BY: indianexpress

Islamabad, with its neatly laid out streets and installations, is famously said to be 15 minutes from Pakistan. But after Pak troops first stormed the Lal Masjid on July 10 to flush out terrorists, the loudest effects are being heard and felt on the unruly border with Afghanistan. And no one’s facing the heat as much as the Pakistan Army.

more than 70 of its soldiers have been killed in suicide bombings and ambushes in just a fortnight after the Lal Masjid operation. In fact, according to estimates by the United States and independent terror monitors, over 600 soldiers have died fighting militancy since Islamabad joined the US led “war on terror” along the Afghan border.

An independent survey by the South Asia Terrorism Portal (SATP), which tracks Pakistan media reports on troop losses to terrorism activities, puts its losses since 2004 at 717 — a number that also includes police casualties.

Taking stock of this spiralling violence against the army observers have drawn focus to what they call “one of the gravest internal security threats since independence”. According to Islamabad-based security analyst and Army-watcher Ayesha Siddiqa, this could have far-reaching consequences.

Speaking to The Sunday Express, she says: “This is the beginning of an internal role for the Pak army. I think we don’t really need India anymore to justify the Army’s presence and significance. This is part of the change post-9/11. The counter-insurgency operations will well entrench the military as a significant player inside the country.”

This couldn’t have come in more challenging circumstances.

As yesterday’s issue of Lahore-based The Friday Times holds, official Pak army casualties could be conservative: “Since March 2004, when hostilities broke out after an army contingent conducted an extraction operation near Wana (Agency Headquarters of South Waziristan), the army has lost some 700 personnel to 1000 militants killed. Unofficial estimates for the soldiers killed range from 1000 to 3000.”

By way of contrast, during this same period, analysts in New Delhi point out, infiltration in Jammu and Kashmir came down to record levels. And according to official records, the Indian army has suffered 397 casualties fighting militants in the Valley since 2004.

Lal Masjid is a key marker in this timeline because one of its immediate effects was the virtual collapse of Pak President Pervez Musharraf’s peace deal last year with militants in North Waziristan.

By July 15, Taliban militants declared the 2006 deal over and Musharraf was reinforcing deployment in the tribal areas. And by yesterday, troops were well on their way to taking control of Miranshah, North Waziristan’s regional headquarters.

In Washington this week, the Bush Administration, too, admitted that Musharraf’s agreement had failed, an agreement it had initially supported involving withdrawal of Pak troops and empowerment of local tribes to fight terror.

“This agreement has not worked well for the Pakistani Government, nor has it worked well for us. As a result, the Pakistani government has recently reinserted its forces into the tribal areas. We would like to see the top Al Qaeda and Taliban leaders, who we believe intentionally use Pakistan as a safe haven, brought to justice,” stated US Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs Nicholas Burns in his testimony before the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs. In short, Pakistan will have to re-deploy forces back into Waziristan.

With close to 100,000 troops 15 per cent of Pakistan’s total estimated force strength deployed along the Afghan border, experts say the “war on terror” could be stretching Pakistan.

“This is going to be a long slog for the Pakistan Army, and they are, or should be, worried about fighting a two front war with India on the one side, with radical Islamists on the other,” says Stephen Cohen, Senior

Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution and author of The Idea of Pakistan, in an e-mail interview to The Sunday Express. On July 25, Cohen testified on the subject to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

Cohen feels that heavy Pakistani engagement along the Afghan border is a possible reason for relative peace in Kashmir and an opportunity to settle the Kashmir issue.

“This may be one reason why Musharraf has come up with a number of proposals regarding Kashmir and why infiltration seems to have been reduced, and we may now have a unique opportunity to settle Kashmir, or at least put it on the backburner for a while. This would enable the Pakistan army to concentrate upon the job of the old Northern Command: stabilizing the Northwest Frontier and adjacent problem areas,” he says.

Adds Siddiqa, author of Military Inc.: Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy: “The government has no option but to be proactive. There appears to be a conflict between the government and the Taliban or the government and the militants and if the army does not fight the other party will gain...The war may not necessarily divide the army as Hamid Gul (a former ISI chief seen to be pro-Taliban) would like to imagine.”

While Pakistan immediately conveyed its support to US post-9/11, it did not commit army troops to anti-terror operations in significant numbers till 2004 in Waziristan, part of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas where the direct writ of the state has somewhat uncertainly held since colonial times.

In the first year of operations, the Pakistan army killed 100 Taliban members at a loss of close to 200 soldiers, according to a US Department of State report.

The operation in Pakistan’s west also come amidst uncharacteristically consistent talk out of official Washington that the US could consider military strikes at militant especially Al-Qaeda havens on Pakistani territory.

This has been balanced with appreciative statements like this one before the Senate Committee on foreign relations on July 25 by Nicholas Burns, the Under Secretary of State for political affairs. He said Pakistan is an “indispensable partner” in the war on terror. “Pakistan has stationed 100,000 troops on the rough terrain of the Afghanistan border and more than 600 members of Pakistan’s security forces have sacrificed their lives in support of anti-terror efforts,” his statement elaborated.