Afghan Journal

from The Great Debate:

America’s trouble with Islam

Of the many posters held aloft in angry demonstrations about plans for an Islamic cultural centre and mosque in New York, one in particular is worth noting: "All I ever need to know about Islam, I learned on 9/11."

As an example of wilful ignorance, it's in a class by itself. It passes judgment, in just 12 words, about a sprawling universe of 1.3 billion adherents of Islam (in 57 countries around the world) who come from different cultures, speak a wide variety of languages, follow different customs, hold different nationalities and believe in different interpretations of their faith, just like Christians or Jews. Suicidal murderers are a destructive but tiny minority.

But for the people waving all-I-ever-need-to-know posters in front of national television cameras two blocks from "ground zero," site of the biggest mass murder in American history, Islam equals terrorism. No need for nuance, no need for learning, no need for building bridges between the faiths. The mindset epitomized by the slogan mirrors the radical fringe of Islamic thought, equally doubt-free and self-righteous.

Both sides have data to back up their assertions. The Islam-equals-terrorism school of thought can point to 3,000 victims of the attacks on New York's World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Those who preach that the U.S. is waging war on Islam itself, and terror acts are therefore a form of self-defence, can argue that Christian soldiers have been killing Muslims through history, from the Crusades to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The "ground zero mosque" affair began with a dispute over the center's proximity to the hole where the Twin Towers once stood. Too close to hallowed ground, argue opponents, including family members of people who died in the attack. The question of location morphed into a national debate on religious tolerance and prompted demonstrations against planned mosques more than a thousand miles from New York.

Does all this add up to a rising wave of anti-Muslim bigotry? Or is it more of the same, with the volume turned higher in advance of mid-term elections? There are no hard data to answer that question and it is worth looking back a few years at polls on American attitudes towards Muslims. In 2006, a Gallup survey found that 39 percent favoured rules requiring Muslims, including U.S. citizens, to carry special identification to better spot potential terrorists.

Callers to a Washington radio show host who followed up on the ID issue suggested identifying Muslims with a crescent-shaped tattoo on their foreheads, stamps on their driving licenses, passports and birth certificates, or special armbands.

The exaggerated role of violent groups in Pakistan’s relief effort

Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari has once again spoken of the danger of hardline Islamists exploiting the misery of the flood-affected to promote their cause,  which must be cause for worry for security forces in not just Pakistan but over the border in Afghanistan as well, fed by the same  militant fervour. Zardari called it the ” ideal hope of the radical” that the floods would discredit Pakistan’s government and warned that some of these extremist groups aimed to scoop up orphaned children and  “create them into robots.”

Such fears, though,  didn’t stop Zardari from proceeding on a heavily criticised foreign tour just as the flooding was getting worse, even though that was exactly the sort of thing that would  fuel public anger and hand the initiative to the Islamist groups.

But quite apart from Zardari’s fulminations, the question, nearly a month into the disaster is whether the Islamists charities linked to  militant groups have really made a difference to the lives of the millions hit by the floods.  Setting up a tent here, offering food and medicines at another place are all good, but they would seem like a drop in the ocean, literally, given the scale of the devastation Pakistan is confronted with.

If Pakistan’s army, one of the few institutions in the country seen as effective, is struggling to reach aid to the people despite the assets at its command, it’s difficult to see how the Jamaat-ud Dawa, a front  of the Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group, can supplant the state in providing assistance in a sustained manner and over such a vast stretch of territory.

On Wednesday, the head of the United States Agency for International Aid, Rajiv Shah, toured a camp which had received supplies from the Falah-e-Insaniyat, which is the  name the banned Jamaat is using to operate in the flood areas. U.S. officials said the camp was not run by the Falah e-Insaniyat but the charity had independently distributed relief supplies a few days ago.

The effect the Islamist charities may have on the overall relief effort is overstated, America’s NPR quoted Vali Nasr, a senior adviser to the U.S. Special Envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke, as saying.  The groups face the same problem of logistics as the government or other aid organisations face, and the militants don’t have the means to solve it on any significant scale. “They basically set up a tent and take pictures, but they can’t get meaningful amounts of food and supplies to the disaster areas.”

