U.S. President-elect Barack Obama has assured Pakistani President Asif Al Zardari of his support for democracy in the frontline nation during a telephone call on Friday, Pakistan’s official state agency said.

Obama’s conversation was part of a round of phone calls he made to world leaders including Britain, Israel, Japan, Australia, France and Germany, mainly to thank them for their messages of congratulation following his victory.

Pakistan’s The News in a report from Washington said Obama conveyed his full support to help Pakistan overcome its financial difficulties as also face down the threat from militants.

He said he was keen for better ties between the two allies in the war against militancy and to settle differences arising from U.S. missile strikes inside Pakistan, the newspaper said.

The call came days after Pakistan’s leaders told the head of the U.S. central command, General David Petraeus, to stop missile strikes into Pakistan because they were counter-productive and difficult to explain in a democracy..

How will this play out? There are lives involved, and if women and children are going to continue to die in these strikes, the cautious enthusiasm with which  Pakistanis have greeted Obama’s ascent to power will quickly dissipate. 

Obama himself several times during the campaign said that he was willing to strike targets inside Pakistan if Islamabad was unable or unwilling to do so. Will that hold?

Meanwhile over the border in New Delhi, the press at least is working itself up into lather over the Obama phone call that never came.  The idea that the U.S. President-elect called leaders of 15 nations and especially Pakistan, and not Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, doesn’t help advance India’s great power ambitions.

But The Times of India quoted an Indian diplomat as saying that New Delhi shouldn’t be over-reacting, arguing that it should consider itself better off that it was “not in the same crisis league”, referring obviously to Pakistan

And in any case, India has cried itself hoarse in the past that U.S. relations with India and Pakistan should not be a zero-sum game. So why this re-hyphenation?

Pakistan cropped up with uncomfortable regularity during the U.S. presidential campaign, but listening to Barack Obama and John McCain it was difficult to discern how different their approach would be in dealing with one of America’s most complicated and conflicted allies.
  

Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari met leaders of both the Democrat and Republican camps just weeks after his own election in September, but unfortunately the controversy stirred by his unguarded compliment for Sarah Palin earned more comment than the substance of those meetings.

During his campaign, Obama stated his readiness to order U.S. forces to undertake operations on Pakistani territory to eliminate al Qaeda or terrorist threats if Pakistan was unprepared or unable to act.

McCain admonished Obama for saying such things out loud as it created diplomatic problems for an allied government, yet there was little to suggest that McCain would behave differently in terms of military strategy.
 
Most Pakistanis are left to conclude that whoever wins today’s election, there will be more American troops in Afghanistan, more unrest in the ethnic Pashtun belt either side of the Afghan-Pakistani border, more U.S. missile strikes, and the constant threat that U.S. ground troops will be let off the leash in Pakistani tribal lands. (more…)

Pakistan will begin talks with the International Monetary Fund over the next few days to secure funding to avert a balance of payments crisis, the IMF said in a statement from Washington.

The statement came after days of speculation that seemed to have gathered pace after President Asif Ali Zardari’s trip to China where according to these media reports he failed to win a commitment for cash to shore up the country’s reserves, barely enough to cover six weeks of imports.

“The amount of Fund financing under a stand-by arrangement has yet to be determined. Financing could be made within the framework of the Fund’s Emergency Financing Mechanism,” IMF Managing Director Dominique Strauss-Kahn said.

Pakistan needs $10 to $15 billion of support from foreign lenders, according to Shaukat Tarin, adviser to the prime minister on economic affairs.

Inflation in Pakistan is running close to 25 percent, the budget deficit is unsustainable, government borrowing from the central bank has squeezed liquidity in the banking system, and the international bond market has priced in a debt default.

Such reports of a fast-approaching economic meltdown and even talk that this could be Asia’s Iceland would rattle any country, given the instinctive resistance to approaching the IMF with all its dreaded conditionalities.

But it made me think of India’s financial emergency in 1991 when a balance of payments crisis forced the country to pledge its gold abroad. The ignominy of the country’s gold being shipped to Britain to finance imports for a nation with a long colonial history and even longer memories was enough to silence most critics when the government shortly afterwards approached the IMF for loan. Here is a question from parliament then Finance Minister Manmohan Singh answered.

There was a silver lining though. India launched the most sweeping economic reforms that year dismantling decades of license raj, and didn’t ever look back although progress was fitful in the first few years.

