"The more precisely the position is determined, the less precisely the momentum is known in this instant, and vice versa," said Werner Heisenberg in his 1927 paper on subatomic particle behaviour in quantum physics. While the context could be continents apart, this uncertainty principle perhaps best describes the trajectory of India-Pakistan ties.

As India's western neighbour faces the ballot box after a tumultuous five years of civilian leadership, there is both apprehension and hope in New Delhi. There is acknowledgement of the democratic process that has run its five-year course for the first time under a civilian leadership that has been constantly under attack, but there is also fear. A fear triggered by the incessant bloodletting and political violence that has marred campaigning in Pakistan. Being called the bloodiest in the country’s history, it is also being seen as targeting the moderate voices in Pakistan - the ones India views as approachable.

Initially, there was optimism in India after all leading political parties in Pakistan articulated the normalisation of relations with India in their manifestoes and it wasn’t just mere posturing. Yet when the incumbent Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), the Awami National Party (ANP) and the Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM) - appeared to have been singled out by the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (or Pakistan Taliban) as targets, scepticism grew. These are parties which have traditionally espoused better relations with India.

The intentions of the current front-runners in the election race - Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League and wild card Imran Khan’s Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf - have been subject to speculation. The invisible hand of encouragement from the Taliban to certain sections within these parties is not being dismissed.

In a roundtable brainstorming session of experts for the Pakistan Project led by the Institute for Defence Studies and Analyses (IDSA), there was growing apprehension about the “formalisation of the process of capture of state power by Islamists by democratic means”.

Smruti Pattanaik, co-ordinator for the project, says “Imran Khan emerging as kingmaker in the polls will worry India because no matter how liberal he is as a leader, his party has links with the Difa-e-Pakistan Council (DPC).” The DPC comprises of 40 right-wing religious groups in Pakistan, whose patrons include Hafiz Saeed, the Jamaat-ud-Dawa chief accused of orchestrating the 2008 Mumbai attacks; Fazl-ur-Rehman Khaleel, founder of the banned Harkat-ul-Mujahideen; and former ISI chief Hamid Gul.

There has been stringent criticism of the DPC by the English media in Pakistan, which is heartening, but there is also reason to believe it is “giving clear shape for the first time in many years to an underworld of hyper-nationalism, militancy, sectarianism and faith-based politics whose influence in Pakistan has until now operated largely beneath the surface.” An impression of tacit backing by the Pakistan army headquartered in Rawalpindi only exacerbates suspicions across the border.

The last few diplomatic encounters have also been setbacks. The beheading of an Indian soldier on the Line of Control in early January began the tailspin. Recently, the death of Indian prisoner Sarabjit Singh in a Pakistani jail led to a retaliatory strike on Sanaullah Haq, a Pakistani prisoner at an Indian jail in Jammu. It has ended badly. Sanaullah’s death is being interpreted as tit-for-tat diplomacy. The shrill media coverage on both sides of the border has polarised public opinions further.

Depending on how you want to look at it, the Pew Poll 2013 infers that Pakistanis feel as threatened by the Taliban as they do by India. “When asked to choose which is the greatest threat to their country – India, the Taliban or al Qaeda - respondents are divided between India (38 percent) and the Taliban (33 percent). Only 4 percent name al Qaeda. Views have shifted significantly since last year, when 59 percent chose India and 23 percent said the Taliban.” The polls also said 45 percent of Pakistanis were worried about the influence of India in Afghanistan.

The Political Barometer, a survey conducted by the Sustainable Development Policy Institute in Islamabad, has also raised eyebrows. It projects that while China was the most popular country in Pakistan, only 28 percent of its respondents would vote for a party which pledged peaceful relations with India. The survey shows an “alarming trend in which  society is getting more radicalized where 53 percent want the government to promote hijab; 30 percent consider honor killing acceptable and justified and 26 percent  want the government to ban women working along with men.” On the upside, 72 percent believe minorities should have equal rights.

In an era where perceptions drive reality, these figures will only make many Indians more uncomfortable. The 2008 Mumbai attacks are still very much a fresh memory. In the run-up to Indian elections due in 2014, mass opinion is already being mobilised. Pakistan is often a rallying point, considered a domestic issue more often rather than a foreign policy one. With political consensus broken on the peace process with Pakistan and the opposition Bharatiya Janata Party pushing the embattled Indian government to take a more hardline stand, New Delhi’s concerns will revolve not around who captures the throne in Pakistan, but what they do afterwards. Uncertainty will continue to be the driving principle in India-Pakistan ties.

One day, a 10-year-old girl died. The next, a seven-year-old boy. The victims of the   relentless attacks on election meetings in Pakistan are so very rarely named that you have to start counting the ages of the children to give some kind of human meaning to the deaths.

More than 50 people have been killed ahead of elections on May 11 that should have been a milestone in the country’s history, the first time a democratically elected government completed its term and handed power to another through the polls. Instead it has turned into a bewildering bloodbath where a mother or father taking their child out to watch history being made cannot be sure of bringing them home alive.

At one level, the violence is neither without meaning nor bewildering.

The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which have claimed responsibility for most of the attacks, have given it a very specific meaning. They have said repeatedly they will attack the Peshawar-based Awami National Party (ANP), the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), which has its roots in Sindh province, and the Karachi-based Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM). They have been as good as their word. All three have been bombed, although the ANP, the last clear line of Pashtun resistance to the Pakistani Taliban, has borne the brunt. Since all three oppose the Taliban, the TTP is making it harder for them to bring out their voters or hold political rallies, effectively trying to rig what should have been a free and fair election in favour of right-wing parties more sympathetic to their cause.

The TTP have also been specific about what they want – the implementation of sharia (presumably their interpretation of it) throughout Pakistan. TTP spokesman Eshsanullah Ehsan, speaking to Dawn newspaper, also made clear that they would not stop with the three parties currently under attack.

“We are against the secular and democratic system which is against the ideology of Islam but we are not expecting any good from the other parties either, who are the supporters of the same system, but why they are not targeted is our own prerogative to decide,” the spokesman told Dawn.

At another level, the deaths are both meaningless and bewildering.

 The election will be decided in Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province, where the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif faces a fierce fight against the Tehrik-e-Insaf Pakistan (PTI) led by cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan. (The PPP, which led the outgoing coalition government, is hoping the two will damage each other enough to allow it to scrape by with a respectable number of seats.)

