One of the things U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ran into last week during her trip to Pakistan was anger over attacks by unmanned “drone” aircraft inside Pakistan and along the border with Afghanistan.

 One questioner during an interaction with members of the public said the missile strikes by Predator aircraft amounted to “executions without trial” for those killed.  Another asked Clinton to define terrorism and whether she considered the drone attacks to be an act of terrorim like the car bomb that ripped through Peshawar that same week killing more than 100 people.

The people of Pakistan aren’t the only ones asking that question.  A top UN rights expert has swung the attention back on the drone programme, saying that the United States may be violating international law with the missile strikes.

Philip Aston, the Special Rapporteur on extradjudicial, summary or arbitary executions, said there could be circumstances under which the use of such techniques could be justified in international law, but Washington would have to show it followed appropriate precautions and accountability mechanisms.

The United States will have to be more upfront about its Predator war. “Otherwise you have the really problematic bottom line, which is that the Central Intelligence Agency is running a programme that is killing a significant number of people, and there is absolutely no accountability in terms of the relevant international law.”

There is little doubt now that targeted killing is official U.S. policy,  Jane Meyer argues in a detailed piece for the New Yorker.  What is worrying is that the embrace of the Predator programme has occurred with remarkably little public discussion, given that it represents a radically new and geographically unbounded use of state-sanctioned lethal force. “And because of the CIA program’s secrecy, there is no visible system of accountability in place, despite the fact that the agency has killed many civilians inside a politically fragile nuclear-armed country with which the U.S. is not at war,” Meyer writes. (more…)

Back in the spring, when the Pakistani Taliban still controlled the Swat valley, video footage of a girl being flogged became one of the most powerful images of their rule. The footage, shot on a mobile phone and circulated on YouTube, turned public opinion against the Taliban and helped lay the groundwork for a military offensive there.

In the latest spate of bombings sweeping Pakistan, women have again become targets.  First came the twin suicide bombing on the International Islamic University in Islamabad which included an attack on the women’s canteen.  Then last week, more than 100 people were killed in the car bombing of a bazaar in Peshawar which was frequented largely by women.

“It was the deadliest bombing in Pakistan in two years and its target was clear: not the police, not the security forces, not political leaders, but Peshawar’s women,” wrote Rafia Zakaria in the Daily Times. ”The site of the blast, Peshawar’s Meena Bazar, as is well known in the area, is an exclusively women’s shopping area where women and children shop for clothing, household wares and similar goods. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority of those killed were women and children.”

“While the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan have denied involvement in the bombing, investigations, the modus operandi of the attack and most importantly the target of the bombing all point to their culpability. Most significant of these factors is that the attack targeted women. It is after all females who have borne the brunt of the TTP’s onslaught since they began their reign of terror in the northwest of Pakistan. As the Taliban’s war against the Pakistani state has ensued, the marginalisation of women, the destruction of schools constructed for their education and their banishment from public spaces like the Meena Bazar have been a central facet of the Taliban’s campaign of terror and hatred. This latest attack thus fits perfectly into this grimly familiar design. The massive and indiscriminate killing of scores of innocent women and children who had dared to leave the walls of their home inculcates the very fear that the Taliban seek to instil among Pakistani women across the country.”

There are many overlapping reasons for women being killed, of which forcing them to stay at home is only one.  Misogyny, in any culture, has always been the preserve of the weak who cannot show their power in any other way. So what seems to be happening here is actually about power. By attacking women and children, along with the teenage girls in Islamabad University, the militants can prove they will stop at nothing in order to drive fear into the civilian population.

My question is how this should be addressed.

In Afghanistan, the west has begun to “load-shed” the rights of women on the grounds that the environment is already complicated enough.

But what if we turn this around and say that the only way to respond to the current wave of violence sweeping Afghanistan and Pakistan is by looking at the 50 percent of the population who are women?

 Please post whatever links you can, and I’ll collect and make sense of them.

(Photos: funeral of a girl killed in Islamabad; after the bombing in Peshawar)

When Northern Ireland’s Omagh bomb exploded, killing 29 people, I was in England, by cruel coincidence attending the wedding of a young man who had been badly injured in another attack in the town of Enniskillen more than a decade earlier.

I had just switched my phone on after leaving the church on a glorious, sunny Saturday afternoon when my news editor called. “There’s been a bomb. It sounds bad. We’re trying to get you on a flight.”

