A recent wave of complex attacks in Kabul, Paktia, Logar, and Nangarhar has stirred strategic debate about the future of the war in Afghanistan. But they also pose tactical and operational questions closer to home. Security officials and police throughout the West have long worried about complex attacks like the assault that kicked off the Taliban's latest offensive. The mostly professional response by Afghan security forces and NATO troops demonstrates the limits of complex attacks, but the intelligence failures that allowed them to occur illustrate the general principle that sound tactics are only one part of the greater operational picture.

Since the 2008 Serena Hotel attack, Kabul has been plagued by repeated complex urban assaults. Deadly gun and bomb attacks in Pakistan and India have also become an unfortunate fact of life in the last decade. Counterterrorism planners, however, focus most on the 2008 Mumbai attack. Mumbai has powerfully shaped police and intelligence services' perception of future terrorist threats. In part, police have married specific training to combat complex attacks to existing prevention and response measures for "active shooters" in crowded areas. Police envision Mumbai while in practice trying to stop killers like the Virginia Tech shooter.

There is little novelty to the Mumbai attacks or armed assaults writ large. Terrorists have always sought to effect attention-grabbing assaults in public places. Adam Dolnik's work on modern hostage operations and armed assault marks the sicarii and hashashin sects of antiquity as the earliest terrorists employing assault techniques for strategic purposes. The Cold War saw numerous armed attacks, including deadly attacks by the Japanese Red Army and Palestinian groups throughout the 70s and 80s. The rise of religious terrorists also fueled strikes on targets ranging from Egypt's Luxor resort to the Oasis residential complex in Saudi Arabia. Mumbai is not the only target terrorists have hit in India; the Red Fort and even Parliament has been attacked.

Unlike the Tet Offensive, an abject failure of its own professed strategic ends with a high (unintentional) symbolic power, the explicit goal of the complex attack is televised gore for strategic effect. Attackers-prepared by fanatical beliefs--fight to the death as suicide commandos, although not all necessarily seek death as the terminus of the operation. In turn, the operational design of complex attacks synergizes disparate killing technologies and finds tactical harmony in off-the-shelf command and control systems. Just like military special operations, attackers aim to gain and maintain relative superiority early on. Body counts and media attention are the primary metrics of tactical success, and hostage-taking and barricading elongates the duration of the raid. Complex attacks, however, require a degree of preparation, training, and coordination that cannot simply be downloaded from a jihadist chat room. Logistics, discipline, and operational deception differentiate group threats from individual attackers like the Fort Hood killer. 

Mumbai exemplifies these deadly operational trends. The terrorists used cell phones, blackberries, and satellite phones to coordinate their operations in real-time in cooperation with an offsite handler. They continued killing until Indian forces wiped them out to a man, inflicting a toll of 165 dead and 304 wounded. With an open-ended goal of killing and gaining attention, their operations could be tactically fluid. An attacker can change a scenario from an "active shooter" operation that triggers an immediate police response to more drawn out barricaded hostage siege, or detonate explosives to generate more casualties. Both happened during the course of the Mumbai assault. The attackers also effectively disguised their preparations and tactical ingress from Indian intelligence until it was too late.

Complex attacks pose significant difficulties for law enforcement command and control. As John P. Sullivan has observed, police are optimized to respond in a piecemeal manner to calls for service. Police also concentrate in space, whereas distributed attackers like the Mumbai teams concentrate in time over large urban expanses. A distributed assault strains police resources and fragments the response, putting in question the ability of police command and control to keep pace with rapid events.

Since 2008, police and counterterrorism elements have developed new operational methods and intelligence collection methodologies. Mumbai-style attacks targeting Europe have been foiled. In the United States, police in major metropolitan areas are broadly familiar with the complex attack template due to their extensive experience with active shooter response. This training has been mainly tactical, as elite units are unlikely to be the first responders. Regular police must be prepared to deny attackers relative superiority. It remains to be seen, however, whether the command and control problems involved in suppressing an attack that might unfold over a large metropolitan region have been resolved.

