Afghan Journal

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.

Pakistan’s journalists won’t be silenced

The killing of an Islamabad-based Pakistani journalist  ,who went missing a few days ago, has triggered an outpouring of grief and anger.   Pakistani journalists and activists are demanding answers for the murder of Saleem Shahzad, who Human Rights Watch said, told them before he was abducted that he was under threat from the Inter-Services Intelligence, the powerful spy agency.

Shahzad, a reporter for the Asia Times and the Italian news agency Adnkronos International, wrote on security/intelligence issues,  often delving deep into the dangerous world of Islamist militancy . The last story he wrote for the Asia Times  two days before  he was abducted, suggested that a militant attack on the navy’s main base in Karachi on May 22 was carried out because the navy was trying to crack down on cells from Al Qaeda that had infiltrated the force. 

The 16-hour raid on the Mehran base in which the militants destroyed two U.S. supplied surveillance aircraft deep inside the base and killed 10 military personnel has embarrassed the military, coming days after the U.S. operation to take out Osama bin Laden in a garrison town not far from the nation’s capital, without the apparent knowledge of the miitary. The naval raid also raised questions of complicity of base  personnel in helping the militants mount the attack, putting the military further in a spot.

Pakistan’s journalists have been unwavering in their questioning and often withering criticism of the military, more so after the bin Laden raid than at any other time in the recent past. On Tuesday as news of Shahzad’s murder filtered through, sending a chill through anyone connected with the profession , the journalists on the frontlines showed little signs of intimidation. Here’s an editorial from The Daily Times that minces few words :

This should also serve as an eye-opener for those who have been apologising for the military and the Taliban alike. How many more innocents have to die before we realise that our country is a war zone where no one is safe from either our so-called saviours or the terrorists. Mr Shahzad and many others like him paid the price for reporting the truth. We must stop blaming external forces for what we are facing right now. In a country where terrorists, murderers, rapists and criminals roam free, deaths of innocents are all but inevitable. How many more people will have to sacrifice their lives before we finally call a spade a spade? Pakistan is in a deep mess right now and it is all our own doing. Let’s wake up to this reality before our soil turns completely red (if it has not already) with the blood of our citizens. RIP Saleem Shahzad; we cannot condemn or mourn your death adequately in words. Our only salvation now lies in bringing Mr Shahzad’s murderers to book.

The Guardian quoted Pakistan talk show host Quatrina Husain as saying : “We want an answer. We need an answer. We deserve an answer.”  Others directly blamed the spy agencies. Author Mohammad  Hanif tweeted : Any journalist here who doesn’t believe that it’s our intelligence agencies ?”

An official of the ISI was reported to have said that allegations of the agency’s involvement in Shahzad’s killing were absurd.

Stirring the hornet’s nest in Pakistan’s northwest

The United States has a set of expectations  that it wants Pakistan’s government to meet, Secretary of State of  Hillary Clinton said ahead of her short trip to Islamabad  last week, the kind of language Washington has frequently employed to bring its conflicted partner in the war against militant Islam to heel, each time  there has been a crisis. Clinton didn’t elaborate, saying only at the end of her meetings in Islamabad that she expected Pakistan to take decisive steps in the days ahead.

But on Monday, Pakistan’s The News reported that the military was preparing to launch an air and ground offensive against militants in North Waziristan, a demand that the United States has repeatedly made over the last two years. It said the decision was taken during discussions that Clinton and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of State Admiral Mike Mullen had with Pakistani government and military leaders.

North Waziristan is a redoubt of the Haqqani network, the most powerful of the insurgent groups in eastern Afghanistan and in and around Kabul where it has carried out a wave of bombings against civilians as well as foreign forces. Pakistan has held off going into the forbidding mountains saying it needed to consolidate its operations in southern Waziristan following the offensive there in 2009.

But in the wake of the international opprobrium Pakistan’s military has come under following the killing of Osama bin Laden deep inside Pakistan, its space for manouevre has become less.  The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month U.S. officials as saying  they hoped to use Islamabad’s embarrassment over failing to find bin Laden—he was killed in a house a short distance from the country’s elite military academy—to press for tougher Pakistani action against the Haqqanis and other militant groups that are focused on attacking U.S. forces in neighboring Afghanistan.

