The Pakistan Update

By Mahir Ali

A few days before Barack Obama`s much-anticipated announcement about reversing the troop surge in Afghanistan, Hamid Karzai issued one of his sporadic declarations of relative independence from the forces that have sustained him in office for nine years.

“They are here for their own purposes, for their own goals, and they are using our soil for that,” he said in reference to the American and Nato military presence. Karzai also spoke of “chemical materials” in the western weaponry — presumably a reference to the use of uranium or other radioactive materials — which he said meant that “our people get killed, but also our environment is damaged.”

The first American response was a rebuke from retired general Karl Eikenberry, the outgoing US ambassador in Kabul (who, incidentally, advised Obama against a surge two years ago). “America has never sought to occupy any nation in the world,” he declared. “We are a good people.”

Quite a few nations that have borne the brunt of American imperialism would beg to differ. Yet his statement that “when we hear ourselves being called occupiers and worse … our pride is offended and we begin to lose our inspiration to carry on” is open to interpretation as a partial explanation for the withdrawals whereby American troop strength in Afghanistan will be reduced by 33,000 before the end of next year.

But that will still leave twice as many boots on the ground as there were at the start of Obama`s tenure. The US president`s explanation for his drawdown — in the face of opposition from the military hierarchy and administration hawks — did not pursue the Eikenberry line of thought. Nor did he make the mistake of declaring `mission accomplished`, despite the suggestion that the withdrawal was justified because its goals had been achieved.

There is plenty of evidence, however, that domestic political considerations are the primary driving force behind the slashing of resources expended on military adventures overseas. Nearly 10 years after the September 11 terrorist attacks, opinion polls suggest that a majority of Americans oppose the military presence in Afghanistan. And the urge to conclude American participation in this open-ended conflict is by no means restricted to Democrats: a substantial proportion of prospective Republican candidates for next year`s presidential contest appear to be keen on a more rapid withdrawal of forces.

None of them are willing to admit, of course, that the American response to 9/11 was essentially misdirected. At the time, a commando operation against Al Qaeda would have made considerably more sense than an all-out invasion of Afghanistan. The Taliban regime — officially recognised only by its sponsors in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the UAE — was indeed appalling in any number of ways, but it did not pose a threat to the US.

The sanctuary it afforded to Osama bin Laden and his cohorts was incidental. The 9/11 attacks were not contingent on a base in Afghanistan. The conspirators held consultations in Hamburg and trained in the US. The location of their mentors was only marginally relevant. It did not suffice as justification for all-out war. Yet hardly anyone in the US opposed that war when it was launched. The thirst for retribution is not hard to fathom; the nation described in the second half of the 20th century by one of its outstanding personalities, Martin Luther King Jr, as “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world” wasn`t accustomed to being attacked on its own soil. But the effort to quench that thirst was misdirected from the outset. It exhibited a bloodlust that more than matched that of its foes — who had, let`s not forget, been its allies until a few years before.

It is now being argued that the incipient pullout from Afghanistan is somehow related to the successful targeting of bin Laden and the degradation of Al Qaeda. Bin Laden was tracked down to a not-very-safe house in Pakistan, far away from the drone zone where American forces have long operated with impunity from unassailable heights. Al Qaeda`s remaining adherents in the region — believed to number in the dozens — as well as the Taliban leadership are believed to mostly be in Pakistan.

That makes it hard to explain why combat operations are being conducted in Afghanistan — amid, mind you, contacts that could lead to negotiations with the Taliban.

American security relations with Pakistan, meanwhile, have hit a new low in the wake of the bin Laden raid. It does not require particularly deep insight to fathom why the CIA decided against sharing its plans for that raid with Pakistani authorities. Although no substantial evidence has emerged of high-level Pakistani involvement in providing a sanctuary to bin Laden, the manner in which Harkat-ul-Mujahideen — a banned militant group with suspected links to military intelligence — and Inter Services Public Relations (ISPR) reacted almost simultaneously with vehement denials of American insinuations of contacts between Harkat and Al Qaeda is certainly intriguing.

ISPR has also been keen to reject American press reports about a brewing revolt within the Pakistani armed forces against the military hierarchy on account of its relations with the US. Doth it protest too much?

Perhaps. It has long been obvious, though, that the struggle against violent religious extremists in Pakistan is something of a lost cause unless it can be portrayed as a Pakistani war. The drone attacks regularly launched from the Shamsi air base in Balochistan have not been particularly helpful in this regard, especially when they entail civilian casualties. The idea that the Americans will maintain forces numbering 25,000 or so even after a `complete` withdrawal from Afghanistan a few years hence, in order to retain the capacity for military interventions in Pakistan, is not particularly reassuring.

The notion that Pakistan is host to terrorists with an international reach is hardly a fantasy. But the notion that US military adventures and expeditions abroad — be they in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen or Pakistan — are somehow going to diminish the likelihood of attacks on American soil remains a dangerous illusion.

This article originally appeared in Dawn.

Tags: 9/11 attacks, Afghanistan, Barack Obama, Hamid Karzai, Iraq, karl eikenberry, martin luther king, NATO, Pakistan, somalia, Taliban, us military, yemen

Posted in Afghanistan, Blog | 2,460 Comments »

With “optimism” and “an open mind,” the Indian and Pakistani foreign secretaries on Thursday began two-day talks here to bridge the trust deficit, which touched a new low after the 26/11 attack, by focusing on peace and security and confidence-building measures (CBMs) on Kashmir.

