NEW YORK - A British expert in terrorism and insurgency has described as “lunatic idea” reports that senior US commanders in Afghanistan want to expand Special Operations ground raids into Pakistan’s tribal areas, saying it was a sign of a “classic error in military strategy”.
“If American generals genuinely want to increase such raids, then it needs to be stated emphatically that this is not just a lunatic idea, but one that demonstrates how far senior American (and British) commanders have become obsessed with the war in Afghanistan at the expense of the struggle against terrorism as a whole,” said Anatol Lieven, a professor in the War Studies Department at King’s College London and a senior fellow of the New America Foundation in Washington.
“Pakistan, with its huge population (around 200m), large army, nuclear weapons, extensive extremist networks and diaspora in the West, is a far more important country than Afghanistan and presents a vastly greater potential threat of anti-Western terrorism,” he wrote in an article published in The New York Times Wednesday.
“Advocates of ground raids seem to think that they are merely an extension of the current campaign of drone attacks on targets in Pakistan’s tribal areas, which have caused great resentment and have had very doubtful success,” the expert said in the op-ed piece: ‘A March of Folly in Pakistan”.
Prof Lieven wrote: “Pakistani officers from captain to lieutenant-general have told me that the entry of US ground forces into Pakistan in pursuit of the Taliban and al Qaeda is by far the most dangerous scenario for both Pakistan-US relations and the unity of the Pakistani Army. As one retired general explained, drone attacks, though ordinary officers and soldiers find them humiliating, are not a critical issue because the Pakistani military cannot do anything about them.”
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