Pakistan: Now or Never?

Musharraf and the mango tree

The future of President Pervez Musharraf grows more opaque by the day. At its simplest level, it seems that while many people think he should step down, few want to see him forced out in a way that would divide and damage the country.

In the latest stories highlighting the currents and counter-currents swirling around the former army general, Musharraf lashed out at “rumour-mongers” for suggesting he planned to quit, while President George W. Bush telephoned him to pledge his continued backing.  Meanwhile disgraced scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, known as the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, has begun speaking out against Musharraf by complaining he was unfairly made to take the rap for selling nuclear secrets.  That A.Q. Khan now feels safe to speak after four years under house arrest is seen as one of the most telling indications of the times turning against Musharraf.

Reading comments on an earlier blog about Musharraf’s future got me wondering whether one could predict his next move from his past. As an Urdu-speaking ”mohajir” whose family fled Delhi at partition, an outsider in Punjabi-dominated Pakistan, and also as a former commando, how would he respond to the pressure on him to quit?

There are simplistic responses to this question — my bet would be that the usual response of an outsider and a commando would be to fight it out, if needs be by adopting the riskiest course of action. But since that question seemed too simplistic, I decided to reread what Musharraf had said about himself in his autobiography “In the Line of Fire”.

My favourite lines were in the prologue: “I have confronted death and defied it several times in the past because destiny and fate have always smiled upon me,” he writes. “I first avoided death as a teenager in 1961, when I was hanging upside down from the branch of a mango tree and it broke. When I hit the ground, my friends thought I was dead.”

Musharraf doesn’t elaborate on the mango tree episode but he does paint a picture of a man who sees himself has having always defied the odds through luck or daring. The helicopter that crashed and which he missed because he was playing bridge. Two assassination attempts. The childhood memory of his mother’s tension when as a four-year-old boy he and his family fled by train from India to Pakistan.

This is a man who sees himself as a survivor, with fond memories of boys’ gangs in his childhood in Ankara. “Even at that age I was very good at making strategies and planning tactics to ambush and trap other gangs,” he writes — a line that carries extra resonance as he tries to outmanoeuvre opposition politicians who want to oust him.

Kashmir cools off, but peace still distant

With the world’s attention focused on the hunt for al Qaeda and the Taliban along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, the 19-year conflict in Kashmir to its east has slipped off the radar.   But Kashmir, which former U.S. President Bill Clinton once said was one of the most dangerous places on earth, has just crossed a milestone with the number of people dying in the fighting falling below 1,000 a year.

Seen purely in terms of fatalities, Kashmir is now classed as a “low-intensity conflict” says the New Delhi-based Institute for  Conflict Management which tracks deaths due to militant-related violence across South Asia.   Last year was a watershed for Kashmir when the number of civilians, securitymen and militants killed in the conflict fell to 777, down from a high of 4,507 in 2001. The decreasing  trend continues this year with 192 people killed until May.   Just to put things in perspective, the comparable figure for Iraq was 13,600 according to the latest U.S. State Department’s annual terrorism report released last month, about 6,000 for Afghanistan and 4,000 in Sri Lanka’s civil war according to Reuters reporters in the two countries.   So is peace at hand in Kashmir and has the  stage been set for a “grand reconciliation” that Pakistan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi spoke about after talks with his Indian counterpart Pranab Mukherjee in Islamabad last week ?   Not quite. The talks, resuming after a year because of political crises in Pakistan, themselves did not throw up any new ideas, much less suggest a resolution of the Kashmir dispute. Indeed if anything Pakistan’s new leaders are calling a set of “out-of-the box” proposals that President Pervez Musharraf made as ‘half-baked.”"

And in the Kashmir valley itself, for the all  improved statistics, the mood is hardly upbeat.

Yasin Malik, chairman of the Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front, says the violence can get worse,  as it did in the 1990s, if India and Pakistan don’t find a solution soon.  He spoke of a mood of  “despondency” as Kashmiris watch leaders from India and Pakistan meeting every now and then, without moving an inch forward on the 60-year-old dispute.

