Is Pakistan winning?

In November 2001, as the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance and their American allies closed a net around the collapsing Taliban regime in Afghanistan, Pakistani planes flew into the Taliban stronghold of Kunduz and evacuated hundreds of Pakistani intelligence officers, Taliban commanders, and al-Qaeda personnel.

This was after then-Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf had pledged support for America’s efforts to destroy al-Qaeda and overthrow the Taliban. The United States knew about the airlift and allowed it to happen. Reasoning that it was better to maintain the fiction that Pakistan was wholly on its side and to cajole whatever assistance it could from Islamabad, Washington declined even to monitor who disembarked from the plane when it landed safely in Pakistan. “It is believed that more foreign terrorists escaped from Kunduz than made their escape later from Tora Bora,” writes Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid in his 2008 book Descent Into Chaos, referring to Osama bin Laden’s mountain stronghold from which he safely fled in December 2001.

For years after 9/11, relations between Pakistan and the Taliban that it had once openly supported followed this pattern. Pakistan would make strident public declarations about confronting extremism, and would indeed hunt down and kill or arrest foreign, usually Arab, al-Qaeda members sheltering within its borders. But the Taliban—either the Afghan or Pakistani variety—were generally unmolested. The Taliban in Afghanistan had provided Pakistan with “strategic depth,” meaning a friendly regime on its rear flank as it faced its mortal enemy, India. The Taliban’s defeat strengthened an Afghan government with close relations with India, leaving Pakistan—in the eyes of its army, and certainly of its spy agencies—caught in a vice.

But Pakistan’s appeasement of the Taliban was akin to feeding a monster that would, inevitably, turn on its master. It did, in 2007, when a bloody confrontation between the Pakistani army and Islamist students and militants at the Red Mosque in Islamabad resulted in more than 100 deaths and waves of retaliatory attacks and suicide bombings. Benazir Bhutto, a former prime minister who had returned to the country to contest the 2008 general election, was murdered in December 2007.

“Al-Qaeda’s focus also shifted from Afghanistan to Pakistan, where it saw a demoralized army, a terrified citizenry, and an opportunity to destabilize the state,” writes Rashid. “For the first time, senior Pakistani officials told me, the army’s corps commanders accepted that the situation had radically changed and the state was under threat from Islamic extremism.” In fact, he says, the Pakistani army was fighting a civil war.

Only months ago, it appeared that this war was on the verge of being lost. The Pakistani Taliban had used a series of truces with the army to consolidate and expand its reach. It had taken over most of Swat district and was moving into Buner, only 100 km from Islamabad, which itself came under attack. “They were really on a roll,” says Bruce Hoffman, a professor of security studies at Georgetown University.

But today, while it is still far too early to speak of Pakistan defeating the Pakistani Taliban, it has reversed their expansion. A three-month offensive by the Pakistani army in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province has retaken much of Swat and Malakand districts. The fighting was devastating and displaced more than two million civilians, but it has been largely successful. Hundreds of Taliban have been killed, and residents who fled the fighting are beginning to return home. The army has vowed to stay in the territory until local police and security forces can hold it themselves.

The Pakistani Taliban suffered a second serious blow in August, when a CIA drone attack killed their leader, Baitullah Mehsud. They are reportedly now shaken by infighting as rivals manoeuvre to succeed him.

There are several factors that have combined to shift momentum against the Taliban in Pakistan. Most importantly, there appears to be a genuine will on the part of Pakistan’s army and security services to defeat them. “The Pakistani Taliban, when it took Swat and then kept moving on, overplayed its hand,” says Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer who, earlier this year, chaired an inter-agency review of American policy toward Pakistan and Afghanistan for the White House.