Pakistan: Now or Never?

On Taliban talks and driving out al Qaeda

In the debate about the possibility of reaching a peace settlement with the Taliban in return for them breaking with al Qaeda, it has never been entirely clear how that breach would be defined. While on one hand the international community would expect the Taliban’s break with al Qaeda to be public and irreversible, few expect them to turn on al Qaeda’s leaders, preferring instead for them to leave the Afghanistan and Pakistan region.

 Somewhere in there is a huge grey area that has not yet got the attention it deserves. The Century Foundation in its newly released report (pdf) calling for a negotiated settlement to the Afghan war has come up with a suggestion which at least forms the basis of debate.  Its key point — or at least the one that jumped out at me — is that Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar would declare the jihad over: 

“The international community will resolutely insist that an acceptable and durable political settlement must include a verifiable severing of ties with al Qaeda and guarantees that Afghanistan could never again be a base from which transnational terrorists could threaten international peace and stability.”

“A political settlement in which the Taliban agreed to be a part of a pluralistic governing structure would have far-reaching symbolic importance in the larger struggle against violent extremism and transnational terrorism. One potentially useful message of the end of the conflict would be an announcement by the Afghan insurgents, including Mullah Mohammad Omar as the head of the Taliban and its spiritual leader, that the jihad has come to a close and that the political settlement represents a definitive cessation of hostilities. This public statement could also reaffirm clearly the dedication of the Taliban to national Afghan goals and again emphasize the severing of ties with al Qaeda and any other transnational terrorist networks. It could declare that Afghanistan will not be used as a safe haven for terrorist groups and will not be allowed to serve as a base for regional destabilization.”

An announcement by Mullah Omar that the Afghan jihad had come to a close would be a powerful repudiation of al Qaeda’s own global agenda and would in itself constitute a significant ideological breach. That is not to suggest it will happen — publicly the Taliban rejects talks until all foreign forces leave Afghanistan — but it’s an interesting idea nonetheless.

Meanwhile on the subject of talks, Pakistani daily The Express Tribune has reported that the government has opened peace talks with the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and other militant groups in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan. The report follows speculation that Pakistan might be planning an expanded military operation in North Waziristan. The two are not mutually incompatible — if Pakistan wanted to succeed in talks, it would probably want to convince the TTP that it had them cornered and they had an interest in coming to the table.   In this context, it is worth noting that Rahimullah Yusufzai, one of the most respected journalists on the tribal areas, has argued that the TTP has lost the trust of the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqani network over its execution of two former members of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency who it had kidnapped in North Waziristan.

Here is what The Express Tribune had to say about the reported talks with the TTP.  ”The authorities, however, have made it clear to the TTP and others that no role of al Qaeda is to be accepted at any level in these negotiations…”

from India Insight:

Amnesty says hundreds detained in Kashmir without charge or trial

Amnesty International has accused the government of detaining hundreds of people each year in Kashmir without charge or trial under a "draconian" Indian law.

The rights group said India's Public Safety Act (PSA)  had been used to detain up to 20,000 people without trial over the past two decades. Public Safety Act allows for detention without trial for up to two years.

Tens of thousands have died in the disputed region, which India and Pakistan claim in full but rule in parts, since a revolt against New Delhi's broke out in 1989.

"The Jammu and Kashmir authorities are using PSA detentions as a revolving door to keep people they can’t or won’t convict through proper legal channels locked up and out of the way," said Sam Zarifi, Amnesty International’s Asia-Pacific Director.

Here's the Amnesty International report released in Srinagar on Monday.

Earlier in January, U.N. special rapporteur on human rights defenders, Margaret Sekaggya, also called for reforms including the repeal of laws giving security forces wide powers of arrest across Kashmir.

Rebel violence is on decline. But there has been a resurgence of street protests across the strife-torn region. At least 110 people were killed last year and dozens were wounded, mostly by police bullets, during the protests, the biggest in 21 years.

