Global News Journal

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Keeping Raymond Davis and Lashkar-e-Taiba in perspective

According to the New York Times, Raymond Davis, the CIA contractor arrested in Pakistan for shooting dead two Pakistanis in what he says was an act of self-defence, was working with a CIA team monitoring the Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group.

The article, by Washington-based Mark Mazzetti, was not the first to make this assertion. The NYT itself had already raised it, while Christine Fair made a similar point in her piece for The AfPak Channel last week (with the intriguing detail that "though the ISI knew of the operation, the agency certainly would not have approved of it.")

But it was the first article I've seen which focused almost exclusively on U.S. anxieties about the Lashkar-e-Taiba -- blamed for the 2008 attack on Mumbai -- while also linking these explicitly to the furore over the Raymond Davis case:

"The CIA team Mr. Davis worked with, according to American officials, had among its assignments the task of secretly gathering intelligence about Lashkar-e-Taiba, the militant 'Army of the Pure'. Pakistan’s security establishment has nurtured Lashkar for years as a proxy force to attack targets and enemies in India and in the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir. These and other American officials, all of whom spoke only on condition of anonymity, are now convinced that Lashkar is no longer satisfied being the shadowy foot soldiers in Pakistan’s simmering border conflict with India. It goals have broadened, these officials say, and Lashkar is committed to a campaign of jihad against the United States and Europe, and against American troops in Afghanistan."

My first reaction to this was that it was not particularly new - we already knew the Americans were worried about the Lashkar-e-Taiba. My follow-up comment is that there is a danger of conflating the very specific row over Raymond Davis with longer-term arguments over the militant group. The two are not one and the same, even though they may overlap. And while rationally everyone knows this, politically such conflation is important, since it feeds all too often into a "pundit consensus" made up of emotion and impression.

 So here is a summary of my understanding of the history of the U.S. view of the Lashkar-e-Taiba based on conversations with officials and analysts (and on which, for fear of falling into pundit consensus traps myself, I am happy to be challenged.)

The United States, much to India's annoyance, was initially reluctant to take on all militant groups in Pakistan, focusing primarily on seeking Islamabad/Rawalpindi's help on tackling al Qaeda following the Sept. 11 attacks.  Yet, according to counter-terrorism experts, in adopting this stance Washington had failed to understand the way in which militant groups had changed in the 1990s from those with vertical hierarchies and clear agendas into a much more polymorphous, overlapping and horizontal movement. Among those who stressed this new development was former French investigating magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguiere, who complained that even after 9/11.  the Pakistan Army was still running training camps for the Lashkar-e-Taiba with the full knowledge of the CIA.

UNsensational? Five more years of Ban Ki-moon

It’s hard to find a delegate to the United Nations who despises U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. But it’s even harder to find someone who thinks he has the gravitas and charisma of his Nobel Peace Prize-winning predecessor Kofi Annan, who invoked the wrath of the previous U.S. administration when he called the 2003 invasion of Iraq “illegal.” As one senior Western official, who declined to be identified, said about Ban: “It’s not as if he’s lightning in a bottle, but we can live with him.”

The former South Korean foreign minister is in the final year of his first five-year term and is widely expected to run for another stint as the supreme U.N. official. The formal re-election process is likely to commence in the coming months. In the meantime, Ban is visiting the capitals of key U.N. member states to gauge his chances of keeping his job. Those chances, U.N. diplomats say, are excellent. So far, no country has nominated any candidate to oppose him. “I’d put my money on Ban Ki-moon getting a second term,” said a Security Council diplomat.

The 15-nation Security Council nominates the secretary-general, though the choice has to be confirmed by the 192-nation General Assembly. Despite the veneer of democracy, it is the five veto-wielding permanent council members — Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States — who choose the top U.N. bureaucrat in New York. And none of the five has any serious objections to a second and final term for Ban, diplomats say.