Both the PML-N and PTI have a reputation of being soft on the Taliban and Punjab has largely been spared the violence seen elsewhere. As a result, those dying outside Punjab are being killed in an election which is not theirs to decide – at least not at the national level. All three parties have insisted that the elections must go ahead. Yet there is an element of martyrdom creeping in

.Democracy was supposed to usher in a more pluralistic Pakistan, whereby the country’s different ethnic groups and provinces would find ways of negotiating a fair share of power and resources without violence. It was meant to provide a transition away from a centralised military-run state to one which, in the long run, would be more stable by incorporating everyone. Instead, the elections, and the geographical unevenness of the TTP attacks, have emphasised the dominance of Punjab. The resentment created will haunt Pakistan for years – the loss of East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, was triggered by the effective disenfranchisement of voters there after elections in 1970.

And despite the very clear statements by the TTP, much of the country remains bewildered about who they are and what they want.

For years, Pakistanis in the heartland have been coached on a narrative that militant violence was an overspill from the U.S.-led war in Afghanistan and, more recently, caused by the use of drones in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). It is as though pre 9/11 history – when jihad was exported to Kashmir and Afghanistan rather than causing trouble at home – does not exist.

That narrative has been accompanied by an Orientalist view of the people of FATA (assumed to be backward, riled up by drones, and politically not allowed to speak for themselves) that allowed many Pakistanis, wrongly, to equate them with the TTP. Few pay attention to what the Pakistani Taliban themselves say they are – a loose grouping of Pakistanis, including Punjabis, allied with Afghan fighters, among them the Haqqani network, and al Qaeda.

The TTP have never said they will end violence if Pakistan severs relations with the United States and stops drone attacks in FATA. They have said they want their view of how Pakistan should be run imposed on the whole country, one in which democracy has no place. Yet still the PML-N and PTI are hedging their bets. Either out of opportunism or lack of understanding, neither have come out and openly condemned the Taliban. The PML-N has a long history of accommodation with sectarian groups in Punjab. Imran Khan – who for years has insisted that TTP violence is a response to the U.S. war in Afghanistan and its use of drones – has pleaded with the TTP to end its attacks until the elections are over.

The TTP have been remarkably clever; they have sown fresh tensions in the country between Punjab and elsewhere. They have shown themselves able to attack almost at will with a single-minded determination to influence Pakistan’s elections. The TTP spokesman was even quoted by Pakistan’s Express Tribune as citing European philosophers, when he said elections were contrary to Pakistan’s Islamic values. “The two are contrary to each other because Islamic laws and values come from Allah Almighty, while the secular doctrine comes from Rousseau, Kant and Bentham.”

They are not just angry tribesmen riled up by drones. They have a plan. And Pakistan, no matter how many nameless children among the dead, does not.

Arriving into Kabul you are struck by two contrasting images. Streets jammed with noisy traffic, pavements spilling with hawkers and women in sky-blue burqas wending their way through the crush of people. And then just a few metres from this bustle of everyday life are whole streets walled off, defended by layer upon layer of guards with machine guns behind sandbags and blast barriers set up in a zigzag manner to stop or at least slow down the suicide bomber.

These are the green zones of the Afghan capital where the top international military brass, diplomats, officials, and staff of the dozens of non-government organisations work and live and party, cut off from the turbulent nation outside, like virtual prisoners.

A drive inside the wire can be an eerie experience; SUVs with jammers silently racing down the street past huge unmarked buildings that look like fortresses with 20 ft high walls and heavily armed guards on watchtowers, looking at you nervously.

You know you are in a war zone, despite the heaving traffic outside, and that everything can change within a minute an attack begins of the type the Taliban or more specifically the Haqqanis have repeatedly carried out deep within the most secure enclaves.

Less than two years before the western military withdrawal is completed and security responsibilities for the whole nation handed over to Afghan national forces, the walls are getting higher, the concertina wires strung further out and more areas disappearing under the security blanket in what must be one of the world’s most militarised capitals.

The west is leaving – indeed the whole conversation last summer was about the departure and whether it will be advanced – but so fraught is the situation that the unspoken fear is that withdrawing forces may be targeted. For some, it has brought back memories of the 1842 retreat of the British army from Kabul that went horribly wrong with the annihilation of the entire force down to the last man, woman and child except for a surgeon who survived to tell the tale of Gandamak massacre.

The withdrawal this time will obviously be a far different affair, carried out on giant C130s instead of horseback as happened then. But just in case and in a reminder of the Taliban strength, one of the issues that figured in track ii talks that Taliban representatives had last year in Paris was to ensure the orderly withdrawal of French troops from eastern Kapisa province where they have faced a spate of attacks. The surge troops that president Barack Obama sent are already gone, and now across Afghanistan the United States is shutting down scores of bases as the remainder 66,000 troops draw down, leaving Afghan forces to fight an undefeated Taliban.
Each time I visit Afghanistan, and this is beginning from the spring of 2002 when the Taliban had been vanquished and hope was high, more and more parts of the country have become no-go areas. You are shown a map each time and the areas marked in red that denote high risk are not just the south and east of the capital, but the north as well and the immediate environs of Kabul itself including Wardak—the logistical route to mount an attack on the Afghan capital. There was a time when the north was considered safe, but now the furthest you can visit without raising the level of risk is the Panjshir valley.

To fight this resilient enemy, Afghan national security forces (ANSF) have been built up to a strength of 350,000, more than double NATO’s peak strength of 150,000 soldiers, but this is a force that has been raised overnight, built up of 95 percent of recruits who could not write their name or count till 10 at the time of entry.
Worse, even granted the Afghans war-fighting abilities, the ANSF lack the air power, the surveillance capabilities, logistics and medical facilities that were available to NATO. Yet even then, the world’s most advanced military failed to prevail over the Taliban.

The strategy, as a senior commander told me recently, was never to build an ANSF that could operate without international assistance, because it was simply unrealistic. Instead the idea was to develop a military which would lead the fight against the insurgency but backed by international forces that would help with the logistics, medical facilities and above all air power which is key to fighting in the mountainous country.

Indeed, even America’s far more developed European allies such as France and Britain rely on U.S. support for operations, as we saw in the Mali mission when French jets were refuelled by the United States air force.

But the American people are done with the Afghan war, especially after the killing of Osama bin Laden, and as they struggle with an uncertain economic recovery and fatigue, there is little appetite for a prolonged engagement in far-off Afghanistan.

Over the next few weeks, president Obama will decide on the recommendations of his commander in the region that a force of 6,000 to 20,000 troops is needed. The white house has suggested that 3,000 to 4,000 may be sufficient, and just before president Hamid Karzai was visiting Washington in January, the administration indicated even the zero option was on the table.

While a force of 20,000, largely of special forces, could still be in a position to help out ANSF on some covert missions, anything in the range of 3,000 can only perhaps defend the bases in Bagram, Kandahar and perhaps U.S. Installations in the capital. One suggestion is to reach an agreement under which the United States will maintain and have access to a number of bases they built but will be handing over to the ANSF. That way, they can still spring in forces to carry out missions rather than arriving cold turkey in the country.

