Pakistan: Now or Never?

Will S. Arabia broker a deal to repair Pakistan-US ties?

With the U.S.-Pakistan dispute over CIA contractor Raymond Davis stuck in Pakistani courts, newspapers are reporting that the two countries’ common ally, Saudi Arabia, may step in to defuse the deepening crisis between them.

The high court in Lahore, where Davis shot dead two people in what he said was an act of self-defence in January, on Monday declined to rule on whether he  has diplomatic immunity. The court referred the question of immunity to a criminal court which is dealing with murder charges against him.

Given Pakistan’s cumbersome legal system which takes years to resolve disputes, something which both the United States and Pakistan would like to avoid, Pakistani newspapers say  Saudi Arabia is playing a behind-the-scenes role to find an out of court settlement.

“All eyes on Saudi role in resolving Davis row,” read a headline in daily The News on March 9. 

According to the report, the Saudi government would try to resolve the issue in line with Qisas — an Islamic injunction which allows the settlement of murder cases through payment of blood-money to the relatives.

The News said Marc Grossman, the new U.S. envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan who replaced Richard Holbrooke, discussed the issue of payment of Qisas with Saudi authorities on the sidelines of an international conference in Jeddah earlier this month.

Titled “Saudi ambassador comes up with ‘Raymond offer’, daily The Nation reported that Saudi envoy to Pakistan, Abdul Aziz bin Ibrahim al Ghadeer, discussed the issue separately with Pakistan’s interior minister Rehman Malik last week.

In India-Iran oil spat, nuclear row trumps Afghan war

Not too long ago, you could have predicted relatively easily how regional rivalries would play out in Afghanistan.  Saudi Arabia would line up alongside Pakistan while Iran and India would coordinate their policies to curb the influence of their main regional rivals. 

But that pattern has been shifting for a while — the row over Indian oil payments to Iran is if anything a continuation of that shift rather than a dramatic new departure in global diplomacy.  And as two foreign policy crises converge, over Iran’s nuclear programme and the war in Afghanistan, the chances are that those traditional alliances will be dented further. It is no longer a safe bet to assume that rivalry between Sunni Saudi Arabia and Shi’ite Iran will fit neatly into Pakistan-India hostility so that the four countries fall easily into two opposing camps come any final showdown over Afghanistan.

India, which has been working to improve its relationship with the United States for much of the last decade, already earned Iran’s wrath by voting against it at the International Atomic Energy Association (IAEA) over its nuclear programme, first in 2005 and then again in 2009. Though India has since been trying to repair the damage, comments by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei late last year criticising India over Kashmir soured the mood further between the two former allies.

The decision by the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) last week to suspend payments for oil imports made by Indian companies from Iran that use the Asian Clearing Union (ACU), a clearing house used to process multilateral payments between South Asian countries and Iran, was pretty much in line with that trajectory of slowly deteriorating relations.

As a caveat, it would probably be unwise to read too much into the oil payments row — Indian media have complained that the RBI decision was not coordinated across government departments and reported that the timing of its announcement came as a surprise even to the foreign ministry.  But extend the trajectory further and the outlook for coordination between India and Iran on Afghanistan does not look too promising.

India, Iran and Russia all supported the then Northern Alliance which opposed the Taliban when they were in power from 1996 to 2001.  But Washington and others have since accused Iran of covertly backing the Taliban — an allegation Tehran denies — in order to maintain pressure on the United States.  In the event of an escalation of the nuclear row, it could ratchet up support for the Taliban to make life even harder for the United States. That is anathema to India, which sees the Taliban as a Pakistan-backed movement used by Islamabad to try to maintain its influence in Afghanistan.

Meanwhile India has been cultivating ties with Saudi Arabia, which was one of only three countries along with Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates to recognise the Taliban government when it was in power.  In February last year, Prime Minister Prime Minister Manmohan Singh made the first visit to Saudi Arabia by an Indian leader since 1982, seeking to build economic ties and to enlist the kingdom’s help in improving regional security.

