Defence analysts in South Asia have been saying for so long that India and Pakistan might solve their problems over Kashmir only to end up at war over water that I had almost become inured to the issue. That was until I read the following comment on an earlier blog about Gulf investors buying up farmland in Pakistan to offset food shortages at home:

“Tough challenges await the investors in this sector due to serious water and energy shortages that the country suffers from at the moment,” it reads. “For effective investment in the agriculture sector, the government must clear these impediments first.”

The comment prompted me to hunt around for evidence of growing tension between India and Pakistan over water, needed to irrigate the land to cope with food shortages and for hydroelectric power — an increasingly attractive alternative in view of high fuel prices.

A quick trawl turned up this overview in the asia sentinel: “Water is destined to be a determining factor in the regional conflicts of South Asia in the years to come, particularly between India and Pakistan,” it says. ”While the West is busy concentrating its efforts on securing a ready supply of oil, in South Asia the governments are slowly but surely waking up to the fact that in the not too distant future water is going to be equally, if not more, important to the survival of their people.”

More specifically, Ijaz Hussain in the Daily Times analyses a row between India and Pakistan over Indian plans to build a hydroelectric project – the Kishanganga dam — on a river on its side of divided Kashmir. Pakistan fears the project will disrupt its own plans to build a hydroelectric dam on the same river on its side of Kashmir.

India and Pakistan have successfully regulated their use of the rivers they share in divided Kashmir through the Indus Waters Treaty  (see full pdf document here), signed in 1960 under the auspices of the World Bank. It is the only agreement to have been fully implemented by India and Pakistan; it held through two full-scale wars in 1965 and 1971 and survived a period of intense antagonism which began with the nuclear tests in 1998 and ended with a ceasefire on the Line of Control dividing Kashmir in late 2003. 

How well will it hold up in the current global crisis over food shortages and high oil prices? Relations between India and Pakistan are better than they have been for years, yet the challenges they face in providing food and electricity for their people and their industries are greater than ever.

I shall return to this subject and would appreciate comments offering links or ideas about how far water is going to replace Kashmir as the main irritant between India and Pakistan.

In the meantime, here is an observation to be going on with. The Stimson Center, in a history of the Indus Waters Treaty, attributes the success of the World Bank in brokering the deal to its insistence that the “functional” aspects of sharing water resources for mutual benefit must be separated from the political aspects of the India-Pakistan relationship.

Yet when Indian Power Minister Jairam Ramesh spoke of the row over the Kishanganga dam earlier this month he said: ”This is an issue with geo-strategic and foreign policy implications. The prime minister would have to give it a thought.”

Did he misspeak? Or were his words about the geo-strategic implications of water a sign of things to come?

With hindsight, it seems clear that a mass movement named after Mao’s Long March but also claiming Gandhi’s principles of non-violence risked disappointing its supporters.  The failure of the Long March by Pakistan’s lawyers to restore judges sacked by President Pervez Musharraf, and its dispersal last Saturday, has prompted much debate about why its leaders gave up without at least staging a sit-in.

Defence analyst Ikram Sehgal called the Long March a logistical success in its ability to garner mass support without violence, but a tactical failure. “The tactical failure of this long-lasting tremendous effort founded on great principles has become a strategic disaster for Musharraf’s opponents,” he writes in The News.  “About Pervez Musharraf, ‘with such friends who needs enemies’, one can paraphrase the saying for him: ‘With such enemies why does he need friends?’”

The blog All Things Pakistan says supporters of the Long March “are justifiably feeling let down by the grand posturing, thundering rhetoric and the subsequent retreat from agitation”. But it adds: “The lawyers’ movement is profoundly significant. It constitutes the finest historical ‘moment’ in our troubled history.”

Aitzaz Ahsan, the leader of the lawyers’ movement, writes in Newsweek  that the Long March was “an act of collective and nonviolent defiance perhaps unrivaled in Pakistan’s checkered history”.

“As the first rays of the Saturday sun streaked over Parliament, I delivered the concluding speech, and this remarkable crowd, the biggest in Pakistan’s recent history, dispersed peacefully for the trip home,” he writes. “Not a shot was fired or a pane of glass broken. Yet more than 200,000 Pakistanis had managed to make their point: they wanted their judges back.”