In any case, the sense in Washington and which is echoed in Kabul, is that it’s time to liquidate the mission and if any footprint has to be kept, it has to be ultra-light.

Some people do argue, though, that while the fight is far from over in Afghanistan, it might be even more serious in next door Pakistan and for that reason alone, America must have a presence. The seeping radicalisation of Pakistani society, the violent extremism it has bred, constitutes a threat to itself, but also to its neighbours including Afghanistan, India and beyond.
For now though, with the United States turning its back on Afghanistan, the regional countries are back in play and no country has clawed back into the frame as much as Pakistan has in just over the past few months. From the ignominy of the bin laden raid when the world discovered that the world’s number one fugitive was living in relative comfort in a Pakistani military town, to returning to a key role in facilitating peace talks with the Taliban, the security establishment has fought back. As the United States pushes for talks with the Taliban now that it has decided to end the military mission, Pakistan has freed the first batch of prisoners to help set the stage for negotiations and promised to release more.
Late last year, Afghanistan’s high peace council visited Pakistan and set out a roadmap for talks that had been drafted by the inner circle of President Hamid Karzai in coordination with Pakistan.

The roadmap envisions, among other points, a series of confidence-building measures to be implemented in the first half of 2013. Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the U.S. are to work together towards arranging direct peace talks between the HPC/government of Afghanistan and the Taliban. Further down the road, the next steps are a ceasefire, an understanding on the withdrawal of international forces as well as modalities for the inclusion of Taliban and other armed opposition leaders in the power structures of the state.5

While the goals seem a bit too ambitious given the ground situation and the inflexibility shown by the Taliban, the centrality of Pakistan to the endgame has been reasserted. It leaves India, which has invested treasure and some blood over the past 11 years, pushed to the sidelines.

A return to a Pakistan-based fundamentalist regime allowing militant groups sanctuary is exactly the outcome India has sought to avoid in Afghanistan, providing aid and investment designed to reduce the landlocked nation’s reliance on Pakistan.

Thus, the highway that India helped build linking western Afghanistan to the Iranian port of Chabahar offers the country an alternate access to sea, other than its sole route to Karachi port.
India has also committed itself to development of the Hajigak iron ore mines, an investment that can run to $11 billion, which if it went through could transform central Afghanistan. Thanks to the northern distribution line it has set up, Kabul is no longer a city suffering blackouts. It has gifted Afghanistan its new parliament building and hosted a rising number of students at its universities. Above all, many of the officer corps has taken courses at top Indian military institutions, and under a strategic partnership agreement signed in oct 2011, the Door has been opened to expanding this programme.
And yet, as the endgame nears, it is Pakistan— blamed by Afghans for most of their problems—which is offering to safeguard its future. The geographical reality puts it in that position along with shared religious, ethnic and cultural links, but to the Afghans it is another tragedy that they must turn to the very country they trust the in the least to help them.

You can see that on the ground in Kabul. Driving through its deserted streets at night time, you are likely to be stopped at street corners by policemen once, twice or even more at any of the dozens of checkpoints.

If you look like a South Asian their guard is up even more. “Pakistani or Indian?” The cop barks out as you lower your window. When I answer “Indian”, he wants me to produce a passport to prove that, and as it happens, I am not carrying one.

So I am pulled out of the car in the Afghan winter and given a full body search, with the policeman muttering under his breath that everyone goes around claiming to be an Indian, especially Pakistanis.

To be an Indian in Kabul is to be greeted warmly wherever you go, whether it is negotiating a security barrier or seeking a meeting with a government official. There is an easing of tensions (in Afghanistan, the fear uppermost in the mind is that the stranger at the door could be an attacker and you don’t have too long to judge), Bollywood is almost immediately mentioned, and your hosts will go out of their way to help.

To be a Pakistani is a bit more fraught. The body search is rigorous, the questioning hostile, and, more often than not, you have to be rescued by a western colleague especially if you are entering one of those heavily guarded, unmarked restaurants frequented by foreigners.

To the ordinary Afghan, India and Pakistan have followed two different paths in the country beginning from the ouster of the Taliban in 2001 when there was hope in the air and you could walk in the streets of Kabul (instead of trying to escape it) to the current time when the Taliban have fought back and hold the momentum as the west withdraws after a long and ultimately, unsuccessful engagement.

While the Indians have been applauded for helping build roads, getting power lines into the capital, running hospitals and arranging for hundreds of students to pursue higher education in India, the Pakistanis are accused of the violence that Afghans see all around them, from the attacks in the capital to the fighting on the border and the export of militant Islam. It’s become reflexive: minutes into an attack, the blame shifts to Pakistan. “they must have done it.”
A rand study into the differing strategies adopted by the rivals in Afghanistan quotes a 2009 BBC/ABC news/ARD poll which showed that 86 percent of Afghans thought Pakistan had a negative influence in Afghanistan, with only 5 percent saying it had made a positive contribution. India’s impact, by contrast, was seen as positive by 41 percent of Afghans and negative by only 10 percent. Overall, 74 percent of Afghans held a favourable view of India against 8 percent of those who had a positive impression about Pakistan.

That’s the scale of the challenge before Pakistan as it tries to manouevre its way back into a post-2014 settlement and install a regime that would protect its interests. Unlike 1996 when it helped the Taliban’s rapid ascent to power, Pakistan has a raging insurgency within its own borders straddling Afghanistan. It may need to lean on the Afghan Taliban to rein in the Pakistani Taliban that remains a recalcitrant enemy and it certainly does not have the level of leverage it had with the Afghan group as it did more than a decade ago.

In that and in the huge goodwill of the Afghan people lies perhaps India’s opportunity. It must remain invested in Afghanistan, expand the scale of its training of the ANSF both at top counter insurgency schools in India and in situ, and tie its plans with both Russia and Iran, both of whom are equally concerned about the potential return of the Sunni Taliban in Kabul.

(A copy of this article appeared in the Spring 2013 edition of SCHOLAR WARRIOR, a quarterly journal of the Centre for Land Warfare Studies in New Delhi)

Their contention – that with more political will and insight war might even have been avoided altogether – has been disputed by those who say Washington did try and fail to engage the Taliban in serious talks ahead of the Sept 11 attacks. Yet in a week where the United States has gone through a bout of soul-searching about the Iraq war, history matters. Were the assumptions that led to the Afghan war also wrong from the start?

A new book by Vahid Brown and Don Rassler, “Fountainhead of Jihad, The Haqqani Nexus: 1973 to 2012” adds to that history by focusing on the Afghan group that actually did have the closest ties to al Qaeda – the so-called Haqqani network.

