Pakistan: Now or Never?

India and Pakistan: a personal view of the water wars

 It was so long in the making,  so utterly predictable, that the news that Pakistan and India are now arguing over water carries with it the dull ache of inevitability.

When I was living in Delhi, which I left in 2004, a few analysts were already warning that the next war between Pakistan and India would be over water, rather than over Kashmir.  The mountain glaciers which fed the rivers which are the lifeline of both countries were melting, they said, and sooner or later India and Pakistan would blame each other for climate change. I did not take it that seriously at the time. Not even after seeing first hand how far the Siachen glacier – the world’s longest glacier – had receded.  

Nor indeed did it properly register after talking to an Indian sherpa who had led the first Indian military expedition to Siachen in 1978 in what India considers part of its own Ladakh region  At the time, Ladakh was much colder, he said, and the snow on the glacier came right down into the valley. It had receded in recent years because of global warming, exposing the black tracts of scree I had scrambled up during my trip there. “It was like a beautiful road coming right down from K2,”he said, , “black moraine on either side.” There was nothing, and nobody there.

From the records of the India Office of the British Library, I unearthed an account written by the American explorer Fanny Bullock-Workman of her own travels in Siachen in 1911-12 – so little consulted nowadays that the pages of her book began to come away in my hands.  She suggested that Siachen had been receding back in her days too,  so I was able to put the ebb and flow of the glacier down to natural changes in the climate.

Then a few years ago,  I made the drive from Srinagar in Kashmir to Leh in Ladakh and — dangerous as it is to extrapolate from one’s own experiences – saw the impact of global warming first hand.

It is a two-day drive from Srinagar to Leh, with a stopover in Kargil where India and Pakistan fought an intense border war in 1999. It is a spectacular drive, but also one of the most precipitous and most terrifying. By the time you are nearing Leh, you are looking forward to a comfortable hotel bed and a bowl of thick Tibetan soup.

Not long before we reached Leh, we discovered that the road bridge had been swept away by heavy floods rushing down from the mountain glaciers. I met a local Ladakhi journalist I knew who was, like me, stranded on the wrong side of the broken bridge. He took one look at me, and though I had not seen him for three years or so, he shook my hand and said two words: “global warming”.  Then, like all the other Ladakhis there, he disappeared over a precarious crossing which the locals had fashioned across the river — which involved walking across the upturned root of  a tree and then somehow making it from branch to branch across a raging glacial torrent to the other side.

Pakistan’s Sharif seen isolated after ‘U-turn’

Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is used to being Pakistan’s most popular politician, but lately he has become the country’s most criticised.

The government had planned to push through the parliament this month a reform package that would have stripped President Asif Ali Zardari of his sweeping powers,  but that seems unlikely now after Sharif abruptly raised new objections on Thursday. Sharif was the one who loudly and actively campaigned against his arch-rival Zardari.

It was a dramatic turnaround.  Just hours before a parliamentary committee comprised of all political parties, including Sharif’s, was due to sign the reforms package, Sharif threw a political bombshell by raising objections over the the appointment of judges and the renaming of the North West Frontier Province.

It is the first time in the history of Pakistan, which has been ruled by the military for half of its history, that a civilian government was pushing a comprehensive constitutional reform package through the parliament — with the consultation of the opposition — to undo provisions introduced by dictators to tighten their grip on power.

Now there is hardly a television talk show, a newspaper editorial or article where Sharif’s stance is not being slammed.

“Nawaz betrays democracy,” the Daily Times front-paged a banner headline on Friday along with picture of a grim-faced Sharif.

“Absolute disappointment”, “about-face” and “U-turn” were how the other newspapers described Sharif’s announcement.

Iran’s role in Afghanistan

Iran has been hosting regional leaders, including Afghan President Hamid Karzai, to celebrate the Persian New Year, or Nowruz (a spring festival whose equivalent in Pakistan, incidentally, is frowned upon by its own religious conservatives).

