Pakistan: Now or Never?

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.

A Pakistani Abroad: Zardari’s ill-fated trip to England

President Asif Ali Zardari’s trip to Britain was particularly ill-fated. When he first planned a visit which should have culminated in him bringing his son, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, out into the political arena, no one could have predicted such a bewildering series of crises. A row with Britain over remarks made in India by  British Prime Minister David Cameron that Pakistan must not “look both ways” in its approach to Islamist militants. Pakistan’s worst floods in 80 years.  A  plane crash, and then riots in Karachi.

So it was perhaps par for the course that his final event in Britain, a political rally in the city of Birmingham for British Pakistani supporters of the ruling Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), should be dogged by controversy.  Zardari faced a firestorm of criticism for going ahead with the visit while his country faced so many problems, and the combination of protesters outside the rally and a shoe-thrower inside appeared to mark the culmination of a disastrously ill-judged overseas tour.

Having been to the Birmingham event, I have to say it was not quite as chaotic and ill-tempered as some media coverage suggested.  The protesters outside were a microcosm of Pakistan’s disunited politics, each separate group of demonstators  operating independently and shouting for their own competing agendas – from the restoration of the Caliphate to independence for Kashmir. They were vastly outnumbered by the PPP supporters who packed Birmingham’s International Convention Centre - many of them staid, respectable middle-aged Pakistani men and women who had emigrated to Britain decades ago, worked hard and kept close family links back home. 

And Zardari certainly was not “pelted with shoes”. The man who said he tried to throw his shoes in protest over Zardari’s response to the floods was standing well back in what was a very large conference hall and had little chance of getting anywhere near the president before he was hustled away by security guards.  Zardari did not interrupt his speech, most of the audience continued to listen to him politely, and it is conceivable that those sitting at the front did not even notice at the time what had  happened.  That in any case is how it looked from where I was sitting – it would be easier to judge the event if the video replay had not been edited out – but my impression was that it was not such a big incident to justify the reaction, or counter-reaction in Pakistan. 

That said, the event did not achieve its purpose. Bilawal Bhutto, son of the late Benazir Bhutto, on Thursday cancelled plans to attend the rally and said he would stay in London instead to collect donations for Pakistan’s flood victims.  That he had been expected was clear from the big photo of him given equal prominence to Zardari’s own photo on a poster at the back of the stage.  The event relied heavily on imagery of the Bhutto dynasty – videos of Benazir and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto were played before the event; Zardari made frequent references to them in his speech, and wore a rosette with his late wife’s photo pinned to his chest.  (For an interesting take on dynastic politics, do read this column in the Daily Times by Shahzad Chaudhry, who argues that Zardari is primarily interested in shoring up the family’s control of the PPP.)  For all the appeal to the popularity of the two slain former prime ministers, the mood in the conference hall — at least from where I was sitting – seemed subdued, polite rather than enthusiastic; although again it would have looked different at the front where groups of youths had been organised as cheerleaders.

With the visit over, a few are beginning to ask questions about whether quite so much energy and attention should have been focused on attacking Zardari’s trip to Britain, when so many flood victims were in need of attention at home.

“Our electronic media’s reaction – really obsession – with this trip has itself been embarrassing, as indeed has been the reactions of too many of us,” writes Adil Najam on the blog All Things Pakistan.  “But even more than an embarrassment, Mr Zardari’s trip and our obsessive reactions to it has proved to be an all-too-costly distraction from the far more real disaster at home.” (To be fair, the British media got pretty caught up in the visit as well.)

Dreams from my father: South Asia’s political dynasties

“Whatever the result, this meeting will be a turning point in Pakistan’s history,” Pakistan President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto told his daughter Benazir as he prepared for a summit meeting with Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1972 in the Indian hill resort of Simla after his country’s defeat by India in the 1971 war. “I want you to witness it first hand.”

If there is a slightly surreal quality to President Asif Ali Zardari’s controversial state visit to Britain - where he is expected to launch the political career of Oxford graduate Bilawal Bhutto at a rally for British Pakistanis in Birmingham on Saturday - it is perhaps no more surreal than taking your daughter, herself then a student at Harvard, to witness negotiations with India after a crushing military defeat.

Family dynasties are a tradition in South Asia. Indira Gandhi, the victor of the 1971 war which led to the creation of Bangladesh, then East Pakistan, had learned about international relations from her father, India’s first prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Now her grandson, Rahul Gandhi, is being groomed as a future prime minister while his mother Sonia Gandhi keeps a tight grip from behind-the-scenes on the Congress Party government led by her appointed prime minister Manmohan Singh.