Perhaps this may well turn out to be Pakistan’s moment as it steps back from the abyss?

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari told a joint session of parliament last month he was committed to wide-ranging constitutional reforms including surrendering the power of the president to dismiss elected governments — a power that many Pakistanis feel has brought much grief to the nation. He also pledged his faith in an independent judiciary and said all outstanding matters would be resolved in line with the constitution.

Those promises have slipped somewhat from public view in recent weeks, preoccupied as the nation and those with a stake in it are with the multiple security challenges and a looming economic meltdown.

But according to the International Crisis Group,  the worsening violence has made it even more necessary that judicial reforms be carried out so that the country’s transition to civilian rule is strengthened after eight years of military rule.

In a report on reforming the judiciary, the influential Brussels-based think tank says the civilian government has an opportunity to reverse the tide of  radicalism in Pakistan by restoring the rule of law and repealing discriminatory religious laws that it says restrict fundamental rights, fuel extremism and destabilize the country.

It lists measures such as the blasphemy law, anti-Ahmadi laws, Hudood Ordinances and Qisas (retribution) and Diyat (blood money) as part of the legacy of military rule that it says discriminate on the basis of religion and gender. 

Here is the full report as a PDF file calling for the honouring of a pledge to repeal Article 58 -2 (b) which gives the president power to dismiss elected governments, and for the reinstatement of all deposed judges, including Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry.

If your country is desperate to stave off economic collapse, there is probably no better place to visit, and no better friend to have, than China right now. With $2 trillion in foreign exchange reserves, China is sheltered from the worst of the financial storm, so much so that many are looking at it to play a part in hauling the global economy into calmer waters. 

Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari begins a trip to China on Tuesday on what is being billed as his first official visit abroad – his earlier trip to the United States has been presented as one to attend the U.N. General Assembly.

Pakistan has long seen China as its most reliable friend, in contrast to the United States, whose support has waxed and waned in line with U.S. strategic interests in the region. And China in turn has long been content to provide quiet support, avoiding the brashness of the United States while building a relationship with an ally that could be used as a counterweight to India. So there is nothing unusual about a Pakistani leader making China his first choice for a bilateral trip. (more…)

Pakistan’s new President Asif Ali Zardari is starting to challenge quite a few long-held positions.

India, he told the Wall Street Journal in an interview published over the weekend, ”has never been a threat to Pakistan.” For a country that has fought three wars with India, including one in 1971  that ended in humiliation and the birth of Bangladesh from what was East Pakistan, these are remarkable words.

Indeed for a country that said it would rather eat grass in order to pay to develop nuclear bombs if India did so, the  idea that India is not a threat is a whole game-changer.

Is that what Zardari, a businessmen who many see as without the baggage that politicians carry, has set himself to do ? He is even more provocative on Kashmir, speaking of the militant Islamic groups that operate there as “terrorists”.

His predecessor Pervez Musharraf would more likely have described them as “freedom fighters”, the Wall Street Journal says. Certainly it would be hard to recall any senior Pakistani leader, his assassinated wife and former prime minister Benazir Bhutto included, going so far as labelling the militants in Kashmir as terrorists.

Indeed, Nawaz Sharif’s Pakistan Muslim League seized on Zardari’s remarks, saying it would raise the issue in parliament. It said the renewed unrest in Kashmir, where a row over the transfer of land to a Hindu pilgrimage trust has snowballed into mass protests against Indian rule, had proved that the uprising  was indigenous.

Zardari also advocated strong trade ties with India,  arguing there was no other way for economic survival for countries like his.  “He imagines Pakistani cement factories being constructed to provide for India’s huge infrastructure needs, Pakistani textile mills meeting Indian demand for blue jeans, Pakistani ports being used to relieve the congestion at Indian ones,” the Wall Street Journal said, noting that for a country that had spent most of its existence trying to match its neighbour’s military strength, this new agenda was a remarkable recognition of India’s rise as a global power.

Trade between the two countries has been rising in recent years, but is still miniscule in relation to its potential, most experts say. So difficult have ties been in the past that Pakistan would rather import tea all the way from Kenya than procure it from India.

So for Zardari to talk of turning his long distrustful nation into a service centre/manufacturing base for India’s gigantic economy is a remarkable leap into the future.  
 

