Pakistan: Now or Never?

Cocking a snook : South Asia hosts Ahmadinejad

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.

Update on Pakistan’s peace deal : will it work?

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.

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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.

Should the media be more positive about Pakistan?

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:

Afghan opium farmers follow the money

The rising cost of food that is stirring unrest in the developing world may have one positive spin-off: Afghanistan’s opium farmers, attracted by high wheat prices, may be turning to legal crops.

The Financial Times quotes a recent commander of British forces in Helmand, the heartland of the country’s drugs trade, as saying there is anectodal evidence of such a switch in the southern province. With wheat prices at record highs farmers are calculating they will make money planting the crop, says Brigadier Andrew MacKay.

But he adds, though, that this doesn’t mean that the tide has turned in the fight against the drug industry in Afghanistan, producing 93 percent of the world’s opium which is processed to make heroin and exported around the world.

Afghanistan’s opium crop is forecast to shrink by as much as half this year after 2007′s record harvest, but then this fall is not so much the result of international anti-narcotics efforts but mainly because of an unusally cold and dry winter that has disrupted germination of seeds.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation also cautions against reaching hasty conclusions, arguing that the profits from planting opium poppies are still high, so there might not be a very compelling incentive for farmers to make the change.

Also, looked at in another way, high food prices might actually drive desperate farmers to grow more opium to feed their families. Already Afghanistan, largely reliant on imports of wheat and flour, is reeling under the impact of high global prices and people have taken to the streets to protest.

How Islamicised is the Pakistan army?

While living in Delhi after 9/11, and in particular after India and Pakistan nearly went to war over an attack on the Indian parliament on December 13, 2001, one of the questions that cropped up frequently was about how much the Pakistan army had been permeated by hardline Islamists. In other words, how much sympathy did the army feel for al Qaeda and Taliban militants that then General Pervez Musharraf had pledged to fight?

Several years later, while researching a book on the Siachen war, I had occasion to travel with the Pakistan army and assess the Islamist question up close.  My impression was that the Pakistan army was not driven by religious fanaticism. Yes, it exhorted its soldiers to embrace “shaheed”,  or martyrdom,  in the name of Allah.  But it was otherwise remarkably similar to the Indian army. Both relied on a blend of nationalism and loyalty to their fellow men in the same unit; both found recruits in the mountains and rural villages who could be inculcated with a spirit of “ours not to reason why”; both counted on officers to lead from the front. Men did not go into battle dreaming of death. An officer who thinks only of killing himself is of little use to a professional army, which needs men who are above all sane, who can remain focused and objective, who know the difference between suicide and getting killed.

My Pakistan army minder on my trip to the Siachen war zone was clearly religious, respected prayer times, and did his best to explain to me the teachings of the Koran. But he probably expended more energy telling me off for smoking –  particularly on the world’s highest battlefield where the air is so thin that it can be difficult to walk — much as my minder during a tour of Siachen on the Indian side had done.

So I thought I had settled the Islamist question — at least in my own mind — until August 2007, when more than 200 Pakistani soldiers in South Waziristan in Pakistan’s tribal areas were taken captive by Islamist militants without firing a single shot.  During a visit to Delhi shortly afterwards, I discovered that people from the Indian army were as surprised as me — accustomed as they were to seeing their rivals on the Pakistan side at least make a show of fighting. Had the Islamists so permeated the Pakistan army that its soldiers had gone soft? 

Pakistan army expert Brian Cloughley addresses this question in his book ”War, Coups and Terror”, a review of Pakistan since 1971 and due to be published next month.  His conclusions make interesting reading.

While he recognises that the Pakistan army includes “some religious extremists among its officers and soldiers”, he says the promotions system overseen by President Pervez Musharraf made sure that officers were promoted on the basis of professional competence rather than religious devotion.

The rub came in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) next to the Afghanistan border, where religious ideologues had affected the morale and efficiency of the military. ”There is evidence that some soldiers have been so influenced by religiosity as to have doubts about their being regarded as Shaheed in the event of being killed in conflict with fellow Muslims who are held (by extremist clerics) to be engaged in fighting against infidels,” he writes. “This has resulted in incidents of refusal to take part in operations in the tribal areas, which indicate a serious malaise.”

from UK News:

Should Pakistan return to the Commonwealth?

