Pakistan: Now or Never?

Taliban names removed from U.N. list – how times have changed

In all the noise about the war in Afghanistan over the last week, including the WikiLeaks uproar and a spat between Pakistan and Britain over remarks made by Prime Minister David Cameron about Pakistan’s links to Islamist militancy, one piece of news carries real significance.

On Friday, five Taliban members were struck off a U.N. Security Council list of militants subject to sanctions in a move designed to smooth the way for  reconciliation talks with insurgents.  Among those, two of the five were dead. The other three - Abdul Hakim Mujahid Muhammad Awrang, a former Afghan ambassador to the United Nations, Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, the last Taliban ambassador to Islamabad before 9/11, and  Abdul Satar Paktin – are no longer subject to the asset freeze and travel ban imposed on those on the list.

To get a sense of quite how significant a change this is, consider how Mullah Zaeef – who now lives in Kabul and says he is no longer an active member of the movement – describes his treatment when he was arrested in Pakistan in early 2002, according to his book “My Life with the Taliban“. The Pakistani official who arrested him told him:  “Your Excellency, you are no longer an Excellency! America is a superpower. Did you not know that? No one can defeat it, nor can they negotiate with it. America wants to question you and we are here to hand you over to the USA.” 

Turned over to the Americans near Peshawar after being driven there from Islamabad, he says he was attacked and his clothes ripped with knives. “The Pakistani soldiers were all staring as the Americans hit me and tore the remaining clothes off my body. Eventually I was completely naked, and the Pakistani soldiers — the defenders of the Holy Koran — shamelessly watched me with smiles on their faces, saluting this disgraceful action of the Americans.”

“That moment,” he says, ”is written in my memory like a stain on my soul.”

That was followed by long years of humiliation and degradation in jails first in Afghanistan and later in Guantanamo. Finally freed from Guantanamo without charge on Sept. 11 2005, he returned to Kabul where he has lived under government protection.

The decision by the United Nations, with American support, to remove the names of Mullah Zaeef and others from the sanctions list is possibly the closest Washington has come since 9/11 to offering some kind of legitimacy to the Taliban movement which ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001.

On WikiLeaks, Pakistan and Afghanistan; the tip of an old iceberg

I’ve been resisting diving into the WikiLeaks controversy, in part because the information contained in the documents – including allegations of Pakistani complicity with the Taliban - is not new. Yet at the same time you can’t entirely dismiss as old news something which has generated such a media feeding frenzy. So here are a few pointers to add to the discussion.

U.S. POLICY TOWARDS PAKISTAN

On the likely implications (or non-implications) for U.S. policy towards Pakistan,  go back to 2009, and this piece in the National Interest by Bruce Riedel who conducted the first review of Afghan strategy for President Barack Obama. Having assessed all the evidence, including well-known American misgivings about the role of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, he concluded that Washington had no option but to stay the course in trying to build a long-term partnership with Pakistan.

American policy for the last 60 years, wrote Riedel, had oscillated wildly between love and hate.  “What the U.S.-Pakistan relationship needs is constancy and consistency. We need to recognize that change in Pakistan will come when we engage reliably with the Pakistani people, support the democratic process and address Pakistan’s legitimate security concerns. Candor needs to be the hallmark of an enduring commitment to civilian rule in Pakistan.

“U.S.-aid levels should not be the product of temper tantrums on Capitol Hill … Our goal should be to convince Pakistanis that the existential threat to their liberty comes not from the CIA or India, but from al Qaeda.

“We also need to engage India constructively on how to reduce and then end the tensions, including in Kashmir, that have resulted from partition. Ironically, the Pakistanis and Indians have made great progress on this issue behind the scenes in the last decade … Quiet and subtle American diplomacy should now try to advance this further.”

“None of this will be easy. Pakistan is a complex and combustible society undergoing a severe crisis. America helped create that crisis over a long period of time. If we don’t help Pakistan now, we may have to deal with a jihadist Pakistan later. That should focus our attention.”

