Category Archives: Pakistan

A century of frenzy over the North-West Frontier

A century of frenzy over the North-West Frontier
By Juan Cole, TomDispatch, July 27, 2009

Despite being among the poorest people in the world, the inhabitants of the craggy northwest of what is now Pakistan have managed to throw a series of frights into distant Western capitals for more than a century. That’s certainly one for the record books.

And it hasn’t ended yet. Not by a long shot. Not with the headlines in the U.S. papers about the depredations of the Pakistani Taliban, not with the CIA’s drone aircraft striking gatherings in Waziristan and elsewhere near the Afghan border. This spring, for instance, one counter-terrorism analyst stridently (and wholly implausibly) warned that “in one to six months” we could “see the collapse of the Pakistani state,” at the hands of the bloodthirsty Taliban, while Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called the situation in Pakistan a “mortal danger” to global security.

What most observers don’t realize is that the doomsday rhetoric about this region at the top of the world is hardly new. It’s at least 100 years old. During their campaigns in the northwest in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, British officers, journalists and editorialists sounded much like American strategists, analysts, and pundits of the present moment. They construed the Pashtun tribesmen who inhabited Waziristan as the new Normans, a dire menace to London that threatened to overturn the British Empire. [continued…]

Assiya Rafiq stands up for women in Pakistan

Not a victim, but a hero
By Nicholas D Kristof, New York Times, July 26, 2009

(An update from Nicholas Kristof, July 28.)

After being kidnapped at the age of 16 by a group of thugs and enduring a year of rapes and beatings, Assiya Rafiq was delivered to the police and thought her problems were over.

Then, she said, four police officers took turns raping her.

The next step for Assiya was obvious: She should commit suicide. That’s the customary escape in rural Pakistan for a raped woman, as the only way to cleanse the disgrace to her entire family.

Instead, Assiya summoned the unimaginable courage to go public and fight back. She is seeking to prosecute both her kidnappers and the police, despite threats against her and her younger sisters. This is a kid who left me awed and biting my lip; this isn’t a tale of victimization but of valor, empowerment and uncommon heroism. [continued…]

Cleric who negotiated Taliban-Pakistan peace deal is arrested

Cleric who negotiated Taliban-Pakistan peace deal is arrested
By Zulfiqar Ali and Alex Rodriguez, Los Angeles Times, July 27, 2009

Pakistani police on Sunday arrested Sufi Mohammed, the Taliban-aligned cleric responsible for brokering a controversial peace deal between Swat Valley militants and the government this year. That deal eventually broke down, leading to the ongoing military offensive against Taliban fighters.

Mohammed is the father-in-law of Maulana Qazi Fazlullah, the Taliban leader who fought Pakistani troops for two years before wresting control of the Swat Valley, once a tourist mecca.

Mohammed negotiated a peace deal with the government in February that called for Fazlullah’s fighters to lay down their arms in exchange for the imposition of Sharia, or Islamic law, in the region. In the spring, Taliban militants in Swat reneged on the truce and moved into the neighboring district of Buner, just 60 miles from the nation’s capital, Islamabad.

Fazlullah’s actions prompted Pakistani leaders to mount an all-out assault on militants in Swat and surrounding regions, a move that forced the exodus of nearly 2 million civilians from the conflict zone. [continued…]

Afghanistan-Pakistan – 7/18

Obama’s war
By Tariq Ali, London Review of Books, July 23, 2009

June is never a good month on the plains. It was 46ºC in Fortress Islamabad a fortnight ago. The hundreds of security guards manning roadblocks and barriers were wilting, sweat pouring down their faces as they waved cars and motorbikes through. The evening breeze brought no respite. It, too, was unpleasantly warm, and it was difficult not to sympathise with those who, defying the law, jumped into the Rawal Lake, the city’s main reservoir, in an attempt to cool down. Further south in Lahore it was even hotter, and there were demonstrations when the generator at Mangla that sporadically supplies the city with electricity collapsed completely.

As far as the political temperature goes there is never a good month in Pakistan. This is a country whose fate is no longer in its own hands. I have never known things so bad. The chief problems are the United States and its requirements, the religious extremists, the military high command, and corruption, not just on the part of President Zardari and his main rivals, but spreading well beyond them.