The talks between Indian Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao and her Pakistani counterpart Salman Bashir have been divided into three segments.

The two top diplomats held discussions on peace and security and CBMs across the Line of Control in Kashmir. The second and third round of talks on Jammu and Kashmir and promotion of friendly exchanges will take place here on Friday.

Both Rao and Bashir struck notes of cautious optimism as they first held restricted talks before they were joined by their delegations.

Welcoming the Indian side, Bashir stressed that they were approaching the talks with a “great sense of confidence, optimism and determination.” “We wish to engage with you in not only walking the trajectory but also exploring new avenues further,” he said.

Rao agreed, saying this was an “apt” statement.

Bashir added that this was an important point in the relationship and will also help the two sides prepare the agenda for the meeting of the two foreign ministers in the near future.

Rao, on her part, said that “we have a clear agenda in front of us for discussions” and noted that there have been good meetings in the past few months. “We are approaching these talks with an open and constructive mind,” she said.

The talks took place on a day US President Barack Obama announced an initial withdrawal of 10,000 US troops from Afghanistan, the violence-torn country that has emerged as an arena of rivalry between India and Pakistan.

During her three-day stay to Islamabad, Rao will call on Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani. She returns to India Saturday afternoon.

The two-day talks are expected to set the stage for the meeting of the foreign ministers in New Delhi.

Rao is expected to convey India’s disappointment with the slow progress in the trial in Pakistan of those suspected to be behind the Nov 26-29, 2008 Mumbai attacks that claimed the lives of 166 people, including some foreigners. Latest intelligence inputs suggest that the infrastructure of anti-India terrorist groups still operates on Pakistani soil.

The two sides are also expected to discuss nuclear CBMs, an issue that has gained greater salience in view of reports about the danger of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons falling into the hand of terrorists.

This is the first high-level engagement between the two estranged neighbours since Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh hosted his counterpart Yousuf Raza Gilani at the World Cup semi-final in Mohali March 30.

In February, the two countries decided to resume talks on all bilateral issues, reviving the dialogue process that was frozen in the wake of the Mumbai terror attack. Since then, the defence, interior and commerce secretaries have met in the last few months.

Rao touched down here in the morning and stressed that the talks aimed at an eventual normalisation of relations.

“I have come to Pakistan with an open mind and a constructive spirit in order to work towards building trust and confidence in our relationship, thereby leading to an eventual normalisation of relations for the well-being and prosperity of our peoples,” Rao said in her arrival statement.

She said her’s was an important visit as it marks the penultimate leg of the resumed dialogue process before the Pakistani foreign minister reaches India next month.

Rao said the discussions would include “peace and security, including confidence-building measures, Jammu and Kashmir and promotion of friendly exchanges”.

“I bring with me the best wishes of the people and the government of India for the people and government of Pakistan. We wish to see a stable, peaceful and prosperous Pakistan,” she said.

While India has called for patience while dealing with Pakistan, Gilani has said that “core issues”, including Kashmir, needed to be discussed.

At the same time, Gilani has underscored the need for increased trade as well as people-to-people contacts.

On Wednesday, he said that the future of Pakistan was closely linked with the resolution of the Kashmir dispute.

In New Delhi, the main opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), upped the ante on the Kashmir issue and warned the government against making any compromise on it. BJP leader LK Advani threatened to launch a mass demonstration if the government went in for a settlement of the Kashmir issue with Pakistan.

Tags: Afghanistan, Kashmir Issue, Mumbai Attacks, Nirupama Rao, Pak-India Relations, President Obama, Salman Bashir

Posted in India | 2,239 Comments »

By Amir Mir

Despite claiming to be a non-violent group whose sole objective is to recommence the Islamic way of life by re-establishing caliphate, those questioning Brigadier Ali Khan of Pakistan Army for his links to Hizbul Tehrir, believe the latter had a violent agenda to overthrow the government in Islamabad and remove the military leadership, for their pro-US stance, through a coup it wanted to stage with the help of its moles in the armed forces.

Investigations being conducted by the authorities following the arrest of Brigadier Ali Khan and several other officers of the Pakistan Army for their links with Hizbul Tehrir have revealed that the leadership of the banned group had actually marked Pakistan as a base from which it wanted to spread Islamic rule across the world. Hizbul Tehrir has managed to maintain its presence in Pakistan despite being outlawed by the Musharraf regime following the July 7, 2007 London subway suicide bombings, conducted by four British nationals of Pakistani origin who were reportedly indoctrinated in London by extremists belonging to militant groups like Al-Mohajiroun and Hizbul Tehrir. Asif Mohammed Hanif, the terrorist who blew himself up in a cafe in Tel Aviv on April 29, 2003, and his accomplice and would-be bomber, Omar Khan Sharif, were British-born Muslims affiliated with HT. The group recruits members from the urban, educated and professional segments of the society and is also known to have spread its influence in the military ranks in recent years.

The Pakistani intelligence sleuths who are responsible for monitoring the HT activities believe that the group might be working in tandem with al-Qaeda under the garb of pan-Islamism. They reminded that 35 members of Hizbul Tehrir were arrested from a house in Islamabad, which was being used to plan a coup plot to overthrow the government and replace it by Caliphate, as envisaged by the group’s founder Umar Bakri. Hardly a few weeks before these arrests were made, the Pakistan chapter of the HT talked about spilling blood to stage an Islamic revolution in Pakistan. At the same time, Tayyab Muqeem, a key Hizbul leader in London, had declared that many HT activists had been sent to Pakistan to bring about Shariah “by force”. He had further claimed that the Hizbul had converted four Pakistani army officers during their training at Sandhurst in England.

