Pakistan: Now or Never?
Perspectives on Pakistan
Taliban poetry, mourn the dead boy, curse the naked “daughter of the west”
“A calamity has emerged from the Western gloom,” we are told. “The Crusader world has come out… The red daughter of the West has come out; she dances naked.”
“O hunter! why did you hold the arrow in your bow? You opened your closed eye slowly. It looks like you started watching my youth. Yes, I am that deer in this forest.”
“And, the tender Talib Jan; The one with long hair, The young Talib Jan, Who used to cleanse hearts with his voice when he called the azan… You would not ask me why I am crying.”
Those lines are from three poems in the newly published “Poetry of the Taliban”, a collection that is as maddeningly confusing as it is revealing. The hatred of the west. The intimacy between the hunted and the hunter. The dirge for the dead boy. The collection, edited by Kandahar-based researchers Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, is a map of sorts into the inner thinking of the Taliban movement, yet one that is painfully hard to follow. Such is the diversity of these poems that you cannot read them and stereotype the Taliban movement either as an enemy which must be crushed or, equally perversely, as a coherent movement that just needs to be coaxed into a peace deal to end the Afghan war. They are poems which deserve to be studied closely.
But first let’s dispense with some misconceptions. It should not come as a surprise that the Taliban like poetry – anyone who failed to notice Mullah Zaeef’s reference in his memoirs, My Life with the Taliban, to Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar reciting a ghazal should either read, or reread his book. Nor should we be surprised that the insurgents are as prone to human frailty as any other group of people, especially after fighting a war in their own country for nearly 11 years.
But we should not romanticise them either – the temptation, particularly for war-weary western countries seeking a way out of the Afghan war is to read whatever we want into these poems. If the insurgents can be humanised as latter-day Wilfred Owens, all the better for those looking to salve their consciences while pulling out troops, with or without any guarantee of peace in Afghanistan. Too often, western policy prescriptions have preceded rather than flowed from an understanding of the people affected by them. Those people are then assumed to be made to fit, as though they have no agency of their own. Thus if we are to make war with the Taliban they will be unyielding fanatics; if we are seeking a peace deal, they become poets. “Poetry of the Taliban”, selected from poems published on the Taliban website, provides an opportunity to reverse that process, to study the insurgency on its own terms and in its own words and work backwards into what fits best. We might or might not like what we find.
My own impression – limited by the fact that I don’t read Pashto and therefore find it harder to imagine the poems in the original – is that the Taliban is essentially a subversive movement without a coherent political platform. The only common theme is a fiercely nationalistic love of Afghanistan and a desire to see foreign troops out. “O my homeland…” reads one poem from 2008. “You are my pride, you are my dignity. You are my world’s paradise. I will sacrifice everything of mine for you.”
In optimism over India-Pakistan trade, a warning flag
In 1997, the business-friendly Nawaz Sharif was prime minister, relations between Pakistan and India were thawing and the two countries were trying to use improved trade to put decades of animosity behind them. Or as the Indian journalist Salil Tripathi wrote at the time, “this sorry state of affairs may be about to improve – through commerce.” Then came the nuclear tests in 1998, the Kargil war and a coup in 1999, mass military mobilisation in 2001-2002, the Mumbai attacks in 2008, and now, finally, we are here again.
Trade is the new/old panacea of India-Pakistan relations, moving ahead rapidly after Islamabad said last year it was ready to match India’s offer of Most Favoured Nation (MFN) trading status. The Economist called it “a profound and welcome shift” that could eventually open up for India trade through Pakistan to Afghanistan and the markets of Central Asia and beyond. As trade increases, so the argument goes, India and Pakistan will build the trust needed to tackle their territorial disputes, while economic inter-dependence will reduce the risk of conflict.
The problem with this scenario is a dangerous mismatch in expectations between India and Pakistan. India sees improved trade ties as a useful end in themselves; Pakistan, in contrast, is looking for rapid progress on territorial disputes. That could be an academic argument, were it not for the fact that this mismatch echoes problems that have bedevilled relations since 1947. Even since their first war over Jammu and Kashmir left India with the more important parts of the former kingdom – the heartland Kashmir valley and control of the rivers on which Pakistan depends – India has been a status quo power. Pakistan, in contrast, has been fighting to change that status quo, nurturing Islamist militants to fight asymmetric warfare against its bigger neighbour, with lethal consequences for the region, and increasingly, for itself. With little or no progress on territorial disputes, the approach of improving trade ties while leaving the rest to a better day risks falling foul of the same cycle of violence.
So far, an agreement on Kashmir appears as elusive as ever. There has been no progress in resolving a boundary dispute in Sir Creek, which lies in the marshlands between Gujarat in India and Sind in Pakistan. And of most immediate importance, there is no change in attitudes to the Siachen region, a wasteland of mountains and glaciers high in the Karakoram beyond Kashmir, which since 1984 has been turned by India and Pakistan into the world’s highest battlefield. After losing 139 soldiers and their civilian staff last month to an avalanche, the Pakistan Army has appealed for talks on the demilitarisation of Siachen. India has rebuffed that call, officially reiterating its stand that Pakistan must first authenticate India’s higher and more advantageous positions before any military withdrawal. The Indian media narrative has taken an even harder line, with some suggesting that the Indian positions be permanently agreed as the boundary between Indian and Pakistani territory – thereby not only reinforcing the status quo, but also negating any possibility of a territorial compromise further down the road.