In both countries, the argument has been that the family name is strong enough to win votes, particularly among the millions of rural poor, strong enough to offer a promise of stability, and strong enough to be worth fighting to preserve across generations even in the face of domestic criticism.

Zardari has run into a great deal of criticism for pressing ahead with his visit to Britain while Pakistan struggled to cope with its worst floods in 80 years. He also faced calls to cancel the trip after British Prime Minister David Cameron said during a visit to India that “we cannot tolerate in any sense the idea that this country (Pakistan) is allowed to look both ways and is able in any way to promote the export of terror”. 

With a war going badly in neighbouring Afghanistan, a spate of allegations against the role played there by its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, and a wave of bombings at home which Islamabad/Rawalpindi see as blowback from the Afghan war, Pakistan is having to navigate through very choppy diplomatic waters.  On top of that, it has had the floods, a plane crash, and then riots in Karachi.

Assuming Zardari goes ahead with Saturday’s rally, he will be bringing the 21-year-old Bilawal – who is co-chairman of the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) but has not yet taken an active part in politics – out into the political arena at a time when his country faces its biggest challenge since its defeat in 1971.  But then again, as Benazir’s own recollections of the Simla summit testify, there is a history to that.  And so far, in the decades since Pakistan and India won independence from Britain in 1947, it has been the family dynasties which have endured.

Guest contribution-A tribute to British democracy

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 the High Commissioner of Pakistan to Britain.

By Wajid Shamsul Hasan

It is, no doubt, a tribute to British democracy that all sections of its society are represented in parliament. For us it is also heartening to note that out of nine Muslim members elected in the May 6 election, seven are of Pakistani origin (five belonging to Labour and two from the Conservatives). For the first time in British history two women of Pakistani origin have made it to parliament. Compared to previous elections, this time three more Pakistani MPs will be sitting in the House of Commons.

Britain and Pakistan are bound by a long shared history, which at times becomes nostalgic amongst the senior citizens who in their youth had some kind of interaction with our part of the world. But the migration of Pakistanis and Kashmiris to Britain during the past six decades has certainly created a human bridge between the two countries. One can see a growing interaction in the cultural, economic and political arenas, which makes Pakistan and the UK favourite destinations for the people of the two countries, especially those who have their origins in Pakistan and Kashmir.  For first-time visitors from Pakistan, London hardly represents an alien city given the fact that almost a million South Asians, including 50 percent Pakistanis, live in this city and immediately connect to their fellow Pakistanis through common language, food and clothes.

In such an environment, it is a matter of great satisfaction that British society has afforded the opportunity to the people of Pakistani and Kashmiri origin to be represented by their own people. This also shows the admirable tolerance shown by the British people and the government towards minorities and serves as a lesson to freedom-loving people throughout the world that in a democratic society, a fair representation of different interest groups is the best guarantee for stability and progress of any society.

It is incumbent upon the Pakistani diaspora to value the British democratic system and take measures to address the problems faced by the community. The election of Pakistani and Kashmiri members to the House of Commons and in councils across Britain is reflective of their keen interest in British political life. As a fellow Pakistani I am proud of their success. It is a recognition of their hard work and their acceptability in British society. I am confident that with perseverance they would prove to be an asset to British political life.

But, I have a word of caution: We in Pakistan are passing through a sensitive phase of defeating extremists and terrorists. Please help us in neutralizing the forces of obscurantism and pay attention to your youth to stop them from falling prey to extremist propaganda. We all know that British youth of Pakistani origin are getting radicalized within the United Kingdom. Unlike some rhetorical claims that three-fourth of terror plots on Britain originate from Pakistan, it is Britain itself where we have to find the causes of radicalization and their remedies. Pakistan is not a place for extremist baptism; we have made them run and we will not rest till they are neutralized.

Pakistan and Britain: On exits and entrances

With one million Britons of Pakistani origin, and as the former colonial power, Britain has a unique relationship with Pakistan. But concerns about Britain’s vulnerability to bomb attacks planned by Pakistan-based militants — British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has said that three-quarters of the most serious plots investigated by British authorities had links to al Qaeda in Pakistan — has made for a rocky relationship.

Irfan Husain, a columnist for Dawn newspaper who divides his time between Britain and Pakistan, writes that these tensions are being worsened by the problems Pakistanis have in obtaining visas to visit Britain.