However, despite being declared a banned organization in Pakistan after all these developments, the HT members can be seen at various key mosques on Fridays in Karachi, Lahore and Rawalpindi, distributing volatile literature propagating the revival of the Caliphate. Apart from organizing underground meetings and seminars, the HT has used text messages on cell phones and social networking sites to spread its message. An open letter dated June 3, 2011, addressed to the “sincere officers” of the Pakistani armed forces, and posted on the website of the Pakistan chapter of the Hizbul Tehrir (www.hizb-pakistan.com), called for removal of the “traitors” amongst the civilian and military leadership of the country for their alliance with the United States. The letter stated: “The need of the time is the Khilafah (the Caliphate) to gather the Ummah (the Muslim community) as the single most resourceful state in the world. Whilst you look upon the humiliation of the Muslims, their misery and despair, the Ummah looks upon you as sincere officers of the most powerful armed forces across the globe that can make Pakistan the starting point for Khilafah.”

The contention of the Pakistan chapter of the Hizbul Tehrir is that the current rulers of Pakistan, civilian as well as khaki, are agents of the United States, and their only agenda is to protect the American interests. The group further propagates that the American and the Pakistani governments are responsible for the killing of innocent men, women and children in drone attacks and military operations which are being conducted in the name of the war on terror.

According to media reports, the Pakistan branch of HT was established in December 2000 when a group of British youth of Pakistani descent, headed by Imtiaz Malik and guided by British-Pakistanis Dr Abdul Wajid in Lahore and Dr Abdul Basit Shaikh in Karachi among others decided to use Pakistan as the base camp for their movement to re-establish Islamic Caliphate. While Imtiaz Malik, a British-born Pakistani is considered to be the underground leader of the Hizbul Tehrir in Pakistan, his deputy, Naveed Butt, a graduate of University of Illinois in the United States, remains the most vocal leader of the group in Pakistan. Butt is assisted by two youngsters, Imran Yousafzai and Shahzad Sheikh.

According to an October 2010 study report compiled by Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies (PIPS) and titled “Hizbul Tehrir in Pakistan: Discourse and Impact”, far from being deterred, the Hizbul Tehrir has continued its efforts to infiltrate into high echelons of the Pakistan Army and the elite of the Pakistani society. The report quoted Shahzad Sheikh, a Hizbul spokesman of Karachi, as saying that the group had been persuading the Pakistan Army to stage a bloodless coup in the country to overthrow the government in Islamabad. Interestingly, in a bid to effectively promote its agenda, the HT clandestinely enlisted some Pakistan Army officers, who were receiving training at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst (RMAS), commonly known as Sandhurst, an elite British training academy. But these officers were arrested in 2003 after their links with the HT were discovered by the Musharraf regime.

This article originally appeared in The News

Tags: Al Qaeda, Al-Mohajiroun, Brigadier Ali Khan, General Musharraf, Hizbul Tehrir, london subway bombing, pakistani intelligence

Posted in Blog | 3,376 Comments »

By Marjorie Connelly

Most Pakistanis disapprove of the American raid that killed Osama bin Laden and think it will have harmful effects on relations between Pakistan and the United States, according to a recent survey conducted by the Pew Research Center. But overwhelmingly negative attitudes toward the United States did not change from the month before the raid to two weeks after, remaining at the worst levels measured in eight years.

Pew surveyed Pakistan as part of its Global Attitudes Project in April, and conducted a second poll following the May 2 raid on Bin Laden’s compound in the city of Abbottabad, 70 miles northeast of the capital, Islamabad. Both polls were predominately urban and, for security reasons, excluded about 15 percent of the population living in areas of instability.

Pakistanis’ views of Bin Laden had become increasingly negative in recent years. In a 2005 Pew poll, 51 percent said they had confidence that Bin Laden would do the right thing in world affairs; in April only 21 percent had such trust.

But almost two-thirds of those surveyed disapproved of the American raid and more than half considered his death to be a negative development. Ten percent of those surveyed in May approved of the American military operation that killed Bin Laden and 55 percent said it is a “bad thing that Bin Laden is dead.”

Looking forward, 51 percent of those surveyed in May expected relations to deteriorate between the countries as a result of the American military action, only 4 percent anticipated improved relations and 16 percent said there would be no change. And after the death of Bin Laden, Pakistanis took a more pessimistic view of relations between their country and the United States. In April, they were divided: 35 percent said relations had improved in recent years and 35 percent disagreed. After the raid, 29 percent said relations with the United States had improved and 44 percent had the opposite view.

About three-quarters of those surveyed had an unfavorable opinion of the United States, basically unchanged from those surveyed earlier. In both polls, about 7 in 10 said they considered the United States more an enemy of Pakistan than a partner. More than two-thirds said they were worried the United States could become a military threat. About 6 in 10 said the United States pays little or no consideration to the interests of countries like Pakistan when making international policy decisions. And only about 10 percent had confidence that President Obama would do the right thing in world affairs.

The face-to-face polls were conducted throughout the country, with samples drawn from about 85 percent of Pakistanis 18 and older. Excluded from the polls for security reasons were areas along the Afghan border, including the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and unstable regions in Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa, the former North-West Frontier Province, and Baluchistan, as well as disputed areas in the mountainous north: Gilgit-Baltistan, Azad, and Jammu and Kashmir.