The Kabul strikes, despite breathless media coverage, did not constitute a Mumbai or a Tet 2012. The attack, mounted by the Haqqani Network, featured 40 attackers in Kabul and smaller attacks in Paktia, Logar, and Nagarhar. Afghan security forces, with air support, intelligence, and logistics support from NATO, handily suppressed the assault. Though Afghan and NATO tactics during past armed assaults have sometimes been haphazard, the Haqqani Network's operatives did not inflict anything close to the damage the Mumbai attackers wrought nor survive for as significant a duration. Insurgent adaptation is often hailed, the Afghans and NATO have also roughly adapted through years of hard fighting. But a focus on tactical professionalism hides more disturbing operational failures.

First, as Thomas Ruttig noted, the scale and distribution of the attack across multiple provinces with heavy NATO presences is without precedent in the current conflict. The Afghan and NATO failure to observe the sophisticated reconnaissance, planning, and logistics phases of the operation is also a serious intelligence failure. The attackers adapted to sophisticated intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, and NATO tactics, but the Afghan government did nothing to enhance security at the unoccupied buildings Kabul attackers often use as fortified high ground. NATO and the Afghans were still taken by surprise despite having forewarning of a general offensive, and the attack once again demonstrated the ability of a handful of armed men to briefly hold an entire city hostage and dominate the news cycle.

So will we see a complex attack in a major Western city? The jury is still out.  There's a world of difference between operating in a South Asian warzone like Afghanistan or a troubled state with a history of terrorism like Pakistan and causing havoc in a Western city. Kenneth Boulding's "loss of strength gradient" applies to non-state actors too, as actors based halfway around the world face substantial challenges in projecting force into heavily fortified and intelligence-protected cities in the Western heartland. Could local networks gain a foothold? Complex attacks depend heavily on training and logistics networks that present plenty of rich intelligence targets, and if "jihobbyists" training in backwoods forests get snapped up by the FBI, the prospects for more serious operations appear dim. The failure to realize Mumbai-style attacks in Europe, an operational environment with greater potential for extremist penetration than the United States, also suggests some cause for skepticism.

However, one lesson from the sophisticated assault on Mumbai is the increasing leveling power of technology in empowering destructive small groups. In London and other cities wracked by political turmoil over continuing economic issues, mostly unarmed rioters augmented with peer-to-peer technologies created urban paralysis.  The emerging informatization of public infrastructure in the West paradoxically enhances the vulnerability of Western cities to new forms of disruption. Even if a denuded al-Qaeda and affiliates lack power projection abilities today, it would be unwise to foreclose the possibility of future urban assaults and disruption by it or other potential adversaries.

Debates about the future aside, the cities of South Asia will continue to burn as urban assaults continue unabated.  The terrorist attacks in Kabul, Mumbai, and Pakistan constitute gruesome evidence of the important role of sound command and control and intelligence in dealing with the urban adversary's potential for operational disruption in crowded cities.

Adam Elkus is a PhD student at American University in the School of International Service and an editor at the Red Team Journal. He is also an Associate at the Small Wars Journal's El Centro profile, and blogs at Rethinking Security.

On November 13, 2009, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that Khaled Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, would be tried in federal court alongside four co-defendants, reversing the 2008 Bush administration decision to try the 9/11 conspirators before a military commissions tribunal. On April 4, 2011, after an avalanche of criticism based on legal and security concerns, Holder sheepishly announced a reversal of policy.  The country was now back where it had started: Khaled Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) would be tried by military commission at Guantanamo Bay. Perhaps because of the evident unease of the administration's turn about, ostensibly in response to political pressure, the debate over military versus federal tribunals for Guantanamo's High Value Detainees is still very much alive.

Recognizing this, William Shawcross's Justice and the Enemy: Nuremberg, 9/11, and the Trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed joins the debate on the side of the military commissions. His somewhat standard reasoning begins with a relatively new, and somewhat flawed premise: that today's military commissions are but the current version of the "remarkable achievement" of the Nuremberg Trials, the international military tribunal which tried twenty-two Nazi defendants accused of war crimes and over which the American Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson presided as chief prosecutor. Shawcross, whose father was the chief British prosecutor at Nuremberg, insists that at Nuremberg, "Justice was done." From the start, Shawcross sets up Jackson as his hero, the unquestionable voice of wisdom, carrying the message from Nuremberg to terrorism.

