Pakistan’s human cockroaches

2. September 2010 by admin.

Pakistan’s human cockroaches

The writer is a columnist, and TV and radio anchor fasi.zaka@tribune.com.pk

 

Source Link: http://tribune.com.pk/story/42158/pakistan/

 

Pakistan, you are a failed state. Not because of Zardari. Not because of America. But because you are a failed people, all of us undeserving of sympathy. We are diseased, rotten to every brain stem, world please make an impenetrable fence around us, keep us all in so we don’t spread it to other people, other countries.

These were words I posted on a social networking website. I have an unusually negative mindset these days. It happened after I saw the video of the two teenage brothers brutally clubbed to death by a crowd frenzied with blood thirst in Sialkot. The police watched gleefully. The video has blurs at certain parts, but even this sensible sensitivity does not prevent one from seeing mists of blood flaying from the heads of these teens as they are hit relentlessly, and remorselessly, again and again.

 

The murderous crowd was truly representative of the richness of Pakistan. Some wear jeans, others shalwar kameez, some were bearded, others clean shaven. The Pakistanis had gotten together to have some fun.

 

Do not be shocked. This wasn’t isolated, it’s just that the crowd wanted to make sure their orgasmic moment could be captured for later viewing, at one’s pleasure. We blame our ill-educated brethren for the barbarity we witness, but that’s a self-serving lie.

The middle and upper classes are immune to education it seems. They hold opinions of everyday violence even if they have never raised their hand at anyone. If you believe Jews are the scum of the earth, all Ahmadis deserve to die or that Hindus are inferior, well why not two teenage boys?

 

I want Pakistanis to feel shame, in fact a substantial loss of self-esteem would be great. This is the only way for us to begin to doubt ourselves and the incessant excuses we make. Yes, the world is right to add restrictions on our visas, to see us as dangerous. If for even a while we felt we were the cockroaches of the human race, maybe we would get to the point we stopped the lies we tell ourselves and let this continue.

The fact is, if we had real democracy, there would be no internet in Pakistan, women would not be allowed out of their homes, education would come to a standstill and we would begin a programme of killing off every minority. Thank you corrupt generals and politicians, you keep this at bay with some sense of being answerable to a world that still has some humanity in it, even if you don’t.

 

And please, no excuses, no excuses. Don’t give us that, “If only there was true Islam they would be better”. I think a thousand years is enough, we can’t wait longer. And there was no America in existence for most of that, or even western colonialism.

 

You want to know just how sociopathic we are? In response to these killings some are happy to say we deserve earthquakes and floods. Typical. Don’t change yourself, but give credit to the indiscriminate and inhumane forces of nature. The floods are a tragedy, an atrocity and should never be used to bolster an argument that really only demands self-reflection.

 

And please, in your self-reflection don’t call us animals, most of them are benign vegetarians. Also don’t blame Sialkot; they were just unlucky because they are subject to scrutiny. There is so much more out there.

 

There is such a sense of sickening moral superiority in Pakistanis, it needs to be addressed. All we care about is foreign policy, eager to point out the hypocrisies of the world, silent on our domestic, or even local life. Why should the world take what you say seriously, why should you be a regional power, or a leader in the comity of Islamic nations?

 

Truth is, there is only one way to get change, and it’s not hanging the people who killed these boys. It is raising your voice to contradict people who advocate death for others, no matter who they are speaking of. To internalise that murder of any kind, for anyone is wrong. Sounds easy? Well just try it.

 

Published in The Express Tribune, August 24^th, 2010.

Posted via email from Jay’s Blogs

Posted in Pakistan | Print | No Comments »

ISI: Wikileaks logs reflect soldiers’ fears, suspicions, and anxieties

29. July 2010 by admin.

ISI: Wikileaks logs reflect soldiers’ fears, suspicions, and anxieties 

The following article is an excerpt from this week’s SPIEGEL cover story. The facts in the story come from a database of almost 92,000 American military reports on the state of the war in Afghanistan that were obtained by the WikiLeaks website. Britain’s Guardian newspaper, the New York Times and SPIEGEL have all vetted the material and reported on the contents in articles that have been researched independently of each other. All three media sources have concluded that the documents are authentic and provide an unvarnished image of the war in Afghanstan — from the perspective of the soldiers on the ground.

“The truth is that not all documents from this treasure trove are beyond any doubt.”

Afghanistan’s neighbor, Pakistan, has been in a tight spot since the al-Qaida attacks on New York and Washington. Officially, the country is part of the worldwide anti-terrorism coalition forged by former United States President George W. Bush. Unofficially, however, the Pakistani security forces are the patrons of the Taliban forces that gave refuge to Osama bin Laden and his terrorists. It is clear that the Taliban would not exist without help from abroad. The Pakistani intelligence service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), helped build up and install the Taliban after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan and the country descended into a fratricidal war among the victorious mujahedeen, creating the threat of a power vacuum.

Despite all assurances by Pakistani politicians that these old connections were severed long ago, the country still pursues an ambiguous policy, in which Pakistan is both an ally of the United States and a helper of its enemies. Now there is new evidence to support this. The war logs make it clear that the Pakistani intelligence service is still presumably the Taliban’s most important supporter outside Afghanistan. The fact is that the war against the Afghan security forces, the Americans and their allies within the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) is still being conducted from Pakistani soil, with the country serving as a safe haven for all hostile forces. It also serves as a staging ground from which they can deploy. The Taliban’s new recruits, including feared foreign fighters, are streaming across the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The three main enemies of the Western coalition forces, the Taliban under Mullah Omar, the fighters led by former mujahedeen leader Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and the militias of the Haqqani clan of warlords all have important quarters and operations centers in Pakistan. Osama bin Laden, the original justification for this war, is also believed to have found safe haven in Pakistan, where he is still involved in the day-to-day operations of jihad against the infidels. On one occasion, according to the documents, bin Laden planned to attack his enemies with a poison called, in his honor, “Osama Kapa,” and on another he reportedly gave the gift of a wife to a particularly zealous Taliban fighter who had designed effective remotely triggered explosive booby traps. Pakistan ‘s Assurance of Future InfluenceThe Pakistani intelligence service has excellent relations with all groups. In the constant fear that Pakistan’s archrival India could gain a foothold in Afghanistan and thus have Pakistan in its pincers, so to speak, the ISI supports everything that could preserve and strengthen its own influence in Kabul. And because many ISI strategists cannot believe that the Americans will remain in Afghanistan for long (after all, Washington has already announced the beginning of its withdrawal), the Taliban remains Pakistan’s assurance of future influence in Kabul. This reasoning is particularly clear in the Afghanistan war logs. According to the warnings of new attacks and suicide bombings by the enemy, ISI envoys were present when Gulbuddin Hekmatyar’s commanders met for a war council in northern Waziristan.A document dated Sept. 1, 2007 reports on an imminent attack by a group of Hekmatyar’s fighters on one of the Allies’ forward operating bases in Kunar, the Afghan province bordering Peshawar in Pakistan. The elaborate and carefully planned attack was to involve four suicide bombers, and the Americans’ source even knew where they were from: one Pakistani, one Arab and two Afghans. The plans also included a rocket attack and artillery fire. Finally, foot soldiers were to storm the outpost and take enemy soldiers prisoner, if possible. The Pakistani intelligence service supplied Chinese ammunition to the insurgents. The ISI, as partial financier of the operation, wanted to retain control and thus intended to send an officer to observe the attack and advise the fighters. Nothing Works without the ISIPakistan’s western Balochistan Province is believed to be the area where Taliban leader Mullah Omar spends most of his time. The Shura, the Taliban’s decision-making body, meets once a month in the city of Quetta, or at least it did in the first few years after the Taliban fled Afghanistan. Some of the documents, such as the Aug. 16, 2006 warning of an impending attack, even claim that bin Laden himself has attended this meeting. The American intelligence gatherers, skeptical about this claim, classified the document as 3F, which means that it does not require verification. A man who undoubtedly attended the Shura was Mullah Baradar, a brother-in-law of Mullah Omar and the former Taliban military chief. The documents describe Baradar as the chairman of the Shura, and state that he monitors the financing, procurement and distribution of weapons, ammunition and other materials. As it happens, Baradar is also a confidant of the ISI. He designed the Taliban’s strategy and, according to the war logs, is also responsible for the use of suicide bombings. Why, then, would Pakistani security forces have arrested Baradar on Feb. 8, 2010?Many observers believe that the Pakistani security forces struck after the mullah had begun communicating with Afghan President Hamid Karzai. If this interpretation is correct, then the arrest of Baradar constituted a clear signal to the Taliban and their allies that nothing works without the ISI. Anyone reading through the material already comes away with this impression. In document after document, it is the ISI that controls the course of the war, and suicide bombers are apparently one of its preferred weapons. In fact, it is the ISI itself that often deploys them, as a threat warning note dated Oct. 30, 2008 indicates. The note reads: “According to a source (C6) AQ (al-Qaida) and ISI formed an attack group that was called ‘General.’ There are six suicide bombers in the group, two of them are Chinese, two of them are Uzbek and the others are Arab. The suicide bombers intruded into Khost (province) … .”The ISI also issues precise orders to murder certain individuals. According to the documents, Afghan President Hamid Karzai is at the top of its hit list. Some of the documents are shockingly succinct and to the point. According to a warning dated August 21, 2008, for example, an ISI colonel “had directed Talib Maulawi Izzatullah to see that Karzai was assassinated. Izzatullah assigned Abdulbari from Sarobi District to assassinate Karzai in a suicide mission at the Presidential Palace.” Archenemy India a Frequent TargetPakistan’s archenemy India is mentioned again and again. According to the documents, the intelligence service instructed its Afghan allies to kill Indians who worked in Afghanistan. Their efforts apparently did not go unrewarded, with the ISI promising fighters in the Haqqani network large sums of money for killing Indians. The ISI’s other preferred targets included all Indian consulates in Afghanistan, roads built by Indian workers and a telephone network installed by Indians. There is only one warning about a planned attack that does not include any indication of the ISI’s involvement, this time on the Indian embassy in Kabul — which did in fact happen, on July 7, 2008, claiming 58 lives. That warning came from intelligence agents within the Polish ISAF contingent. The documents also contain information about attacks ordered on strategic targets, like dams, key roads and the Kabul power supply. Some of the plans the intelligence service apparently had developed were relatively extreme. One report, for example, states that the ISI planned to have its agents poison drinking water and alcoholic beverages sold on the black market. All attacks, including the suicide bombings on foreign troops, came with financial incentives, although the reports vary widely on the level of compensation. For example, the ISI was allegedly willing to pay between $15,000 and $30,000 to fighters in the Haqqani network for each attack on Indians. Former ISI Chief Plays Key Role in LogsPakistan’s former intelligence chief Hamid Gul plays a special role in the documents. Gul, a former army general who headed the ISI from 1987 to 1989, was one of the key supporters of the mujahedeen when they were fighting the Soviet occupation force in Afghanistan. When speaking with the Western media, Gul later proved to be a propagandist of sorts for the Taliban and someone who could easily see himself sympathizing with their struggle against the Americans. The United States accuses him of maintaining ties to al-Qaida. In the newly leaked documents, Gul is also portrayed as an ally and, in one case, even as “a leader” of the Taliban. According to a threat assessment dated Jan. 14, 2008, he coordinated plans to kidnap United Nations employees on Afghanistan’s Highway No. 1 between Kabul and Jalalabad. Some 15 to 20 Taliban fighters were to stop the UN vehicle and threaten the passengers with their weapons. There was to be no mercy. As the report reads, if the Taliban encountered resistance during the kidnapping, the hostage-takers “will use the AK47 guns to fight the resistance or kill the hostages.” According to the reports, the retired general continued to supply his protégés with weapons. One source mentions that Gul had organized a convoy of 65 trucks filled with ammunition for the Taliban, although the authors of the report do not completely trust the source. Another report mentions that the ISI sent 1,000 motorcycles to the Haqqanis and delivered 7,000 weapons to Kunar Province, including Kalashnikovs, mortars and Strella missiles. Skepticism over Veracity of Some DocumentsBut it is precisely the especially transparent attempts to portray the Taliban’s supporters at the ISI as the most sinister of monsters that give rise to skepticism about the documents.On May 29, 2006, for example, the Afghan intelligence service reported on an ISI campaign to burn down Afghan schools. Was this truly the work of a generally secular military, or was the campaign in fact the brainchild of Taliban religious fanatics?And the claims about the ISI’s alleged recruitment of children as suicide bombers? According to the documents, the child bombers were sent out with explosive vests attached to their bodies, and the explosives were then detonated remotely. Was this also the work of the Pakistani intelligence service, which was supposedly being overrun by domestic and foreign candidates for martyrdom? Did the ISI truly ask women to hide explosive vests under their burqas, and is it true that ISI agents tenderly concealed an explosive device inside a gold-colored, fake Koran? These and other claims appear in this collection of reports assembled by the Americans. But are they true? The truth is that not all documents from this treasure trove are beyond any doubt.

