A narrow majority of Pakistanis support the army’s offensive in South Waziristan, but many still believe Pakistan is fighting “America’s war”, according to a Gilani Research Foundation poll conducted by Gallup Pakistan.

In the poll, conducted in the last week of October, 51 percent supported the offensive, 13 percent opposed it and 36 percent were unsure. A majority held the United States and Pakistan’s own government –rather than the Taliban – responsible for the situation which required the offensive in the first place.

And in a country where many believe the government and army are being pushed to follow America’s bidding, in part to bolster the U.S. position in Afghanistan, 39 percent of respondents said the military was fighting ”America’s war”, while 37 percent said it was fighting Pakistan’s own war.

The researchers said 36 percent of respondents were hopeful the operation would bring peace, 37 percent believed it would worsen the situation and 27 percent were unsure.

Pakistani ambivalence about tackling Islamist militants has undermined efforts to rally the country against them, despite a spate of gun and bomb attacks in the country’s cities, though political analysts say the urban violence has now convinced many that action is necessary.

Many blame that ambivalence on what they see as a Pakistani military strategy of attacking only those militants who threaten Pakistan itself, while leaving alone other groups like the Afghan Taliban and Kashmir-oriented groups which can be used as “strategic assets” against Indian influence in the region.

But even in terms of Pakistan’s approach to the Pakistani Taliban, or Tehrik-e-Taliban (TTP) - a major target of the South Waziristan operation - some question whether the army is doing the right thing in launching military offensives in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.

For an alternative view to the prevailing support for the South Waziristan offensive, Muhammad Idrees Ahmad argues in Le Monde diplomatique that Pakistan is creating its own enemy through ill-considered operations that alienate local people and drive more into the arms of the Taliban. 

In a country where conspiracy theories abound, many are also quick to blame India or the United States for the violence rather than the Taliban.

Do read this exchange recounted by Londonstani, a blogger at Abu Muqawama, about last week’s attack on a market in Peshawar which killed more than 100 people, many of them women and children.

  “Person 1: ‘The Taliban couldn’t have blown up the market in Peshawar because a Muslim wouldn’t do that.’
  “Person 2: ‘No, the Americans did it. But you know, the market that got blown up catered for women. And you know it’s haram for women to go out of  the house.’
  ”Person 1: ‘Oh…..yeah’”.

And if the bomb and gun attacks are turning people against the Pakistani Taliban, that does not mean they are likely to rally behind their government. According to this poll, 73 percent of respondents believe that the terrorism has worsened dramatically in Pakistan. But commenting on the government’s response, 44 percent said they believe they had completely failed while 44 percent said they had been successful to some extent.

(Photos: soldiers in Lahore; refugees from earlier Swat offensive)

One of the arguments frequently put forward for sending more western troops to Afghanistan is that western failure there will destabilise Pakistan.

Very roughly summarised, this 21st century version of the domino theory suggests that a victory for Islamist militants in Afghanistan would so embolden them that they might then overrun Pakistan - a far more dangerous proposition given its nuclear weapons.

A slightly different but related argument is that the United States needs to show resolve in Afghanistan to convince Pakistan of its commitment to the region and encourage the Pakistan Army and its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) spy agency to turn against Islamist militants it once cultivated as ”strategic assets” to be used against its much bigger neighbour India.

“Many in Pakistan have always believed the Americans are not really serious about Afghanistan. They recall that the U.S. supported Pakistan and the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s only to abandon both once the Soviets left,” writes Bruce Riedel at Brookings in a follow-up to this weekend’s attack on the Pakistan Army headquarters.

If President Barack Obama ”shows resolve in Afghanistan, Pakistanis won’t love us, but they will believe we are serious and determined to stay until a stable Afghanistan and Pakistan emerges,” he writes. “If it appears the United States cannot make up its mind about what to do, then Pakistanis will say I told you so and make their own accommodations.”

Yet the assault on army headquarters in the garrison city of Rawalpindi raises several questions both about the domino theory and argument about the United States needing to show resolve in Afghanistan.

First, does the Pakistan Army still need to be convinced of the dangers from Islamist militants after its commandos, as the Daily Telegraph put it, “were forced to storm their own headquarters” to release hostages seized in an attack on the most powerful institution in the country?

Second, the attack - which in turn raised jitters about the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons - appeared to have nothing to do with the main Afghan Taliban group fighting western forces in Afghanistan - the so-called Quetta shura led by Mullah Omar, which according to Washington is based in  Pakistan’s Baluchistan province.   