Wikileaks on Pakistan

In the State Department cables released by Wikileaks and so far reported, the most eye-catching as far as Pakistan is concerned is a row with Washington over nuclear fuel.

According to the New York Times, the cables show:

“A dangerous standoff with Pakistan over nuclear fuel: Since 2007, the United States has mounted a highly secret effort, so far unsuccessful, to remove from a Pakistani research reactor highly enriched uranium that American officials fear could be diverted for use in an illicit nuclear device. In May 2009, Ambassador Anne W. Patterson reported that Pakistan was refusing to schedule a visit by American technical experts because, as a Pakistani official said, “if the local media got word of the fuel removal, ‘they certainly would portray it as the United States taking Pakistan’s nuclear weapons,’ he argued.”

The Pakistan Army is deeply sensitive about any questions on the safety of its nuclear weapons.  The country is also often awash with conspiracy theories accusing the Americans of harbouring secret plans to dismantle the nuclear weapons.

That said, the row reported by the NYT appeared to have been about HEU at a nuclear research reactor rather than the weapons themselves, so it may turn out to be less dramatic than it appears.  Pakistan’s nuclear weapons are considered to be well-guarded although analysts have cited a risk of militants trying to seize nuclear material which they might use to make a dirty bomb. (For a factbox on Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, see here).

Of potentially huge significance for Pakistan are cables, reported in The Guardian, saying that Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah has repeatedly urged the United States to attack Iran to destroy its nuclear programme.

“The Saudi king was recorded as having ‘frequently exhorted the US to attack Iran to put an end to its nuclear weapons programme’, one cable stated. ‘He told you [Americans] to cut off the head of the snake,’ the Saudi ambassador to Washington, Adel al-Jubeir said, according to a report on Abdullah’s meeting with the US general David Petraeus in April 2008.” The Guardian reported.

Iran’s role in Afghanistan

Iran has been hosting regional leaders, including Afghan President Hamid Karzai, to celebrate the Persian New Year, or Nowruz (a spring festival whose equivalent in Pakistan, incidentally, is frowned upon by its own religious conservatives).

The Nowruz celebrations, which also included the presidents of Iraq, Tajikistan and Turkmenistan, are part of Iran’s efforts to build regional ties and followed renewed debate over the kind of role Iran wants to play in Afghanistan. As discussed here, it has also been improving ties with Pakistan, and both countries may have worked together on the arrest last month of Abdolmalik Rigi, leader of the Jundollah rebel group.

Depending on who you listen to, Iran is either an unlikely potential ally of the United States in Afghanistan, with shared common interests in stabilising the country, or a spoiler ready to support its old enemies the Afghan Taliban in order to undermine Washington’s position.  Others put it somewhere in between, like every other country in the region biding its time in order to make sense of the U.S. exit strategy from Afghanistan, while also picking its way through a showdown with the United States over its nuclear programme.

Evidence so far of its exact intentions on Afghanistan is sketchy. After initially supporting the United States following the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 -Shi’ite Iran has no natural sympathy with the hardline Sunni Taliban – it found itself branded by former president George W. Bush as part of the axis of evil in 2002, and then after 2003 squeezed between U.S. troops in both Iraq and Afghanistan.

Since then there have been regular unconfirmed reports of Iranian support for the Taliban, largely designed to queer the pitch for the Americans. In one of the more recent reports, Britain’s Sunday Times newspaper provided what it said were details of Taliban fighters being trained in camps in Iran. In a follow-up, however Britain’s Daily Telegraph quoted a senior diplomat as saying that there was intelligence that Iran was instead holding off support to the Taliban and had recently refused requests for arms. U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates described Iranian support for the Taliban as “pretty limited”

At the same time, Iran is keen for stability in Afghanistan in part to help clamp down on a booming heroin trade which has left it with its own huge drug addiction problem. Nearly a year ago, it offered help in combating the Afghan drugs trade at a conference in The Hague attended by U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Its police chief was quoted this month by Press TV as saying that, ”in addition to hosting a large domestic consumption market for narcotics, Iran is the shortest drug trafficking route from Afghanistan to the world. Opium-based products such as morphine and heroin are usually transported to European countries and other products such as hashish are trafficked to other countries such as the Persian Gulf littoral countries. Given all of this, naturally Iran is the country suffering here.”

