Pakistan: Now or Never?

U.S. ground raids into Pakistan halted, Army Times says

The United States has decided to halt cross-border ground raids by Special Ops forces into Pakistan, according to the U.S. Army Times. It quotes a Pentagon official as saying U.S. leaders had decided to hold off on permitting ground raids to allow Pakistani forces to press home their own attacks on militants in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.

“We are now working with the Pakistanis to make sure that those type of ground-type insertions do not happen, at least for a period of time to give them an opportunity to do what they claim they are desiring to do,” it quotes the Pentagon official as saying. This did not apply to air strikes launched from Predator drones.

The article is well worth a read for its explanation of why the United States backed off after making a controversial cross-border ground raid on the village of Angor Adda earlier this month. The raid represented “a strategic miscalculation”, it quoted a U.S. government official as saying. “We did not fully appreciate the vehemence of the Pakistani response,” which included a threat to cut supply lines through Pakistan to Afghanistan. “I don’t think we really believed it was going to go to that level,” the official said.

I’d also recommend the lower part of the article as it gives a wealth of detail about who it thinks is being targeted in Pakistan right now, including the networks of Islamist leaders Jalaluddin Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, both veterans of the campaign against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

Interestingly, it says there has been no U.S. Special Ops activity in areas around the sanctuary of Taliban leader Mullah Omar, believed to be hiding in or near the Pakistani city of Quetta in Balochistan. ”It’s all happening in the tribal areas,” it quotes a civilian expert on Afghanistan as saying. “The target has not been the Omar Taliban.”

That’s probably just a coincidence of geography – targeting Quetta would involve striking much more deeply into Pakistan. But it does make you wonder whether it could have an impact on any attempt to draw parts of the Taliban into peace talks, an idea most recently explored by The Observer newspaper in Britain.  The logic for peace talks, as I have mentioned in previous posts, is that the Taliban, or parts of it, are essentially an ethnic nationalist Pashtun movement which could be won over, and separated from its allies in al Qaeda, by offering it a share of power in Kabul.  Food for thought.

Pakistan names new spy chief: at U.S. behest or own move?

Pakistan has replaced the head of its powerful Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency, following months of questions from the United States about its reliability in the battle against the Taliban and al Qaeda.  Lieutenant-General Ahmed Shujaa Pasha, formerly head of military operations, will replace Lieutenant-General Nadeem Taj.

The change was part of a major overhaul of the military leadership by Pakistan Army chief General Ashfaq Kayani, who also replaced the head of the 10 Corps in Rawalpindi, the most powerful corps in the army.

So to what extent was the United States responsible for the move? Or how far was it Pakistan’s own attempt to shore up its security operations as it cracks down on Islamist militants, who according to U.S. military commander David Petraeus threaten Pakistan’s “very existence”?

Washington has long suspected elements within the ISI of passing sensitive information to the Taliban –with whom the spy agency worked closely before the 9/11 attacks on the United States — undermining its campaign in Afghanistan. India and Afghanistan also accused the ISI of involvement in the July bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul. Pakistan has denied the allegations.

The New York Times reported at the weekend that President Asif Ali Zardari had held an unpublicised meeting with Michael Hayden, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, during his visit to the United States last week, amid ongoing U.S. pressure about what it called “the double game played by Pakistan’s spy agency”.

But it also quoted Zardari as saying that: “The ISI will be handled, that is our problem.” He added that ”We don’t hunt with the hound and run with the hare, which is what (former president Pervez) Musharraf was doing,” and said that ”Anyone not conforming with my government’s policy will be thrown out.”

Besides asking how much the change of leadership at the ISI was dictated by Washington, the other question is how much the army and the government worked together on it.  

Pakistan’s Zardari wins mixed reviews with U.S. trip

Depending on who you read, Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari was either an embarrassment for trying to flirt with Sarah Palin during his trip to New York last week, or a street-smart wheeler-dealer bravely standing up to Islamist militancy after the assassination of his wife Benazir Bhutto.