Posted via email from Jay’s Blogs

Posted in War on Terror, Afganistan, Pakistan, United State of America | Print | No Comments »

The U.S.-Pakistan Conundrum and Europe’s Existential Test

22. May 2010 by admin.

The U.S.-Pakistan Conundrum and Europe’s Existential Test

 

 

May 20, 2010

 

 

U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER JIM JONES and CIA Director Leon Panetta met with Pakistan’s top civil and military leadership Wednesday and reportedly urged it to take more aggressive action against jihadists, especially in North Waziristan. (The region is the main hub of an array of international jihadist actors, which the Pakistanis have yet to target in their yearlong counterinsurgency campaign.) The visit was prompted by revelations about the deep connections the would-be Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad, had with Pakistan’s jihadist community as well as its military. Shahzad’s father is a retired Air Vice Marshal, the third highest rank in the Pakistani air force. His uncle is a retired two-star general who once headed the Frontier Corps in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa Province, formerly known as the North-West Frontier Province. The Frontier Corps is the paramilitary force currently playing a key role in the counterinsurgency campaign against Taliban rebels in northwest Pakistan.

Given the level of religious radicalization that the country has experienced over the past three decades or so, it is not unusual for a person with Shahzad’s pedigree to have joined al Qaeda transnational jihadists. Furthermore, being from an elite family also does not mean that senior people within the army have ties to the global jihadist nexus involved in plots to attack the United States. However, Tuesday there were reports that Pakistani authorities had arrested a serving army major suspected of being an accomplice to Shahzad, which further exacerbates an already complicated U.S.-Pakistani relationship.

 

Cooperation between Washington and Islamabad on dealing with the jihadist menace had just begun to improve when the Times Square bomb incident took place. It had hardly been three months since U.S. Central Command chief Gen. David Petraeus had applauded Pakistani efforts against the militant infrastructure. He said Islamabad’s forces were doing the best they could with limited resources, and should not be expected to expand the scope of their operations anytime soon. The shifting paradigm in Washington vis-a-vis Islamabad came to a screeching halt when it became clear that Shahzad had been dispatched by jihadist elements based in Pakistan.

 

The problem is not that the United States has completely reverted to the old policy of pressuring Pakistan. Rather it has to do with the dilemma where on one hand U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration needs to stabilize Pakistan to deal with the Afghan Taliban, while on the other it needs to pressure Pakistan to take tougher action against al Qaeda, which could further destabilize the already dangerously weakened Pakistani polity. In other words, the U.S. strategy for the region has been knocked off balance.

 

This precarious situation should not be considered an unintended outcome of the plot to detonate an improvised explosive device in the heart of Manhattan. It is very clearly the work of transnational jihadists headquartered in Pakistan who view increased U.S.-Pakistani cooperation as a lethal cocktail. The jihadists have been able to exploit the weakness of the Pakistani state and the contradictions within its security establishment to their advantage.

 

But in the past year they have faced a major onslaught and find themselves caught between U.S. unmanned aerial vehicle strikes and Pakistani ground assaults. They are in no position to resist the combined U.S.-Pakistani offensive. Their only way out is to undermine the bilateral relationship, which, given its fragility and the tools at the disposal of the jihadists, is not hard to do.

 

This strategy mimics efforts to ignite conflict between India and Pakistan by staging attacks in India in an attempt to force New Delhi into taking unilateral action against militant facilities on Pakistani soil. Doing so would lead to an all-out war between the two South Asian rivals, giving militants even more room to maneuver. In the case of the United States and Pakistan, an attack does not have to be successful, such as the case with the Times Square plot. All that is required is an attempt by an individual with easily traceable connections to Pakistan and its security establishment, which would undermine the ties between the two. Ideally, the goal is to create a situation where the United States is forced to be more aggressive about unilateral action on Pakistani soil. Doing so would create further chaos, which is the environment in which the jihadists thrive.

 

It should be noted that the whole idea of the al Qaeda-allied Pakistani Taliban claiming responsibility for the failed Times Square attack makes no sense. Why would the jihadists expend resources on an individual who did not have the skill set to pull off a real bombing? It only makes the organization appear weak, unless of course the intent was not to stage an actual attack, but rather undermine U.S. strategy for the region by creating problems between Islamabad and Washington.

 

Lest our readers think there isn’t anything going on in the world beyond Pakistan, the financial crisis in Europe has not gone anywhere — in fact, it continues to build. German Chancellor Angela Merkel told parliament that Europe is facing an “existential test” from the Greek-triggered crisis, noting that “if the euro fails, then Europe fails.” The chancellor is laying the groundwork for a Friday vote on approving Germany’s 123 billion euro contribution to a eurozone bailout fund.

 

While it was not designed that way, the euro has become the EU. The euro was intended to inject German economic dynamism into the rest of Europe, providing capital and markets that would act like the ocean tide and raise all boats. Instead, the common currency allowed poorer Southern Europe to delay reforms.

The issue of the day focuses on German subsidization of the South versus a series of rolling collapses should Berlin refuse. Unintended or not — and economically beneficial or not — the link between Germany’s checkbook and “the preservation of the European idea” is undisputed. If Germany is to seek global stature, it will have to make donations of similar scale to the European South over and over again. And should it refuse to participate, the great unraveling of Europe will begin with a vengeance.

 

It is not so much that we are attracted to the drama in Berlin — although it is worth noting that there has not been this type of drama in Berlin since the 1940s — but rather that the Germans are enacting policies that have a hint of desperation to them. On Wednesday the Germans instituted a ban on naked short selling, market parlance for betting that a certain horse will lose badly. Such trades usually only affect the margins of the market, and governments only get nervous about them when the ship seems about to go down. 

 

For comparison, the United States instituted a similar policy in July 2008, just before the American markets degraded from wobbly to free fall.

Posted via web from Jay’s Blogs

Posted in Taliban, War on Terror, Germany, Geopolitics, Pakistan, United State of America, Europe, India | Print | No Comments »

Conflicting Objectives in Afghanistan and Pakistan

13. May 2010 by admin.

Conflicting Objectives in Afghanistan and Pakistan

May 11, 2010 

AFGHAN PRESIDENT HAMID KARZAI ON MONDAY began a four-day trip to Washington, where he is reportedly scheduled to have candid conversations with U.S. President Barack Obama and other senior American officials about the war effort in the southwest Asian nation. Karzai’s visit comes after a rather nasty spat that broke out between Washington and Kabul largely over corruption within the Karzai government, which the Obama administration sees as a major impediment in regards to its exit strategy from the insurgency-wracked country. Responding to repeated statements from U.S. officials criticizing the Afghan leader, his family and close associates, Karzai accused the United States and its European allies of attempting to subvert his government by engaging in fraud in the presidential polls held last year.

Karzai went on to warn his Western allies that their pressure on him would only strengthen the Taliban, and that he could be forced to join the Afghan insurgent movement. These remarks from the Afghan president stem from the bitterness between his government and the Obama administration that kicked off shortly after Obama took office, and which largely manifested itself in the controversy surrounding the presidential vote. Therefore, it is unlikely that this one visit will heal matters –-regardless of any handshakes, press statements or photo- or video-ops.

 

In addition to the issue of corruption, there is significant disagreement over how to approach the matter of negotiating with the Taliban. Washington insists on reaching out only to low- to mid-level leadership to divide the movement from within, while the Karzai regime wants to talk to the senior leadership. This state of affairs between Kabul and Washington is deleterious for their mutual interests, especially at a time when anti-Taliban forces need to be on the same page to effectively deal with the Afghan jihadist insurgency. This is particularly true given the short time frame Washington has set for itself.

Islamabad presents an even greater case of conflicting goals for the United States than Kabul. Having realized that their policy of pressuring the Pakistanis to “do more” in terms of aggressive action against the diverse gamut of Islamist militant actors had dangerously weakened the Pakistani state, the Americans recently altered course and rushed toward stabilizing the Pakistani polity. This shift in U.S. attitude to a great degree was facilitated by Pakistan’s own rude awakening about a year ago when it launched a full-scale offensive against rogue jihadists who had declared war on Islamabad.At the end of the day, the Obama administration will likely have to seriously scale back its expectations of good governance on the part of the Karzai regime — whose nature is partially reflective of the nature of Afghanistan — to be able to focus on the core objective: containing the Taliban insurgency. Ironically, Washington is not just in the throes of uneasy relations with its Afghan partners. The failed Times Square bombing attempt appears to have adversely affected the nascent process of improving relations with Pakistan, whose cooperation is critical to the success of the American mission in the region.

 

It was only a few months ago that Central Command chief Gen. David Petraeus came out praising Pakistan and defending its position, saying that Islamabad was doing the best it could. He said its security forces were overstretched in terms of their human and material capacity, and argued that it was not reasonable to ask for more for the time being. This new approach toward Islamabad is also based on the fact that the United States cannot deal with Afghanistan if Pakistan is destabilizing.

 

Effectively dealing with Afghanistan requires not just Pakistani action east of the Durand Line but also U.S.-Pakistani intelligence cooperation to its west, which is the key to being able to distinguish between reconcilable and irreconcilable jihadist actors in Afghanistan. The problem, however, is that while such a policy might help the United States deal with the Afghan Taliban, it does not address the challenge posed by al Qaeda and its local and transnational allies based in Pakistan. And here is where the Times Square bomb plot has created a policy dilemma for the United States.

 

That the attack has been traced back to Pakistan’s murky jihadist landscape forces the Obama administration to return to pressuring Islamabad’s civil-military leadership to once again “do more.” In fact, there have been reports that U.S. officials have warned Pakistan of “serious consequences” if it does not expand its counterinsurgency efforts to North Waziristan, the main hub of a variety of jihadist forces. Many of these forces are hostile to Pakistan, some are neutral and still others are somewhat friendly. Despite this tough talk, which has the potential to throw a wrench into the process of growing cooperation between the two sides, the Obama administration cannot really afford to return to the status quo ante with the Pakistanis because of the larger goal of exiting Afghanistan within a very narrow window of opportunity.

Ultimately, Washington is faced with difficult policy choices in the case of both Pakistan and Afghanistan. In terms of the latter, how does it balance the need for improved relations with Pakistan while at the same time dealing with the threat posed by transnational jihadism? As for Afghanistan, how does President Obama work with Karzai vis-a-vis the Taliban problem and at the same time deal with Kabul’s corruption? It is unclear that the Obama administration will be able to balance these conflicting objectives, especially since its current relationships with its two key partners are far from where they should be from the point of view of U.S. national interests.

