Pakistan: Now or Never?

Pakistan’s ethnic jigsaw shaken by NWFP name change

Changing the name of Pakistan’s North West Frontier Province (NWFP) to “Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa” has triggered a new debate over whether other ethnic communities have the right to claim and win separate regions.

Parliament last week approved the new name, reflecting the Pashtuns’ demographic dominance of the province.

Pashtun nationalists, represented by the Awami National Party (ANP), who lead the coalition government in the province, argue the old NWFP name indicates only a geographical location rather than the ethnicity of its inhabitants, unlike the other three Pakistan provinces — Punjab for Punjabis, Sindh for Sindhis and Baluchistan for Baluchis.

But before its passage in the Senate, angry protesters in the Hindko-speaking dominated region of Hazara in NWFP took to the streets. They burned tyres, blocked roads, damaged buildings and vehicles and observed a strike. Seven people died in clashes with police.

Chaudhry Shujaat Hussain, whose Pakistan Muslim League (PML-Q) is the third largest group in parliament, justified the violence, saying “if their rights (Hazaras’) will be denied then they have no option but to take to the streets.”

His party’s senator, Mohammad Ali Durrani Hussain, said he would soon introduce a bill in parliament seeking provinces for Hazaras, who speak Hindko, and Seraiki speakers, another large ethnic group in the northwest.

Writing in his column for the Daily Times, senior journalist Syed Talat Hussain said Hazara erupted because its inhabitants were assumed to be politically irrelevant and the ANP “drank too deep at the well of political chauvinism.”

from Afghan Journal:

Bombing your own people: the use of air power in South Asia

(U.S. Air Force A-10 Thunderbolt jets, also known as the Warthog. File photo)

Pakistani army chief of staff General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani offered a rare apology at the weekend for a deadly air strike in the Khyber region in the northwest  in which residents and local officials say at least 63 civilians were killed.

Tragically for the Pakistani military, most of the victims were members of a tribe that had stood up against the Taliban. Some of them were members of the army. Indeed as Dawn reported the first bomb was dropped on the house of a serving army officer, followed by another more devastating strike just when people rushed to the scene. Such actions defy description and an explanation is in order from those who ordered the assault, the newspaper said in an angry editorial.

But the question really is wasn't it coming? The counter-insurgency strategy that Pakistan has pursued to wrest control of its turbulent northwest along the border with Afghanistan has consisted of heavy use of air strikes and long range artillery barrages in the initial stages before putting boots on the ground.

It's the steam-roller approach that Lord Curzon, the turn-of-the century British Viceroy of India, spoke about when confronted with a similar challenge in Waziristan - except that it relies on stand-off weapons like releasing bombs from the safety of a jet aircraft to keep military casualties down, taking a leaf from the U.S. playbook in Afghanistan.

Indeed it would appear that while the U.S. is trying to change tack after years of  deadly strikes in Afghanistan, and focus on avoiding casualties at all costs, the Pakistanis are relying on the classic counter-insurgency strategy of overwhelming force as Tim Foxley writes on the Afghanistan blog or the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

Pakistan and the battle for Peshawar

Peshawar is such an important city for Pakistan that it can be hard to write about it without sounding shrill.  It is significant strategically since it lies near the entrance to the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan.  But it is also important emotionally – not only is it a Moghul city and an ancient Silk Route trading hub, but it is also a Pashtun town on the Pakistani side of the Durand Line , the ill-demarcated border between Pakistan and Afghanistan imposed by British colonial rulers that splits the Pashtun people of the region in two. For Pakistan, fighting for control of Peshawar is probably comparable to what France and Germany felt about Alsace Lorraine before World War Two.

So when the New York Times publishes an article about Peshawar being at risk of falling into Taliban hands  we must pay attention.  “In the last two months, Taliban militants have suddenly tightened the noose on this city of three million people, one of Pakistan’s biggest, establishing bases in surrounding towns and, in daylight, abducting residents for high ransoms,” it says. “The threat to Peshawar is a sign of the Taliban’s deepening penetration of Pakistan and of the expanding danger that the militants present to the entire region, including nearby supply lines for NATO and American forces in Afghanistan.”

The Daily Times says it more dramatically, with a Kiplingesque notion of what the fall of Peshawar to Taliban control would mean for Pakistan: “The Taliban are no longer at the gates of Peshawar, they’re inside, making their presence felt in the largest city in the NWFP (North West Frontier Province),” it says.

Pakistan has just launched an offensive against Taliban fighters near Peshawar  in an attempt to re-impose government control. As I said at the beginning, it’s hard not to sound shrill about a place that few outsiders understand. But history is in the making here, and the battle for Peshawar is one we all should watch.