Afghan Journal

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Winning the battle, losing the war; the US and Pakistan

When former foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi said this weekend that Pakistan's nuclear weapons are not safe under President Asif Ali Zardari, he almost certainly did not mean that the nuclear arsenal is not secure. The nuclear weapons have little to do with the civilian government; they are guarded ferociously by the Pakistan Army both against terrorist attacks and any foreign or U.S. attempt to seize them, and, as a matter of pride for Pakistanis chafing at any American suggestions otherwise,  safeguarded to international standards.

Rather it was a rhetorical device to attack the government at a rally where Qureshi announced he was joining the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) , the party of former cricket star Imran Khan, a rising force in Pakistani politics.  Qureshi's assertion tapped into growing anti-Americanism, and a populist view that the  civilian government led by the Pakistan People's Party, to which he once belonged, had somehow sold the country's honour - in this case symbolised by nuclear weapons - in return for American aid.  (Pakistan first agreed its uneasy alliance with the United States under former military ruler Pervez Musharraf.)

Yet it is a measure of how distorted and narrow political discourse has become within Pakistan that Qureshi might use the safety of nuclear weapons to attack the government. That political discourse, difficult even at the best of times, is likely to become even narrower in the fury which has followed the NATO airstrikes which killed 24 Pakistani soldiers on the border with Afghanistan on Saturday. 

The attack, which Pakistan says was unprovoked and NATO described as a "tragic, unintended incident", has outraged Pakistanis who have already endured thousands of casualties in a war they believe was forced on them by the United States.

Underneath the confusion about the aims and course of the Afghan war, lies a deep sense of hurt that Pakistani lives are somehow less valued than American lives, and a painful loss of pride over the country's inability to defend its territory from attacks by a foreign, and apparently hostile, power - whether from airstrikes, drones, or even the May raid by U.S. forces who killed Osama bin Laden.

The result is a society which is being shaped by the Afghan war in ways which neither Pakistan's neighbours, nor western powers, would choose.  The airstrikes, coming soon after the forced resignation of Pakistan's ambassador to Washington Husain Haqqani for allegedly seeking American help to curb the power of the military, have added fresh oxygen to a combustible mix of anti-Americanism and religious nationalism enveloping Pakistan.  Haqqani denies the allegation, but the so-called "Memogate" scandal has badly weakened the civilian government, while the airstrikes have rallied the country behind the army.

In such an environment, there is little room for a discourse that might suggest Pakistanis should also be outraged at the deaths of civilians blown up by suicide bombers sent by the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), and therefore discuss ways to turn decisively against Islamist militants. Nor is there space for a realistic political debate on how Pakistan should manage its foreign relations that goes beyond a hatred of America and an illusory faith in China's readiness to ride to the rescue. 

Sidestepping cursed number “39″ at the Afghan jirga

                                                                  By Mirwaiz Harooni and Hamid Shalizi Afghanistan’s trouble with the number “39″, which has come to acquire a negative connotation, cropped up again at this week’s loya  jirga or  traditional assembly called to discuss the country’s proposed strategic partnership with the United States.  Some 2,000 delegates are attending the assembly and 40 committees were formed to separately deliberate the agreement that is expected to spell out the terms of a long term U.S. military presence in the country. Each committee is known by the number it was set up and so when it came to committee number 39, its members baulked.  “As the members were unwilling to work on committee 39, the best solution was to form committee 41,”  said Safia Sediqqi, the loya jirga spokeswoman. No one is quite sure why the number has become so contaminated, but is widely seen as an unlikely synonym for pimp and a mark of shame in the deeply conservative country.  Kabul gossip blames it on a pimp in neighbouring Iran  who had a flashy car with a 39 in its number plate. So he was nicknamed “39″ and the tag spread, the story goes. Earlier this summer, the country’s booming car sales industry was thrown into chaos with people refusing to buy any vehicle with that number.

Shooting from the hip : Pakistan and the U.S. election season

It’s rarely a nice thing for a foreign country to figure high in a U.S. presidential election campaign. If it is China, it is more likely to be about currency and trade disputes with Beijing, and how each of the candidates was going to tackle it than any bouquets. Or if it is Iran, you can be sure there would be some shooting from the hip as each candidate seeks to outbid the other in trying to convince voters he or she means business with the perceived threat from that country’s nuclear programme.

