The Pakistan Update

By Declan Walsh

Once they were heroes, cloaked justices at the vanguard of a powerful revolt against military rule in Pakistan, buoyed by pugnacious lawyers and an adoring public. But now Pakistan’s Supreme Court is waging a campaign of judicial activism that has pitted it against an elected civilian government, in a legal fight that many Pakistanis fear could damage their fragile democracy and open the door to a fresh military intervention.

From an imposing, marble-clad court on a hill over Islamabad, and led by an iron-willed chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, the judges have since 2009 issued numerous rulings that have propelled them into areas traditionally dominated by government here. The court has dictated the price of sugar and fuel, championed the rights of transsexuals, and, quite literally, directed the traffic in the coastal megalopolis of Karachi.

But in recent weeks the court has taken interventionism to a new level, inserting itself as the third player in a bruising confrontation between military and civilian leaders at a time when Pakistan — and the United States — urgently needs stability in Islamabad to face a dizzying array of threats.

Judges say their expanded mandate comes from the people, dating back to the struggle against the military rule of Gen. Pervez Musharraf that began in 2007, eventually helping to pry him from power. Memories linger of those heady days, when bloodied lawyers clashed with riot police officers, and judges were garlanded and paraded as virtual saints.

In recent months, however, the Supreme Court has ventured deep into political peril in two different cases. Last week, as part of a high-stakes corruption case, it summoned Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani to testify in court under threat of contempt charges that, if carried to conviction, could leave him jailed and ejected from office.

The court has also begun an inquiry into a scandal known here as Memogate, a shadowy affair with touches of soap-opera drama that has engulfed the political system since November. It has claimed the job of Pakistan’s ambassador to the United States and now threatens other senior figures in the civilian government, under accusations that officials sought American help to head off a potential military coup.

Propelled by accounts of secret letters, text messages and military plots, the scandal has in recent days focused on a music video featuring bikini-clad female wrestlers that is likely to be entered as evidence of immorality on the part of the central protagonist, Mansoor Ijaz, an American businessman of Pakistani origin.

Hearings resume Tuesday when Mr. Ijaz is due to give evidence. The fact that the courts have become the arena for such lurid political theater has reignited criticism, some from once-staunch allies, that the Supreme Court is worryingly overstepping its mark.

“In the long run this is a very dangerous trend,” said Muneer A. Malik, a former president of the Supreme Court Bar Association who campaigned for Justice Chaudhry in 2007. “The judges are not elected representatives of the people and they are arrogating power to themselves as if they are the only sanctimonious institution in the country. All dictators fall prey to this psyche — that only we are clean, and capable of doing the right thing.”

The court’s supporters counter that it is reinforcing democracy in the face of President Asif Ali Zardari’s corrupt and inept government. On Saturday, Justice Chaudhry pushed back against the critics.

The court’s goal was to “buttress democratic and parliamentary norms,” he told a gathering of lawyers in Karachi. Deep-rooted corruption was curtailing justice in Pakistan, he added.

“Destiny of our institution is in our own hands,” he said.

Mr. Chaudhry was appointed to the Supreme Court under General Musharraf in 2000. Two years later he wrote a judgment that absolved the military ruler for his 1999 coup. But Mr. Chaudhry shocked his patron and his country seven years later with decrees that challenged General Musharraf’s pre-eminence. Senior security officials were ordered to track down individuals being illegally held by the military intelligence agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, or ISI, in some cases working with the F.B.I. and C.I.A. The privatization of state companies came under sharp scrutiny.
Then, on March 9, 2007, General Musharraf tried to fire Justice Chaudhry and placed him under house arrest. Protesting lawyers rushed into the streets in support of the chief justice. New cable television channels broadcast images of the tumult across the country. Power drained from General Musharraf, who resigned 18 months later.
The euphoria was soon tempered, however, by growing tensions with the new government. Mr. Zardari hesitated to reinstate Mr. Chaudhry, believing that he was too close to his political rivals and the military.

The standoff led to fresh street protests in 2009, led by the opposition leader Nawaz Sharif. That March, amid dramatic scenes that included a threatened march on the capital, Mr. Zardari relented and Justice Chaudhry returned to the bench.

Within months, the Supreme Court had cleared the way for the possible prosecution of Mr. Zardari in a Swiss corruption case dating to the 1990s. The government cited Mr. Zardari’s presidential immunity, and argued, along with some international analyst groups, that the court was specifically targeting the president.

But among the wider public, the court was winning broad support. It engaged in a series of muscular interventions to champion the cause of ordinary Pakistanis, some of which broke new ground. Judges expanded the civil rights of hijras, transgendered people who traditionally suffered discrimination, called senior bureaucrats and police officials to account, halted business ventures that contravened planning laws, including a McDonald’s restaurant in Islamabad and a German supermarket in Karachi, and issued a decree against the destruction of trees along a major road in Lahore.

The court’s populist bent has infuriated the government but won cheers from urban, middle-class Pakistanis — the same people who had supported the lawyers’ drive against General Musharraf. Largely young, frustrated by traditional politics and angered by official graft, they constitute a political class that has in recent months flocked to Imran Khan, the cricket star turned politician who is enjoying a sudden surge in popularity, and is a strong defender of the judiciary.

But the court’s activism has also taken many erratic turns. Justice Chaudhry has fought trenchant battles to win control of judicial appointments, a process traditionally in the government’s purview. While the judiciary has vigorously pursued Mr. Zardari, it absolved Mr. Sharif of his alleged crimes. And critics accuse Mr. Chaudhry of failing to reform the chaotic lower courts, which remain plagued by long backlogs. “Three years after the restitution of the chief justice, the delivery of justice remains as poor as it has ever been,” said Ali Dayan Hasan, of Human Rights Watch.

The gravest charges, though, swirl around the memo scandal. Mr. Ijaz claims to hold an unsigned memorandum showing that Mr. Zardari’s government sought covert United States government help to avert a military coup in the poisonous aftermath of the American raid that killed Osama bin Laden in May.

But the memo’s provenance is unclear and Mr. Ijaz’s credibility has come under assault in the news media. Last week a music video that went viral on the Internet showed Mr. Ijaz acting as the ringside commentator in a wrestling contest between two bikini-clad women and that, in one version, featured full nudity — a shocking sight in conservative Pakistan.

The furor, which made front-page news, injected a fresh sense of absurdity into proceedings that already were under question, and that many here insist would never have started without military intervention: the Supreme Court ordered the inquiry on Dec. 30 at the direct request of the army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, and the ISI director general, Lt. Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, who harbor little love for Mr. Zardari. Also, the court ignored other claims by Mr. Ijaz that the army secretly sheltered Bin Laden, and sought outside support to mount a coup — acts that, if proven, could be equally treasonous.

Suspicions about the court’s impartiality were renewed last Friday, when Mr. Chaudhry ordered the government to disclose whether it intended to fire General Kayani or General Pasha — even though such decisions are normally the government’s prerogative.