Some people say that running the United Nations is the toughest job on earth. With little real power, he spends his time mediating and negotiating behind closed doors, getting blamed for member states’ failures and receiving no credit for his off-camera successes. National lobbyists push and pull him in all directions. The five permanent Security Council members, known as the “P5″, regularly insist that he acquiesce to their demands, often pressuring him to reserve a healthy portion of top U.N. jobs for their nationals or preferential treatment for themselves or their allies. Journalists harangue the secretary-general to disclose the details of sensitive negotiations, which he usually tries to keep secret under the label of “quiet diplomacy.” Human rights groups routinely skewer him for not being tough enough on the rulers of despotic countries, which are, after all, member states like all the others and don’t take kindly to criticism.

Ban has been no exception. He has been publicly clobbered for not congratulating jailed Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo for winning the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize or raising his detention with President Hu Jintao during a recent visit to China. He was hung out to dry for not being tough enough on Sri Lanka’s government and Sudanese President Omar Hassan al-Bashir, who was indicted by the International Criminal Court for genocide in Sudan’s western Darfur region. Arab and other delegations from the developing world accuse Ban of being a U.S. lackey, noting how often his statements on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and other issues echo those of the U.S. State Department or White House.

As much as Ban has sought to please his P5 kingmakers, he has managed to run afoul of each of them in the past. In 2008 Russia accused him of siding with the United States, France and Britain in supporting the secession of Kosovo from Serbia, which Moscow fiercely opposed. U.N. officials said at the time that Russia even threatened to block his second term over Kosovo (Ban made it up to them later). Both China and Russia complained that Ban had voiced public support for Egyptian demonstrators calling for the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, who resigned last week. The United States, Britain and France were annoyed with Ban in 2009 for departing from past practice and not referring to the Georgian breakaway region of Abkhazia as part of Georgia. The Georgian ambassador accused Ban of succumbing to pressure from Russia, which fought a brief war against the former Soviet republic of Georgia in 2008. Ban denied the charge.

Ban’s unwavering stance against Ivory Coast’s incumbent leader Laurent Gbagbo, who refused to recognize U.N. certified election results from November 2010 that say he lost to rival Alassane Ouattara, surprised many U.N. watchers who are more accustomed to seeing him sitting on the fence on tough issues. Philippe Bolopion of Human Rights Watch, who has been one of the secretary-general’s toughest critics, welcomed Ban’s “swift and unequivocal reaction” to Gbagbo, who ordered U.N. peacekeepers out of the world’s top cocoa producer. So far the secretary-general has refused to withdraw his blue helmets and the deadlock continues.

from FaithWorld:

Will Pew Muslim birth rate study finally silence the “Eurabia” claim?

(Photo: Muslims who could not fit into a small Paris mosque pray in the street, a practice the French far-right has compared to the Nazi occupation, December 17, 2010/Charles Platiau)

One of the most wrong-headed arguments in the debate about Muslims in Europe is the shrill "Eurabia" claim that high birth rates and immigration will make Muslims the majority on the continent within a few decades. Based on sleight-of-hand statistics, this scaremongering (as The Economist called it back in 2006) paints a picture of a triumphant Islam dominating a Europe that has lost its Christian roots and is blind to its looming cultural demise.

The Egyptian-born British writer Bat Ye'or popularised the term with her 2005 book "Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis" and this argument has become the background music to much exaggerated talk about Muslims in Europe. Some examples from recent weeks can be found here, here and here.

A good example is the video "Muslim Demographics," an anonymous diatribe on YouTube that has racked up 12,680,220 views since being posted in March 2009. Among its many dramatic but unsupported claims are that France would become an "Islamic republic" by 2048 since the average French woman had 1.8 children while French Muslim women had 8.1 children -- a wildly exaggerated number that it made no serious effort to document. It also predicted that Germany would turn into a "Muslim state" by 2050 and that "in only 15 years" the Dutch population would be half Muslim. "Some studies show that, at Islam's current rate of growth, in five to seven years, it will be the dominant religion of the world," the video declares as it urges viewers to "share the Gospel message in a changing world."

The BBC produced its own video entitled "Welcome to Eurabia?" that gave a point-by-point rebuttal of the video's claims. Watching "Muslim Demographics" and "Welcome to Eurabia?" back-to-back provides a useful lesson in the dark art of twisting statistics. The image at left, shows a fictional flag of "Eurabia" created by Oren Neu Dag.

