Pakistan: Now or Never?

from Afghan Journal:

America in Afghanistan until 2024 ?

The Daily Telegraph  reports that the status of forces agreement that the United States and Afghanistan are negotiating may allow a U.S. military presence in the country until 2024 .  That's a full 10 years beyond the deadline for withdrawal of U.S. combat troops and handing over security responsibilities to Afghan forces.

The negotiations are being conducted under a veil of security, and we have no way of knowing, at this point at least, if the two sides are really talking about U.S. troops in the country for that long. ( The very fact that a decade after U.S. troops entered the country there is no formal agreement spelling out the terms of their deployment is in itself remarkable)

But it does seem more likely than not that there there will be a U.S. military presence, however small, in Afghanistan beyond 2014, and that is going to force the players involved in the conflict and those watching from the sidelines with more than a spectator's interest to rethink their calculations.

Indeed, the talk of an extended force deployment may be an attempt to reverse the perception that America was in full retreat following President Barack Obama's announcement  of a drawdown that many in the military believe has only hardened the resolve of the Taliban insurgents and their backers in Pakistan to wait out the departure.

Now with troops, including a sizeable element of Special Forces, backed by the United States' aggressive and unparalleled air power, to be based in the turbulent south and east of the country beyond 2014, the  players have to shuffle their cards again. For those elements in the Taliban who may have explored the idea of reconciliation, the plan for a long-term U.S.military involvement in the country has just made their task even more  difficult.

For Pakistan, the country most affected by what happens in Afghanistan, the idea that the United States is not going to walk away, sharpens its dilemma and once again goes to the heart of its role as a conflicted partner in the war against Islamist militancy.  On the face of it, a U.S. military presence next door means continued pressure on Pakistan to act against the militant groups that operate from its soil. It means the drones will continue to fly in its skies and fire missiles at will.

Pakistan’s growing democracy

Pakistani politics can be infuriating, petty, violent and often downright incomprehensible. So it is easy to miss what is actually quite a remarkable transformation in the way it governs itself. For perhaps the first time in its 64 years of existence, Pakistan is trying to figure out in detail how to make democracy work.

In a country traditionally dominated by the centralising authority of the military, the government which took office in 2008 is devolving power to the provinces. It is talking about breaking up Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province and traditional recruiting ground of the army, by creating a new Seraiki province in south Punjab. It is extending some political rights into the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) by reforming the draconian Frontier Crimes Regulations, a British colonial-era system designed to control rather than govern the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.

In other words, it is introducing into the system mechanisms which, in theory at least, make it easier for people to negotiate their disputes with the state without taking up arms. By decentralising, it could also become harder for the army to launch a military coup (though it currently shows no inclination to do so), thus beginning the process of making democracy irreversible. And perhaps most importantly, it offers a way of accommodating Pakistan’s ethnic diversity.

As Pakistani columnist Mosharraf Zaidi wrote this month, “decentralisation has been, stealthily, one of the central and most definitive issues in Pakistani democracy.”  And whatever the petty and self-serving politics behind the various positions taken by different political parties, he wrote, “Pakistanis should be pleased that decentralisation represents the very heart of political discourse in Pakistan in 2011.”

Pakistan’s inability to accommodate ethnic diversity has a painful history.  At its worst, it led to the bitter civil war in 1971 when then East Pakistan, resentful of the domination of West Pakistan, broke away with Indian help to become the new state of Bangladesh.   But it is at its  most insidious not for what it fails to do, but for what it requires in its place — an over-reliance on a particular, but contested, interpretation of Islam as the only force which can unite Pakistan, and a need for real or imagined external enemies (it used to be India, now it extends to the United States) to pull the country together in a defensive huddle.

So for all its fitful and frustrating progress, the effort to build democracy is likely to be the real story of Pakistan in the coming year or so, ahead of elections due by 2013.  Rightly or wrongly, people believe the United States is preparing to leave the region, and attention is turning to domestic politics as the place where Pakistan’s future will be contested. Relations with the United States and India will of course continue to play a role, as will the Islamist militants waging a campaign of gun and bomb attacks inside Pakistan, but many of the influences that will shape that political contest are less obvious.