Depending on who you read, Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari was either an embarrassment for trying to flirt with Sarah Palin during his trip to New York last week, or a street-smart wheeler-dealer bravely standing up to Islamist militancy after the assassination of his wife Benazir Bhutto.

Time revisits the encounter between Zardari and Palin – in which he told the vice-presidential candidate she was gorgeous and threatened to hug her in a scene now frequently being replayed on YouTube – writing that it led to Zardari being “pilloried at home as a source of national embarrassment and accused of sexism and impropriety”.

In contrast, New York Times columnist Roger Cohen  was fulsome in his praise of a man filling what he calls ’the most dangerous job on earth’. This is one of the most positive, if not the most positive, reviews I have ever read about Zardari.

“My impression?” writes Cohen. “This guy’s very smart, street smart, a wheeler-dealer in an area full of them, secular, pro-American, committed to democracy, and brave. I never heard (former president Pervez) Musharraf frame Pakistan’s fight against terrorism with such candor. I believe he wants genuine conciliation with India and Afghanistan, essential to the region’s stability. (Positive meetings were held here with the Indian and Afghan leaders.). I care much less right now about his checkered past than about getting behind him for civilization’s sake.”

The Los Angeles Times says the jury is still out on whether Zardari, “an accidental president” thrust into the limelight by his wife’s assassination last year, can reinvent himself as a truly inspirational leader able to rally the country while also keeping the Pakistan Army on side. 

“In a country that has spent half its existence under military rule, Zardari, as a civilian leader, still maintains only tenuous control of the army,” it says.  The newspaper quotes Stephen Cohen, an expert on Pakistan at the Brookings Institution in Washington, as saying that “If the military doesn’t do what he wants it to do, he doesn’t have sovereignty.” Cohen adds: ”He’s been elected president, but that’s meaningless.”

As for Pakistan’s neighbours, Zardari seems to have won over Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who told CNN he sees a new opportunity to work with Pakistan to uproot militant sanctuaries on their shared border. This was in sharp contrast to Karzai’s  relationship with Musharraf, which was marked by both countries blaming the other for failing to crack down on the Taliban and al Qaeda.

And as for India? According to The Economic Times, India welcomed Zardari’s commitment to improving ties, but remained to be convinced that he could deliver on his promise to crack down on Islamist militants operating in both Afghanistan and Kashmir.  Adopting a similar line to that expressed by the Los Angeles Times, Indian newspapers have said that ”there are clearly ‘multiple centres of power’ now in Pakistan which makes it extremely difficult to be certain about deliverables.”

In the aftermath of the deadly hotel bombing in Islamabad, amidst fresh tensions with the United States over  helicopter intrusions in Pakistan’s northwest, and in spite of reports of fresh cross-border firing in Kashmir, negotiators from India and Pakistan met in New Delhi and agreed to open trade across Kashmir. There could hardly have been a more unlikely time for the two countries to agree to crack open one of the world’s most militarised frontiers, where a ceasefire which has more or less held since 2003 is beginning to fray at the edges.

To be sure, the neighbours have a passenger bus service twice a month that links the two parts of Kashmir under their control, but it is heavily restricted and travellers are subject to all sorts of clearances before they can get anywhere near it.

So opening up trade, and at a time like this when Pakistan is battling multiple challenges, does seem like a significant step. Does this mean there is a glimmer of hope in the otherwise pervasive sense of gloom spreading across the region? Or is this another one of those false dawns that the people of the two countries have seen too often in the past, and especially the people of Kashmir?

What the two countries will trade is the first question that springs to mind. And are these goods that are meant to be traded without any tarriffs to be produced in the two Kashmirs or will they be coming from somewhere else?

And then above all, is this initiative going to work at this point when unrest in Indian Kashmir over a land row involving Hindus has snowballed into massive anti-India protests of a scale last seen in 1989?

Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari, who said at his inauguration earlier this month that he expected some “good news” on Kashmir soon, and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh are expected to meet in New York this week where the details will likely become clearer.

One of the more recurrent themes in U.S. political punditry these days is the need to nudge India and Pakistan towards peace. The theory is that this would bolster the new civilian government in Islamabad by encouraging trade and economic development, reduce a rivalry that threatens regional stability, including in Afghanistan, and limit the role of the Pakistan Army, whose traditional dominance has been fuelled by a perceived threat from India.