To justify his reliance on Nuremberg as the determinative precedent, Shawcross asserts a foundational principle - that al-Qaeda is but the most recent example of the evil that evidenced itself in the Nazi atrocities, an evil that "did not die" with the twelve men condemned to death at Nuremburg, an evil that "reinvents itself in every age" and that "struck America on September 11." From this, he extrapolates that, when it comes to al-Qaeda defendants, it is only right to try them by military commissions.

From the trial of Zacarious Moussaoui, who pled guilty in 2005 to charges of conspiracy in the 9/11 attacks, to the reading of Miranda rights, albeit after a delay, to the Christmas Day bomber, Shawcross echoes the oft-repeated opinion that in these cases, "justice was not done." No case, to his mind, has demonstrated this more clearly than the trial in 2010 of Ahmed Ghailani on charges of conspiring in the 1998 Embassy Bombings in East Africa. Taking place twelve years after the crime, during which time Ghailani was tortured at a CIA black site and held at Guantanamo, the Ghailani trial was the Obama administration's attempt to test the federal court system. When the jury found Ghailani not guilty on 284 of 285 charges, Holder's reversal became inevitable. Although Ghailani was sentenced to life in prison without parole, Shawcross is far from satisfied at what he considers a decision "perilously close to acquitting [Ghailani] altogether." He cringes at the notion that "either the government would have had to let him go," causing "immense strategic consequences," or they would have to "detain him despite the verdict of innocence." Justice Jackson, he tells us, would have agreed that terrorism detainees should not be released. Jackson, he reminds us, had opined that prosecutors "must never put a man on trial unless you are prepared to see him walk free," - a notion that Shawcross finds unthinkable in these cases, ignoring the fact that under Jackson's supervision, three of the Nuremberg defendants, were acquitted, and indeed, did walk free. Here, as elsewhere, Shawcross is shamelessly certain about prophesizing what Jackson would have done, telling us at one point that Jackson would have condoned not just the trial of KSM in a military tribunal but Obama's targeted killings policy as well. He cites Jackson on the matter of executing war criminals, "'If it is considered good policy for the future peace of the world, if it is believed that the example will outweigh the tendency to create....a myth of martyrdom, then let them be executed. But...let the decision to execute them be made as a military or political decision,'" not a judicial one. Shawcross's logic, shaped by its usefulness for his argument, fails to consider that Awlaki's crimes as well as bin Laden's were those which both the criminal justice system and Guantanamo had prosecuted, and that bin Laden, indicted in federal court, was already squarely within the trajectory of the criminal justice system. 

Ultimately, Shawcross rests his position on the belief that terrorism defendants are categorically different from those accused tried in criminal proceedings. As such, they are undeserving of the precious protections offered by the U.S. Constitution. When it comes to terrorism, he cannot understand applying the age-old dictum, "it is better for ten guilty men to go free than to have one innocent man convicted." Why, he wonders, must "that generous principle" be extended to terrorists, those who would "murder their way to a destruction of the rule of law and its replacement by a sectarian dictatorship?" "The idea that the Nazis should have had the protections afforded to Americans by the United States Constitution never occurred to Justice Jackson or any of the other jurists involved in the tribunal."  Showing no allegiance to political correctness, Shawcross goes so far as to ask, "Why is one religion being accorded so much more deference than all the others?" Here, it is not just Shawcross's logic which is faulty but his misunderstanding of the law which posits that guilt and innocence must be tested in a fair, evidence-based trial and that ideological leanings do not alter that access to the system of law.