Articles defending the "Eurabia" claim have often been so shrill that they essentially discredited themselves as serious arguments. But it could be difficult to find a solid statistics that gave an overall view of what was actually happening. The Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life has stepped up with an impressive study entitled "The Future of the Global Muslim Population" (here's the press release, report and graphics here). As we summarised it in our report Muslim birth rate falls, slower population growth:

Quadriplegic in an age of austerity

Every time I write a story on European countries cutting public spending, I feel a frisson of panic. I can’t help but fear my health, lifestyle and liberty could be a casualty of the “age of austerity”.

On assignment covering the Sri Lankan civil war for Reuters four years ago, I broke my neck in a minibus smash. It left me quadriplegic, almost entirely paralysed from the shoulders down and totally dependent on 24 hour care. I was 25.

Nine months later, in a wheelchair, using voice recognition software and supported by government-funded personal assistants, I got back to work in Reuters London headquarters the day after leaving hospital. Now political risk correspondent for Europe, the Middle East and Africa, I write about the interplay of politics and markets. For the past year and a half, much of that has been the drive to cut government spending as Europe rebalances its books.

That hasn’t done my personal mental health any good at all. I even had my doctor tweak my medication to make sure worry didn’t produce a gastric ulcer.

Britain’s new coalition government intends to cut more than many countries, some 25 percent over five years. Some details will emerge in an Oct. 20 spending review, but I may have to wait until the end of the financial year for details on how that will affect my care and that of others.

In many respects, I have already been very lucky. Stringent UK employment law meant it was hard to pension me off just because of my disability. Improvements in voice recognition software meant I could still write at roughly the same speed as before – crucial to continuing work as a newswire journalist.

Most important of all, decades of growth in Britain’s social welfare system meant that – after a substantial struggle – enough state funding was available to look after me in my own home.

from Tales from the Trail:

Special Relationship? How quickly they forget….

So much for "Hilly-Milly".

Just last year U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gushed to Vogue magazine about  former British Foreign Secretary David Miliband,  calling the young diplomat a dashing addition to the international scene.

"Well, if you saw him it would be a big crush. I mean, he is so vibrant, vital, attractive, smart. He's really a good guy. And he's so young!" Clinton said in remarks that provoked a spate of joking British tabloid headlines about the new "special relationship" between the United States and Britain.

Well, absence doesn't appear to have made the heart grow any fonder. Asked on Wednesday if she had any advice for Miliband following his decision to bow out of frontline politics after losing a Labour Party leadership contest to his younger brother, Clinton was brief.

"I have no advice for anyone in politics. I'm out of politics. I obviously wish him well and I am very intrigued by the interesting political dynamics that are occuring inside the United Kingdom," Clinton said, before launching into a positive assessment of the state of relations with Britain's current government.

Asked again if she had any farewell words for Miliband, Clinton finally managed a few: "I enjoyed working with him and wish him well."

It was left to visiting German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle to sum up Miliband's exit from the international diplomatic round robin, where new faces appear in the wake of every big election.

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

A Pakistani Abroad: Zardari’s ill-fated trip to England

President Asif Ali Zardari's trip to Britain was particularly ill-fated. When he first planned a visit which should have culminated in him bringing his son, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, out into the political arena, no one could have predicted such a bewildering series of crises. A row with Britain over remarks made in India by  British Prime Minister David Cameron that Pakistan must not "look both ways" in its approach to Islamist militants. Pakistan's worst floods in 80 years.  A  plane crash, and then riots in Karachi.

So it was perhaps par for the course that his final event in Britain, a political rally in the city of Birmingham for British Pakistani supporters of the ruling Pakistan People's Party (PPP), should be dogged by controversy.  Zardari faced a firestorm of criticism for going ahead with the visit while his country faced so many problems, and the combination of protesters outside the rally and a shoe-thrower inside appeared to mark the culmination of a disastrously ill-judged overseas tour.