The titanic three-way struggle among generals, judges and politicians comes at a time when Pakistan has become increasingly chaotic. Taliban insurgents continue to roam the northwest, the economy is in dire straits and urgently needed reforms in education, health and other social sectors have been largely ignored.

From the standpoint of the United States, the deadlock has diverted the spotlight from military airstrikes that killed 26 Pakistani soldiers in November and brought the two countries’ troubled relationship to a new low. But it has also drawn attention away from a pressing priority of the United States in Pakistan: engaging cooperation here to help negotiate a peace settlement with the Afghan Taliban as a major troop withdrawal slated for 2014 draws near.

“In the midst of this institutional wrangling, nobody has a clear plan as to how politics or foreign policy are going to move forward, said Dr. Paula Newberg of Georgetown University, who has written a book about Pakistani constitutional politics. “Pakistan could easily have a much brighter future. But it gets itself worn down by these incessant disputes about where power lies.”

Originally appeared in the New York Times

Tags: Afghan Taliban, Gen. Ahmed Shuja Pasha, General Kiyani, Iftikhar Chaudhry, mansoor ijaz, pakistan supreme court, Pervez Musharraf, President Asif Ali Zardari

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by Wajid Ali Syed

You can’t fool all of the people all of the time. At some point reality catches up to you.

Just like it did in Pakistan over the past week.

During the six years that Osama bin Laden was “hiding” in his compound in Pakistan, experts compiled research, wrote reports and articles and convened panels at think tanks to convince the United States that the ISI — Pakistan’s infamous intelligence agency — has been playing a double game. But the ISI and the Pakistan army continued to benefit from the largesse of American aid and official gratitude for their assistance in the war on terror.

In an old interview, Pervez Musharraf, who was the Chief of the Army and head of the state from 1999 to 2008, said he wanted bin Laden captured anywhere in the world but Pakistan. At around the same time Benizar Bhutto accused Musharraf of hiding terrorists and said that bin Laden could be in the basement of the President’s house in Islamabad. As the world now knows, the world’s most wanted terrorist was a block away from the army garrison. The swaggering confidence of his hosts had to turn into unfathomable embarrassment.

This incident is not the first time the Pakistan Army has made claims that strained credulity. When A.Q. Khan was caught operating a nuclear bazaar that trafficked information to the world’s most notorious regimes, the official Army line was that it had no knowledge of his activities.

Because of arrogance, or overconfidence, the Army chose to overlook the fact that the US had been after bin Laden with force and determination years before 9/11. In mid-August of 1998, the then-Pakistan Army Chief General Jahangir Karamat met his American counterpart, General Joseph Ralston. At the dinner table, General Ralston informed General Karamat that in few minutes some sixty Tomahawk cruise missiles would be entering Pakistan’s airspace to hit a location in Afghanistan where bin Laden was believed to be operating training camps. Obviously, General Karamat was shocked.

The next time the US infiltrated Pakistani air space, it was General Kayani’s turn to be shocked. Only now the destination was different and the mission was a success.

But killing bin Laden does not mean that al Qaeda has been destroyed. It’s not solely a terrorist organization. It facilitates and funds other terrorist groups. According to American journalist and author Mary Ann Weaver, al Qaeda is like a clearinghouse from which other groups obtain funds, training, and logistical support. These other groups exist from Egypt to Algeria, from Yemen to Somalia, from Saudi Arabia to the Philippines and, of course, Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Probably for this reason al Qaeda does not face a leadership crisis, as such. Interestingly enough, the next two frontrunners to take charge of al Qaeda could be residing deep in Pakistan.

Evidence shows that before settling in Abbottabad, bin Laden was seen in North Waziristan in the Tirah valley, then in Balochistan for a short time (probably meeting with the Quetta shura). Months after, he was spotted near Meran Shah with none other than Ayman al Zawahari. Later, al Zawahari was seen with Jalaluddin Haqqani, the head of the Taliban in North Waziristan.

Balochistan’s Quetta Shura and North Waziristan still stand out as al Qaeda and Taliban hideouts. Now that the US has embarrassed the Pakistan Army and its intelligence network for being unaware of the presence of the world’s most wanted terrorist in their own backyard, American officials should keep up the pressure and demand the capture of all terrorist group members and especially their leaders. In a grim yet darkly amusing example of the militants’ ability to survive and thrive, in 2002 Taliban leader Mullah Omar escaped the US Army on a motorbike.

The official Pakistani response to bin Laden’s presence in Pakistan doesn’t hold water. But even if we give the Pakistan Army the benefit of the doubt for not knowing where bin Laden was, it has been an open secret that Jalaluddin Haqqani and Mullah Omar reside somewhere deep in Pakistan. The army does know about Mullah Omar and Haqqani, and the US has been asking it to take action.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Senator John Kerry are still on board, claiming that the US needs access to the Afghanistan supply routes via Pakistan. This official excuse to continue sending aid is that the ISI has been an invaluable ally in helping the US root out terrorists. Now the Pakistan Army should make a grand gesture if it wants to be taken seriously as a partner.

Meanwhile, the US should attach some strings to the aid it lavishes on Pakistan. The Pakistan Army has always been a powerbroker in the country, not answerable to anyone. It’s been said that Pakistan is not a country with an army, but an army with a country.

The US was treated to a dose of the Army’s determination to keep a grip on foreign cash during fuss kicked up over the Kerry Lugar bill, a measure that would provide $7.5 billion in non-military aid over a five year period to help the civilian government provide essential services to the population. The Urdu press went berserk, turning the proposal into a dark conspiracy aimed at undermining Pakistani sovereignty. The army exploited the outrage, carving out a good chunk out of the funds. Apart from foreign military aid, the army gets a lion’s share from the national budget without any accountability, funds that could otherwise be used to pay for education and infrastructure.

So, now that the Pakistan Army has been caught red handed eagerly accepting money to fight terrorism while claiming not to know that the world’s most notorious terrorist was living within a stone’s throw of that same army’s training academy, perhaps it’s time for the US to focus on supporting the country’s fragile political government and demand better results and more candor from the military.

This article originally appeared in the Huffington Post

Tags: 9/11, A.Q. Khan, Abbottabad, Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, algeria, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Balochistan, Benazir Bhutto, double game, Egypt, Featured, General Ashfaq Kayani, General Joseph Ralston, Hillary Clinton, ISI, Jahangir Karamat, Jalaluddin Haqqani, John Kerry, Kerry Lugar Bill, Mullah Omar, North Waziristan, Osama Bin Laden, Pakistan, Pakistan Army, Pervez Musharraf, philippines, Quetta Shura, Saudi Arabia, somalia, urdu media, yemen

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By Wajid Ali Syed

Salmaan Taseer is dead. He’s neither the first politician, first liberal, the first outspoken bullish pugnacious politician who was killed. Nor is he last. There were many, there will be more. He was the sitting governor of Pakistan’s biggest province and was assassinated by his own bodyguard. 

Does Pakistan suffer today because of his death? Yes. Does it change anything on the ground? No. 