And so if you were a Pakistani, last weekend’s Republican presidential debate would be just as worrisome even though you know this is election season and candidates are given to competitive sabre rattling. The country was mentioned 55 times in the debate in South Carolina, notes Sadanand Dhume in a piece on The Enterprise blog. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, the leading candidate, said Pakistan was nearly a failed state with multiple centres of power  including  a weak civilian leadership and a powerful military.

 Texas governor Rick Perry suggested cutting U.S. aid to Pakistan to zero because it was putting American lives in jeopardy and the Newt Gingrich   pulled few punches either, criticising the country for hosting Osama bin Laden “for at least six years in a military city within a mile of their national defence university.”

Another candidate couldn’t decide whether Pakistan was an enemy or a friend, which itself is quite telling in the way the country where Osama bin Laden was found living in relative comfort ten years after the Sept 11 attacks is perceived in America. Quite a far cry from the time President George W. Bush had trouble recalling the name of Pakistan’s military ruler Pervez Musharaf during his election campaign.  But that was before the attacks in New York and Washington and from then on the focus turned to Afghanistan where bin Laden was initially holed up and to Pakistan later.

A lot of the tough-talk has to be seen as part of the election season as we said before, but equally its hard to dismiss the statements altogether  because any one of these candidates could be the next commander-in-chief of the world’s most powerful military.  Even more so, you have to consider the impact of the steadily escalating campaign rhetoric on the incumbent administration.  Its clearly harder for President Barack Obama to strike a conciliatory note with regard to Pakistan, even if the situation arises, in such an atmosphere when his opponents are turning up the heat.  Some people are already seeing it insofar as China is concerned, attributing Obama’s exhortations last weekend that it should behave as a grown-up economy to political posturing aimed at weary voters.

Candidates are only reflecting what they think are voter concerns and if the polls are any indication they are reading the mood right. A recent Rasmussen poll found that 40 percent of Americans consider Pakistan to be America’s enemy, according to Pakistan’s ambassador Hussain Haqqani. 

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Capturing the Punjabi imagination: drones and “the noble savage”

Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid may have captured something rather interesting in his short story published this month by  The Guardian.   And it is not as obvious as it looks.

In "Terminator: Attack of the Drone", Hamid imagines life in Pakistan's tribal areas bordering Afghanistan under constant attack from U.S. drone bombings.  His narrator is one of two boys who go out one night to try to attack a drone.

 "The machines are huntin' tonight," the narrator says.  "There ain't many of us left. Humans I mean. Most people who could do already escaped. Or tried to escape anyways. I don't know what happened to 'em. But we couldn't. Ma lost her leg to a landmine and can't walk. Sometimes she gets outside the cabin with a stick. Mostly she stays in and crawls. The girls do the work. I'm the man now.

"Pa's gone. The machines got him. I didn't see it happen but my uncle came back for me. Took me to see Pa gettin' buried in the ground. There wasn't anythin' of Pa I could see that let me know it was Pa. When the machines get you there ain't much left. Just gristle mixed with rocks, covered in dust."

It is powerful stuff, told in the language of a black American slave in the style of Toni Morrison's "Beloved".  It vividly captures the terror inspired by drones, and the helplessness of the people who live in the tribal areas. But is it true? And does it matter?

In a discussion on Twitter, literary critic Faiza S. Khan, who tweets @BhopalHouse, argued that the story should be judged as a work of fiction rather than taken as reportage. A fair point. But what if we turn this around and consider the story as reportage, not of the tribal areas and the drones, but of the way these are imagined in Pakistan's Punjabi heartland? As a writer who spends part of his time in Lahore, capital of Punjab, Hamid can be considered representative of at least part of that Punjabi imagination.

We will return to the short story later, but first step back a bit and consider that the narrative gaining traction, at least in urban Punjab, is that the people of the tribal areas have been radicalised by American drone attacks.  Pakistan's rising political star, Imran Khan,  attracted tens of thousands to a rally in Lahore last month with a version of this narrative. Stop the drones, and the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), or Pakistani Taliban, can be engaged in peace talks to end a wave of bombings across Pakistan. 

India-Afghan strategic pact:the beginnings of regional integration

A strategic partnership agreement between India and Afghanistan would ordinarily have evoked howls of protest from Pakistan which has long regarded its western neighbour as part of its sphere of influence.  Islamabad has, in the past, made no secret of its displeasure at India’s role in Afghanistan including  a$2 billion aid effort that has won it goodwill among the Afghan  people, but which Pakistan sees as New Delhi’s way to expand influence. 

