Pakistan: Now or Never?

Revenging al Libi’s death in Pakistan

Given the central role of the Wahhabi tradition in inspiring the Taliban and al Qaeda, it’s worth looking behind the scenes at the news that al Qaeda wanted revenge for the killing of Abu Laith al-Libi in Pakistan — in particular what exactly al Qaeda said about his death.

According to our Dubai correspondent Firouz Sedarat,  al Qaeda number two Ayman al-Zawahiri presented an eulogy for Libi in a 9:58 minute video, congratulating him for achieving martyrdom. He spoke of his death as a natural course in jihad.  ”Every time a martyr falls, another martyr grabs the banner from him, and every time a chief goes down in blood, another chief completes the march after him,” he says. These martyrs, Zawahiri declared to America and its “agents”,  are the “pioneers of the coming advance”.  

In his speech, Zawahiri accused “the enemy” of trying to weaken the resolve of Muslims. He referred to a response he had written to a document for the guidance of jihad by Sayyed Imam al-Sherif , who reportedly fell out with him over the use of violence. This document, he said,  presented an Islam desired by America and the West – helpless and submissive –  and was an insult to Muslims.

His comment appeared meant to scotch arguments, as seen in this report by Global Terrorism Analysis, that Islamist ideologues are  reviewing the role of violence in Salafism, the fundamentalist views propagated by the 18th century Sunni reformer Muhammad Abd al-Wahhab and inspiration for al Qaeda. The Nefa Foundation has a transcript.

Pakistan, Afghanistan and the death of a general

The killing of the Pakistan army’s top medical officer this week was another reminder of the price being paid by the military in the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban. Lieutenant-General Mushtaq Ahmed Baig was the most senior army officer killed by militants to date.

 From my own experience of covering the armies of Pakistan and India, the loss of such a high-ranking officer would be a huge blow to morale, all the more so given the years of training and experience it takes to make someone of the rank of Lieutenant-General.  So it’s curious there has been surprisingly little public comment about it on the blogosphere.

The Daily Times asks in an editorial why a man known to be a pious Muslim was killed by a teenage suicide bomber who authorities presume was sent by Islamist militants. ”General Mushtaq Baig was in many ways an exemplary officer. Brilliant in academics and outstanding in his military career as a professional, he was also a meticulously honest man. His goodness sprang from his faith in Islam. He said his prayers five times a day regularly, read his Quran and had learned it by heart,” it says. “Why was such a man killed by someone who seeks to enforce Islamic sharia in Pakistan and has vowed revenge for the destruction of Lal Masjid in 2007?”

Was he just the latest victim of a militant backlash against the Pakistan military after army commandos stormed Islamabad’s Lal Masjid last July? Or is there a more complicated explanation?

In a thought-provoking article in the Asia Times Online, Syed Saleem Shahzad sees the killing as part of an upsurge in violence designed to dissuade the Pakistan army from cooperating with NATO to stop a spring offensive by the Taliban in Afghanistan. ”Asia Times Online investigations show that the Taliban’s three-pronged plan for their spring offensive comprises cutting off NATO’s supply lines running from Pakistan to Afghanistan, recruiting fresh volunteers and, most importantly, the creation of a strategic corridor running from Pakistan all the way to the capital Kabul,” he writes.

So what do you think? Was the Lieutenant-General’s death the result of a tragic but random combination of circumstances? Or was it part of a much bigger game plan?   

from FaithWorld:

How should the media handle the Dutch anti-Koran film?

Geert Wilders doesn't do things by halves. The anti-Koran film that this far-right politician has been working on in recent months will be finished very soon. He doesn't know if any Dutch broadcaster will touch it because of the controversy it has already stirred up. So he has arranged to have "Fitna" put out as a webcast as well. That should ensure that the film can be seen all around the world and not just in the Netherlands.

"It is very good news," Wilders told us , adding that the film would "definitely be finished this week." After that, he has to negotiate with Dutch television programmes to see who -- if any -- will broadcast it. Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende appealed last month for restraint over the film and Iran has urged the Netherlands to prevent this "provocative and satanic act on the basis of European Convention on Human Rights."

The Dutch foreign and justice ministers met Wilders on Wednesday to warn him of the possible consequences of showing his film, including possible charges against him for hate speech. According to the Volkskrant daily and NOS television, Wilders called the meeting "one hour of pure intimidation" and left it determined to work "full speed ahead" on his project.

Nobody has yet seen a 15-minute film about the Koran, which Wilders calls a fascist book, but it has already led to anti-Dutch protests and outraged Muslims worldwide. Clips purporting to be his film have appeared on YouTube, prompting a blockage in access to the popular site in Pakistan that temporarily closed it down worldwide.

