Pakistan: Now or Never?

Anyone here been to Pakistan and speaks English?

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden made a rather odd comment during his visit to Pakistan this week.  “We want what you want: a strong, stable, democratic Pakistan,” he told a news conference, according to the Washington Post.  “We wish your success because it’s in our own interest.” 

It was  not that he was wrong to deny accusations that the United States is out to destabilise Pakistan – a conspiracy theory fuelled by confusion over U.S. strategy in Afghanistan, which to many Pakistanis seems so irrational that they assume there must be a darker plan behind it. Nor that he was wrong to promote democracy — although the United States has had a track record of backing military rulers in Pakistan when it suits them.

It was more in the choice of language — not necessarily Biden’s strong point. It left you wondering which audience he was appealing to when he said, “we want what you want”.

To popular sentiment, which at the moment is running high? But it is not about the need for democracy, but about defending the honour of the prophet Mohammed against perceived western-driven attempts to amend provisions in the Pakistan Penal Code imposing the death penalty for anyone believed to have insulted him.  Religious parties have been able to bring thousands out into the streets to defend Pakistan’s so-called blasphemy laws, after the murder of Punjab governor Salman Taseer by his own security guard over his opposition to these legal provisions.

And while many have rightly pointed out that the religious parties are rarely able to garner more than a few percent of the votes in elections, journalist Mosharraf Zaidi notes that this should not be taken to mean that their views do not enjoy much deeper support in a society which has been becoming increasingly conservative.

“Though the Pakistani right wing is simply instrumentalising Islam, it is tapping into and channelling a political and social force whose appeal and power is unquestionable. Sure, it is unable to translate this appeal into electoral outcomes – but that is because this appeal is not located in the disbursement of patronage, or in administrative prowess. Pakistanis vote for the PPP, the PMLs, the MQM and ANPs because of the certainty that these groups can disburse resources as patronage,”  Zaidi wrote. “In total contrast, it is clear that the religious right wing in Pakistan, while electorally impotent, has tremendous appeal.”

In Pakistan, people are not out demonstrating for democracy — it is too easy for them to blame their democratically elected government for all the ills facing the country from war in Afghanistan to a collapsing economy to devastation wreaked by last summer’s floods. A speech by Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, chairman of the ruling Pakistan People’s Party, condemning Taseer’s killing and delivered to a packed memorial ceremony in London, caused barely a ripple in Pakistan.

After Holbrooke, chances of political settlement in Afghanistan fall

Reading through some of the many thousands of words written about Richard Holbrooke,  for me two stories stood out in their ability to capture what will be lost with his death:

The first was in Rajiv Chandrasekaran’s obituary in the Washington Post:

“While beleaguered members of Mr. Holbrooke’s traveling party sought sleep on transcontinental flights, he usually would stay up late reading. On one trip to Pakistan, he padded to the forward of the cabin in his stocking feet to point out to a reporter a passage in Margaret Bourke-White’s memoirs of the time of India-Pakistan partition and independence. Bourke-White quoted Pakistani leader Muhammad Ali Jinnah telling her that Pakistan would have no problems with the Americans, because ‘they will always need us more than we need them.’ Mr. Holbrooke laughed, saying, ‘Nothing ever changes.’”

The second was in this 2009 profile by George Packer in The New Yorker.

Talking about Washington’s approach to Pakistan, Holbrooke said, “The relationship with Pakistan is so fraught with a history of disappointment on both sides… We can’t align our interests exactly, because they live in a different space, and their history is defined by their relationship with India. . . . The one thing I believe we can do with Pakistan is to try to reach a strategically symmetrical view on the danger posed by Al Qaeda and its allies. That’s the proximate strategic goal.” 

Put together, those comments cover a huge sweep of history and geography which explain why the war in Afghanistan is proving to be so intractable. While the military, and much of the media, focus on Afghanistan – since that is where western troops are deployed - Pakistan is fighting its own battle with India born out of the bloody partition of the subcontinent in 1947.  

Holbrooke was one of the few U.S. officials to have the intellectual range to fully grasp how far the problems of the Afghan war stretched back into history and out into the wider region, from Kabul to Kashmir, from Islamabad to Delhi, from 2010 to 1947. And though he was not allowed to include Kashmir in his mandate because of Indian objections, he nonetheless travelled frequently to India to seek ways of easing tensions with Pakistan. Without such an easing in tensions, Pakistan was never going to turn fully against the Afghan Taliban, believing it might need them to counter Indian influence in Afghanistan.