Foreign Secretary David Miliband says Pakistan has made democratic progress and should be re-admitted to the Commonwealth.

He has pointed to the extension of press freedoms and the re-establishment of constitutional rules. New Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gillani, a member of the Pakistan People's Party (PPP), whose leader Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in December, was sworn in last month.

He has promised to cut back on ministers' perks and re-establish student and trade unions.

Pakistan was suspended from the Commonwealth in November 2007 because of President Pervez Musharraf's imposition of emergency rule. It had previously been suspended in 1999 as well, after Musharraf seized power in a coup.

Do you think the time is right for it to be re-admitted? Could it be that the organisation -- and much of the West in general -- has failed to appreciate the dangerous security reality in which the country lives, with large areas of its border regions sympathetic to the Taliban and Al Qaeda?

Pakistan more dangerous than Iraq ?

The United States, beginning with President George W. Bush himself, has this past two weeks trained its crosshairs on Pakistan, warning that another Sept. 11,  if it were to happen, would most likely not be plotted out of Iraq, Afghanistan or even Iran,  but Pakistan.

Like the steady drumbeat that has often preceded major moves by the administration, the threat from Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, considered the home of the top ranks of al Qaeda, has been articulated from the White House, at Congressional hearings and abroad.

Al Qaeda “won’t go away quietly in the night”, having found sanctuaries in ungoverned places, tribal areas and the Frontier Province of Pakistan, FBI director Robert Mueller said in the latest remarks on the matter, according to Pakistan’s Daily Times.

The issue is starting to create ripples, both at home in America and quite obviously in Pakistan, although for different reasons. For Bush critics at home, the barrage of statements is an admission, at the very least, that America is tied down in Iraq when it should be focusing on the threat along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. At worst, it’s an admission that American blood and treasure have been spent in the wrong place.

In Pakistan, the reaction is measured but concern over U.S. intentions is unmistakable.

“That the Americans are up to mischief is also evident from their extraordinary interest in the internal politics of Pakistan and formation of the government, which they are desperately trying to influence to suit their own objectives,” Pakistan Defence says in a posting arguing that Washington, faced with a strong new national coalition government in Islamabad, had stepped up covert and public pressure.

Madrasas catch the cricket bug

A crack has opened in the cast-iron rules surrounding Pakistan’s madrasas, and cricket, South Asia’s favourite sport, has rushed in.

Students from 24 religious schools in Islamabad, including the hardline Lal Masjid (Red Mosque), have been taking part in the past week in a cricket tournament organised by the city authorities as part of measures to regulate and revamp the schools. The students swapped their shalwar kameez for track pants and T-shirts, and sticks for cricket bats.

By all accounts, the games have been successful as enthusiastic crowds of skull-capped and turbaned students thronged the grounds to watch their schoolmates play with teams drawn from other schools, some of them from different sects who have often clashed in the past.

One blogger wrote that the games were a ray of light during a week clouded by a resurgence in political violence. Women students also took a break from their rigid, dawn-to-dusk schedules to take part in a badminton tournament held alongside the cricket contest.

Change was coming to the madrasas, but it would take a lot of doing before the schools shed their image as breeding grounds of extremism, Pakistani blogs and newspapers said. Indeed, some students from the Red Mosque said they had come to the tournament against the wishes of their teachers who said it was “unIslamic” because it was being covered by television channels.

Others said it was not cricket but a conspiracy against the seminaries.

