Pakistan doesn’t have enough troops for 2 fronts. It has to choose between LOC, Balochistan

File photo of Pakistan Army | Commons

The platoon found its officer when the terrors of the night ended: “He had been castrated and flayed, probably while alive, and his skin lay pegged out on the rocks not far from camp,” the soldier and novelist John Masters later wrote. “They never took prisoners but mutilated and beheaded any wounded or dead who fell into their hands,” he went on. Enraged Ethnic-Pashtun women sometimes joined in: “They would torture prisoners with the death of a thousand cuts, pushing grass and thorns into each wound as it was made.”

A hundred years after the British fought its long, savage counter-insurgency campaign to control the Afghan borderlands of their Empire, Pakistan finds itself flailing in the face of a war that will not end. Fatalities have surged to record levels, driven by an intense wave of strikes by the Balochistan Liberation Army and a resurgent jihadist movement in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa.

Leaders, both civilian and military, have been promising ruthless retribution for these attacks. In this war, though, the Pakistani state cannot and will not win unless it abandons the principles of colonial counter-insurgency, which have coated its institutional thinking like toxic sludge. Addressing the insurgency needs troops to provide security but also creative political and economic engagement. The Islamic Republic’s praetorian guard has repeatedly shown itself incapable of such a project.

Endless attrition

For the Empire’s strategists, historian Andrew Waters has shown, the counter-insurgencies they fought posed an intractable problem: “Here small ground forces, deployed to punish marauders or rebellious villages, attracted large numbers of hostile tribesmen which required large, expensive relief expeditions, with concomitant vulnerable lines of communication, to relieve them.” To be positioned to send out relief expeditions meant maintaining garrisons with roads or railway lines to supply them. Those lines of communication, in turn, needed troops to protect them.

The first thirty years of British rule in the North-West, historian Elizabeth Kolsky records, saw more than forty punitive expeditions in which crops were destroyed, livestock were slaughtered, and entire villages were burned to the ground. The punitive expeditions were officially cast as “measures required for the establishment of a strong rule and a peaceful border in countries which had never before known law and order.”

Thus, each short, sharp campaign to punish rebellious tribes turned into a military expedition whose costs simply could not be justified. The Empire did indeed need to stabilise its border with Afghanistan to protect itself from rival imperial designs—but it needed to do so without bankrupting itself.

Fundamentally, warfare is about geography. Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa sprawls over 101,741 square kilometres, and the country’s largest province, Balochistan, is spread over 347,190 sq. km. Figures for military deployments in this area are hard to come by. Still, a granular study by scholar Zahid Ali Khan estimated that Pakistan committed some 140,000 Army and Frontier Corps personnel to the borderlands during its major counter-insurgency operations of 2009-2010.

This is a small number: To secure the Line of Control against infiltration and to fight jihadists operating inside Kashmir, India uses around 320,000 troops, not counting the close to 100,000 central police personnel. Jammu and Kashmir has an area of 42,241 square kilometres, less than half of Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa alone.

From the war of 1947-1948, Pakistan Army strategists learned that irregular warfare could help them tie down large parts of India’s numerically superior Army and sap resources that would otherwise be available for offensive use. Today, however, they’re also discovering that this sword cuts two ways. Facing an economic crisis, the country has had to increase defence spending, which, Muhammad Luqman and Nikolaos Antonakakis show, is hollowing out human development.

Even then, the Army was unable to ensure the basic elements of order in its massive borderlands. Large parts of Balochistan’s road network, journalist Imtiaz Baloch reports, are under the control of either insurgents or bandits. The simplest answer is to pump in even more troops—but Pakistan can’t do that without significantly weakening its posture on the Line of Control in Kashmir.

The Empire’s planners faced precisely the same problem—and thought they had a solution.

War from the air

From the 1920s, Royal Air Force strategists began to advocate for the use of air power to address the Empire’s many insurgencies, stretching from Iraq to India’s North-West. Air Marshall Sir John Salmond suggested that bombing from the air could “knock the roofs of huts about and prevent their repair, a considerable inconvenience in winter-time. It can seriously interfere with ploughing or harvesting–a vital matter; or burn up the stores of fuel laboriously piled up and garnered for the winter by attack on livestock, which is the main form of capital and source of wealth to the less settled tribes.”

To imperial strategists, it appeared that the use of massive force would cow rebels into submission—this without the enormous resources ground expeditions demanded.

Fighting the rebels led by Haji Mirzali Khan Wazir, the Faqir of Ipi, the air campaign often targeted the villages from which his insurgents had originated. Fresh from three months’ leave in England, historian Andrew M Roe records, Sergeant Albert Holloway of 60 Squadron fired off hundreds of rounds into one village along the Tochi River. Later, he flew multiple sorties over Bhittani, using 20-pound and 112-pound bombs to destroy tribal livestock: “Cattle dispersed with casualties,” his log entries read, “Camels and sheep dispersed.”

Leaders of the tribal Lashkars, not surprisingly, adapted to these new means of warfare. Large groups began to move at night when they could not be detected by air surveillance. From mountain tops, tribespeople also became adept at shooting down low-flying aircraft. The fate of captured pilots was, perhaps unsurprisingly, often an unhappy one.

The RAF was compelled to issue what came to be known as “goli chits”—goli being the Pashto word for ball—promising large cash rewards if the captured pilots were returned without being castrated. “A beer-drinking song in a mess summed up the ghastly prospect,” Graham Chandler writes: “No balls at all. No balls at all. When your engine cuts out, you’ll have no balls at all.”

Lives wasted

Even the brutality of the air campaign did not secure Waziristan for the British. The historian Sana Haroon notes that the “British ultimately secured tribal complicity with their project through huge increases in allowances in Waziristan—from about 130,000 rupees in 1919 to about 280,000 rupees by 1935”. In addition, some 1.9 million rupees were paid out for the Khassadar scheme, which armed and funded local militia raised by the tribes themselves. The Faqir of Ipi himself was never caught and lived on in Pakistan despite loudly voicing his trenchant opposition to Partition.

There were plenty within the Empire’s strategic establishment who understood there could have been better ways to bring peace to the North-West. Expanding and securing trade routes through the region, for example, could have given the tribes access to revenues, freeing them of the need to raid the plains in times of agrarian distress. Efforts to build an alternative agricultural economy might have taken time, but it would likely have been more durable.

Little imagination is needed to see why an Empire didn’t care to build a polity and a state that could endure. Less explicable, though, is the Pakistani state’s disdain for its people. The North-West borderlands remain the most backward regions of Pakistan, systematically denying the investments in infrastructure and education that have allowed other areas to progress. The Army, for its part, has chosen to rule through jihadist proxies and tribal chieftains instead of allowing modern democratic politics to grow roots.

This crisis shows that a breaking point is coming. Further barbarism can defer its arrival, perhaps, but it will risk dragging Pakistan itself to a point of no return.

Praveen Swami is contributing editor at ThePrint. His X handle is @praveenswami. Views are personal.

(Edited by Theres Sudeep)