The Nowruz celebrations, which also included the presidents of Iraq, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan, are part of Iran’s efforts to build regional ties and followed renewed debate over the kind of role Iran wants to play in Afghanistan. As discussed here, it has also been improving ties with Pakistan, and both countries may have worked together on the arrest last month of Abdolmalik Rigi, leader of the Jundollah rebel group.

Depending on who you listen to, Iran is either an unlikely potential ally of the United States in Afghanistan, with shared common interests in stabilising the country, or a spoiler ready to support its old enemies the Afghan Taliban in order to undermine Washington’s position.  Others put it somewhere in between, like every other country in the region biding its time in order to make sense of the U.S. exit strategy from Afghanistan, while also picking its way through a showdown with the United States over its nuclear programme.

Evidence so far of its exact intentions on Afghanistan is sketchy. After initially supporting the United States following the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 -Shi’ite Iran has no natural sympathy with the hardline Sunni Taliban – it found itself branded by former president George W. Bush as part of the axis of evil in 2002, and then after 2003 squeezed between U.S. troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Since then there have been regular unconfirmed reports of Iranian support for the Taliban, largely designed to queer the pitch for the Americans. In one of the more recent reports, Britain’s Sunday Times newspaper provided what it said were details of Taliban fighters being trained in camps in Iran. In a follow-up, however Britain’s Daily Telegraph quoted a senior diplomat as saying that there was intelligence that Iran was instead holding off support to the Taliban and had recently refused requests for arms. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates described Iranian support for the Taliban as “pretty limited”

At the same time, Iran is keen for stability in Afghanistan in part to help clamp down on a booming heroin trade which has left it with its own huge drug addiction problem. Nearly a year ago, it offered help in combating the Afghan drugs trade at a conference in The Hague attended by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Its police chief was quoted this month by Press TV as saying that, ”in addition to hosting a large domestic consumption market for narcotics, Iran is the shortest drug trafficking route from Afghanistan to the world. Opium-based products such as morphine and heroin are usually transported to European countries and other products such as hashish are trafficked to other countries such as the Persian Gulf littoral countries. Given all of this, naturally Iran is the country suffering here.”

Have Plato’s cave shadows finally made it into the Afghan debate?

Joshua Foust has a great piece up at Registan.net about a two-day workshop he attended on tribal engagement in Afghanistan. While essentially focusing on how far the United States should rely on tribes to find a solution to Afghanistan, he raises a fundamental question about the nature of the debate on what to do in a war now into its ninth year:

“There is a bit of a crippling strain of experientialism in the military. It leads a lot of people to trust implicitly their own experiences and to assume those experiences are shared or generalizable. It also tends to engender a degree of mistrust of academia, since most academics gain their understanding through voracious reading rather than extensive experience.”

“Indeed, at the end of the day the whole workshop was crippled by three things the workshop’s organizers cannot control: the war’s strategy and history, the military’s bureaucratic inertia, and a nasty ontological problem we still didn’t resolve. Most importantly, we are coming at this in 2010, when the leadership has already decided upon tribal or community or local ‘defense initiatives’ as the way it is going to solve the war. That severely limits the discussion—despite an entreaty to answer the question ‘should we even do this’, there was almost no discussion of why everyone assumed the answer was ‘yes’”.

I have been trying to work out for a while not so much how the conflict in Afghanistan should be resolved – a question which many others are far better qualified to answer -  but rather the way in which the discussion about what to do is defined by our own cultural history.  Are we, as Joshua Foust suggests, no better than the men in Plato’s cave whose understanding of the shadows they saw there was limited by their own experience?

Before you dismiss this as an academic exercise, consider first that there appears to be a divergence between Britain and the United States over how far the international coalition should go to strike a deal with the Taliban. We don’t know how much this divergence is merely a matter of public posturing. What we do know, however, is that Britain and the United States have very different historical experiences of Afghanistan and South Asia and if policy is based on experience you will almost certainly get different outcomes.

Britain learned the hard way in the 19th century the dangers of invading Afghanistan. It also has a long history of wheeling and dealing in South Asia, learning the local languages in order to build its British Indian Empire, suppressing a Muslim-led insurrection, and playing one community off against the other to extend its power. That does not make its experience right, nor indeed necessarily applicable to 21st century Afghanistan. It does make it different from the one which defines Washington’s own view of policy.