The Lal Masjid, in the heart of Islamabad, was the scene of a bloody battle last year when troops stormed the mosque to put down a Taliban-style student movement, triggering in turn a wave of suicide bombings and blasts throughout the country culminating in the assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

Pakistan’s China connection strong as ever

Notwithstanding his weakened position at home, Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf this week flies to China , the “all weather friend” that has stood by the country through all its troubles.   Unlike its American friends, the Chinese have not blown hot and cold, although there have been challenges such as attacks on Chinese nationals in Pakistan, including the execution of three workers near Peshawar last year and concern that the Islamist fervour sweeping the northwest parts of Pakistan was spilling over to neighbouring Xinjiang, China’s troubled, predominantly Muslim region.   But the Chinese do not give Pakistan lectures on democracy, the dangers of nuclear proliferation – which arguably isn’t surprising since some of it is traced back to the Chinese, according to non-proliferation experts- or threaten to bomb them into the Stone Age , which is what Islamabad says the Bush administration did to enlist its support in its war on terrorism days after Sept 11.   China, Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani told parliament in his opening address last week, was a time-tested ally and the friendship “was deeper than the Indian Ocean and higher than the Himalayas”. On Monday, a Shanghai shipyard launched the first of four frigates to be delivered to the Pakistan navy, while the Pakistani air force has already inducted a fighter aircraft co-produced with China. Beijing has also helped Pakistan build civil nuclear plants.   Pakistan’s alliance with China is far more enduring that the one with the United States, a scholar writing for the YaleGlobal Online argued last month, characterising the relationship with Washington dating back to 1954 as an intermittent, Cold War marriage of convenience. The current U.S.-Pakistan relationship has been built on security interests and is already looking fragile following the outcome of the February elections when the party supported by ally Musharraf was routed.   Pakistan’s alliance with China, in contrast, is based on permanent strategic interests and immutable issues of geography, including China’s desire for access to the warm waters of the Indian Ocean, scholar  Willem van Kemenade says in the article. And unlike the sometimes public polemics with Washington over the war on militancy, Pakistan and China are quietly cooperating to ensure things don’t go out of hand in China’s far west.                                                                                                     Indeed, Musharraf will be winding up his visit in Urumqi, the capital of Xinjiang, where he is expected to appeal to local Muslims to cooperate with the authorities and not to be misled by followers of Tibet’s spiritual leader Dala Lama trying to stoke fires there,  as B.Raman, a former additional secretary at India’s Research and Analysis Wing, the external intelligence arm, says in a paper for the India-based South Asia Analysis Group.

So has China been a better friend than the United States and is the relationship as solid as ever?                

Pakistan: Breaking down the stereotypes

An economy growing at an average of 7 percent for six years now with a construction  and consumer boom, a rising middle-class that has just voted out a government, a free  press, a thriving fashion scene. Another emerging market star?

Yes, but this is the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, better known these days for its  suicide bombings, a nuclear arsenal and labelled as  the epicentre of Islamist extremism including perhaps the last  redoubt of Osama bin Laden in the lands straddling the Afghan border. “Jihadistan” as one reader wrote on this blog.  

What is the reality ? Are there two Pakistans?  Is it really Pakistan: Now or Never ? Or is the image of Pakistan clouded by TV pictures of blood and gore in its  streets, feeding insecurities while shutting out  the important political, economic and social transformations that are underway in a nation of 150 million people.

Author William Dalrymple travels through the harsh scrublands of Sindh, home to  Kalashnikov-wielding landlords and honour killings, and then back up the Punjab and he  doesn’t find a country flirting with state failure or anything even approaching the  “most dangerous country in the world” as it has been so commonly branded in recent  months, right down to a group by that name on Facebook.

Instead, as he writes in the New York Review of Books, he found a countryside that “was  no less peaceful and prosperous than that on the other side of the Indian border”, and a far cry from the violent instability of post-occupation Iraq or Afghanistan. Pakistan’s cities are changing beyond recognition with shopping malls, expensive cars,  and a burgeoning fashion scene with gay designers and amazingly beautiful women, he says.

  And  capping all this is a middle class that grew almost out of nowhere in a country once  famously known as the land of 22 big feudal families, one of them the Bhuttos, for the  absolute political and economic power they wielded.  And it is this enriched and empowered urban middle class that has finally moved from their “living rooms onto the steets, from dinner parties to political parties,” Dalrymple writes, leading a lawyers’ movement that swelled into a full-scale pro-democracy campaign  that has arguably seen off a military dictatorship