This is now Obama’s war. He campaigned to send more troops into Afghanistan and to extend the war, if necessary, into Pakistan. These pledges are now being fulfilled. On the day he publicly expressed his sadness at the death of a young Iranian woman caught up in the repression in Tehran, US drones killed 60 people in Pakistan. The dead included women and children, whom even the BBC would find it difficult to describe as ‘militants’. Their names mean nothing to the world; their images will not be seen on TV networks. Their deaths are in a ‘good cause’. [continued…]

Afghanistan’s lost decade
By Paul Rogers, Open Democracy, July 16, 2009

The war in Afghanistan will move into its ninth year in under three months’ time, with the anniversary of the start of the United States bombing on 7 October 2001. This war is now beginning to approach the duration of the Soviet occupation. That started with the invasion by the Red Army on 24 December 1979 and ended with the United Nations-brokered ceasefire of 15 May 1988 and the final withdrawal of Soviet troops a year later.

That earlier conflict, which killed over a million Afghans and caused millions more refugees, was devastating. It was followed by a bitter and complex civil war in the early 1990s that led to a Taliban takeover of Kabul in 1996 and of most of the country by the end of the decade. For sheer civilian suffering, the Soviet occupation far exceeds the conflict of 2001-09 – but this ongoing war may still be in its early stages. Most military analysts believe that if present-day levels of western military involvement are maintained, then – whoever is in the White House – the war has at least a decade to go. [continued…]

The assault of Mumbai

Last gunmen killed in India, ending siege
By Emily Wax and Rama Lakshmi, Washington Post, November 29, 2008

Security forces brought a three-day assault on India’s financial and cultural capital to an end Saturday morning, killing the last remaining gunmen holed up in one of the city’s luxury hotels after freeing hostages and recovering bodies from two hotels and a Jewish center Friday.

Pakistani officials, responding to charges by Indian leaders that the attack was carried out by an organization with ties to Pakistan, said a senior intelligence officer would travel to India, in an apparent attempt to ease tensions between the two nuclear-armed states.

Indian officials said they now believe that at least 15 gunmen carried out the operation after reaching Mumbai by sea. After an interrogation of one of the attackers, Indian intelligence officials said they suspected that a Pakistani Islamist group, Lashkar-i-Taiba, was responsible. An Indian intelligence document from 2006 obtained by The Washington Post said members of the group had been trained in maritime assault. [continued…]

‘I saw them land on the jetty’
Times of India, November 28, 2008

“In the darkness, I saw eight young men stepping out of the raft, two at a time. They jumped into the waters, and picked up a haversack. They bent down again, and came up carrying two more haversacks, one in each hand,” said Tamore. The bags, he thought, looked very heavy.

They were in their 20s, fair-skinned and tall, clad in jeans and jackets. “The man who was lying down shouted at them, asking what they were doing there. So one of them shouted back ‘Tussle mut le ‘. When they approached me, I also asked them who they were, and what were they doing there. One of them said ‘student hai’.”

Tamore said he found their presence unusual, but as they said they were students, and were carrying haversacks, he didn’t think much about it. He thought they were youngsters returning from a picnic. [continued…]

Mumbai police declare Taj Mahal hotel siege over
By Sadie Gray, The Guardian, November 29, 2008

The militants may have reconnoitred the hotels by checking in as guests, Indian newspaper reports said today. They appeared to be well trained and “very, very familiar” with the layout of the hotel, an army general said.

“At times we found them matching us in combat and movement. They were either army regulars or have done a long stint of commando training,” a commando told the Hindustan Times.

A bag found in the Taj Mahal hotel contained 400 rounds of ammunition, grenades, identity cards, rations, $1,000 (£650) in cash and international credit cards, indicating a meticulously planned operation. [continued…]

U.S. intelligence focuses on Pakistani group
By Mark Mazzetti and Salman Masood, New York Times, November 29, 2008

American intelligence and counterterrorism officials said Friday that there was mounting evidence that a Pakistani militant group based in Kashmir, most likely Lashkar-e-Taiba, was responsible for this week’s deadly attacks in Mumbai.

The officials cautioned that they had reached no firm conclusions about who was responsible for the attacks, or how they were planned and carried out. Nevertheless, they said that evidence gathered in the past two days pointed to a role for Lashkar-e-Taiba or possibly another group based in Kashmir, Jaish-e-Muhammad, which also has a track record of attacks against India.