Lashkar-e-Taiba threatens more violence in Kashmir

The Lashkar-e-Taiba, the Pakistan-based militant group blamed by India for last November’s assault on Mumbai, has threatened more violence in Kashmir after a five-day gunbattle that killed 25 people, including eight Indian troops.

A spokesman for the group, speaking from an undisclosed location, said: “India should understand the freedom struggle in Kashmir was not over, it is active with full force.”

The threat by the Lashkar-e-Taiba, if followed through, would be a new headache for the United States, which would like to see an improvement in relations between India and Pakistan as it overhauls its approach to both Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Washington has been careful to avoid any suggestion that it would intervene overtly in the Kashmir dispute, in what has been seen as an acknowledgement of Indian sensitivities about outside interference.  But Indian newspapers have reported that the United States has nonetheless been quietly leaning on India to reduce tensions on Pakistan’s eastern border so that its army can concentrate on fighting militants on its western border with Afghanistan.

And former CIA officer Bruce Riedel, leading a review of strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan expected to be released this week, has suggested in the past that a resolution of the Kashmir dispute would help ease tensions across the region.

In an interview with Germany’s Spiegel magazine last December, he said that for those involved in global jihad, the Kashmir cause is in many ways “like a second Palestine”.  Solving the conflict and bringing peace between Israelis and Palestinians, he said, would help dry up support for al Qaeda. “We are not going to get al Qaeda to change its mind. These are fanatics. What we want to do, though, is to separate the fanatics from the rest of the Islamic world.”

The Pakistani kaleidoscope and the Swat ceasefire

The debate over the Pakistan government’s decision to seek peace with Taliban militants in the Swat valley by promising to introduce sharia law is proving to be like everything else in the Pakistani kaleidoscope – turn it a little bit and you see something else.

Pakistani analyst Ayesha Siddiqa said the peace deal could encourage groups in other parts of the country to copy the example of the Taliban in forcing through changes. ”The bottom line is that while conflict might be arrested for the short term in one part of the country, it might escalate in other parts where groups of people acting like the Taliban could impose their will on the rest of the population in the name of changing the judicial, economic or political system,” she says. “Ultimately, this could come to redefine Pakistan’s identity completely.”

But in an article in Dawn, Kunwar Idris defended the decision by arguing that the roots of the campaign for the restoration of sharia are quite different from those fuelling the Taliban insurgency in Pakistan’s border areas with Afghanistan. Drawing on his experience as a government adviser in neighbouring Chitral, he says a form of sharia used to work well when Swat was still a princely state. ”Pakistan stands much to gain and its allies in the ‘war on terror’ have little to lose if the Sharia courts bring tranquillity and tourists back to the Swat valley,” he writes.

While India has, perhaps predictably, condemned the peace deal — Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram called it a threat to the entire region — what has been more interesting are Indian readings of the U.S. response.  Although U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke expressed concern, the U.S. response has been relatively muted.

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Holbrooke in Pakistan: a sea change?

With Richard Holbrooke very much keeping his own counsel about his maiden visit to Pakistan, it’s been hard to assess quite how much change is to be expected from President Barack Obama’s new special envoy.

But a couple of early op-eds suggest that the change might be quite substantial. 

In the Indian Express, Indian analyst C. Raja Mohan writes that Islamabad’s  acknowledgement that at least part of the planning for last year’s Mumbai attacks could have taken place in Pakistan could be Holbrooke’s first success. “It will be difficult not to see the connection between Pakistan’s significant announcements on Mumbai and the U.S. Special Envoy Richard Holbrooke’s trip to the region this week and President Barack Obama’s call to (President Asif Ali) Zardari on Wednesday night,”  he says.

The crucial issue will be the extent to which Holbrooke can achieve the United States’ avowed aim of strengthening the civilian government in Pakistan, which many in India suspected of ceding much decision-making to the Pakistan Army after the Mumbai attacks. In admitting to a link to the Mumbai attacks, Raja Mohan says, Zardari appears to have taken a significant political risk.   

Picking up a similar theme, the New York Times quotes Pakistani author Ahmed Rashid as saying the high-profile visit by a civilian envoy could change the tone of the U.S. conversation with Pakistan (the traditional dominance of military-to-military contacts in the U.S. relationship with Pakistan has been criticised for enhancing the role of the Pakistan Army and undermining civilian governments.)

