If reports of Pakistan Army’s (PA) operations in the Swat Valley over the past couple of weeks or so are to be believed, then the head count of Taliban killed should add up to a thousand or more. But with the kind of media access, or lack of it, there does not seem any way of ascertaining exactly what the figure of Taliban killed or caught are. One indication is graves, of which there are no reports.

Artillery Against Civilians!

But there is no doubt that tens of thousand hapless civilians have been displaced because the only way PA knows to conduct operations in its own country too is by uninhibited use of artillery, attack helicopters and even aerial bombardment. This is the same army which was so steeped in raising terrorist organizations for at least five decades since its existence that it never bothered to train itself in counter-insurgency operations.

While it was too good to believe that PA at long last trained its guns on the Taliban in Buner and Dir, albeit much after the latter took over Swat and eventually, targeting Swat itself, the way it was done, caused at least two million hapless innocent people of that region to be displaced and terrorist attacks on the capital, Islamabad and major cites like Lahore only intensified.

Moreover, that the operations were eventually launched after ‘removing’ 6000 troops from the substantial part of PA deployed against India, only after considerable arm-twisting by the US, is no great consolation. Because one point that this move proves is that had this kind and level of US pressure not been applied, then PA would have continued its post-9/11 charade of ‘dismantling’, but actually protecting organisations like Lashkar e Tayyaba (LeT), Jaish e Mohammad (JEM) and some others by letting them change their locations in Pakistan itself, packing some of them off to Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK) and India’s North East and with the Taliban, literally buying peace as it did repeatedly in North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in the past three years or so at least.

To gauge the sincerity, determination and sustainability of PA’s war against terror by the very same terrorist organizations created by it, or the Taliban, it may be relevant to take stock of PA’s six decades long history and get an idea of its will, capability and freedom to fight, which strike at the roots of its professionalism or rather, lack of it.

Army’s Fall from Professionalism

For any army’s will and capability to fight, the former being fighting spirit or aggressiveness stemming from high morale and good leadership and the latter based on sound and sustained training, let us begin from 1947, when PA was carved out of undivided Indian Army, till then acknowledged by Allied and Axis countries of World Wars (WW) I and II as a formidable professional fighting force. PA’s fall from professionalism began when it found itself as an Islamic army seizing the helm of power of an Islamic state. PA’s current expertise of creating terrorist organizations has its genesis in its adopting the strategy of force multiplication by outsourcing and use of terror, as it did for its first attack on Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) in 1947, when it sent thousands of Kabailis (tribals) to plunder, rape and kill Kashmiris.

Indian Army veterans of 1947, 1965 and 1971 India-Pakistan wars observed some major post-1947 changes in Pakistan’s armed forces: (a) The vastly increased distance between the officer and his soldiers during war. Many Pakistani personnel below officer rank expressed this and added “if we were being led by your (Indian) officers, the result of this war would have been very different”. (b) Avoiding proximity to flames or ensuring not to suffer burns, based on the religious belief that death by burning will lead to ‘Jahannum’ (Hell). This meant that Pakistani tank crews abandoned their mounts after the first hit itself, even when the main gun and machine guns were still functional. (c) Despite PA having then more modern American Patton tanks than Indian Army’s British WW II vintage Centurians, standard of gunnery training was far below the mark. Hence, (b) and (c) together resulted in disproportionately large losses of PA’s tanks in both the 1965 and 1971 armour-intensive wars.

Brigadier (retd) Z A Khan, a Pakiatani armoured corps officer, in his book ‘The Way it Was: Inside the Pakistan Army-Indo-Pak Wars 1965 & 1971’(Natraj Publishers, Dehra Dun, 2007), brings out a number of more flaws in addition to most of those already mentioned about PA, which led to its defeat in these two wars. Besides elaborations on outdated methods of instruction in training and faulty planning of operations in war compounded by lack of coordination and cooperation between the three services, some of his telling observations may be impacting on PA’s current operational responsibilities: “The 1965 war with India was started by us to force a favourable settlement of the Kashmir dispute. Operation Gibraltar was badly planned and badly executed, it ended with the loss of over 5000 Azad Kashmiris forcibly recruited and sent as infiltrators……. ‘Man managed’, spoon fed and over supervised in peace, in the loose atmosphere of the battlefield, the soldier, the NCO and the JCO missed the absence of the officer…..The army must learn to shoot, not for the annual classification and the Pakistan Army Rifle Association, but field firing under simulated battle conditions….”

In barely two weeks of war in 1971, 93,000 Pakistan armed forces personnel surrendered to India Army. Pakistan’s third dictator Ziaul Haq made a long term plan of “bleeding India by thousand cuts” by Islamising PA and forming terrorist groups to wage proxy war. For its 1998-99 Kargil misadventure, PA raised twelve battalions of Northern Light Infantry comprising 49% Shias, 23% Ismailees and 10% Noor Bakshis, 55% from Gilgit and 35% from Baltistan as convenient cannon fodder.

Unlike the Indian Army which is still fighting sophisticatedly armed and equipped Pakistani terrorists with small arms only, PA is doing so by mindless use of all kinds of heavy weapon systems. Just take one example. According to Pakistan’s military spokesman, Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, helicopters ‘inserted’ commandos into the main town in Buner on April 29, 2009 against an estimated 450-500 militants after warplanes and attack helicopters engaged ‘miscreants’ and killed more than 50. Rather than fleeing, ‘militants’ seized three police stations in the north of Buner on April 28 and kidnapped 70 police and paramilitary, while eighteen were “recovered” he said, giving few other details. Security forces prevented some reporters from entering the area and telephone services were interrupted, making it hard to verify the army’s account of the fighting (www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30468049/).

Ill Equipped to Fight Insurgency

So, the fact remains that there is little chance of ascertaining PA’s direct fighting role, the exact number of Taliban killed, or whatever or the collateral damage to civilians, which in any case is not a matter of any priority or importance at all.

Last but certainly not least, how ‘free’ is PA in fighting the Taliban and other groups created, nurtured and directed by it? Why does it still need to raise new ‘elite’ forces, as in April ’09, whose 600 policemen refused to go to Swat? Steeped in organizing and outsourcing terrorists, it never prepared itself to effectively fight them even to save Pakistan. Fighting terrorists, particularly in ones own country’s populated areas, must be done not by indiscriminate bombardment by heavy artillery and aircraft but by troops on the ground closing in on terrorists or insurgents. That is the method professional armies follow and one which PA is just not used to because this method requires, in simple terminology, guts, which PA has time and again proved that it lacks.