As discussed in this post and in this analysis, the gunmen involved in the Rawalpindi raid came from a nexus of militant groups linking up the Pakistani Taliban, or Tehrik-e-Taliban (TTP), based in South Waziristan in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, and organisations which have taken deep root in the country’s heartland Punjab province - including sectarian groups and those originally set up to fight India in Kashmir.

The Guardian quotes Pakistan Army spokesman Major General Athar Abbas as saying that five of the attackers came from Punjab while the other five were from South Waziristan. The ringleader, he said, was a Punjabi, while the operation was ordered from South Waziristan. The Pakistani Taliban claimed responsibility for the attack, but said it was carried out by its Punjab unit.

So if the threat to Pakistan comes not from the Afghan Taliban but from the Pakistani Taliban and the many militant organisations based in Punjab, can you still cite the need to stabilise Pakistan as a justification for sending more troops to Afghanistan?

There may be other arguments for sending more troops to Afghanistan, among them to prevent it again becoming a base for al Qaeda. As Reuters correspondent William Maclean writes here, analysts are still divided on whether the Afghan Taliban can be prised away from al Qaeda.

Pakistan’s former ambassador to Kabul argues in this interview with India’s Business Standard that they can. “First of all, we have to understand that the Taliban and the al Qaeda have totally different targets; and also that the Afghan Taliban are different from the Pakistan Taliban and there is evidence of this,” he says. ”We can do business with the Taliban and in order to bring back some normalcy in Afghanistan, the Taliban and the U.S. will have to do business. But we need to have some benchmarks for the conduct of the Taliban government before we do that.”

And in this article in the Washington Post, Prince Turki al-Faisal, the former director of Saudi Arabia’s intelligence service, suggests looking anew at the Afghan Taliban.

“Change the media theme from attacking the Taliban and calling them the terrorists to concentrating on al Qaeda and ‘foreign terrorists’,” he writes. ”By removing the stigma of terrorism from the Taliban, you can pursue meaningful negotiations with them. Mohammad Omar has never enjoyed the full support of Pashtuns. He is a lowly figure in tribal terms, and he is blamed by many of them for the calamity that has befallen Afghanistan. Reaching out to tribal leaders is what will move negotiations.”

Those are big questions about Afghanistan, but are they the same questions as those now being asked about Pakistan? Or is it time to start looking at the two countries separately again, albeit within a broad regional context that acknowledges the very complex links between different Islamist militant groups?

The ”AfPak” label has never been popular in the region itself. Is it time to ditch it?

(Reuters file photos: Nuristan in Afghanistan; U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, and Pakistani soldiers in the border areas)

In the eight years since the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, political pundits have used, and largely overused, all the available historical references. We have had the comparisons to the British 19th century failures there, to the Great Game, and to the Soviet Union’s disastrous experience in the 1980s. More recently, it has been labelled ”Obama’s Vietnam”.

The latest leitmotif is the domino theory - the view that Vietnam had to be saved from communism or other Asian countries would go the same way.  In the case of Afghanistan, the argument is that if it falls to the Taliban, then Pakistan too might become vulnerable - an infinitely more dangerous proposition given that it is a country of some 170 million people with nuclear bombs.

Britain’s Paddy Ashdown alluded to this idea in an op-ed in the Independent titled “What we must do to win this war in Afghanistan”. “I start from the proposition that the war in Afghanistan is one we have to fight and must win. The cost of failure there is just too great. It includes the certain fall of Pakistan and the possible emergence of the world’s first jihadist government with a nuclear weapon …” he writes.

In an article in the American Interest, analyst Stephen Biddle spells this out further by arguing that the main reason for the United States to fight in Afghanistan is to prevent it from destabilising Pakistan.

“With a population of 173 million (five times Afghanistan’s), a GDP of more than $160 billion (more than 10 times Afghanistan’s) and a functional nuclear arsenal of perhaps 20 to 50 warheads, Pakistan is a much more dangerous prospective state sanctuary for al Qaeda. Furthermore, the likelihood of government collapse in Pakistan, which would enable the establishment of such a sanctuary, may be in the same ballpark as Afghanistan, at least in the medium to long term,” he writes.

“Pakistani state collapse, moreover, is a danger over which the United States has only limited influence. We have uneven and historically fraught relations with the Pakistani military and intelligence services, and our ties with the civilian government of the moment can be no more efficacious than that government’s own sway over the country. The United States is too unpopular with the Pakistani public to have any meaningful prospect of deploying major ground forces there to assist the government in counterinsurgency.”