“This is a complete sea change in what Pakistan is used to,” the newspaper quotes him as saying. “There is a suspicion in the American establishment that the Pakistani Army has found it easier to pull the wool over the eyes of the American military. It will be harder to do that with the civilians.”

The other Guantanamo

U.S. President Barack Obama has ordered the Guantanamo military prison closed within the year, but what about the detention centre in Bagram, the U.S. military base in Afghanistan, which has an equally murky legal status ?

An estimated 600 detainees are held there, without any charge and many for over six years, rights activists say. That makes it more than twice the number held in Guantanamo, and according to military personnel who know both facilities, it is much more spartan and with lesser privileges as this report in the New York Times says.

Few detainees have had access to lawyers, and there was no question ever of allowing journalists or human rights advocates into the facility. I lived on the military base for four weeks as part of a group of journalists covering the war in 2002 and we had no clue where the prison was located, and we would keep guessing which one of the cavernous Soviet-built aircraft hangars the detainees were kept in.

Since then, the New York Times says, the population at the Bagram prison has expanded substantially, especially after the Bush administration largely halted the movement of prisoners to the Cuban facility in September 2004, making the Afghan centre the preferred alternative.

Indeed there is a U.S. plan to expand the prison complex to hold 1,100 “enemy combatants” – prisoners who cannot see lawyers, have no trials and never see any evidence there may be against them, Britain’s Telegraph said. The one concession that has happened over the past year is that every Monday families gather in a Red Cross compound in Kabul for a glimpse by live video of brothers, sons and husbands who have disappeared into the feared detention centre in Bagram.

The U.S. military says the detainees are Taliban and al Qaeda fighters who must be kept off the battlefield. But human rights lawyers say the prison also holds scores of innocent people, many seized after tip-offs from feuding rivals in a viciously warring tribal society, as the Telegraph story says.

What does Pakistan want from U.S. envoy Holbrooke ?

Former Pakistan ambassador to London and Washington Maleeha Lodhi has given a taste of what Richard Holbrooke can expect when he makes his maiden visit to Islamabad next week in his new role as President Barack Obama’s special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan.

She may have owed her diplomatic career to General Pervez Musharraf,  but being an ex-official does not mean she has lost touch.

Writing in The News, the paper she used to edit, Lodhi listed an eight-point agenda for Pakistan as it braces for Holbrooke, a diplomat with a reputation for playing hardball.

Lines have to be drawn to make the United States respect Pakistani sovereignty and understand the limits of cooperation, Lodhi writes in an opinion piece titled “Back to the Future”.

Here’s the Pakistani agenda as she sees it : 1. U.S. missile attacks on Pakistani territory should end. 2. Assistance under the Biden-Luger bill should be offered with no strings attached. 3. Give Pakistan helicopters, night vision, radar to fight a counter-insurgency, it doesn’t need conventional arms from America. 4. Give Pakistan a break in trade agreements. The all- important textile industry needs a lifeline. 5. Make India part of the equation for stabilising Kashmir, by recognising Pakistan’s security concerns on its eastern border. 6. The United States should reshape its Afghan policy to take into account Pakistan’s security concerns, otherwise no strategy will work. 7. Pakistan must also tell the United States that sending more troops to Afghanistan without a change in strategy will backfire. 8. Policies to stabilise Afghanistan should not end up destabilising Pakistan. The Taliban should be prised away from al Qaeda, and a reconciliation process with the Taliban begun.

U.S. missile strikes on Pakistan : more of the same under Obama or worse to come?

The first U.S. missiles have struck Pakistan since U.S. President Barack Obama  took office, dispelling any possibility that he might relent on these raids that have so angered Pakistanis, many of whom think it only engenders reprisal attacks from militants on their cities.

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari protested to the U.S. ambassador over Friday’s twin raids in South and North Waziristan and  newspaper editorialists and commentators are worried this is just a foretaste of things to come. The strikes, the first since Jan 2, have led the Dawn newspaper to recall Obama’s statements during the presidential camapaign when he repeatedly said he would “take out high value terrorist targets” inside Pakistan if it was unable or unwilling to do so.

“Three days into Obama’s presidency, we have the first evidence of how his promise will translate into action. Drone attacks in South and North Waziristan have killed at least 14 people, including what the media now routinely refers to as ‘foreign militants’, ” the newspaper said.

