Afghan Journal
Lifting the veil on conflict, culture and politics
from Pakistan: Now or Never?:
Solving Afghanistan and Pakistan over a cup of tea
I have never read "Three Cups of Tea", Greg Mortenson's book about building schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan. I tried to read the sequel, "Stones into Schools" and gave up not too long after the point where he said that, "the solution to every problem ... begins with drinking tea." Having drunk tea in many parts of South Asia - sweet tea, salt tea, butter tea, tea that comes with the impossible-to-remove-with-dignity thick skin of milk tea - I can confidently say that statement does not reflect reality.
So I have always been a bit puzzled that the Americans took Mortenson's books so much to heart. Yes, I knew he boasted that his books had become required reading for American officers posted to Afghanistan; and yes, there is the glowing praise from Admiral Mike Mullen on the cover of "Stones into Schools", where he wrote that "he's shaping the very future of a region". But I had always believed, or wanted to believe, that at the back of everyone's minds they realised that saccharine sentimentality was no substitute for serious analysis. Just as hope is not a strategy, drinking tea is not a policy. (To be fair to the Americans, I have also overheard a British officer extolling the virtues of drinking tea in Afghanistan.)
As a result of my scepticism on the miracle powers of tea-drinking, I find I am learning an awful lot more about the thinking of the U.S. administration than I ever did from Mortenson from the fall-out from the allegations of inaccuracies in his books. (Mortenson rejects these allegations in a statement on the website of his Central Asia Institute charity.)
Take for example the detailed account by Jon Krakauer (pdf) charting not only inaccuracies but also alleged irregularities in the finances of the Central Asia Institute. In his opening paragraph, Krakauer notes that President Barack Obama donated $100,000 of the award money from his own Nobel Peace Prize, which he received in 2009, to the Central Asia Institute. I had not known about the Obama connection until I read advance stories on Krakauer's piece.
During his presidential election campaign, Obama made Afghanistan and Pakistan his foreign policy priority. So you might expect that he would have had foreign policy advisers who would have questioned the wisdom of associating publicly with one man. After all, it was quite clear -- whatever you think about the rights and wrongs of Montenson's philanthropy -- that the narrative used to describe his schools in Baltistan as a bulwark against the Taliban and Islamist militants was a bit awry.
I have only been to Baltistan once, on a brief trip organised by the Pakistan Army to visit the Siachen region, the world's highest battlefield, where Indian and Pakistani troops have faced off against each other since 1984. Yet even under the watchful gaze of my army minder, a group of Balti intellectuals who I met in the regional capital Skardu were able to tell me (over several cups of tea) that they felt neglected by Islamabad and excluded from power in Pakistan. Baltistan is part of the former kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir, divided between India and Pakistan, and because of its disputed status, the people there have never been integrated into Pakistan and nor have they been given voting rights.
The political and security issues in Baltistan are related to the rivalry between India and Pakistan, to the dispute over Kashmir, and to the electoral dispossession of a people who have been frozen in time since the partition of the subcontinent since 1947. They are nothing to do with the Taliban, militant Islam, or the war in Afghanistan. That should have been easy enough to find out - have U.S. diplomats never been to Baltistan? Indeed even without going there, the information was available for free on the Internet. Why did nobody ask any questions?
from Pakistan: Now or Never?:
From Afghanistan to Libya; rethinking the role of the military
In a report this month calling for faster progress on a political settlement on Afghanistan, the influential UK parliamentary foreign affairs committee was unusually critical of the dominance of the military in setting Afghan policy.
"We conclude that there are grounds for concern over the relationship between the military and politicians. We further conclude that this relationship has, over a number of years, gone awry and needs to be re-calibrated ... we believe that problems in Afghanistan highlight the need for a corresponding cultural shift within Whitehall to ensure that those charged with taking foreign policy decisions and providing vitally important political leadership are able to question and appraise military advice with appropriate vigour," it said.
During its enquiries, based on interviews with regional experts and officials, "we gained the impression that the sheer size and power of the U.S. military ensured that the U.S. military remained largely in control of U.S. Afghan policy," it added.
It also quoted former UK special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, as saying that conversations between the U.S. and British military “end up with things being pre-cooked between the U.S. and the UK militaries before they are subject to political approval back in London ..."
"In Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles’s view, the war in Afghanistan gave the British Army a raison d’être it has lacked for many years, new resources on an unprecedented scale and a chance to redeem itself in the eyes of the U.S. following criticisms about the army’s performance in Basra, Iraq."