He was slain because he called the notorious blasphemy law as black law. (more…)

Tags: Bush, christians, Courts, drones, Featured, Judiciary, law and order, Left, Liberals, Minorities, Muslims, Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, Right, Salmaan Taseer, terror, US, Ziaul Haq

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by Patrick Cockburn

Is Pakistan disintegrating? Are the state and society coming apart under the impact of successive political and natural disasters? The country swirls with rumours about the fall of the civilian government or even a military coup. The great Indus flood has disappeared from the headlines at home and abroad, though millions of farmers are squatting in the ruins of their villages. The US is launching its heaviest-ever drone attacks on targets in the west of the country, and Pakistan closed the main US and Nato supply route through the Khyber Pass after US helicopters crossed the border and killed Pakistani soldiers.

Pakistan is undoubtedly in a bad way, but it is also a country with more than 170 million people, a population greater than Russia’s, and is capable of absorbing a lot of punishment. It is a place of lop-sided development. It possesses nuclear weapons but children were suffering from malnutrition even before the floods. Electricity supply is intermittent so industrialists owning textile mills in Punjab complain that they have to use their own generators to stay in business. Highways linking cities are impressive, but the driver who turns off the road may soon find himself bumping along a farmer’s track. The 617,000-strong army is one of the strongest in the world, but the government has failed to eliminate polio or malaria. Everybody agrees that higher education must be improved if Pakistan is to compete in the modern world, but the universities have been on strike because their budgets had been cut and they could not pay their staff.

The problem for Pakistan is not that the country is going to implode or sink into anarchy, but that successive crises do not produce revolutionary or radical change. A dysfunctional and corrupt state, part-controlled by the army, staggers on and continues to misgovern the country. The merry-go-round of open or veiled military rule alternates with feeble civilian governments. But power stays in the hands of an English-speaking élite that inherited from the British rulers of the Raj a sense of superiority over the rest of the population.

The present government might just squeak through the post-flood crisis because of its weakness rather than its strength. The military has no reason to replace it formally since the generals already control security policy at home and abroad, as well as foreign policy and anything else they deem important to their interests. The ambition of the Prime Minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani, in the next few weeks is to try to fight off the demand by the Chief Justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, that the legal immunity of President Asif Ali Zardari should be lifted. Mr Zardari, who owes his position to having been the husband of Benazir Bhutto, assassinated in 2007, has a well-established (though unproven) reputation for corruption during his pre-presidential days. Whatever the outcome of the struggle with the Supreme Court, Mr Zardari is scarcely in a position to stand up to the military leaders who may find it convenient to have such a discredited civilian leader nominally in power.

The military have ruled Pakistan for more than half the time since independence in 1947, but their control has never been quite absolute. The soldiers have never managed to put the politicians and the political parties permanently out of business, so the balance between military and non-military still counts. But there is no doubt about which way the struggle is going. A decisive moment came on 24 July this year when General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the army chief of staff, was reappointed for another three-year term. The US embassy in Islamabad is said by foreign diplomats and Pakistani officials to have protested vigorously but unavailingly to Washington. It said that keeping General Kayani in place would inflict a fatal wound on democracy and demonstrate that the civilian government could not get rid of its own army commander. In the event, Washington, always a crucial influence in Islamabad, decided that it would prefer to deal with a single powerful figure able to deliver in negotiations over Afghanistan. This was in keeping with US policy towards Pakistan since the 1950s. “We were put under intense pressure to keep Kayani,” said an aide of President Zardari’s. “We were left with no choice.”

In one sense, the army never really left power after the fall of General Pervez Musharraf in 2008. It has continued to allocate to itself an extraordinarily high proportion of Pakistan’s limited resources. Military bases all over the country look spruce and well cared-for, while just outside their razor-wire defences are broken roads and slum housing. At the entrance of a base just west of Islamabad last week was an elderly but effective-looking tank as a monument, the ground around it parade-ground clean. A few hundred yards away, a yellow bulldozer was driving through thick mud to make a flood-damaged road passable two months after the deluge, while a side street nearby was closed by a pool of stagnant grey-coloured water. At the other end of the country in northern Sindh, a local leader, who like many critics of the Pakistani military did not want his name published, pointed to a wide canal. He said: “This canal is not meant to be taking water from the Indus, but it is allowed to operate because it irrigates land owned by army officers.”

The army projects a messianic image of itself in which it selflessly takes power to save the nation. It likes to contrast its soldierly virtues of incorruptibility and efficiency with the crookedness and ineptitude of civilians. “The army is very good at claiming to be the solution to problems which it has itself created,” complained a local politician in Punjab. “It is also good at ascribing all failures to civilian governments, which cannot act because the army monopolises resources.” He added caustically that in his area, the floods had arrived on 6 August and the first army assistance on 26 August.

Politicians and journalists criticising the army often employ code words where more is implied than stated. But last month, a government minister made a pungent attack on the army that astonished listening journalists. The minister for defence production, Abdul Qayyum Jatoi, directly accused the army of being behind the killing of the opposition leader, Benazir Bhutto, in 2007, and the revered Baluchi leader Nawab Bugti, a year earlier.

“We did not provide the army with uniforms and boots to kill their own countrymen,” Mr Jatoi said bluntly, suggesting that the army leaders do their duty by going to defend Pakistan’s frontiers and end rumours of a coup. He added: “Not only politicians should be blamed for corruption, rather [army] generals and judges should be held responsible.”

Mr Jatoi’s words reflect what Pakistanis say about the army in private, but seldom dare do so in public. He paid a price for his forthrightness, since Mr Gilani promptly sacked him and he is being accused of high treason in a petition before the courts. He says he does not miss his job very much because all the important decisions in his ministry were in any case taken by the military. Pakistanis are unhappy because every week seems to bring another piece of bad news. The country is highly politicised with millions of people observing with acute interest the struggles for power at the central and local level. Taxi drivers discuss the make-up of the Supreme Court and its future composition. When it comes to open and lively political disputes, Pakistan is more like Lebanon, with its tradition of weak government but free expression of opinion, than Russia or Egypt with their supine and intimidated populations. Political parties in Pakistan are powerful and, given an ineffectual and corrupt administrative apparatus, everybody believes he or she needs somebody of influence to protect their interests. The army likes to denigrate civilian politicians as “feudalists”, but in practice, big landowners have limited political power. Politicians gain influence through helping “clients” who need their support and that of their parties. “All politics here is really about jobs,” says National Assembly member Mir Dost Muhammad Mazari.

Pakistan may not be falling apart, but the floods and the economic crisis – the government is bankrupt and inflation is at 18-20 per cent – means that every Pakistani I meet, be they small farmers, generals, industrialists or tribal leaders, is gloomy about the future. Each negative incident is interpreted as a sign of Pakistan’s decline and a menacing omen of worse to come. Two recent scandals, both filmed as they happened and shown on as many as 26 cable television news channels, appear to confirm that the country is saturated with corruption and violence. This explosion of news channels has happened only in the past few years and makes it far more difficult to censor information.

