The most explicit client relationship ISI maintains with such groups is with the anti-Indian terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba. “Just this week, the Pakistanis allowed the head of Lashkar-e-Taiba … [to be] released from the farce of house arrest,” he said. “Tensions between India and Pakistan are going to go up this week because of that.” And while there aren’t indications that ISI operates in such a way with al-Qaeda or the Pakistani Taliban, the terrorist groups see little problem cooperating with one another.

Selective counterterrorism is weak counterterrorism, because the bad guys tend to operate together. For example, within the last several weeks, a major terrorist cell was exposed in the city of Karachi. The target was to go after senior officials in the city government. That cell had as its leadership a troika: one member of the Pakistani Taliban, one member of Lashkar-e-Taiba, and one member of al-Qaeda. They are prepared to work together. They’re not prepared, so far at least, to turn on each other. … How long is Pakistan going to try and have it all ways at the same time?

For a while longer at least. Over at U.N. Dispatch, Mark Leon Goldberg interviewed Abdullah Hussain Haroon, Pakistan’s ambassador to the United Nations, about the release of that Lashkar-e-Taiba leader, Hafiz Saeed. Haroon defended Saeed and denied that he’s a terrorist:

Are you familiar in any way with the work of Hafiz Saeed? He’s not LET. He’s Jamaat-ud-Dawah [a front group for the LET], and it’s a purely social organization. He works not for Islam alone but does charitable work around the world. … They run a very large myriad of institutions that in fact contribute to the social good. Now if you say, ‘ah, they have an ideological belief,’ well, I suppose they do, but that’s not enough to sink anyone.

It’s almost as if Haroon is forgetting that the reason Saeed was under house arrest was because evidence emerged tying him and the JUD to the Mumbai massacres last year. That’s why Riedel said his placement under house arrest was farcical.

“The ISI has clearly been penetrated by some of these extreme jihadist groups,” Riedel continued. “When you have attacks inside fortified compounds” — like the one last week in Lahore by the Pakistani Taliban in response to the Pakistani military’s offensive in Swat — “those are being done by someone who’s working a double game. But that doesn’t mean the agency itself is a rogue organization. It means it’s been penetrated.”

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“The humanitarian crisis in Swat gets worse every day, which is why it’s so critical that the government of Pakistan and the Obama Administration undertake immediate joint relief operations modeled on our successful efforts following the 2005 Kashmir earthquake. The United States must commit military assets, such as Chinook heavy-lift helicopters, combat engineers and uniformed medical personnel, that the Pakistani government needs to facilitate these efforts without further delay. When terrorist groups such as Jamaat-ud Dawa are reportedly already operating relief camps in Swat, there is no basis for turning back the far more capable assistance of the United States military.

“The statistics underscore the emergency: between two and three million civilians have been displaced and have little or no access to adequate shelter, food or medical care. In a few weeks, the summer monsoons will turn ramshackle camps into fetid swamps, incubators for a host of preventable epidemics. History has already taught us that poorly-resourced refugee communities are prime breeding grounds for extremist movements; the Taliban itself had its genesis in the Afghan refugee community driven into Pakistan during the 1980s and 1990s. We don’t need to repeat that disaster when instead we can show America’s true commitment to the Pakistani people.”

So speaking of public diplomacy, it’s often said that public diplomacy is a poor substitute for good policy — and there’s truth to that, though they don’t need to be defined in opposition to each other. (Gen. David Petraeus tells a story about how, at the start of the surge, visiting dignitaries would tell him he had a public-diplomacy problem; he rejoindered that he had a results problem.) U.S. efforts at helping the people of the Swat Valley might be better promoted, especially as bin Laden’s making it a central aspect of his latest propaganda tape.

