Pakistan: Now or Never?

from India Insight:

Mistrust, Afghan insecurity loom over Indo-Pak talks

By Annie Banerji

As India and Pakistan begin diplomatic talks between the two countries' foreign secretaries, Pew Research Centre published a survey this week that shows Pakistanis are strongly critical of India and the United States as well.

Even though there has been a slew of attacks by the Taliban on Pakistani targets since Osama bin Laden's killing in May, the Pew Research publication illustrates that three in four Pakistanis find India a greater threat than extremist groups.

In similar fashion, 65 percent of Indians expressed an unfavourable view of Pakistan, seeing it as a bigger threat than the LeT, an active militant Islamic organisation operating mainly from Pakistan and Maoist militants operating in India.

Moreover, a majority of Pakistanis disapproved of the U.S. military operation that killed Osama bin Laden in his Abbottabad compound, located 35 miles from Islamabad. Only 12 percent expressed a positive view of the U.S. and most Pakistanis view the U.S. as an enemy, consider it a potential military threat and oppose American-led anti-terrorism efforts.

In the midst of these unflattering opinions that India and Pakistan share of each other, U.S. President Barack Obama's decision to withdraw 33,000 troops from Afghanistan by next summer comes to the foreground as Washington's expectation is to see India and Pakistan jointly fill its shoes. However, India feels it will be left to babysit a dangerous neighbourhood riddled with militancy.

Though both countries wish to have improved relations, Pakistan worries about India's influence in Afghanistan as it would have to defend both its eastern and western borders from what it sees as its existential threat. In the same way, New Delhi fears the possibility of its nuclear-armed neighbour and the Taliban filling the vacuum left by the U.S. troops.

Taliban talks: the new mirage in Afghanistan

Afghan President Hamid Karzai has just said in public what many have been saying for months in private, that the United States is holding talks with the Taliban to try to reach a settlement to the decade-long war in Afghanistan.  “Peace talks are going on with the Taliban. The foreign military and especially the United States itself is going ahead with these negotiations,” he said in a speech in Kabul.

We have been hearing reports about these talks for months. In the climate of disinformation that threads through the Afghan war, it is hard to say exactly when they started, but I first heard last November that the Americans had begun direct talks with representatives of the Taliban and if that was correct, they must have begun some time before that. 

 Such direct talks have long been promoted by many Afghan experts as a necessary but not sufficient condition for a political settlement. While western countries have argued that political reconciliation must be Afghan-led, the Americans are the power-brokers, and unlike the administration in Kabul, the only ones who have the authority to deliver on any concessions agreed in the negotiations.

And the United States has also shifted its position on the Taliban — effectively admitting that the movement can be treated separately from al Qaeda by convincing the U.N.  Security Council to split its sanctions list imposing asset freezes and travel restrictions into two.

All that said, there is a danger that the U.S. Taliban talks become the new mirage in Afghanistan by suggesting that a political settlement is on the horizon if only the current strategy is maintained.  According to senior diplomats involved in international discussions on Afghanistan, the talks have yet to gain any serious traction.  One diplomat said the two sides were still “gauging each other’s temperature”;  another said that, “there are no serious load-bearing talks going on.”

And despite U.S. insistence that its military campaign in Afghanistan is — to use its favourite phrases -  “turning the corner” or “gaining momentum” – one diplomat suggested that the Taliban’s ambitions were still as high as they had been before Washington sent an extra 30,000  troops. 

Unlike the role sketched out for them by western governments in which they would folded into a broader political process,  he said the Taliban were still looking for a serious stake in power.  Among their ambitions would be for Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar to be rehabilitated as “Amir ul-Mu’mineen”, or supreme leader of the faithful, even if not directly running the government - an idea talked about back in early 2010.

A slow-burning revolution in Pakistan

Rarely does the perennial struggle for power between civilian and military authority punch to the surface quite so openly in Pakistan, yet thanks to the increasing use of the internet, it is now being played out in public across websites, Twitter, blogs and online newspapers. It is a struggle that is every bit as important as those taking place in the Middle East,  and like those of the Arab spring, one that has the potential to tip the country into even greater instability or steer it onto firmer ground.

The renewed and very public debate started with the May 2 raid by U.S. forces which found and killed Osama bin Laden in the garrison town of Abbottabad. That unleashed an unprecedented wave of criticism against the military — both for failing to find the al Qaeda leader, and for apparently failing to detect and react to a U.S. raid in the heart of the country.  The anger rose after militants attacked a naval air base in Karachi, and swelled further when the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency was accused of beating to death Pakistani journalist Saleem Shahzad – an allegation it denied.

With one of its own silenced – a man well-liked for his affability and courtesy – the media raised its voice.