Time revisits the encounter between Zardari and Palin – in which he told the vice-presidential candidate she was gorgeous and threatened to hug her in a scene now frequently being replayed on YouTube – writing that it led to Zardari being “pilloried at home as a source of national embarrassment and accused of sexism and impropriety”.

In contrast, New York Times columnist Roger Cohen  was fulsome in his praise of a man filling what he calls ’the most dangerous job on earth’. This is one of the most positive, if not the most positive, reviews I have ever read about Zardari.

“My impression?” writes Cohen. “This guy’s very smart, street smart, a wheeler-dealer in an area full of them, secular, pro-American, committed to democracy, and brave. I never heard (former president Pervez) Musharraf frame Pakistan’s fight against terrorism with such candor. I believe he wants genuine conciliation with India and Afghanistan, essential to the region’s stability. (Positive meetings were held here with the Indian and Afghan leaders.). I care much less right now about his checkered past than about getting behind him for civilization’s sake.”

The Los Angeles Times says the jury is still out on whether Zardari, “an accidental president” thrust into the limelight by his wife’s assassination last year, can reinvent himself as a truly inspirational leader able to rally the country while also keeping the Pakistan Army on side. 

“In a country that has spent half its existence under military rule, Zardari, as a civilian leader, still maintains only tenuous control of the army,” it says.  The newspaper quotes Stephen Cohen, an expert on Pakistan at the Brookings Institution in Washington, as saying that “If the military doesn’t do what he wants it to do, he doesn’t have sovereignty.” Cohen adds: ”He’s been elected president, but that’s meaningless.”

As for Pakistan’s neighbours, Zardari seems to have won over Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who told CNN he sees a new opportunity to work with Pakistan to uproot militant sanctuaries on their shared border. This was in sharp contrast to Karzai’s  relationship with Musharraf, which was marked by both countries blaming the other for failing to crack down on the Taliban and al Qaeda.

Obama, McCain underline policy differences on Pakistan

Presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain stressed important differences in approach to Pakistan in their first debate.

On the surface, Obama advocated a tougher line, as he has done since the start of his campaign. “If the United States has al Qaeda, (Osama) bin Laden, top-level lieutenants in our sights, and Pakistan is unable or unwilling to act, then we should take them out,” he said. He talked about the $10 billion Washington had given to Pakistan in aid over the last seven years, saying it had failed to rid the border region of al Qaeda and the Taliban

“You have got to deal with Pakistan,” the Illinois senator said, and I coudn’t help thinking how those words will play out in a nation already under immense pressure from both the militants  and the United States.

McCain was more considered, saying he would work with the Pakistan government and that new President Asif Ali Zardari’s  (whose name he seemed to have mis-pronounced) had his plate  full. And he accused his rival of threatening Pakistan with military strikes. “You don’t say that aloud. If you have to do things, you have  to do things, and you work with the Pakistani government,” he  said.

As the New York Times said, Obama’s position is closer to President George W. Bush who this summer is reported to have authorised American special forces to cross the Afghan-Pakistan border into Pakistan’s tribal areas that al Qaeda and the Taliban have used as a sanctuary.

Revisiting America’s war in Afghanistan

I finally got around to reading Charlie Wilson’s War (much better than the film and considerably longer) about the U.S. Congressman who managed to drum up huge amounts of money to fund the mujahideen fighting the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in the 1980′s.

George Crile’s book - about how the CIA channelled money and weapons through Pakistan to defeat the Red Army in Afghanistan and helped bring about the collapse of the Soviet Union – was first published in 2002.  But it’s even more relevant today as the United States struggles to defeat the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan, and realises it will never succeed as long as ”the enemy” has sanctuary in Pakistan. It is the only war that the United States has fought on both sides.

This is a tale of how ill-equipped Afghan tribesmen were turned into “technoguerrillas” with American money and a romantic notion of defeating the “Evil Empire”.  I realise this story has been told many times since 9/11. And I acknowledge the obvious perils of judging history with hindsight – back then U.S. policy was seen through the prism of the Cold War, whereas now it is defined by ”the War on Terror”. But there are still lines in “Charlie Wilson’s War” that are worth repeating here:

“The basic law of modern guerrilla warfare,” writes Crile, “is that no insurgent movement can survive without a sanctuary for its fighters. The Vietcong depended on Cambodia and North Vietnam … Without Pakistan, there could not have been a sustained resistance (to the Soviet Union).”

