According to The News in a report from Rawalpindi, “the episode of hurling shoes at U.S. President George W. Bush remained talk of the town, as people belonging to different walks of life expressed their extreme excitement over the incident and praised the ‘brave act’ of the Iraqi journalist. ‘The News’ interviewed a number of people who were all praise for Iraqi journalist Muntazar al-Zaidi…” it said.

The shoe-throwing has also fired the imagination of the Pakistan blogosphere, providing a perhaps welcome respite to discussion about the extent of Pakistan’s involvement in the Mumbai attacks. Changing up Pakistan (CHUP) has matched up a YouTube video of Bush in Baghdad with footage of protesters hitting a former chief minister of Sindh province with a sandal.

Other blogs are running with a spoof statement from the Pentagon saying the Americans have proof that the shoes had links to Pakistan. 

For the record, the shoes had no link to Pakistan, nor indeed to any of the other countries that laid claim to them. Reuters reporter Waleed Ibrahim tracked down Zaidi’s brother who confirmed the shoes were made in a Baghdad factory. “One hundred percent they are Iraqi-made shoes,” Udai al-Zaidi said.

(Reuters photo: Donated shoes labelled with names of Iraqis who died during the war in Iraq are displayed during a protest in front of the White House in Washington/Molly Riley)

While Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari is in the United States discussing U.S. military strikes across Pakistan’s border, army chief General Ashfaq Kayani is on a far less publicised trip to China to talk about defence cooperation. The timing may be coincidental, but the potential implications of the United States and China playing competing roles in Pakistan are huge.

Pakistan has always seen China as a much more reliable friend, while support from Washington has waxed and waned in line with U.S. interests (Islamabad has never quite forgiven the United States for using it to fight the Soviet Union in Afghanistan and then dropping it when the Russians were driven out in 1989.) 

And nowadays the difference in the approaches of Pakistan’s two giant allies is even more striking.  While the United States and Pakistan argue about U.S. cross-border strikes, China has quietly reaffirmed its commitment to keeping Pakistan stable.

In a condolence message sent after this weekend’s Marriott Hotel bombing, Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi said, “As a good neighbour and all-time friend of Pakistan, China will always support the unremitting efforts made by the government and people of Pakistan to safeguard the country’s stability.”

Of course there is no reason to jump to the conclusion the United States and China will become outright rivals over Pakistan — both have a stake in Pakistan’s stability, and in the past both have managed to maintain close ties with Islamabad without tripping over each other. But the current scenario certainly increases the chances of friction.

Add to that the fact that the strategic picture in South Asia has changed dramatically under the Bush administration. The United States has rewritten its relationship with India — which was still seen as in the Soviet camp back in the days of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan –turning it into a crucial ally in Asia and potential bulwark against Chinese influence. It sealed that transformation by reaching a deal with India effectively recognising it as a nuclear power, ignoring any misgivings in China (India’s nuclear weapons programme was developed as much, if not more, as a defence against China as against Pakistan.)

So it will be interesting to see what Kayani brings back from China and Zardari from the United States in the way of promises of support.  Will the United States and China be able to work together to pull Pakistan out of its current crisis? Or are they drifting into a situation where they end up opposing each other?

Following up on yesterday’s post about U.S. military action in Pakistan, I see the New York Times is reporting that President George W. Bush secretly approved orders in July allowing American Special Operations forces to carry out ground assaults inside Pakistan without the prior approval of the Pakistani government.

The new orders, it says, relax firm restrictions on conducting raids on the soil of an important ally without permission.

The paper also quotes two American officials as saying that last week’s raid by U.S. troops involved more than two dozen members of the Navy Seals who spent several hours on the ground and killed about two dozen suspected al Qaeda fighters. ”Supported by an AC-130 gunship, the Special Operations forces were whisked away by helicopters after completing the mission.”

This is big stuff, with enormous potential for escalation, should the raids continue. What happens if a ground assault goes wrong and some U.S. troops are kidnapped and handed over to al Qaeda? An enormous publicity coup for al Qaeda, which would no doubt provoke more raids, in turn requiring air support to cover the U.S. troops on the ground.

According to a comment posted earlier on this blog by Pakistan military expert Brian Cloughley: “If they (U.S. troops) tried to walk in from Afghanistan it would be the duty of the Frontier Corps or the Pakistan Army to repel them. And U.S. ground forces, these days, are incapable of fighting without massive air support. So if they called in airstrikes within Pakistan the PAF would have no alternative but to support their own kin, and use their American-supplied F-16s to counter violations of Pakistan’s airspace by US aircraft.”