For the untoward "generosity" on the part of those who defend the use of the federal courts and who seek to defend Guantanamo detainees, Shawcross blames the Left, specifically the Center for Constitutional Rights and the ACLU, both organizations which have been devoted to creating defense strategies for the Guantanamo detainees, largely through habeas petitions or aid to defense counsel at Guantanamo. In Shawcross's words, "Some of the lawyers, at times, seemed more concerned about the alleged injustices done to the detained terrorists than they did to those perpetrated by them." But it is not just the Left that he blames; the criminal justice system itself as well is to be blamed. Failing to distinguish law enforcement in terms of intelligence gathering and preventive police work from criminal prosecutions of terrorists accused of specific plots, Shawcross sees 9/11 as proof for his argument.  "The very fact that 9/11 happened at all spelled failure for the law enforcement approach to terrorism." Viewed this way, denial of the right to hold trials in federal court seems almost like just punishment to Shawcross. Quoting Justice Scalia's dissent In the Boumedienne ruling which granted the detainees the right to habeas corpus, Shawcross reasserts his fears of the inadequacies of the legal system: the question of "'how to handle enemy prisoners in this war will ultimately lie with the branch [the judiciary] that knows least about the national security concerns that the subject entails."

Those who came of age politically during the Vietnam War might find themselves surprised by William Shawcross's ready acceptance of policies that have consistently bypassed the legal system amidst secrecy, fears of exposure for illegal policies, and without regard for either expediency or efficiency.  His 1979 book Sideshow provided an unparalleled contemporary critique of the foils of power gone wrong. Confident, immensely detailed, and persuasive, Sideshow was journalism in the service of opposition politics, and as such, became one of the seminal works on the Vietnam War. Now, nearly twenty-five years later, Mr. Shawcross has given us a book which is eons away from the spirit of his earlier work. Instead of a critique of those in power, Justice and the Enemy is a defiant embrace of decision-making that yields to political pressure whatever the stakes.  Rather than see this books as a novel argument in defense of military commissions, Shawcross's book is perhaps best viewed as a reminder of the fading spirit of those determined to check the use of power in the name of national security.

Karen Greenberg is director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University's School of Law and author of The Least Worst Place: Guantanamo's First 100 Days.

In March, the United States and Afghanistan announced that the U.S.-run Bagram prison near Kabul will soon be handed over to Afghan control. It was a major diplomatic breakthrough that paved the way for the signing of a Strategic Partnership Agreement by President Obama and President Karzai on May 2. But the agreement to handover Bagram is leading to a dramatic and dangerous expansion of detention power in Afghanistan-and a potentially disastrous legacy for the United States.

As part of the agreement to transfer control of Bagram, the Afghan government is creating the authority to hold individuals without charge or trial for an indefinite period of time on security grounds-a power it has never before said it needed.

While such "administrative detention" regimes are permissible under the laws of war, this new detention power is being established in order to hand over a U.S. detention facility, not because changes in the conflict have convinced Afghan officials that it is necessary. A surge in U.S. detention operations like night raids has driven the prison population to over 3,000 detainees, most of whom the United States lacks evidence against for prosecution under Afghans law. Because the Afghan constitution, like the United States', protects individuals from being detained without charge or trial, the Afghan government needs a new detention law, which is now being modeled on deeply problematic U.S. detention policies and practices.

As a result, Bagram's real legacy may be the establishment of a detention regime that will be ripe for abuse in a country with pervasive corruption and weak rule of law.

Despite potentially far-reaching consequences, the development of this new detention power has been hidden from public view. When I met with leading Afghan lawyers and civil society organizations in Kabul several weeks ago, few knew that the government was proposing to create a new, non-criminal detention regime. Their reaction was disbelief and dismay. None had even seen a copy of the proposed regime, which the Afghan government has not made public and is trying to adopt by presidential fiat.

The Open Society Foundations recently obtained a copy of the proposed detention regime, and after review, we have found what it details deeply troubling. The proposed changes leave open critical questions about the nature and scope of this proposed detention regime, which if left unanswered make it ripe for abuse. Who can be held in administrative detention and for how long? Where will it apply? When will the government cease to have this power? How will the government ensure it will not be abused to imprison the innocent or suppress political opposition?