One scandal was the notorious allegation of match-fixing in return for bribes made against Pakistani cricketers touring England. Commentators noted acidly that it was typical of the political system that the highly unpopular head of the Pakistan Cricket Board, Ijaz Butt, could not be dismissed by the defence minister, Ahmad Mukhtar, because he is the latter’s brother-in-law. The scandal was peculiarly damaging because it broke in August just as the government was trying to persuade the world to give it large sums of money for flood relief.

A second scandal, which may have horrified Pakistanis even more than the bribery case in England, took place a few days earlier. News out of Pakistan at the time was all about the devastating floods and it received little international attention, but the gory events were again played endlessly on television. They took place on 15 August in the city of Sialkot, north of Lahore, where two wholly innocent teenagers called Hafiz Sajjad, 18, and Mohammed Muneeb Sajjad, 15, were misidentified as robbers and lynched by a crowd in the middle of a city street. Uniformed police stood nonchalantly by as men with iron rods and sticks took turns over a period of hours to beat the boys to death. Their mangled bodies were finally hung upside down in the market and the case only became know because a courageous television reporter had accidentally witnessed and secretly filmed what happened.

The Sialkot lynching shows Pakistani society at its worst. It also illustrates what happens when there is a breakdown in the administration of justice. In this case, the local police are reported to have routinely killed alleged criminals or handed them over to lynch mobs. This breakdown in the administration of justice is general. I asked Pashtun tribal elders in a town near Lakki Marwat in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province what they most needed. They all said governance: some form of effective local government administration. In south Punjab I went to a tribal court where 100 tough-looking Baluchi tribesmen had submitted a land dispute to a respected leader of their tribe. It was a complicated case involving a grandfather’s will written in 1985 that left 12 acres of land unequally to the sons of his two marriages. The will was not very precise but nobody cared at first because the land was in the desert. But then one member of the family started to irrigate it and made it productive, leading to a rancorous dispute about ownership. The claimants to the land had chosen binding arbitration by a respected local leader, because a decision would be swift and free. They said that if they went through the state courts, the case could take years and the judges and police could be bribed.

But incidents such as the Sialkot lynching do not mean that the country is slipping into primal anarchy like Somalia. The Western world looks at Pakistan primarily in relation to Afghanistan, the Taliban, extreme jihadi Islam and the “war on terror”. In a country of 170 million people there are always episodes that can be used as evidence to illustrate any trend, such as the belief that Pakistan is filled with bloodthirsty Islamic militants bent on holy war. Earlier this year, Foreign Policy magazine in Washington, which compiles an annual list of failed states, placed Pakistan 10th on the list, claiming that it showed more signs of state failure than Haiti and Yemen, and is only slightly more stable than Somalia and Yemen.

The country’s high ranking in the survey tells one more about the paranoid state of mind of Washington post-9/11 than what is actually happening. There is no incentive to play down the “Islamic threat to Pakistan” on the part of any journalist who wants his or her story to be published, think-tankers who need a grant, or diplomats who seek promotion. The influence and prospects for growth of small jihadi organisations are systematically exaggerated. Over-attentive reading of the Koran is seen as the first step on the road to Islamic terrorism. Overstated claims about their activities by fundamentalist Islamic groups are happily lapped up and repeated.

Stories acquire a life of their own, regardless of their factual basis. During the recent floods, the foreign media reported on how militant Islamic groups were prominent and energetic in distributing aid to victims, the suggestion being that they will use their enhanced status to recruit more young men for holy war. This is supposedly what they did during the Kashmir earthquake of 2005, which killed 75,000 people whom it was difficult to reach because they lived high in the mountains. Christine Fair, an expert on Pakistan at Georgetown University in Washington, eloquently demolishes this and other spurious stories about the growth of militant Islam in Pakistan. She cites a survey of 28,000 households in 126 villages in Kashmir in which one-quarter of the inhabitants said they had received aid from international agencies, 7 per cent from non-militant Islamic charities, and just 1 per cent from the Islamic militant groups. Of course, the militantly religious of all kinds are likely to be to the front in helping survivors of any disaster, because most faiths adjure their adherents to help others in a crisis. The only person I met during a visit to flooded areas who could in any way be described as a religious militant engaged in relief work was an amiable German Pentecostalist waiting for a flight in Lahore airport.

Another hardy-perennial story about Pakistan claims that because of the undoubted inadequacy of the Pakistani public education system, madrasahs, or religious schools, provide free education to the needy. Once enrolled, the children are supposedly brainwashed to turn them into the future foot soldiers of jihadi Islam. In reality, Pakistani educational specialists say that just 1.3 per cent of children in school go the madrasahs, 65 per cent to public schools, and 34 per cent to non-religious private schools. In recent years, it is the small and affordable private schools that have expanded fastest, mainly because jobs in them are open to educated women prepared to accept low pay. Most jihadis turn out to have been educated at public schools.

Extreme Islamists have seldom done well in elections in Pakistan. Widespread popular support for the Afghan Taliban stems primarily from the conviction that they are essentially a Pashtun national liberation movement fighting a foreign occupation. The Pakistani Taliban was once said to be “60 miles from Islamabad”, but such scaremongering ignored the fact that there were three mountain ranges and one of the world’s most powerful armies in between the Taliban’s rag-tag fighters and the capital. The Pakistani state may not function very well but it is not failing, and – a pity – current crises may not even change it very much.

This article originally appeared in The Independent

Tags: Abdul Qayyum Jatoi, Afghanistan, Ahmad Mukhtar, asif ali zardari, Benazir Bhutto, christine fair, failed state, flooding, floods, General Kayani, Iftikhar Chaudhry, jihadis, Kashmir, Lahore, madrassah, Mir Dost Muhammad Mazari, nuclear weapons, Pakistan, Pakistan Army, Pakistan Media, Pakistani Taliban, Pervez Musharraf, punjab, sialkot, somalia, Taliban, yemen, Yusuf Raza Gilani

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by Bilal Qureshi

According to the New York Times, Pakistan’s military is maneuvering to remove the current government. This, according to the paper, is because of corruption and lack of proper response to the flood.

What is missing from the report is that once this government is gone, angels and superheroes are going to takeover and they will change everything wrong with Pakistan, overnight.

The world has seen this before, but I suspect that people in Pakistan like this game of throwing out democratic governments and bringing in old, tried, and tired hands with this hope that somehow, magically, things will change and yes, improve, even though, history begs to differ.

No point in repeating that the current government has been perpetually dealt with crisis right after Musharaff and his cronies left the country without any food, water and money. What Musharaff and his gang did leave behind were multiple disasters in the shape of terrorism, charged up lawyers movement, and uncountable other problems that the current government is still trying to solve.

If Pakistan is viewed as a society without the deranged and delusional support of Pakistan’s contemporary electronic media, it is still not a bad place. However, because of the consistent poisonous war against the left leaning and progressive government of Pakistan People’s Party waged by the jihadists, so called-journalists and judges with the not so subtle help from the army, the country seems like a hell hole.

