Pakistan: Now or Never?

A Pakistani Abroad: Zardari’s ill-fated trip to England

President Asif Ali Zardari’s trip to Britain was particularly ill-fated. When he first planned a visit which should have culminated in him bringing his son, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari, out into the political arena, no one could have predicted such a bewildering series of crises. A row with Britain over remarks made in India by  British Prime Minister David Cameron that Pakistan must not “look both ways” in its approach to Islamist militants. Pakistan’s worst floods in 80 years.  A  plane crash, and then riots in Karachi.

So it was perhaps par for the course that his final event in Britain, a political rally in the city of Birmingham for British Pakistani supporters of the ruling Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), should be dogged by controversy.  Zardari faced a firestorm of criticism for going ahead with the visit while his country faced so many problems, and the combination of protesters outside the rally and a shoe-thrower inside appeared to mark the culmination of a disastrously ill-judged overseas tour.

Having been to the Birmingham event, I have to say it was not quite as chaotic and ill-tempered as some media coverage suggested.  The protesters outside were a microcosm of Pakistan’s disunited politics, each separate group of demonstators  operating independently and shouting for their own competing agendas – from the restoration of the Caliphate to independence for Kashmir. They were vastly outnumbered by the PPP supporters who packed Birmingham’s International Convention Centre - many of them staid, respectable middle-aged Pakistani men and women who had emigrated to Britain decades ago, worked hard and kept close family links back home. 

And Zardari certainly was not “pelted with shoes”. The man who said he tried to throw his shoes in protest over Zardari’s response to the floods was standing well back in what was a very large conference hall and had little chance of getting anywhere near the president before he was hustled away by security guards.  Zardari did not interrupt his speech, most of the audience continued to listen to him politely, and it is conceivable that those sitting at the front did not even notice at the time what had  happened.  That in any case is how it looked from where I was sitting – it would be easier to judge the event if the video replay had not been edited out – but my impression was that it was not such a big incident to justify the reaction, or counter-reaction in Pakistan. 

That said, the event did not achieve its purpose. Bilawal Bhutto, son of the late Benazir Bhutto, on Thursday cancelled plans to attend the rally and said he would stay in London instead to collect donations for Pakistan’s flood victims.  That he had been expected was clear from the big photo of him given equal prominence to Zardari’s own photo on a poster at the back of the stage.  The event relied heavily on imagery of the Bhutto dynasty – videos of Benazir and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto were played before the event; Zardari made frequent references to them in his speech, and wore a rosette with his late wife’s photo pinned to his chest.  (For an interesting take on dynastic politics, do read this column in the Daily Times by Shahzad Chaudhry, who argues that Zardari is primarily interested in shoring up the family’s control of the PPP.)  For all the appeal to the popularity of the two slain former prime ministers, the mood in the conference hall — at least from where I was sitting – seemed subdued, polite rather than enthusiastic; although again it would have looked different at the front where groups of youths had been organised as cheerleaders.

With the visit over, a few are beginning to ask questions about whether quite so much energy and attention should have been focused on attacking Zardari’s trip to Britain, when so many flood victims were in need of attention at home.

“Our electronic media’s reaction – really obsession – with this trip has itself been embarrassing, as indeed has been the reactions of too many of us,” writes Adil Najam on the blog All Things Pakistan.  “But even more than an embarrassment, Mr Zardari’s trip and our obsessive reactions to it has proved to be an all-too-costly distraction from the far more real disaster at home.” (To be fair, the British media got pretty caught up in the visit as well.)

from India Insight:

Time for India to start talking to Pakistan?

It has been more than a year since the 26/11 attacks on Mumbai and many commentators have been advocating restarting the peace process between India and Pakistan.

Is the time ripe?

The process that seemed to have restarted with Sharm-al-Sheikh statement stalled after the outcry in India over the statement's drafting and the subsequent revelations about David Headley.

But a major development since has been Obama's new strategy for Afghanistan which involves a troop surge and announcement of a tentative withdrawal date around July 2011.

This has prompted some commentators to stress the fact that Pakistan will continue as a challenge for India much after the U.S. recalibrates its involvement in the region.

And therefore India needs to re-engage with Pakistan.

