Pakistan: Now or Never?

Pakistan: the next two weeks critical?

The Pakistan Army is fighting to regain control of the Buner valley to stop a Taliban advance deeper into the heartland, a battle that could determine the course of action the United States adopts in the near future.

Two weeks is what U.S. Central Command chief General David Petraeus is giving the Pakistani establishment to destroy the Taliban in Buner, some 60 miles from Islamabad, and begin to reverse the tide in the rest of the northwest region, according to Fox News.

It quoted Petraeus as saying that the Pakistanis had “run out of excuses” and were finally serious about combating the threat from the Taliban and al Qaeda. But because of a history of offensives that were not carried to their conclusion and even ended up in a reversal of positions, the U.S.military had suspended judgment. It would wait to see concrete action by the government to finish off the Taliban who remained in control of parts of Buner.

U.S. President Barack Obama was a bit more positive, although he made clear at his news conference in Washington that he remained “gravely concerned” about Pakistan.

Obama said the Pakistani military had begun to realise the biggest threat to the country’s stability came from militants operating within, not old rival India. “On the military side, you’re starting to see some recognition just in the last few days that the obsession with India as the mortal threat to Pakistan has been misguided, and that their biggest threat right now comes internally,” Obama told a news conference in Washington.

Has there been a shift? If it has, it could certainly be of far-reaching consequence. The New York Times reported earlier this week that Pakistan had moved 6,000 troops from the eastern border with India to fight militants on its western flank along the border with Afghanistan.  These were troops that had been deployed in the east after tensions rose following the attacks in Mumbai in November which New Delhi blamed on Pakistani-based guerrillas.

From unemployed teachers to ghost schools in Pakistan

Often it’s the small details that bring alive the tragedy of a nation. I recommend reading this story on IRIN about how newly qualified school-teachers are unable to take up jobs in Pakistan’s Swat valley because the government is not functioning well enough to appoint them to vacant posts. 

It quotes a 25-year-old as saying that his impoverished family had worked hard to send him to school and on to teacher-training. “We have been waiting for two years to be appointed. But this is being delayed. We are without jobs. We cannot support our families. The government has failed to help us at all,” he said. It also quotes an education department official in Swat as saying that posts were lying empty in schools as many teachers had fled the Swat valley, where the government concluded a peace deal with Taliban militants earlier this year. “But we can make no new appointments as we have no instructions from the government, plus the militants control everything anyway.”

The story is not as eye-catching as the burning of girls’ schools. But the notion of a poor family which must have scrimped and saved to send a son to teacher-training only to discover that he could not get a job is still heart-breaking, if only because its very ordinariness makes it easier to relate to.

Meanwhile, on the subject of education in Pakistan, Pakistani blogger Teeth Maestro has been rounding up articles about thousands of “ghost schools” – which get government funding without actually existing – in Sindh province.

“The ghost schools phenomenon is probably the biggest crime to the future generations of Pakistan,” he writes. “Millions get sanctioned on a yearly basis for the construction and the maintenance of these educational centres and in reality they never exist and are merely paper based ghost schools with a fully employed staff and a regular budget extracting millions from the provincial budget whilst our children continue to remain uneducated.”

The Pakistan Army and civilian democracy

The Pakistan Army has been getting a lot of flak over the past week or so for its alleged failure to take a tough line against Taliban militants expanding their reach across Pakistan’s north-west.  And although Pakistan Army chief General Ashfaq Kayani issued a statement promising to fight the militants and security forces began a new offensive, doubts remain about the military’s willingness to take on Islamist groups that it once nurtured as part of its rivalry with India.

Among a spate of articles about Pakistan’s powerful military, Newsweek ran a piece headlined “Pakistan’s Self-Defeating Army”. It argued that far from serving as a bulwark against chaos, the military had helped destabilise Pakistan by undermining the development of a civilian democracy in the decades since the country was founded in 1947.

David Kilcullen, a counter-insurgency expert, called during a Congressional hearing for “fundamental, root and branch reform of the Pakistani military, and bringing it firmly under the authority of civilian elected officials”. Arguing that U.S. aid should be channelled into building up the police rather than the military, he said this ”would protect the Pakistani people, improve counterinsurgency performance, enhance the rule of law and weaken the stranglehold of the army over the civilian leadership of Pakistan.”

The arguments in favour of civilian democracy were well rehearsed when President Pervez Musharraf was forced out of office last year, and then endorsed by the administration of President Barack Obama. Kayani himself has so far stressed his commitment to civilian democracy. So to some extent the latest talk about the role of the Pakistan Army is a rehash of old news.

What I have not seen however, is a coherent and clear explanation of how the army is supposed to do more in fighting the Taliban, while also doing less by subsuming its power to that of the civilian government. Were the civilian government determined and united in fighting the Taliban, there would be no contradiction – in a constitutional democracy, the army is supposed to follow the orders of the political leadership. But there seems to be something of a suggestion creeping in that the army should be ready to take the initiative, with or without the backing of the government.