Most alarming is the failure to address the serious, long-term risks posed by such a regime. From apartheid South Africa to modern day China, administrative detention regimes adopted on security grounds have too often been used as tools of repression. In Egypt, the former government used administrative detention for decades to commit gross human rights violations and suppress political opposition, relying on a state of emergency declared in 1958, and nominally lifted only after last year's revolution.

Across the border in Pakistan, the draconian Frontier Crimes Regulations are another stark reminder of the long, dark shadow that such legal regimes can cast. The ongoing imposition of these British, colonial-era laws, which among other things legalize collective punishment and detention without trial, are cited by many as a key driver of the rise of militancy in the tribal areas of Pakistan.

But there is still time for the United States to avoid this legacy in Afghanistan. If the Afghan government cannot be dissuaded from adopting an administrative detention regime, then the United States should urge the Afghan government to include provisions that limit its scope and reduce its vulnerability to abuse.

First, a ‘sunset' provision should be adopted, which would impose a time limit on such powers, or require an act by the Afghan Parliament to extend their duration.

Second, the regime should be limited to individuals currently held by the United States at Bagram prison. There is no clear reason why the handover of Bagram detainees requires the creation of a nation-wide administrative detention regime. More generally, the scope of who can be detained must be clearly defined and limited.

Third, detainees must have right to counsel as well as access to the evidence used against them in order to have a meaningful opportunity to challenge their detention-a fundamental right in international law. At present it seems the government will follow the well-documented due process shortfalls of the U.S. model.

The United States and its Afghan partners must be honest about the serious, long-term risks of establishing an administrative detention regime in Afghanistan-particularly one that lacks clear limits and is democratically unaccountable. Protection from arbitrary or unlawful deprivation of life or liberty is at the constitutional core of the United States, and is essential to lasting stability and security in Afghanistan. Living up to the President's promise of responsibly ending the war in Afghanistan requires defending, not betraying this principle.

Chris Rogers is a human rights lawyer for the Open Society Foundations specializing in human rights and conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The next Afghan presidential election is currently slated for 2014, an uninspiring prospect given the sky-high levels of corruption, nepotism, and patronage that beleaguers the Afghan political system. To make things worse, President Hamid Karzai has suggested holding the elections in 2013 to avoid an overlap with the planned end of NATO's combat mission. And there is still no functional plan in place for a smooth transfer of political power to a post-Karzai government.

The challenges of a successful political transition in Afghanistan are multiple. The Afghan government has not yet defined a plausible political strategy for its sustainability after 2014. Furthermore, the Afghan and U.S. governments have failed to develop a mature political class from which the Afghan people can democratically select their leaders. This is further aggravated by officials' failure to establish adept civil services in Afghanistan. As a result, the largely corrupt and inept Afghan civil service is characterized by and operates under a vast network of political patronage and nepotism, leaving it incapable of delivering basic services to the Afghan people. The durability of the Afghan political system requires a feasible political reform agenda that addresses endemic corruption and nepotism, and a political settlement process with an inclusive internal Afghan dialogue. 

Tackling these shortcomings are fundamental to Afghanistan's future generation of leadership, and there are growing concerns in Kabul that President Karzai may attempt to enter the 2014 election, despite being constitutionally barred, and his repeated statements that he will not seek a third term. Earlier, the concern, especially among the Afghan opposition, was that President Karzai would amend Afghanistan's election laws, which currently prevent him from seeking another term in office. However, speculations now abound that Karzai will handpick a successor who will serve as president while he runs the show from behind the scenes. If employed, this arrangement - similar to the one between Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Prime Minister Vladimir Putin - effectively keeps the seat warm until Karzai's return. At present, there is no provision in the Afghan Constitution stipulating that Karzai cannot return to the presidency after a short absence. Depending on whom Karzai picks as his successor, such a move will likely spark outrage among many in Afghanistan, specifically among members of the so-called "loyal" opposition group, the erstwhile Northern Alliance.   