As I wrote here, the book has unearthed primary sources to show that the patriarch of the Haqqani network, Jalaluddin Haqqani, had as much influence on al Qaeda as the Arab fighters had on him – providing them with support and an Afghan safe haven during the jihad against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989.

The first Afghan Islamist known to have actively recruited Arab fighters into his ranks, Jalaluddin Haqqani was also the first to declare the Afghan jihad a duty for Muslims worldwide – preceding by at least four years the Palestinian scholar Abdullah Azzam whose 1984 writings are usually credited with being the foundation of modern global jihad.

But the book is about more than the relationship between the Haqqanis and al Qaeda. It is a treasure trove of history and footnotes about the role played by Pakistan in nourishing the ideology of al Qaeda – which emerged out of the Afghan jihad as a lethal mix of 20th century Arab and South Asian insecurities.

Take for example the earliest days of Pakistan after independence in 1947, when it faced a hostile Afghanistan which to this day refuses to recognise the border, and which for years supported then-breakaway Pashtun nationalists on the Pakistan side. In response, Pakistan relied on religion to suppress ethnic nationalism and hold the country together.

“Pakistan’s ‘Islam over tribe’ approach became a pillar of its policies on the frontier and has characterised its deep involvement in Afghanistan’s conflicts over the last thirty years, including its support for the Haqqani network,” the authors assert.

Much of the story after that is well known: from U.S. support for the mujahideen in the anti-Soviet jihad, to Pakistan’s use of Islamist militants to counter Afghanistan’s claims on Pashtun nationalism on its fragile western frontiers and India’s claim to Kashmir in the east.

By the 1990s, even after the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan and the United States lost interest, the idea of global jihad had found fertile ground in Pakistan, particularly in its heartland Punjab province where international Muslim causes remain popular. Domestically, Pakistan – and especially its army – had come to rely on a particularly militant interpretation of Sunni Islam to override disparate ethnic identities; one which is now cannibalising the country by feeding in on its religious minorities, including Shiites.

At the time of the Sept 11 attacks, only some of al Qaeda’s leadership was in Afghanistan. Others – along with the environment that allowed its ideology to flourish – were in Pakistan.

It should always have been clear that the real challenge facing the United States in 2001 was in weaning Pakistan away from that ideology. Instead it turned to Pakistan, then under military rule after a 1999 coup by General Pervez Musharraf, as its main ally in the war.

Its focus was on the Taliban, who, however brutal their rule, had grown up in rural southern Afghanistan, isolated from world events.  Unlike Jalaluddin Haqqani, many of them were too young to have played a big role in the anti-Soviet jihad; they had no real ties with al Qaeda until after they took power – with Pakistan’s help – in 1996.

There are many reasons why the Afghan war went wrong. The lessons of the failed Russian and British invasions should have made it clear from the beginning that it was going to be difficult to manage Afghanistan. The United States might have succeeded had it not chosen to be distracted by the Iraq war in 2003. Perhaps Pakistan might have been won over to the U.S. side had the Bush administration not signed a nuclear deal with India in 2005, which in the eyes of the Pakistan army decisively tipped the balance in favour of its bigger neighbour. More recently, both Vali Nasr and Sara Chayes have, in different ways, blamed a lack of coherence inside the Obama administration on its approach to Afghanistan.

But read through the history of the Haqqanis for a reminder of what happened in the years before the Afghan war. And if you have not asked this question before, you will be left wondering why the United States was so confident in 2001 that it could turn Pakistan around while simultaneously fighting a war which put the two countries’  interests significantly at odds.

As Washington has discovered over the years, the alleged threat made in 2001 to bomb Pakistan back into the stone-age if it did not cooperate was only ever going to be enough to win acquiescence rather than support, passive resistance rather than overt defiance.

It is probably too much to assert that the Afghan war was lost before it started. The Sept. 11 attacks had such an impact on the United States that politically it would have been nearly impossible for it not to act – and, unlike Iraq, it did so with the support of the international community.  But it is not too late to ask about the systemic failures that meant it went into the Afghan war with such little insight.

The deeply flawed investigation concluded the girls were alive and the matter was dropped. But new killings – and new evidence collected by Reuters – suggests the girls are dead.

Now one man is fighting to bring the Kohistan killers to justice. Like his country, he is wavering at a crossroads, torn between traditional tribal vengeance and the faint hope of justice from a troubled young democracy.

His path may hint at whether the nuclear-armed nation of 180 million people can emerge from decades of bloodshed into a nation secure in the rule of law.

“I have gone to get justice from the court,” said Mohammed Afzal, the slender, brown-eyed brother of the three men recently killed in the feud this January.

“But if they fail me, I am also a Kohistani. I will hunt down my brothers’ killers myself.”

Twenty-five-year-old Azfal says five women and two of his brothers were sentenced to death last year by a jirga, a gathering of tribal elders. Jirgas date back centuries in Pakistan. They resolve local disputes and can help calm violence, bypassing the moribund formal court system.

But the jirgas often also order men and women tortured, mutilated, raped or killed. There is no appeal to the decisions made by the all-male gatherings. For a woman, just an accusation of impropriety often merits a death sentence.

Jirgas order many of the 1,000 “honor killings” in Pakistan recorded each year by the Aurat Foundation, Pakistan’s leading women’s rights group.

Afzal says five names belong among last year’s tally: 19-year-old Sareen Jan, 22-year-old Begum Jan, 23-year-old Amina, 25-year-old Bazigha, and her little sister Shaheen, 12.

More than two years ago, two of Afzal’s brothers used a cellphone to record themselves and the four older women sitting on the floor singing softly and clapping.

A year ago, the video began circulating in Sartay, the remote and deeply conservative village in the mountainous region of Kohistan where they lived.

Afzal says a jirga headed by Maulana Javed, an uncle of two of the women, ordered the men and women killed. Shaheen was sentenced since she had been talking to the women, he said.

Afzal was far from home, but Reuters interviewed a witness to the funerals of four of the women who was too frightened to give his name.

He described one sunny morning at the end of May, when four bodies were brought to the centre of the village in white sheets. They were buried in the corner of the churchyard but he believed they were later dug up and moved because the door that had originally been placed on top of their bodies was later used at another funeral.

Amina, who had been married off young to a rival family to settle a blood feud, was pregnant. The witness said he had heard she was spared until she had given birth, then killed somewhere else.

Afzal said after the killings, the women’s families told the village that his brothers were next.

“They said, ‘we have killed our girls, now we will kill the boys’,” he said.

The case caused an uproar. Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, famed for personally intervening in high-profile human rights cases, ordered activists to visit the village. A number of officials accompanied them.