The “sound and fury” of U.S.-Pakistan ties (Part II)

I have (somewhat belatedly) got around to reading the full text of the statement made by Pakistan Army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani condemning last week’s drone strike in North Waziristan which killed more than 40 people. The strike has reignited tensions with Washington, and came only a day after Pakistan released Raymond Davis, the CIA contractor who shot dead two Pakistanis, after a bruising row with the United States. 

The Pakistani media has put forward many reasons as to why Kayani issued such a public condemnation, and indeed on why the United States chose to  launch such a lethal drone attack just as tempers were beginning to cool over the Davis row (for a must-read round up of the different views of officials and analysts in Peshawar, see Cyril Almeida at Dawn.)

One of the more interesting explanations lies in the statement itself (my italics):

“Chief of Army Staff, General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, strongly condemns the Predator Strike carried out today in North Waziristan Agency resulting into loss of innocent lives. It is highly regrettable that a jirga of peaceful citizens including elders of the area was carelessly and callously targeted with complete disregard to human life. In complete violation of human rights, such acts of violence take us away from our objective of elimination of terrorism. It is imperative to understand that this critical objective can not be sacrificed for temporary tactical gains. Security of people of Pakistan, in any case, stands above all.”

His criticism of the United States putting tactical gains ahead of the longer-term needs of battling terrorism goes to the heart of the mismatch between U.S. and Pakistani priorities. The United States, keen to end the war in Afghanistan, needs Pakistan’s help quickly in fighting militants on its side of the border. Pakistan says it can’t fight all militant groups at once and that moving too fast would unleash fresh instability in Pakistan itself.

This ambivalence by Pakistan is often presented as evidence of duplicity, with the many critics of the country’s approach to militancy arguing that while it is allied to the United States, it continues to support militant groups that can be used against India. But then, read Kayani’s statement in conjunction with this WikiLeaks cable published by The Hindu to understand why none of this is as black-and-white as some would have you believe.

The “sound and fury” of U.S.-Pakistan ties

With the release of CIA contractor Raymond Davis, the United States and Pakistan have put behind them one of the more public rows of their up-and-down relationship.  It was probably not the worst row — remember the furore over a raid by U.S. ground troops in Angor Adda in Waziristan in 2008, itself preceded  by a deluge of leaks to the U.S. media about the alleged duplicity of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency in its dealings on Afghanistan.

But it was certainly one which by its very nature was guaranteed to get the most attention – an American who shot dead two Pakistanis in what he said was an act of self-defence, denied diplomatic immunity and ultimately released only after the payment of blood money. Adding to the drama were two intelligence agencies battling behind the scenes.

It was also the first serious row since the Obama administration began to build what it promised would be a new strategic relationship with Pakistan.

As I wrote earlier this month, overall relations between the United States and Pakistan were rather better than they looked (or at least than they appeared at the height of the Davis row).  Compared to two years ago, Pakistan is more likely to talk now about the need for stability in Afghanistan than strategic depth (the extent of this shift is open to debate). The United States has also moved closer towards meeting Pakistan’s calls for a political settlement in Afghanistan by holding direct talks with representatives of the Taliban, according to several official sources with knowledge of those contacts.

On the subject of Taliban talks, the New York Times noted that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, during a speech to the Asia Society last month, “appeared to recast longstanding preconditions for talks: that the insurgents lay down their arms, accept the Afghan Constitution and separate from Al Qaeda. Instead, she described them as ‘necessary outcomes’. ”

According to the NYT, “officially, the State Department played down the change in language, but a senior Western diplomat in Washington, who was familiar with the strategy behind Mrs. Clinton’s speech, said: ‘It was not intentional to explicitly make preconditions into outcomes. But the text now leaves room for interpretation, which opens doors.’”

