With a five year-ban on playing for Pakistan and a $3.65 million defamation suit slapped against him by the country’s cricket board chief, fast bowler Shoaib Akhtar has his hands full, even by the standards of his tumultuous cricketing career.
 

Is this the end of the road for the pin-up boy of Pakistani cricket and one of the most recognisable figures of his country ? A tragic victim, at age 32, of his success, talent, fame and showmanship?
 
For many of us, there is no better sight in cricket than watching Shoaib steaming in to bowl, raw pace at its best and the crowds in a packed stadium behind him. The “Rawalpindi Express” crossed the 100 mile per hour speed barrier in the 2003 World Cup and there aren’t many in international cricket that quick.
 
This week as he arrived in India to play in an Indian Premier League after the Pakistani cricket board temporarily suspended the ban on him and the defamation suit was withdrawn following a public apology by Shoaib, the buzz was starting to pick up in the cricket-mad region.
 
For Shoaib, for all his indiscipline, late nights, missed training sessions and even a doping scandal, can still turn a match on its head and the crowds love it. His record of 178 wickets in 46 Tests and another 219 in 138 one-day internationals speaks for itself.  And all this, after he missed dozens of matches due to fitness or  disciplinary-related problems, the last straw being when he hit a teammate with a bat in South Africa.
 
One can only wonder what  the temperamental player could have achieved  if he simply had been more disciplined in his cricket.
 
For as they say no player is bigger than the game, and Shoaib has had his chances.
 

It’s coming up to three months since Pakistan’s ambassador to Afghanistan, Tariq Azizuddin, disappeared from the border region of Khyber  along with his driver and guard.

 After weeks of silence, the ambassador appeared on a video aired over Al Arabiya satellite channel last month saying he had been kidnapped by Taliban militants. Surrounded by masked men with automatic weapons, he said he was suffering from health problems and appealed to the Pakistani government to comply with his captors’ demands which Pakistani media have reported relate to the release of several jailed militants.
 
And that is the last that has been heard so far. Indeed, only slightly less intriguing than the envoy’s disappearance has been the lack of any public attention to his plight right from the beginning. So much so that Azizuddin’s family last weekend  issued a public appeal to the government to expedite efforts for his release. The family said they were greatly concerned there were no signs of an early and safe release of the envoy and his companions.
 
An ambassador, as the Pakistan Spectator said, symbolises the government and officials cannot afford to ignore the issue even if the media is focused elsewhere, all the more so after the emergence of a civilian government after nine years of military rule. How would another nation, for example the United States, act if its top diplomat was taken away and not heard from, for months ?

Perhaps the authorities are working quietly to secure the envoy’s release and any kind of statements might hamper the efforts.  Some say Azizuddin’s fate has become tied to a peace deal that the Pakistan government was trying to strike with militant tribes in the frontier region which have since suffered a setback after Baitullah Mehsud, the head of the Tehrik-e-Taliban  (Movement of Taliban) pulled out.

The Pakistan Taliban, though, denied any involvement in the envoy’s kidnapping when news first broke in February.
 
 

After asking last month whether the media should be more positive about Pakistan – the comments on the whole seemed to suggest we should be, while not being blind to the risks– it was interesting to see that Malaysia’s top lender, Malayan Banking, had no such doubts.

 Maybank said it had bought a 15 percent stake in Pakistan’s largest listed lender MCB Bank for $680 million, the largest banking acquisition into Pakistan, as it bet on a bright economic future despite the recent political turbulence.  It said the acquisition would give it access to ”a high-growth and under-penetrated banking market with a large population”, and that it was confident about Pakistan’s political outlook.

Part of this is clearly due to the booming business in Islamic banking. Reuters Bahrain correspondent Mohammed Abbas, who covered a Reuters summit on Islamic banking and finance in February, tells me it is no surprise that a Malaysian bank would invest in Pakistan.  Pakistani bankers basically run the Islamic finance industry in the Gulf and say Pakistan has done a lot to encourage Islamic finance. Since Malaysia’s Islamic banking industry is one of the deepest and most developed, and since  Malaysian banks have been trying to build bridges with other Islamic lenders, Pakistan is an obvious place to go. ”Given how active Pakistanis are in the industry, the fact that Malaysia is finding Pakistan fertile for expansion is logical,” he says.

