Pakistan: Now or Never?

On either side of the Pakistan-Afghanistan border: Bajaur and Kunar

What is going on in Kunar and Bajaur, two neighbouring regions on either side of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border?

NPR has a view from the Afghan side in this piece written from the perspective of U.S. troops fighting in Kunar. (h/t The Captain’s Journal) Key takeaways are the level of mistrust about the Pakistanis, driven by the suspicion its military is supporting the Taliban, and the presence of a massive but newly abandoned CIA post there.

First the mistrust.  According to NPR, American officials acknowledge that the Pakistan Army had made significant gains in fighting the Taliban in Bajaur but still wanted them to do more to stop militants crossing over into Kunar. “Elements of the Taliban and al-Qaida are believed to cross the border at this point from safe havens inside Pakistan.”

Yet having been to Bajaur in April, I have heard the same complaint from the Pakistani commander on the other side. In his view, the Americans need to do more to stop militants from using Kunar as a base from which to attack Pakistan. (The Pakistanis still seem to be making the same complaint, judging by this article in the Boston Globe.)

The two conflicting views give an interesting insight into how the narrative of mistrust in Kunar and Bajaur – a microcosm of the strains in the wider U.S.-Pakistan relationship — is constructed. In particular, you can see how distrust between Pakistanis and Americans is magnified by the mutual suspicion of Afghans and Pakistanis.

Look at this detail in the NPR story, presented under a bold-type sub-heading reading “Taliban in Their Midst?”

The Americans are invited to lunch by the Pakistanis. “The long lunch ends when the Pakistani colonel is called away, and the Americans walk back up the hill. Full bellies, heavy flak jackets, and the altitude at 7,000 feet have everyone moving a bit slowly, but then they get some information from their interpreter that makes them walk a little faster.  The interpreter tells the soldiers that some of the Pakistani commander’s men are spies for the Taliban. ‘So he suggests we get out of here quickly,’ a soldier tells (Captain Thomas) Billig,” the NPR reports. 

Will Obama refer to Kashmir in public in India?

Will President Barack Obama make some public remarks on Kashmir during his trip to India next month?

At a White House press briefing, deputy national security adviser Ben Rhodes refused to be pinned down on specifics,  beyond saying that the United States would continue to express support for India and Pakistan to pursue talks.

“I wouldn’t — I don’t want to get into prefacing with precision what his comments are, in part because he’ll be answering a lot of questions there in the town hall and press conference and we haven’t — we’re still working through his remarks on certain things,” he said.

Yet it is a question that cannot — and will not — be left to chance.

Indian is deeply sensitive about foreign visitors talking about Kashmir — as British foreign ministers have learned to their cost on earlier trips. It regards Kashmir as an integral part of India and refuses even to recognise the territory at the heart of more than 60 years of enmity with Pakistan as disputed. Moreover, it has consistently rejected outside interference, saying that its disputes with Pakistan must be settled bilaterally.

Obama, who raised hackles in India during his presidential election campaign by suggesting the Washington should try to help resolve the Kashmir dispute, is hoping to use the trip to help U.S. business tap into India’s growing economy. With a flagging economy at home, he cannot afford to offend his hosts.

But at the same time, the biggest foreign policy challenge of his administration is over how to deal with Afghanistan and Pakistan.  The war in Afghanistan cannot be ended without Pakistan’s help. And Pakistan itself faces serious instability — potentially a much bigger worry than Afghanistan with its 180 million people and nuclear bombs. Pakistan’s identity in turn is intimately bound up with India – its past support for Islamist militants was driven by its belief that this was the only way to neutralise the influence of its much bigger neighbour both in Kashmir and in Afghanistan.  Depending on who you listen to, it either will not, or can not, tackle Islamist militants based in Pakistan without a peace settlement with India, including on Kashmir.

“Orientalism” in Afghanistan and Pakistan

In his must-read essay on the debate about the state of the U.S.-Pakistan relationship, Amil Khan has one of the best opening lines I’ve seen for a while: ”Much is said about Pakistan, but I’m constantly saddened that so many innocent pixels are lost without good cause.”

Much the same can be said about the recent flurry of stories on the war in Afghanistan, from upbeat assessments of the U.S.-led military offensive in Kandahar to renewed interest in the prospects for a peace deal with Afghan insurgents.

There is a shade of “Orientalism” in all this, a modern-day equivalent of Edward Said’s 1978 argument that the collective understanding of the Middle East, South Asia and Islam was skewed by the vested interests of European colonial powers.

Scroll forward to the 21st century and we have the United States keen to end a war that is increasingly unpopular at home, with a president who has committed to starting to bring home troops by July 2011.   That framework would be best suited by military success in Afghanistan, peace talks which would begin to show fruit by – let’s choose a random date, July 2011 – and a willingness by Pakistan to stick to the U.S. timetable when it comes to tackling militants on its own territory.