Their investigation was deeply flawed.

The investigators took fingerprints and photographs of some of the women. But these were never compared with the women’s identity cards that Reuters confirmed they had been issued.

At some points the investigators used members of the women’s family as translators – the same people accused of killing them.

The women were asked to verify their identity by picking themselves out of stills from the video – an easy task for a relative or friend who had grown up with them since childhood.

Investigators did not meet with the women alone. They did, however, gather the men of the village and ask anyone with information about the murders to raise their hand.

No one did. Anyone who had would likely be killed after the investigators flew away on their helicopter.

While Reuters was investigating the case, Afzal supplied two photographs of one woman who was allegedly killed, Begum Jan.

The two photographs were compared to a picture taken by investigators of a woman claiming to be Begum Jan.

It is highly unlikely they are the same woman, according to an analysis by Digital Barriers PLC, a British company whose facial recognition software is used by military and law enforcement agencies around the world.

Nevertheless, the Supreme Court accepted the tentative conclusion of two of the three investigators – that the girls were probably alive.

Afzal and the two brothers who made the video went into hiding. But in January the girls’ relatives shot dead Afzal’s three brothers as they were preparing to pray on a mountainside.

Twelve men – including Maulana Javed – have been charged with killing Afzal’s brothers.

Several of the accused told police they killed Afzal’s brothers over the video, contradicting their sworn statements to investigators that the video was a minor matter and not worth killing over.

Afzal fears the court may soon release the accused, some of whom are powerful local leaders, unless the Supreme Court re-examines the girls’ case.

Last month, Afzal submitted a petition to the court naming the women that he says impersonated their dead cousin, sister and sister-in-law and asking for a hearing.

“We all failed. The courts, the journalists, the civil society,” said Dr. Farzana Bari, the dissenting investigator who recently petitioned to have the case reopened.

“We are all responsible for protecting the rights of these women and we failed them and ourselves.”

The case is theoretically still pending. It has not had a hearing since June. Afzal’s petition for a further date has been rejected. Bari’s is still pending.

But a series of attacks in and around Peshawar this month should give serious pause for thought.

First came a raid on Peshawar airport in mid-December, for which the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) claimed responsibility. Then political leader Bashir Ahmed Bilour – an outspoken critic of the Taliban and a senior minister in the provincial government of the Awami National Party (ANP) – was killed in a suicide bombing.

While the city was still in shock over Bilour’s death, its defences were attacked. Taliban militants assaulted three security posts meant to separate the so-called settled areas from the neighbouring Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), killing two men from the security forces and taking 22 others prisoner. At least 20 of them were later killed by the Taliban,Pakistani media reported.

It is difficult to escape the notion of a city under siege.

For outsiders, particularly the United States – distracted by domestic political wrangling, weary of the war in Afghanistan, and weary too of trying to work out how to deal with Pakistan – the prospect of Peshawar succumbing to Taliban influence should be ringing alarm bells.

And for Pakistanis, the potential loss of Peshawar should be even more alarming – even a small risk of that happening should be enough to stir memories of the unthinking drift to war that led to the loss of East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, in 1971. Indian military intervention ensured Bangladesh won independence, but the origins of the conflict lay in the dissonance between Pakistan’s Punjab-dominated heartland and ethnic Bengalis; just as now there is a difference in understanding of the threat of militancy between mainly Pashtun Peshawar and the centres of power in the Punjabi cities of Lahore, Islamabad and Rawalpindi.

Yet for all those familiar tripwires, the alarm over the attacks on Peshawar has been muffled at best. While the ANP in Peshawar has appealed for consensus among political parties on a strategy to fight terrorism, many in the rest of Pakistan are looking the other way. True, some of the English-language media has run powerful commentary arguing that Pakistan must wake up to the threat of terrorism, but on the whole, initial shock over the attacks has dissipated into confusion.

Here is the problem – or rather an additional problem compounding Pakistan’s internal divisions over whether the war against the Taliban is its own fight or one being carried out at America’s behest.

All of this is happening at a time when the country is heading into an election, expected next May.  Few want to rock the boat with, for example, a military offensive in North Waziristan that might unleash a wave of reprisal bombings on political rallies across Pakistan. For the first time in its history, a democratically elected government is set to complete its term and hand over power to another democratically elected government – a milestone worth fighting for.

But the boat is already rocking. A huge political rally held in Lahore by Islamist preacher Tahir ul-Qadri – on the same day as ANP leader Bilour’s funeral in Peshawar  – has got everyone talking about whether he was sponsored by “the establishment” (the Pakistan Army and its Inter-Services Intelligence agency) to disrupt the democratic process. Qadri has promised a march on Islamabad in January if changes are not made to the electoral process in time for the polls. And since it is not possible to make those changes in time, his threat has raised fears he might be paving the way for a government of technocrats which would (with the blessing of the military) take over for a few years until Pakistan’s crises are resolved.

To an outsider, it sounds like another Pakistani conspiracy theory. To a Pakistani, used to the army’s dominance of politics and the so-called Deep State’s ability to pull the strings from behind the scenes, the threat to the democratic process is real. Among the unlikely cast of characters being conjured up by the media to support a government of technocrats are Qadri, the Defa-e-Pakistan alliance of militant and religious groups, and Imran Khan’s Tehrik-e-Insaf Pakistan (PTI). Qadri and PTI deny taking any support from the military.

In reality, nobody knows for sure what is going on, and because of the uncertainty, everyone is hedging their bets. And because everyone is hedging their bets, the country will not take on the Taliban. Meanwhile the Pakistan Army – which dominates security policy – says it will launch a new military operation only with political consensus.

DIVIDED POLITICIANS

And there is no political consensus.

The ruling Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) has devoted much of its energy to simply staying in power to prove the democratic system can work – President Asif Ali Zardari confounded everyone by keeping his job and his government in place long enough to hand on the mantle of the PPP, which he inherited from his late wife Benazir Bhutto, to their son Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, who made his political debut in Pakistan this week.

If Zardari and the PPP survived, it was partly thanks to opposition leader and former prime minister Nawaz Sharif, who having been ousted in a coup in 1999 knew better than to leave a gap where the army might take over. Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) is the main challenger in the coming election and is likely to do well because of the PPP-led government’s reputation for poor governance and corruption. He has everything to lose if an escalation in militant attacks forces the election to be postponed.

Imran Khan’s PTI has promised to break the mould of dynastic politics and end corruption. But in a constituency-based electoral system where local patronage buys votes, Khan does not have the party machinery to win a significant number of seats. And having positioned himself as a campaigner against U.S. drone attacks in the tribal areas, which he claimed were the main cause of militancy, he has left himself no space to take a strong stand against the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan.