Since the respondents were disproportionately urban, the data was weighted to reflect the actual urban and rural distribution in the country. The first poll was conducted April 10-26 with 1,970 adults and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. The second poll was conducted May 8 to 15 with 1,251 adults and has a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

The article originally appeared in the New York Times.

Tags: Afghan border, Balochistan, Gilgit-Bultistan, Kashmir and Jammu, Khyber-Pakhtunkhawa, Osama Bin Laden, pew survey, polls, US Pakistan relations

Posted in Blog | 3,540 Comments »

By C. Christine Fair

Enough fresh ink has been spilled about the harrowing straits through which the U.S.-Pakistan relationship is passing. While cooler heads such as Pakistan’s Ambassador to the United States Husain Haqqani and U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates are seeking to explain to audiences at home and abroad the importance of the relationship, the genuine challenges that inhere in the bilateral partnership, and imagine a workable path forward; many other commentators have taken the recent events in Pakistan as an opportunity to stoke further anger and mistrust between the wary governments and their peoples.

While the Pakistani press is rife with caricatures of U.S. policy, distorted versions of history, and outright falsehoods, American journalists are capable of equal chicanery. Mr. Christopher Hitchens’ latest offering in Vanity Fair, “From Abbottabad to Worse,” is an appalling example of American commentary that undermines the efforts of saner voices in this critical debate.

His piece commences with a dramatic reference to rape — not as a crime but as a punishment — and honor killing. The former refers to the rare, horrific instances where women and girls are subject to sexual assault by, in the words of the author, “tribal and religious kangaroo courts.” The latter refers to killing women (and sometimes men) in the name of honor. In this paragraph a complex polity of 180 million — most of whom condemn both practices — are essentialized as a barbarous people who embrace the notion that “moral courage consists of the willingness to butcher your own daughter.” This literary amuse bouche foretells the absurdities, fallacies and dubious assertions in the rest of his troubling account of Pakistan’s malaise.

He next characterizes President Asif Zardari as a man who “cringes daily in front of the forces who[sic] openly murdered his wife… A man so lacking in pride — indeed lacking in manliness — will seek desperately to compensate in other ways. Swelling his puny chest even more, he promises to resist the mighty United States, and to defend Pakistan’s holy “sovereignty.” This offensive passage reveals more about the psychology of the author than it does about that of President Zardari.

What are these “forces” that killed Benazir Bhutto? Mr. Hitchens wants the bravado of casting aspersions upon the Pakistani government. After all, only the government would have the authority to “contemptuously” order the crime scene to be “cleansed with fire hoses, as if to spit even on the pretense of an investigation.” (Regrettably, all crime scenes — big and small –are handled in this way in Pakistan.) However, there is no evidence that the government of Pakistan — then under President Musharraf — ordered her death. However, Mr. Hitchens here and throughout takes refuge in the pusillanimity of the passive tense by which he can intimate all the outlandish claims he wants without the responsibility of employing the active tense which requires him to name the agent of the action suggested. In fact, the U.S. government has consistently claimed that elements of the Pakistan Taliban ordered her death.

President Musharraf suffered considerably from her murder. Those with even a 4-year recollection of politics in Pakistan would remember that the United States had brokered a bizarre condominium by which Pervez Musharraf would remain president while Ms. Bhutto would become the Prime Minister following elections which were scheduled for late 2007. Musharraf had become politically isolated following a series of horrendous missteps and abuses of power. However, Washington was unwilling to let Musharraf slink into oblivion. So it devised a compact by which Mr. Musharraf could be laundered through the electoral legitimacy of Ms. Bhutto. With her demise — and even public suspicion that he or his government had her killed — Mr. Musharraf’s political life in Pakistan was finished. He now lives in London with various legal woes awaiting him in Pakistan.

Mr. Hitchens’ answer to “Why do they hate us” is no less preposterous and misleading. He contends that Pakistanis dislike the United States because they “owe us, and are dependent upon us.” This is simply a mathematical canard. According to the USAID Green Book, in 2009, total economic assistance to Pakistan came to $1.35 billion and military assistance totaled $0.429 (for a grand sum of $1.78 billion). In 2009, Pakistan’s gross domestic product was $162 billion. Calling this is a dependency is an obvious stretch. (In fairness, I too have been guilty of lapsing into this idiom until I crunched the numbers.)

By way of contrast, the United States gave Israel $2.43 billion in total economic and military assistance in 2009. Israel’s GDP was $204 billion. As a percentage of GDP, U.S. total assistance to both countries are nearly the same (around 1 percent). Between 1962 and 2009, total economic and military assistance to Israel totaled $178 billion in constant 2009 U.S. dollars. In the same period, U.S. military and economic aid to Pakistan comes to $37 billion in constant 2009 U.S. dollars. But would Mr. Hitchens describe Israel as being dependent upon Washington? By his own argumentation, he would have to answer in the affirmative.

