The American soldiers, who may have been part of a training unit, were en route to inspect a proposed site for small-scale development projects that were to be undertaken by the Frontier Corps, a paramilitary force that the American Army has been training, a senior official in the North-West Frontier Province said. …

That American soldiers were involved in development assistance had not been previously known.

Given the sensitivities in Pakistan to a U.S. troop presence, how smart is it to be using soldiers for development work and not, say, civilian development experts? Of course, that’s assuming the embassy’s story is true.

Obviously our military will be delivering a lot of these supplies, but they’ll be handing them off to the Pakistani military and to the relief groups, both international and non-governmental organizations.  And we think that’s the appropriate way to proceed.

She specified, “We are not engaged in any military action whatsoever, and we are not engaged in the delivery of any civilian relief.  We are there to facilitate the Pakistani military and the international and NGO relief agencies to be able to do that.”

Clinton was quick to contextualize the aid within the administration’s broader framework of an enduring and deep U.S.-Pakistani partnership. “We face a common threat, a common challenge, and now a common task,” she said.

These include packaged meals that conform with Islamic dietary requirements, water trucks and tents. “We’re looking at providing assistance in those three categories, and potentially in other areas,” Whitman said. “We’ll be providing assistance in conjunction with what the Pakistan government says they can use and the means and methods that would be acceptable to them.

And that’s well and good. The question, though, is when the Defense Department isn’t going to retain the exclusive capability to provide this aid.

Secretaries Hillary Rodham Clinton and Bob Gates have both talked about bolstering the State Department and the U.S. Agency for International Development’s capacity to take on the provision of non-military assistance. I hesitate to criticize, since we’re talking about the well-being of roughly a million people — a concern that eclipses bureaucratic box-checking — but there’s always going to be some important priority that comes before interagency reform. And in this case, the State Department has a more established presence in the country than the Defense Department does.

Islamabad hasn’t officially said it scrapped the pact with the Taliban, which have refused to lay down their arms and last week declared the peace deal “worthless.” Instead, the government said it will continue to implement Islamic law, or Shariah, in the area. Officials say that by doing so the government will rob the militants of their main source of popular support, a campaign for rule of law.

But doesn’t this mean that Swat will have Pakistani law superceded? If that’s what it takes to retake Swat from the Taliban, perhaps it’s an acceptable price. In about an hour, Amb. Richard Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, will deliver his first congressional testimony in his new capacity. I’ll be covering it, and will be listening for what he says about Swat in particular.

1. Paying off tribal elders won’t work. Gen. David Petraeus’ strategy in Iraq of exploiting and deepening fractures in both the Iraqi insurgency and its base of support provoked study in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The tactician says that Petraeus, now the head of U.S. Central Command, can try it in Afghanistan, but he should just expect to be throwing money around. “We know our Afghans,” he says. “They will take the money from Petraeus, but they will not be on his side. There are so many people working with the Afghans and the Americans who are on their payroll, but they inform us, sell us weapons.”

2. The drone strikes actually work, to a degree. In Pakistan, the CIA’s missile strikes from pilotless drones have caused controversy, both within Pakistan, where civilian casualties are fuel for the insurgency, and among American strategists, who debate their utility both within that context and against the stark fact that U.S. combat troops largely can’t operate in Pakistan. The tactician gives the drones their due, saying they’re “very effective,” and that they’ve thinned the ranks of al-Qaeda and Taliban leadership. (All of which suggests the United States has a significant intelligence base within Pakistan after all. Otherwise, the drones wouldn’t know what to hit.) But:

The drone attacks simply prompted Taliban fighters to spend more time in Afghanistan, or to move deeper into Pakistan, straddling both theaters of a widening conflict. The recruits were prepared to fight where they were needed, in either country, he said.

Within this framework, the drones appear to be the newest hammer with which to play whack-a-mole, which is an unsustainable and insufficient long-term strategy. In Wana, he says, “the gossip has finished,” meaning people don’t gather in large groups for fear of being blown up by drones.” The tactician apparently views that as a win for the United States, but in the longer term, it poses a clear risk to U.S. or Pakistani efforts to cleave the populace from the Taliban.