The Peshawar-based ANP, and the Karachi-based Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM), whose leader Altaf Hussain lives in exile in London, have been pretty much alone in speaking out clearly against the Taliban. “The time has come for decisive action,” ANP’s Bushra Gohar, a member of the National Assembly, told Newsweek Pakistan. “We have to expose these elements. The time for apologies is over. We need to adopt a clear-cut policy.”

But in an election year, the heartland of Pakistani politics is in Punjab where both the PML-N and PTI are based and where the biggest number of seats in parliament are to be won. The Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, in a statement released earlier this week, said it had no quarrel with those two parties. Even the PPP, whose roots are in Sindh province, knows its survival comes from winning popular votes in Punjab while maintaining an uneasy relationship – as it has done since it came to power – with the army. All have an interest in appeasing the religious right, whose street power in Punjab by far outstrips its ability to win votes in elections. All would be vulnerable to reprisal attacks by militants with deep roots in Punjab were they to take a strong stand against them.

That leaves Peshawar bearing the brunt of TTP violence, along with the rest of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province and the tribal areas themselves.  Karachi too is suffering from violence, but Peshawar is even more vulnerable, lying next to the tribal areas.

Many of us have declared Pakistan to be on the brink so often over the years that it becomes hard to take ourselves seriously.  It survives, doesn’t it? That famed “resilience”.  And the chances are, it will be fine, muddling through until the election.

And yet the steady infiltration of the Taliban into Peshawar, and their apparent ability to carry out attacks there with impunity, should worry everyone. All the more so since so many elsewhere in Pakistan are showing no signs of responding to the threat to a city barely two hours’ drive from the capital.

(Reuters file photo of an earlier bomb attack on Peshawar)

In dozens of cramped shops crowding the galleries of the echoey exchange, a clannish brotherhood of currency dealers oils the wheels of Afghanistan’s cash-based economy, sending funds across borders, swapping foreign bills or taking deposits in the manner of conventional banks.

With no map to guide them, a small circle of U.S. and European law enforcement and intelligence officials have ventured into this bewildering financial landscape, hoping to chart the ever-shifting pathways that keep the Taliban flush with cash.

It doesn’t take much time wandering around the currency bazaar in the city of Kandahar, the movement’s spiritual home, to appreciate that the line between what NATO calls “Threat Finance” and the core business of many Afghan money men will be difficult to draw.

Perched cross-legged on cushions, or overseeing glass cabinets engorged with neatly-stacked blocks of cash, the merchants operate a centuries-old system known as hawala, from the Arabic word for ‘transfer’. Equipped with little more than calculators, mobile phones, hand-written ledgers and an inexhaustible supply of rubber bands (used to restrain bulging wads of notes), the dealers handle transactions worth hundreds of millions of dollars a year.

In the past six months, the U.S. Treasury Department has designated at least four Afghan hawala dealers as suspected Taliban financiers, slapping freeze orders on any assets they may hold in the United States. (Perhaps the most notable is Haji Khairullah Barakzai, featured in a Reuters special report published today on U.S. attempts to shut down his businesses). Though hawala merchants – known as hawaladars – are not likely to have any assets in American banks, the designations aim to ruin their reputations in the eyes of their customers. A sudden stampede to withdraw deposits can rapidly drive a dealer into bankruptcy.

Arrayed in the towering turbans and flowing dress favoured by any respectable Kandahari, the hawaladars make their profits through commissions on money transfers and via fluctuating exchange rates. They may hold relatively little cash at any one time, often in a safe at the back of their shop. Their most valuable assets, however, are their reputations.

Hawaladars are expert keepers of secrets. Businesses are primarily family concerns, while inter-marriage between big hawala clans cement ties of trust. Penetrating such networks is virtually impossible for outsiders. It is no surprise then that even when account books are seized in raids, investigators often struggle to discern precisely who is sending what money on behalf of whom.

The case of Haji Agha Jan, a hawaldar in the Kandahar exchange, embodies the uncertainties.

A wiry middle-aged man with soft eyes and a shoulder-shrugging resilience to misfortune, Jan tells a persuasive tale. One night in October last year, he heard sounds outside his house. Instinctively, he reached for his pistol, before rapidly realising he was outgunned – a squad of Afghan police and U.S. troops had come knocking. The visitors bound his wrists with plastic cuffs and slipped a hood over his head. According to Jan’s account, he was soon en route to the nearby military base at Kandahar Airfield along with his son, who was also arrested.

Jan says his interrogators were obsessed with the contents of his books – ledgers stretching back years with hundreds of names, amounts and phone numbers scrawled in black ball-point. (Recipients who cannot read or write sign their signatures with thumbprints dabbed in blue ink).

Questions came by day and night. Jan could only tell the time by glancing at his captors’ watches or when guards shouted reminders of Islamic prayer hours through the door of his one-man cell.

“I told them, ‘Yes, I am sending money through hawala, but not Taliban money’,” Jan said, speaking in his uncomfortably-quiet shop on the first-floor of the Kandahar exchange. Fearing he will be arrested again, customers rarely call.

“It doesn’t have ‘Taliban’ written on the money’,” Jan said, chewing on green tobacco and occasionally availing himself of a spittoon.

His son was released first, then Jan himself was freed after 25 days in detention, his captors presumably satisfied that he was not channelling cash to the insurgents.

Indeed, Jan produced a copy of a hand-written Taliban death threat issued some months before his arrest. The movement had declared him a marked man due to his friendship with a police chief from Kakrez, one of the rural districts in Kandahar Province. Jan had later discovered a landmine buried outside his home, which he summoned police to defuse.

Jan maintains that coalition forces still owe him monies including 2.3 million Pakistani rupees ($24,000) seized during his arrest, and four gold necklaces. (ISAF, the NATO-led force in Afghanistan, said it could neither confirm nor deny that Jan had been held).

Was Jan telling the whole truth? Investigators freely admit the difficulty of tracing flows through the hawala system, where book-keeping systems – though thorough – are not designed for the ready comprehension of inquisitive strangers. Nonetheless, the U.S. Treasury is sufficiently satisfied with its evidence to make some definitive declarations about certain hawaladars, including Khairullah, was sanctioned on June 29, along with his business partner, Haji Abdul Sattar Barakzai.

What can be said with some certainty is that licit and illicit commerce in Afghanistan are so intimately entwined that the distinction can often seem almost meaningless.

Edwina Thompson, a researcher who conducted extensive interviews with hawaldars in 2005, points out that the trade plays a vital role in facilitating economic development in Afghanistan, where few people trust banks. Kandahar’s exchange is also central to the mechanics of the heroin trade.