However, from the optic of the American legislator and citizen alike, U.S. assistance to Pakistan appears to be a relatively large sum that should prompt positive feelings for America, or at least dampen raging anti-U.S. sentiment, among Pakistanis. And Americans do expect their funds will be used to a good end rather than be gobbled up by corruption in the host nation and by their own national contractors who are often first-tier executors of U.S. projects. Americans also expect their economic assistance to buy them some sway with Pakistan due to other larger economic factors such as the U.S. role in the International Monetary Fund and other multi-lateral actors which has helped Pakistan considerably. Other forms of assistance such as debt relief are also important beyond the sum it totals. And the United States has been the biggest investor in Pakistan’s human development, trumping Saudi Arabia and China long embraced as Pakistan’s enduring friends. Mr. Hitchens characterization of Pakistan as “our goddam [sic] lapdog” is out of line.

However, the circus of inaccuracy is far from over. Mr. Hitchens then proceeds to announce that “Everybody knew that al-Qaeda forces were being sheltered in the Pakistani frontier town of Quetta…” Mr. Hitchens of course takes refuge again in the passive voice to avoid saying precisely who sheltered al Qaeda. It would appear that the author has confused al Qaeda (an international terrorist organization) and the Afghan Taliban (a regressive Pashtun-dominated Deobandi insurgent organization presently focused upon the international occupation of Afghanistan). The former has not been harbored by the Pakistani state while the latter has been a long-standing client.

He continues to distort the entire record of Pakistan when it comes to al Qaeda. Pakistan has been a critical partner in capturing al Qaeda leadership in Pakistan. In fact, had it not been for this baseline cooperation, the United States would not have even been a position to kill bin Laden in the first instance.

There is at least one practical reason for Pakistan’s cooperation: al Qaeda has targeted Pakistan’s military and civilian leadership for years. In 2009, al Zawahiri denounced Pakistan’s constitution as un-Islamic. Al Qaeda’s sectarian allies such as Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Sipha-e-Sahaba-e-Pakistan has killed or maimed tens of thousands of Pakistanis since 2004. Al Qaeda is not an asset for Pakistan as the author suggests.

Pakistan’s record on al Qaeda has been evident and positive even while Pakistan sustains ties with the Afghan Taliban and groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba. While these groups are foes of the United States, neither the Afghan Taliban nor Lashkar-e-Taiba has targeted Pakistan nor have they embraced the Pakistani Taliban. This has been an invariant truth since the onset of the Global War on Terror in 2001. The United States and Pakistan have an ever-more restricted overlap of foes which makes future cooperation seem increasingly unproductive if not counterproductive to both nations’ aims.

Hitchens next describes his own shock that “Osama bin Laden himself would be given a villa in a Pakistani garrison town on Islamabad’s periphery.” Dodging again behind the passive tense, he offers no evidence for this reckless and dangerous assertion. In contrast to Mr. Hitchens, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has said that he had seen evidence that suggested Pakistan’s senior officials were unaware of bin Laden’s whereabouts. Hitchens’ claim that the state sheltered Pakistan is feckless journalism that encourages further ignorant speculation among publics who have no real understanding of the other and their governments.

And, for the record, Abbottabad is not on the periphery of Islamabad unless one redefines the word periphery. The word is defined as “the edge or outskirts, as of a city or urban area.” While the distance between the two cities, as a crow would fly, is about 67 miles, because Abbottabad is “hill station” resort town, the road is windy, indirect and covers an altitude climb of about 2,500 feet. Periphery implies a jaunt to the suburbs. But the drive is about 2.5 hours depending upon conditions and the quality of your car. Describing Abbottabad as in the periphery of Islamabad is either geographically obtuse or a deliberate attempt to make it sound as if bin Laden was pacing back and forth in a suburb of the nation’s capital. Someone should introduce Mr. Hitchens to Google Earth and if not him, then Vanity Fair’s fact checker –should there be one.

Hitchens is correct in noting that Pakistanis of all strata are deeply outraged that U.S. Navy SEALS came into Abbottabad — a garrison-town — to catch bin Laden without hindrance and with impunity. However, his outrage at Pakistani outrage is misplaced. Of course, Pakistanis should feel so violated because they were. As an American, I support the raid that eliminated this terrorist. However, from the optic of many Pakistanis, they first had to contend with the notion that bin Laden was in their country and second that the United States stormed their airspace, conducted a firefight for 40 minutes in a garrison town and then escaped with its dead quarry all before the Pakistanis could even scramble their F-16s.

Pakistanis themselves began wondering whether their military could protect them from India and whether the United States could act with equal ease to eliminate their nuclear program. Needless to say, all of this came on the back of years of drone attacks against terrorists in Pakistan’s tribal areas. While the facts about the drone program in Pakistan are grotesquely distorted and obscured by Pakistani and American officials, ultimately perception matters more than reality. Pakistanis, especially beyond FATA, loathe them as weekly assaults upon their nation’s sovereignty. The bin Laden raid was just the latest and most brazen of assaults on the country and demonstrated the incapacity or will of the military or intelligence agencies to stop the United States. Who would not be demoralized and outraged by these events?

Pakistanis — more than Mr. Hitchens — understand the limits of their country’s ability to extend rule of law throughout the land, to protect them from the ravages of terrorists and proxies gone wild alike, to grow the economy fast enough to accommodate Pakistan’s burgeoning population, among other challenges.

Similarly the American hysteria over Pakistan’s capture and detention of Pakistanis who collaborated on the raid — while understandable — is unfair. Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, knows full well that the CIA is operating against the organization perhaps as much if not more than it cooperates with it. The Pakistanis who assisted the raid were traitors to Pakistan by law because they aided and abetted a foreign intelligence agency. This is what domestic law enforcement and intelligence agencies do: ferret out and capture traitors. The United States does the same thing when their citizens help foreign spy organizations. Americans and Pakistanis alike hope that Pakistan will show equal diligence to determining who knew about bin Laden and who was involved in giving the mass murderer succor. Time will tell if this is the case.

