Operation Iron Tempest and the treachery around narcotics

(An excerpt from 'The Nukes, the Jihad, the Hawalas and Crystal Meth')

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THE NUKES, THE JIHAD, THE HAWALAS AND CRYSTAL METH

By Iqbal Chand Malhotra

BluOne Ink, 2024, 206 pages, Rs 799/-

Directorate S's immediate response to the targeted killing of Mullah Mansur by launching frontal assaults on several Afghan cities was a dismal failure. They were unable to overcome the Americans, who were still eager for a fight.

After the Quetta Shura forces, now under the direct command of Directorate S's poster boy Sirajuddin Haqqani, captured Kunduz, the US retaliated with special forces deployments and targeted USAF airstrikes. All of the Shura's attacks on Kunduz, Farah, Ghazni and Tarin Kot were repelled.

The Americans proved unbeatable in any ground engagement. Capturing a city at the cost of high casualties, merely to temporarily embarrass the US and the Kabul government, was not going to secure victory for Pakistan and its proxies.

This failure in 2016 pushed Directorate S back to its tried-and-true strategy of asymmetric warfare. The Pakistanis struggled to interpret the tone of Donald Trump's bellicose acceptance speech on 21 July 2016, and they were apprehensive.

Should they attempt to capture as many cities as possible before Trump took office? Faced with crippling USAF airstrikes, how could they mitigate the threat? After extensive deliberation, they concluded that a more effective approach would be to infiltrate cities with small, highly trained units.