Instead the reaction to the pact signed last month during President Hamid Karzai’s visit to New Delhi, the first Kabul had done with any country, was decidedly muted. Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani  said India and Afghanistan were “both sovereign countries and they have the right to do whatever they want to.”  The Pakistani foreign office echoed Gilani’s comments, adding only that regional stability should be preserved. It cried off further comment, saying it was studying the pact.

It continued to hold discussions, meanwhile, on the grant of the Most Favoured Nation to India as part of moves to normalise ties. Late last month the cabinet cleared the MFN, 15 years after New Delhi accorded Pakistan the same status so that the two could conduct trade like nations do around the world, even those with differences.

And on Thursday, Gilani met Indian counterpart Manmohan Singh on the margins of a regional summit in the Maldives and the two promised a new chapter in ties, saying the next round of talks between officials as part of an engagement on a range of issues will produce results. Afghanistan or the pact, was scarcely mentioned in public, although it is quite conceivable that the two would have talked about it.

Is there a shift in the ground, in both India and Pakistan ?  Pakistan is battling multiple  crises, including ties with the United States that at the moment certainly look worse than those with India. It is also struggling to tackle a melange of militant groups that have metastasized into a mortal danger for the Pakistani state itself and a deep economic downturn that a nation of 180 million people can ill-afford at this time. While it continues to invest time and energy in Afghanistan, a large part of the war has come home too and it is struggling to enforce its writ on its side of the Pasthun-dominated lands that straddle the two countries. A lessening of tensions with India can only help at this point.

India, meanwhile, has shot out of the blocks building a trillion-dollar economy  that dwarfs everyone else’s in the region, not just in size but also growth rates even if  it is slowing down now. It still has a long way to go to meet the aspirations of a billion plus people and realise its own potential, though. It needs peace within and on the borders and it needs closer economic ties with  all its neighbours.  Its economic stakes are rising across the region including Afghanistan where Indian firms, along with the Chinese who preceded them, are the only ones prepared to risk blood and treasure to exploit its mineral resources. Conversely if a pomegranate farmer in southern Afghanistan- the Taliban heartland – wants to sell his produce to the booming Indian market,  New Delhi wants to do whatever it can to try and make that possible.

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

She came, she saw, she confounded: Clinton in Pakistan

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's recently concluded visit to Pakistan has left us none the wiser about how the United States and its allies will end the  Afghan war. In her public comments, she spoke of action "over the next days and weeks – not months and years, but days and weeks".  She promised the United States would tackle Taliban militants in eastern Afghanistan in response to a long-standing Pakistani complaint that Washington had neglected the region when  it decided to concentrate its forces in population centres in southern Afghanistan in 2010 (remember "government in a box"?).

She called, in return, for cooperation on the Pakistani side of the border to "squeeze these terrorists so that they cannot attack and kill any Pakistani, any Afghan, any American, or anyone."  Between the two countries, they would tackle the Afghan Taliban, the Haqqani network and the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), or Pakistani Taliban.

But squeeze them to what end?  To weaken all but the hard-core leadership of the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network so that they agree to lay down arms and rejoin the political process in Afghanistan? Or to entice them into serious negotiations through which they might be offered a share of power in Kabul, or accommodated in a "soft partition" of Afghanistan (an idea deeply unpopular among Afghans) which leaves them in control of the south and the east?

As Pakistani columnist Ejaz Haider wrote in Pakistan Today just before Clinton arrived, the current U.S. policy looks a bit like the dialogue between Alice and the Cheshire Cat. "‘Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?’ asked Alice. ‘That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,’ said the Cat. ‘I don’t much care where—’ said Alice. ‘Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,’ said the Cat."

True, Clinton stressed the need for a peace process to reach a political settlement in Afghanistan.  But that idea has been on the diplomatic agenda  for nearly two years. By the second half of last year, we were hearing that the United States had endorsed talkswith all of Afghanistan's main insurgent groups, including the Haqqani network. By January this year, western countries said there would be no preconditions set for insurgents entering peace talks - only end-conditions that they sever ties with al Qaeda, renounce violence and agree to respect the Afghan constitution. In February, Clinton stressed the need for negotiations in a landmark speech to the Asia Society which coincided with reports the United States had begun direct talks with the Taliban.

In other words, we have heard a lot about talk about talks without any explanation as to why these have achieved so little so far (some blame U.S. military strategy, others Pakistani interference, others Taliban intransigence, others poor Afghan governance).   And the danger is that as long as these talks about talks continue without  yielding results, all parties to the Afghan conflict arm themselves up in readiness for an escalating civil war.

