Pakistan: Now or Never?

Pakistani papers retract WikiLeaks story on India

Leading Pakistani newspapers have retracted stories that appear to have partly depended on fake WikiLeaks cables to support long-standing Pakistani allegations against India, particularly in causing instability inside Pakistan. The stories also quoted U.S. diplomats as ridculing India and its army.

The News ran a story saying its report was inaccurate and had been picked up from a local news agency.  The report had originated, it said, in websites “known for their close connections with certain intelligence agencies”.

The Express Tribune said that it “deeply regrets publishing this story without due verification and apologises profusely for any inconvenience caused to our valued readers.”

Britain’s Guardian newspaper, which had advance access to the cables, said that, “an extensive search of the WikiLeaks database by the Guardian by date, name and keyword failed to locate any of the incendiary allegations. It suggests this is the first case of WikiLeaks being exploited for propaganda purposes.”

As discussed in yesterday’s post, Pakistan being what it is, suspicion has fallen on its intelligence agencies for planting the story.  If so, it was a fairly spectacular own goal, as it distracted attention from actual WikiLeak cables. These brought into the public domain for the first time a view by British intelligence that India was supporting separatists in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province – a long-standing complaint made by Islamabad and denied by New Delhi.  According to the Guardian, “the real cables do contain allegations of Indian support for Baloch separatists, largely sourced to British intelligence assessments.”

Meanwhile, just to give a flavour of where the WikiLeaks debate is going in Pakistan itself, here is journalist Ahmed Quraishi - who says in this piece that allegations he is a mouthpiece of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency are “a conspiracy theory with no basis”.

Accusing the Guardian and New York Times of selectively publishing cables which served Western interests, he writes, “Just like the Guardian and NYT, the Pakistani media retains the right to manipulate and highlight WikiLeaks documents that serve our interest. This could involve some exaggeration in some parts of the media.”

On WikiLeaks, India, Pakistan and a partisan media

Reading through some of the WikiLeaks cables, I have been struck by how easy it might be to take the fragmentary and often outdated information contained in them and make a case to support either side of the India-Pakistan divide.  Now it turns out someone did, but without even the support of the underlying cables, according to this version of Pakistani media reports by the Pakistan blog Cafe Pyala of alleged Indian skulduggery, including in Baluchistan. 

As Cafe Pyala notes, Pakistan’s The News and various other papers cited the alleged cables as proof of alleged Indian involvement in creating trouble in Baluchistan and Waziristan. These allegations were included amongst others that anyone who follows the subject closely hears being bandied about between India and Pakistan. (Reporting on those allegations is much harder, for reasons I will discuss below.)

But according to Cafe Pyala these cables may not even exist, but are rather the work of intelligence agencies telling the media what is to be found in them.  ”Small wonder The News and Jang give the source of the report as ‘Agencies’,” it says. “Question: How stupid do the ‘Agencies’ really think Pakistanis are?”

This is terribly confusing, as it is hard enough to make sense of the WikiLeaks cables on India and Pakistan, without having to filter out what intelligence agencies/media  say about what may or may not be in that huge database of leaked U.S. embassy reports.

As it is, we have to keep in mind the idea that the cables are only as accurate (we assume) as the ambassadors who penned them were able to make them,  given that they themselves were dependent on sources who might, or might not, have been telling the truth.  They are not gospel (and odd that in Pakistan which tends to distrust everything the Americans say, they are being treated as such.)

So two points – one on Baluchistan, and the other on the media in India and Pakistan.

For background, Islamabad accuses India of using its presence in Afghanistan to destabilise Pakistan, particularly by funding and arming separatists in Baluchistan. India denies this, and says it is interested only in promoting development in Afghanistan.  The  Indian consulates in Kandahar and Jalalabad particularly trouble Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, which sees them as bases for alleged nefarious activity by its rival,  India’s Research and Analysis Wing (R&AW) spy agency. 