Pakistan: is the threat exaggerated?

As Pakistani forces fight militants in an area close to Swat, there are two contrasting images of a state in upheaval.

One is a nuclear-armed country in great peril, in danger of being overrun by militants, and in turn a mortal threat to the rest of the world, as U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton painted it last week.

The other is a nation of more than 160 million people with a burgeoning middle class that all but rejected Islamist parties in the last election, and hit the streets last month forcing the government to respect the independence and integrity of the judiciary. A nation with a professional army that for all the coups it engineered at home has credited itself well in all three wars it fought with much larger neighbour India, a bureaucracy as professional and cast in the same steel frame of the British empire as its counterpart in India, and a free and aggressive press.

In short as Juan Cole writes on his blog Informed Coment, Pakistan, for all its problems, is hardly the Somalia that some people think it to be. “All the talk about the Pakistani government falling within 6 months, or of a Taliban takeover, flies in the face of everything we know about the character of Pakistani politics and institutions during the past two years,” he writes.

Pakistan’s two big provinces of Punjab and Sind account for some  85% of the  population, and while these provinces have some Muslim extremists, they are a small fringe there, he writes. The Pakistani Taliban are largely a phenomenon of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas west of the North-West Frontier Province, and of a few districts within the NWFP itself. These are largely Pashtun ethnically.

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Pakistan Army says militants will not be allowed to dictate terms

Is the Pakistan army getting ready to act against the Taliban militants who have made the deepest advance yet into the country, seizing control of Buner district, 100 km (60 miles) from Islamabad, after taking over Swat region?

The militants began withdrawing on Friday just as quietly as they moved into the district, and it wasn’t clear what had led to the sudden withdrawal.

It came just as Pakistan army chief General Ashfaq Kayani issued a statement saying the army “will not allow the militants to dictate terms to the government or impose their way of life on the civil society of Pakistan.”

It must be one of the strongest statements yet from the army chief since the government made a peace deal with the Islamists in the Swat valley and comes on top of some rather menacing  noises from Washington.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said Pakistan posed a mortal threat to the world by abdicating  to militants, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates said relations could be affected.

A small force of less than 300 paramilitary soldiers was sent to Buner on Thursday after the Taliban advance triggered global alarm. The poorly-equipped force was repulsed, and the question obviously arose as to why the army was not going in.

It is a question that has cropped up each time the militants have acted with impunity. It came up when their threats were rewarded with a peace deal in Swat deal and again when a teenage girl was flogged in public.

India launches Israeli-made satellite for eyes in the sky

India launched an Israeli-made spy satellite on Monday that will help it keep a close eye on its borders stretching from Pakistan in the west to China in the north and east.

The launch is significant for several reasons. First off, the all-weather advanced satellite that the Israelis themselves use for surveillance on nations such as Iran is an eye in the sky that Indian security planners have been demanding for long. India has its own sophisticated satellite imaging programme that gives pretty high resolution pictures, but, as a defence scientist once told me, they tended to go a bit blind in bad weather, especially during the monsoon.

The Israeli satellite is supposed to be an all-seeing all-weather platform that at a height of 550 kms lets you see things like a motorbike on the street. New Delhi apparently asked the Israelis to speed up the satellite after the Mumbai attacks in November when gunmen arrived on the shores of the country’s financial capital in boats.

The idea obviously would be to watch the borders, both land and sea on the west. But satellites such as these can also tell you about troop movements. Logically any big movement on the border with China would fall under its footprint.

Secondly, the launch underscores the tightening defence links between India and Israel, which, in the space of 17 years when India gave diplomatic recognition to Israel, stand transformed. Israel is India’s second biggest defence supplier, behind Russia which had long enjoyed a virtual monopoly.

For Israel, India is the biggest arms market.

Israel is also giving India the Phalcon Airborne Warning and Control System, a force multiplier seen as so strategic that the Americans leaned on Tel Aviv to abort a similar deal with China.

A letter for Pakistan’s Kayani from an Indian officer

A retired Indian Army officer has written an open letter to Pakistan Army chief General Ashfaq Kayani that Pakistan’s The News carried this week and which is now popping up on blogs.

Colonel Harish Puri says it is incredible that the Pakistan Army allowed something as reprehensible as the public flogging of a teenage girl in the Swat  Valley without lifting a finger, even though it coudn’t have happened very far from an army checkpoint.

For a force that is as professional as the Pakistan Army and which has fought valiantly in all three wars with India,  and acquitted itself well in  U.N. peacekeeping missions worldwide, such an “abject surrender is unthinkable,” he writes.

The Pakistan Army’s inability to jam militant radio broadcasts in the region that have helped spread their power around is equally incomprehensible, Puri, who is from the army’s Signals unit, says. (The United States has just begun a broad effort in Pakistan and Afghanistan to prevent the Taliban from making these broadcasts, the Wall Street Journal reported on Saturday.)