Opposition mounts to Pakistani farmland sale plan

Pakistan is pushing ahead with a plan to sell or lease agriculture land to foreign investors even as opposition grows at home.  A Saudi delegation is due in the country at the end of Ramadan this month for further talks on a plan to lease an area of land more than twice the size of Hong Kong, a Pakistani official told Reuters this month.

The Saudis are looking to boost their food security and Pakistan will presumably will reap monetary benefits in return. But what about Pakistan’s own food security in the longer term, All Things Pakistan asked in a recent post.

A stampede  for food in Karachi on Monday, although not related, underscored Pakistan’s own vulnerabilities and the plight of some of the nation’s desperately poor. Eighteen women and children died iin the stampede that erupted when a local businessman was handing out wheat flour among hundreds of poor women gathered in a narrow lane.

Those were the destitute, but giving away rich land to foreigners to cultivate and take the produce to their homeland will ultimately hit the ordinary Pakistani, the small farmer and those who indirectly depend on farming for their livelihood, critics are warning.

Robert Schubert in a piece for Food and Water Watch says it has been recognised in other parts of the world that such a “land grab”  harms local communities by dislodging smallholder farmers, aggravating rural poverty and food insecurity. Many of the land purchases comprise tens of thousands of acres which are then turned into single-crop farms – and these dwarf the small-scale farms common in the developing world, where nearly nine out of 10 farms (85 per cent) are less than five acres.

Pakistan’s farmland sales: a fatal folly?

Any student of history will tell you that a recurring feature of 20th century revolutions and civil wars was conflict over land ownership, driven by the resentment of the rural poor against the concentration of agricultural wealth in the hands of the elite. (Cuba and Vietnam, where Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh picked up support by championing farm reform, are good places to start.)

So Pakistan’s plans to sell farmland to rich Gulf investors deserve serious attention, even if land ownership does not have the same ability to grab headlines as its nuclear weapons.

Waqar Ahmed Khan, the Federal Minister of Investment, said last month Pakistan was offering one million acres of farmland for lease or sale to countries seeking to develop food supplies, and was holding talks with Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain and other Arab states. He said all land up for sale or lease was currently unused and promised to hire a security force of 100,000 men, funded by foreign aid, to protect their investments.

His comments prompted a column in U.S. website The National Interest, which argued that the farmland sales would serve as a recruitment tool for Islamist militants who have already picked up support by championing the cause of Pakistan’s rural poor against the feudal elite which dominates the country.

The devil, as usual, will be in the details, but the following obvious questions spring to mind.

What does it mean for Pakistan’s fractured society?

In an article in the Huffington Post, Eric Margolis became the latest to argue that the battle against Islamist militants in Pakistan’s north-west is in danger of morphing into a much wider conflict – ”a national revolution in Pakistan against the western-backed feudal oligarchy that has ruled it since 1947.”  If correct, then any perception that the rich were benefitting from farmland sales at the expense of the poor would only stoke this anger further. 

After cricket, an attack on a revered Sufi shrine in Pakistan

The bombing of the mausoleum of a renowned Pashto mystic poet outside the Pakistani city of Peshawar has darkened the mood further in a nation already numbed by the attack on cricket, its favourite sport, when the Sri Lankan team were targeted in Lahore.

Taliban militants are suspected of being behind the attack on the shrine of Abdul Rehman at the foot of the Khyber pass, where for centuries musicians and poets have gathered in honour of the 17th century messenger of peace and love.