Hence the “received wisdom” in the media – or perhaps more precisely, the consensus you would find if you averaged out all the stories on Google News – tends to fit neatly into that framework. 

The problem is that just as Said complained the “Orientalist” world view distorted the facts to suit European interests, the current U.S.-inspired narrative tends to overlook the very real people and countries which get in the way of its own deadlines.

Start with Afghanistan.  We have heard from non-U.S. sources that all insurgent groups are engaged in tentative “talks about talks” to try to agree the ground rules under which all Afghan factions could be brought together into “reconciliation” talks. The United States and NATO have meanwhile been talking up a separate effort  to win over individual insurgent fighters or commanders through “reintegration”.

Pakistan – a list too long

Pakistani journalist Mosharraf Zaidi had a good post up last week attempting to frame the many different challenges Pakistan faces in trying to deal with terrorism.  Definitely worth a read as a counter-balance to the vague “do more” mantra, and as a reminder of how little serious public debate there is out there about the exact nature of the threat posed to a nuclear-armed country of some 180 million people, whose collapse would destabilise the entire region and beyond.

Zaidi has divided the challenges into counter-insurgency, counter-terrorism and counter-extremism.

Counter-insurgency is focused on targeting militants holed up in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) on the border with Afghanistan, with attention directed most recently on U.S. pressure to tackle militant hideouts in North Waziristan.  Pakistan has resisted U.S. pressure to move faster in launching military operations in North Waziristan, in part because it says it needs time to consolidate gains made elsewhere in FATA — itself possible only if adequate governance can be introduced into areas cleared by the army.

“Thus far, Pakistan has fought the insurgency in FATA and earlier, last year, in Swat, using two instruments: negotiation, and conventional military warfare, including ground troops and aerial strikes. This is not how you fight an insurgency. That is how you fight India. To use a hackneyed and tired metaphor in Islamabad, you can’t keep using a jack hammer to try and kill agile, determined and poisonous flies. The approach to the FATA insurgency is all wrong,” writes Zaidi.

Counter-terrorism covers action to prevent attacks across Pakistan including in its heartland Punjab province. ”Repeated and sustained terrorist attacks in Pakistan suggest that the terrorist enterprise in Pakistan enjoys freedom of movement, freedom of procurement, freedom of training, freedom of information and communication, and, quite disturbingly, freedom from the course of law,” he says.

“The third challenge is an obvious and unchallenged problem of religious extremism. The epicentre of religious extremism is the institution of the political articulation of faith in Pakistan. This means that physically there is no epicentre here. Religious extremism is a national problem, transcending demographics, class and ethnicity. Of the three problems, religious extremism is the one that has been around the longest, the one that has the deepest roots in Pakistani culture, the one that has enjoyed the patronage of the state, the one that has the demonstrated ability to undermine linear and rational public policy, and the one that will – because of all the aforesaid factors, take the longest to unpack and resolve.”

Zaidi’s framework is a strong one to use when trying to understand what is going on in Pakistan.

from India Insight:

Why is Kashmir upset over choice of new interlocutors?

Last week, New Delhi appointed three new mediators to find a solution to the decades-old dispute over Kashmir where popular protests against Indian rule have mounted in recent months.

The appointment of the three-member non-political team of interlocutors -- journalist Dilip Padgaonkar, academician Radha Kumar and government official M. M. Ansari -- is also aimed at defusing simmering anger in the disputed region.

More than 110 people were killed, most of them by police bullets, in months of deadly protests.

But New Delhi's most important initiative on Kashmir, which India and Pakistan claim in full but rule in parts, has provoked widespread disappointment and dismay.

"...the eight-point plan of action unveiled last month had generated tremendous hope and enthusiasm. And yet the actual announcement of a three-member non-political team has provoked widespread anger and hostility and even invited ridicule," says Amitabh Mattoo, Professor of International Studies at Delhi's  Jawaharlal Nehru University.

Syed Ali Shah Geelani, a senior separatist leader spearheading the ongoing protest strikes, has described the appointment of interlocutors as a "futile exercise."

Taliban talks: “an iffy, high-level treaty”

In Obama’s Wars, Rob Woodward attributes the following thoughts to U.S. envoy Richard Holbrooke on the prospects for a peaceful settlement to the Afghan war:

“He saw reconciliation and reintegration as distinct.  Reconciliation was esoteric, an iffy high-level treaty with Taliban leaders. Reintegration occurred down at the local level in villages and towns…”

It’s a good place to start to frame the current wave of interest in the prospects for a deal with the Taliban.  As we wrote in this analysis, for the first time in the nine-year war all the main parties involved — from the Afghan government to insurgents, from the United States to Pakistan are seriously considering ways of trying to reach a peace deal.