Puri urges Kayani to act, not just for the sake of Pakistan but the entire region. “It doesn’t matter if it is “my war” or “your war” – it is a war that has to be won.”

An Indian Army oficer writing to the Pakistan Army chief is rare and the fact that the letter is published in a Pakistani newspaper even more extraordinary.

Pakistan, India and the election manifestos

The world’s largest democracy chooses a new government in an election beginning on Thursday, and given the fires burning next door in Pakistan and Afghanistan, the men and women who will rule New Delhi over the next five years will doubtless exert influence over the course of events.

Indeed, with the pain and anger over  the Mumbai attacks of November still raw, the mood could hardly be tougher against Pakistan. Even shorn of the campaign rhetoric, the positions of both the ruling Congress and the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party on Pakistan begin from common ground. No dialogue with Islamabad until it “dismantles the infrastructure of terrorism”, both parties say in their manifestos.

Full texts of the documents of the two main parties are here and here.

New Delhi’s continued refusal to resume dialogue or indeed to expand other links such as trade has caught Pakistan between a rock and a hard place, according to this piece in 2point6billion.com, a website tracking developments mainly in China and India. While Islamabad has repeatedly called for resumption of dialogue since the attacks, Delhi has refused to comply until it is assured that Pakistan will prosecute all those involved in the planning and operations.

Delhi maintains that it holds information garnered from satellite, cellular and other communications devices captured at the scene that lead to specific individuals that Pakistan has as yet failed to apprehend. Islamabad denies the charge and says it is doing everything in its power to cooperate.

The result is that the noose has tightened around Pakistan, exacerbating its already dire financial situation. Trade between Pakistan and India, which had been growing and was forecast to hit US$10 billion by 2010, has dwindled to close to zero over the past few months, with Pakistan feeling the brunt of this economic demise, says the website. Islamabad has already had to apply for a US$7.6 billion loan from the IMF in February and garnered an additional US$2.8 billion in military aid from the Obama administration just two weeks ago. 

Can Pakistan’s ISI sever ties with Taliban?

The United States has begun demanding rather publicly that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence make a clean break of its ties with the Afghan Taliban to help stabilise the situation in Afghanistan.

But can you force a country to act against its self-interest, despite all all your leverage, asks Robert D. Kaplan  in a piece for the Atlantic. And does it make sense for an intelligence agency to break off all contact with arguably the biggest player in the region?

Since President Barack Obama placed Pakistan at the centre of his strategy to fight the Afghan war, the debate over the ISI has gotten more open and more heated. Some Pakistani officials and experts with links to the establishment have taken exception to the United States openly painting the spy agency in enemy colours, accusing elements within it of supporting the Talibam.

Kaplan argues that Pakistan’s geography as well as a history of instability makes it almost impossible for it to cut ties to the radical Islamists. Pakistan and Afghanistan have a long and unruly border and that alone would make it necessary for security agencies to build a network of contacts with the principal players in Afghanistan.

On top of that, Pakistanis tend to see Afghanistan through the prism of the country’s unending conflict with India. “When they look to the west they envison an “islamisation” of Afghanistan and other Central Asian countries with which to face off against Hindu-dominated India to the east,” Kaplan writes.

So just as Israel will not scale back settlements in the occupied territories, frustrating U.S. peace efforts, or South Korea will from time to time extend an olive branch to North Korea, undermining U.S. efforts to contain the communist state, Pakistan, another one of America’s allies is not going to act against its core interest, he says. You can tell Pakistan to stop helping the Taliban plan and carry out operations, but you can’t tell them to cut links to the militant group altogether.

Can Afghanistan’s cricket heroes fight back?

With three defeats in a row, Afghanistan’s cricket team are fighting with their backs to the wall in their quest for a place in next year’s World Cup, the highest level of the game.

Up until now theirs has been an inspired performance, jumping from the fifth division of world cricket to one level below the major test-playing countries in less than a year.  Now in South Africa for the World Cup qualifiers they are bidding for a place at the top table of cricket and after a dream run are struggling.

They lost their latest game against the United Arab Emirates on Wednesday.

Can they find in themselves, in their tough beginnings as cricketers, the power to fight back? This team is nothing if not gritty and determined.  Read this piece in cricinfo about a team unlike any other ever in the history of the game. Many of its members grew up in the refugee camps of northwest Pakistan where their families fled during the wars in Afghanistan.

Middle-order batsman Raees Ahmadzai can’t even tell you how old he is – his mother works out his age by seeing who the Afghan president was at the time of his birth and that is a very rough calculation. “Unofficially, I’m nearly 25, give or take three years. Or four. I could be 21 or 28.”

In the squalor and poverty of their camps made of tents or mud huts, they couldn’t afford cricket balls or even the tennis balls wrapped in tape that the youth in India and Pakistan play with in the streets and back alleys.