Degrees of Indignation

Over the past few weeks there has been political brouhaha in Pakistan – played out daily on the nation’s front pages and interview programs — as dozens of federal and provincial lawmakers have been found to be holding fake university degrees. The investigation of office-holders’ university qualifications has turned into a white-hot, nationwide controversy, with the Supreme Court ordering the Election Commission to verify the academic qualifications of 1,065 of the country’s 1,170 members of provincial and national assemblies. So far 46 lawmakers have been found to be holding fake university degrees, and many more are under investigation. There has been speculation that if too many lawmakers are disqualified for holding fake degrees the country may have to midterm elections.

The requirement for academic qualification is rooted in a controversial law imposed by the former military ruler Pervez Musharraf in 2002, which made a bachelor’s degree, or equivalent, mandatory for those running for office. While the law was justified by Musharraf as a move intended to draw in more qualified lawmakers, it was criticized as a ploy to disqualify scores of political opponents, many of whom were veterans of Pakistan’s feudal and tribal political system but lacked the necessary qualifications. The law was also seen as un-democratic in country with almost half the population illiterate, barring the great majority of the population from running for office. Echoing this view, the Supreme Court struck down the law in April 2008. However, some politicians had already acquired fake degrees to run for the February 2008 elections, and their fraudulent degrees have now become a heated issue.

Analysts have pointed out that fake degree debacle is, to an extent, another instance of the media shamelessly exploiting political scandals to pump up their television ratings. The media’s vigilant and – some say — overzealous coverage has been a key reason for the intensity of the uproar. The issue has made front-page headlines for days, and has been a central theme in popular local talk shows.

The media circus, however, is only one angle of the story. As a number of writers have argued, there is a genuinely strong reaction to the issue from various parts of civil society. A Pakistani lawyer, Babar Sattar, writes, “This scandal isn’t about educational qualification or whether or not such qualification was desirable or legitimate in the first place. It is about lack of personal integrity, corrupt ethical values, use of deceit to achieve a personal end and shamelessly justifying wrongdoing when caught red-handed.” In a country where feudal and dynastic parties have dominated the political scene, the fake degree scandal seems to have struck a nerve, exposing deeply rooted anger at the relentless subversion of the system.

Yet, while the attack on politicians holding fake degrees may, in part, be an attempt at genuine accountability, it is also part of the age-old cynicism within the Pakistani middle-classes at the political system. As the journalist and politician, Ayaz Amir, argues, “making a punching bag of politics feeds into the obsessive delusion of the chattering classes, and indeed the media-obsessed middle classes as a whole, that the thing wrong with Pakistan is the greed and incompetence of politicians.” Not only does this foster a sense of self-righteousness and complacency amongst the middle-classes, but also provides an opening for competing institutions such as the military or the judiciary to step in and possibly bring down the political structure. The fake degrees scandal can be seen, then, as an attack, not just on corrupt politicians, but on the political system as a whole, and even on politics itself.

But even in the midst of the latest grave threat to democracy in Pakistan (as some commentators have alleged), red-faced politicians stumble to regain some dignity, provoking the inevitable humour. A Member of Parliament, Sanaullah Mastikhel, found himself the source of much spelling-related amusement, after he earnestly declared that three “Js”, “Jenerals” (Generals) Judiciary, and Journalists, were responsible for the “conspiracy” to expose fake degrees. The Chief Minister of the Baluchistan Province, Nawab Muhammad Aslam Raisani, meanwhile, emphatically defended fake degrees saying: “A degree is a degree, whether it is fake or genuine.”

Pakistan’s General Kayani given three-year extension

Pakistan army chief, General Ashfaq Parvez  Kayani, is to be given a a three-year extension to his term of office to maintain continuity in the country’s battle against Islamist militants. 

Kayani, arguably Pakistan’s most powerful man, had been due to retire in November. His future had been the subject of intense speculation for months, with opinion divided between the those who argued he should be given an extension for the sake of continuity, and those who said that Pakistan needed to build its institutions rather than rely on individuals – as it had done with powerful army rulers in the past.

Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani, who announced the extension, said the decision to extend Kayani’s term reflected “his effective role in the war against terrorism and in the enforcement of rule of law in the country.”