The argument roughly is that India needs to strengthen the moderate elements in Pakistan like its civilian government over hawkish elements like the ISI or the army who survive by scaremongering over India.

Pakistan: Through the eye of a needle

For the first time in many months, the future of Pakistan is being determined not in the fight against Islamist militants, but within its institutions — its judiciary, its political parties, its government and its military.  Last week’s decision by the Supreme Court to strike down a 2007 amnesty given to politicians and bureaucrats has provided Pakistan with a rare opportunity to remodel itself as a civilian democracy based on the rule of law.  But the way forward is so fraught with difficulties that assessments of its chances of success are at best sober, at worst ominous.

The court decision to strike down the National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO) affects some 8,000 politicians and bureaucrats on a list of those who had been covered by the amnesty, including the defence and interior ministers.  President Asif Ali Zardari had also been covered by the amnesty, but remains protected by presidential immunity. Such was the upheaval created by the ruling that foreign exchange markets were briefly shaken last week by unfounded rumours of a military coup. The real impact is likely to be more slow-burning.

THE POWER OF THE MILITARY

The disarray in government ranks will weaken its ability to take on the country’s powerful military, which continues to call the shots in Pakistan’s security and foreign policy.

“Building faith in the judicial system is vital and calls for accountability of all other state institutions as well to strengthen the perception that the decision on the NRO was in good faith and to strengthen the rule of law,” said Ayesha Siddiqa in a column in Dawn newspaper. ”But if a question is asked about whether the decision signifies the strengthening of the democratic process and civilian institutions, the answer must be in the negative. Since the perception regarding the decision is that it strengthens the armed forces and their ability to manipulate political stakeholders, it is not possible to see a major shift in the balance of power.”

Pakistan Army chief General Ashfaq Kayani has vowed to keep the army out of politics. But the military, which has ruled Pakistan for much of its existence, nonetheless exerts a powerful influence behind the scenes.  Even when out of power it has tended to play the role of an over-protective parent which has never allowed fledgling civilian governments to learn from their mistakes and find their own feet, thereby paving the way for a more mature democracy. The result has been a cycle of military coups — the most recent of which was when former army chief Pervez Musharraf seized power in 1999 — interspersed with brief periods of civilian rule.

Shortly after taking power, Zardari had not only tried to clip the wings of the military but also pushed for peace talks with India, carving out a radically different position from the army which has long seen India as a threat. He had even gone as far as to suggest Pakistan adopt a policy of no-first-use of nuclear weapons back in November 2008, breaking two taboos at a stroke – over the country’s stance towards India, and over an understanding that any discussion of  Pakistan’s nuclear weapons should remain the exclusive preserve of the military.

Pakistan’s political pandemonium

A Supreme Court ruling striking down an amnesty given to politicians and officials by former president Pervez Musharraf has created havoc in Pakistani politics.  Among those affected on a list of 8,000 politicians and bureaucrats who were protected by the amnesty are the interior and defence ministers, who are now no longer allowed to leave the country until they clear their names in court.

“Pakistan’s interior minister today found himself in the unusual position of being asked to bar himself from leaving the country,” wrote Britain’s Guardian newspaper.

The defence minister abruptly cancelled plans to fly to China on an official visit after his name was included on the so-called Exit Control List,  according to Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper.

Indeed such was the drama of a defence minister being refused permission to leave his own country that Twitter was briefly abuzz with talk of a coup, followed later by one comment which pretty much summed up the prevailing uncertainty:  ”a bad sign when CNN is reporting ‘no coup’ in Pakistan”.

President Asif Ali Zardari had also been covered by the amnesty, or National Reconciliation Ordinance (NRO), pushed through by Musharraf in an American-backed plan to allow Zardari’s late wife, former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, to return to Pakistan in what had been supposed to be a power-sharing agreement to provide both stability and democracy. While he is expected to come under pressure to step down, he remains protected by presidential immunity.

The Pakistan blog Deadpan Thoughts captured the immediate reaction to Wednesday’s Supreme Court ruling, talking of  people in Karachi closing down their shops, racing home, and swapping notes on the phone as ”vicious rumors circulated of a coup”. 

