Pakistan: Now or Never?

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.”

For a fistful of dollars, America and Pakistan wrangle

Pakistan’s relationship with the United States can’t get more transactional than the prolonged negotiations over restoration of the Pakistani supply route for NATO troops in Afghanistan.

Pakistan, according to leaked accounts of so-called private negotiations, is demanding $5000 as transit fee for allowing trucks to use the two most obvious routes into landlocked Afghanistan, blocked since November when two dozen Pakistani soldiers were killed in an U.S. air strike from Afghanistan. The United States which apparently paid about $250 for each vehicle carrying everything from fuel to bottled water all these years is ready to double that, but nowhere near the price Pakistan is demanding for its support of the war. It also wants an apology for the deaths of the soldiers but America has stopped short of that, offering regret instead.

The two countries will likely reach a compromise, probably sooner than later. But the whole image of so-called allied nations involved in grubby negotiations about trucking fees while there is a disastrous war going on – and leaking details of those talks – tells you how destructive the relationship has become. You would think Pakistan and the United States would try and figure how to prevent incidents such as the air strike near the Afghan-Pakistan that led to the closure of the supply route in the first place. Imagine another strike of that kind and the impact it would have on an already inflamed nation, weak as it may be. Instead negotiations went down to the wire ahead of the NATO summit in Chicago over how many more dollars Pakistan can make as a conduit for a war that has turned it into a battlefield itself.

And America, playing just as hardball, is refusing to give any quarter even though it is paying quite a high price to transport the supplies by a combination of air and land through a northern route into Afghanistan, bypassing Pakistan. In any case, higher trucking fees in the closing stages of the war, can only be a drop in the vast amount America spends on its military – more than the next four countries put together.

Like a marriage gone sour, it seems to draw the worst in each country. Pakistan got a last minute invite to the NATO summit in Chicago, even though it has been a key player in its war in Afghanistan but its presence seemed to only highlight its isolation. President Barack Obama wouldn’t hold talks with President Asif Ali Zardari, who arguably is just as important to his path out of Afghanistan as Afghan President Hamid Karzai whom he met. Worse, Obama thanked all the countries that had helped NATO in its war in Afghanistan including the Central Asian nations through which supplies are being routed at the moment, but not Pakistan through which the bulk of supplies were transported all these years, save for the current six-month halt.

For a proud nation of 180 million people, the image of its president bounding across the hall to shake hands with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton while Karzai, the head of a nation long considered a poor cousin, confers with Obama, must rankle further. Some people back home may argue, in retrospect, that Pakistan might have been better off staying away from the meeting. The worry is Zardari, still the consummate survivor, may have given the hardliners another weapon as he heads back from Chicago with little to show for.

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.

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.)

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.

India, Pakistan detente: don’t trust, verify every step

It’s clear for some time now that India and Pakistan are on the cusp of the kind of open  trade relationship they had until the 1965 war when all business links were snapped, border trading posts shut and overland Indian access to Afghanistan blocked. It was never to be the same again, despite fitful progress over the years.

On Saturday, the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who has invested a great deal of personal credibility in a rapprochement with Pakistan, inaugurates a  $4 billion refinery in the northern state of Punjab , not far from the border with Pakistan. While   the bulk of the refinery, which is a joint venture between billionaire Lakshmi Mittal and an Indian state oil company will feed the hungry energy markets of India’s booming northern triangle, it stands to reason that some of the fuel sales will flow westwards, to Pakistan. The distance from Bhatinda where the 9 million tonne refinery is located to Pakistan’s heartland city of Lahore is about 100 miles.  If you don’t sell it to the market next door where else would you begin from ?  Pakistan’s refining capacity is half the domestic demand and last year it opened up diesel imports from India, although petrol and other petroleum products are still on a rapidly dwindling negative list.

If they begin piping fuel from the plant in Bhatinda to the Pakistani part of Punjab, and down the coast in Gujarat, if Reliance Industries’ huge refining complex in Jamnagar ships products to Karachi, you can imagine the game-changing effects of such interlocking economic stakes. Next up will be the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India gas pipeline which has been hobbled not just by security fears in Afghanistan, but the deep distrust between India and Pakistan, the two big markets at the far end of the pipe.   If Pakistan can buy refined fuel products from India, then perhaps New Delhi will have less fears about being held to ransom by Pakistani shutting off its natural gas supplies traversing through Pakistan soil.

Are the two over the hump then, ready to bury 65 years of hostility ? Not quite, going by an opposing series of actions.  India fired off its longest range missile this month which scientists said gives it the capability to launch inter-continental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and within days Pakistan tested its own long range nuclear capable missile. While India can argue that the 5,000 km range Agni V was  aimed at closing the deterrence gap with China, Pakistan’s Shaheen missile which defence experts say  is capable of hitting targets 2,500 km away brings virtually all of India in its range.  You could ask why does Pakistan need long range missiles when it can target Delhi which is barely 700 kms from Islamabad. Presumably the idea is to negate India’s strategic depth that Pakistan does not have. Then there is a steady Indian conventional arms buildup in line with its growing economy, and again, to find some level of parity with China. But some of that armour  including  state-of-the-art Rafale fighter planes, an aircraft carrier and nuclear-powered submarines could just as well be deployed on the west.