The other half of that story is to look at who first suggested that the United States focus on outcomes rather than preconditions for talks  – Pakistan Army chief General Ashfaq Kayani, who wrote a detailed letter to President Barack Obama last year outlining how he saw the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Guest contribution-a tribute to Shahbaz Bhatti

(The following is a guest contribution. Reuters is not responsible for the content and the views expressed are the author’s alone. The writer is Pakistan’s High Commissioner to the UK)

SHAHBAZ BHATTI: A TRIBUTE TO A BRAVE HEART

By Wajid Shamsul Hasan

Shahbaz Bhatti’s memorial meeting at the Pakistan High Commission (March 16) was a profoundly sad occasion for all to remember a person who laid down his life for a united and strong Pakistan.

This tribute to him is a humble acknowledgement – in solemn gratitude – of his selfless struggle for the high and noble ideals he so cherished. Those ideals have been a clarion call for every Pakistani to make his country – our country – a place where every citizen has equal rights without fear or favour.

Bhatti laid down his life at a time when he was most needed. In his official capacity, he represented the interests of Pakistan’s religious minorities. However, Bhatti also stood for the vision of Pakistan’s founding father, Quaid-e Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah, that in Pakistan all its citizens will enjoy equal rights, irrespective of caste, creed, colour or gender. Its politics was to be characterised by pluralism, the rule of law, the freedom to practice all faiths and that religion will have nothing to do with the business of the state.

Therefore, it would not be a befitting tribute to the fallen hero if he is just branded as a leader of the minorities or Christians. He belonged to all those brave hearts ready to sacrifice for the alleviation of the sufferings of the common people. Punjab Governor Salman Taseer died for the same noble ideals. So did Shaheed Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto.

Will S. Arabia broker a deal to repair Pakistan-US ties?

With the U.S.-Pakistan dispute over CIA contractor Raymond Davis stuck in Pakistani courts, newspapers are reporting that the two countries’ common ally, Saudi Arabia, may step in to defuse the deepening crisis between them.

The high court in Lahore, where Davis shot dead two people in what he said was an act of self-defence in January, on Monday declined to rule on whether he  has diplomatic immunity. The court referred the question of immunity to a criminal court which is dealing with murder charges against him.

Given Pakistan’s cumbersome legal system which takes years to resolve disputes, something which both the United States and Pakistan would like to avoid, Pakistani newspapers say  Saudi Arabia is playing a behind-the-scenes role to find an out of court settlement.

“All eyes on Saudi role in resolving Davis row,” read a headline in daily The News on March 9. 

According to the report, the Saudi government would try to resolve the issue in line with Qisas — an Islamic injunction which allows the settlement of murder cases through payment of blood-money to the relatives.

The News said Marc Grossman, the new U.S. envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan who replaced Richard Holbrooke, discussed the issue of payment of Qisas with Saudi authorities on the sidelines of an international conference in Jeddah earlier this month.

Titled “Saudi ambassador comes up with ‘Raymond offer’, daily The Nation reported that Saudi envoy to Pakistan, Abdul Aziz bin Ibrahim al Ghadeer, discussed the issue separately with Pakistan’s interior minister Rehman Malik last week.

Keeping Raymond Davis and Lashkar-e-Taiba in perspective

According to the New York Times, Raymond Davis, the CIA contractor arrested in Pakistan for shooting dead two Pakistanis in what he says was an act of self-defence, was working with a CIA team monitoring the Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group.

The article, by Washington-based Mark Mazzetti, was not the first to make this assertion. The NYT itself had already raised it, while Christine Fair made a similar point in her piece for The AfPak Channel last week (with the intriguing detail that “though the ISI knew of the operation, the agency certainly would not have approved of it.”)