Take another example – the way in which ordinary Muslims view the campaign against Islamist militants in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. One of the arguments you hear frequently is not over how the United States should bring a successful end to its post 9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but rather of the need to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.  Here is what even Pakistan’s very liberal secular English-language Dawn newspaper had to say about it:

India and Pakistan on the U.S. see-saw

Few who follow South Asia could miss the symbolism of two separate developments in the past week –  in one Pakistan was cosying up to the United States in a new “strategic dialogue”; in the other India was complaining to Washington about its failure to provide access to David Headley, the Chicago man accused of helping to plan the 2008 attack on Mumbai.

Ever since the London conference on Afghanistan in January signalled an exit strategy which could include reconciliation with the Taliban, it has been clear that Pakistan’s star has been rising in Washington while India’s has been falling. 

If the United States wants to force the Taliban to the negotiating table, it needs Pakistan’s help. And Pakistan has shown by arresting Taliban commander Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar amongst others that it intends to keep control of any negotiations. In return for its cooperation, it expects Washington’s help in securing Pakistan’s own interests, including through a scaling back of India’s involvement in Afghanistan.

By contrast, the relationship between India and the United States which blossomed under the Bush administration has been fading as Washington looks to China and Pakistan to help meet respectively its economic and security needs. An initial outpouring of sympathy and international support for India following the Mumbai attack  - which led to intense pressure on Pakistan to crack down on the Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group blamed for the assault – has dissipated over time.

Nowadays the mantra in Washington is that India and Pakistan must talk to each other to resolve their differences. Pakistan, after initially cracking down on the Lashkar-e-Taiba, eased the pressure on the group in the second part of 2009. India suspects the Lashkar-e-Taiba is not only active again but may have been involved in last month’s attack in Kabul which targeted Indian interests. If true, this would suggest that Lashkar-e-Taiba is acting in conformity with the interests of the Pakistan Army, which is deeply sensitive about India’s growing presence in Afghanistan following the fall of the Pakistan-backed Taliban in 2001.

To rewind briefly, it has always been unclear how far the Pakistan Army and its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency could go in dismantling the Punjab-based militant group it once nurtured to fight India in Kashmir. While few doubt it could shut down the Lashkar-e-Taiba if it chose to do so, the risk has been that action against an organisation which has been scrupulous in avoiding attacks within Pakistan itself would shatter it into splinter groups which would make common cause with al Qaeda and the Pakistani Taliban. A raid on the Pakistan Army’s own headquarters last October highlighted just how vulnerable the country could be to an alliance between militants in its tribal areas bordering Afghanistan and those based in its heartland Punjab province.

So the debate amongst analysts has been whether relative inaction against the Lashkar-e-Taiba has been driven by self-preservation or a desire on the part of the ISI to retain the group’s operational capacity to use it against India. Islamabad is convinced India’s own intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW), is using Afghanistan as a base to destabilise Pakistan, particularly by funding separatists in its Baluchistan province.  Any evidence of Lashkar-e-Taiba’s involvement in the Kabul attack would therefore reinforce suspicions that the Pakistan Army is still using it as part of a proxy war between the two countries’ intelligence agencies. (Both countries deny the accusations levelled at each other’s intelligence agencies.)

from Tales from the Trail:

General Kayani steals the spotlight at Pakistani embassy party

Pakistan's foreign minister heads his country's delegation to Washington this week for high-level talks, but there was no mistaking who was the star at a reception at the Pakistani Embassy on Tuesday night: Army General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani.

Guests crowded around Kayani at the annual Pakistani National Day party at the embassy, posing for photos and jostling for the military leader's ear. Pakistani Foreign Minister  Shah Mehmood Qureshi and Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. special representative for Pakistan and Afghanistan, also drew those eager for photographic souvenirs of the occasion, but not such a feeding frenzy as that around Kayani.

U.S. senators and Obama administration officials lined up to speak to the slim and dapper general, who Pakistani media say rules the roost back home but is also central to U.S. relations with Islamabad.

