Pakistan: Now or Never?

Pakistan and the battle for Peshawar

Peshawar is such an important city for Pakistan that it can be hard to write about it without sounding shrill.  It is significant strategically since it lies near the entrance to the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan.  But it is also important emotionally – not only is it a Moghul city and an ancient Silk Route trading hub, but it is also a Pashtun town on the Pakistani side of the Durand Line , the ill-demarcated border between Pakistan and Afghanistan imposed by British colonial rulers that splits the Pashtun people of the region in two. For Pakistan, fighting for control of Peshawar is probably comparable to what France and Germany felt about Alsace Lorraine before World War Two.

So when the New York Times publishes an article about Peshawar being at risk of falling into Taliban hands  we must pay attention.  “In the last two months, Taliban militants have suddenly tightened the noose on this city of three million people, one of Pakistan’s biggest, establishing bases in surrounding towns and, in daylight, abducting residents for high ransoms,” it says. “The threat to Peshawar is a sign of the Taliban’s deepening penetration of Pakistan and of the expanding danger that the militants present to the entire region, including nearby supply lines for NATO and American forces in Afghanistan.”

The Daily Times says it more dramatically, with a Kiplingesque notion of what the fall of Peshawar to Taliban control would mean for Pakistan: “The Taliban are no longer at the gates of Peshawar, they’re inside, making their presence felt in the largest city in the NWFP (North West Frontier Province),” it says.

Pakistan has just launched an offensive against Taliban fighters near Peshawar  in an attempt to re-impose government control. As I said at the beginning, it’s hard not to sound shrill about a place that few outsiders understand. But history is in the making here, and the battle for Peshawar is one we all should watch.

What does showdown over Iran mean for Pakistan?

1. It’s early days yet, but people are already trying to work out what any Israeli attack on Iran would mean for Pakistan. (The idea that Israel might attack Iran to damage or destroy its nuclear programme gained currency this week when former U.S. ambassador John Bolton predicted in an interview with the Daily Telegraph that it would do so after the November U.S. presidential election but before the next president is sworn in.)

Pakistan defence analyst Ikram Sehgal paints an alarming, and perhaps deliberately alarmist, picture in The News of what this could mean for Pakistan: ”Could Israeli or (US) planners afford the risk of leaving a Muslim nuclear state with the means of missile delivery intact if there is war with Iran? Can they take this calculated risk in the face of a possible Pakistani nuclear reaction because of military action on a fellow Muslim nation and neighbour…?” he writes. ”Should one not be apprehensive that India as the ‘newly U.S. appointed policeman of the region’ takes the opportunity … for launching all-out Indian military offensive….?”

Sounds like a prescription for the Apocalypse? Maybe, but perhaps worth taking apart to see whether this is a serious risk for Pakistan.

The nightmare scenario would require that Israel really was capable of taking out Iran’s nuclear installations and it is by no means clear that its air force has the size and reach to deal with Iran’s dispersed and well-hidden defences and targets.  The Americans, with their huge air strike capacity and firepower could have a go, but even then this would just give an excuse to Iran to leave the Nuclear Non Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and embark on a crash course to develop the bomb. (Both India and Pakistan developed their nuclear weapons while refusing to sign the NPT.)

You would also have to build in the fact that India has a ‘no first strike’ policy and that Pakistan has made clear it will use its nuclear weapons only if it feels its very existence is threatened. Pakistan also has a history of difficult relations with Iran, driven in part by rivalry over Afghanistan, by Sunni dominance over Pakistan, and by the sheer competitiveness of two countries which see themselves as the standard-bearers of Muslim glory in an earlier era. So it is not obvious that Pakistan would come to the rescue of Iran even if it were to be attacked by Israel.

Perhaps the fall-out of the sabre-rattling over Iran will be more mundane.

Pakistan is heavily touting a gas pipeline from Iran to India as a “pipleline of peace” that might bring Islamabad and Delhi together.  Yet at the same time the United States is leaning heavily on India not to agree to the pipeline project in order to put pressure on Iran over its nuclear programme, as this article in The Telegraph from Calcutta the makes clear.

Pakistan, India and the view from China

The People’s Daily does not run editorials very often about Pakistan and India, so when it does, I pay attention.  It just published an op-ed about the latest talks between India and Pakistan on counter-terrorism. The talks themselves appeared to yield little in actual results. Yet according to the People’s Daily, it was an “important step towards mutual political trust”.

“The efforts for peace once again prove that dialogue is the sole path to resolving differences between countries,” it says. “India and Pakistan’s steps on this road are not big yet; but they are moving, in a positive direction.”

Is this an example of China taking on a U.S.-style role of regional policeman? Would India and Pakistan feel uncomfortable about such a role?