In short, exactly the same problem the United States is facing today.

Then there are the weapons supplied to the mujahideen, that the CIA at first bought expensively and unreliably on the black market - ”like trying to get laid in a city you don’t know” – until a secret web of government arms suppliers eventually allowed the Americans to get “out of the world’s black-market whorehouses and into contractual relationships with governments that could provide the Agency with sound, reliable killing devices at a fixed price.”

Which countries are supplying the Taliban now?

India, Pakistan back to their aggressive ways at Wagah

One of the oddities of the troubled India-Pakistan relationship is a  theatrical flag-lowering ceremony that the border guards of the two countries together enact every day at sunset at the Wagah checkpoint in the Punjab – for long the only road crossing.

Tall, very tall, guards from the Pakistani Rangers and men from India’s Border Security Force (BSF) with twirling moustaches goose-march up to the zero point, stamping their feet on the ground till the knees reach the chin, scowling at each other  and shouting their way in a choreographed routine that ends in the lowering of the flags and the slamming of huge gates to the two countries.

Watched by baying crowds seated on grandstands on either side, the guards, wearing huge fan-shaped headresses,  come within inches of each other, the hostility unmistakable, the gestures avowedly  aggressive. The flags are lowered in clockwork precison; the soldiers exchange the briefest of handshakes, and the borders between India and Pakistan are sealed once more as they have been for most of the past 60 years. 

For the last  two years, the two sides had chosen to tone down some of  the posturing  during this retreat ceremony at the border, in keeping with the spirit of rapprochement that began with a peace process in 2004.

Omar Sheikh, a childhood friend turned Pakistani militant

The weekend bomb which tore through the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad, killing 53 people, was a reminder that Pakistan is entering the eye of the storm of Islamist militancy. But for me, it was also a more personal reminder of a childhood friend who went from a suburban upbringing in London to become one of Pakistan’s most notorious militants.

Omar Sheikh, a member of the Jaish-e-Mohammad (Army of the Prophet) organisation which has been linked to the bombing, is currently on death row in Pakistan for organising the kidnapping and beheading of the brilliant Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Karachi in February, 2002.   I had long since lost contact with Omar since we both graduated from Forest School in north London in 1992 and the sight of a heavily bearded Sheikh flanked by Pakistani police during the Pearl trial came as a shock. My jumbled memories of Omar were of a tall, lantern-jawed adolescent with dark-rimmed glasses, a serious but polite demeanour, a childish sense of humour but an unblinking, fearless appetite for a fight. Even as a boy, he spoke feverishly and often of “My Country” and praised the authoritarian and strictly Islamic regime of General Zia — who ousted and killed Benazir Bhutto’s father and helped the mujahedin throw the Soviets out of Afghanistan.

A tangle of contradictions, Omar’s other great love aside from patriotism was arm-wrestling and the would-be Islamist would often be found in smoky pubs — drinking only milk — competing with his team.

We had both started at Forest School at the age of 11 and I remember he never cried at anything – unless he was angry with himself. He loved chess and often spent his lunch breaks pouring over a chess board with a group of friends who were mainly from Sri Lankan, Indian or Bengali families.

The son of a clothes merchant in Wanstead, north London, Omar lived in a nondescript house in a cul-de-sac, where he invited me for lunch after he returned from three years of schooling in Pakistan at the age of 16. Wary of England’s influence, Omar’s father sent him to study at Lahore’s exclusive and disciplinarian Aitchison school — he returned a junior boxing champion and full of stories of contacts with organised crime, gun battles in the ghettos of Lahore, visits to brothels. At the time I thought they were all tall stories – as the chess-lover that he was, Omar’s conversation was full of bluffs and feints — but now I’m not so sure. What I remember of our long lunch were Omar’s fascination with girls and his shock at the liberal relations between young girls and boys in England.