The officials requested anonymity in describing their current thinking and declined to discuss specifics of the intelligence that they said pointed to Kashmiri militants. In the past, the American and Indian intelligence services have used communications intercepts to tie Kashmiri militants to terrorist strikes. Indian officials may also be gleaning information from at least one captured gunman who participated in the Mumbai attacks.

According to one Indian intelligence official, during the siege the militants have been using non-Indian cellphones and receiving calls from outside the country, evidence that in part led Indian officials to speak publicly about the militants’ external ties. [continued…]

Pakistani militants at center of probe
By Craig Whitlock and Karen DeYoung, Washington Post, November 29, 2008

Evidence collected by police in Mumbai, along with intelligence gathered by U.S. and British officials, has led investigators to concentrate their focus on Islamist militants in Pakistan who have long sought to spark a war over the disputed province of Kashmir. India and Pakistan have already fought two wars over Kashmir, the battleground between Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan that each country claimed soon after India’s partition in 1947.

A U.S. counterterrorism official said additional evidence has emerged in the past 24 hours that points toward a Kashmiri connection. “Some of what has been learned so far does fall in that direction,” the official said, declining to offer specifics.

“We have to be careful here,” said the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “When you posit a Kashmiri connection, that puts Pakistan on the table. That is huge, enormous, but what does it mean? It can be anything from people who were [initially] in Pakistan, to maybe people who used to be associated with someone in the Pakistani government, to any gradation you could find.” [continued…]

Britons are among those detained, official claims
By Michael Evans and Jeremy Page, The Times, November 29, 2008

Britons were among the militants arrested for the Bombay attacks, a senior Indian official said yesterday.

Vilasrao Deshmukh, the chief minister of Maharashtra state, in which Bombay lies, made the claim on an Indian television station.

Patrick Mercer, MP, a former Conservative security spokesman, told The Times that he had been given information that at least two of the terrorists had credit cards and other identifying documents that linked them to Dewsbury, West Yorkshire. Other reports last night claimed that men from Leeds and Bradford were among the terrorists. [continued…]

EDITORIAL: Who comes first?

Who comes first?
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, November 16, 2008

The tribal areas of western Pakistan along with the least developed parts of southern and eastern Afghanistan have become the epicenter of international handwringing.

On one level, “the problem” revolves around government military forces being constrained by an international boundary, while their opponents can use that constraint to their advantage. On another level, there’s a struggle to find a suitable balance between bullying and helping as Nato pursues its bomb and build strategy.

The one constant is that no one seems to think that the indigenous population has the preeminent right to determine its own future.

Consider the Korengal Valley in eastern Afghanistan and the people who inhabit this rugged terrain. A fascinating photographic essay in the Boston Globe last week sheds light on some of the inherent contradictions in western efforts to impose a military solution on a topographical reality.

Look at the human craft in the physical structure of this mountainside settlement — something that might not be immediately apparent when viewing this hamlet down the barrel of a gun:

Note, there are no roads. To the western eye, this is a development problem.

At the same time it is also an extraordinary indigenous accomplishment. Men and women and donkeys alone did all the heavy lifting. But instead of admiring the ability of people to master the art of survival in a challenging environment, we regard them as living in a state of deprivation. With a road, life would be better — or so we think.

But do they want a road? Apparently not. The report says: “U.S. and Afghan officers tried to convince the [Korengal Valley] elders to accept a new paved road through the Korengal Valley as part of a large American development project. The elders refused the road, however, saying that they would prohibit anyone in their valley from working on the project.”

What would a road provide for the people of Korengal? Most predictably, the means for Americans to establish larger and more heavily equipped military bases. Beyond that, a road would provide the means to tame a harsh environment. It would diminish the value of the resilience of those who for centuries have survived without a road.

Where a people invest their pride, we see their backwardness and then are perplexed when they spurn our goodwill. We suffer from the burden that dogs every evangelist: how can you insult someone and help them at the same time?

Meanwhile, the narrative that drives out all others is that Afghanistan is now in a downward spiral with the Talilban having established control over a substantial portion of the country.