– The trilaterals were “not just a photo op.” Afghan and Pakistani ministers of agriculture, interior and finance had “never met each other.” As a result, they agreed to hold four sets of meetings per year — “We have set up working groups and task forces” on “water resource management… to negotiating the trade transit agreement between Afghanistan and Pakistan… to perhaps, the most difficult of all, intelligence cooperation.” This will “improve chances achieving our objectives.” But what matters is cooperation on the ground, bilaterally. … So what resulted from the meetings?

– The situation in Pakistan “extremely difficult.” You’re not going to find perfection “in any of our policies in this part of the world.” Holbrooke raises his Vietnam experience. “People ask me if this is another Vietnam,” he said. “Structurally there are many similarities,” including corruption, inadequacies in strategy, “sometimes our own strategy.” But the “core difference” is “9/11. There was no threat from the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese Army to the homeland of the United States … Our enemies now include people who do.”  al-Qaeda is “camped out in western Pakistan … these are the men who killed Benazir [Bhutto], who did Mumbai, who attacked the cricket team in Lahore, who attacked the United States … If it were not for that fact, Mr. Chairman…we would not be having this kind of colloquy.” Always back to the core interest at stake.

–  Holbrooke praised the Kerry-Lugar Pakistan bill, which “corrects an imbalance” in funding Pakistan, which was too heavily military. He also commended the committee’s Thursday lunch with Presidents Karzai and Zardari. Much different tone than the snippiness he showed the House Foreign Affairs Committee last week. The questions asked there were “tougher than those asked at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, at the State Department.” Ooooh.

– Pakistan is “not a failed state.” Politically, “we have a democratically elected government after decades of military rule which was excessively supported, in my view, by the United States.” He reiterated that supporting democracy in Pakistan should be “a core objective.” Every opinion poll shows a desire for a democratic Pakistan, despite the rivalry between Zardari’s party and Nawaz Sharif’s rival party. “Very pleased” by the parties’ coalition government in the Punjab. “A big step forward,” he said. “Before we throw up our hands… let’s recognize with a lot of encouragement from their friends… you can see the signs that Pakistan’s political effort is knitting together somewhat from where it was a few weeks ago.”

– The Swat deal with the Taliban was a mistake. The Pakistani people “supported that deal very strongly, something like 74 percent,” but the Taliban “violated it … and that created a near panic, among some people.” So here’s the military operations, which Holbrooke says he’s “not in a position to report to you … frankly, I don’t really trust what I hear until the dust of battle settles.” But what is clear is that there are now 900,000 refugees, a figure that may grow to as many as 1,300,000. “Major, major refugee crisis. I think there’s a meeting going on right now about this downtown.” The United States. has given $57 million in emergency funds so far.

But the Pakistani newspapers Dawn and the Daily Times report that the government’s decision enjoys broad, if caveated, support. Dawn:

Despite reservations by some mainstream political parties on the Prime Minister’s announcement, there is general consensus that the growing Talibanization needs to be tackled effectively. Many believe the government should use this opportunity to take the battle against militancy to its logical conclusion.

The Daily Times:

The government has been forced to take military action against the Taliban to restore its writ, Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz General Secretary Iqbal Zafar Jhgra said. Talking to a private TV channel, Jhagra said the government made utmost efforts for the enforcement of the Nizam-e-Adl Regulation but “the response from the other side was not encouraging thus forcing the government to launch a military operation”.

It’s natural that there be some reservations among political leaders. Leaving aside the prospect of challenging the Zardari government, the military is basically charged with an operation that will create a lot of civilian casualties, internal displacement and anxiety for an unknown duration. The evident fact that there’s as much support as there appears to be for the operation testifies to Pakistani resolve — which most in the U.S., and in the Obama administration, began the week doubting.

In “Children of the Taliban,” reporter Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy presented an overview of the destruction of the Swat Valley by the Pakistani Taliban, highlighting their confidence that they can defeat the Pakistani army. (By the time she visited Swat, they were on the verge of cementing their victory in seizing the valley.) After visiting internal displacement camps and interviewing civilians caught in the crossfire of the battle — some blame the United States, some blame the Taliban, some blame the Pakistani army — she interviews Maj. Gen. Tariq Khan, commander of the Pakistani army’s effort in the area. “They’ve been very successful, very intense, very high casualty rates, but we have succeeded,” Khan says, sounding like a U.S. general in Iraq from 2003 to 2006.