(Thompson’s 2011 book, Trust is the Coin of the Realm, is the most authoritative account of the hawala system in Afghanistan; some of her research can be found in a report on Afghanistan’s opium industry by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime).

Afghan drug cartels run a sophisticated system of agricultural credit and payment to poppy farmers that could not function without the hawaladars in Kandahar, the largest city in the south.

Thompson found that hawaladars in Kandahar experienced a huge influx of funds for advance payments from traffickers to farmers during the poppy cultivation months of October to December.

She discovered a similar surge in payments from the end of April to June when opium harvested from the poppy crop was ready for purchase. One in four hawaladar in Kandahar might be considered significant facilitators of drug payments, Thompson estimated, handling up to $810 million of opium-related funds in 2005. She made similar findings in neighbouring Helmand Province, the epicentre of the drug industry in Afghanistan, which supplies an estimated 90 per cent of a global market for heroin and other opiates worth some $68 billion a year, according to U.N. estimates.

Individual transactions can be substantial. A report released by Congress in 2009 reported that U.N. officials in Kabul had inspected records of drug-related transactions involving $1 million and had seen evidence of a $15 million hawala transfer.

Pakistan launders much of the money. Unlike in Afghanistan, where hawala is – in theory – regulated, the entire system is officially outlawed in Pakistan. In practise, Pakistani hawaladars are central to the country’s vast informal sector and handle billions of dollars a year while police turn a blind eye.

U.S. officials are particularly suspicious of certain hawala shops in the south-western Pakistani city of Quetta, which has long served as a rear base for members of the Taliban’s high command.

In November, the U.S. Treasury Department slapped sanctions on Rahat, an Afghan hawala shop, saying the Taliban had deposited $500,000 in its Quetta office. Its owner, a hawaladar named Haji Mohammed Qasim, had been arrested in Afghanistan on September 15. (He was also sanctioned, along with his Quetta branch manager, Musa Kalim).

While Afghanistan’s hawala network might seem like one of the more exotic branches of the financial system, its tendrils ultimately terminate in the more familiar hubs of London and New York. Recent U.S. investigations into allegations of money-laundering against banks such as Standard Chartered and HSBC raise the question of whether the real rewards from an ever-more globalised illicit economy may be reaped by tie-wearing lenders in the West.

The United States carried out more drone strikes in Afghanistan this year than it has done in all the years put together in Pakistan since it launched the covert air war there eight years ago.  With all the attention and hand wringing  focused on the operations in Pakistan, it’s remarkable that such a ramp-up just over the border has gone virtually unnoticed.

The two battlegrounds are not the same, of course. Afghanistan is an open and hot battlefield where U.S. forces are deployed and the drones are part of the air support available to troops. Pakistan is a sovereign nation and the United States is not in a state of war with it and so you wouldn’t expect the same pace of operations, even though U.S. commanders say the Taliban insurgency draws its sustenance from the sanctuaries in the Pakistani northwest.

U.S. Air Force statistics published by Wired’s Danger Room blog showed there were 447 drone strikes in Afghanistan this year, up from 294 the previous year and 279 in 2010. It is far more than an estimated 338 strikes carried out by the CIA in Pakistan since it began hunting down remnants of al Qaeda, the Taliban and other militant groups  in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas eight years ago. The number of strikes in Yemen and Somalia together is 46 over the past decade, notwithstanding the high decibel noise over these missions.

It’s a clear sign the United States is changing the way it is fighting the war in Afghanistan. As the troop drawdown gathers pace ahead of withdrawal in 2014, the smaller number of forces left behind on the ground,  especially quick reaction teams, are depending more and more on air strikes to fight the insurgents. And these Predator aircraft which can loiter in an area for as long as 20 hours, are a low cost alternative to having F-18s fly all over the country to carry out these strikes, as Joshua Foust, a fellow at the American Security Project, told me.

Unlike the remotely piloted flights  in Pakistan run by the CIA,  local military commanders order such operations in Afghanistan, usually to help troops under fire. But they are also used by Special Forces for targeted killings as in Pakistan if intelligence points that way or to thwart insurgents trying to plant roadside bombs, still the biggest killer of foreign and local forces.

If you crunch the USAF numbers further, the number of sorties  carried out in Afghanistan dropped to 27,085 this year from 34,286 in 2011 and 32,928 in 2010, the surge years. So while the broader air campaign is winding down in step with the ground troops packing their bags, the proportion of drone flights is going up. The United Kingdom has made an urgent purchase of five more Reaper drones to double the number of these unmanned aircraft carrying out combat and surveillance, The Guardian reported in October, even as it prepares to haul its troops and equipment out of southern Afghanistan. Perhaps the idea is to fight this war a bit longer, but from a distance with robots making up for the lack of boots on the ground.

One piece of argument in support of greater use of unmanned aerial vehicles is that because they stay long and slow over an area  undetected, unlike a bomber aircraft, and are equipped with powerful video cameras, the chances of getting it wrong and killing civilians are reduced. Commanders have been known to stack drones upon drones over a compound to track all movement for hours before unleashing a Hellfire missile.

Still, ultimately it’s a judgement call made by teams on the ground and in the rear and these have sometimes gone wrong in the past. Just because you see two people digging something in the ground on your video screen and because that happens to be in an area used by militants doesn’t necessarily mean they are planting bombs. And perhaps there isn’t much time  in cases such as this to act. You could conclude the diggers are innocent and then have one of your patrol members blown up soon afterwards on that stretch of road. It’s a war out there, better to act than risk your men’s lives by doing nothing.

Der Spiegel has a harrowing account of a former drone pilot who has seen both ends of the war from his bunker in New Mexico. He talks here of his first mission in Iraq when his job was to watch over a group of U.S. soldiers returning to their base camp as their guardian angel. He picked up what looked like an improvised explosive device on his screen and told his supervisor who relayed it to the command centre. But the soldiers on the ground couldn’t be reached because they were using a jamming transmitter and so the drone pilot saw the soldiers’ vehicle blow up on his screen killing five of them. From then on, he couldn’t keep the  five out of his thoughts.

Until another mission, this time over a  mud house in northern Afghanistan where seconds after he pressed the button on a Hellfire missile a child stepped into the frame. A part of the house was obliterated and there was no sign of the kid. The operator and his colleague were left to agonise over whether the child was dead, and worse — never knowing for sure.

It’s been another brutal year of fighting in Afghanistan. While a spike in green-on-blue attacks has justifiably grabbed attention because of the cracks it has exposed within the military coalition, Afghans themselves are paying an increasingly higher price as they get pitchforked into the centre of the battle.