Colunnist Ejaz Haider published an open letter to ISI head Lieutenant-General Shuja Pasha challenging the ISI to prove it was not involved with Shahzad’s death and insisting it respect the supremacy of civilian authority. Institutions of state, he wrote, ”are all accountable through two levels of agency. The first and primary level of agency is granted by the people through elections to their representatives; the second, a much more restrictive level of agency, is accorded by the peoples’ representatives to bureaucratic institutions, including the military and its intelligence agencies. You, sir, are therefore a servant twice over, as are all your officers and other personnel. You are answerable to our representatives and those representatives are answerable to us.”

Najam Sethi, a doyen of Pakistani journalism, wrote that  ”the indignant argument that any criticism of the military is ‘unpatriotic’ or serves the interests of the ‘ enemy’ doesn’t wash any more. Indeed, the term ‘establishment’, which was hitherto used in the media to refer obliquely to the military so as not to offend and incur its wrath, is rapidly going out of fashion, and the army and navy and air force are being referred to as army, navy and air force, which is, of course, exactly what they are and have always been.”

“The Pakistan military should see the writing on the wall. It must hunker down and become subservient to civilian rule and persuasion,” he said.

“What we saw and read in the media in May has never happened before,” wrote Cyril Almeida at Dawn newspaper. Using archive material on Dawn’s reports on the Pakistan Army’s defeat by India in the 1971 war, he compared the criticism levelled at the military now with the very muted coverage of its humiliating surrender in Dhaka on  December 16, 1971.

Ilyas Kashmiri reported killed in drone strike in Pakistan

Ilyas Kashmiri, commander of the al Qaeda-linked Harakat-ul-Jihad al-Islami (HUJI), has been reported to have been killed in a drone attack in South Waziristan in Pakistan. He had been pronounced dead before in 2009, only to have his death disproved through an interview he gave to the late Pakistani journalist Saleem Shahzad. So any assessment of the significance of his death needs to carry a big health warning.

That said, there appears to be rather more evidence this time around of his death, including a statement faxed to Pakistani media from someone who claimed to be a spokesman for HUJI. And if accurate, it would be very significant for reasons which go far beyond one man.

For a start, it would be the first clear result of renewed and redefined cooperation between Pakistan and the United States after the May 2 killing by U.S. forces of Osama bin Laden in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad.  Pakistani officials, who publicly condemn drone missile strikes while condoning them in private, have said these are effective when carried out in coordination with Pakistani intelligence. Those carried out by the CIA acting alone have been blamed for causing the civilian casualties that help make these strikes deeply unpopular in Pakistan. A Pakistani intelligence official said that Ilyas Kashmiri was killed following a tip-off from local intelligence.

Ilyas Kashmiri inhabited the netherworld between Pakistan’s former jihadi proxies once cultivated for use against India and the Arab “outsiders” from al Qaeda. Though HUJI  was affiliated to al Qaeda, it was never clear how far it had been integrated into the organisation. Yet it is precisely that netherworld that is the source of many of the  “double-game” allegations levelled at, and denied by, Pakistan – that its security establishment, or parts of it, maintain links to some militans while fighting others. 

Ilyas Kashmiri once fought India in Kashmir. But after being blamed for organising attacks within Pakistan, he became an enemy of the state and decamped to the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). Yet India in particular has alleged that he retained links to some of his former contacts in the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency.

An Indian government report on David Headley, the American arrested in Chicago who has admitted to carrying out surveillance for the 2008 Mumbai attacks, makes several references to links between Ilyas Kashmiri and individual ISI agents. Headley, it says, visited Ilyas Kashmiri twice in 2009, and discussed plans for an attack on Denmark, where the newspaper Jyllands-Posten had published cartoons deemed offensive to Islam. The men present “even discussed a general attack on Copenhagen,” it quoted Headley as saying. On both occasions, Headley travelled there with a man it named as Abdul Rehman, who in a separate part of the report is described as backed by the ISI. Another of the men who accompanied him, named as Ijaz, had retired from the airforce. “Ilyas Kashmiri knew Ijaz’s brother who happened to be an ISI agent,” it quoted Headley as saying.

Pakistan rejects accusations that individual ISI agents might have been in touch with Ilyas Kashmiri. Officials also frequently complain of Indian propaganda levelled against Pakistan in a “psyops” campaign by its intelligence agency, the Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW.) It has blamed its earlier inability to track down Ilyas Kashmiri on the fact that he moved frequently, and has pointed to the numerous attacks within Pakistan as evidence of its determination to fight Islamist militants. Cvilians, soldiers and the ISI itself have all been targetted in a wave of bombings across Pakistan.