Counterinsurgency expert, David Kilcullen, tells The New Yorker:

We have built the Afghan police into a less well-armed, less well-trained version of the Army and launched them into operations against the insurgents. Meanwhile, nobody is doing the job of actual policing—rule of law, keeping the population safe from all comers (including friendly fire and coalition operations), providing justice and dispute resolution, and civil and criminal law enforcement. As a consequence, the Taliban have stepped into this gap; they currently run thirteen law courts across the south, and ninety-five per cent of the work of these courts is civil law, property disputes, criminal matters, water and grazing disputes, inheritances etc.—basic governance things that the police and judiciary ought to be doing, but instead they’re out in the countryside chasing bad guys. Where governance does exist, it is seen as corrupt or exploitative, in many cases, whereas the people remember the Taliban as cruel but not as corrupt. They remember they felt safer back then. The Taliban are doing the things we ought to be doing because we are off chasing them instead of keeping our eye on the prize—securing and governing the people in a way that meets their needs.

Kilcullen could have said, “The Taliban have established law and order across much of southern Afghanistan. What can we learn from their success?”

Most importantly, in a war that was originally billed as being driven by a moral imperative, how has it come to pass that in this “good war” our allies are corrupt while our opponents are able to establish some system of justice?

To ask such a question is not to excuse the brutality of the Taliban, but merely underline how utterly lost we have become in a country and a region we insist on trying to reshape even while it still eludes our understanding.

GUEST CONTRIBUTOR – John Robertson: Is the US headed for a third war?

Is the US headed for a third war?
By John Robertson, War in Context, September 13, 2008

Don’t look now, but the US is perhaps heading for a third war – this one, with an ally (or so Mr. Bush has told us, and them, for the last eight years): Pakistan. The head of Pakistan’s army has reiterated his earlier warning to the US, that Pakistan cannot tolerate US ground and air forces (which killed another 12 people yesterday – some of them “bad guys,” but some of them reportedly women and children) repeatedly encroaching on Pakistan’s national sovereignty with such impunity.

Are al-Qaida and Taliban elements (including, most probably, Osama Bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri) sheltering in Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier states and launching operations from there? Yes. Do most Pakistanis therefore believe that the US has the right to send in Navy Seal teams (that happened just a few days ago) and dispatch unmanned Predator planes to bomb people in Pakistani territory to smithereens? No.

Across Pakistan (to borrow the memorable line exclaimed by the actor Peter Finch in the movie Network more than 30 years ago), people are getting mad as hell, and are not going to take it anymore. The vast majority of Pakistanis never bought into Bush’s “war on Terror” as being their own fight (they see it as America’s war, not Pakistan’s), they resented how Bush continued to support Pakistan’s president Pervez Musharraf as his “guy” even while Musharraf undermined Pakistan’s democratic institutions (wasn’t the US committed to promoting democracy?) – and now they see the US killing people, fellow Muslims all, wantonly inside their country, after oh-so-many years of watching the US kill fellow Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan, support Israel’s killing of them in the West Bank, Gaza, and Lebanon (and, for that matter, support its old ally Saddam Hussein’s killing of them in Iran between 1980 and 1988), and threaten the killing of them in Iran and Syria.

And at the same time, the US has been burnishing its relationship with the country that Pakistanis have seen as their most mortal enemy and most serious existential threat for 60 years. I mean India, of course – the same India that developed and tested a nuclear weapon completely under the radar of the US intelligence community, to be followed down that road by Pakistan, which felt compelled to develop its own nuclear deterrent against its larger, wealthier, more powerful neighbor. After a several-years-long fit of pique against India, the US in recent years has rushed to embrace India as an economic and strategic partner, even to the extent of pursuing an agreement that (in direct violation of internationally recognized nuclear-proliferation agreements) will provide India with advanced nuclear technology, and that more or less signals the nuclear-weapon wannabes of the world that (as Newsweek‘s Michael Hirsch has put it) “You too can rejoin the international community if you wait long enough! So keep at it.”

On the eve of his 2001 invasion of Afghanistan, most observers with any depth of awareness of that country’s historical and ethnic complexities warned Mr. Bush that he would be opening a Pandora’s box, and that US forces (like so many other invaders, from the phalanxes of Alexander the Great to the troopers sent there to maintain the British Raj in India) might be sucked into a black hole. We’ll never know if the US forces that were sent to Afghanistan might have broken that string. Mr. Bush’s poorly conceived and ill-fated digression, the hubristically and tragically misnamed “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” torched any momentum that the US had built up along any projected pathway to stability in Afghanistan.

