakistan this year, where I examined the scope and scale of its counterinsurgency strategy and al Qaeda’s response.

The bottom line is that al Qaeda’s big plans for world dominance have failed, but its ability to keep the United States and allies on high alert is increasing. There are two primary reasons for this paradoxical situation: First, al Qaeda’s very successful nine-year ‘train the trainer’ program, which multiplies its strength without expanding its numbers. Second, the August floods that devastated Pakistan are a game changer, a godsend for al Qaeda, diverting 30,000 Pakistani counterinsurgents and key enablers (helicopters, engineers, medics, etc.) away from the Afghanistan-Pakistan border to flood relief and reconstruction activities. To overstretch armies, smart insurgents always pray for the opening of multiple fronts. The damage from the floods couldn’t be worse — 1/5th of Pakistan (size of New England) inundated, seven million people lost their homes, and $30 billion in total damages. The timing was equally terrible: The Pakistani surge was finally working, and troops were holding Swat and South Waziristan since 2009.

Today, the nuclear-armed Pakistani army is under great stress, and reluctant to go into North Waziristan, home to al Qaeda, the Haqqani network, and the Pakistani Taliban. The army is the police, National Guard, relief organization, reconstruction agency, and governing body in critical areas in the north and south, while the weak civilian government is perceived to be corrupt, inept, and aloof as it wrestles with the Supreme Court. Half of 180 million Pakistanis are under the age of 25 and facing high prices, unemployment and little opportunity. They watch the rich pay virtually no taxes and they find solace in U.S. and India bashing, and blissful ignorance about their actual enemies, which are the al Qaeda syndicate, corruption and poverty. Al Qaeda couldn’t ask for a better home.

What’s worse is that we don’t have any good options in Pakistan, and President Barack Obama has made that clear again and again. But we can make our bad options better. If there were a 9/11-type attack post-marked Pakistan there would be retaliatory airstrikes against terrorist camps — but Washington doesn’t have a ‘day-after plan’. We need a strategy that deals with such an attack and strives to balance terrorist interdiction (with or without Pakistani help amid imminent danger) with U.S. civil-military aid and outreach to the Pakistani people. Today we must maintain the Catch-22 of supporting nuclear-armed, comatose Pakistan, knowing that it won’t wake up, walk on its own or hug us anytime soon. But we must combine that with a long-term roadmap to bring the countries together, to imagine the impossible by doing the possible. We must continue to assert our security interests, help Pakistan help itself, and make our partnership transparent to the Pakistani people. Hope is not a policy, but striving for a more effective partnership with a nuclear-armed country that is the second-largest Muslim nation, that is home to al Qaeda, and that borders Iran, China and India, is.

Read more here to learn about al Qaeda’s post-9/11 metamorphosis, and how the United States can better partner with Pakistan to degrade al Qaeda and associates.

Haider Ali Hussein Mullick is a Fellow at the U.S. Joint Special Operations University, Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, and the author of Pakistan’s Security Paradox: Countering and Fomenting Insurgencies.