Robert Haddick, the managing editor of Small Wars Journal, takes aim at this line of thinking in an article in Foreign Policy.

“Contrary to Biddle’s assertion, it seems equally reasonable to argue that Taliban-controlled Afghanistan provided a relief valve of sorts for Islamist pressure that might have otherwise formed inside Pakistan during the 1990s. And although the Afghan Taliban and Pakistani Taliban are two distinct movements, the U.S.-led operation in Afghanistan may be inciting and pressurizing Taliban activity inside Pakistan. Contrary to what Biddle argues, the U.S. campaign in Afghanistan may be increasing rather than decreasing the risk to Pakistan,” he says.

“As Biddle points out, the Barack Obama’s administration will have a hard enough time maintaining public support for the Afghan campaign. Best to leave the domino theory out of it.”

He is perhaps right to say that the domino theory is not a useful comparison, having been so widely discredited in Vietnam. Yet arguably the domino theory went wrong not as a concept but on specifics. The United States failed to notice that the Vietminh/Vietcong were nationalists more than communists while it also misread the intentions and capabilities of the Soviet Union and China when it allowed itself to be dragged into military defeat.

But if the real reason for fighting in Afghanistan is to prevent the destabilisation of Pakistan, should this not be discussed openly?

The questions, as in Vietnam, come down to specifics. Are the Taliban primarily Pashtun nationalists who, if brought into the political power structure in Afghanistan, would cease to be a threat? Or are they primarily a religious force intent on spreading global jihad in which Pakistan would be the next domino? (Most people you ask say both, with the argument being over which characteristic predominates.) And what are the intentions of Afghanistan’s neighbours, and of the United States and its allies? Would success or failure in Afghanistan lead to more problems in the neighbourhood - as was widely assumed in Vietnam - or not?

In one of the more dispassionate articles I have read on this in recent weeks, Dawn columnist Irfan Husain writes that the war in Afghanistan can be neither won nor lost.

But the price of failure, and a Western troop withdrawal would be this: ”… we would be back to the pre-9/11 situation. The only difference would be that the Taliban would be viewed as the force that had defeated the mighty Americans. This would give them an aura of legitimacy and invincibility that would win them many recruits and financial backers.”

“… the victorious Taliban would have their own agenda, and would not be the puppets the ISI think they would be able to manipulate. An earlier generation of jihadis drove out the Red Army, and after defeating the U.S.-led coalition, it is unlikely that Mullah Omar would accept dictation from our generals in Islamabad. Chances are that he and his Pakistani allies would seek to extend their writ across large swathes of Pakistan.

“Encouraged by the success of the holy warriors in Afghanistan, groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba would step up their jihad against India in Kashmir. A re-Talibanised Afghanistan would once again become a magnet for young jihadis from across the world. Al Qaeda would emerge from hiding and renew its war against the West and modernity. Rapidly, Afghanistan and parts of Pakistan would become the epicentre of the global jihad to an even greater extent than the region is now.

“Already, there is said to be a strong nexus between the Taliban and the Muslim Uighur separatist movement … The Taliban, ignorant as they are of how the world works, would provoke Russia by openly supporting the Chechen rebels. In short, they would quickly antagonise India, Iran, the West, Russia and China. And as Pakistan would once again be sucked into supporting Kabul, we would be tarred with the same brush as the Taliban. This is the scenario that we and the West need to keep in mind as the war against the Taliban drags on.

“This is a war that cannot be won. But equally, it is a war that cannot be lost.”

When Secretary of State Hillary Clinton raised the possibility in April of Islamist militants taking over Pakistan and its nuclear weapons, her words were dismissed as alarmist - and perhaps deliberately so as a way of putting pressure on Islamabad to act.

The problem with Pakistan is that it is almost impossible to come up with a view that is not either alarmist or complacent. It is such a complex country that nobody can agree a frame of reference for assessing the risk. It is the base for a bewildering array of militants including Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, al Qaeda and anti-India groups, yet also has a powerful and professional army which would be expected to defend to the last its Punjab heartland and nuclear weapons against a jihadi takeover.  Its potent mix of poverty and Islamist sympathies among a significant section of the population make it ripe for revolution, yet it also has a strong and secular-minded civil society which was willing to go out into the streets earlier this year to demand an independent judiciary.

You can assess the risk in Pakistan by looking at the rate of decline in stability there, and that was faster than anyone expected over the past year or so until a military offensive against the Taliban in Swat  which began in April halted the slide.