Ironically, the current champions of freedom of press have jailed journalists while they were in Power. Ask Najam Sethi, Husain Haqani (to name a few) about the experience. Even worse, the same people who claim to be in love with ‘independent judiciary’ are also responsible for organizing the one and only attack on judiciary. Just ask Sajad Ali Shah about it.

As awful as it sounds, it seems likely that the Zardari and Gillani will be shown the door, but it is going to be a supremely sad day for Pakistan’s public and for its future. Gone are the days when an elected government was overthrown, especially when it represented people from smaller provinces, and people took it quietly. Not any more.

Equally terrible is the prospect of ordinary Pakistanis suffering because of this upcoming ‘revolution’. And those, who are inviting a revolution, must not forget what happened in China, Russia, Iran, and Cuba when ordinary people gave up their rights for buying into the hideous notion of a better future. Better life after a revolution remains an unfulfilled dream, and an empty promise. It has never anywhere in the world, and it is not going to happen in Pakistan either. It will only make life more miserable for ordinary citizens and it will tremendously help the hard core hyper nationalists dying to dominate the society.

So, here is a message from insanity to the generals in Pakistan. “Go ahead, remove the government, and make my day.”

Tags: gilani, Husain Haqqani, Najam Sethi, Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, PPP, Sajad Ali Shah, the new york times, Zardari

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by Bruce Reidel

When Obama visits India in November, he must secure a deal on Kashmir, the disputed province where unrest is building again. At stake is another Indo-Pakistani confrontation—with nuclear potential.

Just as the war in Afghanistan is getting bloodier and Pakistan is drowning in floods, a new (yet old) battlefield is heating up in Kashmir. President Barack Obama’s strategy for dealing with Afghanistan and Pakistan always needed a Kashmir component to succeed; that need is becoming more urgent and obvious now. His trip to India in November will be a key to addressing it.

An independent Kashmir is not in the offing. Neither India nor Pakistan would ever accept that outcome. Pakistan has been trying to annex Kashmir since the hour it was born in 1947 and has long and established ties to many terrorist groups operating in the province like Lashkar e Tayyiba, the group that attacked Mumbai in 2008. India is determined to hold on to the part of Kashmir it won in the 1947-48 war at all costs.

This summer, after several years of relative quiet, the Muslim majority in the Vale of Kashmir, the heart of the province, began protesting against Indian occupation. Young Kashmiris began protesting against what they allege are Indian occupation forces’ human-rights abuses. Up to 700,000 Indian army and police garrison the province with a very heavy hand. Stone-throwing produced clashes with the Indian army. Over a hundred have died in what is becoming a Kashmiri version of the first Palestinian intifada of the late 1980s. Polling shows the majority of the Muslim population wants independence.

There is a solution, however, to the problem. The cease-fire line that divides Kashmir between India and Pakistan, the line of control, would become the agreed international border between the two countries. At the same time, it would become a permeable border for Kashmiris, who could move back and forth easily. Both countries’ currencies would be valid on both sides of the line. The two parts of Kashmir, Pakistani Azad Kashmir and Indian Kashmir and Jammu, would handle local issues like tourism, sports, and the environment in joint shared institutions along the lines of how Ireland and Ulster work together now on all Northern Ireland issues.

The broad outlines of this deal were worked out by then Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in secret back-channel talks four years ago. Musharraf told me that while a deal was not consummated, they were very close when his domestic political problems shut down the exercise. Lashkar e Tayyiba’s Mumbai attack was designed to kill it for good.

The new uprising in the Kashmiri capital of Srinagar makes it imperative to get back to the back channel and finish the talks. Pakistani President Asif Zardari probably would embrace them eagerly, but he is too weak to go alone. He needs the Pakistani army on board, and it is unclear if the army chief, General Kayani, Musharraf’s intelligence chief during the old talks, is on board. It will take strong and brave leadership to get a deal, but it is critical to defeating the jihadist Frankenstein that now terrorizes Pakistan itself. If left to itself, the Pakistani army will be tempted to intervene in Kashmir again to help the until now largely indigenous revolt, running the risk of another Indo-Pakistani confrontation.

Singh undoubtedly wishes he had seized the pending deal with Musharraf when it was there. India cannot become a global power with a prosperous economy if its neighbor is a constant source of terror armed with the bomb. A sick Pakistan is not a good neighbor.

For the U.S., reducing and resolving the India-Pakistan Cold War before it goes hot is critical to stability in South Asia, isolating the jihadi extremists and preventing a war in South Asia that could go nuclear. But India is understandably averse to American meddling in its internal affairs. President Obama learned that in the transition, when he briefly floated the idea of an American special envoy for Kashmir and he got a firestorm of Indian resistance.

Obama’s challenge is to quietly help Islamabad and New Delhi work behind the scenes to get back to the deal Musharraf and Singh negotiated. He will have a chance to work this subtly when he visits India in November. The new Kashmiri intifada has put the issue back on the front burner. A deal is good for America, India, Pakistan, and especially the Kashmiris, who have suffered enough.

This article originally appeared in www.thedailybeast.com

Tags: Asif Zardari, Azad Kashmir, General Kayani, India, Kashmir, Kashmir and Jammu, Lashkar-e-Tayyiba, Manmohan Singh, Obama, Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf

Posted in Around, Blog, India, News | 1,748 Comments »

by Ahmed Rashid

THERE IS perhaps no other political-military elite in the world whose aspirations for great-power regional status, whose desire to overextend and outmatch itself with meager resources, so outstrips reality as that of Pakistan. If it did not have such dire consequences for 170 million Pakistanis and nearly 2 billion people living in South Asia, this magical thinking would be amusing.

This is a country that sadly appears on every failing-state list and still wants to increase its arsenal from around 60 atomic weapons to well over 100 by buying two new nuclear reactors from China. This is a country isolated and friendless in its own region, facing unprecedented homegrown terrorism from extremists its army once trained, yet it pursues a “forward policy” in Afghanistan to ensure a pro-Pakistan government in Kabul as soon as the Americans leave.

For a state whose economy is on the skids and dependent on the IMF for massive bailouts, whose elite refuse to pay taxes, whose army drains an estimated 20 percent of the country’s annual budget, Pakistan continues to insist that peace with India is impossible for decades to come. For a country that was founded as a modern democracy for Muslims and non-Muslims alike and claims to be the bastion of moderate Islam, it has the worst discriminatory laws against minorities in the Muslim world and is being ripped apart through sectarian and extremist violence by radical groups who want to establish a new Islamic emirate in South Asia.

Pakistan’s military-intelligence establishment, or “deep state” as it is called, has lost over 2,300 soldiers battling these terrorists—the majority in the last 15 months after much U.S. cajoling to go after at least the Pakistani (if not the Afghan) Taliban. Despite these losses and considerable low morale in the armed forces, it still follows a pick-and-choose policy toward extremists, refusing to fight those who will confront India on its behalf as well as those Taliban who kill Western and Afghan soldiers in the war next-door. An army that has received nearly $12 billion in direct military aid from the United States since 2001, and has favored-nation status from NATO, still keeps the leaders of the Afghan Taliban in safe refuge. Pakistan’s civilians, politicians and intellectuals are helpless; they cannot make the deep state see sense as long as the West continues its duplicitous policies of propping up the military-intelligence establishment in opposition to popular society while demanding that the Pakistani civilian government wrest back control of the country.