So is the United States walking into a quagmire in Pakistan’s border areas? Or will a series of “surgical” raids be enough to destroy the leadership of al Qaeda and the Taliban and turn the war in Afghanistan back in Washington’s favour?

Much will depend on how Pakistan itself — both the new civilian government and the Pakistan Army –  respond to the American actions. The Pakistan Army is already carrying out its own military offensive in the border areas. But Pakistan Army chief General Ashfaq Kayani has warned the United States to keep out, promising that “the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the country will be defended at all cost.”

And here’s a scary thought. Will the consequences of the U.S. operations in Pakistan depend on one of the more common variables in war, especially in rough hostile terrain: luck?

Much has been made of this week’s New York Times article accusing the Bush administration of allowing al Qaeda to rebuild in Pakistan’s tribal areas after it was chased out of Afghanistan following the 9/11 attacks, not least because the White House took its eye off the ball as it turned its attention to Iraq.

“The United States faces a threat from al Qaeda today that is comparable to what it faced on Sept. 11, 2001,” the newspaper quotes Seth Jones, a Pentagon consultant and a terrorism expert at the RAND Corporation, as saying. ”The base of operations has moved only a short distance, roughly the difference from New York to Philadelphia.”

Unsurprisingly, the article has been seized upon by the Obama campaign as evidence of the wisdom of the policies of  Senator Barack Obama, who has argued that the real threat to the United States lay in Afghanistan and Pakistan rather than Iraq, and stirred controversy by saying 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”.

But what was surprising to me reading the article was how cautious the Bush administration was in its handling of Pakistan, in contrast to its pre-invasion approach to Iraq. The hunt for al Qaeda in Pakistan, the newspaper says, ”was often undermined by bitter disagreements within the Bush administration and within the C.I.A., including about whether American commandos should launch ground raids inside the tribal areas”. Rather than send in ground troops, the Counterterrorist Center at C.I.A. headquarters preferred to carry out raids remotely, usiing missile strikes by Predator drones.

Most surprising, perhaps, was a story of how former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, criticised for his hawkishness on Iraq, refused to authorise a Special Operations mission in 2005 to capture Ayman al-Zawahri, Osama bin Laden’s top deputy.  Though the plan to send in more than 100 U.S. commandos — what the newspaper says would have been the most aggressive use of American ground troops inside Pakistan — had the support of the C.I.A. director and the Special Operations commander, “the mission was aborted after Mr. Rumsfeld refused to give his approval for it”.

Did it really just come down to incompetence, in-fighting, indecisiveness, the distractions of Iraq and faith in Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf? Or was there a serious understanding in the Bush administration of the risks of sending ground troops into Pakistan, an ally it knew terribly well having worked with it to defeat the Soviet Union in Afghanistan? And if a hawk like Rumsfeld thought it was too risky, where does that leave Obama’s insistence that he is determined to go after al Qaeda in Pakistan?

If Obama were to win the U.S. presidency, he would still have the option of authorising missile strikes by unmanned Predators against al Qaeda targets in Pakistan. These have enraged Pakistanis in the past, because they have missed their targets and killed civilians, and because even an attack by a drone is an invasion of sovereignty.

Tellingly, the New York Times says those in favour of ground operations argue that the only way to catch bin Laden would be to capture some of his senior lieutenants alive. And that cannot be done by a drone.

Pakistan Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi used an interesting choice of words when he talked to reporters in Paris about the new government’s relationship with President Pervez Musharraf.

Reuters Paris chief correspondent Crispian Balmer tells me that he said the ruling Pakistan People’s Party had established a working relationship with Musharraf after February elections in which the president’s political allies were defeated.

“The reason we have established that working relationship with him is to give stability,” he said. “We realise that this transition from dictatorship to democracy is a delicate transition and let’s not unnecessarily rock the boat.”

Those did not seem to be the words of a government that expects the embattled former army general to step down any time soon, despite a mass rally in Pakistan by lawyers fighting for the reinstatement of judges fired by Musharraf last year.

The Asia Times even suggests that the tide may be turning in favour of Musharraf after this week’s American air strike that killed 11 Pakistani soldiers near the border with Afghanistan. “… the US air strike has severely unsettled the country,” it says. “Musharraf, with his excellent rapport with Washington, is the man many see as the only person capable of preventing it from happening again.”