Navigating this strained relationship under the pressures of reality is hard enough. However, accounts like that of Hitchens and others here and in Pakistan, dims the prospects for salvaging a relationship that is extremely important for the United States if not for Pakistan. And one has to wonder if that’s not the very goal of such fact-free musings.

C. Christine Fair is an assistant professor at Georgetown University, Center for Peace and Security Studies.

This article originally appeared on Huffington Post.

Tags: Abbottabad, General Kiyani, Lashkar e Taiba, lashkar-e-jhangvi, Osama Bin Laden, President Zardari, Robert Gates, US Pakistan relations

Posted in Blog | 2,325 Comments »

Asserting that Pakistan hosts the highest number of refugees – 1.9 million – the UN said in a report Monday that an estimated 80 per cent of the world’s refugees now live in developing countries and yet anti-refugee sentiment is growing in many industrialized nations.

The 2010 Global Trends report of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), marking the World Refugee Day Monday, urged the richer states to address the deep imbalance. Iran and Syria follow Pakistan with 1.1 million and 1 million refugees, respectively, the report said. Pakistan also feels the biggest economic impact with 710 refugees for each dollar of its per capita gross domestic product (GDP), followed by the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Kenya, with 475 and 247 refugees per dollar of their per capita GDP respectively.

The number of people forced to flee their homes to escape war or abuse has risen to its highest for 15 years, with four out of five refugees in developing countries, it said.

In absolute terms and in relation to the size of their economies, poor countries shoulder a disproportionate refugee burden, the report added. “What we’re seeing is worrying unfairness in the international protection paradigm,” said Antonio Guterres, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

“Fears about supposed floods of refugees in industrialized countries are being vastly overblown or mistakenly conflated with issues of migration. Meanwhile it’s poorer countries that are left having to pick up the burden,” he said.

Overall, the report portrays a drastically changed protection environment to that of 60 years ago when the UN refugee agency was founded. At that time UNHCR’s caseload of refugees was 2.1 million Europeans uprooted by the Second World War.

Today, UNHCR’s work extends to more than 120 countries and encompasses people forced to flee across borders as well as those in flight within their own countries.

An estimated 43.7 million people are currently displaced worldwide – roughly equalling the entire populations of Colombia or the Republic of Korea or of all Scandinavian countries and Sri Lanka combined.

Of the total, 15.4 million are refugees – 10.55 million under UNHCR’s care and 4.82 million registered with the UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA). Some 27.5 million people displaced internally by conflict and 837,500 are asylum-seekers. The report does not include this year’s internal displacements in Libya and Côte d’Ivoire.

This article originally appeared in the Nation.

Tags: Afghanistan, asylum, congo, kenya, korea, libya, Pakistan, Palestine, refugees, UNHCR, world refugee day

Posted in Around | 2,387 Comments »

By Adnan Rehmat

Is Pakistan set to implode in its exasperating persistence to define itself in only security terms vis-à-vis India as did the Soviet Union with the United States in a nuclear-shadowed Cold War that lasted 40 years, a numbing fear that consumed three generations, but ended in a barren inevitability 20 years ago of the former collapsing into 13 new countries?

It seems more likely than not, given the few signs that a fundamental rethink in underway in Pakistan in determining what it stands for rather than what it doesn’t stand for, which passes for its schizophrenic identity.

Two specific WikiLeaks cables published in Dawn in recent weeks reveal more than just what is already known about Pakistan’s paranoid obsession with India and the authorship and control of the policy of paranoia by the military establishment. In the first, President Asif Zardari, the commander-in-chief of Pakistan’s armed forces, counters the suggestion of Senator John Kerry that New Delhi is interested in pursuing peace with Islamabad by arguing that India has five times more tanks than Pakistan and that these are Pakistan-specific because the Sino-India border terrain cannot support a tank battle. In the second cable, severe civil-military tensions are revealed over access to and control of American aid flows to Pakistan with the army insisting for, and getting, direct aid and refusing to share details with the elected government even during drafting of the annual budgets.

The oversimplification of the link between military prowess and bilateral relationship – no doubt handed to Zardari in briefings from the military leadership – is disturbing. If Pakistan has to match India tank to tank, plane to plane, soldier to soldier, frigate to frigate and missile to missile before making peace, then it’s a lost battle in perpetuity. If matching military might was the precondition to peace then the world would have been blown up 200 times over because the unending Indo-Pak tensions and Indo-Pak like wars would have been replicated on every shared national border on the planet. What use was there to acquire super-expensive nuclear capability if it didn’t solve the problem of imbalance in conventional military capability? No two nuclear powers have fought a conventional war. Tensions are one thing but war is another. So why still sacrifice national prosperity at the cost of national dignity, as Army chief General Kayani said days after Osama bin Laden was taken out.

The farcical civil-military equation in Pakistan that has kept political forces emaciated and socio-cultural progress stunted is insulting enough it itself but for the military to have its cake (of American aid) all these decades and eat it too is going too far for even weak states. The military is twice richer and the elected governments twice the poorer when it comes to foreign aid. America has been Pakistan’s biggest civilian and military aid provider. In the last 10 years alone it has received over $21 billion in American aid. General Kayani and his corps commanders may have gingerly offered recently that the US military aid to Pakistan may be diverted for civilian development spending but it is neither here nor there since it managed to prevail on the government to secure the highest ever defense budget in the country’s history this year (over Rs500 billion).