Now there is a serious and deadly overlap—Pakistan’s extremists are determined to topple the political system and the deep state. The army is not oblivious to this reality, but it seems unwilling or unable to tackle the real issues at hand. “This is nothing but a creeping coup d’état by the forces of darkness, a coup that will spare no one,” wrote analyst Kamran Shafi in the Dawn newspaper this summer. “It is them against everyone else—an Islamic Emirate of Pakistan is the goal,” he added.

The deep state is failing its own people, who are in turn becoming more traumatized by the incessant violence, the lack of justice or security, and the perennial economic crisis. This only leads the civilian government to be even more inept, inconsequential and incapable of improving governance.

THE MOTHER of all insurgencies is taking place in the seven tribal agencies of Bajaur, Mohmand, Khyber, Orakzai, Kurram, and North and South Waziristan in the northwest-frontier region where the Pakistani Pashtun tribes—under the nomenclature of the Pakistani Taliban—are at war with the state. Amnesty International recently said that 4 million Pakistanis in this and adjoining regions are living under Taliban rule. Every time the army claims to have cleared one agency, the Taliban rebound in another with a vengeance.

Also operating from these northern bases are a dozen groups from Kashmir, Karachi and Punjab which were once trained by the military’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to fight in Indian Kashmir. They have now turned against their former handlers. The Pashtun Taliban have joined with their more sophisticated, better educated urban comrades to plan horrific acts of terrorism in Pakistani cities. Together they want to overthrow the state and establish an extremist Islamic system.

The Pakistani Taliban do not just kill police and soldiers in their barracks or even innocent civilians in mosques. On June 8 they launched a brazen attack on a convoy of trucks carrying NATO war materials for troops in Afghanistan in heavily populated northern Punjab—torching 50 vehicles. There is now talk of the Taliban shutting down Karachi port, where 80 percent of NATO supplies arrive. The public fear is that the army is losing control of the country as the extremists become ever stronger, ever more daring and ever more capable.

If local tribesmen even attempt collaboration with the state, deadly reprisals ensue. In the supposedly “Taliban-free” Mohmand Agency, people received U.S.-donated foodstuffs on July 8. The next day, while tribal elders gathered to discuss helping the army combat the Taliban, two suicide bombings killed over 100 people and wounded another 115.

Since 2004, the area has been hemorrhaging people. Out of a total population of 3.5 million, more than 1 million have fled the tribal agencies while another half a million left during the recent fighting only to become internally displaced refugees in nearby towns.

Amid the Pakistani Taliban, vicious Sunni sectarian groups prosper, galvanizing hatred of all minorities, Muslim and non-Muslim alike. The Ahmadi sect follows the teachings of a nineteenth-century religious reformer, promoting a peaceful variant of Islam. And yet in the 1970s, the Pakistani government declared the Ahmadis a non-Muslim minority and many Pakistanis today view them as heretics to Islam. On May 28 in Lahore, upwards of nine gunmen and suicide bombers blasted their way into two mosques and killed 90 Ahmadis, wounding another 110. The other minority groups, whether they be Shia, Christian, Hindu or Sikh, have lived in even greater fear since.

The Christian community, which makes up less than 2 percent of the population, is already a target. In July 2009, eight Christians were burned alive in the small Punjab town of Gojra, and in riots that followed an entire Christian neighborhood was scorched. The 17 militants arrested for these crimes were not brought to trial, and the police, facing local pressure, later let them go. A year later, riots erupted again in Faisalabad, Punjab, after two Christians were killed while being held in police custody. Since then, any Christians who can have been seeking political asylum abroad in droves.

An even-worse fate has befallen Shia Muslims. Prominent Shia technocrats—politicians, doctors, architects, bureaucrats and judges—have been singled out for assassination in all major cities, while in December 2009, 43 Shias were massacred by Sunni extremists in Karachi.

Thus the Pakistani Taliban have a two-pronged offensive: the first is to politically undermine the state and its organs through terror; the second is to commit sectarian violence against all those they believe are not true Muslims. This intolerance has developed deep roots in Pakistan over the past three decades, and it has now been boosted by the jihadist policies of al-Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban. The government’s inability to deal with sectarian threats has led to some Muslim groups arming themselves and taking the law into their own hands. This only leads to further loss of control by the state.

AS ISLAMIC extremist violence spreads, the very fabric of the country is falling apart. Mapping how widespread and varied the violence is gives but a hint of the disaster facing Pakistani society. Growing poverty, inflation and unemployment have led to an unprecedented increase in suicides—sometimes of entire families. One hundred ninety-one people killed themselves in the first six months of this year; at more than one death a day, it is one of the highest rates in the world. And when 113 of those happen in the country’s richest province (Punjab), it is obvious not a single Pakistani is surviving this unscathed—no matter how seemingly privileged. Violence against women is also on the rise; 8,500 violent incidents took place last year. One thousand four hundred of those were murders. Another 680 were suicides.

Freedom of information is quickly coming to a halt. Journalists receive regular threats if they do not report the statements of extremist groups, while extremist literature, newspapers and pamphlets continue to flood the market with no attempts by the state to stop them. And now leading electronics markets in major cities have been repeatedly bombed and shop owners warned to stop selling computers and TVs. Rather than combat the threat, the government has succumbed, closing down Facebook for three weeks starting in May and announcing that major web sites like Google and Yahoo will be censored for “anti-Islamic material.” This is shuttering a vibrant society and slowly turning a country that long strived for democratic openness into a closed state held hostage by radical Islam.

Meanwhile, the lack of services is creating its own anarchy. In Karachi, with a population of 18 million, violence is so endemic and its perpetrators so diverse that it is difficult to summarize. What we do know is that beyond Islamic extremism, the city is in the grip of heavily armed mafias and criminal gangs, who kill over control of water supplies, public transport, land deals and the drug trade. Car theft is rampant. The most lucrative business is kidnapping for ransom. The independent Human Rights Commission of Pakistan reports that there were 260 targeted killings in Karachi in the first six months of this year, compared to 156 last year. Eight hundred eighty-nine murders were reported in the same period. Because the city is the melting pot of the country, much of the violence is between ethnic groups who live in virtual ghettoes and compete for the scarce resources of the city.

Ethnic violence is translated into interparty political assassinations. The Muhajir-dominated Muttahida Qaumi Movement (MQM) which rules Karachi is made up of Urdu-speaking migrants from India. They are in a bloody war with an MQM offshoot and in intense rivalry with the largest Pashtun secular political group (the Awami National Party) as well as with the majority Sindhi population. The Muhajirs blame the Pashtuns for introducing the Taliban to Karachi, and ethnic killings are multiplying; party workers of all groups are being targeted.