Kayani is considered to have built a good working relationship with the United States - which needs the Pakistan Army’s help in fighting the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan – prompting speculation, denied by the U.S. embassy in Islamabad, that Washington had pressed for his term of office to be extended.

He has also been the subject of intense speculation in India, where the views of the army – which controls foreign and security policy even under a civilian government – are seen as crucial to determining the fate of the faltering India-Pakistan peace process.

A former head of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, Kayani has been credited with keeping the army out of politics on the whole.  Military analysts also say he has redefined “strategic depth” – an old policy under which Pakistan aimed to use Afghanistan as a rear base in the event of war with India – to suggest instead that the country’s strength should come from a strong economy at home. Yet under his tenure – both as the head of the ISI until 2007 and then as army chief – Pakistan has also been criticised for failing to take strong enough action against Islamist and Taliban militants.

Otherwise, relatively little is known about the thinking of the inscrutable general, who never gives public interviews. Pakistan, its neighbours and the United States and its allies fighting in Afghanistan, will now have another three years to find out.

When two foreign policy crises converge: Iran and Afghanistan

Last week’s suicide bombing of a mosque in Zahedan, capital of the Iranian province of Sistan-Baluchestan, is another reminder of how far two of the United States’ main foreign policy challenges – its row with Iran over its nuclear programme, and its policies towards Afghanistan and Pakistan – are intertwined.

A senior commander in Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards said on Saturday that the United States would face “fall out” from the bomb attack which it blamed on the Jundollah Sunni Muslim rebel group - a militant group which Iran says is backed by Washington and operates from Baluchistan province in neighbouring Pakistan.  Massoud Jazayeri, deputy head of the dominant ideological wing of Iran’s armed forces, did not specify what he meant by fall-out from the bombing, which killed 28 people and which the United States has condemned.

But his comments nonetheless raised tensions at a time when the United States is at loggerheads with Tehran over its nuclear programme, and when its top diplomats, including U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, are visiting Pakistan and Afghanistan to try to press U.S. interests there.

The intertwining of these two foreign policy challenges runs far deeper than a coincidence of timing or geography.

As I wrote in this analysis after a suicide bombing last year in Sistan-Baluchestan – also blamed on Jundollah – the violence there exposed a deep sectarian faultline between Shi’ite Iran and Pakistan, allied with Tehran’s main rival, Sunni Saudi Arabia. (For a detailed study of Jundollah, and tensions between Iran’s dominant Shi’ites and its minority Sunnis, see this report (pdf) by the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment published last July).  

Analysts have also said that the use of suicide bombers suggested that Jundollah – which fights for the rights of ethnic Baluch in Iran – was becoming increasingly influenced by the tactics and sectarian agenda of groups like the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, blamed for a series of suicide bombings inside Pakistan.

Weaving the net more tightly is  Iran’s capacity to act as a spoiler in any U.S. attempt to reach a political settlement in Afghanistan, ratcheting up or down its alleged support for Taliban insurgents depending on the extent to which its distrust of the Sunni movement is outweighed by its anger with the United States.

Richard Haass on Afghanistan – time to scale down U.S. ambitions

Richard Haass, president at the Council on Foreign Relations, has become the latest to urge the United States to change course in Afghanistan and to seek a political settlement to try to bring an end to the war.

“The war the United States is now fighting in Afghanistan is not succeeding and is not worth waging in this way. The time has come to scale back U.S. objectives and sharply reduce U.S. involvement on the ground. Afghanistan is claiming too many American lives, requiring too much attention, and absorbing too many resources. The sooner we accept that Afghanistan is less a problem to be fixed than a situation to be managed, the better,”  he writes in an article in Newsweek.

Haass argues that the United States needs to focus clearly on what it is seeking to accomplish in Afghanistan. “The two main American goals are to prevent al Qaeda from reestablishing a safe haven and to make sure that Afghanistan does not undermine the stability of Pakistan.”