More than 300 Afghan soldiers and policemen are dying each month, Afghanistan’s defence ministry spokesman said earlier this month. He said the deaths had risen largely because local forces had taken over security responsibilities covering 75 percent of the population and were therefore taking higher casualties. Still, losing 10 members of the security forces each day is a worrying statistic. At this rate, Afghan national forces are going to lose nearly twice as many men in a year than the United States has lost since it invaded the country in 2001.

Are they being thrown into battle too early in their training? A Pentagon study released this week found that only one of the Afghan National Army’s (ANA) 23 brigades is able to operate independently without air or other military support from the United States and NATO partners.

There is some progress, though. A little over a year ago just one out of 582 units of the army and police together was judged to be able to operate independently. Now they have advanced to independent operations by  a whole brigade, which typically mean 3,000 to 5,000 soldiers.

It’s slow, but it’s not easy even getting here. More than 95 percent of recruits in the army and police are functionally illiterate. A NATO training instructor in Kabul this summer showed me the picture books they were using to help recruits read simple words, write their name and count to a thousand in either Pashto or Dari.  She  said the mandate was somehow to get the strapping 20-year-olds  or even older reading and writing skills of a third-grader in the Afghan system, typically an 8-year-old.

Many in the army were unable to read instructions on how to maintain a vehicle, fill out a form for the issue of equipment, or read a serial number to distinguish their weapon from another – all basic soldiering duties anywhere in the world. The policeman couldn’t read the law he was supposed to enforce.

From such beginnings and an ethnically divided nation to build a modern, all-classes mixed fighting force of 350,000 men, and that too, in the middle of a worsening war is remarkable. While the British took a whole century to build a native army in India beginning from 1757 through a mix of trial and error,  the Americans are trying to fashion a new national Afghan army in a mere 11 years, Gautam Das, a former Indian army officer who has helped train Afghan officers of an earlier period, writes in The Small Wars Journal.

Das also points out a key difference in the British and American approaches to constructing the two armies drawn from different religious, ethnic and regional backgrounds. The British adapted the  regiment system to the Indian army in which regiments had  a fixed class composition, drawn from a particular region or ethnic group. Thus a regiment would consist of companies of  Sikh   soldiers or Hindu Dogra Rajputs or Muslim “Pathans” and then just so they didn’t pull in different directions these regiments would be mixed up into bigger  battalions.  Thus an infantry battalion would be built up of different class-based companies cooperating with each other while also keeping an eye on each other.

The American-designed ANA, in contrast, is meant to be  an all-classes nationalist force with combat units reflecting Afghanistan’s  ethnic mix of Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras. Indeed the ANA itself is supposed to be a unifying force bridging the ethnic divide that has made the country  so vulnerable to conflict and civil wars. Quite the opposite of what the British were partly trying to do by fostering a regimental ‘esprit de corps’  and keeping any feelings of ‘Indian-ness” in check.

While the officer corps is still slightly Tajik-heavy, the ANA as a whole is a little over 40 percent Pashtun, nearly a third Tajik followed by the Hazaras, Uzbeks and the other smaller ethnic groups reflecting the broad composition of the country. Its an obvious strength, but it also a potential risk. What if soldiers of one ethnic group refuse to take part in operations for some reason or the other; perhaps they don’t want to go on an operation in a Pashtun-dominated area or there is some other cause for disaffection.  Because the men are in every combat unit,  rather than  disaggregated into separate companies as the British Indian army did –  and continues to, in great degree, to this day-  it  means the operational effectiveness of the whole ANA would be compromised.

So far they have held up, and are, by far, the most respected of the array of security forces  that have been set up to defend the Afghan state as foreign forces leave.  There are concerns over high desertion rates and the lack of training, which afflict all classes. It must also be hard to build up a spirit of camaraderie overnight between people with a fiercely different sense of their identities,  but there haven’t been any reports of infighting within the combat units.

This week, 35-year-old Cheema published his most ambitious investigation yet. The leaked tax details (pdf) of 446 Pakistani legislators and ministers showed that nearly 70 percent did not even file a tax return, highlighting the lax regulatory environment and tax loopholes that allow many Pakistani millionaire lawmakers to pay no income tax at all.

Of those that did pay, most paid less than $1,000. A 2010 study (pdf) found the average legislator had assets of $800,000.

Cheema’s report was the first time such a detailed trove of information had been released, and underlines an important cause of Pakistan’s instability: the government’s failure to provide services for tens of millions of poor citizens. Schools and hospitals are crumbling because the government has no money to pay for them. Authorities refuse to crack down on tax cheats. Among the beneficiaries of the lax enforcement, Cheema’s report showed, are the politicians themselves.

Such investigative journalism can be dangerous in Pakistan, named as one of the most deadly countries in the world to report from by the Committee to Protect Journalists. Seven journalists were killed in Pakistan in 2011, and many more were attacked.

With his rectangular, wire-rimmed glasses and stripy sweaters, Cheema seems an unlikely revolutionary. He is the son of a village primary school teacher and a housewife and wanted to become a bureaucrat. But he decided to try journalism, becoming a trainee in the summer of 2001. It was a hot, slow summer. Then New York and Washington were attacked.

Cheema’s stories for The News on the military and intelligence services made him famous. He got a scholarship to the London School of Economics and a fellowship at the New York Times, named after reporter Daniel Pearl, who was beheaded in Pakistan’s port city of Karachi. But although Cheema enjoyed the travel, he wanted to go home and put his new skills to use.

“When I was in the U.S. and the U.K., I started thinking, ‘Who am I?’” he said. “Everything I learned was useless unless I put it into practice.”

He returned to Pakistan and in 2010, he registered the Center for Investigative Reporting  to promote the kind of long-term investigations he saw in other countries.

But it wasn’t just foreigners who had been reading his stories on the intelligence services. One night he was driving home when a vehicle pulled up behind him. Another one stopped in front. Armed men in unfamiliar uniforms emerged. They hooded him and drove him to an interrogation room.

Suddenly, Cheema found himself face down, naked and blindfolded. His captors started beating him with whips and sticks. Then they roughly shaved off his hair, eyebrows and mustache, leaving him with a bleeding scalp. Finally they dumped him far outside of town with a warning to watch his coverage. The men have never been identified and the investigations have not been released.

Cheema was shaken but not discouraged.

“It was a testimony that I am doing something important,” he said. He is driven by the thought of helping shape the country his young son and daughter will one day inherit.

A part of that is holding Pakistan’s politicians to account through the release of data like their tax history. The country’s media has only been free for a few years, and journalists are often subject to pressures from sources and publishers, he said.

He hopes his Center for Investigative Reporting in Pakistan will promote the type of long-term investigations that are will force politicians to keep their promises.

“Even if I can’t fix everything in Pakistan, there should not be regret on my part that I didn’t try,” he said quietly. “Silence is not an option.”