Memories of Omagh returned this week when a massive car bomb ripped through a market in the Pakistani city of Peshawar, killing more than 100 people, many of them women and children.

Will the Taliban’s bloody assault on Pakistan’s cities deprive them of popular support and ultimately lead to their defeat?

The BBC’s Urdu service had reported earlier this month that sympathy for the Taliban in Peshawar — where many are deeply hostile to the United States – was waning due to the violence being unleashed on the border city since the Army began its assault on the militants’ South Waziristan stronghold.

Was this a sign the Islamists were overreaching themselves on their war against the Pakistani state, much as they had done in Swat?

Against that, as others have pointed out on this blog, a coherent leadership that might unite a stricken country against its attackers has yet to emerge.

In the immediate aftermath of Omagh there was a widespread fear that the Northern Ireland’s fledgling peace process would unravel in a familiar grim spiral of reprisal and counter-reprisal.

In fact, the opposite happened. Such was the revulsion at Omagh that the “Real IRA”, the breakaway faction behind the attack, was finished as a serious threat.

It can be dangerous and misleading to look for parallels between very different conflicts on opposite sides of the world. But tipping points in seemingly intractable conflicts do happen. The problem is, they are impossible to predict and often only apparent long after the event.

(Reuters photos: Peshawar; Omagh)

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has held out an olive branch to Pakistan by renewing an offer to talk, while also calling on it to take action against militants operating from its territory.  India’s Press and Information Bureau has the excerpts of a speech delivered in Kashmir. in which Singh held out “a hand of friendship” to Pakistan. It’s worth reading in detail because it was clearly carefully prepared, endorsed politically by Congress president Sonia Gandhi who accompanied the prime minister, and according to The Hindu newspaper. an attempt to advance the peace process with Pakistan. 

India and Pakistan, he said, had made progress in peace talks started in 2004, and had been able to open up trade and travel across the Line of Control (LoC), the ceasefire line dividing Kashmir. “These are not small achievements given the history of our troubled relationship with Pakistan.”

“However, all the progress that we achieved has been repeatedly thwarted by acts of terrorism. The terrorists want permanent enmity to prevail between the two countries. The terrorists have misused the name of a peaceful and benevolent religion. Their philosophy of hate has no place here. It is totally contrary to our centuries old tradition of tolerance and harmony among faiths.

“I strongly believe that the majority of people in Pakistan seek good neighbourly and cooperative relations between India and Pakistan. They seek a permanent peace. This is our view as well.

“The cross-LoC initiatives have been well received on both sides of the border. But I am also aware that they are not as people friendly as they could be. Trade facilities at the border are inadequate. There are no banking channels. Customs facilities need to be strengthened. There are no trade fairs. The lists of tradable commodities need to be increased. Clearances for travel take time. Prisoners of India and Pakistan are languishing in each other’s jails even after completing their sentences.

“The fact is that these are humanitarian issues whose resolution requires the cooperation of Pakistan. We are ready to discuss these and other issues with the Government of Pakistan. I hope that as a result things will be made easier for our traders, divided families, prisoners and travelers. For a productive dialogue it is essential that terrorism must be brought under control.

“We will press the Government of Pakistan to curb the activities of those elements that are engaging in terrorism in India. If they are non-state actors, it is the solemn duty of the government of Pakistan to bring them to book, to destroy their camps and to eliminate their infrastructure. The perpetrators of the acts of terror must pay the heaviest penalty for their barbaric crimes against humanity.”

India broke off peace talks after last year’s attack on Mumbai and has been reluctant to resume a formal peace process until Pakistan takes more action against the Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group accused of involvement in the assault. But with Pakistan pursuing a military offensive against Pakistani Taliban militants in South Waziristan, and facing a wave of reprisal attacks across the country, action against the Lashkar-e-Taiba has been seen as dropping down the priority list, all the more so given that it is one of the few militant groups in the country not yet believed to have targeted the Pakistani state.

That has left both countries deadlocked at a time when the region is desperately in need of stability to stem an increase in violence and help ease tensions over rivalry between India and Pakistan in Afghanistan.

The Hindu said in an editorial that the speech in Kashmir might offer a way forward. ”What the Prime Minister has essentially done is to separate out the strands of the dialogue process as it existed prior to its suspension following the Mumbai terrorist attacks of November 2008 and raised the possibility of forward movement on the ‘humanitarian’ strands even as substantive political engagement, or ‘productive dialogue’, must await the action that India has asked Pakistan to take against the camps and infrastructure of terrorist groups and other hostile non-state actors on its territory.”