Maybe not. India and China decided years ago to put the bitterness of their 1962 border war behind them in order to concentrate on winning a place at the top table in the global economy. India’s nuclear deal — the centrepiece of its rapprochement with the United States — appears to be running into trouble at home – leaving it all the more in need of friendly neighbours on its own doorstep.

Pakistan has always seen China as a more reliable friend than the United States, as underlined in this Yale Global Online backgrounder. With relations between the United States and Pakistan getting tetchier by the day, you would expect Islamabad to turn to China for help.  Plus China seems to be pumping investment into Pakistan, of which this story in the Daily Times about it offering Chinese skilled labour to build a dam is just one example.

So is the United States losing its place in South Asia? And is China stepping in to fill the gap? It’s worth remembering that China, India and Pakistan all have a stake in Kashmir since all of them control parts of what was once the former kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir.  And the Siachen war is the only conflict in the world to have been fought in a place where three nuclear-armed powers meet.  If these three countries are now trying to pull together, what kind of role does the United States have left in the region?

from Global News Journal:

Enter the new farmers

What's with farming these days? The humble, even if slightly romantic vocation, is attracting a new breed of participants as investing in farmland and agriculture becomes the latest fad in the world of investments.   With financial markets in tumoil and commodity prices at record highs, traditional financial players such as investment banks and hedge funds, and even sovereign wealth funds of cash-rich emerging economies are increasingly looking at farm land as the next major investment avenue.

The motivations are varied -- from pure financial punting to concerns about food security. Underlying all this is the belief that the rapid economic expansion of China and India could add more than a billion people between them to the ranks of consumers of meat and wheat-based products. And then there is the growing demand for land to grow crops for biofuels.

Morgan Stanley has bought some 40,000 hectares of land in Ukraine , while the New York Times reported this month that Calyx Agro, a division of the giant Louis Dreyfus Commodities, is buying tens of thousands of acres of cropland in Brazil.

Chinese firms are said to be locking up farmland and mineral reserves in Africa, while Saudi Arabia and Bahrain plan to grow strategic grains abroad to protect their countries from crises in world food supply.

According to Asia Times, Pakistan's Prime Minister Yousaf Gillani during a visit to Saudi Arabia in early June sought $6 billion in financial and oil aid in return for hundreds of thousands of acres of agricultural land, which could be tilled by the Saudis.   All this could present some poor countries with both opportunities and threats. With oil prices at near record highs, they could trade their energy security with the food security needs of their investors and bring millions of acres of non-arable land into use. But contract farming could just as easily boomerang if high prices and domestic food shortages create a backlash against such barter deals.

from FaithWorld:

Survey says world’s top 10 intellectuals are Muslims

The bimonthly U.S. international affairs journal Foreign Policy has just published a survey of the world's top 20 public intellectuals and the first 10 are all Muslims. They are certainly an interesting group of men (and one woman) but the journal's editors are not convinced they all belong on top. In their introduction in the July/August issue, they wrote: "Rankings are an inherently dangerous business." It turns out that some candidates ran publicity campaigns on their web sites, in interviews or in reports in media friendly to them. So intellectuals who many other intellectuals might have put at the top -- say Noam Chomsky or Richard Dawkins -- landed only in the second 10 or in a much more mixed list of post-poll write-ins.

"No one spread the word as effectively as the man who tops the list," the introduction said. "In early May, the Top 100 list was mentioned on the front page of Zaman, a Turkish daily newspaper closely aligned with Islamic scholar Fethullah Gülen. Within hours, votes in his favor began to pour in. His supporters—typically educated, upwardly mobile Muslims—were eager to cast ballots not only for their champion but for other Muslims in the Top 100. Thanks to this groundswell, the top 10 public intellectuals in this year’s reader poll are all Muslim. The ideas for which they are known, particularly concerning Islam, differ significantly. It’s clear that, in this case, identity politics carried the day."

Still, the results are interesting. Fethullah Gülen, pictured at right by his website announcing the survey result, heads a network of schools and media that is probably the world's largest moderate Muslim movement. He may be one of the most influential Muslims that non-Muslims have never heard of. We ran a feature about him just last month.

Second was Muhammad Yunus, the Bangladeshi economist who won the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize for the microcredit project run by his Grameen Bank. So he's not an unknown and he's here for his secular work rather than anything religious.

Four other Muslim religious personalities made the top 10 -- Youssef al-Qaradawi (3), the spiritual head of the Muslim Brotherhood and weekly preacher on al-Jazeera satellite television, Amr Khaled (6), a popular Egyptian television preacher, Abdolkarim Soroush (7 -- pictured at left), an Iranian reformist theologian and Tariq Ramadan (8), the Swiss-born scholar popular among young European Muslims. Soroush, who is much more philosopher than activist, is probably the only one we have not written much about.