The militants were angry that women had been visiting the shrine of the Rehman Baba as he was popularly known and so they planted explosives around the pillars of the tomb, to pull down the mausoleum in an echo of the Taliban bombing of the giant Buddha statues in Bamiyan in central Afghanistan back in 2001. The structure was damaged and the grave blown up, Dawn reported.

“Is there any limit to this insanity ?’ asks Owais Mughal in a post on All Things Pakistan.  The militants had burnt girls schools to the ground in northwest Pakistan, forced traffic to drive on the right hand side instead of left in the Malakand region, dug up graves of a minority sect and even hung the bodies in the public square in Swat region, he says. And now they were blowing up the resting place of the dead.

“Believe it or not; probably like some of our readers, I am now reluctant to open a newspaper to avoid reading any bad news about Pakistan. It hurts. It simply hurts,” he wrote.

(more…)

from FaithWorld:

Religion and politics behind sharia drive in Swat

Pakistan has agreed to restore Islamic law in the turbulent Swat valley and neighbouring areas of the North-West Frontier Province. What does that mean? Sharia is understood and applied in such varied ways across the Muslim world that it is difficult to say exactly what it is. Will we soon see Saudi or Taliban-style hand-chopping for thieves and stonings for adulterers? Would it be open to appeal and overturn harsh verdicts, as the Federal Sharia Court in Islamabad has sometimes done? Or could it be that these details are secondary because sharia is more a political than a religious strategy here?

As is often the case in Pakistan, this issue has two sides -- theory and practice. In theory, this looks like it should be a strict but not Taliban-style legal regime. As Zeeshan Haider in our Islamabad bureau put in in a Question&Answer list on sharia in Swat:

WHAT KIND OF ISLAMIC JUDICIAL SYSTEM IS SWAT GETTING?

Under Nizam-e-Adl or Islamic system of justice, all judicial laws contrary to Islamic teachings stand cancelled and the courts will decide the cases in line with Islamic injunctions.

These laws were largely in use before Swat was absorbed into Pakistan in 1969, and governments in the 1990s had promised to implement them to placate militants, but never fully did.

Unlike the Taliban courts, which have been summarily handing out severe punishments like chopping off hands of thieves and stoning to death adulterers and rapists, there will be a system of appeal on the decisions handed out by courts in Swat and neighbouring districts.

Ordinary judges, with a knowledge of Islam, will officiate rather than a Qazi. Analysts said the courts are unlikely to hand down Taliban-like sentences.

(UPDATE: Haider followed this up on Tuesday with an analysis "Pakistan takes risk with Islamic Law.")

According to the Karachi daily Dawn, the draft regulation to implement Islamic law, which was already under debate in the provincial capital of Peshawar, has been made more restrictive than a text drawn up last October. That regulation gave sharia courts wide powers with no recourse for appeal. This latest draft says the Federal Sharia Court in Islamabad  will be the final court of appeal. Ordinary judges, not qazis (Islamic judges), will officiate. All that makes it sound like sharia in Swat will be less harsh than the summary sharia judgments the Taliban may impose in other areas.

So far, so good. But that's just on the theory side. As for the practical issues, the Daily Times in Lahore focuses on the local politics behind the sharia drive. It says implementation will depend on local Islamist leaders such as Maulana Sufi Mohammad and adds:

"A chilling feeling is that the Sufi and his warlord son-in-law will preside over the establishment of the sharia law and will also interfere in the day to day implementation of it. The power of the Sufi will derive from the gun of the Taliban and he will not for long allow a sharia which is different from the one enforced by the Taliban elsewhere. This is very important because sharia is the order that will ensure longevity to the governance of the Taliban in the various territories they hold. Finally, if the Taliban win the war in Afghanistan and the Americans leave the region, it is the sharia that will ensure that the territories conquered in Pakistan stay with them."