Yet why did the lawyers’ leaders give up without staging a sit-in that might have forced home their point? 

Was it simply poor judgment, as suggested in this piece in the Khaleej Times: “The mystery behind the decision of Aitzaz Ahsan, the man who had so successfully and so untiringly spearheaded an unprecedented campaign of lawyers and civil society, may not be unveiled in near future,” it says. “Those who saw him delivering the concluding speech to close the long march say that he was not in his usual self and was witless.”

Or had the movement become too dominated by those, including former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, who were more focused on getting Musharraf out as seen in this BBC video than on restoring the judges?

It’s worth remembering that Gandhi had a habit of calling off protests if he thought they were going in the wrong direction, often irritating his own supporters in doing so. So have the lawyers avoided a confrontation in order to fight all the better another day? Or have they missed their chance?
  

This is an idea that looks crazy at first glance — Pakistan, struggling with its own food shortages and rising prices, rents out its farmland to grow grains for the rich Gulf states instead. 

But the idea appears to be gaining momentum. Saudi Arabia is holding talks with officials in Pakistan, among other countries, to set up projects to grow wheat and other grains to protect itself from crises in world food supplies. Dubai-based private equity firm Abraaj Capital has already said it is looking at investing in agriculture in Pakistan  and other Gulf countries are also showing an interest.

So is this good or bad news for Pakistan?

U.S. News & World Report says there may be ”potential for large and enduring benefits on both sides. The reported sellers of under-developed farmland, Pakistan and Sudan, for example, are poor and lack the resources to make their own land productive,” it says. “Foreign investment is meant to help the investor, but in these cases it might also help the host countries by improving roads and irrigation and, of course, providing cash.”

The Financial Times last month quoted a senior Pakistani official  as saying of the talks to sell farmland to the United Arab Emirates: “Our aim is not to do away with precious farmland but in fact to raise the productivity of our farms and turn barren land in to fertile farmland.”

On the positive side is the potential for big investments in Pakistan from wealthy Gulf economies looking to use windfall oil profits to diversify away from oil.  According to one expert, the cumulative sovereign wealth fund wealth in the Middle East is now about 1.5 trillion dollars, mostly in the United Arab Emirates; and their assets could triple or quadruple in five to 10 years time.

Pakistan also has an interest in keeping relations sweet with Saudi Arabia as it seeks a deal on deferred oil payments  to ease its own financial crisis. Is this the beginning of a new version of oil for food deals?

On the negative side are all the issues about sovereignty and economic control. And of course the perennial question in emerging markets. What will it mean for the poor man who is already struggling to feed his family.

Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi used an interesting choice of words when he talked to reporters in Paris about the new government’s relationship with President Pervez Musharraf.

Reuters Paris chief correspondent Crispian Balmer tells me that he said the ruling Pakistan People’s Party had established a working relationship with Musharraf after February elections in which the president’s political allies were defeated.

“The reason we have established that working relationship with him is to give stability,” he said. “We realise that this transition from dictatorship to democracy is a delicate transition and let’s not unnecessarily rock the boat.”

Those did not seem to be the words of a government that expects the embattled former army general to step down any time soon, despite a mass rally in Pakistan by lawyers fighting for the reinstatement of judges fired by Musharraf last year.

The Asia Times even suggests that the tide may be turning in favour of Musharraf after this week’s American air strike that killed 11 Pakistani soldiers near the border with Afghanistan. “… the US air strike has severely unsettled the country,” it says. “Musharraf, with his excellent rapport with Washington, is the man many see as the only person capable of preventing it from happening again.”

But even if he survives as president for now, many say his situation will become almost untenable when President George W. Bush, who prided himself on his personal relationship with Musharraf, leaves office next January. 

According to one comment on a blog I posted last month on Musharraf: “Given Pakistan’s history,  no ruler has survived more than a decade,  give or take a year or two. As Musharraf approaches the 10th anniversary of his coup against Nawaz Sharif next year, I think he is going to leave. But he’ll leave on his on own terms, not let the Sharif brothers hound him out.”