Tellingly, seven of the last 10 years have been ruled by the military. So they have ended up getting $17 billion of this aid, whether military or ‘civilian’ (the “uniformed” Musharraf had a ‘civilian prime minister’). The civilian government – in place for the last three years only – has received barely $3 billion but the bulk of this too has gone to the military and spent on fighting a war on terror. No wonder there is nearly a trillion-rupee budget deficit crippling Pakistan at the joints – this is why the economy is tanking, social development is at a standstill and unemployment, starvation and poverty are soaring according to the government’s own statistics. Pakistan is fighting a war with its own proxies who also take money and dictation from al Qaeda.

The two WikiLeaks cables on Pakistan’s security obsession with India and the skewed civil-military equation are at the root of Pakistan’s sorry state. The deficit of trust between Washington and Islamabad that is so wide that despite being allies the former had to invade Pakistan militarily to eliminate bin Laden has thrown up for public debate – and pressure on the military – the need to define “sovereignty”, the concept that the military has traditionally used to reinforce its stranglehold over the national polity.

The military early on crafted a national security doctrine that helped it manufacture a national security state (as opposed to a national welfare state). This is based on the supposed “clear and continuing” danger from India to unravel Pakistan. The doctrine extrapolates that this “perpetual threat” is a projection of India’s supposed “capacity” to hurt Pakistan rather than its intention to make peace.

The problem with this contention is that India may have the same stance on Pakistan, which means this is a formula for an unending arms race and not a remedy to war, which should be state’s priority. India’s ruling elites may have been averse to the idea of Pakistan and hostile to the new country in the early decades but it follows that after the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Pakistan and their testing in 1998, the deterrent has demolished any existential threat to Pakistan from India. The Lahore summit between the popularly elected civilian governments of both countries (Sharif’s in Islamabad and Vajpayee’s in New Delhi) within a year of the nuclear tests was an affirmation of this new reality. So why no let-up in the paranoia even 15 years down the line?

If 9/11 (New York) was the moment America and 27/11 (Mumbai) that India changed forever, 2/5 (Abbottabad) could be Pakistan’s crossroads of opportunity to likewise choose the path of being a state that protects its own people by fighting terrorism unconditionally. Sovereignty is not about nurturing dubious proxies to fight your wars but to fight against the instinct to do so. The real violation of sovereignty is the imbalance in receiving foreign aid flows in-country and then not accounting for it. It is the civil-military imbalance within Pakistan that has distorted the nature of civil society and crippled the economy, thus opening up the space for non-state actors and terrorists to appropriate the sovereignty by propelling the country into a suicidal conflict with America and India instead of forces like al Qaeda and Taliban that espouse violence and extremism. Having plans in place in perpetuity to fight India and not even contemplating plans to fully and decisively fight the terrorists (foreign and local) in the border regions (particularly North Waziristan) of your own country – this is not stuff sovereignty is made of. A German delegation that met Kiyani last week was quoted by a local newspaper as saying to them that Afghanistan’s stability is not a priority for Pakistan Army if its strategic interests don’t match it.

Of course, like any country that has the resources to do so, Pakistan should have a robust military and adequate defense preparedness not only against an overarching India but also an unstable Afghanistan. But India throwing its weight around and building its military muscle is a function of its political, economic and cultural stability and durability, not the other way round. After all, doesn’t Pakistan do the same when it comes to the other six states in South Asia? Pakistan wants political and military parity with India (without matching the democratic and economic stability that India has) but how come it is in a virtually one-sided relationship with Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Maldives, Nepal, Bhutan and Afghanistan who can’t match it in military terms?

The only way to protect Pakistan against threats, perceived and unperceived, is to build trust, peace, trade and interdependence with India, Afghanistan and Iran and key global allies like America and Europe that have deep interest in the region’s stability. Safety and protection will not come from the military’s policy of paranoia to serve in ‘national interest’ which forces the unwilling country to weaken or leverage regional and international players by internal and external state and non-state provocations. These include supporting some militant organisations allied with al Qaeda and Taliban while going after others and by both doing little and seen to be doing even less to stem the involvement of people in attacks or attempted attacks in India, Afghanistan, the US and Europe.

There is no shame in acknowledging that some things are wrong and accepting that these need to be set right. Pakistan must stop equating sovereignty with defiance. Sovereignty is neither abstract nor absolute but a function of power, which in turn is also not absolute or abstract. Power is relative to the demonstrated power of others and dependent on the discipline of political and economic stability both of which elude Pakistan. Beneficial and lasting power flows from the social contract between a people and its rulers via a consensus constitution in which universal rights are adopted and elected civilian parliaments are supreme and empowered to make all policies, including security and foreign policies, both of which are the military’s handmaidens in Pakistan and therefore without public support or sanction.

Pakistan needs rigorous and sustained accountability of outmoded, unchanging self-serving institutional doctrines that don’t have public sanction and which have propelled Pakistan into an unsustainable arms race with India and are seeking to control Afghanistan, and which seek to leverage terrorist non-state actors against even allies. It is due to these policies that, according to yet another WikiLeaks cable published by Dawn, a French national security advisor told an American envoy “Pakistan is an army in search of a country.”