When two foreign policy crises converge: Iran and Afghanistan

Last week’s suicide bombing of a mosque in Zahedan, capital of the Iranian province of Sistan-Baluchestan, is another reminder of how far two of the United States’ main foreign policy challenges – its row with Iran over its nuclear programme, and its policies towards Afghanistan and Pakistan – are intertwined.

A senior commander in Iran’s elite Revolutionary Guards said on Saturday that the United States would face “fall out” from the bomb attack which it blamed on the Jundollah Sunni Muslim rebel group - a militant group which Iran says is backed by Washington and operates from Baluchistan province in neighbouring Pakistan.  Massoud Jazayeri, deputy head of the dominant ideological wing of Iran’s armed forces, did not specify what he meant by fall-out from the bombing, which killed 28 people and which the United States has condemned.

But his comments nonetheless raised tensions at a time when the United States is at loggerheads with Tehran over its nuclear programme, and when its top diplomats, including U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, are visiting Pakistan and Afghanistan to try to press U.S. interests there.

The intertwining of these two foreign policy challenges runs far deeper than a coincidence of timing or geography.

As I wrote in this analysis after a suicide bombing last year in Sistan-Baluchestan – also blamed on Jundollah – the violence there exposed a deep sectarian faultline between Shi’ite Iran and Pakistan, allied with Tehran’s main rival, Sunni Saudi Arabia. (For a detailed study of Jundollah, and tensions between Iran’s dominant Shi’ites and its minority Sunnis, see this report (pdf) by the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment published last July).  

Analysts have also said that the use of suicide bombers suggested that Jundollah – which fights for the rights of ethnic Baluch in Iran – was becoming increasingly influenced by the tactics and sectarian agenda of groups like the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, blamed for a series of suicide bombings inside Pakistan.

Weaving the net more tightly is  Iran’s capacity to act as a spoiler in any U.S. attempt to reach a political settlement in Afghanistan, ratcheting up or down its alleged support for Taliban insurgents depending on the extent to which its distrust of the Sunni movement is outweighed by its anger with the United States.

Is Baluchistan more strategically significant than Afghanistan?

Baluchistan, Pakistan’s biggest province, rarely gets much attention from the international media, and what little it does is dwarfed by that showered on Afghanistan.  So it is with a certain amount of deliberate provocation that I ask the question posed in the headline: Is Baluchistan more strategically significant than Afghanistan?

Before everyone answers with a resounding “no”, do pause to consider that China – renowned for its long-term planning – has invested heavily in Baluchistan, including building a deep water port at Gwadar on the Arabian Sea to give it access to Gulf oil supplies.  The region is rich in gas and minerals; attracting strong international interest in spite of a low-level insurgency by Baluch separatists. 

Bordering both Iran and Afghanistan, it lies along the sectarian and geopolitical faultlines that have fissured the region  since the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran and Soviet invasion of Afghanistan later that year. Its capital, Quetta, is often cited by Washington as a haven for the Afghan Taliban in the so-called Quetta shura, who operate independently of the more secular Baluch separatists. 

The province is also a source of friction with India, with Pakistan accusing it of using its presence in Afghanistan to fund the Baluch separatists, a charge Delhi denies.  Whatever the rights and wrongs of that argument, you can be fairly sure that anywhere lying on the intersection of Indian, Chinese and Pakistani interests will be strategically far more important than it might appear on the surface.

In that context, Forbes Magazine has a must-read take-out on China’s drive to develop its presence in Baluchistan.

“In the Pakistani province of Balochistan, South Asia and central Asia bleed into the Middle East. Bordered by Afghanistan, Iran and the Persian Gulf, and well endowed with oil, gas, copper, gold and coal reserves, Balochistan is a rich prize that should have foreign investors battering at the gates,” it says.  “But for a half-century it has been the exclusive playground of the Pakistani government and its state-owned Chinese partners. China would prefer it to stay that way.”

