A Hail Mary Strategy in Pakistan: The Gut Reaction to Obama's Speech (Part 2)

On Wednesday in Holland, I was set a challenge by a member of the audience: could I summarise, in 30 seconds, the Pakistan side of President Obama's Tuesday speech setting out US intervention in that country as well as Afghanistan?

Here goes....

In American football, there is a desperation play called the Hail Mary pass. You're behind 4 points and there are only 5 seconds left on the clock. So you hurl the football 60, 70, 80 yards down the field and hope against hope that one of your receivers can something snatch it for 6 points and an unlikely victory.

Josh Shahryar’s Afghanistan Primer: The US and the "Warlords"
Afghanistan Special: Josh Shahryar on the Obama Not-So-Grand Plan
A Gut Reaction to Obama’s Afghanistan-Pakistan Speech: The Halfway House of The Long War (Part 1)

Kill Bin Laden: this is President Obama's Hail Mary.

Of course, the President didn't use that exact expression, preferring general rhetoric with little substance about "an effective partnership with Pakistan". Instead, his advisors left breadcrumbs for more observant journalists to follow, as in this extract from Wednesday's New York Times:

Administration officials said that Mr. Obama had signed off on a plan by the Central Intelligence Agency to expand C.I.A. activities in Pakistan. The plan calls for more strikes against militants by drone aircraft, sending additional spies to Pakistan, and securing a White House commitment to bulk up the C.I.A.’s budget for operations inside the country.

The expanded operations could include drone strikes in the southern province of Baluchistan, where senior Afghan Taliban leaders are believed to be hiding, officials said.

There's no mention of Osama or his deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, but then again this is not a new strategy. The US has been pursuing the drone strikes, supported by covert ground operations, for years; the only difference since January 2009 has been that President Obama has expanded the effort. This autumn the Administration has been spinning that the attacks killed at least seven top "extremists" (take your pick with the generic label, "Taliban" or "Al Qa'eda"), including Baitullah Mehsud.

Which raises an immediate question: where do you go from there with yet another "expansion"? I guess you hope that you can rub out Mehsud's relative and successor, Hakimullah Mehsud, who popped up alive weeks after US sources said he was most likely dead, and any other claimants of leadership.

But let's assume that the super-effective drones can eliminate most of the local Pakistani insurgent leaders. Let's assume that there is not a "hydra effect", in which you assassinate one senior member only for another two to pop up. Let's even assume that you don't have the inconvenience of eliminating dozens of civilian bystanders, as has happened frequently during the drone campaign.

Here's the problem for the US Government: is this all there is? A possible answer would be no, since in Obama's words, "The Pakistani army has waged an offensive in Swat and South Waziristan."

Well, yes, there has been an offensive in the summer and autumn which has pushed insurgents deeper into the country. It has also displaced millions --- not thousands, hundreds of thousands, but millions --- of Pakistanis from their homes (a minor blip that Obama wished away on Tuesday with, "We are the largest international supporter for those Pakistanis displaced by the fighting"). It has diverted Pakistani resources, at a time of serious economic difficulty, a diversion which the US Government hopes can be covered by its aid package "to support Pakistan's democracy and development".

This is not a strategy beyond Whack-a-Mole and hope he doesn't pop up again. So is there all there is?

Maybe not, in the sense --- unspoken by Obama on Tuesday --- that his Administration is hoping to back a political centre in Islamabad that will be more stable than that in Kabul. (See Part 1 of this analysis for the Afghanistan dimension of the "hole in the doughnut".) President Zardari is to be stripped of any authority beyond shaking hands at official functions. The top civilian is now Prime Minister Gillani --- how coincidental that he was profiled glowingly this week in the US media --- backed, perhaps surpassed, by the Pakistani military.

That will probably be enough to hold the line in Pakistan, barring the long-shot scenario of an implosion of the military structure. Obama, however, declared on Tuesday that Hold the Line is not enough. So can the US, with all the billions in aid and the rhetorical pushing, get the Pakistani military not only to put on offensives but to take the battle all the way into the insurgent heartland? Do US allies in Islamabad share the goal of Get Bin Laden?

(And even if the Pakistani military takes on the task, can you wage such a campaign without further dislocation --- not only physical but economic, social, and cultural --- of the Pakistani people? Can this be a cost-free campaign, given the tensions in Pakistani politics and society that are never far from the surface?)

I don't know the answers, even this late in the War on Terror game. Sometimes even a Hail Mary pass is successful.

But not often.