The Bush administration may have once believed that by 2003 it had more or less closed Pandora’s box in Afghanistan. According to the ancient Greek myth, when Pandora opened her box (which was, actually, a large jar), she loosed all manner of evils into the world. But we tend to forget that she was able to clamp the lid back on quickly enough to keep one thing inside: hope. The chaos now brewing in Pakistan is surely one of the box’s escapees of 2001, nurtured to deadly maturity by its fellow escapees, the evils that have befallen the region over the past seven years. Mr. Bush (or more likely, his successor) must now find a way to get the lid back on – finally, firmly, and quickly – if he is to prevent full-blown civil war (or worse – remember, Pakistan is a state with nuclear capability). Otherwise, hope – for a stable Afghanistan, or even South Asia – may already have escaped that box as well.

John Robertson is a professor of Middle East history at Central Michigan University and has his own blog, Chippshots.

FEATURES & EDITOR’S COMMENT: America needs a better Qaeda narrative

Amid policy disputes, Qaeda grows in Pakistan
By Mark Mazzetti and David Rhode, New York Times, June 30, 2008

Administration lawyers and State Department officials are concerned about any new authorities that would allow military missions to be launched without the approval of the American ambassador in Islamabad. With Qaeda operatives now described in intelligence reports as deeply entrenched in the tribal areas and immersed in the civilian population, there is also a view among some military and C.I.A. officials that the opportunity for decisive American action against the militants may have been lost.

Pakistani military officials, meanwhile, express growing frustration with the American pressure, and point out that Pakistan has lost more than 1,000 members of its security forces in the tribal areas since 2001, nearly double the number of Americans killed in Afghanistan.

Some architects of America’s efforts in Pakistan defend the Bush administration’s record in the tribal areas, and vigorously deny that Washington took its eye off the terrorist threat as it focused on Iraq policy. Some also question whether Mr. bin Laden and Mr. Zawahri, Al Qaeda’s top two leaders, are really still able to orchestrate large-scale attacks.

“I do wonder if it’s in fact the case that Al Qaeda has really reconstituted itself to a pre-9/11 capability, and in fact I would say I seriously doubt that,” said Mr. Crocker, the American ambassador to Pakistan between 2004 and 2006 and currently the ambassador to Iraq.

“Their top-level leadership is still out there, but they’re not communicating and they’re not moving around. I think they’re symbolic more than operationally effective,” Mr. Crocker said.

But while Mr. Bush vowed early on that Mr. bin Laden would be captured “dead or alive,” the moment in late 2001 when Mr. bin Laden and his followers escaped at Tora Bora was almost certainly the last time the Qaeda leader was in American sights, current and former intelligence officials say. Leading terrorism experts have warned that it is only a matter of time before a major terrorist attack planned in the mountains of Pakistan is carried out on American soil. [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — Why would the branch of al Qaeda based in Pakistan be wasting its resources plotting another major attack on the US? To my mind it seems more likely that they’re now operating under the principle: No need to attack them over there when we can fight them right here.

These are strategic thinkers and I doubt that they have as strong an interest in the abstract goal of destroying Western civilization as they do in the practical goal of driving the US and its allies out of Afghanistan. 9/11 was the bait intended to draw the enemy into a fight on the home turf. We swallowed the bait.

And at the same time, let’s not lose sight of the fact that even a so-called reconstituted al Qaeda with — as the NYT claims — 2,000 local and foreign fighters, is a relatively minor player in this war.

As Graham Usher makes clear in the article below, the geographically-rooted social force here is an ethnic Pashtun movement that ultimately aspires to turn its homeland into a state. “The closest analogy,” according to Khalid Aziz, a former first secretary in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), “is the Maoists in Nepal.”

When Obama and the Democratic chorus use the line, “finish the job” in Afghanistan and Pakistan’s tribal areas, do they have the slightest clue what this means? It’s comic-book-talk — no more sophisticated than Bush’s original “smoke ’em out of their caves” line. Anyone serious about trying to dismantle al Qaeda has to reconcile themselves to the ugly fact that this will require dealing with, rather than attempting to destroy, the Taliban. That effort could have started in September 2001. The fact that it didn’t, resulted from a failure in imagination that has haunted us ever since.