This could be achieved, he says, through a political settlement which would include decentralisation of governance in Afghanistan, U.S. support for local Afghan leaders who rejected al Qaeda and did not seek to undermine Pakistan; and talks with the Taliban, along with an acknowledgement that the movement was likely to regain power in parts of the Pashtun-dominated south.

“The advantage of this option is that it works with and not against the Afghan tradition of a weak ruling center and a strong periphery. It would require revision of the Afghan constitution, which as it stands places too much power in the hands of the president,” he says.

“Under this scenario, the Taliban would likely return to positions of power in a good many parts of the south. The Taliban would know, however, that they would be challenged by U.S. air power and Special Forces (and by U.S.-supported Afghans) if they attacked non-Pashtun areas, if they allowed the areas under their control to be used to supply antigovernment forces in Pakistan, or if they worked in any way with al Qaeda. There is reason to believe that the Taliban might not repeat their historic error of inviting al Qaeda back into areas under their control. Indeed, the United States should stop assuming that the two groups are one and the same and instead start talking to the Taliban to underscore how their interests differ from al Qaeda’s.”

Such ideas are not new – it has long been clear that the United States and its allies had shifted their sights from defeating the Taliban to fighting over the terms of a settlement.  Many analysts, particularly here in London, have been arguing for months for greater provincial autonomy for Afghanistan as a way of easing the strains which could otherwise lead to a renewed civil war or de facto partition in the event of a U.S. withdrawal. But that the suggestion comes from someone of Haass’s stature, with a track record inside the U.S. administration, highlights the extent to which American thinking is evolving on Afghanistan.

India and Pakistan, living up to low expectations

Hopes of progress were low when the foreign ministers of India and Pakistan met in Islamabad last week and the two sides lived up to expectations, disagreeing on how to move their relationship forward and blaming each other for souring the mood. 

Pakistan took exception to the timing of remarks by the Indian Home Secretary on the eve of the talks accusing the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency of involvement in the November 2008 attack on Mumbai.  India objected to comments made by Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi comparing those remarks to anti-India speeches given by Hafez Saeed, the founder of the Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group blamed for Mumbai.  Qureshi complained his counterpart repeatedly took instructions from Delhi during their talks, an accusation that Indian External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna denied.

Signs are, however, that the mood is steadying and the two countries are trying to put the acrimony behind them.

Pakistan Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani said Pakistan wanted good relations with India and both sides were sincere in improving ties. Indian Foreign Secretary Nirupama Rao, the country’s top diplomat, also stressed in interviews with television channel NDTV and with CNN-IBN that the process of dialogue must continue.  “I think in diplomacy, as in life, disappointments such as these needs to be surmounted, because as neighbours India and Pakistan will have to deal with each other,” she said. “We don’t have the luxury of maintaining irresolvable distances between our two countries.”

In an editorial, The Hindu newspaper argued not only that dialogue must continue, but that India and Pakistan must learn the lessons of the Islamabad talks by encouraging officials of both countries to be more restrained in their public comments. Indian Home Secretary G.K. Pillai, it said, should have known better than to air in public India’s allegation about ISI involvement in Mumbai on the eve of the foreign ministers’ talks, an allegation which was not particularly new and which had already been conveyed to Islamabad.  ”Its public airing at a sensitive moment raises troubling questions about the motives for doing so, and about who really runs this government,” it said. ”The Pakistan Foreign Minister too has been unnecessarily aggressive in his posturing towards India, perhaps out of domestic political compulsions.”

Those comments found an unlikely echo in the person of Hamid Gul, former head of the ISI, who said the remarks from both Pillai and Qureshi were unnecessary.  “I think we need to douse the fires of aggression,” he said.

Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper said in an editorial that the acrimony over the Islamabad talks could actually indicate that Pakistan and India were making a sincere effort to engage with each other - although it also did not rule out the possibility that hawks on both sides of the border were out to sabotage the process.

Hopes low, stakes high when Indian and Pakistani foreign ministers meet

Perhaps one of the most telling features on the media commentary ahead of a meeting between the foreign ministers of India and Pakistan in Islamabad this week is the lack of it. Expectations could hardly be lower.

