THE Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan’s recent decision to withdraw the offer of peace talks with the incoming government may not alter the PML-N and Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf’s position.

The two parties have advocated peace negotiations with the militants but it may be worth their while to review a list of policy options to ensure stability and peace in KP and Fata.

There are a whole range of choices available in counterinsurgency (COIN) literature.

States tend to target insurgent leaders who are at the core of articulating responses to counterinsurgency strategies and perpetrating violence against the state.

Since insurgents tend to attack soft civilian targets, state infrastructure and organisations, it is a logical reaction on the part of authorities to dispatch security forces to counter the perpetrators.

The process leads to a domino effect; the state attempts to challenge the authority of the insurgents with the display of equal or greater force in order to restore its writ and the confidence of the populace in the state.

But this reprisal provokes greater resentment, especially when the state is perceived to be overstepping its bounds. Thus there needs to be a fine balance maintained by the state in its COIN operations amidst the risk of offending the sensibilities of the affected population.

The need for ‘fine-tuning’ the COIN campaign is also complicated by the fact that an insurgency may diminish in intensity only after the militant leadership and cadres are more or less entirely eliminated — otherwise it continues to smoulder.

Looking at COIN as a strategy that is 80pc political and 20pc military, it is easy to imagine the reverse process on part of the Taliban, who persuade the population that they share their political, economic or religious grievances and the state is against them. Any large-scale reprisals by the state tends to strengthen the idea.

Meanwhile, Pakistan cannot afford not to respond to the terrorist threat, as that would give a negative signal to the Taliban to engage in more violence.

According to the Small Wars Manual: “Delay in the use of force, and hesitation to accept responsibility for its employment when the situation clearly demands it, will always be interpreted as a weakness.”

But force will have to be tempered with measures to reclaim the confidence of the affected populace which has witnessed massive internal displacement and rising instability.

An option would be recognition of the Taliban as a party to ensuring peace in the region, which is being done by the US where the Afghan Taliban are concerned and is being talked about in our local context.

In the Afghan Taliban’s context, for that to be credible, they would need to project themselves as an Afghan-Pakhtun entity rather than contribute to the perception that theirs is a pan-nationalist Pakhtun-based tribal insurgency with roots in Pakistan or a radical Islamist movement with Al Qaeda linkages.

The Taliban insurgency (Afghan and Pakistani) gets its strength from the cementing bond of anti-Americanism, and Pakistan may not be able to escape its label as an ‘American ally’.

A consistent theme in the Pakistani COIN is that the anti-America-driven insurgency may get a further boost if Pakistan relies openly on US alignment and support. It could also have the effect of making any subsequent ‘winning hearts and minds’ processes more difficult.

Nevertheless, the effort should be to win the hearts and minds of people facing an insurgency in order to demonstrate that the state is serious in its resolve to fight terrorism. It remains to be seen how Pakistan, with its spiralling inflation and economic crunch, will handle this dimension of COIN.

It may also be relevant to mention here that it is extremely tempting to attempt a divide and rule regime by offering trade-offs to selected warlords. In the long run, a ‘quick fix’’ is seen as cheaper than attempting socioeconomic reforms on a large scale; perhaps that approach explains Pakistan’s tendency to attempt trade-offs.

However, socioeconomic uplift in Fata will pay greater dividends in the long term even if trade-offs are pertinent in the short to medium term; neither approach can be discounted.

It is not advisable to rely on the ‘good Taliban’ to restore peace in the area, particularly because the leader in question could lose control of his cadres if he were to appear overtly pro-Pakistani and thus pro-American by default.

Jihadist ideals are widespread and deeply entrenched among militant cadres, and warlords who have appeared openly amenable to negotiation have had to swallow their words and re-embrace their anti-state rhetoric to regain some control of their men.

Whatever the methods used, Pakistan’s strategists will have to keep public indicators in mind or the insurgency will either enter a protracted phase or emerge in the country’s urban

centres where it will smoulder on in the form of a guerrilla campaign.

Any measures in COIN that do not cater to a public backlash or recognise the potential for subtle escalation through radicalisation are bound to fail eventually in their long-term goals.

The endgame of a COIN regime, which is almost always up against the political, ideological, or economic agendas of the insurgency, is about providing better opportunities to the people. Whoever provides these opportunities wins.

The writer is a security analyst.