If Pakistan acted against these groups, it said, then both countries could resume a peace process on Kashmir. ”And in the interim, as a demonstration of the two countries’ stated commitment to the welfare of the people of Jammu and Kashmir, discussions on making existing cross-LoC initiatives more ‘people friendly’ can begin more or less immediately.”

Can the prime minister’s gesture make a difference?

Pakistan welcomed the offer of talks, but a foreign ministry spokesman reiterated Pakistan’s position that the correct forum was the formal peace process or composite dialogue. India has so far refused to resume the composite dialogue.

And political separatists in Kashmir in the Hurriyat Conference are unlikely to want to open bilateral talks with the Indian government if there is no progress in improving relations between India and Pakistan.

While there is little sympathy for either India or Pakistan in the Kashmir Valley after two decades of separatist revolt, few believe that a solution to the long-running Kashmir dispute can be found with one country without the support of the other. And while that would not necessarily mean India and Pakistan sitting at the same table with representatives from Kashmir, there would still need to be some form of three-way dialogue to make progress.

The Pakistan government also has its hands full already without trying to work out how to respond to any Indian overture that might eventually require politically unpopular concessions at home.

That said, both countries have been trying to improve the mood ahead of an expected meeting between the Indian and Pakistani prime ministers on the sidelines of a Commonwealth summit in Trinidad in November.

Singh’s hand of friendship could help pave the way for a more productive meeting.

Pakistan’s militants have unleashed a guerrilla war in cities across the country in retaliation for a military offensive against them in their South Waziristan stronghold. But while they have seized all the attention with their massive bomb and gun attacks, what about the offensive itself  in their mountain redoubt ?

Nearly two weeks into Operation Rah-e-Nijat, or Path of Salvation,  it is hard to make a firm assessment of which way the war is going, given that information is hard to come by and this may yet be still the opening stages of a long and difficult campaign.

Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan whose uncharacteristically low profile over the past few weeks has spawned speculation, said at the weekend that it was too early to make a call on the operation. and that he had asked his intelligence officers and they had no definitive information. Pakistan’s Dawn quotes him as telling reporters in Washington “‘it’ll take a while before we know whether the enemy they’re fighting has been dispersed or destroyed or some mixture of the two.”

Looked at in another way and judging purely by what has not happened so far, this hasn’t shaped up into the mother-of-all battles that many had predicted it to be. No major ambushes or a tribal uprising has happened as the Pakistani army inches deeper into the Taliban mini-state,  taking the village of Kotkai, the home of Pakistani Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud.

As the BBC and the military-focused Strategy Page blog note, the Pakistani army appears to be moving slowly and deliberately.  “This is a campaign of small battles. The soldiers are advancing from three directions, often along a single road,”  the Strategy Page  says.

“The army is advancing slowly, to insure that the troops win all these little battles. It’s important for troop morale that the tribesmen do not pull off many of their traditional ambushes and surprise attacks that have, for centuries, killed and demoralized invaders. This has largely been successful, with one soldier dying for every ten or so Islamic radical fighters killed.”

Some people think the Mehsud fighters are doing  a tactical retreat to draw the Pakistani military deeper into South Waziristan, an arid land of mountains, dried-up creeks, sparse forests and rocky plains. Local administration officials have told the BBC that the Mehsud fighters are not fighting by holding ground against the military. Instead they are ceding territory to the security forces and then counter-attacking when the military starts to secure the area.

The Pakistani offensive holds lesson for U.S.-led forces in Afghanistan, according to a presentation by Frederick Kagan and colleagues Reza Jan and Charlie Szrom at the American Enterprise Institute. The preparatory work that went into the fighting, especially the deals struck with surrounding tribal groups offers a paradigm for the coalition forces in Afghanistan, the Washington Post reports Kagan and his associates as saying in their 37-page analysis. Efforts were aimed at either getting support for the move against the traditional Mehsud area, where the Pakistani Taliban  was strongest, or having groups agree to refrain from joining the fight on the Taliban side.

Pakistan, in turn, is also being helped by the United States, discreetly, as it supplies the military with drone images of the battlefield. The  intelligence and surveillance video from armed Predator aircraft to the Pakistani army marks the deepest American involvement yet in a Pakistani military campaign. (L.A. Times)

The United States, which has long pushed Pakistan to take on the militants has rushed hundreds of millions of dollars in arms, equipment and sophisticated sensors to Pakistani forces in recent months. (NYT) . Pentagon officials have rushed spare parts for helicopter gunships,night vision goggles and body armour to the fight.  The one thing Pakistan has insisted on is that the assistance remain discreet.  There should be “no American face” on their war, officials say.