Official sources in different countries interviewed by Reuters said all the main insurgent groups — the Afghan Taliban led by Mullah Omar, the Haqqani network and the Hizb-ul-Islami Gulbuddin (HiG) led by Gulbuddin Hekmatyar — were involved in informal talks on how to open a more structured peace process. 

They also said the United States had given a far higher level of endorsement to these talks than before, while Pakistan was showing a slight shift in its approach to Afghanistan as it worries about increasing instability at home.

However, the whole thing came with a huge health warning – the current “talks about talks” are fragile, preliminary and liable to break down at any time.  Analysts and official sources caution that no one should expect an early result in a country which has seen more than three decades of war and many broken promises on all sides. And the whole process — if indeed “process” is the right word for it — is bedevilled by contradictions which could bring the whole thing tumbling down.

Here are just a few of them:

Attacking Sufi shrines in Pakistan

Amil Khan has a post up at Abu Muqawama about last week’s bombing at a Sufi shrine in Karachi and its implications for intra-Sunni conflict between Deobandi Taliban militants and people of the majority Barelvi sect:

“There are all sorts of studies written by people much cleverer than me that will tell you violence in this type of conflict aims to do a lot more than just kill its immediate victims. In Pakistan, right now, it also aims to push people into ideological camps (for or against) so that the perpetrators can claim they defend a constituency and create an ideological cover for their actions. In that sense, the attacks were aimed at forcing people to think about the ‘who is Muslim and who is not’ argument.” he writes.

“I would add just raising this argument where once it wouldn’t be entertained at all is an achievement for extremists because, well.. if you are arguing about whether Muslims are really Muslims, whether people agree or not, you have already radicalised on the sly the discourse concerning non-Muslims, or Shia.”

There’s a troublesome pattern here.  In May,  militants killed more than 80 people from the minority Ahmadi sect in Lahore.

In September, Interior Minister Rehman Malik accused militants of trying to create a Sunni-Shi’ite rift after bomb attacks on Shi’ite rallies in the cities of Lahore and Quetta.

And now the Karachi attack – the latest attack on Sufis whose mystical faith is condemned by hardline militants seeking a return to what they see as a purer form of Islam.

At a superficial level, the wave of bombings and gun attacks which have hit Pakistan over the last few years can be seen as an attempt to sow chaos - revenge for the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan, and for Pakistan Army operations against militants in its own tribal areas.

Pakistan: street rage and sectarian bombings

One of the more troublesome aspects of the current situation in Pakistan is how subdued – at least relative to the scale of the deaths – are protests against suicide bombings on Pakistani cities. Travelling from Lahore to Islamabad last month, my taxi driver winced in pain when I told him I had a text message saying the city we had just left, his city, had been bombed again. Yet where was the outlet for him to express that pain, or indeed for the many grieving families who had lost relatives?

I was reminded of this reading Nadeem Paracha’s latest piece in Dawn on the outcry over Aafia Siddiqui, the Pakistani neuroscientist  jailed in the United States after being convicted of shooting at U.S. soldiers. She has been claimed as the “daughter of the nation” who must be rescued from an American jail.

“Never have the highly vocal keepers of our women’s sanctity even superficially censured the aggravating antics of monsters like the Taliban and al Qaeda at whose hands thousands of innocent Pakistanis have lost their lives,” writes Paracha. ”None of the many women, children and men who were mercilessly slaughtered by the extremists, it seems, were good enough to also be celebrated as brothers, sisters and children of this nation.”

Saba Imtiaz made a similar point in Foreign Policy last month. “Political parties rarely call for protests after suicide bombings, but the Jamaat-e-Islami called for countrywide protests shortly after Aafia’s sentencing. Breathless condemnations of the sentencing came in almost instantly from political parties,”  Imtiaz wrote.

“The millions displaced by the floods in Pakistan, thousands languishing in jail awaiting trial and the countless women who are victims of honor killings, mistreatment in jails and discrimination will not see anyone rallying for their cause. Not acting swiftly to help them — who should also be dubbed daughters of Pakistan and supported by politicians — is the real injustice.”

Not that those comments are meant to suggest Siddiqui’s case should be ignored altogether. But it does indicate a worrying tendency in the way Pakistani society’s national narratives are constructed.  As discussed here, Manan Ahmed at Chapati Mystery has already written about how the Siddiqui case has tapped into the historical narrative about Mohammad bin Qasim, who first brought Islam to South Asia by conquering Sindh in the 8th century - allegedly after racing to the rescue of a Muslim woman who had been raped. The story of bin Qasim was specifically cited by Faisal Shahzad, the failed Times Square bomber.