But it was the first article I’ve seen which focused almost exclusively on U.S. anxieties about the Lashkar-e-Taiba — blamed for the 2008 attack on Mumbai — while also linking these explicitly to the furore over the Raymond Davis case:

“The CIA team Mr. Davis worked with, according to American officials, had among its assignments the task of secretly gathering intelligence about Lashkar-e-Taiba, the militant ‘Army of the Pure’. Pakistan’s security establishment has nurtured Lashkar for years as a proxy force to attack targets and enemies in India and in the Indian-controlled part of Kashmir. These and other American officials, all of whom spoke only on condition of anonymity, are now convinced that Lashkar is no longer satisfied being the shadowy foot soldiers in Pakistan’s simmering border conflict with India. It goals have broadened, these officials say, and Lashkar is committed to a campaign of jihad against the United States and Europe, and against American troops in Afghanistan.”

My first reaction to this was that it was not particularly new – we already knew the Americans were worried about the Lashkar-e-Taiba. My follow-up comment is that there is a danger of conflating the very specific row over Raymond Davis with longer-term arguments over the militant group. The two are not one and the same, even though they may overlap. And while rationally everyone knows this, politically such conflation is important, since it feeds all too often into a “pundit consensus” made up of emotion and impression.

 So here is a summary of my understanding of the history of the U.S. view of the Lashkar-e-Taiba based on conversations with officials and analysts (and on which, for fear of falling into pundit consensus traps myself, I am happy to be challenged.)

The United States, much to India’s annoyance, was initially reluctant to take on all militant groups in Pakistan, focusing primarily on seeking Islamabad/Rawalpindi’s help on tackling al Qaeda following the Sept. 11 attacks.  Yet, according to counter-terrorism experts, in adopting this stance Washington had failed to understand the way in which militant groups had changed in the 1990s from those with vertical hierarchies and clear agendas into a much more polymorphous, overlapping and horizontal movement. Among those who stressed this new development was former French investigating magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguiere, who complained that even after 9/11.  the Pakistan Army was still running training camps for the Lashkar-e-Taiba with the full knowledge of the CIA.

Towards a review of Pakistan’s blasphemy laws

After two assassinations, Pakistani politicians are finally beginning to address tensions over the country’s blasphemy laws.

Interior Minister Rehman Malik said in an interview politicians should be able to reach a cross-party consensus on preventing the misuse of the blasphemy laws, as proposed by Maulana Fazl-ur-Rehman, head of the Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI-F) religious party. ”Its misuse is being, of course, taken into account and the party leaders are going to sit together as proposed by Maulana Fazl-ur-Rehman … and I hope this matter can be thrashed out, whenever this meeting takes place.” 

Two senior politicians, Punjab Governor Salman Taseer and Minorities Minister Shahbaz Bhatti, were assassinated this year after they called for amendments to the blasphemy laws, which critics say are often misused to settle personal scores.  The row over the blasphemy laws has become one of most incendiary issues in Pakistan, highlighting the dominance of the religious right which has been able to bring out thousands into the streets to protest against any changes to the laws.  Taseer’s self-confessed killer, Mumtaz Qadri, was celebrated as a hero by many.

Fazl-ur-Rehman, who quit the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP)-led government in December after a row over the sacking of one of his ministers, has been a vocal defender of the blasphemy laws. However, Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper quoted him as saying last week that “if a law is being misused against minorities we are ready to discuss this.”  In a follow-up commentary, Dawn called it “a climbdown from his customary hardline position”.

The row over the blasphemy laws was only part of a growing trend  towards extremism in Pakistan, it said. “However unwittingly, the JUI-F leader has also provided the key to the only conceivable way out of this frightening situation. The clear and present danger of extremism can only be countered if all parties, particularly those whose focus is spreading religious ideology, work together on a consensus that taking the law into one’s own hands, regardless of the issue at stake, is unacceptable.”

Interior Minister Malik said Fazl-ur-Rehman’s proposals would be likely to gain support, without giving details. “Everybody, I think will follow him in this connection.”

The intervention of Fazl-ur-Rehman, who despite his pro-Taliban credentials has had good ties with the secular-leaning PPP, appears to have coincided with an improvement in relations with the ruling party after the December falling-out.