Many Pakistanis and their leaders may hate the Taliban, but few dare speak openly against them for fear of reprisals from the hardline Islamist group.

The militants have carried out four attacks and killed at least a dozen people since the army launched an assault on their South Waziristan stronghold, while more than 150 people were killed in a deadly spree preceding the offensive - including a brazen raid on army headquarters in Rawalpindi.

Yet despite the attacks, few Pakistanis are prepared to come forward and bear witness against the militants.

While Naveed Haider was not afraid to give his version of events after witnessing the drive-by shooting of an army brigadier in the capital, he said he understood why others were more relectuant.

“They are scared,” he said pointing to a dozen people standing around him. “The shooting took place in front of all these people, but no one will speak because they are fightened.”

“What can we do?” a man in the crowd responded. “We are poor people. How can we speak?”

The apparent fear is not confined to ordinary people and seems even to have struck the country’s leaders — many who don’t move without a heavy bodyguard.

Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani invited political leaders for a briefing with the army chief before the South Waziristan offensive,  but former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, the main opposition leader, and Maulana Fazl-ur-Rehman, an Islamist ally of the government, declined to attend.

“Nawaz falls ill, Maulana flies off, both avoid Taliban fury,” The News said.

Though Sharif was represented by his brother Shahbaz, chief minister of central Punjab province, the newspaper quoted unidentified “knowledegable sources” as saying that Sharif opted out because he didn’t want to be viewed as supporting the offensive “at a time when the Taliban had already started vengeful strikes in different parts of the country”.

Underlining security concerns, Shahbaz is seeking the postponement of a Punjab by-election due early next month on the grounds that the family faced threats from the militants.

Rehman, head of Jamiat-e-ulema-e-Islam, the country’s largest Islamic political party which draws much of its support from the northwest where most of the militants operate, also missed the government’s briefing on the offensive, the newspaper said. He has received threats from the militants in the past.

Some analysts say Sharif’s ambivalence might be linked to his political rivalry with President Asif Ali Zardari who has seen his popularity plunge, but local media urged a stance against extremism.

“At this time of great danger, we must also ask: what else will shake leaders such as Nawaz Sharif, who are still on the fence, to take a firm stand against militants and support the effort to subdue them?” Dawn asked in an editorial entitled “The evil in our midst”.

Karachi resident Quratulain Shafi, in a letter published in the Daily Times, called on politicians to bury their differences in the face of mounting problems faced by the country. “Stick to your word,” he said.

“We need both major political parties … to work together and with an eye on Pakistan’s interests, rather than their own, if the country is to succeed in defeating the current challenges.”

(Photos: Police in Lahore, and former prime minister Nawaz Sharif)

A spate of gun and bomb attacks seen as a response to the Pakistan Army’s offensive in South Waziristan has sent jitters across Pakistan, including in the normally peaceful capital Islamabad. 

Conventional wisdom would have it that the attacks on both security services and civilians would eventually turn the people against Islamist militants rather as happened in Iraq at the height of the violence there. But as yet, there is no sign of a clear and coherent leadership emerging that might be able to forge a consensus against the militants.

“Where are you, our leaders?” asks Cyril Almeida in a column in Dawn newspaper. “As the country burns, parents agonise over whether to send their children to school or not, offices of businesses local and foreign ramp up their security measures, the average citizen thinks twice before venturing into crowded locales or government buildings, a simple question for our leaders: where are you? Where are you, President Zardari? Where are you, Prime Minister Gilani? Where are you, Nawaz Sharif?”

“The limitations of our political class are well known,” he writes. “Our politicians are venal, corrupt and weak. We have to muddle through with them because they are all we have. Expecting statesmanship is futile. But as the country burns and the people cower in fear, we must ask: for the love of God and all things that can be good, can they not for once, if only for a little while, stand up and be counted?”

In a country given to conspiracy theories, the attacks are feeding a rumour mill in which everyone talks about who will be targeted next, writes Fatima Bhutto, the estranged niece of the late Benazir Bhutto.