Misplaced bravado does not make pride and there’s no shame in desiring peace with someone we’ve painted as an enemy. The only way the delusional mindset that ill-serves Pakistan will be righted is when the national security doctrine puts the people, not the military establishment, at the center of Pakistan’s raison d ‘etre. We have tried India as an enemy and it has cost us dearly. It’s time to try India as a friend because the cost of being a friend is far, far less than the cost of being an enemy. For this to happen, what we need to do in Pakistan is what Peter Feaver suggested as the perfect civil-military equation: “The civil-military challenge is to reconcile a military strong enough to do anything the civilians ask with a military subordinate enough to do only what civilians authorize”. Good luck Pakistan!

This article originally appeared in Dawn

Adnan Rehmat is a journalist, analyst and media development specialist. He heads Intermedia, a Pakistani media support NGO.

Tags: General Kiyani, India, John Kerry, Osama Bin Laden, Pak-India Relations, President Zardari, Soviet Union, United States, US military aid, wikileaks

Posted in Blog, India | 2,464 Comments »

by Wajid Ali Syed

The relationship between the U.S. and Pakistan has almost always been termed as crucial. It has also been characterized as complicated because of the mistrust on both sides. The question is, why is there so much suspicion? Is it just because of the difference of interests, that the U.S. wants to do one thing while Pakistan another or is it more than that? So far, the reports that have surfaced suggest the latter. The difference of opinion of the people running the war on terror — on both sides — has resulted in a tumultuous relationship.

Even if the U.S. and Pakistan were on the same page on how best to combat terrorism, conflicting and false interpretations of history don’t help. Pakistanis do try to twist the facts in their own favor to boost hatred against the United States. Their reason is primarily based on America’s decision to abandon Pakistan after the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan. They are now not ready to budge. This can easily be overcome if the U.S. comes clean about all their operations against the militants. They need to share their plans with their allies, especially Pakistani politicans and the people, instead of dealing solely with the military and carrying out covert operations. Did Pakistan agree with the U.S. to use drone strikes or not? If there was an agreement — verbal or written — the U.S. should share that information. This one point can help the U.S. gain trust and would go a long way towards eliminating biases and mistrust over the use of drones.

Americans need to know truth about this war too. They need to understand why Pakistan is an ally and how it can help the U.S. negotiate with the Afghan Taliban. This could only happen once the big shots in Washington jettison their version of the war story and keep their facts straight.

Here’s an example. Richard Clarke — a long time security expert who served four presidents and was the chief counter-terrorism advisor for the National Security Council was on Bill Maher’s show blatantly accusing Pakistan of creating the Afghan Taliban to fight India.

If someone like Clarke, who has been the decision maker on security issues, is way off the mark, then the outcome of this war could be disastrous.

The Taliban in Afghanistan was an indigenous movement formed to counter the Northern Alliance. The Taliban movement was primarily made up of Pashtun tribesmen, the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan. Their purpose was to counter the Northern Alliance’s corrupt government. In 1994 and 1995, the Pakistan government was tasked by the U.S. to support the Taliban to restore law and order in Afghanistan and facilitate the construction of UNOCAL’s oil and gas pipeline projects.

The U.S. once again used the Taliban and Pakistan government in its favor just like it used the mujahideen. And like before, things got out of hand. Al- Qaeda became enemies of the U.S. The Taliban eventually backed al-Qaeda, which went on to terrorize the world.

The Taliban government proceeded to impose their brutal interpretation of sharia law on the country. Initially, the U.S. supported the Taliban, hoping they would restore order to a country ravaged by the war against the Soviets.

After 9/11, the U.S. wasted 10 years, billions of dollars and thousands of lives. It blamed the Pakistan army for supporting the Afghan Taliban while at the same time attempting to secretly strike a deal with the Taliban. Either you blame and squabble or join hands and find a solution. Like the expression goes, you can’t have your cake and eat it too.

In the meantime, the U.S. also supported former members of the Northern Alliance and warlords without considering that there cannot be peace in Afghanistan until the Pashtun Afghans get their fair share to rule the country. Even now, a large number of Afghan police and army trained by the U.S. and NATO forces are made up of non-Pashtuns. If the Pashtuns get their way and are included in such projects, discrimination does not let them survive for long. The Pashtuns complain that the Northern Alliance has monopolized important ministry positions, governorships, and embassy postings abroad.

Years later, the U.S. is back to square one, without having learned the lesson that there is no military solution to Afghanistan and Pakistan problem.

The U.S. needs to gain the trust of the people of Pakistan. It needs to realize that Pakistan’s army is not the same as Pakistan. The U.S. needs to ally with the politicians and support democratic institutions instead of men in uniform. The best way to wash off the mistrust is to engage the population and invest in education rather than in arm deals. The Saudis build schools that children can attend for free. The result? In many cases, extremist madrassahs become the only educational option. Why not invest in teaching children how to read?

It needs to negotiate and cut deals with the same Taliban back in Afghanistan. The efforts to achieve peace will be in vain until the U.S. considers Pakistan’s position, keeps its facts straight, brings the truth out in the open and accepts its share of blame. The solution to the Afghan problem cannot be reached until all the facts are understood and all the parties involved are on board.

This article originally appeared in the Huffington Post

Tags: Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, drones, Extremism, northern alliance, pakistani politician, Pashtun, Richard Clarke, Soviet Union, Taliban, US Pakistan relations

Posted in Afghanistan, Blog | 3,360 Comments »