Amid the conventional wisdom that Pakistan’s economy is falling to pieces — a view reinforced inside the country by soaring food prices and frequent power cuts — it’s interesting to see that someone still sees it as a hot market for foreign funds.

The Melchior Selected Trust Pakistan Opportunities Fund, one of the first funds to target Pakistan, believes the country’s problems have been exaggerated and sees its market as having the potential of “India at half the price”, according to this Reuters story.

It quotes Naz Khan, chief executive officer of KASB Funds in Karachi, as saying there is no reason to be particularly concerned by the tensions along the border with Afghanistan. “We have locked horns with India many times along the border with them in the last few decades,” he says. “This is just a different border and it shouldn’t affect the overall economy.”

The story prompted me to hunt around to see what else is out there painting a positive picture of Pakistan’s economy.

For starters, there is an economic growth forecast of 5.5 percent for the fiscal year starting in July, according to preliminary details on the budget due out next week. That is a level that the recession-haunted west can barely remember, let alone dream about.

Then there are record oil prices swelling the coffers of Gulf Arab states for whom Pakistan is a near neighbour and obvious investment target. The Dubai-based CPI Financial online newsletter says that investors are taking a long-term view on Pakistan’s economic turmoil. Of particular interest is a boom in Islamic banking — a sector relatively insulated from the credit crunch and dominated in the Gulf by Pakistani bankers.

CPI Financial quotes Mansoor Khan, managing director of Lahore-based law firm Khan Associates, as saying that conventional banks would probably be more affected by Pakistan’s economic turmoil than their Islamic counterparts. “The conventional banks are western, risk-averse and do not understand ‘Pakistan risk.’ Islamic banks are primarily Middle Eastern or Asian and have a better understanding of the mentality of Pakistan. They will not be put off.”

It’s also worth reading this blog on the South Asia Investor Review about Gulf Arab investors buying up farmland in Pakistan to increase food security and control inflation.

Pakistan’s economy has proved incredibly resilient in the past, surviving amongst other things, military coups, three wars with India, the division of the country into West and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in 1971, and tough economic sanctions after its 1998 nuclear tests. So are reports of its demise premature?

The picture may be clouded by the volatility of Pakistan’s stock market, hanging on every word of the bickering political parties elected in February, and feverishly debating the future of President Pervez Musharraf. But according to the last IMF report, a boom in foreign direct investment into Pakistan (more than $5 billion in 2006/07) was driven not so much by its — until recently — soaring stock market, but primarily by greenfield investment in areas like telecoms, manufacturing and financial services.

I’ll return to the downside risks in another blog, but in the meantime would be interested in hearing whether other people out there think Pakistan still makes it as a hot, or at least warm, emerging markets destination. It’s also worth wondering whether any shift in the origins of foreign investment in Pakistan — still dominated by the United States — towards more Gulf Arab funding would affect the political make-up of the country.

It would be hard to think of a more complex web of problems.  Pakistan and Afghanistan face, in very different ways, severe domestic political crises which are being exacerbated by soaring prices and food shortages. Both blame each other for failing to crack down on the Taliban and al Qaeda. And now tensions are rising over attempts by Pakistan, the traditional supplier of food to Afghanistan, to curb its wheat exports to make sure it can feed its own hungry population.

For an idea of how significant this is in Afghanistan, it’s worth reading this piece in the Chicago Tribune. “Western officials - including officers with the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force - say the food crisis is potentially more destabilizing to the U.S.-backed government of President Hamid Karzai than the insurgency itself,” it says.

The website Registan.net followed this up by saying that the food crisis will drive more people into the arms of the Taliban. “Hungry, disenfranchised people are angry people,” it says. ”… every time someone can’t afford to buy bread for his family, he’ll have one more reason to … blow up some Humvees.

The World Food Programme says that emergency food aid meant to help 2.55 million Afghans affected by soaring food prices has reached only about 38 percent of the targeted population, according to IRIN, largely due to curbs on Pakistani food exports.