It puts the Pakistani military in a spot , as has happened so often since it reluctantly joined the U.S.-led war on al  Qaeda and the Taliban following the Sept 11, 2001 attacks. The Haqqanis are long seen as a  prized asset  of  the Inter-Services Intelligence, the Pakistani spy agency, beginning from the 1980s when it along with the CIA – ironically-  funded them to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Jalaluddin Haqqani, the family patriarch, acquired legendary status among supporters for his exploits against the Red Army.  Like the Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Punjabi group focused on fighting Indian forces in Kashmir and elsewhere in India, the Haqqanis have never carried out an attack on Pakistani soil.

An offensive against them in their Waziristan base carries the risk of a backlash that the Pakistani military is already facing from other militant groups it once nurtured like the members of the Pakistani Taliban. They turned against the state following the army’s operation to clean up the Red Mosque in Islamabad, and today, the Pakistan Taliban are at the forefront of the campaign against the military, claiming responsibility for some of the biggest attacks including the daring raid on the Karachi naval base attack last week to avenge bin Laden’s death.

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

The “sound and fury” of U.S.-Pakistan ties

With the release of CIA contractor Raymond Davis, the United States and Pakistan have put behind them one of the more public rows of their up-and-down relationship.  It was probably not the worst row -- remember the furore over a raid by U.S. ground troops in Angor Adda in Waziristan in 2008, itself preceded  by a deluge of leaks to the U.S. media about the alleged duplicity of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency in its dealings on Afghanistan.

But it was certainly one which by its very nature was guaranteed to get the most attention - an American who shot dead two Pakistanis in what he said was an act of self-defence, denied diplomatic immunity and ultimately released only after the payment of blood money. Adding to the drama were two intelligence agencies battling behind the scenes.

It was also the first serious row since the Obama administration began to build what it promised would be a new strategic relationship with Pakistan.

As I wrote earlier this month, overall relations between the United States and Pakistan were rather better than they looked (or at least than they appeared at the height of the Davis row).  Compared to two years ago, Pakistan is more likely to talk now about the need for stability in Afghanistan than strategic depth (the extent of this shift is open to debate). The United States has also moved closer towards meeting Pakistan's calls for a political settlement in Afghanistan by holding direct talks with representatives of the Taliban, according to several official sources with knowledge of those contacts.

On the subject of Taliban talks, the New York Times noted that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, during a speech to the Asia Society last month, "appeared to recast longstanding preconditions for talks: that the insurgents lay down their arms, accept the Afghan Constitution and separate from Al Qaeda. Instead, she described them as 'necessary outcomes'. "

According to the NYT, "officially, the State Department played down the change in language, but a senior Western diplomat in Washington, who was familiar with the strategy behind Mrs. Clinton’s speech, said: 'It was not intentional to explicitly make preconditions into outcomes. But the text now leaves room for interpretation, which opens doors.'”

The other half of that story is to look at who first suggested that the United States focus on outcomes rather than preconditions for talks  -- Pakistan Army chief General Ashfaq Kayani, who wrote a detailed letter to President Barack Obama last year outlining how he saw the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Ahead of Lisbon, soul-searching in Pakistan

For all of former Pakistan President General Pervez Musharraf’s faults, the one thing you would have to give him credit for is the emergence of a free press. It’s every bit as fearless, and questioning as its counterpart across the border in India, sometimes even stepping over the line, as some complain.

Indeed east of the Suez, and perhaps all the way to Japan, it would be hard to find a media that is as unrestrained as in India and Pakistan, which is even more remarkable in the case of Pakistan given the threat posed by a deadly militancy.

And so in the run-up to the Lisbon summit where NATO leaders will decide, among other things, the way forward in Afghanistan, a few Pakistanis have spoken forcefully. They touch upon Pakistan’s role as a conflicted ally in the war there and the extreme danger that the state itself  faces now because of its refusal, or inability to break ranks with militant organisations. More striking, they challenge some long-held beliefs relating to India and Pakistan, in ways you would think was unthinkable.