But even if he survives as president for now, many say his situation will become almost untenable when President George W. Bush, who prided himself on his personal relationship with Musharraf, leaves office next January. 

According to one comment on a blog I posted last month on Musharraf: “Given Pakistan’s history,  no ruler has survived more than a decade,  give or take a year or two. As Musharraf approaches the 10th anniversary of his coup against Nawaz Sharif next year, I think he is going to leave. But he’ll leave on his on own terms, not let the Sharif brothers hound him out.”

The future of President Pervez Musharraf grows more opaque by the day. At its simplest level, it seems that while many people think he should step down, few want to see him forced out in a way that would divide and damage the country.

In the latest stories highlighting the currents and counter-currents swirling around the former army general, Musharraf lashed out at “rumour-mongers” for suggesting he planned to quit, while President George W. Bush telephoned him to pledge his continued backing.  Meanwhile disgraced scientist Abdul Qadeer Khan, known as the father of Pakistan’s nuclear bomb, has begun speaking out against Musharraf by complaining he was unfairly made to take the rap for selling nuclear secrets.  That A.Q. Khan now feels safe to speak after four years under house arrest is seen as one of the most telling indications of the times turning against Musharraf.

Reading comments on an earlier blog about Musharraf’s future got me wondering whether one could predict his next move from his past. As an Urdu-speaking ”mohajir” whose family fled Delhi at partition, an outsider in Punjabi-dominated Pakistan, and also as a former commando, how would he respond to the pressure on him to quit?

There are simplistic responses to this question — my bet would be that the usual response of an outsider and a commando would be to fight it out, if needs be by adopting the riskiest course of action. But since that question seemed too simplistic, I decided to reread what Musharraf had said about himself in his autobiography “In the Line of Fire”.

My favourite lines were in the prologue: “I have confronted death and defied it several times in the past because destiny and fate have always smiled upon me,” he writes. “I first avoided death as a teenager in 1961, when I was hanging upside down from the branch of a mango tree and it broke. When I hit the ground, my friends thought I was dead.”

Musharraf doesn’t elaborate on the mango tree episode but he does paint a picture of a man who sees himself has having always defied the odds through luck or daring. The helicopter that crashed and which he missed because he was playing bridge. Two assassination attempts. The childhood memory of his mother’s tension when as a four-year-old boy he and his family fled by train from India to Pakistan.

This is a man who sees himself as a survivor, with fond memories of boys’ gangs in his childhood in Ankara. “Even at that age I was very good at making strategies and planning tactics to ambush and trap other gangs,” he writes — a line that carries extra resonance as he tries to outmanoeuvre opposition politicians who want to oust him.

I personally rather liked the story about how the outbreak of the 1965 war with India allowed him to escape a looming court-martial in the army for going absent without leave. He says he rescued his reputation by fighting in the war, and winning an award for gallantry for pulling shells away from a fire before they exploded.

Whatever critics have said about this autobiography, it certainly makes you think Musharraf’s next move will be far from predictable. A man who writes of his punishments in the army for ”fighting, insubordination and lack of discipline” is not one to toe the line easily. And yet again, he also writes of his fondness for Turkey which must, among other places, be a possible refuge were he to step down.

Update - Since filing this blog,  Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud has said he is pulling out of the peace deal with the government after it refused to withdraw the army from tribal lands on the Afghan border. So were the sceptics right all along? And what does this mean for the government’s new strategy?

On the same subject, here is an interesting piece in the Christian Science Monitor comparing Pakistan’s policy to that of the United States in Iraq. “Americans can hardly complain that Pakistan is on the verge of a deal with jihadists,” it says. “The US has already done a similar deal with Iraqi Sunni terrorists. In both cases, a prime goal is simply to isolate Al Qaeda.”

No doubt many more twists and turns are yet to come before the picture becomes clearer.

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Pakistan’s impending deal with the Mehsud tribes to end hostilities in South Waziristan could either turn out to be the door to a wider peace along the troubled corridor with Afghanistan or a strategic blunder with consequences not just for Pakistan, but for Afghanistan and beyond including the West.

Is Pakistan ready for it ? How far have the country’s new civilian leaders — who had pledged a radically different approach to the northwest region considered the haven of the Taliban and al Qaeda — thought it through?

Newspaper editorials, military experts and blogs are debating those questions both in Pakistan and a world away in the United States, Britain and even Canada, which worries whether its troops in Afghanistan will end up paying a price.