Saving women’s rights in a post-war Afghanistan

                                                        By Andrew Hammond

There have been worrying signs in Kabul over the past week  that political and social gains made by women since the Taliban  were removed from power in 2001 are at best tenuous.

 ”Normalising” the country’s profile after the extremes of  five years of Taliban rule has been one main justifications for  continuing the Western military mission in Afghanistan, and of  Hamid Karzai’s government.

Karzai’s interim cabinet after 2001 included a female  vice-president and there were three female ministers after his election in 2004.  Next month’s parliamentary polls maintain a  quota to ensure at least 25 percent of Walesi Jirga seats are  filled by women.

The state has also done away with the austere version of  Islamic law applied by the Taliban and its fixed sharia punishments for crimes such as adultery. Women are not barred  from education or the workplace or no longer need cover up  completely in public.

Social freedoms, specifically those of women, have played a  central role in Western arguments justifying a military operation  dubbed by insurgents as an occupation by Crusaders

from Tales from the Trail:

Karzai appeals to U.S. taxpayers

Afghan President Hamid Karzai is taking a page from the playbook of American politicians campaigning for public office: talk to the taxpayers.

Karzai is on a campaign to give the boot to tens of thousands of foreign private security guards working in Afghanistan. He's already put the U.S. government on notice that the private security firms operating in his country will be disbanded within four months.

On Sunday, the Afghan leader took his case directly to the American people.

"I am appealing to the U.S. taxpayer not to allow their hard-earned money to be wasted on groups that are not only providing lots of inconveniences to the Afghan people but actually are, God knows, in contact with Mafia-like groups and perhaps also funding militants and insurgents and terrorists through those funds," Karzai said on in an ABC "This Week" interview.

Karzai said the relatively high pay that foreign security firms offer is keeping Afghans from joining the police and security forces.

"Why would an Afghan young man come to the police if he can get a job in a security firm, have a lot of leeway and without any discipline?" Karzai said.

The private security firms should be banned because "they trample our people's rights and disrupt security," Karzai said in a speech earlier this month.

India, Pakistan can’t break the ice, even in hour of tragedy

Pakistan’s catastrophic flood continues to boggle the mind, both in terms of the human tragedy and the damage it has inflicted on a fragile, unstable country.  One official has likened the disaster to the cyclone that devastated what was once East Pakistan, setting off a chain of events that eventually led to its secession and the birth of Bangladesh.

Not even that spectre, raised by Pakistan’s ambassador to Britain, can however dent the steadfast hostility between India and Pakistan.   For a full three weeks as the floods  worked their way  through the spine of Pakistan from the turbulent northwest to Sindh in the south, Islamabad made frantic appeals to the international community not  to ignore the slow-moving disaster,  and instead help it with emergency aid, funds. But next-door India, best-placed to mount  a relief effort probably more because of the geography than any special skill at emergency relief, was kept at arm’s length. An Indian aid offer of $5 million, which itself came after some hesitation and is at best modest,was lying on the table for days before Pakistan accepted it.   ”There are a lot of sensitivities between India and Pakistan … but we are considering it very seriously,” a Pakistani embassy spokesman told our reporter in New Delhi earlier this week.  Things appeared to have moved faster only after Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh called his Pakistani counterpart Yusuf Raza Gilani expressing sympathy and reminding him of the offer of aid. Millions of Pakistans meanwhile continued to struggle for food.

To some extent, Pakistan’s hesitation in accepting aid from India is understandable. India is the traditional enemy. It is also the bigger country of the two. And over the last two decades it has become easily the more prosperous entity, courted by the world’s industrialists while Pakistan is “haunted by the world’s terrorists”, as columnist Vir Sanghvi writes in the Hindustan Times.   A Pew poll that we wrote about a few weeks ago showed how deep-seated these Pakistani fears are:  a majority of those polled said they considered India to be the bigger threat than al Qaeda or the Taliban, despite the violence they have suffered at the hands of the militant groups over the past few years.

As Sanghvi writes:

But, to be fair to the Pakistanis, let us accept the position that decades of hostility between our two countries have led to a situation where the Pakistanis simply do not trust us. Let us also accept that they are so resentful of India that even in their hour of greatest crisis when thousands of people have died and millions are homeless, they will still spurn India’s hand of friendship. And let us grant them their claim that given our history, they are justified in being suspicious of India.