Or you can look at the worst case scenario, of Islamist militants taking over a nuclear-armed Pakistan, and decide that even if that outcome is unlikely, the potential dangers arising from it are so great as to put Pakistani stability at the top of global risks.

In an essay in the National Interest, Bruce Riedel, the former CIA officer who led a review of strategy in Afghanistan and Pakistan for President Barack Obama, lays out the implications of that worst case scenario.

“A jihadist Pakistan would be the most serious threat to the United States since the end of the Cold War.  Aligned with al-Qaeda and armed with nuclear weapons, the Islamic Emirate of Pakistan would be a nightmare. U.S. options for dealing with it would all be bad,” he writes.

And if the United States were to try to invade “the Pakistanis would, of course, use their nuclear weapons to defend themselves. While they do not have delivery systems capable of reaching America, they could certainly destroy cities and bases in Afghanistan, India, the Gulf states and, if smuggled out ahead of time by terrorists, perhaps the United States. A victory in such a conflict would be Pyrrhic indeed.

“Of course, the hardest problem would be the day after. What would we do with a country twice the size of California with enormous poverty, almost 50 percent illiteracy and intense popular hatred for all that we stand for after we have fought a nuclear war to occupy it?”

Riedel’s essay, titled “Armageddon in Islamabad” goes some way to answering the oft-asked question of why western troops are fighting in Afghanistan when al Qaeda and its allies are believed to be based in Pakistan. It also helps explain why the United States is so keen to see a peace deal with India that might help stabilise the country.

“A jihadist, nuclear-armed Pakistan is a scenario we need to avoid at all costs,” he says. That means working with the Pakistan we have today to try to improve its spotty record on terrorism and proliferation. There is good reason for pessimism. Working with the existing order in Pakistan may not succeed. But there is every reason to try, given the horrors of the alternative.”

Do read it in conjunction with this article in the CTC Sentinel (pdf), in which Shaun Gregory, a professor at Britain’s Bradford University, assesses the risk of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons falling into the hands of Islamist militants. The nuclear weapons, he argues, are well guarded by the Pakistan Army against the internal threat of a seizure by Islamist militants. But this also means that they could not be spirited out of the country by a third party, or destroyed, in the event of a state collapse.

Joshua Foust is an American military analyst. He blogs about Central Asia and Afghanistan at Registan.net . Reuters is not responsible for the content - the views are the author’s alone.

It would be an understatement to call opium cultivation in Afghanistan America’s headache. The issue of illegal drug cultivation and smuggling has vexed policymakers for three decades, and led to a multi-billion dollar campaign to combat the phenomenon.

Opium causes all of our problems, so they say—according to a factsheet at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul (pdf), opium creates instability, funds the insurgency, and wreaks havoc on the government. They’re not alone - entire books have been written on the subject.

The blame game on opium, however, ignores a critical - and quite uncomfortable - fact: it misses the point. The reality is, while the cultivation of opium does not help matters from a Western perspective, in Afghanistan it is actually a healthy economic activity. The concerns over its cultivation, too, are overblown: even a brief look at the numbers show it to be at best a trailing indicator of insecurity, insurgency, corruption, and economic malaise. Opium, therefore, is only an indicator of other, more substantial problems.

Consider, for example, what I call The Nangarhar Swing. According to the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime, in 2005 Nangarhar produced nearly 1/5 of Afghanistan’s opium, but was virtually poppy-free in 2006. 2007 saw a 285 percent increase (pdf) in cultivation, making the province one of the country’s top poppy producers. Yet in 2008, it was once again virtually poppy-free (pdf). This shift cannot be tied only to security, as many like to claim: according to the violence statistics compiled by the Long War Journal, even as Nangarhar has stopped the large scale cultivation of opium, it has become steadily more violent. Moreover, there are many other areas of the country, like Khost province along the border with Pakistan, or Kunar province further north, where the insurgency has become worse even as those provinces were emptied of opium.

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When France and Germany put years of enmity behind them after World War Two, they made a leap of faith in agreeing to entwine their economies so that war became impossible. With their economies now soldered by the euro, it can be easy to forget how deep their mutual distrust once ran - from the Napoleonic wars to the fall of Paris to Prussia in 1871, to the trenches of World War One and the Nazi occupation of France in World War Two.

As India and Pakistan begin yet another attempt to make peace, they face a similar challenge. Can they put aside years of distrust to build on a tentative thaw in relations?