3. The Taliban is not al-Qaeda. The goals of the Taliban in what The Times says the tactician sees as “one fluid and sprawling war” are to drive the United States out of Afghanistan and to take over Pakistan. What they’re not is to attack the United States at home. The Times describes the relationship between al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban as “respectful but distant.” Al-Qaeda’s operatives don’t “tell us their activities,” he said. While he respects al-Qaeda’s “ambitions,” he said the Taliban will be “content in capturing Afghanistan and throwing the Americans out,” and destabilizing the Pakistani government. But when al-Qaeda needs a suicide bomber, the Taliban supplies the recruits.

4. The Taliban is in your village already. The tactician’s spent the last month moving about 80 fighters from Pakistan into Afghanistan to combat the American troop increase. They move into Afghan villages and spend four to six months getting to know the locals, who become the Taliban support base. By contrast, how much time do U.S. troops and development workers, who rarely speak the language, spend with the villagers?

5. It’s not hard to get over on the Pakistani Frontier Corps. Meet the force that the U.S. is relying on to conduct counterinsurgency operations in Pakistan.

The Taliban tactician said getting his fighters over the border was not a problem. The Pakistani paramilitary soldiers from the Frontier Corps who guard the border were too busy looking after their own survival, he said.

6. The near-term Taliban goal in Afghanistan is to control the Kabul-Kandahar highway. It’s Afghanistan’s major artery for transportation of people and commerce, and the United States has long known its strategic importance to both the Afghan government and the insurgency. That’s why the 3rd Brigade Combat Team of the 10th Mountain Division was ordered to deploy to the Logar-Wardak region late last year — so it could sit on that highway. The Taliban intends to harass and inflict as much damage along that highway to U.S. forces as it can. “We want to inflict maximum trouble, to lower their morale, to destabilize,” the tactician says. That includes making movies. They’re increasing their propaganda strategic communication efforts, bringing “cameramen instructed to capture video of faltering American soldiers” alongside their operations in order to make and distribute DVDs.

That in turn raises the question of why the tactician is bothering to talk to a reporter at all. Clearly he sees value in spreading this message. Perhaps what he’s saying is interspersed with false statements; it certainly can’t represent a complete account of the situation. But dismissing the report carries its own attendant risks, not least of which is willful blindness. Jane Perlez and Pir Zuzbair Shah of The Times deserve a tremendous amount of credit for what must have been an arduous report to put together, to say nothing of the personal danger they probably faced in doing so.

“Enough is enough. We have decided to flush them out,” the senior adviser in the [Pakistani] Interior Ministry, Rehman Malik, told the independent television channel Geo.

“The peace accord was linked to peace. When there is no peace, there is no use for that accord,” Mr. Malik said. “I appeal to the Taliban to lay down their arms. There is no other option for them.”

A military operation in the Lower Dir area west of Swat “killed 30 militants and one paramilitary soldier, Pakistan’s Interior Ministry said.” OK, but what about taking territory back from the Taliban? As long as important Pakistani military commanders define success in terms of body counts, the specter exists of the Pakistani government declaring victory instead of rolling back Taliban advances. Taliban-affiliated clerics and officials are claiming the Lower Dir operation as a pretext to continue to attack Pakistani civilians, soldiers and officials whom they’ve never stopped attacking.

For a sense of the anxiety felt in Islamabad that comes from the Taliban being about 60 or 70 miles outside of the city, read this great Washington Post piece.