With Pakistan on the ropes, the fight against extremism just got harder

Pakistan’s army has said it won’t be diverting forces from the fight against Islamist militants while it helps deal with the country’s worst floods  in 80 years . Troops who were on training have been called back to lead the flood relief effort, leaving those  deployed on the Afghan front to continue operations against militants, the army said.

But with the floods devastating the trunk of Pakistan running from the northwest to Sind, through the growthengine of Punjab, disrupting the lives of an estimated 20 million people - which is 12 percent of the population – and delivering a serious blow to an already enfeebled economy, it’s hard to imagine that there won’t be any impact on the deadly, costly battle to win back ground from the extremists, bothinside Pakistan and Afghanistan.  It is hard enough for any nation to fight a war such as the one Pakistan is engaged in, willingly or otherwise, against an enemy that it once nurtured.  But to be at war when a third of the land  is affected by the most devastating floods yet,  crops worth a $1 billion are damaged in a country in a country where agriculture is the mainstay  and popular anger is  running high, calls for nerves of steel. And all this when it is already on a $11.3 billion IMF bailout programme whose stringent conditions Pakistan was struggling to meet even before the floods struck.

Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani, underscored the scale of the disaster, calling it a challenge similar to the one that marked the birth of Pakistan when the bloody partition of the subcontinent in 1947 led to the flight of an estimated 10 million people, perhaps the greatest migration in human history. 

Noted Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid said all of Pakistan’s four wars with India, including the 1999 faceoff in Kargil, did not cause the kind of damage that the floods have unleashed. The disaster, he  wrote in the Daily Telegraph,  presents an unparalleled national security challenge for the country, the region and the international community.

It has become clear this week that, unless major aid is forthcoming immediately and international diplomatic effort is applied to improving Pakistan’s relations with India, social and ethnic tensions will rise and there will be food riots. Large parts of the country that are now cut off will be taken over by the Pakistani Taliban and affiliated extremist groups, and governance will collapse. The risk is that Pakistan will become what many have long predicted – a failed state with nuclear weapons, although we are a long way off from that.

from FaithWorld:

VIDEO: Roundup of Ramadan starting in Turkey, Asia, Afghanistan

Below is a Reuters video roundup of the start of Ramadan in Turkey, Malaysia, Indonesia, China and Afghanistan:

Follow FaithWorld on Twitter at RTRFaithWorld

Resurgent Taliban target women and children

Civilian casualties in the worsening war in Afghanistan are up just over 30 percent in the current year,  the United Nations said in a mid-year report this week, holding the Taliban responsible for three-quarters of the deaths or injuries.

More worrying, women and children seem to be taking the brunt of the violence directed by a resurgent Taliban, which will only stoke more concern about the wisdom of seeking reconciliation with the hardline Islamist group.

Indeed the Taliban have been blamed for a series of horrific assaults on women in recent weeks,  which must be distasteful to even those pushing for a deal with them as a way to end the nine-year conflict.

A 48-year-old widow was given dozens of lashes in public and then executed for alleged adultery by the insurgents in the northwestern Badghis province on Sunday, according to a Reuters report, citing a provincial police officer.  This came hard on the heels of a Time magazine cover picture of an 18-year-old woman allegedly disfigured by the Taliban for trying to flee abuse by her husband.

The UN report, documenting attacks on women and children, makes for equally grim reading. It said that in the first six months of this year, 55 percent more children were killed or wounded by the Taliban and other anti-government groups than in the same period in 2009. The number of women killed or wounded by the Taliban and other insurgents increased by six percent. Here is a PDF of the report.

It’s not just accidental deaths that we are talking of here, or people getting caught in the middle of crossfire between soldiers and insurgents.  These were targeted killings, especially in the case of children, often suspected of  spying for the government. Here are three cases listed in the report :

The Islamists and the Great Flood of Pakistan

Pakistan’s floods are now considered to be more damaging than the massive earthquake that devastated its part of Kashmir in 2005, not least because of the inability of the administration to respond quickly to the crisis.  Pakistan is not alone in the region ill-prepared  to cope with natural disasters. Bigger, richer India is just as unable to either eliminate or limit the destruction that its bountiful rivers unleash each monsoon, and you hear the same chorus of criticism of government apathy. Bangladesh, too, gets more than its share of cyclones and floods each season, and yet successive governments are overwhelmed each time disaster strikes.