Pakistani Ambassador Husain Haqqani, who has had his own tensions with the military in the past, heaped praise on Kayani during his introductory remarks for Qureshi.

"He (Kayani) embodies the conviction of the Pakistani armed forces, not just to defend the frontiers of Pakistan but also to ensure the continuity of constitutional democratic rule in accordance with the aspirations of our people of Pakistan," said Haqqani before Qureshi took the podium.

Since he has been in the United States, Kayani has had a busy schedule, meeting U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, Navy Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, Army General David Petraeus, head of the U.S. Central Command, and other senior U.S. military officials.

General Kayani in Washington; Pakistan’s most powerful man

So much for democracy. When Pakistan holds a “strategic dialogue” with the United States in Washington this week, there is little doubt that the leading player in the Pakistani delegation will be its army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani.

We have got so used to Americans dealing with the Pakistan Army in their efforts to end the stalemate in Afghanistan that it does not seem that surprising that the meeting between the United States and Pakistan would be dominated by the military. Nor indeed that Dawn columnist Ardeshir Cowasjee would describe Kayani as the most powerful man in Pakistan. Even the grudging admiration granted in this Times of India profile of Kayani by Indrani Baghchi is in keeping with the current mood.

But before taking it for granted that this is a normal state of affairs, do pause to consider how it might seem if Britain, for example, which has worked closely with the United States on both the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, sent a delegation to Washington in which the army chief was expected to call the shots. Also in the interests of keeping everyone honest, remember that it was not actually supposed to be this way.

The United States has always preferred to deal with military rulers in Pakistan, but the forced exit of former military ruler Pervez Musharraf in 2008 and the election of President Barack Obama had raised hopes Washington might be about to turn over a new leaf, with policies which encouraged the development of civilian democracy.  Its preference for military rulers in the past has been partially blamed for suppressing democracy in Pakistan (though others blame either the country’s own hapless politicians or the overweening nature of the army, depending on which side of the argument you sit).

So what happened to the change promised by Obama, which encouraged many Pakistanis to hope that for once Washington would “pour money into democracy as opposed to autocracy“?

Inside Pakistan itself, the political parties have been at loggerheads, leaving Kayani looking like the only national figure who remained above the fray.  In a sense he retained the army’s traditional “parental role”, ready to step in if the fighting between the rival politicians got out of hand. A bruising battle between President Asif Ali Zardari and the judiciary also limited the scope for the government to clip the wings of the powerful military.

Kayani, meanwhile, has both vowed to keep the army out of politics while retaining a tight grip on foreign and security policy. He spoke out fiercely against a reported incursion by U.S. ground troops in 2008 and in 2009 condemned provisions in the Kerry-Lugar U.S. aid package which called for greater civilian oversight of military appointments and promotions.

Guest contribution-A message for the EU summit

The following is a guest contribution. Reuters is not responsible for the content and the views expressed are the author’s alone. The writer is the High Commissioner of Pakistan to Britain.

By Wajid Shamsul Hasan 

Pakistan has a rollercoaster history of civilian and military regimes taking turns. Unfortunately, democratically elected governments have always assumed charge at a time when the political, economic and social crises were at their peak. Dictatorial rulers in Pakistan survived each time for a decade, ironically, due to the fullest support of Western democracies.

This time around, when the Pakistan Peoples’ Party along with other political partners has been democratically elected after enormous sacrifices including the assassination of former Prime Minister Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto the situation is no different. It is rather worse within the entire region. Pakistan’s neighbourhood is extremely hostile, turbulent and posing an existential threat.

Pakistan has been stretching itself thin to sustain the “war on terror”. However the assistance from our Western friends is not equal to the enormous challenges Pakistan faces. The government and the people of Pakistan feel that the situation has not got out of hand yet. But if help from Western powers, to whom wholehearted public support has been extended both in the fight against terrorism and through logistic support for their efforts in Afghanistan, is not reciprocated immediately then the impact on the deteriorating economic situation may provide space – so far blocked – to the obscurantist forces that pose a serious threat to the present democratic dispensation.