For an entirely different view, Informed Comment has a guest contribution up by Berkeley academic Kiren Aziz Chaudhry. The arguments can be a bit distracting if you don’t buy into conspiracy theories about the reasons for the U.S. presence in Afghanistan. But do persevere until you get to the point where the writer identifies Baluchistan as the main centre of interest for the many rivalries across Afghanistan and Pakistan:  “The fulcrum is the province of Balochistan. And within Balochistan, the pivot is the dusty, obscure coastal town of Gwadar. Gwadar has a spanking new deep water port. Wheels within wheels. Devices within devices.”  It’s worth reading through to the end, if nothing else but because this little known part of the world deserves as many different voices as possible.

Pakistan’s South Waziristan operation: defeat or dispersal?

Pakistan’s military offensive in South Waziristan appears to be showing considerably more success than earlier attempts to take control of the tribal region on the Afghan border, at least according to army accounts which are the only real source of information. 

But will it turn the tide in Pakistan’s battle against Islamist militants? A few articles which have appeared over the last few days give pause for thought.

Dawn newspaper says in an editorial the Taliban have “been subdued, not vanquished”.

“Before operation Rah-i-Najat was launched, the army put the Taliban strength at about 10,000. Since the maximum number of Taliban fatalities has been put at about 500, those not taken prisoner may have slipped into North Waziristan or the adjoining settled districts. They must be pursued relentlessly without being given a chance to reorganise, and the nation ought to be told what strategy the authorities have up their sleeve to finish the job.”

And to achieve lasting success, the civilian administration is going to have to provide the kind of basic development – schools, roads, healthcare, electricity – that the refugees quoted in this Los Angeles Times article say they are hoping for. 

But that might prove difficult at a time when the country’s political parties – rather than focusing on development and political reforms to convince people to back the government rather than the Taliban — are once again embroiled in the kind of in-fighting that has destroyed civilian democracy in the past.

Writing in Gulf newspaper The National, historian Manan Ahmed worries about the Pakistani Taliban spilling into Baluchistan and finding fertile ground for growth among a people unhappy with the government in Islamabad.  The province is already home to a separatist Baluch insurgency. “The true crisis facing Pakistan is not the Taliban,” he writes. It is instead the state’s failure to provide political and economic rights to the many different people and ethnic groups who make up the country.

The Taliban “spillover” into Pakistan’s Baluchistan

According to the New York Times, Pakistan has objected to the influx of U.S. troops into southern Afghanistan, saying this will drive Taliban militants across the border into its troubled Baluchistan province. It quotes a Pakistani intelligence official as saying that a Taliban spillover would force Pakistan to put more troops into Baluchistan, troops the country does not have right now.

The Pakistan Army has already moved into the Swat valley to clear out a Pakistani Taliban group there and is now preparing an offensive against Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mehsud in his stronghold in South Waziristan. At the same time it is unwilling to move significant numbers of troops away from the Indian border.

What is puzzling about Pakistan’s objection to the U.S. military offensive is not so much its logic, but its timing. All this information was publicly available months ago. A cursory look at a map would show that Pakistani troops were going to be stretched fighting in Swat and Waziristan while also preventing Taliban militants fleeing from Afghanistan into Baluchistan – let alone tackling the Afghan Taliban leadership which the United States says is based in Baluchistan’s capital Quetta. 

The United States and Pakistan discussed their military plans well in advance - the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen said in May that both countries were aware of the risk of a Taliban spillover from Afghanistan into Baluchistan and were planning measures to prevent it. The timing of the U.S. offensive was also clearly flagged in advance – to take place before August elections in Afghanistan. And while Pakistan’s planned offensive into South Waziristan is not going as expected, it’s hard to believe that the professional armies in both countries would base their strategy on an assumption of everything going smoothly in the tribal areas. Nor did anyone expect a sudden peace deal with India that would allow Pakistan to move large numbers of troops from east to west.

So what has changed?  Or why object now more than before?