The comments in the report struck me as interesting, primarily because they were included at all -- "civ-mil" relations are not usually a hot topic for political debate in Britain. Otherwise they seemed to be largely a reflection of a far more heated discussion in Washington over the extent to which the U.S. military has come to dominate American foreign policy in the years following the Sept 11, 2001 attacks and during two major wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For recent articles on the subject see Stephen Walt at Foreign Policy or Franz-Stefan Gady at the Small Wars Journal (pdf)
For some time now, it has become conventional wisdom that the military has dominated strategy in Afghanistan -- when the army asked President Barack Obama for more troops, they got them. And the pundit consensus has been that Obama, after sacking two generals, had little room for manoeuvre even if he wanted to challenge the decisions made by his commander, the politically powerful General David Petraeus.
Umair,
You have a limited perception of democracy in Pakistan! Pakistan Democracy has time and again faled to give dignity to the people of Pakistan. Pakistan military were more sensitive to dignity, but also failed after taking the civilian Govt. task of administeration and development of the Nation. Today Pakistan is no different than it was half a century before and the state of limbo has dragged on. India is its enemy No.1, with full diplomatic relations, and the the Americans are there to help maintain the military and provide weaponry, but in real time Pakistan military has never admitted defeat at the hands of Indian miliary, though unconditional surrender is a historical document, no different from the surrender of the Third Reich. Shame on today’s Generals who are visiting Washington and calling on Colin Powel who threatend Musharaf Din the stone age. The General of Ayub’s calibre, who was the first to remove the civilian head and took over the reins of the Govt. could never have stooped down so low that today’s Pakistan has even lost the meaning of the word ‘DIGNITY’. Nor would the military continue to support clandastine operations against India and the Pashtoon Nation, almost half of them live in todays Pakistan and the other half in Afghanistan. Pakistan Govt. today is as unpopular in Afghanistan as it used to be in sixties! What Pakistan needs is the direct democracy for the people, so that legislations are made with people’s participation and not military participation. Pakistan military should be confined to barracks outside the cities.
That Pakistan future still hangs in the middle of Sardari and sharif Bros on one side and the military on the other side which is equivalent to a permanent Babylonian prison.
Rex Minor
from Pakistan: Now or Never?:
On either side of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border: Bajaur and Kunar
What is going on in Kunar and Bajaur, two neighbouring regions on either side of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border?
NPR has a view from the Afghan side in this piece written from the perspective of U.S. troops fighting in Kunar. (h/t The Captain's Journal) Key takeaways are the level of mistrust about the Pakistanis, driven by the suspicion its military is supporting the Taliban, and the presence of a massive but newly abandoned CIA post there.
First the mistrust. According to NPR, American officials acknowledge that the Pakistan Army had made significant gains in fighting the Taliban in Bajaur but still wanted them to do more to stop militants crossing over into Kunar. "Elements of the Taliban and al-Qaida are believed to cross the border at this point from safe havens inside Pakistan."
Yet having been to Bajaur in April, I have heard the same complaint from the Pakistani commander on the other side. In his view, the Americans need to do more to stop militants from using Kunar as a base from which to attack Pakistan. (The Pakistanis still seem to be making the same complaint, judging by this article in the Boston Globe.)
The two conflicting views give an interesting insight into how the narrative of mistrust in Kunar and Bajaur -- a microcosm of the strains in the wider U.S.-Pakistan relationship -- is constructed. In particular, you can see how distrust between Pakistanis and Americans is magnified by the mutual suspicion of Afghans and Pakistanis.
Look at this detail in the NPR story, presented under a bold-type sub-heading reading "Taliban in Their Midst?"
The Americans are invited to lunch by the Pakistanis. "The long lunch ends when the Pakistani colonel is called away, and the Americans walk back up the hill. Full bellies, heavy flak jackets, and the altitude at 7,000 feet have everyone moving a bit slowly, but then they get some information from their interpreter that makes them walk a little faster. The interpreter tells the soldiers that some of the Pakistani commander's men are spies for the Taliban. 'So he suggests we get out of here quickly,' a soldier tells (Captain Thomas) Billig," the NPR reports.
Rex Minor: ” Slowly but gradually the Pashtoons would calm down and go about looking after the orchids, agriculture and fruits export business, leaving their klashnikovs in their homes, the words of the President of Afghanistan, not mine.”