Pakistan amidst the storms
By Graham Usher, MERIP, June 27, 2008

Pakistan’s insurgents are not one group, but at least four, loosely allied. There is the Pakistan Taliban and the Afghan Taliban. There are the “Kashmiri mujahideen,” native jihadist groups once nurtured by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies to fight a proxy war with India in the disputed Kashmir province but which have now cut loose from their handlers. And there is al-Qaeda and its affiliates: between 150 and 500 Arab, Uzbek and other foreign fighters who have found refuge in the FATA and use the remote tribal enclave for planning, training, rearmament and recruitment.

There are differences between the factions. The Pakistan and Afghan Taliban are still overwhelmingly ethnic Pashtun movements with a focus on Afghanistan. Al-Qaeda and the jihadists have a more global reach, including targets within Pakistan, such as the bombing on June 2 of the Danish Embassy in Islamabad. But all are united in the war against the US and NATO in Afghanistan. And all are committed to extending the Taliban’s territorial reach beyond the FATA to the NWFP as a whole, including Peshawar, the provincial capital. Such Talibanization “gives the Taliban more security, territory, recruits and bargaining power,” says a source. “It allows them to talk peace in Swat while waging war in Waziristan.”

The government’s response to Talibanization has been to temporize. In 2007, before her return, Bhutto spoke of devolving democratic power to the tribes while integrating the FATA into Pakistan proper, in effect doing away with its special “tribal” status. The focus of the Pashtun nationalist Awami National Party, which heads the NWFP Provincial Government, is economic: It has drawn up plans for a crash program of schools, colleges, rehabilitation centers and jobs to wean young tribesmen from an emerging Taliban polity that is well “on the way to primitive state formation with its own tax system, paid bureaucracy and dispute resolution,” says Aziz. For him — and many in the NWFP government — the Taliban represents less an Islamist movement than a “class revolt expressed in a religious idiom. The closest analogy is the Maoists in Nepal,” he says. It can only be addressed by the “transformation and integration” of a derelict tribal system.

Such a project “will take years,” says Aziz. It is also understood that no peace will hold in the NWFP without a resolution of the conflict with the Taliban in the FATA, which is under the remit of the federal government. And the PPP and Awami Nationalist Party have passed that buck to the army: an abdication frankly admitted by the government’s decision on June 25 to entrust the use of force in FATA entirely to Kayani. The army’s strategy for now is to secure localized peace deals that will keep the territorial advantage it obtained in February while playing divide-and-rule with the Taliban’s different tribal leaderships. It is “the policy of the breathing space,” says Afghanistan expert Ahmad Rashid.

In South Waziristan, this means extracting a pledge from the Taliban to end attacks on the army and government-sponsored development projects. In return, the army will release prisoners and “reposition” its units outside the cities. In Swat in the NWFP, the tradeoff is that the Taliban end attacks on government institutions, including girls’ schools, in return for implementation of Islamic law, seen principally as a means to coopt hundreds of jobless seminary students who may otherwise join the militants. “It’s an agreement,” says Aziz, “but not in the Western sense. In the FATA an agreement is an arrangement to coexist. It means shutting your eyes to many things.”

The Taliban have closed their eyes to the army camps that now nestle permanently in the mountains above them. And the army is looking away from a steady flow of guerrillas across the border, or at least is not acting overtly to intercept them. Peace in Pakistan, in other words, may translate into intensified warfare in Afghanistan. [complete article]

NEWS & EDITOR’S COMMENT: Peshawar “could fall” to the Taliban

The Taliban’s advance threatens Pakistan
By Paul Woodward, The National, June 29, 2008

“The security situation in Peshawar is grim. Officials in the home department, who evaluate the situation on an almost daily basis, believe declaring a state of red alert is now only a matter of time,” Pakistan’s Dawn newspaper reported on Tuesday.

“With militants knocking at the gates of the capital of the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP), even the more circumspect government and police officials now grudgingly concede that Peshawar, too, could fall in a few months.

“‘Peshawar is in a state of siege and if Peshawar falls, the rest of the districts in the NWFP would fall like ninepins’, a worried senior government official told Dawn.”