Posted via web from Jay’s Blogs

Posted in War on Terror, Taliban, Afganistan, Pakistan, United State of America | Print | No Comments »

Pakistan: Faisal Shahzad and the Pakistani Taliban

11. May 2010 by admin.

Pakistan: Faisal Shahzad and the Pakistani Taliban

May 10, 2010 

 

U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said May 9 that the United States has evidence linking the Pakistani Taliban to Faisal Shahzad, the man who confessed to the failed bombing attempt at Times Square in New York City on May 1. Shahzad is a naturalized U.S. citizen who demonstrated a willingness to carry out an attack on U.S. soil. However, his status as a U.S. citizen would have been problematic for the Pakistani Taliban, who must remain wary of potential infiltration from U.S. intelligence. Furthermore, the attempted bombing showed little to no signs that Shahzad had help from an outside group.

 

The Case of Faisal Shahzad U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced May 9 that the United States had uncovered evidence linking the Pakistani Taliban to Faisal Shahzad, the naturalized U.S. citizen of Pakistani descent who confessed to the botched May 1 attempt to bomb Times Square in New York City. Gen. David Petraeus, head of U.S. Central Command, made essentially the opposite contention May 7, arguing that Shahzad acted alone. Any link between Shahzad and the Pakistani Taliban is not as meaningful as it appears, but it does draw attention to the need for a more sophisticated discussion of the Pakistani Taliban phenomenon and the way in which Shahzad approached the organization.

 

In the wake of the attack, Shahzad allegedly has been linked not only to the Pakistani Taliban but also to Anwar al-Awlaki, the former U.S.-born radical imam of a mosque in a Virginian suburb of Washington, D.C., who is now thought to be in hiding in Yemen. Al-Awlaki was also linked to two of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers and U.S. Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, who gunned down 13 at Fort Hood in November 2009.

But even Hasan, who appears to have had closer ties to al-Awlaki, acted as a lone wolf and did not inform anyone of his intentions. In other words, despite some loose ideological affinity, the connection played no operational role in the attack, as the old apex leadership of al Qaeda prime did in the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. What made Hasan an effective lone wolf was not his ideological connections, but his insider knowledge of a good location for an attack at Fort Hood, his professional and personal proficiency with small arms and an appropriate target selection commensurate with his skill.

 

Shahzad was more of a “Kramer” jihadist in the tradition of Richard Reid — an ultimately inept radicalized individual with no operational understanding of basic tradecraft, no self-awareness of that lack of skill and ambition to carry out an attack utterly beyond his capabilities. Shahzad’s skill set is strikingly similar to that of Najibullah Zazi or the Glasgow group — they were all failed bomb makers.

 

The ‘Walk-In’ Jihadist

About the only thing Shahzad brought to the table was the passport of a naturalized U.S. citizen and a willingness to carry out an attack on U.S. soil. However, that entails more problems than opportunities.

A militant group that U.S. and Pakistani intelligence are actively targeting has to be inherently skeptical of outsiders — especially if one shows up on their doorstep (as Shahzad did) with an offer that appears to be too good to be true. Any entity must balance operational security with the active pursuit of its goals and objectives. But the lack of tradecraft that Shahzad exhibited is only further evidence that if Shahzad interacted with the Pakistani Taliban meaningfully — and there is not yet much evidence either way about how far he made it up the chain of command during his visit – they did not help him attain any meaningful skills. Although subsequent events might have shown that the group — if it was behind the plot — missed a chance to strike at the U.S. homeland, the ensuing investigations and focus of both U.S. and Pakistani intelligence efforts will only make operational security all the more important and any Shahzad-like offers all the more difficult to trust.

 

Shahzad’s childhood in Pakistan afforded him both cultural and filial connections in the country. There are even reports that a childhood friend was behind the 2008 attacks in Mumbai. Childhood has little bearing on adult operational capability, though it did make it easier for Shahzad to travel outside Peshawar, where he once lived, and make contacts with innumerable individuals — some invariably with some degree of connection to the shadowy, amorphous world of the Pakistani Taliban and their local and transnational allies.

 

However, a naturalized U.S. citizen who had spent more than a decade in the United States — even one with some historical acquaintance among militants — is problematic. It is next to impossible for a jihadist group to have any confidence in the trustworthiness of an individual who walks in and volunteers in a scenario such as this. The potential for that individual to be a double agent is simply too high to meaningfully compromise operational security — especially as the United States and others are trying very hard to enhance their intelligence for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) strikes in the region. The lack of tradecraft in Shahzad’s device is compelling evidence that whatever “contacts” or “training” he might have received in northern Pakistan was largely confined to physical training and weapons handling, not the far more sophisticated skill set of fashioning improvised explosive devices.

 

So whoever he did talk to in Pakistan — and the list of potentials is virtually endless for someone who grew up in the area — reveals almost nothing. More information may become available about whom he spoke with and what was discussed but there is no meaningful context for these conversations. Basic tradecraft and Shahzad’s Times Square device that make it clear that at most, the Pakistani Taliban sent a low-level representative to speak with him. It is unclear who provided the training, but it is reasonable to assume that he underwent basic guerilla training courses, but not advanced bomb-making courses. (Zazi received the bomb-making training but still failed in his attempt to attack New York’s subways because training without experience is insufficient.) However, the May 3 video of Pakistani Taliban leader Hakeemullah Mehsud claiming he had not been killed in a 2009 U.S. UAV strike probably gave the group an almost irresistible opportunity to claim credit for the May 1 attempted attack in the United States — even if it was an inept one — in order to bolster the larger movement’s standing (although the Pakistani Taliban is so fractious and diffuse, it can hardly be said that the claim was from “the group”).

 

Pakistani Taliban

The Pakistani Taliban is an outgrowth of the Afghan Taliban that Islamabad nurtured in the 1990s. The radical Islamist ideology and militant training that Pakistan (along with the United States and Saudi Arabia) had cultivated in Afghanistan during the 1980s war against the Soviets in order to consolidate control over the country eventually spilled back across the border. With a recent rise in attacks against Pakistani government targets, Islamabad began to grasp the implications and consequences of its existing policies. Consequently, in April 2009, it initiated an unprecedented counterinsurgency and counterterrorism campaign in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). The Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the leading group in the amorphous and diffuse phenomenon that is the Pakistani Taliban (even though the TTP itself is fractious), certainly has had ambitions to attack the continental United States, a supporter of the regime in Islamabad that it opposes.

 

However, it is important to note that at its strongest, the TTP demonstrated the ability to strike at urban targets in Pakistan. It has never demonstrated the capability to strike far afield, much less on the opposite side of the world. Others, such as splinter factions of Lashkar-e-Taiba and Hizb-ul-Jihad al-Islami, have demonstrated that capability recently, but not the TTP. So while it has the intent, it has never had the capability to carry out an attack at that distance. The closest it has come to an international attack is the suicide bombing on the CIA facility in eastern Afghanistan across the border from the FATA, which for all intents and purposes should be considered a local operation given the close proximity and porous nature of the border. In that instance, the group got lucky in that the bomber had independent access to agency officials. And the ongoing campaign in FATA is only further pressuring the Pakistani Taliban. Facing both the Pakistani military and American UAV strikes, the group has seen its operational reach within Pakistan severely constrained. The idea that the group has sufficient capacity to plot and support a strike on the continental United States is increasingly far-fetched, despite its desire to do so. In any event, Shahzad’s actions were not only carried out ineptly by an untrained individual, but have no evidence of meaningful outside support.

 

So while there are links that should not be underestimated, the botched Times Square bombing is merely the latest in a now well-established trend of “grassroots” and “Kramer” jihadists. They absolutely pose a danger — and an ongoing one at that — but they must not be mistaken for the coherent, transnational phenomenon of al Qaeda 2.0.

Posted via web from Jay’s Blogs

Posted in Taliban, War on Terror, Terror, Pakistan, Jihad, United State of America | Print | No Comments »

Robert Fisk: Pakistan is in pieces

1. May 2010 by admin.

Robert Fisk: Pakistan is in pieces

 

Originally Posted On Tuesday, 6 April 2010

 

American drones overhead, Taliban troops on the offensive, and the horrifying rise of child kidnapping – Pakistan is in pieces, writes Robert Fisk, in a devastating portrait of a country thwarted by violence and corruption.

 

 

Pakistan ambushes you. The midday heat is also beginning to ambush all who live in Peshawar, the capital of the North West Frontier Province. Canyons of fumes grey out the vast ramparts of the Bala Hisar fort.

“Headquarters Frontier Force” is written on the ancient gateway. I notice the old British cannon on the heights – and the spanking new anti-aircraft gun beside it, barrels deflected to point at us, at all who enter this vast metropolis of pain. There are troops at every intersection, bullets draped in belts over their shoulders, machine guns on tripods erected behind piles of sandbags, the sights of AK-47s brushing impersonally across rickshaws, and rubbish trucks and buses with men clinging to the sides. There are beards that reach to the waist. The soldiers have beards, too, sometimes just as long.

 

 

I am sitting in a modest downstairs apartment in the old British cantonment. A young Peshawar journalist sits beside me, talking in a subdued but angry way, as if someone is listening to us, about the pilotless American aircraft which now slaughter by the score – or the four score – along the Afghanistan border. “I was in Damadola when the drones came. They killed more than 80 teenagers – all students – and, yes they were learning the Koran, and the madrasah, the Islamic school, was run by a Taliban commander. But 80! Many of them came from Bajaur, which would be attacked later. Their parents came afterwards, all their mothers were there, but the bodies were in pieces. There were so many children, some as young as 12. We didn’t know how to fit them together.”

 

 

The reporter – no name, of course, because he still has to work in Peshawar – was in part of the Bajaur tribal area, to cover negotiations between the government and the Taliban. “The drones stayed around for about half an hour, watching,” he says. “Then two Pakistani helicopter gunships came over. Later, the government said the helicopters did the attack. But it was the drones.”

An Islamabad garden now, light with bright oak trees and big birds that bark at us from the branches, beneath which sit two humanitarian workers, both Europeans who have spent weeks in the Swat valley during and after the Pakistani army’s offensive against the Taliban. “There were dozens – perhaps hundreds – executed by the army. They were revenge killings by the soldiers, no doubt about it. A number of people we had reported to us as arrested – they were later found dead. What does that mean? The Americans and the Brits were aware of this, of course they were, and they intervened with the government. But what does this say about the army? In one village, two bodies lay in the street for two days – it was a way of showing the local people what would happen to them if they supported the Taliban. What does this say about the army? Can they control Pakistan like this?”

 

 

Some 70 per cent of the Pakistani army come from Punjab, and 80 per cent of retired army officers come from Punjab. In a few days, Punjab will pay for this.

 

 

But lest the Taliban appear in freedom-fighter mode, here is a different account of the Swat valley by one of Pakistan’s most eloquent journalists, Owais Tohid, reporting from the city of Mingora. Read, as they say, and inwardly digest. “Splotches of red blood still stain Ziarat Gul’s memory: his sister was gunned down by the Taliban and her body placed at the chowk [square] where I stand… A year ago, Gul’s sister, Shabana, was shot three times by the bearded and turbaned men.” Shabana was a singing and dancing girl, of whom there are many in the tribal areas; they perform at weddings, while the men play harmoniums and the stringed rabab.