“One of the main reasons why food aid has not yet reached even half the targeted communities is procurement and logistical hurdles,” IRIN reports. “Initially it was decided that wheat and other food items would be procured from markets in neighbouring countries, especially Pakistan, which traditionally supplies Afghan food markets. However, rising prices have prompted Pakistani authorities to impose a strict ban on food exports, hitting WFP’s operation in Afghanistan.” 

Yet look at it from Pakistan’s point of view. It has a shaky coalition government which will become all the more vulnerable if it doesn’t make sure its people have enough food to eat. For all its interference in Afghanistan, it has also felt the burden of supporting three million Afghan refugees. 

“The priority must be on feeding the people of Pakistan, not excluding the three million Afghan refugees who still enjoy our hospitality, Hamid Karzai and company’s ingratitude notwithstanding,” wrote Ikram Seghal in The News last month. “Find me another nation in the world having so many refugees.”

Can someone see a way out of this morass? Or are Pakistan and Afghanistan condemned to stumble from crisis to crisis until historians write, with 20/20 hindsight, that whatever happens next was inevitable?  

The future of President Pervez Musharraf grows more opaque by the day. At its simplest level, it seems that while many people think he should step down, few want to see him forced out in a way that would divide and damage the country.

In the latest stories highlighting the currents and counter-currents swirling around the former army general, Musharraf lashed out at “rumour-mongers” for suggesting he planned to quit, while President George W. Bush telephoned him to pledge his continued backing.  Meanwhile disgraced scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, known as the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, has begun speaking out against Musharraf by complaining he was unfairly made to take the rap for selling nuclear secrets.  That A.Q. Khan now feels safe to speak after four years under house arrest is seen as one of the most telling indications of the times turning against Musharraf.

Reading comments on an earlier blog about Musharraf’s future got me wondering whether one could predict his next move from his past. As an Urdu-speaking ”mohajir” whose family fled Delhi at partition, an outsider in Punjabi-dominated Pakistan, and also as a former commando, how would he respond to the pressure on him to quit?

There are simplistic responses to this question — my bet would be that the usual response of an outsider and a commando would be to fight it out, if needs be by adopting the riskiest course of action. But since that question seemed too simplistic, I decided to reread what Musharraf had said about himself in his autobiography “In the Line of Fire”.

My favourite lines were in the prologue: “I have confronted death and defied it several times in the past because destiny and fate have always smiled upon me,” he writes. “I first avoided death as a teenager in 1961, when I was hanging upside down from the branch of a mango tree and it broke. When I hit the ground, my friends thought I was dead.”

Musharraf doesn’t elaborate on the mango tree episode but he does paint a picture of a man who sees himself has having always defied the odds through luck or daring. The helicopter that crashed and which he missed because he was playing bridge. Two assassination attempts. The childhood memory of his mother’s tension when as a four-year-old boy he and his family fled by train from India to Pakistan.

This is a man who sees himself as a survivor, with fond memories of boys’ gangs in his childhood in Ankara. “Even at that age I was very good at making strategies and planning tactics to ambush and trap other gangs,” he writes — a line that carries extra resonance as he tries to outmanoeuvre opposition politicians who want to oust him.

I personally rather liked the story about how the outbreak of the 1965 war with India allowed him to escape a looming court-martial in the army for going absent without leave. He says he rescued his reputation by fighting in the war, and winning an award for gallantry for pulling shells away from a fire before they exploded.

Whatever critics have said about this autobiography, it certainly makes you think Musharraf’s next move will be far from predictable. A man who writes of his punishments in the army for ”fighting, insubordination and lack of discipline” is not one to toe the line easily. And yet again, he also writes of his fondness for Turkey which must, among other places, be a possible refuge were he to step down.

With Senator Barack Obama looking increasingly confident about winning the Democratic nomination, there have been a new spate of articles on what it would mean for Pakistan if he becomes president.

The most eye-catching, perhaps, was a story in The News  about how President Pervez Musharraf’s family in the United States have been giving donations to Obama’s campaign.  ”President Pervez Musharraf’s family members here are supporting and giving donations to a US presidential candidate who strongly opposes the Bush administration policy of supporting and keeping the retired general in the presidency,” it says.