Many analysts argue that a sketchy roadmap to peace is already available, based on negotiations between advisers to former president Pervez Musharraf and Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, in which Pakistani action against militants was matched by Indian moves towards a peace deal on Kashmir. But reviving that roadmap - or for that matter finding another way forward - would require both countries to put aside their past and accept that history is not the only guide to the future.

Indian newspaper, the Business Standard, summarised what many Indian commentators say about past attempts at peace-making - that Indian peace offers have never been matched by a sincere effort by Pakistan to curb Islamist militants. ”Pakistan has a history of trying first to get what it wants on the battlefield and, when that fails, to get it at the negotiating table,” it says in an editorial. “Indian leaders meanwhile fall into the traps of magnanimity (make a gesture to a smaller neighbour) or gullibility (concede this or that and it will deliver peace).”

Pakistan has its own version of history, seen from the perspective of a smaller country that believed it was cheated of Kashmir at partition in 1947, and then torn in two with Indian help when Bangladesh, then East Pakistan, won independence in the 1971 war.  Both sides accuse the other of breaching the Simla accord which followed that war - the last major peace treaty between the two - Pakistan by sponsoring militants to fight in Kashmir, and India by starting the Siachen conflict in the mountains beyond Kashmir in 1984.

Many other arguments about the past, too numerous to mention, come up every time anybody discusses India and Pakistan until the weight of history becomes an immoveable obstacle to peace.

So how did France and Germany put their history behind them? And are their parallels with India and Pakistan?

Their reconciliation was in part due to a real change in Germany after World War Two, when it renounced a tradition of militarism dating back to its roots in Prussia.  But New Delhi has yet to be convinced that Pakistan has really changed in its attitude to Islamist militants it once nurtured, fearing that while it attacks the Pakistani Taliban in its tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, it will leave alone other groups used against India like the Lashkar-e-Taiba, based in its Punjab province.

In a column in the Daily Times, Pakistani analyst Hasan-Askari Rizvi has an interesting take on this question, suggesting the next few months could be decisive.

“It seems that these (Punjab-based militant) groups are no longer favoured by Pakistan’s security and intelligence authorities. These have been put on hold because the army is busy in the tribal areas and does not want to open a new front in mainland Pakistan. Further, it does not want to seen as taking action against these groups under Indian pressure,” he writes. “The Punjab security and intelligence apparatus is now targeting activists of these organisations and monitoring the madrassas that have a reputation for militancy and maintain links with the Taliban. This effort is aimed at destroying their networks, isolating them and discouraging recruitment.

“The next two months will show if Pakistan’s civilian and military authorities will exert more pressure on Punjab-based militant groups and ensure that they do not force a foreign policy situation on Pakistan in its interaction with India. If the role of these groups is neutralised, it will be possible to argue that Pakistan’s counter-terrorism policy has made a historical shift.”

Franco-German reconciliation was also encouraged by the United States, which wanted both to work together against a common enemy in the Soviet Union. The United States, keen to see an improvement in relations between India and Pakistan to help stabilise the region as far as Afghanistan, is now quietly trying to persuade them that they both face a common enemy in terrorism.

As for the benefits of greater economic cooperation between India and Pakistan, these are rarely questioned by either country, from increased bilateral trade, to pipelines bringing oil and gas to India from Iran and Central Asia, and to the opening up of transit trade from India via Pakistan into Afghanistan.  So the parallels are there - in the possibility of real change (and the jury is still out on that one), in the backing of the United States, and in the potential economic gains.

Where the parallel falls down is perhaps in vision and leadership. While Franco-German reconciliation was inspired by men who had lived through the horrors of World War Two and saw European integration as the best way to stop history from repeating itself, there is no clear vision of where India and Pakistan might end up. And while France and Germany benefitted from leaders who were powerful enough to push change through, only in India does Prime Minister Singh enjoy a relatively strong position having just won a renewed mandate in a general election, while in Pakistan the civilian government shares power with the Pakistan Army on foreign and security policy.

A much-quoted aphorism is that those who cannot learn from history are doomed to repeat it. But only very rarely do two countries like France and Germany escape their history. Can India and Pakistan do the same?

(Photos: French President Francois Mitterrand and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl in Verdun (1984), Pakistan Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (undated); Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi with Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau (1983).)

(Please keep comments short and on topic. Those which are overly long, or do not address the post directly, will be deleted.)

Having asked last month whether Pakistan was in a position to take on the Laskhar-e-Taiba, an obvious follow-up question was to try to assess how much of a threat the militant group blamed for last year’s attacks on Mumbai represents to the West and to India.