So what are the chances of progress? (assuming the latest bombings just being reported in Delhi do not trigger a new downwards spiral)

President Asif Ali Zardari has got everyone talking by promising that there will soon be “good news” on Kashmir. An expected meeting  between Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Zardari on the sidelines of the United Nations General Assembly in New York later this month would also give the two leaders the chance to repair relations soured by the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul in July.  

It seems unlikely however, that India and Pakistan can make any real concessions on Kashmir, at a time when the people of the Kashmir Valley at the heart of the dispute have renewed their protests against Indian rule. In Pakistan this would be seen as a betrayal of the people of Kashmir, while in India the government would be accused of caving in to the protests.

One alternative would be to try to resolve the dispute over Siachen, an idea revived this week by Zardari , as a way of building trust and creating an atmosphere to make progress on Kashmir.

India and Pakistan have fought for control of the mountains overlooking the Siachen glacier since 1984, although there has been a ceasefire since 2003. Apart from the troops stationed on the world’s highest battlefield, there is nothing there but snow, ice and rocks (believe me, I’ve been there), and many commanders on both sides have long accepted the region has no strategic value.  Siachen, in the Karakoram mountains, is quite geographically distinct from the Kashmir Valley — it would take you three days to drive from the Kashmiri capital Srinagar to the Indian base camp in Siachen, and then only if you were lucky — and it is a far less explosive issue to tackle.  What has been lacking is the trust and political will to agree a mutual withdrawal.

Benazir Bhutto and Rajiv Gandhi came tantalisingly close to reaching a deal on Siachen in 1989 when they were young prime ministers seeking a fresh start for the region. With both now assassinated, it will be interesting to see whether their widowed spouses now in positions of power — Zardari in Pakistan and Sonia Gandhi in India as head of the ruling Congress party — try to complete what they started. 

Last week, after U.S. forces were reported to have launched their first ground assault in Pakistan, the website Registan.net asked the obvious question: “Did We Just Invade Pakistan?”  Nearly a week and several missile attacks by U.S. drones later, I am still pondering the same question.

We have just witnessed what may have been the most sustained U.S. military action against targets inside Pakistan, not just since 2001, but since 1947 when the country was founded.  Yet it is not any clearer what is going on.  The Council on Foreign Relations has produced an excellent round-up of media reports on Pakistan, published by the Washington Post. But I’d defy anyone to read through them and come up with a coherent hypothesis that does not immediately run into a contradiction.  Here are some of the ideas being discussed:

1) Washington has lost patience with Pakistan because it is not doing enough to root out al Qaeda and the Taliban on its border with Afghanistan, and has decided to go it alone (all the more so because the Bush administration would like a foreign policy success before the presidential election). This argument does not quite make sense, since as I noted in my last post, the stepped-up U.S. military operations happened after the Pakistan Army had launched its own offensives in Pakistan’s border areas. Plus, if we were to accept that the United States attacked because the Pakistan Army had failed, why are U.S. forces and drones targeting North and South Waziristan, while the Pakistan military launched its offensives elsewhere, in Bajaur and Swat?

2)  The United States is now working, if not in concert, at least not against, the civilian administration in Pakistan, whose new President, Asif Ali Zardari, has called the fight against terrorism a battle for Pakistan’s soul. According to this argument, the Pakistanis were very rattled earlier this year by fears that Peshawar, the capital of North West Frontier Province, might fall into Taliban hands. This could have led to the Balkanisation of Pakistan, encouraging other provinces to peel away from Punjab, the country’s traditional heartland. Therefore Pakistan and the United States share a common interest in driving out al Qaeda and the Taliban. According to this argument, there is some method in the madness – although critics mutter about echoes of Vietnam.

3) It is all chaos on the western front. This view holds that nobody has a master plan, there is no coordination and sometimes Pakistan and the United States are working against each other. In this context, the New York Times has a story about how soldiers in Pakistan’s Frontier Corps and U.S. troops ended up, it says, fighting against each other in June.   The argument here is that many in the Pakistan Army, or perhaps more precisely in the Frontier Corps, sympathise with the Taliban and will defend them against a U.S. attack.  The argument against would be, as I noted in an earlier post, that the leaders of the Pakistan Army were aware of this problem and had begun to take action to deal with it so that by now it is less of an issue.

That’s three possible theories, and there are more, in many different permutations.  As I have seen from the comments on previous posts, there are strong views out there on the answers. But maybe it would be a good idea to start with the questions?