The Bush administration's fervent attempts in recent weeks to promote good news from Iraq have proved increasingly difficult in the wake of the attack on the al-Askari mosque in Samarra on 22 February, and the wave of violence that followed. Its efforts faced further embarrassment with the comments from the United States ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, who on 7 March said that the termination of the Saddam Hussein regime and the subsequent occupation had opened a "Pandora's box" of potential sectarian conflicts.
Khalilzad's intervention may have contained a coded political message, designed to discourage the Bush administration from withdrawing too many troops from Iraq in the run-up to the mid-term elections to Congress in November 2006. They were certainly in contradiction to other recent administration statements, and had a markedly different emphasis from Donald Rumsfeld's claims of Iranian interference in the form of Revolutionary Guard support for insurgent groups in Iraq.
In any case, the persistent realities on the ground in Iraq are truer pointers to the trend of events than the words of US officials. An indication of the insurgents' current capabilities is the assassination on 6 March of a key figure in the Iraqi security forces.
Major-General Mubdar Hatim al-Dulaimi was a professional soldier from the Saddam Hussein era, a Sunni Muslim who commanded the 6th division of the Iraqi army in Baghdad (see Alistair Macdonald, "Iraqi forces probe general's 'strange' killing", Reuters, 7 March 2006). This division was responsible for maintaining security in much of Baghdad, 70% of which is now under local Iraqi control, and al-Dulaimi's troops were heavily involved in attempting to suppress sectarian violence after the Samarra bombing.
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Al-Dulaimi was travelling in a convoy of fourteen vehicles in western Baghdad. He was wearing body armour, but as he stepped out of his vehicle and started to put on his helmet, a single bullet to his head (believed to be have been fired by a sniper) killed him instantly. A ministry of defence official's comment that the assassin must have had very precise information provides further evidence that even elite forces in the new Iraqi army have been compromised by insurgents.
The Pakistan context
The intense violence in Iraq has coincided with the continuing dispute over Iran's nuclear programmes, which on 8 March saw the International Atomic Energy agency (IAEA) finally decide to refer Iran to the United Nations Security Council.
Meanwhile, the visit of George W Bush's visit to India and Pakistan (with a brief stopover in Afghanistan on the outward journey) has also refocused attention on south Asia. The coordinated bombs in the Hindu pilgrim city of Varanasi on 7 March claimed the following day by a previously unknown group called Lashkar-e-Qahab (possibly a splinter of the Islamist group Lashkar-e-Taiba) indicate that India is not immune from paramilitary attack on its soil. But the predicament facing India's government is overshadowed by the challenge to that of its neighbour and regional rival, Pakistan.
A strong message of the Bush tour is that the US now regards India as a key partner in its regional security interests, not least because India is seen as a powerful counterforce to the growth of Chinese influence. The current US administration is aware that cultivating good relations with India may cause internal problems for President Pervez Musharraf, but it considers that having a country of India's size and importance "on side" outweighs any negative impact that might have in Pakistan.
There are considerable risks in such a policy, especially in light of the marked deterioration in the security situation in Afghanistan in the past year (see "The next Afghan war", 26 January 2006). The Taliban and other paramilitaries have sustained their insurgency operations at a higher level than in the previous three winters and have been able to operate with impunity in the cross-border areas between Afghanistan and Pakistan.
Musharraf himself is at present remaining close to the United States, partly as a result of a careful calculation in relation to the nuclear deal concluded between India and the United States. Pakistan's routine distrust of India reaches a peak when there is any hint of India acquiring nuclear ascendancy in the region. An agreement that aids India's civil nuclear-power development and perhaps grants India a freer hand in enhancing its nuclear-weapon capabilities is frankly anathema to Islamabad. But there must be some hope that Washington might be persuaded to offer a broadly similar deal to Pakistan too.
This may help to explain the intense recent activity of the Pakistani army in the border areas, to a pitch not seen for two years. The Islamist leanings of some senior officers in the army means, however, that this strategy carries its own risks.