“This particular brand of national machismo projected onto a woman’s body is neither new nor unique, yet it is a potent mixture in the oppressive, patriarchal Pakistani middle class. The mullahs can safely rage about the nation’s daughter, and the street urchins can eagerly vow to invade Manhattan,” wrote Ahmed.

from Afghan Journal:

America takes the war deeper into Pakistan

One of the most interesting things in Bob Woodward's re-telling of the Afghan war strategy in his book "Obama's Wars" is the approach toward Pakistan. It seems the Obama administration figured out pretty early on in its review that Pakistan was going to be the central batttleground, for this is where the main threat to America came from.

Indeed, the mission in Afghanistan was doomed so long as al Qaeda and the Taliban were sheltered in the mountains of northwest Pakistan straddling the Afghan border. The question was how do you deal with Pakistan?

Like much else, the administration debated long and hard just how far to push Pakistan to cracking down on the militants, some of whom it had spawned as assets in Aghanistan and as a front against its much bigger traditional enemy, India. One of those arguing for a tougher posture inside the administration was Dennis Blair, then the director of National Intelligence who thought there were just too many carrots being handed out and not enough sticks. He suggested the United States bomb targets inside Pakistan without seeking Islamabad's approval. "I think Pakistan would be completely, completely pissed off and they would probably take actions against us ... but they would probably adjust," he once told Obama.

Josh Rogin, recounting the debate from a piece in Foreign Policy, said that Obama chose a less confrontational path toward Pakistan. A year later, patience is running out. Last week's repeated incursions by NATO helicopters  from Afghanistan into Pakistan while pursuing militants seemed to signal a new, muscular strategy of the type Blair advocated.

Three Pakistani soldiers were killed in an attack by a NATO helicopter, triggering outrage and prompting authorities to close down a supply route for NATO troops in Afghanistan. Trucks carrying fuel for the foreign troops were set on fire in southern Pakistan in apparent retaliation for the soldiers' deaths, and on Monday, three guards were killed in an attack on tankers bound for Afghanistan in the nation's capital.

By choking off NATO supplies, even temporarily, the Pakistanis are saying they have had enough, says Robert Haddick, editor of The Small Wars Journal. While NATO said the helicopter strikes were carried out in self-defense after cross-border firing and in line with the rules of engagement, Pakistan saw it as a flagrant violation of its sovereignty, which is already under sustained pressure from the United States.

Claiming Jinnah’s mantle: Musharraf joins the queue

The minute I entered the elegant book-lined club in central London where Pervez Musharraf was about to launch his political career, it was clear who was to dominate the proceedings – Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Quaid-e-Azam, Founder of the Nation, Father of Pakistan. In his trademark peaked Jinnah cap, it was his photo alone which was hanging prominently on the platform where the former military ruler was to speak; and his photo on the little entrance ticket they gave you to get past security.

It was his spirit which was invoked even in the name of Musharraf’s political party — his All Pakistan Muslim League (APML) was a deliberate echo of the pre-independence All India Muslim League, through which Jinnah created the state of Pakistan in 1947.

 It was Jinnah’s speech of August 11, 1947 that Musharraf cited as one of the guiding principles of the APML, with its most famous lines: ”You are free; you are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place or worship in this State of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed that has nothing to do with the business of the State.”

Musharraf quoted a verse too from Allama Muhammad Iqbal, the poet-philosopher who imagined Pakistan as a place where what he saw as the true spirit of Islam – equality, peace and justice — would flourish. And it was to that idealistic vision that Musharraf appealed when he promised to fight poverty and corruption, end the domination of the feudal elite, and bring true freedom and economic well-being to the poor masses of Pakistan.

Appealing stuff. The problem is that every politician does it. Everyone invokes the spirit of Jinnah; everyone promises to improve the lot of the poor; everyone says he or she is the true democrat. Musharraf — who says he will go back to Pakistan before the next election due by 2013 come what may (and that includes possible arrest and assassination) is just the latest in a long line of politicians queuing up for Jinnah’s mantle. The problem is who are we – or more to the point – who are Pakistan’s voters – to believe?

It is a problem that cuts to the heart of Pakistan’s current political turmoil. Who are the true democrats? The progressives? The representatives of the poor? The inheritors of the poetic idealism of Iqbal, and the more pragmatic constitutionalism of Jinnah who used his background as a lawyer to create a country?

Start at the crudest caricature of Pakistani politics today. On one side, you have the “forces of democracy” in the two main parties – the ruling Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) of the late Benazir Bhutto and the main opposition Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) (PML-N) of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif.  On the other, you have the military which have dominated Pakistan for much of its life and which has grown ever more powerful after taking the lead in providing emergency relief following Pakistan’s devastating floods.