From an Indian point of view, focusing on trade first appears to make sense. With Pakistan’s economy struggling and relations chilling with the United States, it too stands to gain from better trade. As Sadanand Dhume at the American Enterprise Institute argued in a discussion on Twitter, Pakistan should stop seeing better trade ties as a concession to India.
“Pakistan hurts itself by seeing trade as a concession to India. Pakistan’s economy needs the boost much more than India’s,” he argued. “Robust economic ties will create constituencies for peace on both sides. In short, both sides would benefit from more trade even if neither budged an inch on Siachen, Sir Creek or Kashmir.”
With its growing political and economic clout, India sees little reason to make early territorial concessions to Pakistan, especially with the wounds of the 2008 Mumbai attacks still raw, and the man it believes masterminded those attacks, Lashkar-e-Taiba founder Hafez Saeed, continuing to play an active public role. And increasingly, it has the United States on its side – Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used a visit to India this month to renew pressure on Pakistan to tackle Islamist militants – a choice of location that irked many Pakistanis. In short, according to the Indian view, Pakistan should take what is on offer for its own benefit, and what is on offer right now is better trade.
@Rex,
Yes, if that could help adding (on your CV) an additional qualification as Astrologer.
Warp and weft:tales from the Pakistani blogosphere
I am going to break a self-imposed rule and recount my latest conversation with a Pakistani taxi driver. His parents live in Lahore, so we got talking about his main worries about Pakistan. The answer - lack of clean water and dengue fever. I am somewhat parodying the tired journalistic device of “my taxi driver said” here (I promise not to do it again) – since you can quote a Pakistani taxi driver without even going to Pakistan (London minus the extra airfare) – but here’s my point. People don’t always, or even often, talk about the stuff that makes headline news – like relations with the United States, the war in Afghanistan, Islamist militancy, drones, civilian-military competition and political confrontation. Pakistan (190 million people or more) is also cultural, social, economic and historical; it is religious but not only religious, traditional and urbanising; it is the most parochial country to be obsessed with the outside world; the most feudal to be driven by a web-savvy and growing youth; its issues include music and education, the price of onions and the fear of dengue.
To capture some of that, I have decided to start, on an experimental basis, a round-up of some of the latest articles in the Pakistani blogosphere. Apologies to anyone who feels they were unfairly ignored this time around but 1) I notice more those on my Twitter timeline (@myraemacdonald), 2) I am looking at themes that would be worth exploring further 3) I have tried to exclude those about The Big Political and Geopolitical Issues and 4) This is a personal choice rather than a scorecard. I have, however, included blogs from the diaspora with some reservations - inside the space created by the internet, and particularly on Twitter, diaspora/Pakistan conversations appear seamless (especially, for reasons I have never understood, when Manchester United is playing); outside the internet, real world influences are different in ways that are not always obvious.
I shall refine/amend/drop this series depending on what people have to say. But to get started, here are a few blogs/themes that caught my eye.
First up, urbanisation. This is important since much of the support for Islamist groups and for the kind of “stability” which some think can best be provided by the army has come from the urban middle and lower-middle classes. As has been the case in India, anger against corruption has also been driven by the urban middle classes who want a bigger share of the pie, while being presented rather disingenuously as concern for the rural poor. And urbanisation is an essential subject to master for anyone who wants to invest in Pakistan.
In the blogosphere, Umair Javed at Recycled Thought has been making much of the running, writing not just about urbanisation, but suburbanisation. For background, read his column in Pakistan Today about how suburbanisation and gated communities are transforming Punjab province, with garish consumerist adverts, fast-food restaurants, new colleges for the growing youth population, and changing land use. “Population pressures, urbanisation, and its accompanying features all have very real consequences in terms of the politics it breeds, the developmental questions it poses, and the impact these have on society at large,” he writes. “So while the world places its focus on Islamism, radicalisation, and state collapse, society in some parts of the country is humming along, forging a unique relationship with modernity in the process.” The next step, as described this month at Recycled Thought, is to try to map those changes, for example by looking at how the urban middle classes in Lahore are moving into the suburbs in pursuit of better education for their children: “…a specific class, the middle to upper middle one in this case, can be spatially identified by mapping out desired commodities – like private education,” he says. “Can’t say for sure, but I suspect if one were to mark out growth in mid-range food outlets, the results would be quite similar.”
The line, “it’s the economy, stupid”, never seems to wear thin, probably because we keep forgetting it. So read his posts and consider that rather than anguishing about state failure/not state failure in Pakistan, someone ought to be running the numbers on urbanisation/suburbanisation, population growth, youth as a percentage of the population, income and income disparity, political views, educational standards, use of English versus Urdu/Punjabi, and indeed according to Umair Javed, purchasing power for Toyotas, Hondas, take-away food and burgers.
(And on the subject of urban development, do please also catch up on Manan Ahmed’s elegaic series on Lahore, of which the latest is here at Chapati Mystery.)
Spent Christmas break in India. I always tip the rickshaw wallahs proportionally to their conversation. A buck for me is 50 for them. I get to feel generous. They get to buy their kids a treat.
I wouldn’t trust investment advice from a taxi driver. But if you want to know the best places to eat, the best bars, the place where all the cool kids hang out or what the common man finds most troubling, the taxi driver is the best intelligence source you’ll ever have.
