Pakistani Outrage and the Imperative of Sovereign Control

JCS Chairman Mike Mullen was suddenly dispatched to Pakistan yesterday to deal with the uproar created by news of a US incursion into Pakistani territory. The new Pakistani administration continues to assert its own rights and seems eager to be seen as facing down the US, although military professionals on both sides would probably prefer to keep any chance encounters off the front page. Both Pakistani and international politicians have emphasized the importance of respecting Pakistani sovereignty, which leads us to an interesting gap in international theory.

Can nations reasonably expect the world to accept their sovereignty over areas they cannot actually control? The Northwest Frontier Province of Pakistan has never fully submitted to national authority, and has been at blows with federal forces more often than not. This is the standard excuse for the inability to track down and capture key Al Qaeda figures. If internal forces do not respect the authority of Islamabad in the NWFP, then why should international law force external actors to respect that authority?

The answer to that question is fairly obvious: to prevent the type of foreign intervention that was demonstrated most recently in Georgia. But Pakistan is a special case, in that it contains a universally acknowledged international threat lodged within its borders. It is difficult to imagine a region more conducive to terrorist concealment than the NWFP, and if Al Qaeda could be dislodged from its stronghold, it would be severely, perhaps fatally weakened as an organization (although it would certainly live on as a source of guidance and inspiration). The unique value of the NWFP as a terrorist redoubt cannot be reproduced, and the incentive for the international community to secure that redoubt is immense. So why does international respect for sovereignty persist in this case?

International Law is yet to confront the reality that the NWFP and Afghanistan do not conform to the Westphalian state system that dictates every other aspect of international relations. The concept of sovereignty is difficult to grasp when that mantle is cast over areas that are de jure autonomous regions and de facto independent polities. It is time to account for actors within these actors that pose a threat, not just to the regime that claims sovereignty over the area or its neighbors, but to the international community as a whole.

[Edit: The US incursions actually took place in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), not the NWFP. I still stand by everything stated above, although FATA is even further from government control than the NWFP]