“The legislative branch of our government has right now with this judgment directed the executive branch to prosecute itself,” it said.  “After all is said and done and we have torn apart this government, gone to mid term elections and arrived at the same crossroads in say another year or two at most, we must ask ourselves is democracy the best system for Pakistan? If it is then why does it never work for us?”

Give us bin Laden, Britain tells Pakistan

It’s the kind of language, or perhaps more accurately the tone, that can test the patience of any nation.

You have had eight years,  you should have been able to catch Osama bin Laden and his deputy Ayman al-Zawahiri,  British Prime Minister Gordon Brown is reported to have said about Pakistan in an interview with the BBC following a conversation with Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari over the weekend.

“We have got to ask ourselves why, eight years after September 11, nobody has been able to spot or detain or get close to Osama bin Laden. Nobody has been able to get close to Zawahiri, the No 2 in al-Qaeda. And we have got to ask the Pakistan authorities and security services, army and politicians, to join us in the major effort the world is committing resources to, not only to isolate al-Qaeda, but to break them in Pakistan,” he said.

Quite apart from the fact Brown chose to go public with his frustration with Pakistan just days after a U.S. senate report said that U.S. forces had bin Laden “within their grasp” in Afghanistan back in 2001, it comes when Pakistan is in the middle of an offensive in South Waziristan which has triggered a wave of retaliatory attacks on its towns killing hundreds.

As the Times reports, Brown’s intervention upset Pakistan which shouldn’t be much of a surprise. ”We are doing what we can. We have carried two very big operations at enormous cost to the country,” the Times quotes Pakistan’s envoy Wajid Shamsul Hasan as saying.  Bin Laden, according to Pakistani intelligence was in Afghanistan, and if the West had information about him being in Pakistan, they should share it, the Pakistanis say.

Pakistan had captured or killed 700 al Qaeda members over the past eight years, a Pakistani foreign office spokesman said, adding nobody should have doubts about its resolve to fight them.

Pakistan and India: Signposts in the Sinai

Even before Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Asif Ali Zardari broke the ice by meeting on the sidelines of a regional summit in Yekaterinburg, Russia last month, the real question over talks between India and Pakistan has not been about the form but the substance.

After the bitterness of last year’s attacks on Mumbai by Pakistan-based militants, can India and Pakistan work their way back to a roadmap for an agreement on Kashmir reached two years ago? Although never finalised, the roadmap opened up the intellectual space for an eventual peace deal. This week’s meetings between India and Pakistan on the sidelines of a Non-Aligned Movement summit in Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt could give some clues on whether it has any chance of being  revived.

India broke off the formal peace process, the so-called composite dialogue, with Pakistan after the three-day assault on Mumbai blamed on the Lashkar-e-Taiba, a militant group once nurtured by Pakistan to fight India in Kashmir.  But even before the attack, informal behind-the-scenes talks on Kashmir held under former president Pervez Musharraf had fallen victim to the political turbulence which led to his ouster last year, and any hope of reviving them under the new civilian government led by Zardari was dashed altogether by the Mumbai assault.

Ahead of the NAM summit in Sharm el-Sheikh — during which the foreign secretaries of both countries will meet on the sidelines, to be followed by talks between Singh and Pakistan Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani – the two countries have been trying to put together the pieces of their shattered relationship.

In an unprecedented move, Pakistan has said it will put on trial five Pakistanis suspected of involvement in the Mumbai attacks, including senior Lashkar-e-Taiba commander Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi, accused of masterminding the assault. Pakistan has traditionally refused to acknowledge in public the role of anti-India militant groups like the Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and putting on trial a commander like Lakhvi is a major departure. India had insisted it would not resume formal peace talks until Pakistan took action against those behind the Mumbai attacks.

The Indian High Commissioner to Pakistan has also held talks with the head of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), according to Prime Minister Singh,  a move that would have been unheard of — at least in public — in the past when India accused the ISI of driving a separatist revolt in Kashmir that erupted in Kashmir in 1989. Pakistan Army chief General Pervez Ashfaq Kayani also suggested this month that the internal threat facing Pakistan was greater than the external threat,  a comment seen as easing — albeit perhaps only marginally — the military’s traditional view of India as its primary enemy.