Our resident Pakistani blog dog here (Umair) goes on and on about nuclear weapons. That taxi driver gives not a wit. He cares about clean water and dengue fever. Guess he didn’t get the memo. He’s supposed to tell everybody that he’s proud to eat grass and that all is well since Pakistan has nukes. How dare he talk about clean water and dengue fever.
Ambiguous, embittering and unstoppable: U.S. drones in Pakistan
One of the most frustrating aspects of the debate on drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas is that it rests on a tangle of assumptions on which neither Washington nor Islamabad can agree. The result is a corrosive discussion which undermines U.S. legitimacy and gives Pakistanis a focus for anti-Americanism which drowns out all other issues, including how militancy should be tackled and the Afghan war brought to an end.
This week the United States and Pakistan again publicly contradicted each other on the use of drones. While top White House official John Brennan described drone attacks as legal, ethical and wise, Pakistan lodged a formal protest against the latest strike on its tribal areas while its foreign ministry condemned it as a “total contravention of international law”. The hardening of Pakistan’s attitude to drones – it has shifted from tacit approval and token condemnation to more vocal opposition – overlaps with a dispute over Washington’s refusal to apologise formally for a NATO attack which killed 24 Pakistani soldiers near the Afghan border last year. Pakistan has insisted on an apology before it reopens supply routes for troops in Afghanistan, closed since the attack.
None of this will be resolved soon. President Barack Obama is unlikely to offer up any apology which might compromise his projected image as a leader who is tough on terrorism ahead of November’s presidential election. For now, foreign troops in Afghanistan are surviving without the Pakistani routes, either flying supplies in by air or using the Northern Distribution Network (NDN), which Washington has been expanding specifically to reduce its dependence on Pakistan. And while the United States has slowed the use of drones, it has made clear they will not be stopped. In Pakistan, where anti-Americanism is running high,the ruling Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) cannot be seen to back-pedal on a stance taken by Pakistan’s parliament demanding an end to drone strikes and a full apology for cross-border attack. With a political crisis brewing after the conviction for contempt of court of Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani, it may well be facing elections this year. The result of the electoral compulsions in both the United States and Pakistan will be drift, a continued cooling of relations between Washington and Islamabad without the catharsis of a real rupture, accompanied by a spitting, angry frustration, much of which, for now, is focused on drones.
There are no easy answers. Those who draw a moral line in the sand saying drone attacks are “extra-judicial executions” have yet to offer a viable alternative to end the murder of civilians of all nationalities by militants who themselves operate outside of the law (and which does not produce more civilian casualties than drone strikes). Those who defend drones ignore the many ambiguities of the missile campaign in terms of respect for sovereignty, the exercise of the power of the state, and international law, all of which set a dangerous precedent for which we may all eventually pay dearly.
The drone campaign, can however, at least be broken down into the three different but overlapping motivations. The United States believes Pakistan is either actively supporting or passively harbouring militants (the degree of passive vs active support is bitterly contested) who 1) pose a threat to US and western domestic security 2) compromise its campaign in Afghanistan and 3) endanger stability in Pakistan itself. Drone bombings are still seen as an effective way of preventing acts of terrorism in the west, reducing militant attacks in Afghanistan, and curbing the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), or Pakistani Taliban, who have waged a bombing campaign on Pakistani cities.
Start with the threat of terrorism in the west. None of the experts can agree how big that risk remains and it is therefore impossible for outsiders to judge whether the drone strikes are proportional to the threat. Moreover, killing Pakistanis (along with foreign fighters) to prevent a potential threat to western lives is never going to be seen as ethical in Pakistan, no matter what John Brennan may say. And arguably, Pakistani intelligence cooperation is more valuable – any reduction in intel-sharing caused by the drones row would put the west at greater risk of attack from militants based both in the tribal areas and in Pakistan’s heartland. That said, politically, no American president would take the risk of halting drones strikes if it were seen to expose the United States to a higher threat of terrorism. Practically, from a Pakistani point of view, its intelligence cooperation and earlier tolerance of drones is also motivated by a desire to avoid the certain retribution it would face were an attack on the United States to be traced back to Pakistan. And legally/ethically, opposition to drones as “extra-judicial executions” invites the question of what would happen if the United States were actually to declare war on Pakistan.
Coming to the war in Afghanistan, the arguments for drones are marginally clearer in as much as the threat from militants in the tribal areas is more proximate and real both to Afghans and foreign troops. The arguments here become somewhat self-referential. The United States chose to occupy Afghanistan; it chooses to pursue its military campaign in a particular way; as a result of these choices, it says drone strikes are necessary; it alone chooses the targets. For those Pakistanis who do not think the United States should be in Afghanistan in the first place; or who believe the strategy it has followed has been badly flawed, or who distrust the targetting choices, those arguments carry no weight. Rather they would inclined to see the drone strikes as an extension of neo-colonial power.
@KPSingh01
I wonder if Umair has ever actually left Pakistan. The Pakistanis I know are embarrased to be Pakistani because of what has happened in Pakistan. They tell Indians and close friends they are Pakistani. But to other random folk? They say they are Indian.
Umair is only proud because he is either a) employed in some capacity by the state or b) hasn’t travelled abroad much recently to experience the humiliation of decent Pakistanis.