Pakistan’s Daily Times noted: “These days Taliban fighters do not sneak in to Peshawar. They arrive in broad daylight on the back of pick-up trucks, brandishing automatic weapons, and threatening owners of music stores to close down. ‘They had long hair and flowing beards, and were carrying Kalashnikovs. They told me to close down the shop or face the consequences,’ said Abdul Latif, a clean-shaven 20-year-old, whose video store received a visit from the vigilantes last week. ‘I asked police for help but they said they are helpless,’ he said.” [complete article]

Editor’s Comment — The Democratic Party national security posture has for several years been to claim that a clear-eyed Democratic president would “finish the job” that George Bush started in Afghanistan and from which he got distracted by Iraq.

In 2009, assuming Obama wins the election, the Democrats and the rest of America will be in for a rude awakening. A war in Afghanistan — originally dreamed up by Zbigniew Brzezinski as the Soviet Union’s Vietnam — is destined to become for the US more like Vietnam than even Iraq has been. But whereas Vietnam had the natural containment of Vietnamese nationalism, Afghanistan has no such boundaries.

The fantasy of a border between Afghanistan and Pakistan — the Durand Line — is the reason the war in Afghanistan is so difficult to prevent becoming a deeper regional conflict. With the Pakistani side of the “border” defended largely by the Frontier Corps, it’s not hard to understand why the NWFP and FATA provides the Taliban with a comfortable refuge. Created by the British, the FC retains a colonial structure: 80,000 soldiers drawn from the local population, commanded by officers from outside the region who apparently often “disdain the assignment.” FC soldiers are naturally ambivalent about fighting fellow Pashtuns, but the more heavy-handed the Pakistani Army becomes, the more the concept of Pakistan comes under threat.

American pressure on the Pakistan government to crackdown on the militants, risks provoking a civil war. In that event, the chances for NATO finishing the job in Afghanistan will be reduced to precisely zero.

A useful question to pose both presidential candidates might be this: Where do you anticipate American troops fighting for the longest? Iraq or Afghanistan?

EDITORIAL: Taking the blood out of killing

Taking the blood out of killing
By Paul Woodward, War in Context, March 27, 2008

“If America wants to see itself clean of terrorists we also want that our villages and towns should not be bombed.”

This was the modest request issued by Nawaz Sharif after Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte and Assistant Secretary Richard Boucher went to Pakistan this week to secure the new government’s commitment on fighting terrorism. Negroponte and the rest of his State Department contingent might have received a slightly warmer response if they had not barged in on Pakistan’s celebrations at the restoration of democracy.

The New York Times reported:

The timing of the American visit was harshly criticized by the news media for creating the appearance that the United States was trying to dictate policy to a government that was not even hours old. The two American diplomats met Mr. Sharif as President Musharraf was administering the oath of office to Mr. Gillani.

“I don’t think it is a good idea for them to be here on this particular day,” said Zaffar Abbas, the editor of the respected English language newspaper Dawn, in Islamabad. “Here are the Americans, right here in Islamabad, meeting with senior politicians in the new government, trying to dictate terms.”

And the article continued:

An independent analyst on the Pakistani military, Shuja Nawaz, who lives in Washington, said he had been told by Pakistani officials that they discouraged the American diplomats from coming this week.

But the Pakistanis had been informed that Mr. Negroponte was on a trip that included other already arranged stops and Tuesday was the only possible day for him. Mr. Nawaz called the visit “ham-handed,” and said it could be interpreted as Washington wanting to continue to act as the “political godfather behind Musharraf.”

Ironically, it was the Pakistanis who needed to give the Americans a little instruction on the meaning of democracy: “We told them that since 9/11 until now the decisions were made by an individual and therefore these did not reflect the aspiration of the people. The situation has been changed now because an independent parliament has come into being and all the decisions will be made by it.”

That was how Sharif explained to Negroponte and Boucher that the US government needs to get used to dealing with a government instead of a dictator. Unfortunately, this administration like so many others before it still finds dictators easier to work with as a matter of convenience. It’s the boneheaded mafia approach to international relations: make a deal with “the man” and then let his and your minions take care of the details.