But the one difference in Pakistan is that Islamist charities, some believed linked to militant groups, are ready to step into the breach. And that is worrying a lot of people, as the flood waters sweep over Khyber-Pakhtoonkhwa, the province in northwest Pakistan which has been the main battleground in the fight against militants, down to the heartland province of Punjab and into Sindh.

The concerns centre on Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the charity arm of the Lashkar-e-Taiba, the  banned Pakistani militant group blamed for the 2008 attacks on Mumbai in which 166 people were killed. The Jamaat, which was banned by the U.N. Security Council last December, is working with Fatah-i-Insani Foundation, which is also suspectedof links to extremists, setting up relief camps and sending medical camps to the flooded northwest. It had also organised medical ambulances for emergency treatment, survivors said.

While foreign and government officials debate the security risks from venturing into the troubled northwest, the Islamists groups have penetrated even remote villages with ease, they said. As our correspondents report, they may not bring huge resources to bear, but they establish a presence in the affected areas, often setting up a canvas awning beside a road, with a banner appealing for donations and table covered with bottles and jars of basic medicine. At one village near the swollen Indus in Punjab province, our reporters saw workers of the Jamaat preparing food in huge pots over a smoky fire while four burqa-clad women sat at a charity medical post.

The New York Times said a brigade of 4,000 volunteers from Islamist groups was on the ground in Nowshera  to rebuild homes in villages far too dangerous for foreign aid workers to enter.

Is the Jamaat about to pull off another publicity coup  building on from its success in 2005 when it moved quickly to deliver aid to survivors of the Kashmir earthquake ? The  group then  had the most efficient response teams on the ground, and boasted the most functional and well-stocked relief camps. Its mobile X-ray machines and operating theaters made international headlines. Through their clever use of mobile technology, the group’s volunteers established an unparalleled communications infrastructure that facilitated relief work. The government and army, meanwhile, fumbled in early relief and reconstruction efforts, as charges of corruption in the distribution of aid and resources were rampant. For ordinary Pakistanis, the Jamaat had stepped in where others had failed, and they gave their full backing.

But this is also the group whose armed wing, the Lashkar-e-Taiba,  is accused of mass casualty attacks in Mumbai, and increasingly seen as a top threat to the West.  Brookings scholar Bruce Riedel wrote last month said that it was time Pakistan came clean on the Lashkar and its patrons in the Pakistani security establishment. “There is no excuse for not executing a  more robust crack down on Lashkar e Tayyiba and its front organizations from the Pakistani government and for not conducting a thorough house cleaning within the Pakistani army.” The truth about Mumbai and the future of the Lashkar was a ticking time bomb that could wreck the U.S.-Pakistan partnership, he warned.

Is the West losing the Afghan War?

PAKISTANI President Asif Ali Zardari’s bleak assessment that the international community is losing the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan created ripples this week, but it is perhaps better seen as a riposte to Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron questioning Islamabad’s willingness to choke  support for Afghan Taliban insurgents.

Cameron’s barb came last week after leaked U.S. military documents said former and current intelligence officers in Pakistan were for years collaborating with the Taliban, who are intensifying bloody attacks against President Hamid Karzai’s government and around 150,000 foreign troops.

“I believe that the international community, which Pakistan belongs to, is in the process of losing the war against the Taliban,” Zardari said. “And that is, above all, because we have lost the battle for hearts and minds.”

Whatever Zardari’s motives may have been, if one looks closely at events in Afghanistan since U.S.-led and Afghan forces overthrew the Taliban in 2001, you would likely agree with him.

Zardari said what Afghan officials have felt privately for a long time. Former spy chief Amrullah Saleh, who Karzai sacked in June over security lapses, spoke after his departure about the president’s lack of confidence in Western forces winning the war.

Despite bristling with technology and spending billions of dollars, coalition leader the United States not only hasn’t been able to defeat the Taliban, but insurgents are now reaching areas once thought secure.  A New Zealand soldier was killed in an ambush on Tuesday in Bamiyan province, in the central highlands, marking the country’s first combat death in an area regarded as the Afghanistan’s safest region.

Last week, there was a deadly attack on a road leading to the province, which is a popular tourist destination lying on the ancient Silk Route.