“There are stories being whispered in Pakistan these days, and their veracity is hard to gauge,” she writes. “No one knows what is real anymore in this country that seems hell-bent on self-destruction. In fact, our chief industry now seems to be the manufacture of fear, and everyone’s on the assembly line. The combination of ever-present violence and lack of reliable information has made us a country of debilitating Chinese whispers.” 

And unlike Iraq, where al Qaeda was largely seen as an outside force, those behind the spate of attacks are from within Pakistan, often from its heartland Punjab province. They spent decades being told, with official sanction, that they were fighting a noble cause, first against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during its 1979-1989 occupation and then against India in Kashmir, only to see the state turn against them.

In Iraq too, the United States skilfully used the power of American money to buy off local Sunni leaders to fight against al Qaeda. In Pakistan the power of American money is working against it, thanks to an uproar over U.S. plans to triple aid to the country, which are seen as carrying conditions which impinge on its sovereignty. 

No matter how much U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke might insist that there are no conditions attached to the American aid, and that U.S. intentions have been misrepresented, the perception lingers that the United States is using its money to threaten, rather than help, Pakistan. And that is a perception that can be exploited by militant groups keen to convince their followers that they alone will stand up to the United States.

The jihadica website says that the row over the Kerry-Lugar Bill, along with persistent rumours - denied by the government - of U.S. security company Blackwater expanding its operations in Pakistan - are recurring themes in Urdu-language jihadi literature.

“Militant scribes are chipping in on the hot topics of mainstream Pakistani media, dangerously aligning their grievances with those of the public - specifically, the latter’s anti-U.S. sentiments,” it says. ”While opinion may be torn on the use of military operations in Pakistan, Pakistanis from all walks of life appear united in perceiving the U.S. as an enemy.”

“So, what is to be done?” asks Pakistan’s News International.  ”We cannot obviously sit back and let our country be destroyed. Far more radical and more far-reaching steps are needed if the problem is to be overcome. The public needs to be involved to a larger extent in the effort against terrorism. This after all is a battle that has an impact on the life of every citizen – man, woman or child. The suicide bombers who strike so frequently have parents, siblings and other relatives somewhere. These people must play a part in stopping them. So too must their neighbours and others aware of the places where they are being trained and prepared for their missions.”

But in a country divided upon itself, who will lead that drive forwards?

(Reuters photos: the grave of a 19-year-old girl killed in an attack on Islamabad University; a child at the grave of Benazir Bhutto)

The Jihadica website has just posted an item about an apparent rift between al Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban in the so-called Quetta shura led by Mullah Omar.

“Mullah Omar’s Afghan Taliban and al-Qa’ida’s senior leaders have been issuing some very mixed messages of late, and the online jihadi community is in an uproar, with some calling these developments ‘the beginning of the end of relations’ between the two movements,” it says.

“Beginning with a statement from Mullah Omar in September, the Afghan Taliban’s Quetta-based leadership has been emphasizing the ‘nationalist’ character of their movement, and has sent several communications to Afghanistan’s neighbors expressing an intent to establish positive international relations.  In what are increasingly being viewed by the forums as direct rejoinders to these sentiments, recent messages from al-Qa’ida have pointedly rejected the ‘national’ model of revolutionary Islamism and reiterated calls for jihad against Afghanistan’s neighbors, especially Pakistan and China.”

Reports of rifts between different militant groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan have surfaced before, particularly between Mullah Omar’s Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani Taliban, the Tehrik-e-Taliban (TTP), over the latter’s insistence on targetting Pakistan. Mullah Omar, according to media reports earlier this year, wanted the TTP - which is believed to be close to al Qaeda - to focus instead on fighting western troops in Afghanistan.

Such reports of rifts are impossible to verify and may be deliberately designed to confuse - the talk of a break between Mullah Omar and al Qaeda comes as the United States has talked of stepping up pressure on the ”Quetta shura”, named after the capital of Pakistan’s Baluchistan province, where Washington says the Afghan Taliban are based. Islamabad says Mullah Omar is not in Pakistan.

But history would suggest that the Islamist militants do not always form a cohesive whole or even follow a common ideology. After the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989, the mujahideen who had driven them out became fragmented, leading to a bloody civil war.  In Kashmir too, where a separatist revolt began in 1989, different militant groups rivalled and sometimes fought each other.

The general picture is of many different Islamist militant groups which often make common cause, and sometimes co-operate opportunistically when this suits their many different objectives. 