Having been to the Birmingham event, I have to say it was not quite as chaotic and ill-tempered as some media coverage suggested.  The protesters outside were a microcosm of Pakistan's disunited politics, each separate group of demonstators  operating independently and shouting for their own competing agendas - from the restoration of the Caliphate to independence for Kashmir. They were vastly outnumbered by the PPP supporters who packed Birmingham's International Convention Centre - many of them staid, respectable middle-aged Pakistani men and women who had emigrated to Britain decades ago, worked hard and kept close family links back home. 

And Zardari certainly was not "pelted with shoes". The man who said he tried to throw his shoes in protest over Zardari's response to the floods was standing well back in what was a very large conference hall and had little chance of getting anywhere near the president before he was hustled away by security guards.  Zardari did not interrupt his speech, most of the audience continued to listen to him politely, and it is conceivable that those sitting at the front did not even notice at the time what had  happened.  That in any case is how it looked from where I was sitting - it would be easier to judge the event if the video replay had not been edited out - but my impression was that it was not such a big incident to justify the reaction, or counter-reaction in Pakistan. 

That said, the event did not achieve its purpose. Bilawal Bhutto, son of the late Benazir Bhutto, on Thursday cancelled plans to attend the rally and said he would stay in London instead to collect donations for Pakistan's flood victims.  That he had been expected was clear from the big photo of him given equal prominence to Zardari's own photo on a poster at the back of the stage.  The event relied heavily on imagery of the Bhutto dynasty - videos of Benazir and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto were played before the event; Zardari made frequent references to them in his speech, and wore a rosette with his late wife's photo pinned to his chest.  (For an interesting take on dynastic politics, do read this column in the Daily Times by Shahzad Chaudhry, who argues that Zardari is primarily interested in shoring up the family's control of the PPP.)  For all the appeal to the popularity of the two slain former prime ministers, the mood in the conference hall -- at least from where I was sitting -- seemed subdued, polite rather than enthusiastic; although again it would have looked different at the front where groups of youths had been organised as cheerleaders.

With the visit over, a few are beginning to ask questions about whether quite so much energy and attention should have been focused on attacking Zardari's trip to Britain, when so many flood victims were in need of attention at home.

"Our electronic media's reaction - really obsession - with this trip has itself been embarrassing, as indeed has been the reactions of too many of us," writes Adil Najam on the blog All Things Pakistan.  "But even more than an embarrassment, Mr Zardari's trip and our obsessive reactions to it has proved to be an all-too-costly distraction from the far more real disaster at home." (To be fair, the British media got pretty caught up in the visit as well.)

from Pakistan: Now or Never?:

Dreams from my father: South Asia’s political dynasties

"Whatever the result, this meeting will be a turning point in Pakistan's history," Pakistan President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto told his daughter Benazir as he prepared for a summit meeting with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1972 in the Indian hill resort of Simla after his country's defeat by India in the 1971 war. "I want you to witness it first hand."

If there is a slightly surreal quality to President Asif Ali Zardari's controversial state visit to Britain - where he is expected to launch the political career of Oxford graduate Bilawal Bhutto at a rally for British Pakistanis in Birmingham on Saturday - it is perhaps no more surreal than taking your daughter, herself then a student at Harvard, to witness negotiations with India after a crushing military defeat.

Family dynasties are a tradition in South Asia. Indira Gandhi, the victor of the 1971 war which led to the creation of Bangladesh, then East Pakistan, had learned about international relations from her father, India's first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Now her grandson, Rahul Gandhi, is being groomed as a future prime minister while his mother Sonia Gandhi keeps a tight grip from behind-the-scenes on the Congress Party government led by her appointed prime minister Manmohan Singh.

In both countries, the argument has been that the family name is strong enough to win votes, particularly among the millions of rural poor, strong enough to offer a promise of stability, and strong enough to be worth fighting to preserve across generations even in the face of domestic criticism.

Zardari has run into a great deal of criticism for pressing ahead with his visit to Britain while Pakistan struggled to cope with its worst floods in 80 years. He also faced calls to cancel the trip after British Prime Minister David Cameron said during a visit to India that "we cannot tolerate in any sense the idea that this country (Pakistan) is allowed to look both ways and is able in any way to promote the export of terror". 