“It is true that Pakistan is increasingly viewed as the epicentre of Islamic terrorism. Many plots, real and imaginary, have had their roots in the badlands of Fata (the Federally Administered Tribal Areas),” he writes. “Many young Brits of Pakistani descent have travelled to remote parts of the country to receive training in bomb-making. But the point is that these young men do not need visas to return to Bradford and Wolverhampton. Being born in Britain, they enter their country without let or hindrance.”

Among those denied entry were members of the Lahore Pipe Band hoping to take part in a world championship in Scotland, a trade delegation, a well-known columnist, and a guitarist.

It’s not entirely clear whether the visa problems are driven more by bureaucratic bungling than fear of terrorism. The Guardian newspaper says that several thousand Pakistani students hoping to start university in Britain are facing delays of three months or more for visas because of a “bureaucratic fiasco” – after a reorganisation, visa applications from Pakistan are now processed in Abu Dhabi.

Husain argues that by denying entry to the likes of writers and musicians, Britain is compounding the very problem it wants to contain - the spread of extremism. These are the kind of people who should be made welcome in the west, he says. ”Given the position they enjoy in Pakistan, they can influence many to see that the enemy is not the West, but the forces of darkness that have gained the ascendancy in our own country. By turning them down, the British government only provides ammunition to those who are convinced of the West’s inherent anti-Islam policies.”

In any case, most security analysts would argue that the main  concern is not about Pakistanis coming into Britain; it is about Britons of Pakistani origin leaving the country to attend militant training camps based in Pakistan. On this subject, Stephen Tankel has an interesting post about signs of growth in the operations of the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM) militant groups. Based in Pakistan’s heartland Punjab province, these groups were initially focused on fighting India over Kashmir, but are increasingly seen as a potential or direct threat to the west.

Jaish building new base in Pakistan’s south Punjab-report

Saeed Shah at McClatchy has an interesting story about Jaish-e-Mohammad, an al Qaeda linked militant group, building a big new base in Pakistan’s Punjab province.

The group, which was blamed for killing U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl and for an attack on the Indian parliament in 2001, already has a headquarters in the town of Bahawalpur in south Punjab.

But Shah writes that it has now walled off a big new compound outside the town. The new facility, he says, is surrounded by a high brick and mud wall, has a tiled swimming pool, stabling for more than a dozen horses, an ornamental fountain and even swings and a slide for children.

“There are jihadist inscriptions painted on the inside walls, including a proclamation that “Jaish-e-Mohammad will return”, alongside a picture of Delhi’s historic Red Fort, implying further terrorist attacks against the Indian capital,” he says. 

It’s unclear what the new base is meant to be used for – Shah quotes Jaish and Pakistani officials as saying that the facility, which is still under construction, is simply a small farm to keep cattle.

What is clear is that many countries have an interest in what is happening with the Jaish-e-Mohammad.

The group was set up in 2000 after its founder, Maulana Masood Azhar, was released by India in return for the freeing of passengers aboard an Indian Airlines plane hijacked from Kathmandu to Kandahar in Afghanistan.  While its focus was on fighting in Indian Kashmir, it had links to Afghanistan dating back to the militant campaign against the Soviet occupation.  Shah says in his article that Jaish and other Punjab-based militant groups now recruit and train thousands of young men to fight western forces in Afghanistan.

Britain and the Kashmir banana skin

Memories seem to be short in the British government when it comes to Kashmir. Foreign Secretary David Miliband stirred up a diplomatic row over the region during his visit to India earlier this month. As this piece in The Times says, Miliband angered Indian officials by giving what they described as “unsolicited advice” on Kashmir, over which India has three times gone to war with Pakistan since independence from Britain in 1947 and over which it is in no mood to be lectured by outsiders, let alone the former colonial power. It was on a visit to Pakistan and India in 1997 to mark the 50th anniversary of those two countries’ independence that the then British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, also got into trouble over Kashmir. Cook, who also served the Labour government, was forced to row back from suggestions that Britain might help resolve the long-running dispute. His intervention cast a serious shadow over the visit by Queen Elizabeth, who was at one point forced to cancel a long-planned speech. The visit, during which the queen was accompanied by Cook, went downhill after that, and at one point a senior British diplomat was seen sitting, head in hands in despair, on the pavement outside Chennai airport. There were even suggestions, denied of course, that the British High Commissioner might be recalled. Tony Blair, then prime minister, had to patch up ties by assuring his Indian counterpart, Inder Kumar Gujral, that London would not meddle in Delhi’s dispute with Pakistan over Kashmir. One wonders whether Miliband was reminded of all this before he went to India, and if he was, why did he walk into the Kashmir minefield once again. Or maybe he wasn’t, which poses a different set of questions about competence and institutional memory at the Foreign Office.