The late Burhanuddin Rabbani, a former Afghan president and head of the High Peace Council (HPC), was previously touted to succeed Karzai largely due to his role as an interlocutor between the Afghan government and opposition groups. With Rabbani no longer in play, some of the other names currently being tossed around are: Atta Mohammad Noor, a Tajik and current governor of Balkh province; Farooq Wardak, a Pashtun and the current Minister of Education; Mohammad Hanif Atmar, a prominent Pashtun and former Minister of Interior and Education; and Ashraf Ghani, a well-known Pashtun, one-time presidential contender, and former Minister of Finance who is now chairman of Afghanistan's security transition commission. Rumors also abound that President Karzai has been grooming Qayum Karzai, his multi-millionaire older brother who presently dominates most of Afghanistan's security, construction, and transportation sectors, to succeed him.  A one-time restaurant owner in Maryland and now an unrivaled Afghan powerbroker, Qayum is said to be the man behind all key cabinet and provincial level appointments in Afghanistan.

However, President Karzai's first choice and personal favorite appears to be Education Minister Farooq Wardak, due in large part to the confidence and trust President Karzai has placed in him. If President Karzai chooses to publicly announce his support for Wardak's candidacy, it could significantly raise Wardak's current stature, and garner widespread public support, particularly among the Pashtun voters who would most likely rally to get him elected. The 2014 elections are central to future political stability of the country. With the anticipated election irregularities and several in Karzai's inner clique loathe to forgo the power they currently enjoy, the election will test the trust and confidence of the Afghan people in the governance system and their future participation in Afghanistan's political process. While it is too early to anticipate, President Karzai's voluntary departure before the election will not only sit positively with many Afghans, but will also leave him a respectable legacy in Afghan history.

There is also a widespread perception in Afghanistan that the United States acts as kingmaker, and whomever the U.S. supports will become the next president. Whether or not that narrative is true, the United States can help encourage young and educated new leaders to become involved in politics, and advise the Afghan government to disqualify corrupt individuals. 

Some American officials have recently increased outreach to Afghan political figures, which appears to have somehow emboldened the kingmaker perceptions among Afghans. Senior members of the U.S. Congress reached out to the members of the Northern Alliance during a recent visit to Kabul, riling many, including President Karzai. The emphasis of this political outreach effort stressed a peculiar narrative of decentralization that contradicts the policy of the Obama administration. This type of power devolvement includes, among other things, granting legislative power to the provincial councils, and having elected provincial governors rather than presidential appointees. These elected officials would also have all powers invested in them, including the ability to levy their own taxes and make key provincial appointments.

Yet, this strategy also entails accepting considerable risks.

Giving provincial governors the authority to hire and fire civil servants, and levy their own taxes with no input or control from Kabul risks creating and supporting local "strongmen" and parallel power structures that could be potentially destabilizing.  Such an arrangement also risks turning up the heat on the already simmering ethnic tensions, and could essentially create a Pashtun-dominated "Pashtunistan" separated from a confederation of provinces dominated by ethnic Tajiks, Uzbeks and Hazaras.  It is a strategy of soft partition that effectively opens the door for ethnic cleansing. A cursory look at history, including that of India, Bosnia, Palestine, and Cyprus suggests that the partition of mixed political entities has almost always been accompanied or preceded by ethnic cleansing and/or colossal ethnic violence.  Afghanistan's population is heterogeneous, and any proposals, however attractive, for the country's de facto or de jure partition through decentralization appear not only impractical, but also irresponsible. So while U.S. support in Afghanistan over the past decade has been invaluable, and U.S. officials have the right to criticize the Afghan government, any such calls, or the supporting of one faction over another currently displayed by certain members of the U.S. Congress, amount to meddling in Afghanistan's domestic affairs and must be avoided.

At a time when the U.S. is in need of widespread public support on the Afghan mission, the administration's tone on Afghan governance is feeble. It is time that the U.S. starts investing in and nurturing the future generation of capable Afghan leaders through education, leadership training, and foreign exposure, rather than supporting the usual unholy alliance of corrupt or militant pro-American individuals it has supported in the past. This includes supporting key moderate and visionary leaders, technocrats, capable civil servants in each of the factions, as well as bringing new, dynamic, educated and impartial young leaders into the political sphere that will lead the country into a positive future. The 2014 election is of crucial significance. Real and tangible steps must be taken towards guaranteeing that Afghanistan's future does not once again fall into the hands of warlords, drug kingpins, or jihadi leaders that will most certainly compromise the freedom and security of Afghan people.