In India and Pakistan talks, an intimately tangled web
Listening to Narendra Modi campaign for re-election in Gujarat in 2002 after some of the worst communal bloodletting in India’s history, one word was repeated so often that even I, with little knowledge of the language, could follow the meaning. “Pakistan”, he said, was the real threat to India. No matter that his opponents accused him of orchestrating violence in which some 2,000 people, most of them Muslims, died in retaliation for the burning of Hindu pilgrims in a train returning from a flashpoint town in northern India. “Pakistan”, he said, was responsible for terrorism in India. “Pakistan”, Modi repeated five times like an incantation, his fist clenched, his neck garlanded with marigolds. The cheering crowds were to be left in no doubt that only he, with his brand of Hindu right-wing populism, could stand between them and the external threat. The guilt-by-association at the death of so many Muslims earlier in the year in Gujarat, a state which borders Pakistan, was to be rechannelled into victimhood and vulnerability. From there came a process of expiation and, for Modi, electoral victory.
A full decade on, cleared by Indian courts of involvement in the Gujarat bloodshed, his image rehabilitated at least for some as a leader who can deliver good governance in India, Modi faces a new state election in Gujarat at the end of this year in which Pakistan will again play a role. It will be far less than before – India has moved on from the tensions of 2001 and 2002 when it came close to war with Pakistan over a December attack on its parliament. But the fact that Pakistan will play any role at all in the Gujarat campaign is testament to the peculiar intimacy of India-Pakistan relations, and with it, the tangled web of domestic politics that will define how far and how fast the two countries can go in improving ties.
As Chief Minister of Gujarat and a rising star in the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Modi is uniquely well placed to choose whether to exploit for political gain the efforts by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of the ruling Congress party to improve relations with Pakistan. In particular, he will have a say on whether Singh can reach a settlement on the disputed Sir Creek region which lies between Gujarat and Sind in Pakistan. If Singh and Congress were to give away too much, Modi and the BJP will accuse them of going soft on terrorism at a time when the man India believes masterminded the 2008 Mumbai attacks, Lashkar-e-Taiba founder Hafez Saeed, continues to take a high profile in Pakistan. Were Singh – who has said he wants to visit Pakistan – to give away too little, he might find it difficult to win Pakistani support for further peace moves or even to carry off a successful trip to the country of his birth.
Rewind for a moment to the current state of India-Pakistan relations. A rather well organised peace process has allowed both countries to set aside for now their priority issues – for Pakistan, disputed Kashmir and for India, “cross-border terrorism” by Pakistan-based militants – and instead focus on improving trade. The idea is that the more India and Pakistan become economically interdependent, the more both have to gain from peace than from war. Over time, that is meant to create the space to tackle the more difficult problems that have divided India and Pakistan since Partition in 1947.
Where it has become complicated, is over the timing and nature of a visit by Singh to Pakistan. He was already invited by Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani, who travelled to the Indian town of Mohali last year to watch his team being defeated by India at cricket. He was invited again by Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari this month, who turned a trip to an Indian shrine into a state visit. Refusing an invitation from both prime minister and president offering to return the hospitality would be just plain rude.
The difficulty, however, is in arranging a prime minsterial visit to Pakistan which would achieve something without Singh and the Congress party facing criticism at home. While it was enough for his predecessor, BJP leader Atal Behari Vajpayee, to simply go to Lahore in 1999 to demonstrate his recognition of the existence of Pakistan and make an opening bid for peace, Singh needs to find a new way to give substance to his visit.
Yet the chances of a peace deal on Kashmir look slim. While Singh and then Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf came close to agreeing a roadmap for peace in Kashmir in 2007 - essentially accepting the division of the region between India and Pakistan while trying to make borders irrelevant – the current civilian government in Pakistan has no authority to deliver on a deal which even Musharraf admitted had yet to be worked out in detail. The Pakistan Army continues to dominate foreign policy, and Hafez Saeed continues to insist that as soon as the Afghan war is settled, the mujahideen will turn their attention back to “a full-scale armed jihad” in Kashmir. The Pakistan government led by Zardari’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), meanwhile, deny any knowledge of the agreement worked out by Singh and Musharraf. Nor would it be easy for the PPP, as a party which claims to represent the democratic aspirations of the diverse peoples of Pakistan, to accept a deal effectively imposed on Kashmir from above, by central authorities in New Delhi and Islamabad.
Throughout history all aggressors have faced resistance from the natives of the land, which they occupied with military force. Neither India nor Israel are likely to be the exceptions and sooner or later the will of the people shall prevail and break the hold of the aggresors on muslims. This is the law of nature and the path to lasting peace and prosperity in the region. It is the destiny of Pakistan leaders to slip into the role that they did not opt for nor feel comfortable with it, but have no option to go against the will of people.
Rex Minor
Tragedies don’t end wars, even in Siachen
One of the most frequently cited misconceptions about the Siachen war – where 135 Pakistani soldiers and civilian staff were buried by an avalanche this weekend – is that it is somehow contained to a relatively small area, as though it were a mountain version of a 19th century battlefield. The Indian and Pakistani troops, we are told in an oft-used and incorrect phrase, are “deployed on the Siachen Glacier at elevations as high as 22,000 feet.” From there, it becomes a relatively easy step to say, as many are saying after the tragedy, that India and Pakistan should end their futile conflict on the world’s highest battlefield. The argument has gathered momentum with a successful private-turned-state visit by President Asif Ali Zardari to India, generating expectations that Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh will in turn visit Pakistan this year.