There is another civil war going on in Baluchistan Province between Baluch separatists and the army. A province long deprived of development, political freedom and revenue, this is the fifth insurgency by the Baluch tribes against the army since Pakistan’s founding. The ISI maintains that Indian agents based in Afghanistan and the Arabian Gulf states are arming and funding the Baluch. The insurgents launch ambushes and assassinations, and lay land mines every day. They have begun killing prominent non-Baluch who long ago settled in the province. School teachers, university professors and officials have proven the easiest targets—and this in a province that professes a literacy rate of only 37 percent (20 percent for women) compared to the national average of 54 percent. This summer Interior Minister Rehman Malik said that four separatist Baluch “armies” funded by India had forced 100,000 people to migrate from the province. Baluch militants killed 252 non-Baluch settlers from January to June of this year, also assassinating 13 army officers. The army in turn has brutalized Baluch society and several thousand young Baluch are said to be missing, presumed in prison and being tortured. The army’s insistence that the entire Baluch problem is caused by India and that the Baluch have no grievances of their own simply leads to further escalation of violence and further alienation of the population. The province erupted in days of riots and strikes after prominent Baluch nationalist leader Habib Jalib was gunned down in Quetta in mid-July.

The local justice system in Pakistan is in dire straits. Policemen, judges and lawyers are frequently intimidated by terrorist groups. Evidence is rarely collected against the arrested perpetrators of attacks, and either the police or judges release the suspects. If not, the terrorists are quite capable of freeing their own by force from jails, courthouses and hospitals. After the Ahmadi killings, terrorists attacked a hospital where one of their arrested comrades was being treated under heavy police guard. In June, terrorists attacked a Karachi courthouse, freeing four members of their group undergoing trial for the earlier massacre of 43 Shias in the city.

It is now a cliché to describe how a worsening economy and the lack of education and job opportunities have helped spawn Islamic extremism in Pakistan and elsewhere. Yet it is a trope worth repeating.

PAKISTAN’S GEOPOLITICAL assertiveness in the midst of all this chaos is a result of the military’s overwhelming power. It may be losing its hold on vast amounts of territory to the extremists, but it is taking control of Pakistan’s national security and foreign policy away from the government. As the country is now led by weak and widely considered to be incompetent and corrupt civilian rule with President Asif Ali Zardari, the husband of slain leader Benazir Bhutto, at the helm, the armed forces have found it relatively easy to carry out their own programs.

Following its election, the ruling Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) sought to reform the policies of the Musharraf era. This included improving relations with India, Iran and Afghanistan and ending Pakistan’s regional isolation. They failed.

Zardari’s overtures regarding India were rebuffed, not only by New Delhi, but also by the Pakistan army—such civilian initiatives are considered an encroachment on military territory. And the November 2008 massacre in Mumbai by Pakistani extremists paralyzed engagement with India for nearly two years. India accuses the ISI of having a direct role in the massacre, which Pakistan denies. Yet Lashkar-e-Taiba, the militant group behind the massacre, has not been curbed.

The situation in Afghanistan isn’t much better. Although Zardari improved personal relations with President Hamid Karzai, it had little impact on the army’s posture—an anti-Karzai, anti-ruling-government strategy. Only recently has the army decided that with a U.S. troop withdrawal starting next year, Karzai and the Afghan Taliban need to be brought together. The Afghan Taliban leadership has had sanctuary and support from the military since its retreat into Pakistan in 2001. Though former-President George W. Bush never attempted to tackle this conundrum, President Barack Obama has privately acknowledged what must be done, trying hard to bring Kabul and Islamabad together. Certainly, any recent success can’t be chalked up to the civilian leadership in Pakistan. The army says it wants to see a stable and peaceful Afghanistan after the U.S. withdrawal, and to that end it is trying to promote talks between Karzai and the various factions of the Taliban. However, many Afghans remain suspicious of an army that wants an Afghanistan free of Indian influence.

Zardari and the PPP no longer make any moves that oppose the army’s foreign-policy aims. And over the past two years, a strident judiciary, at times backed by the military, has whittled away at the president’s power, trying repeatedly to undermine Zardari or force him to resign by resurrecting old corruption charges against him and by asserting its influence over the constitution—which is in fact Parliament’s prerogative. This judicial collision with parts of the government has further stymied the country’s reputation and put off aid donors and investors. It is destroying Pakistan’s democratic character. Making matters worse, the all-powerful General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani has just received a three-year extension to his term as army chief. It was a move that stunned the country. Many Pakistanis concluded that this further reduced the power of civilian authority.

Political instability is precisely what Pakistan does not need. The country requires a sustained period of democracy under civilian governance—even if it is a bad, poorly functioning democracy. If Zardari is unpopular or ineffective, then he should be removed in the next election, not through a judicial or military coup.

FOR DECADES, a cyclical pattern of military rule followed by its collapse and replacement by elected but weak civilian governments has occurred. In time, they too fall—often with a prod from the ISI—and the military returns. Repeated military rule has resulted in the decline of political parties, the exile or execution of civilian leaders, their lack of experience or knowledge when they do come to power, and the unwillingness of young professionals to get involved in politics. The political class has seen no new blood for a generation.

The PPP suffers from all these problems and more. However, it remains the only national party in Pakistan, for it has support in all the provinces—Baluchistan, Sindh, Punjab and the former North-West Frontier (now called Khyber-Pakhtoonkhwa). Every other party, including the Pakistan Muslim League–N (the main opposition group), has degenerated. They are now nothing more than regional organizations representing local ethnicities or territories. Only the political alliance the PPP has forged in Parliament can claim to forward a national agenda; it includes regional parties belonging to all ethnic groups. If the government had the total support of the military and the judiciary, there would be a chance of greater stability and better policy options.

Despite the severe problems it faces, the PPP has accrued some political successes in which lie hope for the future. After much delay and procrastination, Parliament passed the Eighteenth Amendment to the constitution in April 2010 that incorporates over 100 changes to the 1973 version of the document, virtually restoring it to its original form and doing away with authoritarian amendments made by successive military dictators.

From having a de facto presidential form of government under military rule, Pakistan has now reverted back to having a parliamentary form of government with the elected PPP Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani as the chief executive. The amendment also introduces a new judicial commission to choose judges for the higher courts (justified surely, but it has unsurprisingly angered the judiciary and further prolonged the conflict between it and the PPP).

The amendment also grants an unprecedented degree of autonomy to the four provinces, increases decentralization, and brings many social subjects such as health care and education under provincial control for the first time. This has long been the demand of the three smaller provinces which have felt deprived by the concentration of wealth and power in Punjab. Now the government is giving an additional 10 percent of the federal tax take to the provinces under a new National Finance Commission Award. And Punjab made a rare sacrifice by giving part of its share to the poorer provinces. Over 70 percent of federal taxes now revert back to Baluchistan, Sindh, Punjab and Khyber-Pakhtoonkhwa. For the first time there is relative peace between the center and the periphery.

In an effort to continue these steps toward stability, the PPP has moved to give greater autonomy to the northern areas abutting China. This is especially remarkable because they are part of the territory involved in the Kashmir dispute between Islamabad and New Delhi. Because of the areas’ proximity to India, Pakistan has exercised control over the region, which has never had self-government. That is now changing.