According to analysts who track the LeT closely, the Pakistan-based militant group is not the new al Qaeda. It is still very much focused on Kashmir and India, while its single-issue agenda along with the humanitarian work carried out by its Jamaat-ud-Dawa charitable wing mean it is more comparable to the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas than to al Qaeda.

That said, it has a formidable infrastructure and global network of sympathisers and fund-raisers that could be used by other groups which do want to target the west, and that in itself makes it a threat.  What also comes across in talking to people about the LeT are concerns about the group going rogue, either because it slips out of the control of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency, or because splinter groups break away from the leadership of its founder, Hafez Saeed, and become a danger not just to India and the West, but also to Pakistan itself. (As discussed in this earlier post, deepening instability in Pakistan’s heartland Punjab province, where the LeT is based, would dwarf anything seen until now in the tribal areas.)

In the meantime, Praveen Swami, associate editor at The Hindu, has written an analysis of the Indian Mujahideen and the Lashkar-e-Taiba for the June edition of the CTC Sentinel (pdf document). It is a must-read for its wealth of detail about the LeT’s connections in the Gulf, as well as its description of how the LeT nurtured the Indian Mujahideen within India itself.

“From its origins in Pakistan’s Punjab province, the LeT has grown into a transnational organisation,” he writes. “This development is of concern to authorities across the region for three reasons. First, the evolutionary trajectory of the LeT will make it increasingly resistant to counter-terrorism action in any one country or decapitation attempts targeting its leadership. Second, the LeT’s ability to recruit from a pool of well-educated, affluent sympathisers in multiple countries gives it dramatically enhanced reach and lethality. Third, the LeT could spawn and sustain the growth of quasi-independent jihadist movements outside of Pakistan.”

Do also check out Swami’s rather prescient article in the Hindu which he wrote in 2007warning about the risks of LeT militants reaching India by sea – just as they did in last November’s Mumbai attacks — rather than following the traditional route of crossing the Line of Control dividing Kashmir.  “So far, Pakistan appears to have moved to restrain the Lashkar from acting on its publicly declared desire to execute major terrorist strikes in India — but done little to dismantle its capability to do so,” he wrote in 2007. “As the detente process proceeds, India needs to ensure that Pakistan is urged to take this next, necessary step.”

Finally, for an insight into how the U.S. administration views the Laskhar-e-Taiba, it is interesting to see Tim Roemer, President Barack Obama’s choice for ambassador to India, bracketing the LeT along with the Taliban and al Qaeda.

According to this report in Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper, asked what India could do to improve its relationship with Pakistan, Roemer said: ”There’s more we can do to share information about our common threats in that area, which are al Qaeda, the Taliban and Lashkar-e-Taiba, and try to prevent the next attack from taking place, or deflect that next attack.”

Much to talk about when the foreign secretaries and then prime ministers of India and Pakistan meet next weekon the sidelines of a Non-Aligned summit in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.

(Reuters file photos: Mumbai skyline; LeT commander Lakhvi and U.S. ambassador-designate Tim Roemer)

A new poll shows public opinion in Pakistan has turned sharply against the Taliban and other Islamist militants, even though they still do not trust the United States and President Barack Obama. Reporting on the poll, our Asia specialist in Washington, Paul Eckert, said the WorldPublicOpinion.org poll, conducted in May as Pakistan's army fought the Taliban in the Swat Valley, found that 81 percent saw the Pakistani Taliban and al Qaeda as a critical threat to the country, a jump from 34 percent in a similar poll in late 2007. Read Eckert's report here.

(Photo: Pakistani Taliban in Swat, 2 Nov 2007/Sherin Zada Kanju)

The poll shows a wide divergence between Pakistani public opinion and the views of the Taliban on the implementation of sharia, a religious issue sometimes cited to help explain earlier tolerance of the militants. Some 80 percent of the respondents said sharia permits education for girls, one of the first services the Taliban close down when they gain control of an area. And 75 percent said sharia allows women to work, which the Taliban do not.

Reflecting their distrust, 71 percent said they believed the Taliban would not even submit to the sharia courts that they themselves have set up or promised to install as a pure and speedy alternative to Pakistan's corrupt and inefficient civil courts. Only 14 percent supported the Taliban claim that it could provide more effective and timely justice than the state, a claim that partly helped the Islamist militants in the past (although it must be added that only 56 percent expressed trust in the civil courts). Only 9 percent said they thought the Taliban would do better at fighting corruption than the government, which got a lukewarm 47 percent. In any case, these results seem to indicate very little support for trademark Taliban promises that once seemed attractive.