Miliband’s gift: stiffening Indian resolve over Pakistan

British Foreign Secretary David Miliband may yet end up achieving the opposite of what he intended in India when he called for a resolution of the Kashmir dispute in the interests of regional security.

To some Indians, linking the attacks in Mumbai - which New Delhi says originated from Pakistan – to the issue of Kashmir is not just insensitive, it is also a wake-up call. The lesson they have drawn is this: for all the world’s sense of outrage over Mumbai, India will have to deal with Pakistan on its own, and not expect foreign powers to lean on its neighbour in the manner it wants.

Miliband’s visit was a “jarring reminder to India to stop off-shoring its Pakistan policy,” writes Indian security affairs analyst Brahma Chellaney in the Asian Age. He then goes on to call for a set of measures including a military option short of war to weaken Pakistan.

New Delhi has diplomatic options that it has not yet deployed, he argues. These include recalling the Indian High Commissioner to Islamabad or suspending peace talks, or disbanding a “farcical” joint anti-terrorism mechanism or halting state-assisted cultural and sporting links or invoking trade sanctions.

On the military front, he suggests offensive military deployments along the entire length of the border. This would be different from the 2002 all-out mobilisation for a war that nobody really believed would happen, following the parliament attack in Dec 2001. Such a strategy, Chellaney argues, would put keep Pakistan on tenterhooks as to which front would be chosen for a quick, sharp thrust. Pakistan would have to follow suit and that would put unbearable pressure on a state already in severe financial difficulties.

Plausible? Well, two months after the attacks, you would have to argue the appetite for such tough measures has reduced. . If you had to act, you were better off even in the eyes of your own people to have done it then, rather than now.

But this may well be a pointer to a stiffening mood in India as it heads into an election that could bring the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party into power. And then all bets would be off as to what would be India’s policy towards Pakistan.

India – aiming for diplomatic encirclement of Pakistan?

India is piling on the diplomatic pressure to convince the international community to lean on Pakistan to crack down on Islamist militants blamed by New Delhi for the Mumbai attacks.

According to the Times of India, “India has made it clear to the U.S. and Iran as well as Pakistan’s key allies, China and Saudi Arabia, that they need to do more to use their clout to pressure Pakistan into acting…” The Press Trust of India (PTI), quoted by The Hindu, said India had used a visit by Saudi Foreign Minister Saud al-Faisal to Delhi to drive home the same message.

As discussed previously on this blog, in the immediate aftermath of the Mumbai attacks, India’s response was to look to the United States to put pressure on Pakistan. It also appears to have won some support from Russia, whose officials said publicly that the attacks were funded by Dawood Ibrahim, an underworld don who India says lives in Pakistan. China, Pakistan’s traditional ally, supported the United Nations Security Council in  blacklisting the Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the charity accused of being a front for the Lashkar-e-Taiba.  China’s Foreign Minister has also telephoned his counterparts in India and Pakistan urging dialogue, according to Xinhua. 

And to complete the tour of the permanent members of the Security Council, Britain blamed Pakistan-based militants for the Mumbai attacks, while France has also called on Pakistan to take action.

That’s a fairly broad consensus in favour of diplomatic pressure. There certainly seem to be more players more visibly involved than in 2001/2002 when India and Pakistan came to the brink of war over an attack on the Indian parliament that India blamed on Pakistan-based militants. You might therefore be tempted to argue that the diplomatic approach is working — and as long as this stands a chance, the prospects of military escalation are slim.

So what is going wrong? Despite the flurry of diplomatic activity, the military tensions are rising.  Pakistan has cancelled army leave and redeployed troops.  The Washington Post said thousands of troops were being redeployed from the Afghan border to the border with India.

Pakistan, India and the rise and/or fall of the nation state

When the British left India in 1947, they bequeathed what was arguably a European notion of the nation state on a region for which the very concept was alien. I say ”arguably” because anything one writes about Partition or the nation state is open to dispute. And until the financial crisis, I relegated this argument to the realm of historians – a subject that interested me personally, but did not seem relevant today.

That was until I noticed a new debate bubbling up on the internet about the future of the nation state. Will it become more powerful as countries scramble to protect themselves from the financial crisis as George Friedman at Stratfor argues in this article?  Or does the need for global solutions to the crisis sound a death knell for the nation state, as John Robb suggests here?

Let’s just suppose the paradigm has shifted and the 60-year-old model defined by the departing British colonial rulers is no longer valid. What does that mean for Pakistan and India? (more…)