Continue down this track and you overlap with another frequently made argument - that a meaningful and important agreement must be ready to be signed in order to give substance to Singh’s trip. Enter a deal on Siachen, where India and Pakistan have competed over an uninhabitable wasteland of snow and ice high in the Karakoram mountains since 1984. Such an agreement, so the argument goes, would act as a major confidence building measure, building the momentum to reach a settlement of the festering Kashmir dispute and lasting peace between India and Pakistan.
But if tragedies could end wars, India and Pakistan would have made peace in 1947. And if Siachen were indeed an isolated and contained battlefield, contained on the Siachen glacier – which at 22,000 feet would have it floating improbably at the height of the mountains peaks above it – it too would have been settled long ago. Far from being confined to the Siachen glacier – in fact Pakistan has no troops deployed on the glacier itself – the soldiers are spread across a wide area after fighting for control of the heights above before eventually agreeing a ceasefire in late 2003.
To fly over the region by helicopter, as I did on both the Indian and Pakistan sides while researching a book on the conflict, is to be awed by the sheer scale of the war zone. This is a vast region of towering craggy mountains, of chaotic rubble-strewn glaciers tumbling into valleys, of acres of seemingly endless white where the small and isolated Indian and Pakistani posts and gun positions look as though they might at any moment drown in the snow.
India began the war in April 1984 when, fearing Pakistan was about to occupy the area, it sent in troops to take control of the Bilafond-la, the main pass leading from Baltistan on the Pakistani side into the Siachen glacier. The region lies on the fringes of the former kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir, divided between India and Pakistan by a ceasefire line, or Line of Control (LoC). But while India and Pakistan had demarcated the LoC, they had not considered it worth extending into the remote uninhabited Siachen region saying only that that the line should continue “thence north to the glaciers”. It was only after 1978, when India sent a military mountaineering expedition to explore Siachen, that they began to argue over exactly how that should be defined.
The Indian deployment on the Bilafond-la in 1984 was meant only as a show of force which would be limited to the summer months – nobody had ever spent the winter in Siachen. But such was the nature of the relationship between India and Pakistan that they both felt compelled to fight across an ever widening area, losing more men to the harshness of the environment and in accidents in avalanche-prone and crevassed terrain than to fighting. By the time I visited in late 2003 and 2004, India and Pakistan had long recognised the region had no strategic value whatsoever. But the troops posted there on both sides told me in near identical language that they had to stay to ensure that “not one inch of land” be ceded to the other side.
In the early years, the war was particularly cruel – men fighting agonising battles for control of high positions at altitudes where even walking was a strain and where the terrain meant it was impossible to amass large enough numbers of men to mount a serious offensive. The two armies managed to bring in artillery; they used anti-tank and even anti-aircraft guns in a chilling accumulation of firepower to be used against men manoeuvring awkwardly across thick snow. An agreement was nearly reached in the late 1980s to withdraw, but fell foul of domestic politics, and the war dragged on.
The woman who died twice; Pakistan and acid attacks
There are many ways to make women invisible. One is to ignore them; another is to banish them from public view; and in the case of acid attack victims, to literally efface them. Pakistani acid attack victim Fakhra Yunus seems to have suffered all three, when after being deformed by an acid attack in 2000, she escaped to Italy for treatment where she lived for years, largely forgotten in the country she left behind.
This month, according to Pakistani media reports, she jumped to her death in Italy, guaranteeing that at least for a brief moment, her name would be remembered. Her body was brought back to Pakistan and Pakistan’s Geo News channel ran a story on her accompanied by before-and-after pictures of a once beautiful girl. On Twitter, links to old stories about her were unearthed and exchanged - a detailed profile in Time magazine from 2001, and a story in Newsline from 2011. Activists also launched a petition seeking justice for acid attack victims.
Fakhra Yunus, a former dancing girl, was catapulted into the feudal elite when she married into one of Pakistan’s best known political families – her former husband Bilal Khar is the cousin of now Foreign Minister Hina Rabbani Khar (whose make of handbag alone has garnered more attention recently.) After years of abuse, Fakhra Yunus fled back home where she said her estranged husband caught up with her when she was sleeping and poured acid over her. Bilal Khar was never prosecuted, and insisted after her death that he was not guilty.
After the acid attack, Fakhra Yunus sought help from Tehmina Durrani, who herself had married into the same family before leaving and writing of her own experience in her autobiography “My Feudal Lord”. Helped by Durrani, she was able to move to Italy where surgeons attempted to restore her face. Yet in some ways, Durrani wrote in an op-ed, she had already died back in 2000. When she committed suicide, wrote Durrani, “Fakhra died again to remind the world that she had lived.”
Yet there are many reasons to believe her name will soon be forgotten again. Pursuing the thread of her story simply takes you across too many of the painful faultlines of Pakistan’s fractured society.
The Pakistani elite has long been accused of being above the law, guilty of corruption and of using violence against more ordinary people with impunity. Yet it is also – at least on its own terms – a peculiarly besieged elite, for whom the sins of the few should not be blamed on all. Some of its members in the ruling Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) have been waging their own battle against the power of the military. This does not excuse crimes of violence or corruption – it does mean that the country is so polarised that rational debate tends to disappear behind rapidly constructed defensive walls.