So what is to be made of this Maybank deal? Was it born simply out of the growth in Islamic finance, fuelled by the oil money washing into the Gulf, and a South Asian approach to banking?

Or was there a bigger shift here, one which looks beyond the United States and its battle against al Qaeda and the Taliban and its war in Iraq, into the financial flows of the future?

I noticed that Merrill Lynch’s Soofian Zuberi, who advised on the deal, said that Maybank and MCD are likely to seek future deals together and look for opportunities in Central Asia and the Middle East. “These are markets where there is a geographic and cultural proximity that both parties can work together on,” said Zuberi.
    
   

(Luke Baker is with the U.S. army in eastern Afghanistan) 

The snows have largely melted in the Hindu Kush and the high trails over the mountains between Pakistan and Afghanistan are once again passable. What’s more, Tehrik-e-Taliban’s leader, Baitullah Mehsud, looks like he may secure a peace deal with Pakistan’s new leadership, including the possibility of Pakistan’s security forces backing off from attacking his hideouts in South Waziristan.

To many observers, those two developments lead to a conclusion: any spring offensive by the Taliban against U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan could be that much more powerful this year, with Mehsud throwing his tactical weight behind the offensive without fear of being squeezed by Pakistan’s forces from behind.
 
The argument has a fair amount of logic on its side, but how likely is the whole scenario really?

On the Afghanistan side of the border, U.S. commanders seem unconvinced, even if they are not dismissing the possibility of some sort of offensive in the coming months. First, they say many of the traditional infiltration routes over the mountains have now been closed off or are under watch by special forces. Even if much of the border is likely to remain passable — there’s no way 16,000 or so U.S. troops could seal every mountainous nook and cranny along hundreds of miles of frontier — they are not expecting the overall rate of infiltration to change substantially from last year.

Secondly, rather than relations between U.S. forces and Pakistani troops breaking down in the wake of President Pervez Musharraf’s sidelining and the murmurs of a peace deal with Mehsud, they say cooperation remains strong. Senior U.S. officers meet once a month, face-to-face for what they call “border flag” meetings with senior Pakistani officers, sharing intelligence and building relationships. Junior officers have even more contact — they have exchanged mobile phone numbers with the other side and sometimes communicate by radio on a daily basis.

“I wouldn’t say it’s perfect all along the border, but generally relations are pretty good. Uneven but good,” one senior U.S. officer said this week to describe the ties.

On occasion U.S. forces need to seek and have received permission to cross into Pakistan’s territory to pursue militants, he said. American unmanned spy planes are not allowed to pass into Pakistan’s air space, but otherwise, relations seem to be sound.

Perhaps most crucially, U.S. officers say they have seen no signs yet of Pakistani troops pulling back from the border area — a demand Mehsud has made as part of any peace deal.

Those three factors alone may not rule out any spring offensive — certainly the Taliban remains strong across southern Afghanistan and shows no signs of weakening — but they hint that this year may not see the big spring offensive some have suggested.

The U.S. State Department has just released its 2007 report on terrorism worldwide and it doesn’t look like it is winning the war against al Qaeda seven years after the Sept 11 attacks. The group not only remains the biggest threat to the United States and its allies, but using the tribal areas of Pakistan it has rebuilt some of its pre-Sept 11 capabilities. And its top  leadership, especially Ayman al-Zawahri, has regained some of its control over the group’s operations worldwide, says the report.

It makes for sobering reading and some of the figures are worth recounting.

-  The number of what the report identified as terrorist attacks worldwide fell slightly in 2007, but the number of people killed in the attacks rose to 22,685, from 20,872 in the previous year which suggests that people around the globe were getting increasingly efficient killing other people, as Russ Travers of the National Counterterrorism Center put it.
  One factor contributing to the increased lethality of attacks: increased use of backpacks by suicide bombers that are easier to sneak into crowded areas.

- A 50 percent increase in suicide attacks worldwide over the previous year and this ranged from somebody as young as a 15-year-old boy to a 64-year-old man in the advanced stages of cancer, potentially the oldest.