How would Pakistan fare under Obama?

With Senator Barack Obama looking increasingly confident about winning the Democratic nomination, there have been a new spate of articles on what it would mean for Pakistan if he becomes president.

The most eye-catching, perhaps, was a story in The News  about how President Pervez Musharraf’s family in the United States have been giving donations to Obama’s campaign.  ”President Pervez Musharraf’s family members here are supporting and giving donations to a US presidential candidate who strongly opposes the Bush administration policy of supporting and keeping the retired general in the presidency,” it says.

The Daily Times, in an analysis by former Pakistani foreign secretary Najmuddin A Shaikh, says there would be little difference between Obama and the Bush administration on the need to hunt out al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan — if needs be through unilateral U.S. action – and on keeping its nuclear weapons safe. What the writer sees is a difference in tone,  which would be welcomed in Pakistan:

“What one can expect, however, is that Obama will be less averse – as the candidate for change – to recognising that extremism in the Muslim world flows from causes other than religious injunctions, no matter how this may be portrayed by so-called spokesmen for Islam or misguided scholars in the West,” he says. “He certainly will not be talking about crusades nor will he oppose direct talks with adversaries.”

But what strikes me is how this optimism about Obama may be offset by the United States in general taking a harder line against Pakistan, regardless of who wins the presidential elections.  A couple of months ago,  in a blog on Obama’s policies on Pakistan, I wrote about how he supports unilateral strikes on al Qaeda targets in the country.

Since then, the background noise in the United States about the need to attack al Qaeda and the Taliban inside Pakistan has increased —  to the point where you wonder whether any difference in style and substance Obama might bring would be drowned out by a hardening shift in public opinion towards taking a more aggressive stance.

One blog I came across, calling itself the Danger Room on Wired.com, argues that Pakistan is in fact al Qaeda’s best base for planning attacks on the United States and Europe, since unlike more unstable places like Iraq where the United States is free to use force, the group flourishes in countries where there is a reasonable amount of state control.

from FaithWorld:

Kissinger, Iraq and India’s Muslims – a new domino theory?

Is Henry Kissinger trying to update the domino theory to fit what he fears in 2008? He had a "Lunch with the FT" interview in Saturday's Financial Times and surprised his interviewer, historian Stephen Graubard, by linking the war in Iraq and Muslims in India. As Graubard wrote:

He believes the military “surge” is working and says the next question is when to start to move away from an exclusively military option. “This is not a war of states,” Kissinger says. “If we withdraw from Iraq, the radical elements in all the neighbouring Arab countries will be greatly encouraged.” We will, he fears, be unable to maintain ourselves in Afghanistan, or to retain our present position in Pakistan.

He fears a rapid withdrawal could radicalise the vast Islamic community in India. I am fascinated by this statement – I have never heard anyone else say it so robustly – and suggest that he argued in a similar vein about the dangers of a departure from Vietnam. “Not at all,” he says, adding that the collapse in Vietnam was partly compensated for by the almost simultaneous and fortuitous disintegration of the Soviet Union.

Hmmm ... that's not what we've been noticing. In fact, our chief correspondent in New Delhi, Alistair Scrutton, just wrote a post on a “Movement Against Terrorism” among Muslim clerics there urging imams to preach against terrorism at Friday prayers across India. Earlier this year, an influential Islamic seminary declared terrorism un-Islamic. That's not to say there's no possibility of anything happening, but it seems the situation is more complex than Kissinger seems to think.

It's not clear whether Kissinger lunched with the FT before or after the Jaipur bomb that killed 60 people. But he is a historian who prides himself on taking a longer-term view. Do you think he's right to see dominoes falling in India if the United States pulls out of Iraq?

Showdown or climbdown in Pakistan?

This is definitely a case of “the more you know, the less you understand”. 

There has been much talk in the media about whether PPP leader Asif Ali Zardari is heading for a showdown with President Pervez Musharraf to force him out of office.