Obaid-Chinoy asks Khan about teenagers who sympathize with the Taliban in the wake of the army’s destruction of their homes and the deaths of their relatives. His response:

Yeah, they probably were the Taliban, and they run away from [Bajaur, in the tribal areas] and they’re sitting out there hiding in the refugee camps, because you can’t tell who’s where, like I say. But those people who complain about it are probably part of the problem and are not part of the solution.

Khan is commander of the Frontier Corps, the component of the Pakistani military designated to fight in the tribal areas and that the Obama administration’s Pakistan Counterinsurgency Capability Fund is designed to support. Note his dismissal of the idea that civilian casualties are counterproductive; his assumption that embittered civilians are nothing more than disguised Taliban; his confidence that the measure of success is a body count; and his inattention to the idea that the Taliban feeds off of legitimate civilian grievances unaddressed or exacerbated by his war plan.

How does the United States think an officer so senior and so self-assured is going to respond to an adviser who says, “Actually, you’re doing this all wrong?” This isn’t Iraq or Afghanistan, where the United States has been effectively in charge of those nations’ militaries. In Pakistan, we won’t be telling, we’ll be asking. And the people we’re asking may not be so inclined to listen.

Pakistan has not done a peace deal with the Taliban in Swat Valley. Period. Pakistan has negotiated an arrangement, locally, with the Tehrik-e-Nifaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammedi of Swat. The president of Pakistan has not signed the agreement and not approved the agreement yet because he’s waiting for the TNSM to fulfill its end of the bargain, which was, essentially, to make sure that the Taliban — whose leader happens to be his son-in-law — they do not continue to use force. Since that has not happened, the agreement has not been enforced.

Here’s what I mean when I say that the shorthand about Pakistan is based on an assumption that Pakistan is unable to change. Pakistanis went to the polls on February 18, 2008. They elected a leadership that ran on the platform saying that fighting terrorism is our first priority. They elected the party of someone who was killed by terrorists for standing up against terrorism. So the people of Pakistan, quite clearly, have a preference for fighting terrorism. Does Pakistan have a complex situation, political and power equation? Absolutely. But at the same time I think we need to make distinctions and we need to understand how the various shades of grey operate in Pakistan. That said, we will make sure that the Swat Valley is cleared of the extremist Taliban and the violent extremists that have been operating there. There have been many reasons for us to respond. Recently there was a video shown on Pakistani television and it really galvanized the nation into recognizing that the Pakistani nation does not want to tolerate people that do not respect basic human rights.

There are military difficulties in different parts of Pakistan, and different parts of the Pakistani tribal areas, as well as in Swat, which we will be able to deal with much better when the capacity of our military is built to the level where we can be an effective counterinsurgency force.

There’s a lot there. First, the Pakistani component to the Obama administration’s Af-Pak strategy is partially predicated on bolstering Pakistani counterinsurgency capability, and there’s a whole new fund established for it. Second, pledging to “clear” the Swat Valley of extremists has to sound like an encouraging sign to the administration. Third, as Bill Roggio notes, another interesting development is that the leader of the extremist TNSM, Sufi Mohammed, is blaming Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari for the peace deal collapsing precisely because Zardari didn’t sign on to it. Haqqani is indicating that the Pakistani military needs a bolstered counterinsurgency capability before it goes back into Swat; we’ll see what happens when it gets some U.S. assistance in that regard.

From a purely military perspective, the Predator surge has largely succeeded in tracking and killing high-value terrorist suspects. In the last year or so, Pentagon and CIA operatives have cultivated a better network of informants on the ground, received greater cooperation from the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence, and, most important, used a nearly seamless combination of new operational techniques and surveillance equipment on the Predator. [emphasis mine]

This, I think, is the real story here. The drones are only as good as the intelligence about where Al Qaeda targets will be.