 - Incidents fell slightly in Iraq, but still accounted for 45 percent of all attacks and 60 percent of all fatalities worldwide in 2007.

- Pakistan saw the grimmest change, a 100 percent increase in attacks, and injuries and fatalities quadrupled.

- A 16 percent increase in attacks in Afghanistan

- Well over 50 percent of those killed or injured were Muslims.

- 2,400 children were killed or injured in 2007 by suicide attacks, an increase of 25 percent.

 The one silver lining according to Oxford Analytica is that several radical groups, who are engaged in local conflicts, could be undermining al Qaeda’s appeal in some parts of the world by adopting its brand name.

Al Qaeda’s legitimacy rests on convincing supporters that it acts justly to defend Muslims against domination by foreigners. On current trends, this message may increasingly be undermined: as the State Department notes, several radical causes adopted al Qaeda’s ‘brand’ during 2006 and 2007, importing it into conflicts in Algeria and Libya as well as longer-established battlegrounds.

This insertion into intractable local conflicts — such as the confrontation between radical Islamists and the state in Algeria — is a key reason for the high share of Muslims in the global death toll from terrorism.

If al Qaeda’s potential supporters associate the group with the indiscriminate slaughter of their fellow practitioners — rather than daring assaults against US interests — its call to violence may no longer hit home.

Is that something the world can hold on to? Or is it a hopeless and unending cycle where the heavier the hammer used to crush the attackers, the more the backlash? Is it time to change tack?
 

Harvard's Kennedy School of Government has just published a study called "Estimating the Impact of the Haj: Religion and Tolerance in Islam’s Global Gathering." The pilgrimage is often described as the highpoint of a Muslim's religious life. Media reporting usually stresses the experiences of the people taking part in it. But what is the longer-term effect of participating in such a massive and moving pilgrimage? This study, based on data from over 1,600 applicants to Pakistan’s haj visa allocation lottery in 2006, had some interesting conclusions:

Our findings show that ... the Haj has quite a remarkable effect in shaping the views of Pakistani pilgrims. It induces a shift from localized beliefs and practices towards global Islamic practice, increases tolerance, and leads to more favorable attitudes toward women. We find no evidence that by raising cohesion within the Muslim community, the Haj threatens non-Muslims. On the contrary, the Haj makes pilgrims more peacefully inclined, and increased tolerance extends to adherents of other religions.

The evidence suggests that these changes are more a result of exposure to and interaction with Hajis from around the world, rather than religious instruction or a changed social role of pilgrims upon return.

Click here to download the PDF of the whole study.

(hat tip to The God Blog)

After a dramatic decamping to Dubai, Asif Ali Zardari and Nawaz Sharif reached an agreement on the restoration of the judiciary that should allow the coalition to live to fight another day.

Though details are still sketchy, Sharif told reporters after a second day of talks with Zardari that, “The meeting has made progress in a very positive way. We are now satisfied.”

Information Minister Sherry Rehman, a senior leader in Zardari’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) also said, “We are very satisfied with the results of the talks.”    

At the time of writing, it is too early to find reactions on the internet, though one thing that did strike me was that there seemed to be rather less chatter on the blogosphere about the Zardari-Sharif talks than when the coalition was first formed. Does this mean people in Pakistan are already tired of the judiciary question? Or are Pakistanis simply a little bit more sanguine about the nature of politics?

Before the announcement of an agreement, defence analyst Ikram Sehgal wrote in The News that Zardari did well to show he was not going to be bullied by Sharif into restoring the judiciary en masse within the 30-day deadline agreed between the PPP and the PML (N), which expired on Wednesday. “If PPP had submitted to blackmail…” he wrote of the PML threat to pull out of the coalition…”they would have been politically dead.

On the other side, in an open letter to Zardari published in Dawn, Ghazala Minallah urged him to support full restoration of the judiciary. “You can either prove yourself to be a selfless, pragmatic leader, rising above personal grudges, or you can go down in history as the man who deprived this nation of an opportunity that can come only once in a lifetime,” he wrote.