Part of that is the nature of the actors involved. In India, policy towards Pakistan is set by the prime minister’s office, not the foreign ministry. So External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna is not in a position to deliver the kind of breakthrough that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh achieved at a meeting with his Pakistani counterpart Yusuf Raza Gilani when both agreed at a meeting in Thimphu, Bhutan in April to try to find a way back into talks broken off by the November 2008 attack on Mumbai. In Pakistan, the army retains a tight grip on foreign and security policy, limiting in turn the kind of concessions that Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi might make.

Part of the low expectations come too from the very limited agenda set for the talks - to work out ways of  reducing the huge trust deficit between the two nuclear-armed rivals. Or as the Indian foreign ministry described it in a terse statement on its website:

“In pursuance of the mandate given by the Prime Ministers of India and Pakistan, during their meeting at Thimphu in April, 2010, to the Foreign Ministers and Foreign Secretaries of both the countries to work out the modalities of restoring trust and confidence in the relationship, thus paving the way for a substantive dialogue on issues of mutual concern, Hon’ble External Affairs Minister, Shri S.M. Krishna will visit Pakistan from July 14-16, 2010 for bilateral discussions at the invitation of H.E. Mr. Shah Mahmood Qureshi, Foreign Minister of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.”

And they come too from a long and weary history of two countries which have tried, and repeatedly failed, to settle differences dating back to the partition of the subcontinent by departing British colonial rulers in 1947 – and indeed even before that when warring political parties wrangled over whether Muslims needed the protection of a separate homeland or whether they could achieve their political aspirations in a united India.

Over the years, any number of forums and formats have been tried out to find a way towards peace. There’s the formal peace process, known as the Composite Dialogue, broken off by India after the Mumbai attack blamed on the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba, and yet to be resumed. There’s informal “backchannel diplomacy” – secret talks between special envoys held away from the glare of the media – which came near to a breakthrough on Kashmir in 2006-2007. Then there are “Track Two” talks – conferences held by intellectuals, politicians and retired military officers from India and Pakistan acting in a private capacity without the endorsement of their governments to try to seek common ground.

And equally, over the years, any number of proposals for peace have been put forward, from the “solve-Kashmir-first-and-the-rest will-follow” school of thought to incremental measures like increasing trade, relaxing visa restrictions and improving people-to-people contact in order to build enough confidence to start tackling the more contentious issues.

Towards a settlement in Afghanistan; on terms and timing

In the highly charged debate about Afghanistan, one of the more common features is the straw man fallacy - in which you deliberately misrepresent your opponent’s position in order to discredit it. One of the least common is a definition of terms and timing – thereby making the straw man attack even easier.  So before a round-up of where things stand on prospects for a settlement, here are some caveats on what it does not involve.

First, as Andrew Exum highlights here, few are talking about a helicopters-on-the-rooftops of Kabul-style, complete U.S. withdrawal come July 2011, the deadline fixed by President Barack Obama for starting to draw down U.S. troops. Second, few believe the war will end in an outright victory; but rather in a negotiated settlement, including with the Taliban.  Third, when people talk about negotiating,  they are not suggesting Taliban leaders are suddenly about to lay down arms and come to the table (it is just not the sort of thing you do when your names figure on the most-wanted list.) Beyond those caveats, what you do have is a set of questions about the likely influences that will define the timings and terms of a settlement.

ON TIMING:

The obvious question is how long will U.S. and European public opinion hold up in support of the war? And also how long will Afghan public opinion tolerate the war before some segments of the population see a return of the Taliban as the least bad option?  For one indication on this, do read this piece by Spencer Ackerman at Danger Room reporting on a study showing Afghans are far more likely to react against civilian deaths caused by ISAF than against deaths caused by insurgents. 

The less obvious question is how long Pakistan can withstand what it sees as blowback from the Afghan war. A new wave of attacks, including on the country’s most important Sufi shrine in Lahore, have raised fresh fears about stability in its heartland Punjab province. Pakistan has faced attacks in Punjab before, including an assault on its own army headquarters last year. What makes the latest attacks worrying though, is the deliberately religious choice of targets – first the minority Ahmadi sect, then a Sufi shrine - suggesting that the tactics and indeed the nature of militancy in Pakistan may be mutating.