Follow the thread far enough down the rabbit hole and you reach the point where accusations of corruption and wrong-doing against the ruling political elite – particularly of President Asif Ali Zardari – are instrumentalised not so much as a means of cleaning up the country and protecting the innocent but of overthrowing the civilian dispensation. As Pakistani columnist Raza Rumi wrote in an editorial, “corruption, as a slogan, has been used by almost every Pakistani government to undermine political opponents”. In the past it has been popular with the military as an excuse for overthrowing civilian governments; its use now, he wrote, by rising politician Imran Khan (who has promised to end corruption in 90 days) smacked more of autocracy than democracy.
Why single out the elite?
We all know that Pakistanis at all levels of society have committed crimes like these.
But beyond that, Myra, your defence of the elites is baffling. What does being elite have to do with the crime of assaulting a woman? On one hand you excorciate them for being above the law. On the other you say they should be held responsible for their hypocrisy because they face many challenges? Wow. Do you care about the state of women at all in that country?
The state of women in Pakistan shows you every fault of Pakistani society today. They hold a convicted felon who attempted to murder her co-workers (Aafia Siddiqui) on high account while the lives of women who are raped or attacked with acid are so disrupted and threatened that they must flee the country since the state won’t provide them refuge. More than anything, this shows how rotten the values of Pakistanis.
Do you think Afghanistan hasn’t changed since 1842?
With U.S. strategy in Afghanistan in disarray, one of the tropes we are likely to see with increasing frequency is the notion that Afghans are inherently ungovernable, too steeped in tradition to accept the “modernity” offered to them, and by extension, only have themselves to blame for failure. It will come in seemingly innocuous references to the massacre of the British army during its retreat from Kabul in 1842, graphically symbolised by William Brydon, the “lone” survivor struggling into Jalalabad on his horse. We might see a revival of the historically inaccurate cliche about Afghanistan being the Graveyard of Empires (the British went on to defeat the Sikhs and kept their empire for another century.)
Pundits will explain how Afghanistan’s history offers a guide to its future (because people in Afghanistan can be frozen in time in 1842, rather as though we might freeze our conception of Americans to the United States in its pre-civil war days). And then we will see comments like this, from the editors of the National Review Online: “The impulse to throw up our hands and be done with the entire business is understandable. The protests over the Koran burnings brought home, again, that we are dealing with primitive people in a primitive society operating on a system of values vastly different than ours.”
In such an environment, “Fragments of the Afghan Frontier”, a new book by Benjamin Hopkins and Magnus Marsden, is a useful corrective to anyone who thinks their views are based on reason rather than simple prejudice. It is not the first book to challenge conventional views of Afghanistan and the “North-West Frontier”. But it is unusual in combining history with anthropology to contrast how the British defined the lands beyond the frontiers of their Indian empire – an ungovernable space too steeped in tradition to benefit from the “modernising” influences of colonialism – with how it is actually experienced by the people living there.
Despite their unsuccessful military forays to Kabul, the British never had any interest in colonising Afghanistan, seeking instead a buffer to protect their Indian empire from an expansionist Russia. It suited them to conceive of Afghanistan as primitive, traditional, its tribes fractured in such a way that made them more amenable to British influence. This belief in tradition became particularly sharp in defining the people who lived along the Frontier, which though mapped by the British in the 1893 Durand Line, was never actually imagined as a border in the traditional European sense. (For a discussion of the Durand Line, see this RUSI paper/subscription required). Rather the “Frontier” was a series of lines across which British authority gradually tailed off, from the settled areas whose people were subject to colonial rule, and later became full citizens of Pakistan, to the tribal areas, which even today remain governed by the colonial era Frontier Crimes Regulation, to the far-beyond in Afghanistan.
This idea of Frontier tribes frozen in time by tradition, one belied by centuries of Pashtun migration , still holds sway in Pakistan - often translated into wishful thinking that once the Americans leave Afghanistan and end drone missile strikes on the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), the Frontier tribes will settle back into some imagined, bucolic and therefore peaceful existence.
“Fragments of the Afghan Frontier” shows how far this narrative was artificially constructed by the British. Under a system introduced by colonial officer Robert Sandeman in 1876 and first applied to the Baloch frontier, the British deliberately conserved tribal traditions while also subtly subverting and altering these as a means of exerting authority – thus becoming both protector and arbiter of tradition. The approach “did not seek to integrate, civilise and modernise the frontier’s unruly tribesmen as imperial subjects like their Indian counterparts. Rather it sought to contain, conserve and traditionalise them separate from the colonial sphere.”
Some of the material covered is more relevant to Pakistan as it struggles to address a Baloch separatist movement and a Taliban insurgency on its borders; other parts are more directly relevant to Afghanistan – the authors also take a swipe at American failed efforts to exploit Afghan tribal ties. All of it should ring alarm bells whenever anyone mentions 1842 or uses the word “primitive” to suggest the people living beyond the old British colonial frontiers are somehow different from the rest of us in their rejection of modernity and development (push that argument to the extreme and you would end up insisting that on one side people want mobile phones and modern medicine; on the other they would rather be in the pre-telegraph days of Doctor Brydon limping into Jalalabad on horseback.)