Several top-tenners besides Yunus made the list for their secular work. Orhan Pamuk, the Turkish novelist who won the 2006 Nobel Prize for literature, came in fourth. Next was Aitzaz Ahsan (pictured below), the Lahore lawyer whose lawyers' protest movement is possibly the strongest voice of secular civil society in Pakistan. Ninth and tenth places went to Ugandan-born cultural anthropologist Mahmood Mamdani and Shirin Ebadi, the Iranian human rights lawyer who won the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize.

What do you think of this survey? Do you think these 10 are the world's top public intellectuals? If not, who would you nominate?

Fears grow of U.S. attack on Pakistan

Some people have begun to voice what has been for some time an unspoken fear in Pakistan - that of a U.S. attack.

What would happen if there were to be another big attack  on the United States that is traced back to militants holed up in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas on the Afghan border?

“Such an attack would immediately trigger massive bombing and an invasion of Pakistan by the U.S. and NATO,” says Riaz Haq in his blog Haq’s musings. “It could also result in the removal of the democratically elected government and installation of a new military regime in Pakistan,” he writes. “In addition to unparalleled death and destruction, such a scenario could turn Pakistan into a failed state with widespread unrest, homelessness, poverty, hunger and disease.”

Within the United States, he says, it would mean the election of Republican presidential candidate John McCain.

A top adviser to McCain appeared to corroborate that bit at least when he was quoted as telling Fortune magazine that a Sept.11-type attack before the November election would benefit McCain. Charlie Black has since apologised for his remarks following widespread criticism.

Haq is the not the only one worrying about the months ahead. Pakistani blogger Farrukh Khan Pitafi  goes as far as to say : “Accept it or not, Pakistan is the next target of the U.S. invasion.” Over-reaction ?  Paranoia ?

India and Pakistan: watch out for water fights

Defence analysts in South Asia have been saying for so long that India and Pakistan might solve their problems over Kashmir only to end up at war over water that I had almost become inured to the issue. That was until I read the following comment on an earlier blog about Gulf investors buying up farmland in Pakistan to offset food shortages at home:

“Tough challenges await the investors in this sector due to serious water and energy shortages that the country suffers from at the moment,” it reads. “For effective investment in the agriculture sector, the government must clear these impediments first.”

The comment prompted me to hunt around for evidence of growing tension between India and Pakistan over water, needed to irrigate the land to cope with food shortages and for hydroelectric power — an increasingly attractive alternative in view of high fuel prices.

A quick trawl turned up this overview in the asia sentinel: “Water is destined to be a determining factor in the regional conflicts of South Asia in the years to come, particularly between India and Pakistan,” it says. ”While the West is busy concentrating its efforts on securing a ready supply of oil, in South Asia the governments are slowly but surely waking up to the fact that in the not too distant future water is going to be equally, if not more, important to the survival of their people.”

More specifically, Ijaz Hussain in the Daily Times analyses a row between India and Pakistan over Indian plans to build a hydroelectric project – the Kishanganga dam — on a river on its side of divided Kashmir. Pakistan fears the project will disrupt its own plans to build a hydroelectric dam on the same river on its side of Kashmir.

India and Pakistan have successfully regulated their use of the rivers they share in divided Kashmir through the Indus Waters Treaty  (see full pdf document here), signed in 1960 under the auspices of the World Bank. It is the only agreement to have been fully implemented by India and Pakistan; it held through two full-scale wars in 1965 and 1971 and survived a period of intense antagonism which began with the nuclear tests in 1998 and ended with a ceasefire on the Line of Control dividing Kashmir in late 2003. 

How well will it hold up in the current global crisis over food shortages and high oil prices? Relations between India and Pakistan are better than they have been for years, yet the challenges they face in providing food and electricity for their people and their industries are greater than ever.

Pakistan’s lawyers: recovering from the anti-climax

With hindsight, it seems clear that a mass movement named after Mao’s Long March but also claiming Gandhi’s principles of non-violence risked disappointing its supporters.  The failure of the Long March by Pakistan’s lawyers to restore judges sacked by President Pervez Musharraf, and its dispersal last Saturday, has prompted much debate about why its leaders gave up without at least staging a sit-in.

Defence analyst Ikram Sehgal called the Long March a logistical success in its ability to garner mass support without violence, but a tactical failure. “The tactical failure of this long-lasting tremendous effort founded on great principles has become a strategic disaster for Musharraf’s opponents,” he writes in The News.  “About Pervez Musharraf, ‘with such friends who needs enemies’, one can paraphrase the saying for him: ‘With such enemies why does he need friends?’”