A network of Muslim communities in the Netherlands is planning to hold an "open mosque day" around the country when the film is screened to appeal for calm and dialogue. Politicians and celebrities have taken out full-page newspaper adverts to pledge their commitment to tolerance and social harmony.

A survey by TNS Nipo institute last December found two-thirds of those polled thought the film was a bad idea and three-quarters believed the film could sour relations between Muslims and non-Muslims.

Some people say the media should ignore politicians like Wilders and not give him a platform to spread his views. But he can use the Internet to broadcast his film directly to anyone who clicks on the site. What do you think is the best way for the media to deal with a story like this?

from FaithWorld:

Influential Muslim seminary brands terrorism un-Islamic

One of the most influential Islamic seminaries in one of the world's most populous Muslim states has issued an important statement denouncing terrorism as un-Islamic. The statement is all the more interesting for the fact that it comes from an institution often linked in the media to the Taliban. But the seminary is hardly known to non-Muslims and the country is not an Arab state, not even a real "Muslim country" as such. So the statement, which was backed by several thousand Islamic scholars, looks like it will end up like the tree that falls in the forest with nobody around to hear it. It got some good coverage in its home country (like here and here and here) , but little anywhere else.

The seminary is Darul Uloom Deoband, a 150-year old institution in northern India that is the spiritual home for the arch-conservative Deobandi school of Islam. Its influence spreads across the subcontinent, into Afghanistan and into Muslim communities abroad, such as in Britain. Its link to Afghanistan's radical Islamists goes through the madrassas in Pakistan that are considered to be "Taliban nurseries." Most of them are Deobandi schools. Many of the pro-Taliban Islamist parties in Pakistan are Deobandi. General Zia-ul-Haq, who began Pakistan's Islamisation drive in the 1980s that helped spread those madrassas, was Deobandi. Etc, etc, etc. Darul Uloom Deoband has always denied any connection with the Taliban and there is no reason to think it had any direct links. Its denunciation of terrorism will probably not influence the men with guns along the Afghan frontier, but it might carry some weight with the Islamist parties and madrassa directors further inland in Pakistan.

The declaration says "Islam sternly condemns all kinds of oppression, violence and terrorism. It has regarded oppression, mischief, rioting and murdering among severest sins and crimes." Maulana Marghoobur Rahman, the ageing rector of Darul Uloom Deoband, told our New Delhi bureau: "There is no place for terrorism in Islam." Our bureau saw his comments as a sign of deep sense of anxiety among India's 140 million Muslims that a violent interpretation of Islam was finding root in the country and tarnishing the reputation of the entire community. Indian Muslims were implicated in bomb attacks on packed commuter trains in Mumbai in 2006 and in a failed attack in Britain last year.

Notice the number there? India has 140 million Muslims, putting it third behind Indonesia and Pakistan in the ranks of Muslim populations. The difference is that they're only 13% or so of the majority Hindu country, while the others are overwhelmingly Muslim.

Do you think statements like this one make any difference? Does the fact that an important Islamic seminary makes this declaration give it any special weight?

Going after al Qaeda in Pakistan

Reports last week in the New York Times and the Washington Post about CIA operations against al Qaeda inside Pakistan — with or without the permission of the Pakistan government — have got everybody asking what exactly is going on. Let’s rewind and look at what the United States asked for immediately after 9/11 when it demanded President Pervez Musharraf’s cooperation in hunting down al Qaeda.

In his book “In the Line of Fire”, Musharraf says the Americans presented him with a list of demands on Sept. 13, 2001 which included a requirement Pakistan “provide the United States with blanket overflight and landing rights to conduct all neccessary military and intelligence operations”. Musharraf says that though he agreed to cooperate with the United States, this particular request was turned down.

That begs the question of just how the Americans responded to the rejection. Did the world’s sole superpower, who in Musharraf’s own words had just threatened to bomb Pakistan “back to the Stone Age” if it did not cooperate, simply say “Ok fine. Sorry to trouble you” or words to that effect? Or did the Americans think even then that al Qaeda and Taliban militants would flee from Afghanistan into Pakistan and extract a promise to let the CIA go after them? In other words who knew what, when?

The question is interesting in the context of the U.S. presidential election, with Barack Obama saying he would be willing to go after al Qaeda inside Pakistan and John McCain accusing him of inexperience for threatening to invade a U.S. ally — comments that are attracting a fierce debate among U.S. bloggers.