In the middle of all this, Prime Miniser Yousaf Raza Gilani spelled out in the Washington Post a plan to tackle Pakistan’s problems, from its economy to the presence of al Qaeda. ”We want to show the world that our nation is back in business, with an overwhelming mandate from our people,” he wrote.

India, Pakistan and even tiny Sri Lanka have all ignored U.S. concerns, and have hosted Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad over the past two days. It is a fleeting visit with less than five hours scheduled in Delhi, but it seems like a carefully calibrated piece of diplomacy tiptoeing around the elephant in the room.
 
For, as relations go, India and Pakistan have become bound up with the United States in ways that would have been unthinkable not very long ago. Islamabad is a frontline ally in Washington’s war on al Qaeda and the Taliban, India a growing strategic partner with whom it is pushing a far-reaching civilian nuclear deal that gives it de facto recognition as a nuclear state.

So what’s this dance with Iran, accused by the United States of sponsoring terrorism and seeking to develop nuclear weapons ? Some of it is down to economics : Iran holds the key to India’s energy  insecurity, as a piece in the Asia Times argues.

With oil prices skyrocketing, India’s thirst for cheaper imported gas has acquired a greater urgency than before and if this means jumpstarting the 15-year-old proposal to pipe gas from Iran through Pakistan, now estimated to cost $7.5 billion, so be it. Pakistan too needs the natural gas to meet its growing energy demand, as also the millions of dollars it will earn in transit fees.

And if history is any lesson, the “pipeline of peace” could promote security in the region with the costs of a conflict between India and Pakistan that much higher.

But is there also a desire to assert or rather be seen to be asserting independence of action in hosting Ahmadinejad at a time when tensions are rising again over its nuclear ambitions ?

Pakistan has a new civilian government which has pledged to pursue a more independent course, including in the fight against al Qaeda, than followed by President Pervez Musharraf.

India’s government is under pressure from its communist allies who think it has gone too far in seeking warmer ties with America and risks losing its independence of action. In any case, New Delhi has been acutely sensitive of being seen as anything other than a fiercely independent nation.  

What of Sri Lanka ? Perhaps the island has had enough of lectures on human right violations and veiled threats to hold back assistance if it continues to seek a military solution to the insurgency by Tamil Tiger rebels. Iran will probably abjure such admonitions.    

Update - Since filing this blog,  Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud has said he is pulling out of the peace deal with the government after it refused to withdraw the army from tribal lands on the Afghan border. So were the sceptics right all along? And what does this mean for the government’s new strategy?

On the same subject, here is an interesting piece in the Christian Science Monitor comparing Pakistan’s policy to that of the United States in Iraq. “Americans can hardly complain that Pakistan is on the verge of a deal with jihadists,” it says. “The US has already done a similar deal with Iraqi Sunni terrorists. In both cases, a prime goal is simply to isolate Al Qaeda.”

No doubt many more twists and turns are yet to come before the picture becomes clearer.

                             ————————————————————–

Pakistan’s impending deal with the Mehsud tribes to end hostilities in South Waziristan could either turn out to be the door to a wider peace along the troubled corridor with Afghanistan or a strategic blunder with consequences not just for Pakistan, but for Afghanistan and beyond including the West.

Is Pakistan ready for it ? How far have the country’s new civilian leaders — who had pledged a radically different approach to the northwest region considered the haven of the Taliban and al Qaeda — thought it through?

Newspaper editorials, military experts and blogs are debating those questions both in Pakistan and a world away in the United States, Britain and even Canada, which worries whether its troops in Afghanistan will end up paying a price.

The 15-point agreement, according to a draft that has appeared in the media, essentially calls for an end to militant activity and an exchange of prisoners in return for the gradual withdrawal of the Pakistani military from parts of South Waziristan. There would be no more attacks or kidnapping of military and government officials, roads will be opened and the Frontier Corps, the local security force, will be allowed free movement.

More importantly, the Mehsud elders have also promised to expel all foreign militants from their territory starting within a month and the Pakistani government hopes to replicate the agreement in other parts of the region as well, aiming to drive the wedge deeper between the home grown elements and al Qaeda.

Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the umbrella group Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (Taliban Movement of Pakistan) has already announced a ceasefire and threatened to string anyone violating it upside down in a bazaar. So far so good although there was a car bombing on Friday near a police station in North West Frontier Province. The Taliban said it was in retaliation for a police shootout and the ceasefire remained in place.

The government justifies the policy change saying it believes negotiations, significantly increased development aid for the tribal region and legislation designed to eventually integrate it with the rest of Pakistan offer the most effective strategy for turning the population there against al Qaeda.

In any case the military option has been tried, and it hasn’t produced results ; the military has lost hundreds of soldiers in the fighting, it has brought forth a spate of suicide bombings, and the operations have been deeply unpopular across the country.

Indeed, even the U.S. Congress’ investigative arm, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in a report this month accused the Bush administration of failing to develop a comprehensive strategy to prevent — let alone decisively defeat — the al Qaeda leadership that fled to Pakistan after U.S.-led forces chased it out of Afghanistan more than six years ago.

The report, which was based on intelligence reports and interviews with U.S. diplomats and military and intelligence officers, found that Washington had relied too heavily on President Pervez Musharraf and the Pakistani army to deal with al Qaeda and that virtually all of the nearly six billion dollars in aid Washington had provided to help Pakistan fight al Qaeda and the Taliban in the tribal areas had gone to the military, while only a tiny fraction was earmarked for economic and other forms assistance for the largely Pashtun population there.

So then where is the rub ? The main criticism is that Pakistan might be buying peace for itself, while letting the militants devote their energy to the fight against U.S. forces in Afghanistan which they say is the “mother of all the problems there.”
There is no mention in the draft agreement of ending cross-border attacks into Afghanistan.

Secondly, deals with militants in both North and South Waziristan have been tried before, with disastrous consequences. A report by the International Crisis Group said Musharraf’s 2006 North Waziristan agreement was directly responsible for creating a safe haven for al Qaeda’s leadership in Pakistan.

And finally there is an issue of principle. Pakistani defence specialist Ikram Sehgal argues that while “all militants are not terrorists”, he says “one cannot (and should not) negotiate with terrorists. Baitullah Mehsud is a terrorist.”

In a posting this week, the blog fiverupees says Pakistan must pause and consider if it is ready to face the consequences of another 9/11 or 7/7 , but this time originating directly from the areas it is supposed to control.

In the comments on our blog earlier this month Pakistan: Breaking Down the Stereotypes one thing stands out – that people in Pakistan are tired of it being portrayed as a failed state and blame the western media for focusing too narrowly on suicide bombings rather than the achievements and attractions of the country.

You can read all the comments here and I am reproducing some below:

“Pakistan has always been portrayed in the media as a failed or dangerous country. In reality, this is totally absurd and false. The recent elections in Pakistan proves my point. They are progressive, they want peace and most of all they mean business.” - Posted by arif

“It is quite unfortunate that Pakistan has now become a synonym with suicide bombings and militancy, however, it is more than that. A thriving economy, booming telecom, construction , financial and IT market, Pakistan offers a lot more than what is on the news” - Posted by Kashif

“Pakistan is the best country in the world. It has everything. Beautiful country, beautiful people.. powerful military, fastest growing economy, best relations with other countries (other than communist India), awesome food.. what else does one need?” - Posted by Ahsan.

These comments encouraged me to put up the following video, mostly of the moutains in the north, which is one of the most popular videos of Pakistan on YouTube.  The accompanying music is a little bit dated, but photos are worth a look. I also e-mailed Waseem Khan Jadoon, who posted the video, to ask about it and he made the following comment:

“I uploaded this video because I want to show the world that we Pakistanis are not terrorists. Stop spreading propaganda against Pakistan especially western media. Promote peace and harmony in the world rather than hatism towards different religions and regions.”

Of course, as a journalist watching this video, I see not only my favourite part of the world, but also glaciers melting because of global warming; the divided former kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir, the potential for fights between India and Pakistan over water from Kashmir’s rivers; and the obvious tensions of an area that lies between India, Pakistan and China.

So are our commenters right that the media is too negative about Pakistan? Or are we simply trying to highlight the risks in the years ahead?