And acccording to Dawn newspaper, Gilani has been seeking political consensus in the country’s approach to India ahead of the meetings in Sharm el-Sheikh, including winning support from powerful opposition leader and former prime minister Nawaz Sharif. Singh on his part has said he is willing to meet Pakistan more than half way, while also insisting Pakistan must take action to dismantle militant groups which target India.

from India Insight:

India, Pakistan: two steps forward and four backwards?

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari has dropped a plan to travel to Egypt next month where he was expected to hold further talks with Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh following their meeting in Russia this week.

Pakistan's foreign office has said Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani will attend the summit of Non-Aligned Nations in the Egyptian city of Sharm El Sheikh although soon after the Singh-Zardari meeting in Yekaterinburg the two sides announced plans for a second meeting in July.

Has something gone wrong?

Newspapers on both sides of the border read more into the change of plans than just a normal swap of duties between the prime minister and the president.

The Dawn linked the cancellation to displeasure over Singh telling Zardari in the full glare of the world's media that Pakistan should not allow its soil to be used for militant attacks on India.

The soft-spoken Singh's rather unexpected remark right at the beginning of the first-to-face encounter with Pakistan's leaders since the Mumbai attacks in November ensured that the meeting was unpleasant from the outset, it said.

Pakistan's The News said New Delhi had handed Zardari a "well staged slight" but Islamabad was setting it aside because at the end of the day the two sides were talking again.

When India and Pakistan shake hands

As encounters go between the leaders of India and Pakistan, the meeting in Russia between Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and President Asif Ali Zardari — their first since last November’s Mumbai attacks — was a somewhat stolid affair.

It had none of the unscripted drama of the handshake famously offered by Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf to Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee when they met at a South Asian summit in Kathmandu in January 2002, while the two countries mobilised for war following an attack on the Indian parliament in December 2001. Musharraf’s gesture made little difference in a military stand-off which continued for another six months.

Nor did it carry the warmth of a summit meeting between Vajpayee and then prime minister Nawaz Sharif in Lahore in 1999, which raised high hopes of a breakthrough peace deal between India and Pakistan. Those hopes were dashed months later when the two countries fought a bitter conflict in the mountains above Kargil, on the Line of Control dividing disputed Kashmir.

But for all its absence of drama, or more precisely because of this, did the meeting between Singh and Zardari lay a more solid foundation for what is likely to be a long and difficult process of repairing relations? 

The two leaders stopped well short of resuming a formal peace process broken off by India following the Mumbai attacks, and Singh delivered a stern warning to Zardari that Pakistan must not allow militants to operate from its territory. “I am happy to meet you, but my mandate is to tell you that the territory of Pakistan must not be used for terrorism,” he told Zardari at a meeting on the sidelines of a Shanghai Cooperation Organisation summit in Yekaterinburg, in Russia.

But officials nonetheless held out the prospect of another meeting between Zardari and Singh at a summit of the Non-Aligned Movement in Egypt in July and said that senior officials would hold further talks to exchange information on terrorism. Semantics aside, that means the two countries are talking again after a deep crisis in relations following the Mumbai attacks, although India has insisted it will not reopen the so-called composite dialogue peace process until Pakistan takes action against the Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group it blames for the assault.

So where do they go from here?  Analysts see little hope for now of the two countries being able to pick up where they left off in a peace process which some say had nearly led to a breakthrough on Kashmir. 

How much time does Pakistan have?

Ahmed Rashid’s article on Pakistan in the New York Review of Books makes for an alarming read.  Excerpts do not do justice to it,  as you have to read the whole thing to understand why he thinks Pakistan really is on the brink, but here are a few:

“American officials are in a concealed state of panic, as I observed during a recent visit to Washington at the time when 17,000 additional troops were being dispatched to Afghanistan. The Obama administration unveiled its new Afghan strategy on March 27, only to discover that Pakistan is the much larger security challenge, while US options there are far more limited.”

“The last two years have bought some hope in the growth of the middle class, an articulate and increasingly influential civil society made up partly of urban professionals and publicly involved women. Most Pakistanis are not Islamic extremists and believe in moderate and spiritual forms of Islam, including Sufism. However, Pakistan is now reaching a tipping point. There is a chronic failure of leadership, whether by civilian politicians or the army. President Zardari’s decision to invade Swat in early May came only after pressure was applied by the Obama administration and the army and the government had been left with no other palatable options. But with the Taliban opening new fronts, it will soon become impossible for the army to respond to the multiple threats it faces on so many geographically distant battlefields. The Taliban’s campaigns to assassinate politicians and administrators have demoralized the government.”