 

 

Back to Owais Tohid. “Her body was then strewn with currency notes, CDs of her performances, and her photographs. Pooled in blood, nobody was allowed to her body until the next day. Gul, his father and two cousins were the only ones to offer funeral prayers and bury her the next morning…” Shabana’s friend Shehnaz, a famous dancing girl, was a witness to the murder: “I switched off the light and peeped through a hole; I could see the door was broken. Shabana sat on the floor and Taliban carrying Kalashnikovs and rocket-launchers stood around her. Some carried swords. I heard Shabana beg them to spare her life. She was pleading, ‘Don’t kill me, don’t kill me.’ But then one of the Taliban said, ‘We warned you … we even offered you our mujahid to marry, but you continued to dance…’ Shabana continued pleading…” Shehnaz heard the gunshots.

 

I wonder if all these tales are true. Alas, they are. Not far from Peshawar last month, a dancing troupe was returning from a party in Hindko Damaan, when armed men surrounded their vehicle at 3am. Afsana, one of the girls, had her two sisters, Salma and Sana, alongside her in the car, and her stepfather, Azizur Rahman. Her brother, in a following car, argued with the gunmen, who were demanding money. So they shot Afsana dead. She had just divorced, and danced to earn money for her family. Three other girls have been murdered outside Peshawar in the past fortnight.

 

 

But the drones dominate the tribal lands. They killed 14 men in just one night last month, at Datta Khel in north Waziristan. The drones come in flocks, and five of them settled over the village, firing a missile each at a pick-up truck, splitting it in two and dismembering six men aboard. When local residents as well as Taliban arrived to help the wounded, the drones attacked again, killing all eight of them. The drones usually return to shoot at the rescuers. It’s a policy started by the Israeli air force over Beirut during the 1982 siege: bomb now, come back 12 minutes later for a second shot. Now Waziristan villagers wait up to half an hour – listening to the shrieks and howls of the dying – before they try to help the wounded.

 

 

The drones – Predators and Reapers, or “Shadows”, as the Americans call them when they follow US troops into battle – have acquired mythical proportions in the minds of Pakistanis, a form of spaceship colonialism, imperialism from the sky, caught with literary brilliance by A H Khayal in the daily newspaper The Nation, when he asked where the drones come from: “The masses are piteously ignorant. They just don’t know that the drones are not material creatures. Actually, they are spiritual beings. They don’t need earthly runways for taking off… They live in outer space, beyond the international boundaries of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

 

 

“When they feel hungry, they swoop down and kill innocent Afghani women and children. They eat the corpses and fly back to their spacial residences for a siesta. When they again feel hungry, they again swoop down and kill another lot of innocent women and children. Having devoured the dead bodies, they fly back to their bedrooms in space. It has been going on and on like this for years.”

 

Indeed it has. But where do the drones come from? When President Hamid Karzai flew into Islamabad last month, the entire Pakistani cabinet turned up to welcome this fraudulently elected satrap of the United States. Many are the Pakistanis who found this a natural circumstance. Was not their own President, Asif Ali Zardari, another of Washington’s corrupt satraps, his minions heading to Washington only two weeks later to plead for a vast increase in the $7.8bn (£5.1bn) of aid which Congress voted Pakistan last year? “There was a time when America did not trust you,” Pakistan’s Prime Minister, Yousuf Gilani, lectured the upper house of his federal parliament. “You were their ally, but they did not trust you. Now they are trusting you and holding a strategic dialogue.”

 

 

It was enough to make the average Pakistani squirm. After Hillary Clinton arrived last November to berate the students of Pakistan on their anti-Americanism – and to hint that their government must surely know the location of al-Qa’ida’s top men in the tribal lands – the Foreign Minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, set off to Washington last week with his chain-smoking army commander, General Ashfaq Kayani, with the biggest begging bowl in Pakistani history. President Barack Obama wants an exit strategy in Afghanistan and realises – at last – that only Pakistan can provide this. But he also wants to support India as a bulwark against China, and the Pakistanis know that Delhi’s agents are trying to control Afghanistan.

 

 

But what struck Pakistanis about Karzai’s visit was not his cloying remarks about the fraternal love of the Afghan and Pakistani people – “India is our close friend but Pakistan is like a twin brother,” he piously observed – but his astonishing statement that the devastating missile attacks against Pakistan by pilotless US drone aircraft were not being launched from inside Afghanistan.

 

 

“We are not responsible for these attacks,” he said. “They are being carried out by a powerful sovereign country, namely the United States, which is also a close ally of Pakistan. They [the drones] don’t fly from our territory but in our airspace, and it is beyond our capacity to stop them.” Karzai looked subdued, apologetic, meekly sympathising with Gilani over the growing number of civilian casualties.

 

Karzai was (for once) telling the truth. The drones launched from the Kandahar airbase are attacking the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban inside the international frontier. The drones attacking Pakistan come from – Pakistan.

 

 

In fact, the Americans launch them from a Pakistan Air Force base at Terbile, 50 miles west of Islamabad. US officers were also interested in using the Peshawar airfield – the same runways employed by the old U-2 spy planes, from which Gary Powers took off over the Soviet Union during the Cold War – and the Taliban spent weeks trying to discover the headquarters from which the Americans were directing the drones. They eventually decided that the US drone control centre was on the highest floor of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad.

 

 

They were wrong. US officers did stay at the Marriott, but they were not air force personnel. This, however, was the reason the Marriott was attacked by a suicide bomber in 2007, and then again with a truckload of explosives on 20 September 2008 – not because President Zardari had just given his first speech to parliament a few hundred metres away, but because the Taliban were trying to destroy the “brain” behind the drones. At least 54 civilians were killed – most of them Pakistanis – and 266 wounded. The drone attacks continued, more than ever after Barack Obama became US President.

 

 

The war, however, is now directed at the Pakistani army – although the authorities try to portray the Taliban’s targets as purely civilian. The assault on the police torture centre in Lahore on 8 March was merely a warning. Nine policemen were among the 18 dead at a building known for its night-time torture sessions – local inhabitants had complained many times about screams from the basement, not because of the abuse taking place there but because it made their homes a target for bombers. They were right. The worst suicide bombing of the year had already occurred at a volleyball field in Lakki Marwat, when the killer murdered 105 people – many of them policemen and Frontier Corps personnel. On 4 February, another suicide bomber – after a long surveillance operation by the Pakistani Taliban – struck a military convoy in the Koto area of the Lower Dir district. He killed three schoolgirls, a Frontier Corps policeman – and three US soldiers. Since 11 September 2001, more than 5,700 men and women have been killed in insurgent attacks in Pakistan. This is revenge for the army’s offensives in Swat and Waziristan.

 

 

The double suicide attack on two army vehicles in Lahore, the Punjabi capital, on 12 March was thus merely the most brazen assault on the Pakistani military. Both killers destroyed themselves next to two army trucks – killing 14 soldiers – in the garrison city, shaming the security authorities and provoking the local chief minister, Shahbaz Sharif, to plead shamefully with the Taliban to spare his capital in future. Attack another city, was the implication. Sixty-one men and women were killed – most of them, of course, civilians – and hundreds wounded. Within 24 hours, another suicide bomber attacked an army checkpoint in the North West Frontier Province at Saidu Sharif, killing 14 people, most of them soldiers and policemen.

 

 

Even the military were surprised by the determination of the Pakistani Taliban to assault them. Four days after the attack in Lahore, the police found 1,500 kilos of explosives and two suicide vests in Iqbal Town in the Punjabi capital, along with Russian-made hand grenades and rifle ammunition. The next day, they discovered another 3,000 kilos of explosives in the same area. Amir Mir, the most accurate of Pakistani journalists amid the chaos of what is in fact a war, has calculated that 321 Pakistanis have been killed and more than 500 wounded in 15 suicide bombings across Pakistan in the first 70 days of 2010. This is up from ‘only’ 11 suicide bombings in the same period last year.

 

 

The Institute for Peace Studies in Pakistan has been recording every act of violence in the country since the 2001 attack on America, and concludes that just in 2009 12,632 men and women – civilians, soldiers, Taliban militants, even victims of inter- tribal battles – were killed. Of the dead, 3,021 were killed by insurgents, 6,329 in Pakistan army operations, 1,163 in army-Taliban battles, 700 in border violence, and 1,419 in other violence, including drone missiles.

 

 

The scorecard for death over the past four years – I’m afraid that death in Pakistan is today much like a tally – is truly awful. In 2005, a mere 216 Pakistanis were reported killed. In 2006, 907 Pakistanis died; in 2007, 3,448; in 2008, 7,997. By 2009, the total number of victims in just five years came to more than 25,000. When I twice visited Lahore, it felt like a city under martial law, thronged with troops and checkpoints, its bridges and ancient British ministries and schools laced with soldiers in steel helmets.

 

 

In just two weeks in March – far from Lahore – lawlessness reached epic proportions. On 14 March, four men were killed in the Khyber tribal area. In Quetta on 17 March, a retired policeman, a member of a “sectarian organisation”, and two construction workers were shot dead or blown up. A day later, 10 men of the Mehsud tribe – quite possibly militants – were killed in a five-missile US drone attack. In a suburb of Peshawar on the same day, three Frontier Force soldiers and two policemen were shot dead. In Karachi that day, two political leaders, their lawyer and a taxi driver were shot. Within 24 hours, a prominent Quetta lawyer was kidnapped. By the end of the same week, the Pakistani Taliban publicly announced that it intended to murder the Pakistani Interior Minister, Rehman Malik. And there would be more attacks across the country, the Taliban said, in revenge for the American drone attacks. “Just wait for our reaction,” the Taliban’s spokesman, Azam Tariq, said.

 

The Pakistani military responded in the time-honoured way. The Taliban’s attacks were “a clear sign of frustration and desperation” on the part of the militants. The director of the CIA, Leon Panetta, declared from the safety of Washington that the drone assaults – and other attacks, unspecified – were “the most aggressive operation that the CIA has been involved in in our history. The CIA’s offensive in the Pakistan tribal region had driven Osama bin Laden and his colleagues into hiding – where they have presumably been since 2001 – leaving al-Qa’ida “rudderless and incapable of planning sophisticated operations”.

 

 

Pakistan surely deserves better than this nonsense. Embedded with the Pakistani military, writers such as Michael O’Hanlon in The New York Times remind their readers that America’s $17bn in aid since 2001 comes to only half Pakistan’s costs in the “war on terror”, a battle to which the Pakistani army is now fully committed (or so he believes). This, however, does not explain the scores of soldiers who have surrendered to the insurgents over the past 12 months, nor the weird double-game being played by the Pakistani security services, who captured senior members of the Afghan Taliban only to find themselves condemned by Hamid Karzai’s corrupt government for breaking up the secret communications between the Afghan government and its enemies. The US was “extremely gratified” by Pakistan’s arrests, President Obama’s envoy, Richard Holbrooke, says. In other words, the Americans would control contacts with the Afghan Taliban – not their local ruler, Hamid Karzai.

 

 

And all the while, the ’security’ experts who dominate the American press have been sowing their suspicions through the dumbed-down intelligence world of the West. For while we bomb the tribal regions with our drones, we are told to fear the imminent theft of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. Terrorists, we are told in a West Point journal, may take the country’s atomic arms for use against us – note how this threat never seems to apply to our trusted ally, India – and mythical accounts are told of three separate attacks by “terrorists” (unnamed, of course) on Pakistan’s nuclear facilities in the last three years. In the past we were told that Muslim “nationalists” might hijack Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. Now the danger is supposed to come from “Islamists”. In fact, the real danger is much closer to home.

 

 

Seventy per cent of NATO’s ammunition, vehicles and food in Afghanistan still transits through Pakistan, along with 40 per cent of its fuel. The Taliban’s attacks on these convoys – both the Pakistani and Afghan versions of the movement (for they are not the same) – have over the past two years netted some incredible dividends, which NATO has not seen fit to disclose. Gunmen have managed to steal three separate – disassembled but complete – military helicopters and a clutch of American Humvee armoured vehicles, one of which was used by the Pakistani Taliban’s leader, Hakimullah Mehsud. At least 62 Humvees were burned out in just one raid near Peshawar in 2008.