If accurate, these findings mark a major shift from the results of a similar poll by WorldPublicOpinion.org in late 2007, not long after the Pakistani army flushed out Islamist militants who had taken control of the Red Mosque complex in the heart of Islambad. More than 100 died in the raid, including dozens of suspected militants and at least 10 troops. Some 64 percent said the raid was a mistake while only 22 percent supported the decision. A 60 percent majority believed that sharia should play a larger role in Pakistani law than it did at the time.

(Photo: Anti-Taliban rally in Lahore, 19 June 2009/Mohsin Raza)

Another poll, by the International Republican Institute, relativises this shift a bit. Conducted in March, before the height of the Taliban-army clash in Swat and the video of Taliban flogging a teenage local girl that reportedly turned Pakistani opinion against the militants, it shows more sympathy for the Taliban's sharia demands. While 74 percent said religious extremism was a problem in Pakistan, 80 percent supported the introduction of sharia in Swat and 72 percent supported the government peace deal with the Taliban there. Some 56 percent said they would support the Taliban if they demanded sharia in other cities such as Karachi, Multan, Quetta or Lahore.

The relationship between traditional religious views and the Taliban in Pakistan and Afghanistan is so complex that I'm not sure any poll gives a very accurate picture. Unfortunately, neither poll examined in greater detail what those polled thought about sharia and how much of it should be applied in Pakistan. Does anyone have other poll results that give what they think is a better picture?

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UPDATE (July 2) Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid has an interesting opinion piece in the Los Angeles Times saying: "The Pakistani public, army and government have suddenly awakened to the Taliban threat. That is a crucial first step. But it will need strong international support to effectively respond."

One of the more intriguing reports about Pakistan under former president Pervez Musharraf was that it had come close to a deal with India on Kashmir. The tentative agreement failed to see the light of day after Musharraf became embroiled in a row over the judiciary which eventually forced him to quit. His successor, President Asif Ali Zardari, then renewed calls for peace with India, stressing the economic gains of increased trade ties and even offering to overturn Pakistan’s nuclear doctrine by offering to commit to a policy of no first use of nuclear weapons. Then came last November’s attack on Mumbai, blamed by India on the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group, and all talk of peace was off.  India quashed any suggestion a resolution of the Kashmir dispute would help bring peace to South Asia, insisting that linking Kashmir with the Mumbai attacks would reward acts of terrorism.

Three developments this week pushed Kashmir back onto the agenda.

In the Kashmir Valley itself, protests erupted over the alleged rape and murder of two Kashmiri women.  Residents said the women, aged 17 and 22, were abducted, raped and killed by security forces. Indian authorities denied the killing and said the women drowned in a stream.

In Pakistan, Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani said a resolution of the Kashmir dispute held the key to durable peace in South Asia. Significantly, he said a peaceful solution must be found in line with U.N. resolutions passed in 1948 giving the people of the former kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir the right to vote on whether to join India or Pakistan.  That suggested a hardening of Pakistan’s position compared to the one adopted by Musharraf, who had been willing to set aside the U.N. resolutions if this opened the way to a peace deal. Gilani’s comments were echoed by opposition leader Nawaz Sharif, who was quoted by the Daily Times as saying that there could be no durable peace in South Asia without a peaceful resolution of the Kashmir conflict.

Finally, a Pakistan court ordered the release of Lashkar-e-Taiba founder Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, who had been held under house arrest after the attack on Mumbai. His release was criticised by the United States while India said it raised serious doubts about Pakistan’s willingness to crack down on militant groups operating from inside its borders. Many in India are sceptical about Pakistan’s willingness to crack down on militants, fearing it will target those groups which threaten Pakistan itself, like the Pakistani Taliban in the Swat valley, while leaving Kashmir-oriented groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba alone.

So what does the future hold for Kashmir?

Some analysts argue that India may well resume talks with Pakistan, if only to do so on its own terms rather than being seen to cave in to American pressure to ease tensions so that Islamabad can concentrate on fighting the Taliban on its western border with Afghanistan. U.S. Under Secretary for Political Affairs William Burns will travel to India on June 10-13, according to the State Department, in what is being seen by Indian media as preparing the ground for an expected visit by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton next month. 