By coincidence, an insurgency in Baluchistan by Baluch separatists – which is quite different from the Pashtun Taliban insurgency – is also gaining fresh attention. A joint statement issued by the prime ministers of India and Pakistan last week included a reference to Pakistani concerns about India helping the Baluch separatists, a charge New Delhi denies. While Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has been heavily criticised at home for agreeing to the reference, Praveen Swami at the Hindu argues that it could put the long-forgotten Baluch separatist insurgency back in focus.

Iran presses Pakistan to curb militant groups

Pakistan is already under intense pressure from the United States and India to crack down on militant groups inside its borders. Now Iran has added its own pressure after 25 people were killed last week in the bombing of a Shi’ite mosque in Zahedan, in the southeast of the country towards the Pakistan border.

According to the Tehran Times, the Iranian foreign ministry summoned Pakistan’s ambassador to Iran to protest about the bombing, which it blamed on militants on Pakistan’s side of the border.

Pakistani newspaper The News International quoted diplomatic sources in Islamabad as saying the future of a gas pipeline from Iran to Pakistan could be jeopardised because of Tehran’s anger at what it saw as Pakistan’s failure to crack down on Sunni militants targeting Iran. It said Iran believed the mosque bombing could have been averted if Pakistan had acted on information provided by Iranian intelligence.

Dawn newspaper  said Iran had partially shut its border with Pakistan, leading to a suspension of trade and causing hardship to the people in the area, in the restive Pakistani province of Baluchistan.

Pakistan and Iran have a long history of difficult relations, driven by Sunni-Shi’ite rivalry and by competition for influence in Afghanistan and in the broader Islamic world. But a summit meeting in Tehran last month between the presidents of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan was meant to help smooth over those differences. Plans for the Iran-Pakistan pipeline — giving Iran an export market for its gas and Pakistan much-needed energy — would give the two countries a powerful economic incentive to bury their political differences.

So the row over the Zahedan bombing comes at a particularly bad time, all the more so given that Pakistan desperately needs friends as it tries to tackle an Islamist insurgency within its borders.  ”At this crucial time, we cannot afford a new diplomatic front,” said a post in the Pakistan blog Chowrangi.

(Photo: Presidents Karzai, Ahmadinejad and Zardari)

Pakistan, from Swat to Baluchistan via Waziristan

The Pakistan Army is engaged in what appears to be a very nasty little war in the Swat valley against heavily armed Taliban militants.  With journalists having left Swat, there have been no independent reports of what is going on there, though the scale of the operation can be partly measured by the huge numbers of refugees – nearly 1.7 million – who fled to escape the military offensive.

Dawn newspaper carried an interview with a wounded soldier saying the Taliban had buried mines and planted IEDs every 50 metres.  ‘They positioned snipers in holes made out of the walls of houses. They used civilians as human shields. They used to attack from houses and roofs,” it quoted him as saying. ‘They are well equipped, they have mortars. They have rockets, sniper rifles and every type of sophisticated weapons.”

Al Jazeera’s correspondent said that the battle was about to get worse as the army prepared to enter Mingora, the main town in the Swat valley. The BBC’s Urdu service managed to talk to a couple of people trapped inside Mingora, one of whom mentioned coming across an Arab among a group of militants.

President Asif Ali Zardari has talked of extending the battle into Waziristan, believed to be the hideout of al Qaeda, and now Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said a U.S. military offensive in southern Afghanistan could push Taliban fighters from there into Pakistan’s Baluchistan province. (To get a sense of the geographical scale of this, scroll down to the map at the bottom of this page to see how far Quetta, the main city in Baluchistan, is from the Swat valley.) Mullen said both U.S. and Pakistani forces were aware of the risk of a spillover from Afghanistan into Pakistan, and were planning measures to prevent it.

He did not say how they would do this, although the Wall Street Journal said earlier this week that the United States was sending 25 to 50 Special Forces personnel into Baluchistan to train Pakistanis, bringing U.S. troops deeper into Pakistan. The Special Forces would focus on training Pakistan’s Frontier Corps, but were not meant to fight alongside them, it said. But it added, “A senior American military officer said he hoped Islamabad would gradually allow the U.S. to expand its training footprint inside Pakistan’s borders. A former U.S. official familiar with the plans said the deployments would ‘get more American eyes and ears’ into the strategically important region.”