What is still missing is a plan to bring the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA)—the seven tribal agencies—into the mainstream of governance. Currently this territory has considerable autonomy from Islamabad; the government of the former North-West Frontier Province has no jurisdiction over FATA. Instead, the area is ruled by the president and laws drafted by the British during the Raj. This has led to a power vacuum that has produced a terrorist safe haven. Even though the army claims to have a counterterrorism strategy for the area, it is a plan that cannot work until the army is willing to accept a political agenda that brings FATA under the central government’s control.

DESPITE THE incompetence of the government, the groundwork is now being laid for a genuine democratic dispensation through provincial autonomy, decentralization and the rebuilding of democratic institutions—theoretically making it more difficult for the army to seize power again.

If these steps are matched with equivalent advances in restoring economic stability, reviving local and foreign investment, combating terrorism and Islamic extremism on a nationwide basis, and modernizing the judicial and police systems, Pakistan has a far brighter future than is currently portrayed.

For now, a staggering foreign debt of $54 billion is crippling the country. An estimated growth rate of 4.1 percent for 2009–10 (a negligible improvement from last year’s 1.3 percent) means Pakistan is likely stuck in this financial quagmire. An energy crisis that leads to 14 hours a day of electricity cuts has crippled industry, farming and exports.

The irresponsible handling of the economy is only deepening the crisis. This year’s $38 billion budget has seen a 30 percent increase in military expenditures from last year. This clearly leaves little money for health and education. With 28 percent of the funds reserved for servicing foreign debt, nearly 60 percent of the budget is taken up by that and defense. The entire development pool of $9.2 billion is provided by foreign donors.

Pakistan needs financial aid desperately. Europe is extremely hostile to further bailouts of the country because it is well aware that the military is still spending more money arming itself against India than it is spending to fight the Taliban. On a recent trip to the European Union in Brussels, Prime Minister Gilani was sharply taken to task for his failure to provide good governance and greater transparency on how aid dollars are being utilized.

It is to the credit of the current U.S. administration that it sees and understands that progress is being made, and is providing both financial aid and political support to deepen these changes. For the first time, under the Kerry-Lugar bill, there is U.S. aid that is specifically earmarked for civilian rebuilding rather than military spending.

However, no real change is possible without a change taking place in the army’s obsessive mind-set regarding India, its determination to define and control national security, and its pursuit of an aggressive forward policy in the region rather than first fixing things at home.

It is insufficient for the army to merely acknowledge that its past pursuit of foreign-policy goals through extremist proxies has proven so destructive; it is also necessary for the army to agree to a civilian-led peace process with India. Civilians must have a greater say in what constitutes national security. Until that happens, the army’s focus on the threat from New Delhi prevents it from truly acknowledging the problems it faces from extremism at home.

The army’s track record shows that it cannot offer political or economic solutions for Pakistan. Indeed, the history of military regimes here shows that they only deepen economic and political problems, widen the social, ethnic and class divide, and alienate the country from international investment and aid.

Today there is much greater awareness among the Pakistani people that extremism poses a severe threat to the country and their livelihoods. There is also a much greater acceptance that ultimately civilian rule is better than military or mullah dictatorship. What is still lacking in the war against extremism, however, is a consistent and powerful message from both the government and the army that they will combat all terrorists—not just those who threaten their security. Pakistan’s selective approach to extremism has to end before it can defeat the problem and move on to become what its founders originally intended it to be.

———-

This article originally appeared in The National Interest

Tags: Afghanistan, Ahmadis, asif ali zardari, Bajaur, baluchistan, civil society, FATA, gilani, habib jalib, Hamid Karzai, ISI, Islam, Khyber, Kurram, Lashkar e Taiba, Mohmand, mqm, NATO, North Waziristan, NWFP, Orakzai, Pak army, Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, PML (N), PPP, punjab, South Asia, south waziristan, Taliban, Terrorism

Posted in Blog, India, News | 794 Comments »

By Wajid Ali Syed

A very loose translation of an Indian phrase is, “a tail of a dog always stays bent.” I don’t think anyone ever experienced this first hand, but some witnessed the true meanings of the phrase last night when Pakistan’s ex-military dictator General Musharraf held a meeting with his fans.

The General and his clique of Chosen Ones called this gathering the ‘Friends of Pakistan First’. Now who the heck knows what this name means but with this, Musharraf tried to present himself as this self-taught historian, who read a book yesterday and now fancies himself an expert. Much like newly-minted Fox News “historian” Glenn Beck, (more…)

Tags: Democracy, double game, General Musharraf, marshal law, Pakistan, Pakistan Army, Pervez Musharraf, political parties, senators

Posted in Blog | 783 Comments »

By Najam Sethi

On initial appearances, the first high-level bilateral talks between India and Pakistan since November 2008 weren’t a success. When the two foreign secretaries convened in New Delhi on Feb. 25, at times it was as if they were at different meetings. The Indians tried to focus on terrorism sponsored from within Pakistan, while the Pakistanis wanted a broader dialogue. In the end, there was no noteworthy result. But appearances in this case are deceiving. This meeting is likely to prove more successful than many expect.

That’s because interests on both sides are at last correctly aligned to give talks a shot at success. For India, it has been a matter of reaching several conclusions at the same time. First, New Delhi has failed to browbeat Islamabad into steps like cracking down on Lashkar-e-Taiba, the terrorist group responsible for the Nov. 2008 Mumbai attacks. Indian saber rattling alone hasn’t done the trick, just as in 2002 when India’s armed forces tried but failed to intimidate Pakistan into halting the flow of jihadis into the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir.

At the same time, the United States has been pressing New Delhi to reduce tensions along the Pakistani border. (more…)

Tags: Afghanistan, Asif Zardari, Bilateral Talks, Featured, Hillary Clinton, ISI, Islamabad, jihadis, Manmohan Singh, Military establishment, Mumbai Attacks, Nawaz Sharif, New Delhi, Pak-India Relations, pakistan india talks, Pakistan Update, Pervez Musharraf, SAARC, Taliban, Terrorism, USA

Posted in Blog, India, News | 803 Comments »

By Raza Rumi

Many decades ago, our Governor General-President Iskander Mirza had rather contemptuously stated that democracy does not suit the genius of Pakistani people. Immediately after these words of wisdom were uttered, direct military rule not only exiled Mirza but also became a norm rather than aberration. For the last six decades or so we have not been able to overcome this political reality. The unelected institutions of the state are not willing to give up the power they inherited from the might of the colonial state. At best, they are willing to share power to a degree that they deem fit.

It is now clear that within a few months Pakistan is due for another political upheaval. Barely two years after an election took place, the political elites are back in business (more…)

Tags: Asif Zardari, Democracy, Dictatorship, Judiciary, Kerry Lugar Bill, Martial Law, Nawaz Sharif, NRO, Pervez Musharraf, PML (N), PPP, Ziaul Haq

Posted in Blog | 403 Comments »