But it is not clear whether Zardari is really looking for a showdown, or instead a climbdown that would allow Musharraf to stay on with reduced powers, while also accommodating former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, whose antipathy to the former army general dates back to the 1999 coup.

For an outsiders’ view, The Australian boiled it down into a story headlined “Leaders duel in battle for Pakistan. 

“Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, enraged over a tirade against him by Asif Ali Zardari, last night cut off longstanding secret contacts with the dominant Pakistan People’s Party as speculation mounted he would launch a counter-strike to shore up his hold on power,” it wrote.

But there is also an interesting insiders’ view from Ikram Sehgal, a defence analyst close to the Pakistan army, who says that Musharraf might replace army head General Ashfaq Kayani with another man to counter any attack by his political opponents. 

“Offence being the best defence, there are signs that the Empire is now preparing to strike back. The perception of continuing absolute authority in the public mind is quite a virtuoso performance by Musharraf, given that this avid bridge player’s only remaining power base is the ISI controlled by talented cousin Lt Gen Nadim Taj,” he writes. 

Pakistan’s peace deals with militants: the march of folly?

Despite the reservations of its principal ally, the United States, Pakistan’s new civilian leaders have gone ahead and sued for peace with militants in the Swat valley this week, and by all indications are about to cut another deal, and this with the head of the Taliban in the country.

While the politicians have repeatedly emphasised their independence of action with regard to militants and vowed to pursue a different course from President Pervez Musharraf, can they really see these deals through without the Americans on board?

Unlikely, if you listen to the comments/analyses not just in the United States but within Pakistan itself, which while more welcoming of attempts to try a different tack, sees dangers ahead.

Rahimullah Yousafzai, the Peshawar-based executive editor of The News, writes that the peace accords are not going  to be easy to implement in the face of U.S. opposition. He points to the U.S. missile strike in the village of Damadola in the Bajaur tribal agency earlier this month as an indicator of American displeasure over Pakistan’s policy of making deals with militants. 

Eighteen people were killed in that strike aimed at a senior al Qaeda leader, but among the dead were women and children, drawing condemnation from Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza  Gilani. And within days, the militants struck back, carrying out a suicide bombing at an army base in Mardan in which 13 people were killed. The Taliban claimed responsibility, saying it was to avenge Damadola.

It showed how quickly things could go wrong if the Pakistanis pulled in one direction and the Americans and NATO just over the porous border in Afghanistan pulled in  another.

Pakistan’s peace deal with the militants in the Federally Administered Territorial Areas is actually meaningless if Islamabad cannot ensure the security of FATA against U.S. aerial attacks, Zeenia Satti, a Washington-based consultant and energy geopolitics analyst writes in The News.

Pakistani rock band in Kashmir to heal wounds

Pakistan’s hottest rock band Junoon plays in Srinagar, Kashmir on Sunday, in what must rate as the biggest music show in decades in one of the world’s most militarised regions.

Junoon, or madness in Arabic,  will play in a heavily fortified auditorium on the banks of the Dal lake, but its Sufi music and soaring guitar riffs should resonate far beyond, given that this is where Sufism, a form of Islamic mysticism, struck roots in the subcontinent.

The idea of a Pakistani band playing in the centre of Kashmir, which has been at the heart of 60 years of unremitting hostility between the neighbours, is itself remarkable, a testament to the change that is quietly taking place.

It would have been unimaginable a few years ago, Ïndia’s NDTV quotes a local college professor as saying.

Both nations have faced challenges in recent days; India, the blasts in Jaipur which at another time would have almost reflexively been blamed on the neighbour, and Pakistan renewed bombings and a civilian coalition government that is dangerously drifting apart barely weeks after it was formed.

The neighbours have been tested in Kashmir itself recently with reports of cross-border incursions and gunbattles but they have kept their counsel, and resumed peace talks this week.