A blog called World War 4 Report calls Obama’s comments “alarmingly bellicose”. On the other side of the debate, Juan Cole challenges McCain’s own record on U.S. Pakistan policy, accusing him of being an enthusiastic supporter of the Islamist mujahideen who fought the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s – a movement that spawned al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Commenting on the reports of CIA operations inside Pakistan, the Seminal asks how Americans would feel if Pakistan’s intelligence agency, the ISI, set up shop in the United States and struck a secret deal with George W. Bush allowing them to target suspected Islamists there. A Pakistani who commented on my last post on U.S. policy towards Pakistan was more sanguine. Writing about Obama’s threat to go after al Qaeda in Pakistan, he wrote: “Here is a guy who is truthful and is playing no games. We in Pakistan can live joyfully with the likes of him. No double-speak and therefore no contradictions.”

Lots of questions then. Should America be going after al Qaeda aggressively inside Pakistan? Is Obama just being honest, stating a policy that is already being carried out by the CIA, albeit in secret? Have your say by posting a comment here.

from FaithWorld:

Pakistan bucks apparent Islamist trend in elections

An interesting thing happened in the Pakistani elections this week. A country where radical Islamism has been on the rise in recent years went to the polls and voted Islamists out of office. In North West Frontier Province (NWFP), the most "Talibanised" part of the country, an avowedly secular Pashtun party -- the Awami National Party -- emerged as the largest party by far. This bucks what seemed to be a trend in the Muslim world, i.e. the freer the election, the more chances the Islamists have. Think back to late 1991, when the Algerian military cancelled the run-off round of elections after the FIS (Islamic Salvation Front) took a strong lead in the first round. In more recent years, elections in Egypt, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza have shown Islamists doing well at the polls. In a very different context, Turkey's "post-Islamist" AKP has gone from strength to strength thanks to the ballot box.

We expected the Islamists to lose but that doesn't make the result any less interesting. The Islamist parties won only about 1 percent of the seats in the National Assembly, a precipitous drop from the 17 percent they scored in the 2002 vote. One crucial factor here is that opposition parties like the PPP of the late Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif's Muslim League were allowed to run, in contrast to the 2002 poll that the then soldier-president Pervez Musharraf restricted to"friendly" parties. The conspiracy theory in Pakistan was that Musharraf made sure the Islamists advanced in order to make himself indispensable to the United States, the argument being "if you drop me, they'll take my place".

In NWFP, the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) alliance of Islamist parties won only 11 of 99 seats in the provincial assembly after governing there with a majority in the assembly for the past five years. One of the most prominent Islamist leaders, the Taliban-friendly Maulana Fazlur Rehman, was defeated in his NWFP home town of Dera Ismail Khan in his bid for re-election to the National Assembly. In Baluchistan, the other province with Islamists in government, the MMA won only five of the 65 seats in the provincial assembly.

The big winner in NWFP was the Awami National Party (ANP), which went from 7 to 31 seats. The ANP was founded by Wali Khan, a secular left-winger whose father Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan was a legendary figure among the Pashtuns, the same ethnic group as today's Taliban. Known as the "Frontier Gandhi," he was an ally of Mahatma Gandhi who opposed the partition of India and creation of a "Muslim homeland" in Pakistan. A suicide bomber killed at least 16 people at an ANP rally in Charsadda, near Peshawar, only days before the election. In short, this party comes as close as could be to the opposite of the religious parties.

"The greatest achievement of this transition to democracy is the rout of religious extremists who wanted to plunge Pakistan into anarchy," wrote Najam Sethi, editor of the Daily Times. "It is the rise of liberal democracy ... that will help solve the problem of religious extremism in Pakistan."

Ali Eteraz has taken a close look at what this means:

The success of the ANP in the face of the Islamist programme ... shows that one way of defeating Islamism is to offer a potent and viable alternative narrative. The ANP does that in the form of Pashtun nationalism.

In my opinion, the secular resurgence has far more to do with material concerns than ideological ones. Ordinary Pakistanis didn't vote for the ANP because they suddenly became hip to Thomas Jefferson or because they became persuaded by some blogger in Birmingham. They voted for the ANP because they want clean water. If the ANP fails to deliver the essentials of life - and simply uses nationalism the way Islamists use Islam - then they will be replaced. If western interests want to maintain the secular resurgence, they are going to have to make sure that these groups do not fail. At the moment, though, I don't see any discussion about this in our press.

from FaithWorld:

Is it time to scrap the term “jihadist”?

At a conference on terrorism in Brussels this week, debate on how to tackle al Qaeda was punctuated by repeated arguments over the terms "jihad" and "jihadist".

The terms have became synonymous in the West with "holy war" and "holy warrior" against the West, and al Qaeda itself has used it in that sense. But for most Muslims, as our Security Correspondent Mark Trevelyan points out, it originally means a spiritual struggle and they don't want it hijacked anymore.