The blog All Things Pakistan says supporters of the Long March “are justifiably feeling let down by the grand posturing, thundering rhetoric and the subsequent retreat from agitation”. But it adds: “The lawyers’ movement is profoundly significant. It constitutes the finest historical ‘moment’ in our troubled history.”

Aitzaz Ahsan, the leader of the lawyers’ movement, writes in Newsweek  that the Long March was “an act of collective and nonviolent defiance perhaps unrivaled in Pakistan’s checkered history”.

“As the first rays of the Saturday sun streaked over Parliament, I delivered the concluding speech, and this remarkable crowd, the biggest in Pakistan’s recent history, dispersed peacefully for the trip home,” he writes. “Not a shot was fired or a pane of glass broken. Yet more than 200,000 Pakistanis had managed to make their point: they wanted their judges back.”

Yet why did the lawyers’ leaders give up without staging a sit-in that might have forced home their point? 

Was it simply poor judgment, as suggested in this piece in the Khaleej Times: “The mystery behind the decision of Aitzaz Ahsan, the man who had so successfully and so untiringly spearheaded an unprecedented campaign of lawyers and civil society, may not be unveiled in near future,” it says. “Those who saw him delivering the concluding speech to close the long march say that he was not in his usual self and was witless.”

from Tales from the Trail:

Obama, McCain camps spar over bin Laden comment

CHICAGO - Republican presidential candidate John McCain's campaign is attacking rival Barack Obama for saying that if al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden is caught, the United States should avoid making him into a martyr.      Allies to McCain have suggested the comment shows the Democratic candidate opposes the death penalty for bin Laden -- an interpretation the Obama campaign says is false.      The Illinois senator was asked on Wednesday how he would proceed if bin Laden were captured. He said he was not sure if bin Laden would be caught alive because of shoot-to-kill orders.   Concerning how to try the al Qaeda leader, Obama said it was important "to do it in a way that allows the entire world to understand the murderous acts that he's engaged in and not to make him into a martyr and to be sure that the United States government is abiding by the basic conventions that would strengthen our hand in the broader battle against terrorism."      McCain adviser Randy Scheunemann seized on the word martyr.   "Now, the last time I checked the definition of martyr, it's someone who dies for a cause or is killed for a cause and it seems to be that Sen. Obama is ruling out capital punishment for Osama bin Laden were he to be captured alive under U.S. jurisdiction," he said.   The Obama campaign said that interpretation was wrong and noted Obama is on record saying he believed bin Laden "would qualify for the death penalty."      When he spoke about bin Laden on Wednesday, Obama cited the Nuremberg trials of Nazi war criminals after World War II as an example of how the United States "advanced a set of universal principles" in bringing to justice people who committed heinous acts.      After the Nuremberg proceedings, 10 top Nazi figures were hanged following the main trials and several dozen lower-lever figures were hanged following other trials.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage: http:www.reuters.com/globalcoverage/2008candidates

Photo credit: Reuters Afghanistan stringer (Bin Laden speaks at news conference in Afghanistan in 1998)

Pakistan-U.S. alliance scarred

A New York Times report about Pakistan threatening to postpone or cancel an American programme to train a paramilitary force because of last week’s U.S. air strikes has been widely picked up in the Pakistani media.

Eleven soldiers from the Frontier Corps died in those air strikes in the Mohmand agency in circumstances that remain unclear. But the U..S.-Pakistan alliance forged after the September 11 attacks has been deeply scarred as a result, says the report. It quotes former Pakistan Army chief General Jehangir Karamat as saying that the United States deliberately targeted Pakistani forces and that there had not been a statement from the United States that this was friendly fire and that the intention was not to attack Pakistani forces.

The Frontier Corps is the very paramilitary force that Washington had begun spending $400 million to train in counter-insurgency techniques.

Such is the anger in Pakistan, inflamed further by Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s threat to send troops in to Pakistan to stop cross border attacks, that defence expert Shireen M Mazari questioned whether America was a “dubious ally or an outright enemy.”

Air strikes are blunt instruments and rarely win hearts and minds, says writer Eric Margolis. Attacks by U.S. aircraft, Predator hunter-killer drones, U.S. special forces and CIA teams have been rising steadily inside Pakistan’s FATA, and instead of intimidating the Taliban, they have ignited a firestorm of anti-western fury among the tribesmen, he writes.

But the United States says cross border attacks into Afghanistan have been increasing – there were 50 percent more in April than the year before- attributing it to lack of pressure on the militants on the other side of the border.