The Daily Times, in an analysis by former Pakistani foreign secretary Najmuddin A Shaikh, says there would be little difference between Obama and the Bush administration on the need to hunt out al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan — if needs be through unilateral U.S. action – and on keeping its nuclear weapons safe. What the writer sees is a difference in tone,  which would be welcomed in Pakistan:

“What one can expect, however, is that Obama will be less averse - as the candidate for change - to recognising that extremism in the Muslim world flows from causes other than religious injunctions, no matter how this may be portrayed by so-called spokesmen for Islam or misguided scholars in the West,” he says. “He certainly will not be talking about crusades nor will he oppose direct talks with adversaries.”

But what strikes me is how this optimism about Obama may be offset by the United States in general taking a harder line against Pakistan, regardless of who wins the presidential elections.  A couple of months ago,  in a blog on Obama’s policies on Pakistan, I wrote about how he supports unilateral strikes on al Qaeda targets in the country.

Since then, the background noise in the United States about the need to attack al Qaeda and the Taliban inside Pakistan has increased —  to the point where you wonder whether any difference in style and substance Obama might bring would be drowned out by a hardening shift in public opinion towards taking a more aggressive stance.

One blog I came across, calling itself the Danger Room on Wired.com, argues that Pakistan is in fact al Qaeda’s best base for planning attacks on the United States and Europe, since unlike more unstable places like Iraq where the United States is free to use force, the group flourishes in countries where there is a reasonable amount of state control.

“Pakistan’s better infrastructure, weak counterterrorism capacity, ambivalent counterterrorism policy, and increasingly prickly sovereignty issues gives al Qaeda a more stable platform to train, shield and export personnel-everything a terrorist group needs to organize an attack against targets in the West, as a string of plots now seem to show,” it says.

There are arguments against this — the most obvious being that al Qaeda developed first of all in the chaos of Afghanistan — but it’s worth reading to see where the tide of public opinion might be headed.
 
 

This is definitely a case of “the more you know, the less you understand”. 

There has been much talk in the media about whether PPP leader Asif Ali Zardari is heading for a showdown with President Pervez Musharraf to force him out of office.

But it is not clear whether Zardari is really looking for a showdown, or instead a climbdown that would allow Musharraf to stay on with reduced powers, while also accommodating former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, whose antipathy to the former army general dates back to the 1999 coup.

For an outsiders’ view, The Australian boiled it down into a story headlined “Leaders duel in battle for Pakistan. 

“Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, enraged over a tirade against him by Asif Ali Zardari, last night cut off longstanding secret contacts with the dominant Pakistan People’s Party as speculation mounted he would launch a counter-strike to shore up his hold on power,” it wrote.

But there is also an interesting insiders’ view from Ikram Sehgal, a defence analyst close to the Pakistan army, who says that Musharraf might replace army head General Ashfaq Kayani with another man to counter any attack by his political opponents. 

“Offence being the best defence, there are signs that the Empire is now preparing to strike back. The perception of continuing absolute authority in the public mind is quite a virtuoso performance by Musharraf, given that this avid bridge player’s only remaining power base is the ISI controlled by talented cousin Lt Gen Nadim Taj,” he writes. 

“The distancing of the Army from politics is a myth as long as uniformed officers in the ISI manipulate political power. For the populace the Army and ISI are synonymous, the perception of their meddling in Pakistani politics is very much alive and well, and will probably remain so. All principal political federal and administrative appointments are presently subject to “clearance” by Nadim Taj.  So let’s not fool ourselves!

 ”"Unsubstantiated rumours are afloat that Musharraf will replace Kayani with Nadim Taj as COAS of the Pakistan Army, sooner rather than later–i.e., before the constitutional amendment to be tabled by the PPP takes away his powers to appoint the Service Chiefs. Even when trial balloons do not fly, the desperate will gamble, throwing caution and calculated risks to the wind. ”

All I might add is that officers in the Pakistan army are rather good at playing bridge (just like the officers in the Indian army).  So what will Musharraf go for? Will he declare No Trumps and try to win with a three of clubs? Or is he still holding the Ace of Hearts?
 