Among these is the separatist insurgency in Baluchistan, Pakistan’s largest but least populated province,  where demands for outright independence appear to be gaining strength over aspirations for greater autonomy. The area is rich in resources, home to Gwadar port — meant to give China access to the Arabian Sea and Gulf oil supplies – and arguably more strategically significant than Afghanistan.  Although the insurgency has not yet come to dominate political discourse, it is an unpredictable wild card which could prompt some to call for greater, centralised, and therefore military control, and others for even more decentralisation.

When there are no people in Pakistan

Rarely does a story reveal so much so unintentionally as this month’s article in the New Yorker by Nicholas Schmidle reconstructing the May 2 raid by U.S. forces who found and killed Osama bin Laden in the Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad. The article, beautifully written in the genre of Black Hawk Down, purports to tell the inside story of the Navy SEALS on the raid, right down to what they were thinking, or indeed, in the case of one of them, what he had in his pockets.

The problem, as reported initially by The Washington Post, was that Schmidle had not actually spoken to any of the SEALS involved in the raid but relied on the accounts of others who had debriefed the men. That, along with his failure to disclose this fact in the article, has prompted a vivid debate on Twitter and elsewhere, both about journalistic ethics and the accuracy of the story.

C. Christine Fair, a South Asia expert at Georgetown University in the United States, complained that the lack of transparency on the sourcing of the story was an “egregious exercise of incaution”  that left it impossible for readers to judge its credibility.  It was an issue, she said, that went beyond journalism, but played into conspiracy theories about American policy and particularly about whether bin Laden was dead at all.  That those theories are alive and well was highlighted by this story in Pakistan’s The News, claiming that all witnesses to bin Laden’s death were killed in a U.S. helicopter crash in Afghanistan on  August 5. Actually, although members of SEAL Team 6 were among the dead, none of them had been involved in the raid.

As a journalist writing about Pakistan, I would be wary of taking too strong a stance either way – the expression “people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones” springs to mind. I would probably split the difference and say that the more transparency on sourcing the better when it comes to Pakistan. We are all subject to manipulation and propaganda when we rely on unnamed sources, so much so that a journalist friend in Islamabad made the case to me that we should collectively decide to use only named sources. (For the record, I would try to counter that manipulation by seeking out two or more sources, preferably of different nationalities in different countries, to corroborate a story.)

At the same time, unlike a news story, a magazine article like this one is closer to book form where the demands of stylistic coherence require a huge effort of imagination, not of invention, but of empathy. It requires laborious questions about the kind of details we would not normally have time to ask – like the contents of someone’s pockets. We cannot entirely judge it by the same standards as we would apply to daily, or even weekly news. 

That said, what we do have in front of us with the New Yorker’s reconstruction of the bin Laden raid is a text. We know it exists since we can link to it (primary sourcing). Where we will differ is over interpretation.

In a post over the weekend which prompted me to re-examine the New Yorker story, Jakob Steiner at RugPundits complained about Orientalism. That in turn led me to look at how small a role Pakistanis play in the story. Pause here, and consider that Pakistan is a country of some 180 million people of diverse religious, social, linguistic and cultural backgrounds. People who fret about their children’s education and grieve for their parents like the rest of us. People who in the office will bitch around the water cooler, and over dinner  talk about the weather. And yes. I simplify people’s lives, because those of us who live them (signpost irony here) know how simple they are.

from Photographers Blog:

Retracing my steps in Pakistan

On August 7, 2010, with a camera in hand, I dropped into a flooded village on an army helicopter that was delivering food aid to marooned villagers. As a crewman slid the door open to find solid ground, I leaped out, took some photographs, and managed to get back on before the chopper departed.

Time stamps on the images show the hover-stop lasted less than the length of an average song. For those three minutes, my thoughts were focused on finding an image that would bring the Pakistan floods story to life.

After getting back to base, I worded the caption, “Marooned flood victims looking to escape grab the side bars of a hovering Army helicopter which arrived to distribute food supplies in the Muzaffargarh district of Pakistan's Punjab province August 7, 2010.”

I never got a chance to speak to the villagers in my image. Trapped in the belly of the chopper, I did not even know where we had descended. All I could confirm was that I had leaped onto a graveyard, where the winds from the propellers threw me from one dirt mound to another.

On July 30, 2011, nearly one year later, I found the village and my subjects.