One of them is an influential Pakistani newspaper editor, who according to Arnaud de Borchgrave in a piece carried by the Atlantic Council, has just made the rounds of Washington, delivering a stunning indictment of some of the players involved in the Afghan conflict.  He can’t be named and his comments were off-the-record, but meant for public use, Borchgrave says.

He has listed some of them, and I can do no better than sum them up here, given they speak so directly to the issues at the heart of a troubled region.

-  All four wars between India and Pakistan (1947, 1965, 1971 and 1999) were provoked by Pakistan.

WikiLeaks: shaking the foundations of U.S. policy toward Pakistan

A Pakistani security official stands near a burning vehicle after it was attacked in Chaman in Pakistan’s Balochistan province, along the Afghan border on May 19, 2010.

On the face of it, you could ask what’s new about the latest disclosures of Pakistani involvement in the Taliban insurgency while accepting massive U.S. aid to fight Islamic militancy of all hues. Hasn’t this been known all along — something that a succession of top U.S. officials and military leaders have often said, sometimes  couched in diplomatic speech and sometimes rather clearly?

It was only last week that U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said there must be somebody in the Pakistani government who knew Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts. Coming from America’s top diplomat, it couldn’t be more blunt.

Then why is a trove of over 90,000 classified military documents released by WikiLeaks on the war in Afghanistan causing so much consternation? Leslie H. Gelb, president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, says  it is now much more difficult to deny or dodge the truths that everyone has been aware of:

Government officials can always deflect news stories simply by crossing their fingers and waiting for the story to sink in a haze of oil spills and Lindsay Lohan extravaganzas. Now, however, “proof” is there in the black-and-white of secret U.S. documents, compliments of anti-war WikiLeaks. Even if one does not believe that the information contained in every one of these reports is accurate (some do sound rather bizarre), and even if little in the reports can be corroborated independently, the very volume of the “secret” material is overwhelming and plausible—and yes, seductively “secret.”

The White House condemned the leak, saying it could threaten national security and endanger the lives of Americans. Islamabad said leaking unprocessed reports from the battlefield was irresponsible and added that Pakistan had paid in blood fighting militants.

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

New report accuses Pakistan’s ISI of backing Afghan insurgents

According to a new report published by the London School of Economics, Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency not only funds and trains Taliban fighters in Afghanistan but is officially represented on the movement's leadership council, giving it significant influence over operations.

The ISI has long been accused of backing the Taliban - an accusation Pakistan denies, saying this would make no sense when it is already fighting a bloody campaign against Islamist militants at home. But the report is worth reading for its wealth of detail on the perceptions held by Taliban commanders interviewed in the field. You can see the Reuters story on the report here and the full document (pdf) here.

The report, based on interviews with Taliban commanders, former senior Taliban ministers and Western and Afghan security officials, says research strongly suggested support for the Taliban was the "official policy" of the ISI. "Pakistan appears to be playing a double-game of astonishing magnitude," it says.  Interviews with Taliban commanders "suggest that Pakistan continues to give extensive support to the insurgency in terms of funding, munitions and supplies."

"These accounts were corroborated by former Taliban ministers, a Western analyst and a senior U.N. official based in Kabul, who said the Taliban largely depend on funding from the ISI and groups in Gulf countries," the report, which was dismissed by Pakistani officials as spurious and unfounded, says.

Almost all of the Taliban commanders interviewed in the report believed the ISI was represented on the Quetta Shura, the Taliban's supreme leadership council which Washington says is based in Pakistan. "Interviews strongly suggest that the ISI has representatives on the (Quetta) Shura, either as participants or observers, and the agency is thus involved at the highest level of the movement."

"Pakistan’s apparent involvement in a double-game of this scale could have major geopolitical implications and could even provoke US counter-measures. However, the powerful role of the ISI, and parts of the Pakistani military, suggests that progress against the Afghan insurgency, or towards political engagement, requires their support. The only sure way to secure such cooperation is to address the fundamental causes of Pakistan’s insecurity, especially its latent and enduring conflict with India," it says.

As discussed many times on this blog, most recently here, Pakistan is unlikely to act decisively against the Afghan Taliban without reassurances of a scaling back of India's presence in Afghanistan.  It may have some ability to convince Afghan Taliban leaders to join peace talks by leaning on those who are based in Pakistan, or whose families live there, as and when it judges the timing is right.