So once again, as mentioned here in our last post about Swat, religion and politics form an unpredictable and combustible mixture with the Taliban. If previous blogosphere debates about sharia are anything to go by, we'll probably hear a lot about how sharia is imposed, how the system compares to Saudi Arabia and whether this reflects true Islam. That will be interesting, of course, but won't go far enough to understand what's happening in Swat. There will also be a heavy dose of local politics involved, much of it opaque to outsiders. But it's in this practical sphere that the real issue will lie. The Daily Times gives the context for this political struggle that points to a wider strategy in which sharia is a tool. It's worth repeating: "...if the Taliban win the war in Afghanistan and the Americans leave the region, it is the sharia that will ensure that the territories conquered in Pakistan stay with them."

Pakistani Taliban force girls’ schools to close

Taliban militants have banned female education in the northwest Pakistan valley of Swat, depriving more than 40,000 girls of schooling. Last month, the Taliban warned parents against sending their daughters to school, saying female education was “unIslamic”.  The warning was reiterated by a close aide to militant leader Mullah Fazlullah in a message broadcast through an illegal FM radio station on Friday night. Government schools have been shut down and some 300 private schools due to reopen next month after the winter break will probably remain closed, a senior official said.

The development highlights the extent to which the Taliban have extended their influence from the tribal regions on the border with Afghanistan into Pakistan itself, and their willingness to challenge Pakistanis’ way of life.

In the same vein, the blog All Things Pakistan, in a post headlined “Pakistan at War: No Women Allowed” runs a photo of a banner in Mingora, the main city in Swat, which it says reads: “Women are not allowed in the market.”  It says the Taliban has banned the entry of women in markets and ordered the killing of women who violate the ban. “From the picture, this is clearly a textile and cloth market — the type of market where, in Pakistan, you would expect most customers to be women,” it says. It also says that most shop owners have sold or shut down their business because of falling sales.

So what’s going on here? Is this only about the Taliban enforcing their religious views even at the risk of alienating the local population? Neither the parents whose daughters have been banned from school nor the shop owners appear to welcome the development.  Or is it more about them showing their power to intimidate as part of a longer-term strategy?

Other conservative Muslim countries do not have bans on female education — for example in Saudi Arabia female students make up a little over half of those enrolled in schools and universities, although they are strictly segregated. 

The Saudis and the Taliban come from different religious traditions. But according  to the website of the Saudi Arabian embassy in Washington, “education is a requirement for every Muslim, both male and female. The Holy Qur’an and the Hadith [teachings and practices of the Prophet Muhammad] repeatedly emphasize the importance of learning,” it says.

Pakistani society in the throes of tectonic change?

Pakistan is dealing with multiple challenges all at once – its sovereignty and its very idea of itself as an independent nation state are tested in the northwest by both the Islamist militants and U.S. forces hunting them. To its east, the old hostility with India is back in full force following the Mumbai attacks. Then above all, some think the economic meltdown is a more serious risk to Pakistan’s survival than the threat of a conflict with India.

Where does a proud nation turn to for deliverance, faced with almost daily prognosis of its imminent demise?

To religion, going by the rise and rise of the mullah in Pakistani society according to a couple of articles in Pakistan’s Newsline magazine. Time was when the village mosque imam was one  of the most powerless men in the community whose social functions were limited to being present at  births, deaths and weddings, recalls author Mohammed Hanif .

The imam also led the prayers, but it was a different time then. There would be people loitering around the  mosque but it never occurred to him to ask them to join the prayers; nor were those hanging outside  the mosque embarrassed about sitting them out.

What was there to discuss? Faith was your personal  business, between you and your god. So a tiny majority went to the mosque regularly and another  opened “a bottle of something” in the evening, and they all lived on the same street.

Forty years later, the imam has metamorphosed into a television evangelist who preaches 24/7 on his own satellite channel, or goes around the nation building madrasas while some others are engaged in jihad. But each is flaunting an influence that they never had, according to Hanif, author of the book  “The Exploding Mangoes”.