“The Obama administration can provide money and weapons but it cannot recreate the state’s will to resist the Taliban and pursue more effective policies. Pakistan desperately needs international aid, but its leaders must first define a strategy that demonstrates to its own people and other nations that it is willing to stand up to the Taliban and show the country a way forward.”

There has been much alarmist talk this year about Pakistan, notably with U.S. adviser David Kilcullen saying in March that the Pakistani state could collapse within six months, followed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton saying in April that Pakistan posed a “mortal threat” to the world. Most of that talk has been dismissed as exaggerated, including by Juan Cole in his blog Informed Comment and other analysts. The country has a strong civil society, which only in March took to the streets to demand an independent judiciary and the reinstatement of the Chief Justice. It has a powerful military, and whatever its critics say about its policies, the Pakistan Army is intensely patriotic and is hardly likely to hand over control of the country to Islamist militants who do not even believe in the existence of the nation state. 

Yet looking at the flood of refugees in Pakistan — above one million and still rising, according to the UNHCR — you do have to wonder how much time Pakistan has to right itself.  President Asif Ali Zardari says the current offensive in the Swat valley is just the start of an operation that will take the army  deep into the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.  How many more internal refugees can the country cope with, especially given that it traces its current instability to the three million refugees who flooded in from Afghanistan after the Soviet invasion in 1979?

Part of the problem is that some of the solutions for Pakistan lie in the long term.  To the west, an end to the fighting in Afghanistan would stop instability washing over into Pakistan. But no one expects a political settlement in Afghanistan any time soon. To the east, peace with India would boost the economy by encouraging trade and give the Pakistan Army an opportunity to readjust its mindset away from seeing India as an existential threat. But India remains wary of Pakistan after last November’s attack on Mumbai and any moves made by the newly re-elected government of Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to reduce tension are likely to be slow and tentative.

Making decisions in Pakistan

With Pakistan facing a refugee crisis, and its army engaged in intense fighting in the Swat valley, the question of who makes decisions in the country and how these are taken may not seem like the top priority.

But Shuja Nawaz at the Atlantic Council makes a strong argument in favour of deepening institutional mechanisms for decision-making. While President Asif Ali Zardari, who has retained the sweeping presidential powers of his predecessor Pervez Musharraf, made many decisions himself and also personally represented Pakistan diplomatically on trips overseas, the institutional process of decision-making that would allow coordination between the different branches of the country’s government is lacking, he writes. As a result the government seemed unprepared to deal with the million refugees created by Pakistan’s military offensive against the Taliban. 

“If there had been an institutional mechanism for national security analysis and decision-making with a clear central command authority … the exodus would have been anticipated and arrangements put in place to look after the displaced people,” he writes. ”The National Security Council has been abolished. The Defence Committee of the cabinet does not appear to have met to discuss the crisis. And in the absence of a National Security Adviser, sacked by the prime minister in a moment of pique following the Mumbai attack, there is no formal mechanism for studying such issues nor a central point in government to ensure that all parts of the administration work together to anticipate problems and resolve issues.”

“A highly personalized decision-making process remains in place, informed in some cases more by anecdote than by analysis. Most exchanges on military issues take place directly between the President and the Army Chief. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is often by-passed. Coordination of the fight against the militants between Interior Ministry and the military is desultory at best,” he says.

“The army, still unequipped and untrained for counterinsurgency, may yet be able to clear the Swat valley of the militants. But, as a senior military officer confided to me, the army will be unable to hold the territory indefinitely. Providing governance and justice is the civilians’ job. And there is no evidence of civilian institutions or a police force to do the needful. So the Taliban may return to fill the vacuum, as they did before.”

By most accounts, Pakistan faces a long war if it is to take on the Taliban while also rebuilding shattered communities and bringing much-needed economic development to its north-west.  But success in long wars tends to depend more on logistics than on leadership. It will be interesting to see how well Pakistan develops the institutional mechanisms needed to provide those logistics.