In the sixth form, he became interested in economics, dreamed of going to study in the United States at Harvard, and even sat the SAT exams, and he went everywhere with a sturdy black plastic suitcase which weighed a ton (I think he carried weights around to pump up his muscles for arm-wrestling). He seldom had fights at school after he returned from Pakistan and had trained as a boxer, but he would often joke around by letting his fists fly within inches of your face as if he were shadow boxing.   Looking back, Omar’s years in Pakistan were the first step in a transformation which was completed when he went to the London School of Economics and threw himself into the cause of persecuted Muslims in Bosnia. After a mysterious trip there at the end of his first year in 1993, Omar dropped out of his studies and his conversion to militancy began.   By the time of the Pearl kidnapping, Sheikh was already a high-profile militant: he had been detained in India in 1994 for the kidnapping of three Britons and an American in the volatile Kashmir region. Via our school, his lawyer asked if I would be willing to testify as a character witness at his trial, a request I turned down. In any case, I couldn’t see what my testimony as a character witness could achieve, given that Omar appeared to have undergone an ideological transformation by that stage.

Finally, Omar walked free in 1999 when Islamist militants hijacked an Indian Airlines flight with 155 people on board from Kathmandu, forcing it to land in Kandahar in Afghanistan. The Indian government exchanged Omar and two other prisoners in return for the release of the passengers and crew.   In many ways, Omar’s Westernised identity made him a precious commodity in the militant world. In his book “Who Killed Daniel Pearl?”, left-wing French intellectual Bernard-Henri Levy cites evidence Sheikh had spent time with Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan and the al Qaeda founder referred to the genteel and well-educated economist as “my favourite son”.   Levi also cites evidence Sheikh was a conduit for funds from the head of Pakistan’s fractious but powerful military intelligence agency ISI to the pilots of the 9/11 planes in the United States. The Wall Street Journal’s Pearl was investigating the embarrassing allegations that one of the U.S. government’s most important allies in fighting terrorism was actually linked to the New York attacks at the time he was kidnapped — a charge Pakistan has denied.   Sheikh appears to have spent a week in the hands of the ISI before being turned over for trial for Pearl’s killing, and Pakistan has steadfastly refused to hand him over to US authorities. Sheikh remains a mysterious figure: Pakistan’s former president Pervez Musharraf alleged he was actually working for British intelligence and downplayed his significance.   Even before the July 7, 2005 bomb attacks on London, Omar was an early reminder of the fragmented and conflicted identity of some young Muslims in England. Indeed, the Jaish-e-Mohammed group, linked to Pearl’s beheading and the Islamabad bombing, is alleged to receive much of its funding from Pakistanis living in Britain. While Omar had a reckless longing for adventure which propelled him along his path to radicalism, he also shared with many second-generation immigrants to Britain a longing to belong and he struggled to find anything in British society with which he could strongly identify.

Choosing your friends: Pakistan, the U.S. and China

While Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari is in the United States discussing U.S. military strikes across Pakistan’s border, army chief General Ashfaq Kayani is on a far less publicised trip to China to talk about defence cooperation. The timing may be coincidental, but the potential implications of the United States and China playing competing roles in Pakistan are huge.

Pakistan has always seen China as a much more reliable friend, while support from Washington has waxed and waned in line with U.S. interests (Islamabad has never quite forgiven the United States for using it to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and then dropping it when the Russians were driven out in 1989.) 

And nowadays the difference in the approaches of Pakistan’s two giant allies is even more striking.  While the United States and Pakistan argue about U.S. cross-border strikes, China has quietly reaffirmed its commitment to keeping Pakistan stable.

In a condolence message sent after this weekend’s Marriott Hotel bombing, Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said, “As a good neighbour and all-time friend of Pakistan, China will always support the unremitting efforts made by the government and people of Pakistan to safeguard the country’s stability.”

Of course there is no reason to jump to the conclusion the United States and China will become outright rivals over Pakistan — both have a stake in Pakistan’s stability, and in the past both have managed to maintain close ties with Islamabad without tripping over each other. But the current scenario certainly increases the chances of friction.