 

 

And all this, you have to remember, takes place against the profound corruption of Pakistani society, from the shoe-shine boy to the president, Asif Ali Zardari, Benazir Bhutto’s widower, whose own venality is so legendary that only rarely does it cause discussion. Only once in the last month has it been mentioned – when Zardari, addressing a conference on Sufism and peace, announced that he was not afraid of death, that he represented “nothing more than a speck in the universe” and would donate his body organs on his death. Within hours, five people – including my taxi driver, a hotel waiter, the owner of an Islamabad bookshop, a Pakistani humanitarian worker and a lawyer – made precisely the same comment to me: “Zardari will donate his body organs to the people – but not his dollars!”

 

 

Thank God, I suppose, for the Pakistani press, as brave, as disillusioned and as tough as any media folk in the West. The ‘oil mafia’ which siphoned off billions of rupees during Musharraf’s rule, the four cabinet ministers living in government houses but claiming rent (shades of Westminster’s very own), the massive financial irregularities in the Punjab education department, all have been exposed in Pakistan’s newspapers. “The government,” reported The News International on 11 March, “has removed yet another officer of impeccable integrity, the chief Commissioner, Islamabad, Shahid Mehmood, within 90 days of his posting, after he allegedly refused to accommodate the ‘wishes’ of certain political masters.” Now that’s what I call reporting. The luckless Mehmood, it turned out, had rashly frozen a land deal which involved a certain Asif Ali Zardari, the President of Pakistan.

 

 

Pakistanis – in other words, most of the 150 million men and women who live in penury in this nuclear state – simply no longer believe in the authorities who claim to govern them. When an increase in bus fares brought hundreds – and then thousands – of young people onto the streets of Islamabad’s suburbs last month, the police opened live fire on the demonstrators. Western embassy personnel were confined to their bunkers – US diplomats are not even allowed to go grocery shopping at the best of times – and Zardari’s government then announced that the protesters had been “imported”, brought into the capital from “surrounding areas”.

 

 

Where does a foreigner – a real one, like me – go to understand this beautiful, ferociously angry, ripped-up, intelligent, hopelessly overcrowded, war-smitten country?

 

Raza Kazim admits only to being in his eighties, but he has a perfunctory, almost irritatingly child-like way of twining his thin fingers together while trying to define his love of country, his belief in the worth of Pakistan. His is speaking over the throb of the air-conditioners, as an unprecedented spring heat warms up the Lahore trees outside his home. He brings in two frozen cans of Murree beer and is vexed that I won’t join him. I can see why he led the first strike in his Indian school’s history.

 

“I benefited vastly from the Raj,” he says. “It wasn’t a love-hate relationship – it was a love-adversarial relationship. My heart went out to the ‘Quit India’ movement, and I was coming from the peasantry. It was a time when peasants could be flogged for two rupees. I had a belief in freedom and in 1946, I took a leap of faith and feeling.”

 

 

Some faith. Some feeling. Kazim is a kind of ‘guru’ – in the original meaning of the word, an elderly advisor/oracle for generations of Pakistani politicians – and his involvement in the Indian National Congress of British India, then in the Muslim League and later in the Pakistan People’s Party, have turned him into the Malcolm Muggeridge – or perhaps Tony Benn – of Pakistan. A lawyer and ex-Communist whose philanthropy has produced the Sanjan Nagar School Institute of Philosophy and Arts, and the inventor of a stringed musical instrument intended to preserve South Asian classical music as a modern art form, he has two qualifications for Pakistani sainthood: he was kidnapped by military intelligence in 1984, and has been jailed five times between 1950 and 1985. His other quality is historical; he still thinks the date is 1947 and he smiles when he realises that I agree with him.

 

 

“August 1947 was a kind of competition between Hindus and Muslims,” he recalls, the fingers beginning to twist around each other, the lamp-light reflecting his baldness as dusk brings out the big birds in the garden. “Who would give a better account of freedom? I never had a sense of India being divided. It was like the people were split into two teams. Who would score more runs off freedom?”

 

 

Freedom at midnight, I murmured. At what cost? “Yes, there was bloodshed in Bihar. There was bloodshed in Delhi, a lot of bloodshed in the Punjab – but that was action and reaction. Then it spread into the Deccan area. They (the new Indian state) took soldiers from the Punjab whose children had been murdered here and whose women had been abducted here, and sent them to the Deccan area where they bashed the heads of [Muslim] children against pillars. Yes, I know what happened in those trains.

 

 

“The political capital made out of these killings is another story – a bad story, but a different story. The events were capitalised. But bloodshed didn’t begin with Pakistan. The first genocide of Indian history took place in the Punjab in 3,000 BC – it was a conflict between feudal and pastoral

 

Kazim had it easy. “On 13 September, 1947, I came on a plane to Pakistan as guest of the Indian communications minister. I came with my gramophone records, books and poetry, and two sets of clothes.” It is a very post-colonial story. While the masses tore each other to pieces below, Kazim’s plane soared above the bloodbath to drop him as a witness to the mass looting of the new Pakistan’s most beautiful city, Lahore.

 

“People think of the properties taken from the Hindus and Sikhs, but the most important things were the jobs, the business, the vacancies, and grabbing those properties. The educated people looted and took things away in trucks – these were the people who were going to run the country. It became a sign of patriotism that you forged property papers to homes in India that you never had – this was thought to be a patriotic duty because the Indians had three times as many claims against us. The bureaucracy had been civil servants under the British system – they were middle-level bureaucrats in India, who had suddenly become senior bureaucrats in Pakistan.” Mohammad Jinnah, the founder of the state, who died in 1948 – Kazim went to his funeral – “had a weakness for flattery. He didn’t keep good company.”

 

 

I’ve heard this story before, albeit less eloquently told. Pakistan existed, but there was no sign of a developing society or the creation of a nation. “We have still not made a society,” Kazim says. “People have to take something out of their personal lives and invest it in our society.” There is a pause here, then Kazim’s voice rises. “WE ARE STILL IN 1947!” Pakistan obtained its freedom under the Indian Independence Act – but there is nothing called the Pakistan Independence Act.”

 

 

Another room now, in what Pakistani reporters still call a “posh” area of Islamabad. (When they bring themselves into their own stories, by the way, Pakistani journalists call themselves “scribes”, rather than our self-denigrating “hacks”). But the air conditioner is just as noisy. Now it is another lawyer, Aitzaz Ahsan, hero of the ‘Long March’ of spring 2009 which eventually secured the reinstatement of Iftikhar Chaudhry as Chief Justice after the abdication of America’s favourite dictator, the president-general Pervez Musharraf. Ahsan’s new book, The Indus Saga and the Making of Pakistan suggests that there were two culturally different regions of the land which the British called India, that there was a continuous social and political order in the Indus region – the bit that became Pakistan – that was quite different from that of the rest of India.

 

 

On Pakistani independence, the structure of state-Raj versus the citizen-native did not change. As Ahsan puts it bleakly, “the military officers who on 14 August, 1947, saluted the raising of the green standard with crescent and star had on the 13 August been saluting the Union Jack. They couldn’t change in a day. Somebody else had fought for independence. The ‘natives’ remained and continued to be denied democratic rights until 1970.”

 

 

Thus – and Kazim would not agree with this – Pakistanis loved their judges rather than their soldiers, and admired them with a fair degree of cynicism. Rightly so. In 1954, the Governor General dissolved parliament – an act unsustainable in law – but the judges upheld the dissolution. In 1958, the military commander dissolved the assembly, abrogating the constitution. And the country’s Supreme Court endorsed the imposition of martial law on the grounds that “a successful coup d’état is an internationally-recognised, legal method of changing a government.” Judges reversed this opinion in 1972, ruling that there was no place for a military regime in Pakistan – but it did so only after the military regime had fallen.

 

 

Now the army – guardian of the nation of Pakistan, and America’s second-best friend in the region (after the Indian army) – is under constant military attack, while obligingly allowing the totally corrupted (and corrupting) politicians to run the vehicle of state under the banner of ‘democracy’. Everyone knows that the Inter- Services Intelligence – their leaders appear to be interchangeable with the regular army – continue to succour and guard and lead the Afghan Taliban. They will do so as long as America ignores Pakistan’s conflict with India over Kashmir. American soldiers die because of Muslim anger at Washington’s support for Israel, as US Commander General David Petraeus suggested last month. But American soldiers also die because of Kashmir. Pakistanis – and here is something which truly unites all of them – believe that America supports India, and that Kashmir is thus ultimately lost to them. So why should they allow America – and Indian money and political influence – to control Afghanistan?

 

 

It’s sometimes difficult to find the line between aggression and fear in Pakistan. We in the West fear its nuclear weapons without even looking at a map of the country about which we obsess with such devotion.

 

Every major city – Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Lahore, Karachi, Peshawar, Quetta – is close to the borders of India or Afghanistan. It is a both sump of poverty and a nuclear power, an intelligent nation – its people desire education with the same craving as the Palestinians – with a history that began and ended at the moment of partition, its datelines framed by military coups and imperial hand-outs and, now, by drone attacks and suicide bombers. The latter arrived with a peculiar shock in Pakistan. They started in Lebanon, moved to ‘Palestine’, then to Iraq and then to Afghanistan – and then to Pakistan. From the Mediterranean to the old Raj, this black-magic rite travelled with incredible speed. And now it has merged with the dirt and corruption and nuclear power of Pakistan.

 

 

I tried, in Pakistan, to define the sorrow which so constantly afflicts this country. The massive loss of life, the poverty, the corruption, the internal and external threats to its survival, the existentialism of Islam and the power of the army; perhaps Pakistan’s story can only be told in a novel. It requires, I suspect, a Tolstoy or a Dostoyevsky.

 

 

But perhaps it is Pakistan’s ability to do harm to itself that most struck me – symbolised, I fear, by the latest and most terrible affliction to strike it: child-kidnapping. Steal a little boy or a little girl, ask the parents for money, and kill the infant if they don’t pay. When Sahil Saeed, the British-Pakistani boy, was taken, the police and the British embassy helped to bring him home. But journalists covering the story found that the family home was sometimes overwhelmed with other parents, like those of six-year-old Mahnoor Fatima, who was stolen from his family in October of last year and never seen again. “This shows the difference between rich and poor,” Mahnoor’s mother said. “No one even came to my house to console me… Everything is done here for the rich and the British, but nothing for Pakistanis and the poor.”

 

 

Near Peshawar, a three-year old girl called Fariha was taken from a wedding party last month, her kidnappers demanding Sterling pounds 8,000 for her life. The parents couldn’t pay. So Fariha was killed and thrown into a canal. Her father, a worker at a brick-kiln, later came to the Peshawar Press Club with the body of his daughter to demand punishment for her killers. In Faisalabad two days later, another kidnapped child, seven-year-old Samina Ali, was found dead in a drain after her parents failed to pay a ransom for her. They complained that the police later demanded £120 for handing over her body. A kidnapped boy, a six-year-old identified only as Sharjeel, was also found dead in a drain a few hours earlier.

 

 

In the first two months of this year, 240 people – almost all of them children – have been kidnapped in Pakistan. Only 74 have been recovered alive. There – not in the suicide attacks and the venality of politicians– lies the worst statistic in Pakistan.