You forgot opium. That gets the most money now-a-days in the glorious land of the Pashtuns.
from Pakistan: Now or Never?:
“Orientalism” in Afghanistan and Pakistan
In his must-read essay on the debate about the state of the U.S.-Pakistan relationship, Amil Khan has one of the best opening lines I've seen for a while: "Much is said about Pakistan, but I'm constantly saddened that so many innocent pixels are lost without good cause."
Much the same can be said about the recent flurry of stories on the war in Afghanistan, from upbeat assessments of the U.S.-led military offensive in Kandahar to renewed interest in the prospects for a peace deal with Afghan insurgents.
There is a shade of "Orientalism" in all this, a modern-day equivalent of Edward Said's 1978 argument that the collective understanding of the Middle East, South Asia and Islam was skewed by the vested interests of European colonial powers.
Scroll forward to the 21st century and we have the United States keen to end a war that is increasingly unpopular at home, with a president who has committed to starting to bring home troops by July 2011. That framework would be best suited by military success in Afghanistan, peace talks which would begin to show fruit by - let's choose a random date, July 2011 - and a willingness by Pakistan to stick to the U.S. timetable when it comes to tackling militants on its own territory.
Hence the "received wisdom" in the media - or perhaps more precisely, the consensus you would find if you averaged out all the stories on Google News - tends to fit neatly into that framework.
The problem is that just as Said complained the "Orientalist" world view distorted the facts to suit European interests, the current U.S.-inspired narrative tends to overlook the very real people and countries which get in the way of its own deadlines.
Start with Afghanistan. We have heard from non-U.S. sources that all insurgent groups are engaged in tentative "talks about talks" to try to agree the ground rules under which all Afghan factions could be brought together into "reconciliation" talks. The United States and NATO have meanwhile been talking up a separate effort to win over individual insurgent fighters or commanders through "reintegration".
from Pakistan: Now or Never?:
Pakistan – a list too long
Pakistani journalist Mosharraf Zaidi had a good post up last week attempting to frame the many different challenges Pakistan faces in trying to deal with terrorism. Definitely worth a read as a counter-balance to the vague "do more" mantra, and as a reminder of how little serious public debate there is out there about the exact nature of the threat posed to a nuclear-armed country of some 180 million people, whose collapse would destabilise the entire region and beyond.
Zaidi has divided the challenges into counter-insurgency, counter-terrorism and counter-extremism.
Counter-insurgency is focused on targeting militants holed up in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) on the border with Afghanistan, with attention directed most recently on U.S. pressure to tackle militant hideouts in North Waziristan. Pakistan has resisted U.S. pressure to move faster in launching military operations in North Waziristan, in part because it says it needs time to consolidate gains made elsewhere in FATA -- itself possible only if adequate governance can be introduced into areas cleared by the army.
"Thus far, Pakistan has fought the insurgency in FATA and earlier, last year, in Swat, using two instruments: negotiation, and conventional military warfare, including ground troops and aerial strikes. This is not how you fight an insurgency. That is how you fight India. To use a hackneyed and tired metaphor in Islamabad, you can’t keep using a jack hammer to try and kill agile, determined and poisonous flies. The approach to the FATA insurgency is all wrong," writes Zaidi.
Counter-terrorism covers action to prevent attacks across Pakistan including in its heartland Punjab province. "Repeated and sustained terrorist attacks in Pakistan suggest that the terrorist enterprise in Pakistan enjoys freedom of movement, freedom of procurement, freedom of training, freedom of information and communication, and, quite disturbingly, freedom from the course of law," he says.
"The third challenge is an obvious and unchallenged problem of religious extremism. The epicentre of religious extremism is the institution of the political articulation of faith in Pakistan. This means that physically there is no epicentre here. Religious extremism is a national problem, transcending demographics, class and ethnicity. Of the three problems, religious extremism is the one that has been around the longest, the one that has the deepest roots in Pakistani culture, the one that has enjoyed the patronage of the state, the one that has the demonstrated ability to undermine linear and rational public policy, and the one that will – because of all the aforesaid factors, take the longest to unpack and resolve."
Zaidi's framework is a strong one to use when trying to understand what is going on in Pakistan.
Rex Minor,
A meaningful and intelligent discussion with you is obviously impossible – flogging a dead horse. Period.
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Afghan Journal Expert
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If I recall, it was said that Mr. Obama falsified his own autobiography. That said, he is perhaps appreciative of the value of lies in promoting a cause.
In war, truth is the first casualty.