Pakistan’s debate on drones, lifting the secrecy

In a rare admission of the effectiveness of drone strikes, a senior Pakistani military officer has said most of those killed are hard-core militants, including foreigners, according to Dawn newspaper.

It quotes Major-General Ghayur Mehmood as telling reporters at a briefing in Miramshah, in North Waziristan, that, “Myths and rumours about US predator strikes and the casualty figures are many, but it’s a reality that many of those being killed in these strikes are hardcore elements, a sizeable number of them foreigners.”

“Yes there are a few civilian casualties in such precision strikes, but a majority of those eliminated are terrorists, including foreign terrorist elements,” he said.

The comments may not have been entirely authorised — the New York Times quoted Pakistan Army spokesman Major General Athar Abbas as playing down the remarks. Abbas called them a “personal assessment”. ”General Abbas emphasised that the army supported the public policy of the government that drone strikes inside Pakistani territory ‘do more harm than good’,” the newspaper said.

And nor were they an unqualified endorsement of the attacks in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.  According to Dawn, “Maj-Gen Ghayur, who is in charge of troops in North Waziristan, admitted that the drone attacks had negative fallout, scaring the local population and causing their migration to other places. Gen Ghayur said the drone attacks also had social and political repercussions and law-enforcement agencies often felt the heat.”

But it is unlikely that such a high-ranking officer would have made such comments if they did not reflect the thinking of the army leadership.  The big question now is on whether they have lifted the lid on what has become a truly poisonous debate within Pakistan on drone attacks.

It has long been an open secret that the drone attacks are carried out with the tacit endorsement of the Pakistani military, with Pakistani intelligence helping to identify targets on the ground.  Yet their covert nature, and a widespread view propagated by some sections of the media that most of those killed are civilians, has fuelled anti-Americanism and stoked conspiracy theories about U.S. intentions in Pakistan.

From Afghanistan to Libya; rethinking the role of the military

In a report this month calling for faster progress on a political settlement on Afghanistan, the influential UK parliamentary foreign affairs committee was unusually critical of the dominance of the military in setting Afghan policy.

“We conclude that there are grounds for concern over the relationship between the military and politicians. We further conclude that this relationship has, over a number of years, gone awry and needs to be re-calibrated  … we believe that problems in Afghanistan highlight the need for a corresponding cultural shift within Whitehall to ensure that those charged with taking foreign policy decisions and providing vitally important political leadership are able to question and appraise military advice with appropriate vigour,” it said.

During its enquiries, based on interviews with regional experts and officials, “we gained the impression that the sheer size and power of the U.S. military ensured that the U.S. military remained largely in control of U.S. Afghan policy,” it added.

It also quoted former UK special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles, as saying that conversations between the U.S. and British military “end up with things being pre-cooked between the U.S. and the UK militaries before they are subject to political approval back in London …”

“In Sir Sherard Cowper-Coles’s view, the war in Afghanistan gave the British Army a raison d’être it has lacked for many years, new resources on an unprecedented scale and a chance to redeem itself in the eyes of the U.S. following criticisms about the army’s performance in Basra, Iraq.”

The comments in the report struck me as interesting, primarily because they were included at all – “civ-mil” relations are not usually a hot topic for political debate in Britain.  Otherwise they seemed to be largely a reflection of a far more heated discussion in Washington over the extent to which the U.S. military has come to dominate American foreign policy in the years following the Sept 11, 2001 attacks and during two major wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For recent articles on the subject see Stephen Walt at Foreign Policy or Franz-Stefan Gady at the Small Wars Journal (pdf)

For some time now, it has become conventional wisdom that the military has dominated strategy in Afghanistan — when the army asked President Barack Obama for more troops, they got them.  And the pundit consensus has been that Obama, after sacking two generals, had little room for manoeuvre even if he wanted to challenge the decisions made by his commander, the politically powerful General David Petraeus.