“War does not determine who is right — only who is left.” (Or so said the British philosopher and anti-war activist Bertrand Russell.) So who is going to be left standing once U.S. and NATO forces have finished battling it out with the Taliban and al Qaeda in Afghanistan?

Republican presidential candidate John McCain came out with some interesting comments in a speech in Ohio last week on where he sees Afghanistan at the end of his first term in office in 2013, if he were to be elected president:

“The threat from a resurgent Taliban in Afghanistan has been greatly reduced but not eliminated. U.S. and NATO forces remain there to help finish the job, and continue operations against the remnants of al Qaeda. The Government of Pakistan has cooperated with the U.S. in successfully adapting the counterinsurgency tactics that worked so well in Iraq and Afghanistan to its lawless tribal areas where al Qaeda fighters are based. The increase in actionable intelligence that the counterinsurgency produced led to the capture or death of Osama bin Laden, and his chief lieutenants. There is no longer any place in the world al Qaeda can consider a safe haven.”

Optimistic or realistic?

Digging around on the internet, you can find a different view. Back in April Syed Saleem Shahzad, the Pakistan Bureau Chief of Asia Times Online, wrote that the Taliban were taking their inspiration from the Vietminh who chased the French out of what was known as Indochina in the 1950s.  He wrote that they were inspired by the Vietnamese commander General Vo Nguyen Giap, who successfully employed guerrilla tactics against the French before crushing them in the battle of Dien Bien Phu  in 1954.

Taking up the theme, the website openDemocracy  followed up by saying that the west tends to assume that it alone is watching the lessons of Vietnam. ”It is as if “only” the United States (and by extension western forces or combatants in general) have the capacity or the interest to draw lessons from the past,” it said. It called the reference to the Taliban looking for  inspiration in Vietnam ”startling and ominous”.

“In the early 1950s, the Vietminh - faced with an imbalance between their own forces and conventional French military power - concentrated on attacking isolated garrisons in the northern part of Vietnam well away from the main colonial centres of control…  This strategy, combined with attacks on French supply-lines, gradually wore down the French military and political leadership’s resolve. Now, it seems, the Taliban aim to do the same against an equivalently “asymmetrical” enemy: Nato, and the International Security Assistance Force forces in Afghanistan.”

So do we go with McCain, who has his own experience of Vietnam? Or the historical parallels with France, which like the United States today in Afghanistan and Iraq, was struggling to cope with guerrilla warfare, did not know how to win over the hearts and minds of the local population, and faced economic crisis at home and a general public which was tired of war in faraway places?

I thought it would be interesting to ask one of the retired Reuters correspondents who had covered Vietnam whether it was legitimate to compare it to Afghanistan and got the following reply from Bernard Edinger, a French reporter who was sent in from Paris before the fall of Saigon in 1975 and also covered Kabul when the Russians first went in with ground troops in 1979:

“Yes, America’s opponents all dream of seeing the US helicopter its people out of Kabul the same humiliating way they flew out of Saigon. I stood on a rooftop opposite the embassy and watched the last choppers go as thousands of local Vietnamese clamouring to be evacuated were abandoned. As you know, the Communists did not win the war, the Americans lost it - at home. The press and much of the public had turned against the war to the point that the politicians just no longer thought it was worth fighting,” he wrote.

“Obviously domestic opposition to US involvement in Afghanistan is far less than that over Vietnam because the horror of the Taliban regime is already known and the Western public has seen the execution by rifle fire of kneeling women in midfield at half-time at Kabul soccer matches , the condemned men hanging from the goalposts etc … Also, opposition to Vietnam was led by students who had the threat of army service before them if the war lasted whereas the US only commits pro soldiers to the war today.”

“An outright Taliban victory over the US is out of the question … But in asymmetric warfare, ‘the strong lose if they don’t win and the weak win if they survive.’ I’m quoting others. The Pathans outlasted Kipling’s British Indian army (and even slit the throat of the British ambassador in his residence) and the Soviet Army. All they have to do is hang in there.”
  

 Any other views out there?