Early signs from Washington suggest that it will continue military action on Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), considered to be place where al Qaeda has reconstituted itself, the newspaper said.  At the same time it will demand that Pakistan do more against the militants, tying aid to the armed forces with achieving concrete results.

The News wrote that the ‘rather optimistic assurance” given by Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani earlier on that the Predator drone attacks would stop once Obama took charge had been dashed. And it added that it wasn’t clear why or how Gilani made such a statement when he was in no position to issue a guarantee on behalf of the Americans.

Obama’s South Asian envoy and the Kashmir conundrum

Earlier this month, I wrote that the brief given to a South Asian envoy by President Barack Obama could prove to be the first test of the success of Indian diplomacy after the Mumbai attacks. At issue was whether the envoy would be asked to focus on Afghanistan and Pakistan or whether the brief would be extended to India, reflecting comments made by Obama during his election campaign that a resolution of the Kashmir dispute would ease tensions across the region.

That question has been resolved – publicly at least — with the appointment of Richard Holbrooke as Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. No mention of India or Kashmir.

India has long resisted overt outside interference in Kashmir and argued – with great vehemence since the Mumbai attacks – that tensions in South Asia were caused by Pakistan’s support for, or tolerance of, Islamist militants rather than the Kashmir dispute.  For India, a public reference to Kashmir following Mumbai would amount to endorsing what it calls cross-border terrorism.

So does that mean the end of the road for efforts to ease tensions in Kashmir? Analysts think not. Unlike British Foreign Secretary David Miliband, who riled India this month by linking security in South Asia to Kashmir, the United States appears to have decided that by keeping quiet in public, it can achieve more in private.

In The Cable, Washington reporter Laura Rozen – who says India’s U.S. lobby worked hard to make sure there was no reference to India in Holbrooke’s brief – quotes Philip Zelikow, a former counselor to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, as saying the omission might make things easier. “Leaving India out of the title actually opens up (Holbrooke’s) freedom to talk to them,” Zelikow says. In Pakistan’s Daily Times, columnist Ejaz Haider writes that “Obama will not overtly offend India by putting in place a special envoy for Afghanistan-Pakistan-India. But discerning analysts in New Delhi know the fine print.” Indian analyst Raja Mohan made a similar point when he wrote before Holbrooke’s appointment that, “although in deference to New Delhi’s objections, Obama might not name Kashmir as part of the special envoy’s mandate, reworking the India-Pakistan relationship will be an inevitable and important component of his initiative.”

And India may actually be less defensive about U.S. involvement in Kashmir than it was when Obama first raised the idea. It has since concluded elections in the state of Jammu and Kashmir, conducted in conditions of relative peace that many reckon would not have been possible without the active cooperation of Pakistan in restraining militants from disrupting the polls. 

Obama and his South Asian envoy

There’s much talk about President-elect Barack Obama possibly appointing Richard Holbrooke as a special envoy to South Asia. The New York Times says it’s likely; while the Washington Independent says it may be a bit premature to expect final decisions, even before Obama takes office on Jan. 20.

But more interesting perhaps than the name itself will be the brief given to any special envoy for South Asia. Would the focus be on Afghanistan and Pakistan? Or on Pakistan and India? Or all three? The Times of India said India might be removed from the envoy’s beat to assuage Indian sensitivities about Kashmir, which it sees as a bilateral issue to be resolved with Pakistan, and which has long resisted any outside mediation. This, the paper said, was an evolution in thinking compared to statements made by Obama during his election campaign about Kashmir.

Before last year’s Mumbai attacks, Obama had suggested that the United States should help India and Pakistan to make peace over Kashmir as part of a regional strategy to stabilise Afghanistan. In this he was supported by a raft of U.S. analysts who argued that Pakistan would never fully turn against Islamist militants threatening the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan as long as it felt it might need them to counter burgeoning Indian influence in the region. Obama’s suggestion raised hackles in India, and broke with a tradition established by the Bush administration which had tended to be – publicly at least — hands-off about the Kashmir dispute. 

But since the Mumbai attacks, India has argued that any attempt to link these to the Kashmir dispute would be to reward what it has called cross-border terrorism from Pakistan. Pakistan, which denies involvement in the Mumbai attacks, has in turn insisted that the best way to resolve tensions with India would be to seek a solution on Kashmir. So the brief given to a South Asia envoy could turn out to be one of the first clear tests of how successful Indian diplomacy has been post-Mumbai in trying to convince the United States to see Pakistan, rather than Kashmir, as the problem. 

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