True,  Clinton admitted in public during her visit to Islamabad that the United States had held a preliminary meeting with representatives of the Haqqani network. But we already knew that.    According to The Washington Post, U.S. officials met Ibrahim Haqqani, the brother of the group’s patriarch, Jalaluddin Haqqani, in a Gulf kingdom in August. The meeting was arranged by the head of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, Lieutenant General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, who also attended, it reported.

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Trusting the masses: US tiptoes into democracy in Pakistan

In his book "Where the Wild Frontiers Are: Pakistan and the American Imagination", an edited collection of his Chapati Mystery blog, historian Manan Ahmed complained about the United States' past support for former president Pervez Musharraf, and its refusal, at the time to trust Pakistan with democracy.  In an entry written in 2007, he described Pakistan as the "the not yet nation" - a country for which democracy might be a good thing in the long run, but  was in American eyes not yet ready.

"We fear the multitudes on two fronts. One is that we conceive of them as masses without politics – forever hostage to gross religious and ideological provocations. Masses which do not constitute a body politic or act with an interest in self-preservation or self-growth. Faced with that absence of reason, we are forced to support native royals to do the job (from Egypt to Pakistan). We justify it by stressing that we may not like these dictators but we know that if we did not have them, the masses would instantly betray us to the very forces of extremism that we seek to destroy," he wrote.

"Second is that these masses are Muslim. This fear grounded in our history can, at best, be understood as the fear of the “Other” and, at worst, as the Lewis/Huntington model of civilizational clash. Either case, it is borne out of our inherent belief in 'difference'. They are not like us. They do not possess reason, etc."

That U.S. attitude has been changing slowly over the past few years, underpinned by the Arab spring, and in the case of Pakistan, Washington's increasingly difficult relationship with the Pakistan Army over its alleged support for, or tolerance of, Islamist militants based in Pakistan. 

Democracy has become the new mantra, expressed most recently by former White House adviser Bruce Riedel in an op-ed in the New York Times.

"America needs a new policy for dealing with Pakistan. First, we must recognize that the two countries’ strategic interests are in conflict, not harmony, and will remain that way as long as Pakistan’s army controls Pakistan’s strategic policies. We must contain the Pakistani Army’s ambitions until real civilian rule returns and Pakistanis set a new direction for their foreign policy," he said.

Somewhat more diplomatically, President Barack Obama made a point of saying that the United States' argument was  not with the people of Pakistan but with the army's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), agency.

The Taliban in Afghanistan’s once impregnable Panjshir Valley

Last month driving up Afghanistan’s magnificent Panjshir valley, you couldn’t help thinking if the resurgent Taliban would ever be able to break its defences, both natural and from the Tajik-dominated populace. With its jagged cliffs and plunging valleys, Panjshir has been largely out of bounds  for the  Taliban, whether during the civil war or in the past 10 years when it has expanded a deadly insurgency against western and Afghan forces across the country. But on Saturday, the insurgents struck, carrying out a suicide bombing at a provincial reconstruction team base housing U.S. and Afghan troops and officials.

They were halted outside the base, but according to the provincial deputy governor they succeeded in  killing two civilians and wounding two guards when they detonated their explosives. The Taliban claimed responsibility, saying the first suicide bombing in a decade was a message to Western forces that they were not secure anywhere in the country. They said the  bombers came from within Panjshir, which if true  would worry people even more  because that would suggest the penetration was deeper and there could be more attacks.

The Long War Journal’s Bill Roggio wrote that the bombing was a propaganda coup for the Taliban. Panjshir is the home of the legendary Northern Alliance commander Ahmad Shah Massoud who was assassinated by two days before the Sept 11, 2001 attacks. Under Massoud’s leadership the Panjshir Valley held out against not only against the Taliban, but famously the Soviet before them.

All along the drive by the side of the rushing Panjshir river on way to Massoud’s hilltop mausoleum, the relics of the war against the Russians have been preserved : rusted tanks on roadsides and an overturned  armoured personnel carrier in the river. There were giant Massoud posters everywhere and because it was the anniversary of his assassination at the hands of a pair of men who pretended to be journalists, the ceremonial gates to the valley were draped in black.