According to U.S. commander General Stanley McChrystal the three main insurgent groups in Afghanistan co-ordinate their efforts but have different command structures and work under separate strategic plans. These are the Quetta shura Taliban, the Haqqani network and the Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin.

Within Pakistan, security forces appear to be fighting against a coalition of militant groups which include the Tehrik-e-Taliban (TTP), based in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, and the sectarian anti-Shi’ite Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), both of which have been suspected of involvement in gun and bomb attacks in Punjab province in recent weeks. The banned LeJ was originally based in Punjab, but has been operating increasingly out of the tribal areas.

The Pakistan Army has launched an offensive in South Waziristan, stronghold of the TTP. It says around 1,000 foreign fighters, mainly Uzbeks, are also holed up there.

Punjab is also the base for the Lashkar-e-Taiba, which was blamed for last year’s attack on Mumbai. Lashkar differs from many other militant groups in that it is not believed to have launched attacks within Pakistan itself, focusing instead on Kashmir and India. Nor does it share the Deobandi religious ideology of many of Pakistan’s militant groups and of the Afghan Taliban, instead following a tradition more akin to al Qaeda’s Salafist views.

Jaish-e-Mohammed, another Punjab-based group which like Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) originally focused mainly on Kashmir, is seen as much closer to al Qaeda than the LeT.  It is one of many militant groups which is believed to have splintered in Pakistan as a result of various crackdowns following 9/11, creating many dangerous offshoots.

In Pakistan’s Baluchistan province, rebels have long been waging a separatist insurgency which Pakistan says is backed by India - a charge Delhi denies. But these rebels are quite separate from the Jundollah Sunni militant group blamed for last Sunday’s suicide bomb attack in Sistan-Baluchestan province in neighbouring Iran.  Analysts argue that Jundollah, whose religious ideology is Deobandi, is increasingly following a sectarian anti-Shi’ite agenda, under the influence of Pakistan’s own Deobandi groups.

But according to French historian Stephane Dudoignon, quoted in this Reuters interview, the group does not share the Islamic internationalism of al Qaeda. Instead, its leader Abdolmalik Rigi had always stressed that he was a Baluch and Iranian patriot. And the rise of Jundollah, he says, coincided with an explosion of drug smuggling on the eastern fringes of Iran, from which it drew much of its funding.

Meanwhile on the subject of drug smuggling and to return to the original subject of the jihadica post, it’s worth noting that the Afghan Taliban under Mullah Omar appear to be considerably better funded than al Qaeda nowadays. That would suggest that if there is indeed a rift between a nationalist and internationalist agenda, the Afghan Taliban may have the upper hand.

(Photos: U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan; the TTP, opium field)
.     

Regular readers of this blog will know that I have questioned before the value of the “AfPak” label, which implies that an incredibly complicated situation involving many different countries can be reduced to a five-letter word.

Having spent the last couple of days trying to make sense of the suicide bomb attack in Iran which Tehran blamed on Jundollah, an ethnic Baluchi, Sunni insurgent group it says has bases in Pakistan,  I’m more inclined than ever to believe the “AfPak” label blinds us to the broader regional context. Analysts argue that Jundollah has been heavily influenced by hardline Sunni sectarian Islamist thinking within Pakistan which is itself the product of 30 years of proxy wars in the region dating back to the Iranian Islamic Revolution in 1979, and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan towards the end of the same year.

This Sunni-Shi’ite faultline is showing up in suicide bombings in Iran, while at the same time Sunni Islamist groups continue to challenge the writ of state inside Pakistan even as the Pakistan Army presses ahead with its offensive in South Waziristan, stronghold of the Pakistani Taliban.

Such is the power of the Sunni Islamist movement, that Pakistan has been forced to close schools for fear of more bombings in its heartland in response to its military offensive in South Waziristan.

So what is the response on the “Af” side of the “AfPak” strategists? After intense diplomatic efforts, President Hamid Karzai has agreed to a second-round run-off in a disputed election. Allegations of electoral fraud had undermined Washington’s strategy in Afghanistan, and delayed a decision by President Barack Obama on whether to send more troops to the region.

But how many people believe that a second-round run-off on Nov. 7 will change the dynamics of a region which is getting more, rather than less, unstable by the day? (That is not to say a run-off is a bad idea, but rather that it may be overrated in its significance).