One thing that proved advantageous to the Afghan tribes is the harsh terrain with steep mountains and valleys. It is extremely difficult to stage a ground based war in such a terrain. Similarly in an extremely dense jungle territory it is difficult to stage combat. The US encountered it in Vietnam. In Afghanistan, a different type of harsh terrain made it difficult for them to chase and contain the enemies. There is nothing great about Pashtuns or anyone else as some three eyed, horn headed monsters who cannot be defeated. They were run over by the Mughals and ruled over three centuries before the British came into the picture. I would not equate the Taliban with the traditional Pashtuns. Though Taliban is made up of Pashtuns, these groups were made up mostly of refugees who grew up in the refugee camps in Pakistan. They are highly radicalized as the US, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan’s ISI pumped money into the Madrasas to fuel Islamic radicalism. Taliban mostly lack the generosity and trustworthiness of the normal Pashtuns. Taliban is more Pakistanized. The US did not lose to Afghans. Afghans have welcomed the US. It lost to Pakistan which deceived them by earning their trust and then repeatedly bilked them until they ran out of options. Taliban and its supporters are claiming victory without offering a fight. They ran away from Afghanistan and hid themselves under the pants of the ISI until patience ran out for the Americans. I would not call it a victory for some valient and brave people. These are cowards to the core who write history made up of lies and celebrate defeats as victories. The less said about them, the better.
Amid Afghan gloom, a glimmer of hope on regional front
One of the comments you hear quite often about the long U.S. war in Afghanistan is that the Americans should leave it to the region to sort out its own problems. It is sometimes said in fear that the United States will abandon Afghanistan to civil war; sometimes in exasperation over its often confusing policies; and sometimes in anger. With the U.S. approach to Afghanistan in disarray after protests over the burning of copies of the Koran, regional powers are, however, attempting to do just that. Progress, whether in the first meeting of a China-Pakistan-Afghanistan trilateral, or in improved trade relations between Pakistan and India, or in regional diplomacy led by Turkey and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation among others, is extremely tentative. And regional powers, especially India and Pakistan, may yet end up backing opposing sides in any civil war which follows the withdrawal of most foreign combat troops at the end of 2014. But the fact that regional diplomacy is happening at all suggests there is at least some hope of salvaging the situation in Afghanistan.
China, whose help has long been sought by the administration of President Barack Obama to stabilise Afghanistan and Pakistan, hosted a meeting in Beijing at the end of last month in which the three countries pledged to support an Afghan-led process of reconciliation and to work together to accommodate each others’ concerns, a foreign ministry statement quoted by the China Daily said. “Analysts spoke highly of the significance of the dialogue,” the China Daily added, “which marked the beginning of new process for countries in the region to tackle problems by themselves.”
Given Pakistan’s own near-reverence for China, Beijing is in a strong position to encourage Islamabad/Rawalpindi to play a positive role. It has significant economic stakes in Afghanistan and Pakistan; it has shown impatience in the past if its own interests are threatened by militants, but does not have the same ideological opposition to Islamists abroad, maintained, at least until recently, by the United States, prioritising stability above all. That makes it a potentially strong and pragmatic partner in helping to shepherd a political settlement.
All that said, China remains wary of becoming over-involved, while its role is complicated by its rivalry with India. According to Andrew Small, an expert on China at The German Marshall Fund of the United States, speaking at the end of last year, “China wants to see a broadly stable, capable Afghanistan with a government that’s sympathetic to Chinese interests, or at least neutral. It wants to ensure that hostile powers and strategic competitors have a restricted role in the country. And it wants an environment that’s secure enough for its economic projects to move ahead.
“It is also concerned that it doesn’t get sucked into the problems there and that its involvement in the country doesn’t turn China into a target for militant groups. In practice, that has resulted in them putting a toe in the water with certain investments but otherwise sitting on their hands – neither actively cooperating with the West nor actively undermining it, and maintaining positive but not particularly deep relations with the current Afghan government.”
INDIA-PAKISTAN TRADE TIES
Meanwhile India and Pakistan embarked last year on what has been perhaps their most organised if slow attempt at peacemaking in their history, eschewing breakthrough summits and landmark agreements in favour of building ties incrementally, and in particular by focusing on increasing trade rather than on the issues of Kashmir and security that have crippled them in the past. That effort is beginning to bear fruit – albeit painfully slowly – with Pakistan effectively agreeing to grant India Most-Favoured Nation (MFN) status by the end of the year.
KP, Interestingly the change in the mindset of Pakistanis is unmistakable regarding India-Pakistan relations and a significant number of them now cautiously support this thaw in relations that is occuring for the past two years.
The only dampener is the lobby which seeks normalization is still restricted to political class and that too a section of it.
Even then considering past choices that Pakistan made on India, the rhetorice against India has considerable declined but turned instead to America. The strong anti-US protests there were obviously the result of War on Terror which most Pakistanis (except the English media liberals) hate and this anger only spilled on the streets signifying the change in the Enemy in the subconcious mind.
While we could be glad that the heat is off on our side, the worrying factor is the Pakistan is yet to get out of the denial mode regarding the past choices it has made. It need not even reconcile openly, that would be hard for a seemingly proud nation but could slowly undo some the choices it has willingly taken.
And although it would be too early to celebrate victory that our point is vindicated (we have been advocating that let trade bossom and put in intractible issue in cold storage), it would do good for us to realize the change in attitude is temporal and is still subject to changing geo political realities.