"Now to call jihadists as terrorists is either reflective of ...lack of understanding of Islam, or it is I must say an intended misuse, which again is unfortunate," General Ehsan Ul Haq, former chairman of Pakistan's joint chiefs of staff, told the annual conference of the EastWest Institute think-tank. "It might have been somewhat excusable in the trauma post-9/11 but I don't think it is any more."

Raphael Perl, head of the Action against Terrorism Unit at the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said the failure to agree on a shared terminology in the wake of the September 11 attacks was "a major mistake on our part."

Read the whole article here. And then let us know if you think that the way these terms are used muddles our understanding of what is going on.

Pakistan’s coalition of the unwilling

Thanks to readers for pointing out some great online debates on who is going to form the next government in Pakistan. 

Five Rupees predicts confidently that the two frontrunners in Monday’s election – the PPP of the late Benazir Bhutto and the PML-N of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif — will be unable to bury their traditional rivalry to form an alliance. It then goes on to forecast that the PPP led by Bhutto’s widower Asif Ali Zardari will join forces with the PML-Q, the defeated party allied to President Pervez Musharraf.

Teeth Maestro asks anxiously whether  the Americans are encouraging a deal between the PPP and the PML-Q to keep Nawaz Sharif’s PML-N in opposition.  On the same theme, the Asia Times Online says the Americans would like the PPP to form a coalition with other smaller parties, again without the PML-N.

At the heart of the matter is Sharif’s insistence that judges sacked by Musharraf when he imposed a state of emergency in November be restored to office. That would add to pressure on Musharraf to quit, depriving the Americans of their main ally in the battle against al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Reuters has done a factbox on the possible post-election scenarios in Pakistan. But what do you think? Is Five Rupees right with its long-shot prediction of an alliance between the PPP and the PML-Q? Have people reason to worry about American interference to protect Musharraf from Sharif? All I can say with certainty is that Pakistan is headed for a coalition of the unwilling.

Pakistan: Can America square the circle?

Scanning the U.S. media for reaction to the Pakistan election, two themes stand out.  One is a U.S. desire to reach out to the newly elected political leaders in Pakistan and bolster a return to civilian-led democracy. The other is the U.S. need to shore up the battle against al Qaeda and the Taliban – even if it means pursuing them aggressively inside Pakistan’s lawless tribal areas.  One may turn out to contradict the other.

The New York Times says in an op-ed that the United States must invest in Pakistan’s people – its schools, courts and political parties — to build popular support for tackling al Qaeda and the Taliban.  Reuters Washington-based Asia Correspondent Paul Eckert quotes Barack Obama, among others, as saying a democratic Pakistan will make “a better ally in the fight against terror and extremism.”

Compare that to a piece in the Washington Post about a missile strike by a CIA-operated Predator drone that killed a senior al Qaeda commander inside Pakistan last month.  ”Having requested the Pakistani government’s official permission for such strikes on previous occasions, only to be put off or turned down, this time the U.S. spy agency did not seek approval,” it says. Significantly, it adds that  this could be a model for future U.S. operations.

Attacks by Predator drones are already highly controversial in Pakistan. So how does the United States build ties with democratically elected allies in Pakistan if it is also launching missile strikes on Pakistani soil without asking permission from those same allies? It seems hard to believe that either the government or the army would welcome unilateral U.S. action. So how will Washington square the circle? 

Pakistan election – what next for Musharraf?

President Pervez Musharraf could hardly have found a better way of convincing the world about his commitment to holding a “free and fair” election in Pakistan – by letting his own allies in the Pakistan Muslim League (Q) be defeated at the polls.

Commentators are already trying to work out whether the opposition Pakistan People’s Party (PPP)  of the late Benazir Bhutto and the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif  – ousted by Musharraf in a 1999 coup — can muster enough seats between them in parliament for the two-thirds majority needed to impeach him.

Yet if the early results, which indicate a strong showing for the opposition and a trouncing of Musharraf’s allies, are confirmed, I am left with an unanswered question. Is the election the beginning of the end for the retired army general? Or was it on his part an act of daring born out of his days as an army commando?

Did he gamble that even if his own supporters lost, he would still gain by proving his commitment to a free election to the international community? And in that gamble, was there an assumption that the opposition parties would squabble too much amongst themselves to form an effective coalition against him? It would be an interesting question to ask him.

In the coming days and weeks, it will become clearer whether that gamble was made. And if it paid off.

In my previous entry, and in the comments section, you can find links to some of the blogs and websites which are tracking the election results. If I have missed good sites, let me know. Or have your say here, by posting a comment.