With a war going badly in neighbouring Afghanistan, a spate of allegations against the role played there by its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, and a wave of bombings at home which Islamabad/Rawalpindi see as blowback from the Afghan war, Pakistan is having to navigate through very choppy diplomatic waters.  On top of that, it has had the floods, a plane crash, and then riots in Karachi.

Assuming Zardari goes ahead with Saturday's rally, he will be bringing the 21-year-old Bilawal - who is co-chairman of the Pakistan People's Party (PPP) but has not yet taken an active part in politics - out into the political arena at a time when his country faces its biggest challenge since its defeat in 1971.  But then again, as Benazir's own recollections of the Simla summit testify, there is a history to that.  And so far, in the decades since Pakistan and India won independence from Britain in 1947, it has been the family dynasties which have endured.

from Africa News blog:

Gordon Brown resurfaces. In Africa

It’s odd to see a once powerful man walk slowly. And odder still to see him sit in the corner of a restaurant nursing a glass of water for more than an hour. But that’s exactly what delegates to an African Union summit in Ugandan capital Kampala saw former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown do on Saturday.

Brown has been treated as something of a fugitive by the British media since his May election defeat with a slew of “Have you seen this man? type articles published in the country’s newspapers. Speculation on what he was up to ranged from bashing out a book on economics to Alastair Darling’s “he’s reflecting”.

But nobody guessed that when he reappeared it would be in Uganda with a speech about Africa being the potential engine for global economic growth.

The decision will fuel rumours that Brown has his eye on a top job at the International Monetary Fund or the United Nations or a role as a special envoy, but it’s also true that Africa's development and its economic progress are subjects that fascinate him.

And his track record is rightly respected by African leaders.

He perhaps alluded to the inevitable “Why are you here?” questions with a joke.

The quality of MEPs is sometimes strained

I am not a Eurosceptic, but you do sometimes question whether the billions of euros European taxpayers’ dole out each year to the European Union — and specifically the European Parliament – is always money well spent.

Those doubts came freshly to mind on Tuesday during the presentation of the European Central Bank’s annual report to the parliament’s Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs.

ECB Vice-President Lucas Papademos of Greece was speaking to the committee for the last time before he leaves the bank’s executive board in May and is replaced by Vitor Constancio, the governor of Portugal’s central bank.  Constancio’s appointment was confirmed in March.

Yet during a question-and-answer session at the end of Papademos’s presentation, one MEP — I will spare the deputy the embarrassment of being named, but she was from the United Kingdom — quizzed Papademos on who was going to replace him at the ECB.

The Greek seemed a little non-plussed, but didn’t respond. He looked straight ahead in silence.

It is not the first time a member of the 736-person parliament, the only directly elected body in the European Union, has shown a suprising ignorance of their own area of responsibility.

Perhaps accustomed to such slip-ups, the chairwoman of the committee, Britain’s Sharon Bowles, quickly papered over the error, stating that of course the committee had voted to approve Constancio’s appointment barely a month ago.

Should Norway bail out Iceland?

While not exactly pocket change, Iceland’s $5.5 billion Icesave debt to Britain and the Netherlands amounts to just 1.2 percent of the value of Norway’s offshore wealth fund. For Iceland, it’s more than $15,000 per citizen.

Given the two countries’ close historic links — Norwegian Vikings discovered the Atlantic island where people still speak a version of “old Norwegian” — speculation about Oslo coming to the rescue has Reykjavik licking its lips.

It would take some coaxing of the Norwegian electorate, but why shouldn’t Oslo help out its crisis-hit cousin, Icelandic newspapers are asking.

On muted idea has Norway buying Icesave debts and allowing Reykjavik to repay the loans on better terms than it has gained from the Dutch and British governments.

The standing terms, a 5.55 percent fixed annual rate for the next 15 years with no payments for the next seven years, are deemed unfairly high by most Icelanders and set to be overwhelmingly rejected in a referendum on the Icesave bill this Saturday.

Unlike Germany, which fears it will have to bail out fellow euro-member Greece by taking cash from its own people or issuing more debt, Oslo would simply tap into savings and ensure the loan gets repaid before its oil runs out in a few decades.

But finding bailout advocates in Oslo is proving tough.