The network of militants believed to operate from Pakistan — including the Afghan Taliban led by Mullah Muhammad Omar, the Tehrik-e-Taliban-e-Pakistan (TTP), al Qaeda, along with sectarian and/or Kashmir-focused groups based in Punjab – has never been particularly static. Allegiances shift for ideological or opportunistic reasons. Some have turned against the Pakistani state; others, like the Lashkar-e-Taiba have not. But militant groups have always been at risk of both splintering into more extreme factions, and – perhaps paradoxically – uniting into a force which would pose a serious threat to Pakistan.

For a sobering insight on this, do read Pakistan’s Competing Jihadists by Praveen Swami at The Hindu, arguing that militants belonging to the Lashkar-e-Taiba – traditionally one of the most cohesive of the militant groups – are peeling away to join more radical groups because its leadership has refused to fight the Pakistani state and the west. The Lashkar-e-Taiba’s humanitarian wing, the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, has a huge following inside Pakistan and in the Pakistani diaspora. If the organisation were to splinter enough and go rogue – and Pakistani security officials already blame rogue elements for both the November 2008 attack on Mumbai and for those LeT cadres fighting in Afghanistan – it could pose a danger to Pakistan, to the region, and to the west, comparable to al Qaeda.

Kashmir protests: another tragedy of timing

Another three people have been killed in Kashmir in the biggest anti-India demonstrations in two years, bringing the death toll to at least 14 in the last three weeks. You can see some video of the protests in the Kashmiri capital Srinagar here – please watch it and remember that only a few years ago peace had returned to the streets of Srinagar after more than a decade of violence.

While Indian Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram has suggested the violence is being whipped up by the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba, our correspondent in Srinagar says that many local Kashmiris believe the protests are largely spontaneous.

If that is the case, it is a tragedy of timing. As discussed nearly two years ago on this blog, Kashmir has an entire generation of young people who have grown up knowing only what it is to live in the midst of an insurgency.  Then, after India and Pakistan re-opened a formal peace process in 2004, violence began to drop dramatically (something that has usually gone unacknowledged by Delhi but was obvious to anyone who regularly visited Kashmir).

The sense you picked up was of a shift away from what was at most tacit tolerance for Pakistan-backed militant groups (anyone who questions this should first read Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night) into a belief in peaceful protests, led by the younger generation. It is that younger generation who are throwing stones today, and seeing their own being killed. That is what makes the latest round of violence in Kashmir so dangerous. If the youth of Kashmir are radicalised anew, as happened when an earlier generation protested against Indian rule in 1989, the cycle of rage begins again.

One of the most telling comments in the latest round of violence in Kashmir came from separatist leader Mirwaiz Omar Farouk, when he said that the protests were not about Muslim Kashmir vs Hindu India. He would not have had to say that before – the Kashmir separatist revolt at the start was always more about nationhood than religion. That he now has to deny the communal undertones highlights how far these have grown.

The latest protests also come as India and Pakistan have begun a tentative attempt at peace-making after a long diplomatic limbo following the November 2008 attack on Mumbai. Their foreign ministers are due to meet on July 15 to take the process forward. Both have an interest in trying to reduce tensions, if nothing else but because the uncertainty over U.S. policy in Afghanistan threatens new instability in the region. Yet neither country will find it politically easy to accommodate each other if Kashmir is going up in flames.

The protests in Kashmir also coincide with some fresh soul-searching in Pakistan over the role of militant groups – some of whom were once nurtured to fight India in Kashmir – following  last weeks suicide bombing of one of the country’s most popular Sufi shrines in Lahore. A perception of “Indian oppression” against fellow Muslims in Kashmir has always fed into popular support for militants fighting for its “liberation” – so in another tragedy of timing, the crackdown in Srinagar is likely to make it harder for those voices within Pakistan who want to win backing against Islamist militant groups.