Javid Ahmad is program coordinator with the Asia Program of the German Marshall Fund of the United States in Washington, D.C. The views reflected here are his own.

Last month, an avalanche on the Siachen glacier in Kashmir killed 124 Pakistani soldiers and 11 civilians. The tragedy has intensified debate about the logic of stationing Pakistani and Indian troops on such inhospitable terrain. And it has also brought attention to Pakistan's environmental insecurity.

Siachen is rife with glacial melt; one study concludes the icy peak has retreated nearly two kilometers in less than 20 years. It has also been described as "the world's highest waste dump." Much of this waste-generated from soldiers' food, fuel, and equipment-eventually finds its way to the Indus River Basin, Pakistan's chief water source.

Siachen, in fact, serves as a microcosm of Pakistan's environmental troubles. The nation experiences record-breaking temperatures, torrential rains (nearly 60 percent of Pakistan's annual rainfall comes from monsoons), drought, and glacial melt (Pakistan's United Nations representative, Hussain Haroon, contends that glacial recession on Pakistani mountains has increased by 23 percent over the past decade). Experts estimate that about a quarter of Pakistan's land area and half of its population are vulnerable to climate change-related disasters, and several weeks ago Sindh's environment minister said that millions of people across the province face "acute environmental threats."

The last two years have provided ample proof of Pakistan's climate-change vulnerability. According to climatologists, the devastating floods of 2010-which submerged a fifth of the country and displaced millions-constituted "the worst natural disaster to date attributable to climate change" (a judgment rendered in 2010). They argued that a combination of high temperatures in the Atlantic Ocean and lower ones in the Pacific "created the perfect conditions" for the deluge.

The floods' destructiveness was exacerbated by Pakistan's rampant deforestation.  UN data and Pakistani media reports paint an alarming picture of this emissions-releasing scourge: Pakistan suffers from the highest annual rate of deforestation in Asia (the nation lost 33 percent of its forest cover between 1990 and 2010), with barely 2 percent of the country's total area remaining forested today.  One of the prime perpetrators is the Pakistani Taliban, which has long recognized the revenue-generating potential of logging. During its rule over Swat in northern Pakistan, the Taliban's timber sales eliminated up to 15 percent of the picturesque region's forest cover. Separately, back in the 1990s, wealthy landowners in Sindh ordered laborers to clear forestland for crop cultivation; one small village alone lost 10,000 acres of forest. In both Swat and Sindh, the loss of forestland has facilitated riverbank erosion and deprived the country of a natural bulwark against raging floodwaters.

The next year brought another climate-related disaster: record-setting monsoon rains. Though they produced less destruction and garnered less media attention than the preceding year's floods, nearly nine million people were affected and more than a million homes damaged or destroyed. September 2011 witnessed the most rain ever recorded in southern Pakistan, with monsoon amounts 1,170 percent above normal. Deforestation once again made matters worse. Torrential rains swept away illegally cut logs, with the timber eventually coming to rest under small bridges, blocking the flow of rainwater and diverting it toward populated areas.

Pakistan's environmental insecurity is not merely a matter of nasty weather. In three specific ways, it also threatens the country's fragile stability.

First, climate change vulnerability risks inflaming relations with India. Some Pakistani hardliners accuse their upper riparian neighbor of contributing to the flooding that has ravaged their country in recent years. India, they allege, manipulates Indus Basin river flows so that water gushes downstream into lower riparian Pakistan. "Liberating" India-held Jammu and Kashmir, they argue, is the only way to stop India's hydro machinations. Given the warming trend in Pakistan-India ties over the last year, such rhetoric-produced by an admittedly small minority-is not presently a major concern. However, with flood-exacerbating glacial melt well underway, and with anti-India sentiment becoming more vociferous thanks to the emergence of the Difa-e-Pakistan Council, or DPC (a new political movement of militant organizations and conservative religious parties), the relationship could in time be put to the test.