U.S. officials say Quetta is the base for the Afghan Taliban and its leader Mullah Omar, who are able to hide in the Afghan refugee camps that sprang up after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. (Mukhtar Khan at CTC Sentinel has a detailed report on the Afghan Taliban in Quetta which you can find by scrolling down on this pdf document.)

But taking on the Afghan Taliban in Baluchistan, while also chasing the Pakistan Taliban out of Swat, and pursuing al Qaeda in Waziristan would be a massive operation. It’s not clear whether there is some kind of masterplan and timeline for all this that we have yet to be told about, or if as Cyril Almeida worries in a column in Dawn, the Pakistan government is simply “steering blindfolded” with “a mix of lucky breaks and nonsense planning.”

How will Obama tackle militants in Pakistan?

Read President Barack Obama’s speech on his new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan and compare it to what he said a year ago and it’s hard to see how much further forward we are in understanding exactly how he intends to uproot Islamist militants inside Pakistan.

Last year, Obama said that ”If we have actionable intelligence about high-level al Qaeda targets in Pakistan’s border region, we must act if Pakistan will not or cannot.” Last week, he said that, ”Pakistan must demonstrate its commitment to rooting out al Qaeda and the violent extremists within its borders.  And we will insist that action be taken — one way or another — when we have intelligence about high-level terrorist targets.”

The United States has already stepped up attacks by drone missiles on suspected militant targets in Pakistan’s tribal areas since Obama took office, despite official protests by Pakistan, which says they are counterproductive since they cause civilian casualties and encourage people to support the insurgents.

The Pakistani protests began to look rather hollow after media reports that the drones were taking off from a base inside Pakistan. But that may have missed the point. The question of where the drones are based is perhaps less important than the distrust between the U.S. and Pakistani militaries on sharing intelligence about militant targets.

General Ashfaq Kayani, now head of the Pakistan Army, tells a rather revealing story about this. He is quoted in Brian Cloughley’s book “War, Coups and Terror” as describing the case of a tribesman with a performing monkey who gathered an audience of turban-clad, rifle-bearing men around him in a village in 2005. The U.S. controllers of the drone mistook the event for a weapons-training session or military briefing and dropped a missile, killing many in the audience (he doesn’t say what happened to the monkey). “This, said the General, was an example of lack of cultural understanding,” writes Cloughley.

“The monkey incident, and other attacks by the U.S. within Pakistan,” adds Cloughley, “have convinced the population of North West Frontier Province and a disturbing number of other citizens, including many in uniform, that there is nothing to be gained by supporting the United States, which they consider to be overbearing and imperceptive in its engagement with the country.”

Concern mounts over U.S. aid worker kidnapped in Pakistan

Concern is mounting over the health of John Solecki, an American working for the UNHCR, who was kidnapped from the Pakistani city of Quetta 45 days ago.

The UN said it was worried about an apparent deterioration in his health after a little known Baluch group, which says it is holding him, called a local news agency saying he was seriously ill with a heart condition.

Three deadlines set by a group calling itself the Baluchistan Liberation United Front have passed and a new one was meant to end on Thursday. The group wants the release of 1,000 Baluch prisoners, including women, said to be held in Pakistan government cells.

With little sign of any resolution Pakistani media are questioning the seriousness of the effort to secure Solecki’s release. Neither the Baluch government nor the government in Islamabad had taken the task seriously, the liberal Daily Times said. “No matter who kidnapped Solecki, observers say the government cannot absolve itself of the primary responsibility of protecting all those in Pakistan’s territory,” it said.

And the News wrote of the “casual cruelty” involved in picking up an unarmed aid worker on his way to work. It said there were credible reports that extremist groups had a a sort of “rate card” of potential victims. grading them by their public profile and relative value. And since the number of foreigners on Pakistani soil is dwindling fast, the value of those who remain such as Solecki is high.