So what’s the subtext to Junoon in Kashmir, if at all ? Yusuf Jameel, who has reported extensively on the region, says the political connotations of their presence in the disputed territory are not lost on anyone, and authorities are trying to ensure there is no trouble.

from Photographers Blog:

Close enough…

From Reuters photographer Goran Tomasevic who is near Garmser in Helmand Province, Afghanistan with the U.S. 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit come these 4 frames from a sequence taken when the unit came under fire from Taliban fighters May 18, 2008.

The Marine was uninjured.

http://www.reuters.com/news/pictures/slideshow?collectionId=1864&galleryName=All%20Collections#a=1

Who will be left standing when the Afghan war ends?

“War does not determine who is right — only who is left.” (Or so said the British philosopher and anti-war activist Bertrand Russell.) So who is going to be left standing once U.S. and NATO forces have finished battling it out with the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan?

Republican presidential candidate John McCain came out with some interesting comments in a speech in Ohio last week on where he sees Afghanistan at the end of his first term in office in 2013, if he were to be elected president:

“The threat from a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan has been greatly reduced but not eliminated. U.S. and NATO forces remain there to help finish the job, and continue operations against the remnants of al Qaeda. The Government of Pakistan has cooperated with the U.S. in successfully adapting the counterinsurgency tactics that worked so well in Iraq and Afghanistan to its lawless tribal areas where al Qaeda fighters are based. The increase in actionable intelligence that the counterinsurgency produced led to the capture or death of Osama bin Laden, and his chief lieutenants. There is no longer any place in the world al Qaeda can consider a safe haven.”

Optimistic or realistic?

Digging around on the internet, you can find a different view. Back in April Syed Saleem Shahzad, the Pakistan Bureau Chief of Asia Times Online, wrote that the Taliban were taking their inspiration from the Vietminh who chased the French out of what was known as Indochina in the 1950s.  He wrote that they were inspired by the Vietnamese commander General Vo Nguyen Giap, who successfully employed guerrilla tactics against the French before crushing them in the battle of Dien Bien Phu  in 1954.

Taking up the theme, the website openDemocracy  followed up by saying that the west tends to assume that it alone is watching the lessons of Vietnam. ”It is as if “only” the United States (and by extension western forces or combatants in general) have the capacity or the interest to draw lessons from the past,” it said. It called the reference to the Taliban looking for  inspiration in Vietnam ”startling and ominous”.

Musharraf, “shorthand” for Pakistan?

I finally got around to reading the full text of a speech by U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte to the National Endowment for Democracy’s Pakistan Forum earlier this month and the following exchange caught my eye:

Question: “Does the Bush Administration still consider President Musharraf an indispensable ally?”

Negroponte: “Well, first of all, I think what you — your first question is prompted by the fact that at times in the past, when we talked about the war on terror, particularly in the wake of 9/11, we personalized the characterization of Pakistan’s collaboration with us by saying that Mr. Musharraf was an indispensable ally in the war on terror. And I myself used that phrase on a number of occasions.

“But it really is shorthand for the nation of Pakistan and it’s a shorthand for saying that we have an — I mean, Pakistan is in an indispensable situation in terms of dealing with the threats we confront in the war on terror because of the border area, because of al Qaeda, because of the position that this whole al Qaeda threat poses to our interests, the interests of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the rest of the world. So I think that’s — that would be what I’d say to that one.”

Am I alone in thinking that “shorthand” is an extraordinary word for the Americans to use about Musharraf? The reference is all the more interesting in the context of speculation on whether the rift between former prime minister Nawaz Sharif and Pakistan People’s Party leader Asif Ali Zardari will take pressure off Musharraf to quit.  

The Washington Post, in an article headlined “Sidelined Musharraf Still Exerts Influence“, says that the former army general has continued to influence the country from the shadows, even after his political allies were trounced in elections in February.

“In the past week, the coalition’s acrimonious split — over how and when to restore judges fired by Musharraf — has dashed some of the hopes for democratic progress generated by elections in February,” it says. “Just as swiftly, it has generated talk of Musharraf as the political beneficiary, chortling at his adversaries’ failures and sensing a chance for political muscle-flexing if not rehabilitation.”