In the meantime India is becoming increasingly worried about instability in neighbouring Pakistan. But it is in a difficult position in working out how to respond, since it wants action against the Lashkar-e-Taiba, blamed for last year’s attack on Mumbai. Yet Lashkar-e-Taiba is one of the few militant groups which is not believed to have been involved in attacking targets within Pakistan, potentially pushing it down the priority list for an army already fighting in South Waziristan and facing an assault in the country’s heartland from Punjab-based groups.

In my 25 years of journalism, I’ve rarely seen a situation move so quickly.  I’d like to think there is someone in power who is not only keeping pace, but keeping ahead.

In the meantime, here are some articles worth reading:

Steve Coll makes a compelling argument for U.S. commitment to Afghanistan in an article reproduced by Foreign Policy

Shuja Nawaz, also writing at Foreign Policy, argues that the Pakistan Army deserves more support and equipment in its offensive in South Waziristan (read on to the bit where he writes about Frontier Corps scouts having to go out in open-toed sandals).

Andrew Exum has done us all a favour by arguing that comparisons with Vietnam depend entirely on how you view the history of that war (it’s hard enough to make sense of what is happening now, so maybe Vietnam analogies need to be consigned to the same cyber-dustbin as the AfPak label?)

And last, but not least, look at Reuters new Afghan Journal blog, combining the insights of our team of journalists on the ground with news from around the world.

(Photos: Presidents of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran; British soldier in Afghanistan)

A week after suspected Sunni Islamist insurgents attacked the headquarters of the Pakistan Army, a suicide bomber killed six senior Revolutionary Guards commanders and 25 other people in Shi’ite Iran in one of the deadliest attacks in years on the country’s most powerful military institution.

Were these two events connected only by the loose network of Sunni insurgent groups based in and around Pakistan? Or are there other common threads that link the two?

Iranian state media said Jundollah, an ethnic Baluch Sunni insurgent group, claimed responsibility for the attack in the Iranian province of Sistan-Baluchistan. The group, led by Abdomalek Rigi, is believed to have bases in neighbouring Pakistan’s Baluchistan province.

Jundollah has been linked in some reports to the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, an anti-Shia sectarian group based in Pakistan’s Punjab province, and to the Pakistani Taliban, or Tehrik-e-Taliban (TTP), based in Pakistan’s tribal areas bordering Afghanistan. Both the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and the TTP are believed to have close ties to al Qaeda, and are suspected of involvement in the attack on the headquarters of the Pakistan Army.

Trawling through published reports about Jundollah, it is not easy to work out how clear its links are to the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, the Pakistani Taliban and al Qaeda. This article in the Asia Times Online cautions that there are two organisations with the same name, one focused on Pakistan and the other on Iran.  Pakistani newspapers, however, have reported links specifically between Rigi’s group and the Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and TTP.

Being fellow travellers in the network of Sunni Islamist insurgent groups does not necessarily mean they are pursuing a common agenda. However, it does raise intriguing questions about how far they are collaborating, and about how far al Qaeda might be directing operations behind the scenes.

According to the Jihadica website, al Qaeda has been publicly cementing its ties with the Tehrik-e-Taliban, whose declared aim is to take over Pakistan.  The TTP is currently under siege in its stronghold in South Waziristan, where the Pakistan Army launched a long-awaited ground offensive on Saturday. A series of militant attacks across Pakistan in the past few weeks have been seen as an attempt by the Tehrik-e-Taliban and its al Qaeda-linked allies to show it can outwit the Pakistani security forces.

So was the bombing in Iran part of that deliberate attempt to spread mayhem across the region? That’s almost impossible to tell for now, although the Long War Journal earlier this year quoted an al Qaeda commander as talking about expanding the jihad into neighbouring countries, including Iran.

Of all the many players in the region, al Qaeda probably has the most to gain from the fall-out of the attack in Iran.

The Iranian armed forces, which have long harboured suspicions that Jundollah was funded by the west to weaken Iran, have accused the United States and Britain of involvement in the attack and vowed revenge.  That could torpedo efforts by President Barack Obama’s administration to improve relations with Iran and seek its help in stabilising Afghanistan.

It could also raise tensions between Pakistan and Iran, which reacted sharply to the bombing of a mosque in the Iranian city of Zahedan earlier this year. As Pakistan struggles to fight militants within the country and defeat them in South Waziristan, the last thing it needs is trouble on its border with Iran.

So is there an overall plan at work here? Or instead, is it simply that the region has become so destabilised that insurgents are finding it easier to operate both inside and outside of Pakistan?

(Photos: Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad; Pakistani soldiers in Lahore)