^Independent

Read more: http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/news/world-news/robert-fisk-pakistan-is-in-p.htmls-14756006.html?r=RSS#ixzz0mguPWbHa

Posted via web from Jay’s Blogs

Posted in Pakistan | Print | No Comments »

Three Points of View: The United States, Pakistan and India

30. April 2010 by admin.

Three Points of View: The United States, Pakistan and India

 

One of al Qaeda’s goals when it attacked the United States in 2001 was bringing about exactly what the United States most wants to avoid. The group hoped to provoke Washington into blundering into the region, enraging populations living under what al Qaeda saw as Western puppet regimes to the extent that they would rise up and unite into a single, continent-spanning Islamic power. The United States so blundered, but the people did not so rise. A transcontinental Islamic caliphate simply was never realistic, no matter how bad the U.S. provocation.

Subsequent military campaigns have since gutted al Qaeda’s ability to plot extraregional attacks. Al Qaeda’s franchises remain dangerous, but the core group is not particularly threatening beyond its hideouts in the Afghan-Pakistani border region.

 

As for the region, nine years of war have left it much disrupted. When the United States launched its military at the region, there were three balances of power that kept the place stable (or at least self-contained) from the American point of view. All these balances are now faltering. We have already addressed the Iran-Iraq balance of power, which was completely destroyed following the American invasion in 2003. We will address the Israeli-Arab balance of power in the future. This week, we shall dive into the region’s third balance, one that closely borders what will soon be the single largest contingent of U.S. military forces overseas: the Indo-Pakistani balance of power.

Pakistan and the Evolution of U.S. Strategy in Afghanistan

U.S. strategy in Afghanistan has changed dramatically since 2001. The war began in the early morning hours — Pakistan time — after the Sept. 11 attacks. Then-U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell called up then-Pakistani President Gen. Pervez Musharraf to inform him that he would be assisting the United States against al Qaeda, and if necessary, the Taliban. The key word there is “inform.” The White House had already spoken with — and obtained buy-in from — the leaders of Russia, the United Kingdom, France, China, Israel and, most notably, India. Musharraf was not given a choice in the matter. It was made clear that if he refused assistance, the Americans would consider Pakistan part of the problem rather than part of the solution — all with the blessings of the international community.

 

Islamabad was terrified — and with good reason; comply or refuse, the demise of Pakistan was an all-too-real potential outcome. The geography of Pakistan is extremely hostile. It is a desert country. What rain the country benefits from falls in the northern Indo-Pakistani border region, where the Himalayas wring moisture out of the monsoons. Those rains form the five rivers of the Greater Indus Valley, and irrigation works from those rivers turn dry areas green.

 

Accordingly, Pakistan is geographically and geopolitically doomed to perpetual struggle with poverty, instability and authoritarianism. This is because irrigated agriculture is far more expensive and labor-intensive than rain-fed agriculture. Irrigation drains the Indus’ tributaries such that the river is not navigable above Hyderabad, near the coast — drastically raising transport costs and inhibiting economic development. Reasonably well-watered mountains in the northwest guarantee an ethnically distinct population in those regions (the Pashtun), a resilient people prone to resisting the political power of the Punjabis in the Indus Basin. This, combined with the overpowering Indian military, results in a country with remarkably few options for generating capital even as it has remarkably high capital demands.

 

Islamabad’s one means of acquiring breathing room has involved co-opting the Pashtun population living in the mountainous northwestern periphery of the country. Governments before Musharraf had used Islamism to forge a common identity for these people, which not only included them as part of the Pakistani state (and so reduced their likelihood of rebellion) but also employed many of them as tools of foreign and military policy. Indeed, managing relationships with these disparate and peripheral ethnic populations allowed Pakistan to stabilize its own peripheral territory and to become the dominant outside power in Afghanistan as the Taliban (trained and equipped by Pakistan) took power after the Soviet withdrawal.

 

Thus, the Americans were ordering the Pakistanis on Sept. 12, 2001, to throw out the one strategy that allowed Pakistan to function. Pakistan complied not just out of fears of the Americans, but also out of fears of a potentially devastating U.S.-Indian alignment against Pakistan over the issue of Islamist terrorism in the wake of the Kashmiri militant attacks on the Indian parliament that almost led India and Pakistan to war in mid-2002. The Musharraf government hence complied, but only as much as it dared, given its own delicate position.

 

From the Pakistani point of view, things went downhill from there. Musharraf faced mounting opposition to his relationship with the Americans from the Pakistani public at large, from the army and intelligence staff who had forged relations with the militants and, of course, from the militants themselves. Pakistan’s halfhearted assistance to the Americans meant militants of all stripes — Afghan, Pakistani, Arab and others — were able to seek succor on the Pakistani side of the border, and then launch attacks against U.S. forces on the Afghan side of the border. The result was even more intense American political pressure on Pakistan to police its own militants and foreign militants seeking shelter there. Meanwhile, what assistance Pakistan did provide to the Americans led to the rise of a new batch of homegrown militants — the Pakistani Taliban — who sought to wreck the U.S.-Pakistani relationship by bringing down the government in Islamabad.

The Indian Perspective

The period between the Soviet collapse and the rise of the Taliban — the 1990s — saw India at a historical ebb in the power balance with Pakistan. The American reaction to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks changed all that. The U.S. military had eliminated Pakistan’s proxy government in Afghanistan, and ongoing American pressure was buckling the support structures that allowed Pakistan to function. So long as matters continued on this trajectory, New Delhi saw itself on track for a historically unprecedented dominance of the subcontinent.

 

But the American commitment to Afghanistan is not without its limits, and American pressure was not sustainable. At its heart, Afghanistan is a landlocked knot of arid mountains without the sort of sheltered, arable geography that is likely to give rise to a stable — much less economically viable — state. Any military reality that the Americans imposed would last only so long as U.S. forces remained in the country.

The alternative now being pursued is the current effort at Vietnamization of the conflict as a means of facilitating a full U.S. withdrawal. In order to keep the country from returning to the sort of anarchy that gave rise to al Qaeda, the United States needed a local power to oversee matters in Afghanistan. The only viable alternative — though the Americans had been berating it for years — was Pakistan.

 

If U.S. and Pakistan interests could be aligned, matters could fall into place rather quickly — and so they did once Islamabad realized the breadth and dangerous implications of its domestic insurgency. The five-year, $7.5 billion U.S. aid package to Pakistan approved in 2009 not only helped secure the arrangement, it likely reflects it. An unprecedented counterinsurgency and counterterrorism campaign conducted by the Pakistani military continues in the country’s tribal belt. While it has not focused on all the individuals and entities Washington might like, it has created real pressure on the Pakistani side of the border that has facilitated efforts on the Afghan side. For example, Islamabad has found a dramatic increase in American unmanned aerial vehicle strikes tolerable because at least some of those strikes are hitting Pakistani Taliban targets, as opposed to Afghan Taliban targets. The message is that certain rules cannot be broken without consequences.

 

Ultimately, with long experience bleeding the Soviets in Afghanistan, the United States was inherently wary of becoming involved in Afghanistan. In recent years, it has become all too clear how distant the prospect of a stable Afghanistan is. A tribal-ethnic balance of power overseen by Pakistan is another matter entirely, however. The great irony is that such a success could make the region look remarkably like it did on Sept. 10, 2001.

 

This would represent a reversal of India’s recent fortunes. In 10 years, India has gone from a historic low in the power balance with Pakistan to a historic high, watching U.S. support for Pakistan shift to pressure on Islamabad to do the kinds of things (if not the precise actions) India had long clamored for.

 

But now, U.S. and Pakistani interests not only appear aligned again, the two countries appear to be laying groundwork for the incorporation of elements of the Taliban into the Afghan state. The Indians are concerned that with American underwriting, the Pakistanis not only may be about to re-emerge as a major check on Indian ambitions, but in a form eerily familiar to the sort of state-militant partnership that so effectively limited Indian power in the past. They are right. The Indians also are concerned that Pakistani promises to the Americans about what sort of behavior militants in Afghanistan will be allowed to engage in will not sufficiently limit the militants’ activities — and in any event will do little to nothing to address the Kashmiri militant issue. Here, too, the Indians are probably right. The Americans want to leave — and if the price of departure is leaving behind an emboldened Pakistan supporting a militant structure that can target India, the Americans seem fine with making India pay that price.

Posted via web from Jay’s Blogs

Posted in Afganistan, Pakistan, United State of America, India | Print | No Comments »

The Afghanistan Campaign, Part 4: The View from Kabul

25. April 2010 by admin.

 The Afghanistan Campaign, Part 4: The View from Kabul

April 20, 2010

 

Amid a surge of Western troops into Afghanistan, a raging Taliban insurgency and Pakistan’s attempts to consolidate its influence in the country, Kabul is being pulled in many directions. The government of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, now at the beginning of its second five-year term, is trying to secure its own future as well as balance the ambitions of other key players, all while preventing the already war-torn country from becoming a proxy battleground.

A growing Taliban insurgency and a surge of U.S. and allied forces into the country are shaking things up in Kabul, Afghanistan’s capital. There, Afghan President Hamid Karzai, now in his second five-year term, has been formally in power since 2002 and in elected office since 2004. After several years of being portrayed as an American lackey, perceived more as the mayor of Kabul than the president of Afghanistan, Karzai has tried to break out of this mold and secure his own political survival. This at a time when the Taliban have emerged as a major force and the United States has made it clear that its commitment to Afghanistan is limited.Karzai’s problems have only escalated since the Obama administration took office. Relations began to sour in the run-up to last year’s Afghan presidential election, when elements in Washington began searching for alternatives to Karzai, who was being criticized for corruption. But with years of experience in managing his country’s many regional warlords, Karzai was able to quickly align with all major ethnic groups and ensure his victory in the election, despite the entire process being marred by charges of fraud.Tensions with Washington throughout the election helped Karzai create his own political space within the country, space that he sought to expand even as U.S. Ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry behind the scenes expressed doubts about Karzai’s viability as an effective American partner. In recent weeks, Karzai took his efforts to a different level by accusing the United States of engaging in fraud during the Afghan election, triggering a strong response from Washington. His move paid off. After a couple of weeks of high tensions, senior U.S. officials, including President Barack Obama, moved to ease the strain, calling the Afghan president an ally and partner. With almost all of a second five-year term still ahead of him, Karzai is as much a political reality in the country as the Taliban. 

Objectives and Problems

 The main objective of the current Karzai regime is to maintain as much of the existing political structure as possible and to maximize its position within that structure. This is a system that has been crafted and staffed in large part by Karzai and his inner circle, and thus it bolsters their position disproportionately. But because the Taliban are also a political reality, Kabul must work to achieve meaningful political accommodations that will serve to stabilize the security situation in the countryside.To maximize its leverage, Kabul must do this rapidly. The surge of U.S. forces into the country and the money, aid and advice that the Karzai regime receives will never be more abundant than it is right now, so with his power at its height, Karzai must reach these political accommodations as soon as possible.Meanwhile, Kabul has two main problems. The first is that it has limited means to compel the Taliban to negotiate on the requisite timetable while the Taliban have every incentive to hold out on any meaningful talks. The Karzai government is working with interlocutors (mostly former Taliban officials who still retain influence) to negotiate with the jihadist movement, but the question is the pace at which real progress can be made. At the heart of these negotiations is the question of who speaks for the Pashtuns, Afghanistan’s single largest demographic segment, accounting for more than 40 percent of the country’s population.Nor will political accommodation come cheaply. The Taliban will not be won over with a few Cabinet positions. The current discussions include the need for constitutional change that will allow more room for Islamic law and perhaps an extra-executive religious entity that controls the judiciary. Just how much of a stake the Taliban would have in the government and what shape that stake would take remains to be seen. In any case, it will likely require substantial concessions in Kabul.  