In the context of logistics support, our western friends need to understand that 85 percent of Pakistan’s trucking fleet is engaged in supplies for NATO and ISAF forces in Afghanistan, through Torkhum and Chaman from Karachi port using the road network of over 3000 km on the two routes.   Dedication of this transportation source has strained Pakistan’s economy in terms of the erosion of the road network, an adverse impact on climate, the financial implications of security cover that is provided and the non-availability of trucks for domestic requirements. It appears that none of our friends has quantified the negative impact on domestic economic activity and diversion of our resources due to the cooperation on this count.

While Pakistan’s role in the war on terror since 2001 has adversely impacted its economy and social order, the military operations launched since mid 2009 have only accelerated the downward slide. We have suffered from thousands of terrorist attacks in retaliation, taking a huge toll on human lives and causing colossal material losses. Thriving industries have come to a standstill; it has resulted in the flight of capital, and scared away investors. Our development budget for the current fiscal year was allocated as PKR 400 billion, which has now been slashed by the Prime Minister to PKR 300 Billion, as we have had to divert our development budget to sustain the war on terror.

from India Insight:

Kashmiri separatists seek Saudi mediation to end dispute

Mirwaiz Umar Farooq, a senior Kashmiri separatist leader, has urged Saudi Arabia to use its influence and bring India and Pakistan closer to solve the decades-long conflict over the disputed Himalayan region.

Farooq arrived in the Kingdom last Thursday to perform the Umrah pilgrimage and his visit, two weeks after the visit of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, is being considered significant.

Farooq is chairman of Kashmir's moderate separatist alliance -- the All Parties Hurriyat Conference.

Saudi Arabia has old and close ties with Muslim Pakistan and has also been mentioned as a possible mediator in any political settlement with the Taliban in Afghanistan, where India and Pakistan have been battling for influence since long.

Singh's visit, the first to Saudi Arabia by an Indian leader since 1982, sought to build economic ties and to enlist Riyadh's help in improving regional security.

"Currently, a rethink is going on in India. Given the strengthening of ties between India and the Kingdom, New Delhi would be more comfortable with Saudi mediation than any other country," Farooq told Arab News.

Farooq said Saudi Arabia has a history of playing positive roles in disputes and in addressing the problems faced by Muslims around the globe, particularly in Afghanistan and Palestine.

Punjab minister asks for mercy from Taliban, earns woman’s scorn

After the chief minister of Pakistan’s biggest province reportedly asked the Taliban to spare his region from attacks, he kicked off an uproar and earned the scorn of a woman member of a provincial parliament, who sarcastically offered him her scarf and said “the women of the frontier province” would protect him.

Shahbaz Sharif, chief minister of Punjab province, on Sunday said he didn’t understand why the Taliban were targeting the Punjab when his party — the PML-N — and militants alike opposed the policies of former military ruler, General Pervez Musharraf, who allied with the United States after the Sept. 11 attacks.

“Gen. Musharraf planned a bloodbath of innocent Muslims at the behest of others only to prolong his rule, but we in the PML-N opposed his policies and rejected dictation from abroad,” the daily Dawn quoted him as saying. “If the Taliban are also fighting for the same cause then they should not carry out acts of terror in Punjab.” (Where the PML-N rules.)

Shahbaz’s reported remark at an Islamic seminary in the provincial capital of Lahore on Sunday was widely seen as an attempt to appease Taliban militants who have unleashed a wave of bombs and suicide attacks across the country. Just two days before, militants killed 45 people in twin suicide bombings in a high-security zone in Lahore.

Because of such attacks, Pakistanis have generally been supportive of the military campaign against militant enclaves in the volatile border regions in the northwest, although the U.S.-led war on al Qaeda militants and their allies is highly unpopular in Pakistan.

But Shahbaz’s remarks were too much for one Nighat Orakzai, the woman who on Monday accused the chief minister of cowardice.

“The statement shows the chief minister of Punjab is afraid of the Taliban. I offer my dupatta (scarf) to him. He should wear this and sit in the chief minister’s house. The women of the frontier province are ready to protect him,” she said as she threw her scarf on the floor of the North West Frontier Provincial Assembly.