In stark contrast to that racist denialism is Iftikhar Chaudhry, the newly-reinstated chief justice of Pakistan whose return to the Supreme Court was the condition for defusing last month’s political crisis between President Asif Ali Zardari and opposition leader Nawaz Sharif. Chaudhry ordered the government to facilitate a round of testimony from the woman about her public torture, and is using its lack of compliance as a vehicle for interrogating its decision to allow the Pakistani Taliban a new safe haven in Swat. The New York Times reports:

Chaudhry, assailed the officials for laziness and self-importance, and challenged them for not taking up the case until it became a national scandal in recent days, when a video showing the woman pinned to the ground and repeatedly whipped by a Taliban commander was broadcast on Pakistani television.

“Before the video became public, what were you doing, why couldn’t you find out what had happened?” Mr. Chaudhry asked the attorney general, Sardar Latif Khosa.

By choosing to highlight the terror in Swat, Mr. Chaudhry, who has been back on the bench about two weeks after two years of enforced limbo, immediately returned to his role of shaming an acquiescent government and military into acting in the face of wrongdoing.

It’s good to see Chaudhry, a force for liberalism in Pakistan, tying together human rights and counterterrorism.

– Do you see drone attacks bringing about fear and terror in the common people? (Yes 45%, No 55%)

– Do you think the drones are accurate in their strikes? (Yes 52%, No 48%)

– Do you think anti-American feelings in the area increased due to drone attacks recently? (Yes 42%, No 58%)

– Should Pakistan military carry out targeted strikes at the militant organisations? (Yes 70%, No 30%)

– Do the militant organisations get damaged due to drone attacks? (Yes 60%, No 40%)

It’s important not to read this like you would read a domestic politics poll. Forty-five percent of respondents who say that the drone strikes cause “fear and terror in the common people” is a very large figure. Just because it’s a narrow minority that lives in fear of having a missile descend out of nowhere is no excuse for profligacy in dropping one. That’s a number that doesn’t indicate a great margin for error. Indeed, overinterpreting that figure is pretty much what al-Qaeda hopes we’ll do.

OK, so much for overinterpreting it. What about, you know, interpreting it? What the poll would seem to indicate, according to its pollsters, is that “a large majority of the people in the Pakhtun belt wants to be incorporated with the state and wants to integrate with the rest of the world.” It views the Taliban and al-Qaeda, properly, as the principal obstacle to that prospect. Counterintuitively, reducing the drone strikes might be the best approach here: the better not to distract the population from how much they disdain the extremists.

Of course, this runs into the problem of what to do in the absence of ground troops, because places like Swat have become, in essence, new safe havens for the jihadists. And there the answer may have to lie with Pakistani governmental will and capacity to return to the fight, especially as the Taliban keep violating the cease-fire. That’s not a good short-term strategy; in fact, it might be a dangerous one, given the prospect of the Taliban growing stronger in the areas they control. But the poll suggests that the sounder long-term strategy is one that doesn’t get in the way of Pakistani antipathy for the extremists.

The idea that the Taliban will stop at Swat flies in the face of Taliban irredentism since its inception in Pakistan a few short years ago. With Pakistani and Afghan officials in Washington to talk about their future cooperation with the Obama administration, it’s important to see Swat as a prologue for what the Taliban wish to do to a nuclear-armed country.

That government, The Times reports, reiterated its demands that the United States stop its missile attacks on the tribal areas. But behind closed doors there may be a renewed U.S.-Pakistani modus vivendi on that front:

A retired Pakistani general, Talat Masood, who attended a dinner in honor of Mr. Holbrooke at the American Embassy on Tuesday night, said he got the impression that there may be some effort by the Americans to make the drone strikes more palatable by conducting them as a joint operation.

The Daily Times, a major Pakistani newspaper, has an interesting bit on that in a recent editorial, which seems to capture the emerging contours of policy:

The US determination to continue with Predator attacks means the intelligence is proving effective in taking out high-value targets. Therefore, Washington will ignore public protests by Islamabad. However, there is need, simultaneously, to shield the Pakistani government from the negative fall-out of use of force. This is where reconstruction and development efforts come in. The joint mechanism also means the two sides want to arrive at commonalities; moreover, that the US wants to bring on board Pakistan’s security and other concerns.

The paper approves of that, by the way.