 

 The second problem is that Kabul’s efforts to negotiate with the Taliban are being pulled and manipulated from all sides. This is the real challenge for the current regime — balancing all the outside players who are trying to shape the negotiations. Kabul needs to prevent the already fractious and war-torn country from becoming a proxy battleground for the United States and Iran or Pakistan and India (among other countries). The difficulty of maintaining this balancing act — while also maintaining local support — is increasing by the day.Kabul’s closest allies are the United States and the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF). Although Washington and Kabul do not always see eye to eye, and Karzai is trying to distance himself from the United States in order to downplay the puppet image, the United States and other coalition countries provide the foundational support for his government as well as security in the countryside. And while the United States likely views Karzai as a convenient scapegoat as well as an interchangeable political part, it is trying to demonstrate some confidence in the Afghan president. At a major tribal meeting in Kandahar on April 4, U.S. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, head of the ISAF, was notably silent, allowing Karzai to speak and lead the discussion.Aside from the United States, Pakistan is the next biggest player in Afghanistan, and because of its own links to the Taliban, it has far more practical leverage than the United States does in shaping the negotiations (of which it has every intention of being at the center). Pakistan’s arrest of senior Taliban figure Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar is now believed to have been carried out to disrupt direct negotiations between the Taliban and Kabul in which Baradar is thought to have been engaged. A strong Pakistani hand in Afghanistan is a longstanding reality for Kabul, but Islamabad is maneuvering to consolidate its influence as a planned American drawdown in 2011 approaches.But Pakistan’s resurging role in Afghanistan places Karzai in a difficult place between his eastern neighbor and its regional rival India. New Delhi has invested a great deal in development and reconstruction work in Afghanistan since 2002, and Kabul will need to balance this aid with the need for Pakistani assistance with the Taliban. And complicating all this, of course, is India’s alignment with Russia on the Afghanistan issue.Perhaps more critical than the Indo-Pakistani struggle over Afghanistan is the U.S.-Iranian contest. Although Iraq is the main arena for Washington’s struggle with Tehran, the focus of the contest is shifting to Afghanistan, along with the U.S. military effort. Iran also has considerable influence to its east, with deep historical, ethno-linguistic and cultural ties that it has adroitly established and cultivated not only among its natural allies — ethno-political minorities opposed to the Taliban — but also among some elements of the Taliban themselves. Though this influence is not decisive (the Taliban have their own interests, and many groups opposed to the Taliban are close to Karzai and the West), Tehran has the ability to influence events on the ground in Afghanistan, and an eventual settlement of the war cannot happen without Iranian involvement. From Karzai’s point of view, he has to balance his alignment with the United States with the fact that Iran is always going to be Afghanistan’s western neighbor, long after U.S. and NATO forces have left his country.This is really the ultimate problem. On its best day, Afghanistan is poor, lacks basic infrastructure and is economically hobbled. With weak domestic security forces and little to offer the outside world, Kabul can only hope to continue to entice more international aid while playing all the various countries with vested interests in Afghanistan against each other. Incorporating the Taliban into the political framework will be especially important over the next few years, but when and if that happens, the balancing act will continue to be played by any central government in Kabul.

Posted via web from Jay’s Blogs

Posted in Terror, Taliban, War on Terror, Geopolitics, Afganistan, Jihad, Pakistan, Obama, United State of America | Print | No Comments »

The Afghanistan Campaign, Part 3: The Pakistani Strategy

25. April 2010 by admin.

The Afghanistan Campaign, Part 3: The Pakistani Strategy

 Pakistan is central to the U.S. war in Afghanistan — and Islamabad views Kabul’s fate as central to its own. No other country is as pivotal to Afghanistan’s long-term fate as Pakistan is, and in this part of our series we examine the country’s long historical relationship with the Taliban and its strategy and objectives going forward.The Pakistani strategy of securing influence in Afghanistan is dictated by the unalterable reality of geography. With a long common border, a strong Pashtun population on both sides and active militant groups interconnected with each other across the border, Pakistan is forced to take an active role in Afghanistan. It’s the same sort of geopolitical imperative that bound the colonial British to the region, and before them the Muslim emperors, and before the Muslim emperors the Hindu rulers.Pakistan’s core is comprised of the provinces of Punjab and Sindh, which encompass the country’s demographic, industrial, commercial and agricultural base. From Punjab in the north, this heartland extends southward through Sindh province, flowing seamlessly along the Indus River valley into the Thar Desert. This means Pakistan’s core is hard by the Indian border, leaving no meaningful terrain barriers to invasion. (Indeed, the Punjabi population straddles the Indian-Pakistani border much as the Pashtun population straddles the Pakistani-Afghan border). This narrow strip of flat land is inherently vulnerable to India, Pakistan’s arch-rival to the east, a geographic arrangement that was no accident of the British partition. Hence, suffering from both geographic and demographic disadvantages vis-a-vis India — and with no strategic depth to speak of — Pakistan is extremely anxious about its security in the east and is forced to look in the opposite direction both out of concern for its depth and in search of opportunity.

West of the Punjabi-Sindhi core lay the peripheral territories of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and Balochistan province. Though the Pakistani buffer territories of the NWFP and FATA are far more interlinked with Afghanistan than with Pakistan by virtue of the common Pashtun populations, they do provide Pakistan with some of the depth it lacks to the east and also protect against encroachment from the northwest. Having firm control of its own heartland and secure access to the sea through the port of Karachi, Islamabad must also control these buffer territories as a means of further consolidating security in the Punjabi-Sindhi core.In this effort, Afghanistan is both part of the problem and part of the solution. It is part of the problem because the Islamist insurgency that Islamabad once supported in Afghanistan has now spilled backwards onto Pakistani soil; it is part of the solution because Afghanistan remains a critical geopolitical arena for Islamabad. By securing itself as the single most dominant player in Afghanistan, Pakistan strengthens its hand in its own peripheral territories and ensures that no other foreign power — India is the immediate concern here — ever gains a foothold in Kabul. If India did, it would have Pakistan more or less surrounded. Indeed, the need to assert influence in Afghanistan is hardwired into Pakistan’s geopolitical makeup.

History

Afghanistan already was an issue for Pakistan when the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in the final days of 1979. A secular Marxist government was in Kabul supported by arch-rival India and bent on eradicating the influence of religion (a powerful and important aspect of Pakistani influence in Afghanistan). When the Soviets invaded, Pakistan used Saudi money and U.S. arms to back a seven-party Islamist alliance. In the civil war that followed the Soviet withdrawal, Pakistan threw its support behind the much more hard-line Islamist Taliban and gave it the training and tools it needed to rise up and eventually take control of most of the country. Though Afghanistan was still chaotic, it was the kind of Islamist chaos that the Pakistanis could manage — that is, until Sept. 11, 2001, and the American invasion to topple the Taliban regime for providing sanctuary to al Qaeda.Thus ensued an almost impossible tightrope walk by the government of then-President Gen. Pervez Musharraf. Pakistan was forced to abruptly end support for the Taliban regime it had helped put into power and around which its strategy for retaining influence in Afghanistan revolved. Islamabad tried to play both sides, retaining contact with the Taliban but also providing the United States with intelligence that helped U.S. forces hunt the Taliban. This engendered distrust on both sides in the process. The Taliban realized that they could not depend on or trust Pakistan as they once did, and from 2003 to 2006, American pressure on Islamabad to crack down on al Qaeda in Pakistan’s tribal areas directly contributed to the rise of the Pakistani Taliban. So as the Islamist insurgency in Afghanistan spilled backwards into Pakistan, the cross-border Taliban phenomenon began to include groups focused on the destruction of the Pakistani state. To this day, however, despite the inextricably linked nature of these Pashtun Islamists, there is still an inclination within many quarters in Islamabad to distinguish between the “good” Taliban, who have their sights set on Afghanistan and ultimately Kabul (and with whom Pakistan retains significant, if reduced, influence), and the “bad” Taliban, who have become fixated on the regime in Islamabad and have perpetrated attacks against Pakistani targets. There also are other, non-Pashtun renegade Islamist elements that have carried out major attacks beyond Pakistani borders that have risked provoking Indian aggression, such as the militant attack in Mumbai in 2008.Nevertheless, Pakistan has realized that the militant problem in Afghanistan has endangered the weak control it does have over the buffer territories of the FATA and NWFP and is applying military force to the problem on its side of the border. It also appears to be working closer with the United States in terms of sharing intelligence. Across the border in Afghanistan, Pakistan does not want to see the Taliban stage too strong a comeback because of the offshoots of the movement that are becoming problematic on Pakistan’s own turf.Strategy But the Afghan Taliban can neither be ignored nor destroyed. They still have utility for Islamabad and must be dealt with. This will require skillful handling on the part of the Pakistanis, who have lost a lot of leverage over the group. Islamabad’s strategy is to try and balance a domestic policy that seeks to militarily neutralize Taliban rebels on the Pakistani side of the border while working with the Taliban on the Afghan side to achieve its foreign policy aims. Pakistan’s intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence directorate, can provide devastating intelligence on the Taliban movement to the Americans, giving Islamabad leverage over Washington. And its long-standing connections to the group put Islamabad in a unique position to facilitate and oversee any negotiated settlement.So Pakistan is seeking to maximize its influence within the Afghan Taliban movement, gain control and ownership over any negotiation efforts and establish international recognition as the single most important player in Afghanistan. The West’s interest in withdrawing from Afghanistan puts Pakistan in a good position to succeed here. The Americans know Pakistan must be part of the solution and are anxious for Islamabad to provide that solution.But to succeed, Pakistan must again walk the middle ground between the United States and the Taliban. And once it is at the center of the negotiations, it must not only push both parties toward each other, it must also pull them in a third direction in order to satisfy its own aims — namely, to establish long-term conditions for Pakistani domination over Afghanistan.And to succeed in this effort, Pakistan will need more than just the Taliban. It must establish influence with the other key players in Afghanistan — particularly the government of President Hamid Karzai, who recently acknowledged that Islamabad will have a great deal of influence in the country but that he wishes to place limits on it as much as possible. And this is where things get tricky. The United States may ultimately have no choice but to work with Pakistan in attempting to secure a negotiated settlement with reconcilable elements of the Taliban. But Karzai is also seeking a deal with the Taliban, and if he can achieve one outside of Pakistan’s influence, he can try and minimize Pakistani influence in the negotiations (though Pakistan can no more be cut out of the negotiations than could the Taliban).

At the same time, Islamabad must find common ground with other regional players — Iran, Saudi Arabia and Turkey — in order to roll back Indian influence in Afghanistan (there even appears to be an emerging axis of sorts consisting of the Americans, the Saudis and the Turks). But Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin visited New Delhi March 11 in order to coordinate and craft a common strategy for Afghanistan — a strategy being formulated between two countries that share a common interest in Afghanistan that runs counter to Pakistan’s and is coming closer to aligning with Iran’s.

In sum, Pakistan retains more levers in Afghanistan than any other single country, and with Saudi money and American might it is maneuvering to be the pivotal player in a powerful coalition with abundant resources. But Pakistan will continue to face challenges as it tries to distinguish between and divide the Taliban phenomena in Afghanistan and within its own borders.

Posted via web from Jay’s Blogs

Posted in Terror, Taliban, War on Terror, Geopolitics, Afganistan, Islam, Jihad, Pakistan, United State of America | Print | No Comments »

The Afghanistan Campaign Part 2: The Taliban Strategy

25. April 2010 by admin.

  

The Afghanistan Campaign Part 2: The Taliban Strategy

 

 

The Afghan Taliban is a group of insurgents who ultimately seek to secure power over Afghanistan, but first they must merely survive as a cohesive entity during the current International Security Assistance Force offensive. Nevertheless, the Taliban is a diffuse entity being pulled in many directions by multiple actors, and the precise definition of “securing power” and the appropriate strategy to regain that power are still being debated.