The 15-point agreement, according to a draft that has appeared in the media, essentially calls for an end to militant activity and an exchange of prisoners in return for the gradual withdrawal of the Pakistani military from parts of South Waziristan. There would be no more attacks or kidnapping of military and government officials, roads will be opened and the Frontier Corps, the local security force, will be allowed free movement.

More importantly, the Mehsud elders have also promised to expel all foreign militants from their territory starting within a month and the Pakistani government hopes to replicate the agreement in other parts of the region as well, aiming to drive the wedge deeper between the home grown elements and al Qaeda.

Baitullah Mehsud, leader of the umbrella group Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (Taliban Movement of Pakistan) has already announced a ceasefire and threatened to string anyone violating it upside down in a bazaar. So far so good although there was a car bombing on Friday near a police station in North West Frontier Province. The Taliban said it was in retaliation for a police shootout and the ceasefire remained in place.

The government justifies the policy change saying it believes negotiations, significantly increased development aid for the tribal region and legislation designed to eventually integrate it with the rest of Pakistan offer the most effective strategy for turning the population there against al Qaeda.

In any case the military option has been tried, and it hasn’t produced results ; the military has lost hundreds of soldiers in the fighting, it has brought forth a spate of suicide bombings, and the operations have been deeply unpopular across the country.

Indeed, even the U.S. Congress’ investigative arm, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in a report this month accused the Bush administration of failing to develop a comprehensive strategy to prevent — let alone decisively defeat — the al Qaeda leadership that fled to Pakistan after U.S.-led forces chased it out of Afghanistan more than six years ago.

The report, which was based on intelligence reports and interviews with U.S. diplomats and military and intelligence officers, found that Washington had relied too heavily on President Pervez Musharraf and the Pakistani army to deal with al Qaeda and that virtually all of the nearly six billion dollars in aid Washington had provided to help Pakistan fight al Qaeda and the Taliban in the tribal areas had gone to the military, while only a tiny fraction was earmarked for economic and other forms assistance for the largely Pashtun population there.

So then where is the rub ? The main criticism is that Pakistan might be buying peace for itself, while letting the militants devote their energy to the fight against U.S. forces in Afghanistan which they say is the “mother of all the problems there.”
There is no mention in the draft agreement of ending cross-border attacks into Afghanistan.

Secondly, deals with militants in both North and South Waziristan have been tried before, with disastrous consequences. A report by the International Crisis Group said Musharraf’s 2006 North Waziristan agreement was directly responsible for creating a safe haven for al Qaeda’s leadership in Pakistan.

And finally there is an issue of principle. Pakistani defence specialist Ikram Sehgal argues that while “all militants are not terrorists”, he says “one cannot (and should not) negotiate with terrorists. Baitullah Mehsud is a terrorist.”

In a posting this week, the blog fiverupees says Pakistan must pause and consider if it is ready to face the consequences of another 9/11 or 7/7 , but this time originating directly from the areas it is supposed to control.

The United States, beginning with President George W. Bush himself, has this past two weeks trained its crosshairs on Pakistan, warning that another Sept. 11,  if it were to happen, would most likely not be plotted out of Iraq, Afghanistan or even Iran,  but Pakistan.

Like the steady drumbeat that has often preceded major moves by the administration, the threat from Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas, considered the home of the top ranks of al Qaeda, has been articulated from the White House, at Congressional hearings and abroad.

Al Qaeda “won’t go away quietly in the night”, having found sanctuaries in ungoverned places, tribal areas and the Frontier Province of Pakistan, FBI director Robert Mueller said in the latest remarks on the matter, according to Pakistan’s Daily Times.

The issue is starting to create ripples, both at home in America and quite obviously in Pakistan, although for different reasons. For Bush critics at home, the barrage of statements is an admission, at the very least, that America is tied down in Iraq when it should be focusing on the threat along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. At worst, it’s an admission that American blood and treasure have been spent in the wrong place.

In Pakistan, the reaction is measured but concern over U.S. intentions is unmistakable.

“That the Americans are up to mischief is also evident from their extraordinary interest in the internal politics of Pakistan and formation of the government, which they are desperately trying to influence to suit their own objectives,” Pakistan Defence says in a posting arguing that Washington, faced with a strong new national coalition government in Islamabad, had stepped up covert and public pressure.

Raids in Pakistan’s tribal areas have already been carried out by U.S. drones,  the News said, warning that any further U.S. intervention in region will aggravate the considerable problems there, including the legacy of the militant armies set up to fight the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.