But even if India were to resume peace talks (and media reports suggest opinion is still divided on the subject), there appears to be little room for substantive concessions on Kashmir.  Rather some are arguing that India should capitalise on the participation of Kashmiri voters in state and national elections to try to restore normalcy to the Kashmir Valley, pulling out its troops and leaving the police to maintain order. In the long run, this would allow India to declare the Line of Control dividing Kashmir as the international border - an idea Pakistan has long resisted.

In Pakistan, the latest editorials on the subject suggest there is no single view on how to approach India and the Kashmir dispute. The News International has an op-ed editorial saying that Pakistan should repudiate the tentative deal made by Musharraf as offering far too many concessions to India and betraying the aspirations of the Kashmiri people. 

“The best course would be to return to the pre-Kargil position: political, moral and diplomatic support to the Kashmiri people for a settlement under the UN Security Council resolutions. It would be in consonance with the wishes of the new generation of Kashmiris which has grown up in the shadow of Indian bayonets and is not prepared to accept indefinite Indian occupation of the state. Implicit in this stance would be a rejection of the Kashmir non-paper hammered out during the Musharraf regime. In the diplomatic newspeak popularised by Joe Biden, it is called pressing the reset button,” it says.

In Dawn newspaper, columnist Irfan Husain defends Musharraf’s efforts at peacemaking. “For all his many faults, at least Musharraf did try to break the logjam over Kashmir with a number of out-of-the-box proposals that were either shot down, or allowed to languish unanswered by the Indian government,” he writes.  He calls on India, as the more powerful country, to make a symbolic gesture towards confidence-building by pulling some troops back from the border and for both countries to work together to fight terrorism. “We have seen that a piecemeal approach to fighting terrorism has not worked. By pooling intelligence and by denying jihadis sanctuary and political space, the war can be won.”

And in another column in Dawn, Ayesha Siddiqa argues that Islamabad should open up trade to India, including a transit route to Afghanistan, to improve relations and give India a stake in maintaining stability in Pakistan.

“But then what does one do about the Kashmir issue? More than 60 years of experience tell us that we were not able to solve it militarily and using the issue to withhold solutions for other matters is not likely to work either. At the moment, India has no stakes in solving the issue to Pakistan’s advantage especially when it is investing in its own political system to come up with a solution for the Indian state and the Kashmiri population,” she writes. “Part of the reason why India refuses to be sympathetic to Pakistan’s position is that it has no major stakes here. Transit trade and bilateral trade is one of the formulas for starting a more constructive relationship between the two countries.”

And how does all this look from inside Kashmir itself? Take a look at the home page of the Greater Kashmir newspaper.

(Photo: mourners at funeral of Nisar Ahmad, a protester killed by a tear gas canister; Indian policeman fires tear gas; funeral procession in Srinagar; a charred policeman’s helmet next to a burned effigy/Fayaz Kabli)

India has been fretting for months that it could be pushed into the background by the United States’ economic dependence on China and by the renewed focus on Pakistan by President Barack Obama’s administration.  That anxiety appears to have increased lately – perhaps because the end of the country’s lengthy election campaign has opened up space to think more about the external environment — and is focusing on China.

In an interview with the Hindustan Times, Indian Air Chief Marshal Fali Homi Major said China posed a greater threat than Pakistan.  “China is a totally different ballgame compared to Pakistan,” he was quoted as saying. “We know very little about the actual capabilities of China, their combat edge or how professional their military is … they are certainly a greater threat.”

The Mint newspaper followed up with a editorial calling China “perhaps the gravest external threat” to India’s security. “That India is in an unstable neighbourhood is clearer than ever this summer,” it said. “But troubles from Pakistan, Sri Lanka or Nepal pale when compared with China.”

The increased anxiety has been driven by the end of the war in Sri Lanka, where the government’s victory was attributed partly to a supply of Chinese weapons, and where China has been building a new port on the island’s southern coast.

“This is part of a broad move by China into the Indian Ocean, which India has traditionally considered its sphere of influence,” said British newspaper The Times. Chinese engineers are building another port at Gwadar in Pakistan; roads are being cut or improved through Burma to help trade routes between Yunnan province in China and the Indian Ocean; ties are being improved with island nations such as the Seychelles; surveillance stations are being sited or upgraded on Burmese islands.”

But even without the Sri Lankan trigger, Indian analysts have suggested that India may no longer enjoy the favoured position that developed under former president George W. Bush, when Washington forged close ties with Delhi, in part as a counterweight to China.  Facing the twin challenges of financial crisis and a military stalemate in Afghanistan, the Obama administration is dependent on India’s two main rivals — China to pay for American debt and Pakistan to help it defeat the Taliban.

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