 

It was thus clear to the Taliban long before U.S. President Barack Obama’s long-anticipated announcement that some 30,000 additional troops would be sent to Afghanistan in 2010 that there would be more of a fight before the United States and its allies would be willing to abandon the country — a surge that is an attempt, in part, to reshape Taliban perceptions of the timeline of the conflict by redoubling the American commitment before the drawdown might begin.

And though it took the Taliban a while to regroup, a considerable vacuum began to grow in which the Taliban began to re-emerge, particularly amid poor, corrupt and ineffectual central governance. As early as 2006, it was clear that the Afghan jihadist movement had assumed the form of a growing and powerful insurgency that was progressively gaining steam; the situation was beginning to approach the point at which it could no longer be ignored. As the surge in Iraq began to show signs of success, the United States began to shift its attention back to Afghanistan.

While the U.S.-led coalition never stopped pursuing the Taliban, Washington’s attention quickly shifted to Iraq. In Afghanistan, the mission quickly evolved from toppling a government in Kabul to combating a nascent insurgency in the south and east. U.S. officials, led by the American ambassador to Kabul, Zalmay Khalilzad, first began the process of talking to the Taliban on the eve of the invasion of Iraq. All this took place while Washington continued to press Islamabad to do more against the Taliban.The Taliban were never defeated in 2001, when the United States moved to topple their government in the wake of the 9/11 attacks. They largely declined combat in the face of overwhelmingly superior military force. Though they were not, at that moment, an insurgent force, their moves were classic guerrilla behavior, and their quick transition from the seat of power back to such tactics is a reminder of how well — and how painfully — schooled Afghans have been in the insurgent arts over the last several decades.

Overall, the Taliban ideally aspire to return to the height of their power in the late 1990s but realize that this is not realistic. That ascent to power, which followed the toppling of the Marxist regime left in place after the Soviet withdrawal and the 1992-1996 intra-Islamist civil war, was somewhat anomalous in that the circumstances were fairly unique to post-Soviet invasion Afghanistan. Today, the Taliban’s opponents are much stronger and far better equipped to challenge the Taliban than in the mid-1990s; this opposing force is as much a reality as the Taliban and has a vested interest in preserving the current regime. The old mujahideen of the 1980s, whom the younger Taliban displaced in the 1990s, have grown steadily wealthier since the collapse of the Taliban regime and are now well-settled and prosperous in Kabul and their respective regions, benefiting greatly from the Western presence and Western money. This is true of many urban areas of Afghanistan that have been altered significantly in the eight years since the U.S. invasion and have little desire to return the Taliban’s severe austerity. In many ways, this fight for dominance is between not only the Taliban and the United States and its allies; it is also between the Taliban and the old Islamist elite, the former mujahideen leaders who did their time on the battlefield in the 1980s.

 

So, in addition to fighting the current military battle, there is a great deal of factional fighting and political maneuvering with other Afghan centers of power. At a bare minimum, the Taliban intend to ensure that they remain the single strongest power in the country, with not only the largest share of the pie in Kabul (the ability to dominate) but also a significant degree of power and autonomy within their core areas in the south and east of the country. But within the movement (which is a very diffuse and complex set of entities), there is a great deal of debate about what objectives are reasonably achievable. Like the Shia in Iraq, who originally aspired to total dominance in the early days following the fall of the Baathist regime and have since moderated their goals, the Taliban have recognized that some degree of power sharing is necessary. The ultimate objective of the Taliban — resumption of power at the national level — is somewhat dependent on how events play out in the coming years. The objective of attaining the apex of power is not in dispute, but the best avenue — be it reconciliation or fighting it out until the United States begins to draw down — and how exactly that apex might be defined is still being debated.

But there is an important caveat to the Taliban’s ambitions. Having held power in Kabul, they are wary of returning there in a way that would ultimately render them an international pariah state, as they were in the 1990s. When the Taliban first came to power, only Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates recognized the regime, and the group’s leadership became intimately familiar with the challenges of attempting to govern a country without wider international recognition. It was under this isolation that the Taliban allied with al Qaeda, which provided them with men, money and equipment. Now it is using al Qaeda again, this time not just as a force multiplier but, even more important, as a potential bargaining chip at the negotiating table. Mullah Omar, the Taliban’s central leader, wants to get off the international terrorist watch list, and there have been signals from various elements of the Taliban that the group is willing to abandon al Qaeda for the right price. This countervailing consideration also contributes to the Taliban’s objective — and particularly the means to achieving that objective — remaining in flux.

To understand the Taliban and their current strategy, it helps to begin with the basics. The Taliban are insurgents, and their first order of business is simply survival. A domestic guerrilla group almost always has more staying power than an occupier, which is projecting force over a greater distance and has the added burden of a domestic population less directly committed to a war in a foreign — and often far-off — land. If the Taliban can only survive as a cohesive and coherent entity until the United States and its allies leave Afghanistan, they will have a far less militarily capable opponent (Kabul) with whom to compete for dominance.

Currently facing an opponent (the United States) that has already stipulated a timetable for withdrawal, the Taliban are in an enviable position. The United States has given itself an extremely aggressive and ambitious set of goals to be achieved in a very short period of time. If the Taliban can both survive and disrupt American efforts to lay the foundations for a U.S./NATO withdrawal, their prospects for ultimately achieving their aims increase dramatically.

And here the strategy to achieve their imperfectly defined objective begins to take shape. The Taliban have no intention of completely evaporating into the countryside, and they have every intention of continuing to harass International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) troops, inflicting casualties and raising the cost of continued occupation. In so doing, the Taliban not only retain their relevance but may also be able to hasten the withdrawal of foreign forces.

Judging from the initial phase of Operation Moshtarak in Marjah and what can likely be expected in similar offensives in other areas, the Taliban strategy toward the surge is: 1) largely decline combat but leave behind a force significant enough to render the securing phase as difficult as is possible for U.S.-led coalition forces by using hit-and-run tactics and planting improvised explosive devices; 2) once the coalition force becomes overwhelming, fall back and allow the coalition to set up shop and wage guerrilla and suicide attacks (though Mullah Omar has issued guidance that these attacks should be initiated only after approval at the highest levels in order to minimize civilian casualties). In all likelihood, this phase of the Taliban campaign would include attempts at intimidation and subversion against Afghan security forces.

Being a diffuse guerrilla movement, the Taliban will likely attempt to replicate this strategy as broadly as possible, forcing ISAF forces to expend more energy than they would prefer on holding ground while impeding the building and reconstruction phase, which will become increasingly difficult as coalition forces target more and more areas. The idea is that the locals who are already wary about relying on Kabul and its Western allies will then become even more disenchanted with the ability of the coalition to weaken the Taliban. However, the ISAF attempting to take control of key bases of support on which the Taliban have long relied, and the impact of these efforts on the Taliban will warrant considerable scrutiny.

For now, the Taliban appear to have lost interest in larger-scale attacks involving several hundred fighters being committed to a single objective. Though such attacks certainly garnered headlines, they were extremely costly in terms of manpower and materiel with little practical gain. And with old strongholds like Helmand province feeling the squeeze, there are certainly some indications that ISAF offensives are taking an appreciable bite out of the operational capabilities of at least the local Taliban commanders.

Conserving forces and minimizing risk to their core operational capability are parallel and interrelated considerations for the Taliban in terms of survival. If the recent assault on Marjah is any indication, the Taliban are adhering to these principles. While some fighters did dig in and fight and while resistance has stiffened — especially within the last week — the Taliban declined to make it a bloody compound-to-compound fight despite the favorable defensive terrain.

Similarly, the U.S. surge intends to make it hard for the Taliban to sustain — much less replace — manpower and materiel. Taliban tactics must be tailored to maximize damage to the enemy while minimizing costs, which drives the Taliban directly to hit-and-run tactics and the widespread use of improvised explosive devices.

There is little doubt that the Taliban will continue to inflict casualties in the coming year. But there is also considerable resolve behind the surge, which will not even be up to full strength until the summer and will be maintained until at least July 2011. Indeed, it is not clear if the Taliban can inflict enough casualties to alter the American timetable in its favor any further.

There is also the underlying issue of sustaining the resistance. Manpower and logistics are inescapable parts of warfare. Though the United States and its allies bear the heavier burden, the Taliban cannot ignore that it is losing key population centers and opium-growing areas central to recruitment, financing and sanctuary. The parallel crackdowns by the ISAF on the Afghan side of the border and the Pakistani crackdowns on the opposite side, where the Taliban has long enjoyed sanctuary, represent a significant challenge to the Taliban if the efforts can be sustained. Signs of a potential increase in cooperation and coordination between Washington and Islamabad could also be significant.

In other words, despite all its flaws, there is a coherency to what the United States is attempting to achieve. Success is anything but certain, but the United States does seek to make very real inroads against the core strength of the Taliban. One of those methods is to reduce the Taliban’s operational capability to the point where it will no longer have the capability to overwhelm Afghan security forces after the United States begins to draw down. There is no shortage of issues surrounding the U.S. objectives to train up the Afghan National Army and National Police, and it is not at all clear that even if those objectives are met that indigenous forces will be able to manage the Taliban.

But the Taliban must also deal with the logistical strain being imposed on it and strive to maintain its numbers and indigenous support. Central to this effort is the Taliban’s information operations (IO), conveying their message to the Afghan people. Thus far, the ISAF has been far behind the Taliban in such IO efforts, but as the coalition ratchets up the pressure, it remains to be seen whether the more abstract IO will be sufficient for sustaining hard logistical support, especially with pressure being applied on both sides of the border.

Similarly, there is the issue of internal coherency. Any insurgent movement must deal with not only the occupier but also other competing guerrillas and insurgents, whether their central focus is military power or ideological. The Taliban’s main competition is entrenched in the regime of President Hamid Karzai and among those in opposition to Karzai but part of the state; at issue are the Taliban’s sometimes loose affiliations with other Taliban elements and al Qaeda. The United States, the Karzai regime, Pakistan and al Qaeda are all seeking and applying leverage anywhere they can to hive off reconcilable elements of the Taliban.

The United States seeks to divide the pragmatic elements of the Taliban from the more ideological ones. The Karzai regime may be willing to deal with them in a more coherent fashion, but at the heart of all its considerations is the partially incompatible retention of its own power. Al Qaeda, with its own survival on the line, is seeking to draw the Taliban toward its transnational agenda. Meanwhile, Pakistan wants to bring the Taliban to heel, primarily so it can own the negotiating process and consolidate its position as the dominant power in Afghanistan, much as Iran seeks to do in Iraq. Each player has different motivations, objectives and timetables.

Amidst all these tensions, the Taliban must expend intelligence efforts and resources to maintain cohesion, despite being an inherently local and decentralized phenomenon. As Mullah Omar’s code of conduct released in July 2009 demonstrates, “command” of the Taliban as an insurgent group is not as firm as it is in more rigid organizational hierarchies. The reconciliation efforts will certainly test the Taliban’s coherency.

If history is any judge, in the long run the Taliban will retain the upper hand. In Afghanistan, the United States is attempting to do something that has never been tried before — much less achieved — i.e., constitute a viable central government from scratch in the midst of a guerrilla war. But the Taliban must be concerned about the possibility that some aspects of the U.S. strategy may succeed. Central to the American effort will be Pakistan — and Islamabad is showing significant signs of wanting to work closer with Washington.

Posted via web from Jay’s Blogs

Posted in Geopolitics, Taliban, War on Terror, Afganistan, Obama, Islam, Jihad, Pakistan, United State of America | Print | No Comments »