There is similarly little forward movement on the hot-button territorial disputes that have kept the two countries apart .  Last month’s tragic accident in Siachen in northern Kashmir where 138 Pakistani soldiers and civilians were buried   in rock and ice brought the focus back on a remote high altitude battlefield that many believe is best left untouched, given its questionable strategic value.  Pakistani army chief General Ashfaq Kayani, responding to calls from anguished countrymen, said the civilian and military leaders of the two countries should hold talks to resolve the brutal standoff in the icy mountains.  But the general’s call has met with a measured response from New Delhi which wants the positions of the two armies to be authenticated before considering a withdrawal from the remote area. This along with the row over Sir Creek off the Arabian Sea was considered a low-hanging fruit which the two sides could pluck before tackling the dispute over Kashmir, really at the core of the decades of hostility.

But distrust has only deepened over the years, and as Vikram Sood former head of India’s external intelligence agency wrote recently, Pakistan’s refusal to accept the actual positions of the troops – in which India holds the advantage – only sows suspicion in the Indian mind that should there be a withdrawal from the Saltoro heights, Pakistan would “want to alter the position at first dawn.” It would be another folly on the lines of returning 90,000 prisoners and territory sezied from Pakistan after the 1971 war without permanently resolving disputes with the country, he says.

from India Insight:

Did pro-India militias kill Western tourists in Kashmir?

A government human rights commission in Kashmir on Tuesday evening said it will review records from the 1995 abduction of Western tourists after a new book claimed that four of six foreign tourists were murdered by a pro-India militia to discredit India’s arch-rival Pakistan.

On July 4, 1995, Americans Donald Hutchings and John Childs, as well as Britons Paul Wells and Keith Mangan were kidnapped by the little known Al-Faran militant group while trekking in the Himalayas near Pahalgam, 97 km (60 miles) southeast of Srinagar.

Four days later, Childs escaped. On the same day, the captors abducted German Dirk Hasert and Norwegian Hans Christian Ostroe. Ostroe was found beheaded in August 1995. The others were never found.

Journalists Adrian Levy and Catherine Scott-Clark, whose book "The Meadow: Kashmir 1995 - Where the Terror Began" is about the abduction, claim that the four Westerners were murdered by a pro-government militia group who worked for Indian security forces.

After Ostroe was beheaded, Al-Faran was ready to strike a monetary deal to free the hostages and might have released them for £250,000, the authors claim. They say the deal was deliberately sabotaged.

"It appeared that there were some in the Indian establishment who did not want this never-ending bad news story of Pakistani cruelty and Kashmiri inhumanity to end, even when the perpetrators themselves were finished," the book says.

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.

The large cracks in fortress Kabul

Arrive in Kabul and you know you are in a war zone, despite the heaving traffic on its crumbling roads. Whole streets are blocked off by concertina wire and sandbags, while a  zig-zag series of  blast walls are designed to stop or at least slow down the suicide bomber.  Indeed, the walls seem to get higher and more neighbourhoods disappear behind this concrete curtain each time you go back. And yet insurgents have repeatedly breached the layer-upon-layer of security, as  happened in September when the vast U.S. embassy compound came under attack, and now on Sunday when the upscale Wazir Akbar Khan diplomatic district was again targeted along with parliament.

The one feature common to the multiple attacks on Sunday and the daring September operation was that the attackers sneaked into half-finished or empty buildings, took positions half-way up the building and were able to hold off an armada of helicopters and Special Operations forces for up to 20 hours.   Kabul has been in the  midst of a construction boom that has slowed only recently as the Western pullout looms in 2014. The result is that you have a number of these high rise buildings in the centre of town which offer vantage views of the city – especially the sealed-off parts where the diplomatic and political elite live in virtual bunkers,  and which an ordinary Afghan can hardly ever see, much less gain access to.  From the reports so far, the attackers didn’t have to do much to get into these lightly guarded blocks, many of them just empty shells.  Once in, it was easy to hide behind a concrete pillar on a sixth-floor landing and fire rocket propelled grenades at the western installations below while holding off  the choppers.  The question is why are these buildings left unguarded even after the U.S. embassy was attacked from another one in the vicinity last September. What about the measures that were set in place to monitor such high-rises?

While the jury is still out on the implications of Sunday’s attacks (for some excellent analysis read this blogpost or this piece by the Afghanistan Analysts Network) there is a sloppiness to security which gives pause for thought.

You get the same gnawing worry at Kabul airport, supposed to be one of the most secure places in Afghanistan. You go through multiple checks, get out of your car several times to be patted down, take an airport bus to the terminal building, or walk carrying your bags through eerily empty grounds ringed by Afghan army and police. At one airport checkpoint during a visit last month, a soldier checking my pockets asked for “baksheesh”. I was surprised but pretended not to understand. He said it again and I continued to feign lack of understanding, sliding away as his face fell.  But if the man could be bought off with baksheesh, what would have stopped me from smuggling through a knife or even a pistol?

You know money is changing hands if you watch carefully when a car stops at one of the checkpoints at the airport and the guard refuses to let it go through. An argument ensues and the driver steps out; they keep talking until the man embraces the guard in the Afghan form of greeting and neatly hands over a $10 bill so quickly that you scarcely notice.  They keep talking loudly, the driver returns to the car and the gates are opened.

In short, the Afghan administration which is responsible for security in the capital has set up what was proudly called a Ring of Steel but which has obvious chinks in its armour which an adversary can easily exploit. For each corrupt security guard, there are at least five others who cannot be bought and that is perhaps why complex attacks like Sunday’s do not happen more often.  And as was immediately clear on Sunday, Afghan forces fought back bravely and by all accounts , in a professional manner. Some amount of backup came from NATO,  including strafing runs by helicopters on the  buildings, despite an initial attempt to spin the whole operation as entirely Afghan. But  overall the Afghan forces acquitted themselves well.

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.