In the past week much of the violence has been centred on the town of Miran Shah, the capital of the border district of North Waziristan which happens to be the main focus of Taliban and other paramilitary groups in the region. The Pakistani army has undertaken many sorties here in recent years, but overall an uneasy "arrangement" has existed between Islamabad and areas such as North Waziristan a large measure of local autonomy in return for loose oversight by government officials. When on occasion army units have engaged in direct military operations against the Taliban and other militias, they have taken considerable casualties.
The most recent bout of such fighting has been unusually fierce, sufficiently so to make ground-force movements by Pakistani army units difficult. According to Pakistan's foreign minister Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri, Musharraf told President Bush during their Islamabad talks that the Pakistani army has had 600 soldiers killed in these operations over the years of combat in the area.
The nature of the terrain and the fighting means that Musharraf's forces have tended to rely increasingly on helicopter gunships, much as the Americans have in Iraq. The inevitable consequence (again, as in Iraq) is a high level of civilian casualties. Moreover, the deployment of armed drones by US units operating from across the Afghan border has also had the effect of killing civilians.
The combined result is increasing bitterness towards the Musharraf regime in Pakistan. A small, unlikely but significant side-effect of this was the temporary house-arrest of the renowned former cricketer turned independent politician Imran Khan, who has embraced a decidedly anti-American outlook and is seen even by some radical Islamists as a potential leader of the country (see Syed Saleem Shahzad, "Pakistan battles the Forces Within", Asia Times, 7 March 2006).
In addition to his weekly openDemocracy column, Paul Rogers writes an international security monthly briefing for the Oxford Research Group; for details, click here
Paul Rogers has recently written a report for the Oxford Research Group on the likely effects of a military attack on Iran:
"Iran: Consequences of a War" (February 2006)
A collection of Paul Rogers's Oxford Research Group briefings, Iraq and the War on Terror: Twelve Months of Insurgency, 2004-05 is published by IB Tauris
(October 2005)
The North Waziristan theatre
The fighting in North Waziristan has for the moment receded, but what happens there in the next few weeks could shape military outcomes in the region, and even political outcomes in Pakistan, in the months to come. North Waziristan and its neighbouring areas directly straddle the routes between Pakistan and Afghanistan. These include the corridors through which Taliban and other paramilitaries are developing the logistical supply-lines for the anticipated spring offensive against both the Afghan government and its western (United States and Nato) military allies.
2006 is expected to be the first year since their withdrawal from Kabul in November 2001 when Taliban units take the offensive on a large scale. In order to maximise their effect, they need safe access to and from Pakistan. Musharraf is therefore under considerable pressure from Washington to sustain military activity on the Pakistani side of the border; yet the more he does this, the more he is likely to provoke local antagonism to his regime.
Much will now hinge on whether Musharraf decides to continue the military operation in the border regions. The domestic political risk is severe; so too is the potential benefit in terms of the kudos he may earn in Washington. If, however, the Bush administration does not respond to Musharraf's efforts, he may respond by scaling down operations in North Waziristan, thus enabling a more forceful Taliban spring campaign in Afghanistan.
It may seem unlikely that Musharraf would thus jeopardise even the vague hope of support from his principal ally. But his regime may well consider that it has another card to play its relations with China and Russia.
Beijing has long had a cordial and useful relationship with Islamabad. The positive nature of Musharraf's visit there on 19-23 February 2006 is reflected in the joint statement released at its conclusion. Russia, too, has no problem with improving its relations with Pakistan, despite its closer historic ties with India.
Both Russia and China, conscious of their overall strategic weaknesses in relation to the world's sole superpower, would regard improved relations with Islamabad as valuable. Such an outcome, though, is dependent on the Pervez Musharraf regime surviving the next few months. That in turn may depend on what happens in North Waziristan and neighbouring regions as the Taliban's spring offensive gathers pace.