Indian experts must realize that just as India has its own interests to guard Pakistan has them too. So policy makers in India must scruninize the choices made by Pakistan and if they feel they are good at stabilizing the region, they should support “specific policies” knowing fully that even Pakistan doesn’t have complete mandate to overrun Afghan policies due to china’s own fear of reemergence of militant environment if Pakistan has a free run. India must support the “specific policies” like the Iran-Pakistan gas pipeline project which given its nature must come with a pre-requisite of safety along Iran-Afghan-Pakistan region.In any case, the above policy can only be taken once US moves out or reduces its foot print in Afghanistan.
I belive the biggest danger lurking for Pakistan in the medium term is haphazard withdrawl of the Americans which would vindicate the military’s policy on Afghanistan so much so that Mujahideens would be seen as liberators from US imperialism and the mystic of invincibility attached to the fighters. They then roam the streets of Aghanistan and Pakistan forcing the Pakistani policy makers to either dumb down their relations or worse make a volta face to the direction that they are presently seeking. The mystic that two superpowers were defeated in a matter of too and half decades is too good for the “establishment” that had rough time for quite some time. Pakistani security forces will face less heat from Pakistani Taliban and the focus shifts onto recapturing Afghanistan. With the absence of Americans, the conflict will be back between reemerging Taliban and Northern alliance where India would be seen a main arbiter of the Northern Alliance. This is the moment of reckoning where India (and will all the support it could get from US,China) must make clear to Pakistan that all the relation building that it has cultivated for the past decade of so will go into the drain unless Pakistan mediates for ceasefire and later Peace between warring parties.But in all respects this is a medium term problem that both countries must encounter and this is the time India will need to standup strong and unrelenting in this policy. The everlasting peace on both sides durand line in any case will only be made by a strong pluralistic and democratic pakistan where all ehtnicities get immersed in its diversity.
And now, into the dead end in Afghanistan
When the history of the Afghan war is written, the protests over the burning of copies of the Koran will certainly be defined as a watershed. What remains to be seen is whether they become the moment the United States lost the war, or rather, when America lost patience.
The anger of Afghans is evident, whether it be over the sense of religious insult or the sheer frustration with a war that has gone on too long and yielded too little.
Less evident, but perceptible and equally important, however, is the American response. “2014 cannot come fast enough,” was one comment on Twitter about the date when the United States and its allies are meant to hand over control of security to Afghan forces.
“It’s reasonable to wonder what we have gotten out of more than a decade of investment-including 1901 US and 2901 total NATO Coalition deaths-in an effort to forge, as President Obama put it in his speech at West Point, a “partnership with Afghanistan grounded in mutual respect – to isolate those who destroy; to strengthen those who build; to hasten the day when our troops will leave; and to forge a lasting friendship in which America is your partner, and never your patron,” wrote James Joyner at the Atlantic Council. “Aside from hastening the day when our troops leave, none of those goals seem any closer than they were in 2001.”
Contrast that with the reaction to last September’s assault on the U.S. embassy on Kabul, which was erroneously compared to the Tet offensive, when Vietnamese insurgents attacked the U.S. embassy in Saigon 1968 and convinced the American public that – although the attack was defeated - the war was lost. Last year, the attack on the embassy in Kabul was blamed on Pakistan. This year, while that accusation stands, the protests over the burning of the Koran are delivering the more authentic message of the Tet offensive – that wars are lost on the home front of public opinion more often than they are on the battlefield.
Andrew Exum from the Center for a New American Security (CNAS) summed it up best in his complaint on Twitter that Afghan President Hamid Karzai had appeared to take sides with the protesters against the Americans. “In a reversal, with each passing day, Karzai needs U.S. troops in Afghanistan beyond 2014 more than the U.S. does. Does he realize that?” he wrote. “The U.S. has interests in Afghanistan, but surely Karzai sees how they have become less and less important for the U.S. government & public.”
Yet stop for a moment and consider how this jars with U.S. strategy in Afghanistan. Along with its allies, the U.S. aim is to build up Afghan security forces to the point where they can hold their own against an insurgency after 2014, with or without a peace deal with the Taliban. The sequencing in the rather confusing U.S. mantra of “fight, talk and build” requires an ability to project enough power - or at least pretend to do so - that the Taliban might find they have more to gain from negotiating a settlement while U.S. troops are still in Afghanistan than by fighting their way to Kabul in a civil war.
The Man has spoken as I said in March 12 post, and straight to the parrot nosed clintonian, get you forces out of the urban areas and confine them to the cantonments. The Afghan forces shall protect your rag tag sub-graded military of still over 100.000, until you are able to pack up and leave.
If only the suntanned american President had listened to the four star brave General Macchrystal, who had earned himself a name among the citizens of Afghanistan.
We are soon going to see the staff Seargent with medalled chest, who single handed carried out the assault on the women and children while they were asleep. Vietnam lies, once again?
Rex Minor
@True North
You are not with it, or perhaps you have the “scotty beam me trick” for the USA adminstration, which could show the escape route for the marines to pull out of Afghanistan? Vietnam scenario is the only alternatve for the great marines.
The fate of Afriis are decided by Afridi tribes! Even his own family shall disown him if what is alleged about him is true.You are just blowing too much hot air!
Rex Minor