And yet there were concerns even then . Security was tight at each of the gates on the narrow and winding highway through the tall mountains, and the Afghan police who stood guard said if Panjshir had been spared the kind of attacks the Taliban had mounted in the rest of Afghanistan,  it wasn’t for lack of trying . They had already carried out attacks in neighbouring Nuristan province and according to a local Afghan police commander responsible for security at one of the checkpoints, American helicopters had been spotted in the area a few days before the anniversary, firing rockets over a hilltop. It wasn’t clear who they were targeting, the commander said.

Even the proud Panjshiris were worrying about the expanding Taliban influence, especially concerned at the time about government attempts to seek reconciliation with them.  One Afghan elder who lost his son in the war against Russians said his village was fully armed to fight  the Taliban.  There was no way they were going to accept the Taliban in the Panjshir, he told me.

Pakistan and Afghanistan, spoiling for a full-blown fight ?

With a series of spectacular attacks over the past few months, first in the provinces and then in the Afghan capital Kabul, the Talban have captured attention and even prompted comparisons with the Viet Cong’s Tet offensive. But they are not the only ones attacking Afghanistan, according to The Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI). It lists a series of attacks from early this year to build the case that Pakistan has joined the Taliban in what it called a “military invasion of Afghanistan”, driving another nail in the faltering U.S. effort in the country.

Beginning from the February bombardment of Afghan  border police posts in Nangarhar and Khost provinces in eastern Afghanistan by Pakistani planes to the firing of hundreds of rockets last month in Kunar and Nuristan, Pakistani forces have stepped up cross border action, MEMRI  said in a report.  It quoted Afghan officials  as saying the artillery and missile strikes backed by air intrusions were an “act of intrusion.”

 By August there had been 50 incidents of border violation by Pakistani forces, Afghan border police commander Aminullah Amarkhel said. He also made the startling claim that  Pakistani forces had established 16 checkpoints inside the territory of Afghanistan in the east, taken control of some parts and even offered offered citizenship to the local tribes. He said there was proof that Pakistan provided Pakistani citizenship cards to Afghans in the eastern border towns, particularly in Kunar and Nuristan provinces.

It’s hard to tell what is going on in the remote and rugged area straddling the two countries. Pakistan says it has legitimate security concerns with many of the militant groups fighting the state operating from sanctuaries just over the border in Afghanistan.  With foreign forces stretched and focused largely on securing the Afghan south, the eastern region was left largely uncovered, allowing militant groups to reconstitute themselves.  Indeed there is growing concern that some militant groups may have shifted their base from Pakistan’s Waziristan strongholds to provinces such as Kunar.

Pakistan has in recent months faced down attacks from groups of up to 400 militants crossing the border from Afghanistan. On Sunday, Pakistani soldiers killed 30 Afghan militants who had crossed the border to attack the Pakistani army, it said. One Pakistani soldier was killed and four were wounded in the latest frontier incident, which lasted close to an hour when  some 200 militants launched the attack. The Pakistani army says that with the Afghans and the foreign forces unable to crack down  on militant nests in the east, it risks losing the hard-fought gains made against them in offensives over the past few years on its side of the border.

Whatever the claims and the counter-claims,  what is indisputable is that ties between the two countries are rapidly deteriorating.  Tension has been high since Afghan officials accused Pakistan’s main intelligence agency of masterminding the September 20 assassination of Kabul’s chief peace negotiator with the Taliban. Pakistan strongly denied the allegations.

from Photographers Blog:

38 days and 10 years in Afghanistan

By Erik de Castro

As I write this blog, I am on the 38th day of my current assignment to Afghanistan as an embedded journalist with U.S. military forces. I have been assigned here several times since 2001 to cover the war that is still going on 10 years after the al Qaeda attack on U.S. soil. Mullah Omar, popularly known as the one-eyed Taliban, was the first member of the Taliban I met back in 2001. He held press conferences almost daily at the Afghan embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan a few weeks before U.S. forces and its allies attacked Afghanistan to remove the Taliban government.

Ten years and several trips back to Afghanistan later, I still haven't seen a lot of Taliban fighters. My present assignment is the time I’ve experienced the most encounters between the combined U.S. and Afghan forces and the Taliban.

It is remarkable how the Afghan soldiers and Taliban fighters are more aggressive now. The insurgents, though they know their artillery is no match to that of the Americans, are daring enough to attack at every opportunity, be it with small arms, RPGs or, on occasions, IEDs and rockets. Most of the time, it is a “hit and run” kind of attack wherein they flee after firing some shots. Such eagerness, however, could cost lives.