Add to that the fact that the strategic picture in South Asia has changed dramatically under the Bush administration. The United States has rewritten its relationship with India — which was still seen as in the Soviet camp back in the days of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan –turning it into a crucial ally in Asia and potential bulwark against Chinese influence. It sealed that transformation by reaching a deal with India effectively recognising it as a nuclear power, ignoring any misgivings in China (India’s nuclear weapons programme was developed as much, if not more, as a defence against China as against Pakistan.)

So it will be interesting to see what Kayani brings back from China and Zardari from the United States in the way of promises of support.  Will the United States and China be able to work together to pull Pakistan out of its current crisis? Or are they drifting into a situation where they end up opposing each other?

Kashmir trade: glimmer of hope or false dawn?

In the aftermath of the deadly hotel bombing in Islamabad, amidst fresh tensions with the United States over  helicopter intrusions in Pakistan’s northwest, and in spite of reports of fresh cross-border firing in Kashmir, negotiators from India and Pakistan met in New Delhi and agreed to open trade across Kashmir. There could hardly have been a more unlikely time for the two countries to agree to crack open one of the world’s most militarised frontiers, where a ceasefire which has more or less held since 2003 is beginning to fray at the edges.

To be sure, the neighbours have a passenger bus service twice a month that links the two parts of Kashmir under their control, but it is heavily restricted and travellers are subject to all sorts of clearances before they can get anywhere near it.

So opening up trade, and at a time like this when Pakistan is battling multiple challenges, does seem like a significant step. Does this mean there is a glimmer of hope in the otherwise pervasive sense of gloom spreading across the region? Or is this another one of those false dawns that the people of the two countries have seen too often in the past, and especially the people of Kashmir?

What the two countries will trade is the first question that springs to mind. And are these goods that are meant to be traded without any tarriffs to be produced in the two Kashmirs or will they be coming from somewhere else?

And then above all, is this initiative going to work at this point when unrest in Indian Kashmir over a land row involving Hindus has snowballed into massive anti-India protests of a scale last seen in 1989?

Pakistan: firing reported on Indian and Afghan borders

Just two days after a suicide bomb attack on the Marriott killed 53 people in the heart of Islamabad, there were reports of trouble both on Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan and on the Line of Control with India.  

On the Afghan border, Pakistani troops fired on two U.S. helicopters that intruded into Pakistani airspace on Sunday night, forcing them to turn back to Afghanistan, according to a senior Pakistani security official.  On the Indian side, Pakistani and Indian troops exchanged fire across the Line of Control dividing Kashmir, in the latest breach of a ceasefire agreed in 2003. And as if that was not enough, Afghanistan’s top diplomat was kidnapped in Peshawar.

None of this is new in the sense that we have known about the tension on Pakistan’s borders, and its fragile internal security situation, for a long time. What is new is the scale of it. And how everything seems to be happening at once. And also the number of players involved — not only the United States (in mid presidential election), Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, but also the Pakistan Army and Pakistan’s new civilian government, along with the other powers on the sidelines, Saudi Arabia, China, and U.S. allies in NATO.

So which of these many players do you track most closely to assess what is happening in Pakistan? My hunch is to watch the Pakistan Army, and Pakistan’s powerful spy agency, the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI).

In a posting on the Pakistan Policy Blog, Arif Rafiq wrote about how army chief General Ashfaq Kayani had gone twice to the frontlines with India, each time after the civilian government had talked of making peace over Kashmir (small quibble – the photo in his blog looks like it was taken at the brigade headquarters at Yuching, rather than on the Siachen glacier, which is in Indian hands).

The Pakistan Army, and by extension the ISI, rightly or wrongly, sees itself as the ultimate defender of Pakistan. It would seem obvious that the Pakistan Army would not tolerate its authority being challenged on both fronts – by U.S. raids over the border with Afghanistan on one side, and by peace moves with India on the other. I realise too that there are many who argue that only democracy can save Pakistan.

The point of this posting is not to say who to judge. Simply who to watch. And who do you watch when a country’s borders are fragile and its capital city attacked?