This scenario becomes even more likely if Pakistan's next national election brings to power a more conservative governing coalition that is willing to trumpet the DPC's aggressive views on water-which accuse India not only of flooding Pakistan with the resource, but also of withholding it. At a DPC rally in February, one of the movement's most notorious spokespersons, Hafiz Saeed (leader of the extremist outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba), thundered that India was preventing water from flowing into Pakistan.

Second, environmental stress could deepen Pakistan's urban violence.  Karachi is often convulsed by such strife, and much of it arises from fierce competition over precious land. Yet Karachi-a coastal, low-lying metropolis-is vulnerable to flooding, cyclones, and other climate-related phenomena that could easily wipe out vast swaths of the city's heavily contested real estate. This means the land that remains could become even more precious, thereby raising the stakes for the city's fighting factions and likely increasing violence. Additionally, many impoverished farmers and fishermen, their livelihoods shattered by water shortages, have migrated to cities. Pakistan's government is woefully unprepared to meet the soaring demand for basic services and natural resources sparked by this influx of migrants. Such privation, over time, could increase poverty and joblessness, breed anger, and spark more urban unrest.

Third, and perhaps most troubling, Pakistan's environmental insecurity imperils nuclear security. The fear here is not of militants seizing nuclear weapons, but rather of the nation experiencing the type of disaster that befell Japan's Fukushima nuclear plant last year. The Karachi Nuclear Power Plant (KANUPP) sits not only in a flood- and storm-prone area, but also in one of the most densely populated parts of the country. In fact, a study released by the journal Nature and Columbia University this spring concludes that more than eight million people live within 30 kilometers of KANUPP-the largest such figure for any nuclear facility in the world. Nuclear physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy describes the 40-year-old KANUUP as a "chronically incontinent" reactor that frequently leaks heavy water. Given the combination of a dysfunctional plant, a large surrounding population, and Pakistan's poor emergency-response capabilities, the consequences of a tsunami or cyclone strike on or near KANUUP could be truly catastrophic. Hoodbhoy predicts not only the release of deadly radioactivity, but also clogged roads, a collapse of vital services, and Karachi-Pakistan's financial capital-taken over by "looters and criminals."

To its credit, Islamabad does not ignore the country's environmental threats. Back in 2002, the Global Change Impact Study Center was formed to undertake climate change research and to advise policymakers and planners on climate issues. In 2005, the government established a Committee on Climate Change (overseen by the prime minister). And in 2010, a task force set up by the Planning Commission issued a report on climate change impacts in Pakistan, which prompted the Ministry of National Disaster Management to fashion a National Climate Change Policy and Action Plan. This strategy was approved in principle by Pakistan's cabinet in March.

Pakistanis have also implemented adaptation and resource-conservation measures. For instance, a new Aga Khan University building in Karachi plans to use stormwater harvesting for plant-watering and wastewater re-use for fountains, fire control, and toilets. Meanwhile, to commemorate Earth Day last month, Karachi officials announced a project to plant 5,000 trees.

Pakistan must do much more to address its climate challenges, which are daunting. Still, while the country is powerless to stop glacial melt or fend off tsunamis, it can nonetheless blunt some of their effects. This can be done by passing more stringent laws on deforestation, repairing leaky and dilapidated dams and canals, and establishing more robust disaster risk reduction mechanisms.

A former Pakistani environment minister has projected that climate change effects could cost Pakistan's economy up to $14 billion per year. Given the inevitability of global warming, Pakistan will undoubtedly be saddled with some of these debts. Yet by taking steps to manage, and reduce, the impacts of climate change, Pakistan can be spared some of these costs-not to mention some of the death and destruction visited on the country by an angry and abused environment.   

Michael Kugelman is the South Asia associate at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. He can be reached by email at michael.kugelman@wilsoncenter.org and on Twitter @michaelkugelman