Years ago, CIA counterterrorism officers would lament how blind they were in Pakistan; this has really, really changed, and all under the radar. Notice that The New York Times piece about yesterday’s truce in the Swat valley contains this line:

Analysts are now suggesting that the drone strikes may be pushing the Taliban, and even some Qaeda elements, out of the tribal belt and into Swat, making the valley more important to the Taliban.

That underscores the importance of, as Zenko writes, a comprehensive strategy for Af-Pak. If the drone strikes are doing damage, it’s because the intelligence network is getting stronger. It’s important to ask why that is. I can’t answer that without reporting, but one fairly safe assumption is that the strength of the Pakistani Taliban and Al Qaeda elements in the area is alienating at least some portion of the locals. These forces are not as rooted in the area as their Afghan counterparts: they have risen to power over the last three or four years by substituting their code of justice for the authentic tribal structure — in other words, the sort of thing that presaged the fall of the British and the Russian expeditions into Af-Pak. That’s the sort of cleavage that a savvy strategy exploits. We’ll see if that emerges from the Obama administration.

The Taliban offered the government of President Asif Ali Zardari a truce in Swat, pending the establishment of Islamic sharia law. As The New York Times reports, the Pakistani Army evidently lacks a sufficient counterinsurgent capability, and that prompted the government and the military to talk terms, rather than continue a protracted struggle of uncertain outcome. (If ever there’s an argument for embedding counterinsurgency competencies into the U.S. national security apparatus, here it is.) The deal is being finalized, but here’s how provincial minister Ameer Haidar Hoti described it:

Hoti said troops would remain in “reactive mode” instead of “proactive mode” and would not target anyone unless threatened. He said army should be removed only after peace has been restored. Troops would play their role in reconstruction and rehabilitation, he added.

He also said the population in the area demanded to be ruled under Islamic law, but that may be an effort at saving face.

In any event, the previous Pakistani government of Pervez Musharraf tried signing a self-governance truce with militants in 2006 and it collapsed spectacularly. Perhaps this is just a time for both Pakistani soldiers and the Taliban to take a kneee ahead of the next confrontation. But in the meantime, Beitullah Massoud is likely going to use his new Swat Valley safe haven to launch attacks against Zardari’s government — based barely 100 miles away — and to allow extremists a place to regroup before exfiltrating to neighboring Afghanistan to fight U.S., NATO and Afghan forces. And his allies are almost certain to consolidate their hold on Swat by murdering the opposition, as they’ve been doing: The Times notes that Swat elected a secular party in last year’s elections, but the Taliban started assassinating its members and supporters. This is how a nuclear-armed country slips into failed-statehood.

The TV channels, at first soft on the Taliban, have finally come around to seeing the terror in Swat for what it is. Swatis themselves have been intimidated into keeping silent about [self-appointed Swat ruler and extremist Maulana] Fazlullah and criticising only the army and its “collateral damage”. But the channels can no longer conceal the fact that the Swatis are now praying for America’s drone attacks in their valley as the last resort.

I am in no position to judge the truth of that statement, but if it’s even in spitting distance of accurate, that’s rather significant.

On the one hand, Beitullah Massoud, leader of the Pakistani Taliban, and Fazlullah have taken actions that are reminiscent of those taken by the British and Russian invaders whom the Pashtun people have resisted thoughout history: through violence, they’ve sought to substitute their preferred system of governance for the organic, tribal structure that’s existed in the area for hundreds of years; and they’ve introduced new strictures on the way people practice religion.

If the United States did that, people would be screaming bloody murder, and they’d be right to. But on the other hand, you don’t want to assume that people want to be, you know, bombed. That would be an awful thing to predicate a strategy upon. Clearly more information is needed here.