The false premise upon which Negroponte and Boucher’s unannounced visit was based was that Pakistan is not as serious as the United States when it comes to dealing with terrorism. But they would do well to consider the following remarks from an editorial in today’s edition of Pakistan’s leading English-language daily, The News:

What Washington still does not seem to have grasped is that almost everyone in Pakistan, including its political leaders, is at least as keen as they are to see an end to terror. It is, after all, Pakistani men, women and children who die when bombs explode; it is their blood that stains roadsides; their screams that fill hospital emergency rooms. The US-directed policies of the past seven years have led only to an expansion in militancy, to more violence and to more hatred. It is indeed a mystery why, in the face of these facts, Washington considers Musharraf to have been a success in battling terror. The White House and its team must now restrain themselves in further meddling in Pakistan’s affairs. Its new leaders must be allowed to devise their own strategies without attempts at long-distance dictation or remote-controlled operations. Such dictation has brought disaster in the past and is likely to do so in future as well. The people of Pakistan and their elected representatives must now be left alone to chalk out a brighter future for everyone in the country.

Unfortunately for the people of Pakistan, when it comes to confronting terrorism in the tribal areas, Democrats and Republicans are largely in agreement that the US needs to pursue a “tough” approach. Very few Americans are willing to question the idea that if an opportunity arises, then “high value targets” should be “taken out.”

But consider for a moment this frequently used phrase: take out.

Whenever a command is issued that someone or some people should be “taken out,” the words connote executive power, wielded by unbloodied hands. All the way down from the command to the deed, taking out requires a sense of detachment and a comfortable distance from the fatal event. Absent that distance, the nature of the act becomes inescapable.

When Brutus stabbed Julius Caesar, he didn’t take him out. Brutus and his fellow assassins killed Caesar. They had blood on their hands. Brutus says, “let no man abide this deed, but we the doers.” He knew what he had done and he accepted full responsibility.

When we talk about taking out terrorists, we prefer not to know what has been done and we try to disperse responsibility. We imagine that if a greater good (“defeating terrorism”) is being served, then the loss of innocent life, though regrettable will also most likely be unavoidable. What we can and do avoid considering is the carnage. We mask it with a casual phrase.

The message from the new government of Pakistan to America is quite simple: our people are worth as much as yours. Should that not be seen as an indisputable truism?

NEWS: Locals hold key in Pakistan

Moderates hold key in Pakistan
By Carlotta Gall, New York Times, March 26, 2008

One of the most significant results of Pakistan’s elections in February was the defeat of the religious parties that ran this critical border province for the last five years. In their place, voters elected moderates from a small regional party that may now wield big influence over Pakistan’s changing strategy toward its militants.

The victory of the Awami National Party, or A.N.P., was welcomed by Western officials and Pakistanis as a clear rejection of the Taliban and the religious parties that backed them here in North-West Frontier Province. The party will now be part of the governing coalition in the national Parliament, and sees itself as critically placed to begin a dialogue with the militants, something the Bush administration has regarded warily.

Not only has this province suffered most from the militants, who are based in the adjacent tribal areas, but most of the militants are from the same Pashtun ethnic group as the A.N.P. Pashtuns populate this region, on both sides of the Afghan border. The A.N.P., a Pashtun nationalist party, and Pakistan’s militants speak the same language. [complete article]

U.S. steps up unilateral strikes in Pakistan
By Robin Wright and Joby Warrick, Washington Post, March 27, 2008

The United States has escalated its unilateral strikes against al-Qaeda members and fighters operating in Pakistan’s tribal areas, partly because of anxieties that Pakistan’s new leaders will insist on scaling back military operations in that country, according to U.S. officials.

Washington is worried that pro-Western President Pervez Musharraf, who has generally supported the U.S. strikes, will almost certainly have reduced powers in the months ahead, and so it wants to inflict as much damage as it can to al-Qaeda’s network now, the officials said.

Over the past two months, U.S.-controlled Predator aircraft are known to have struck at least three sites used by al-Qaeda operatives. The moves followed a tacit understanding with Musharraf and Army chief Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani that allows U.S. strikes on foreign fighters operating in Pakistan, but not against the Pakistani Taliban, the officials said. [complete article]

NEWS: Unilateral strike called a model for U.S. operations in Pakistan

Unilateral strike called a model for U.S. operations in Pakistan
By Joby Warrick and Robin Wright, Washington Post, February 19, 2008

In the predawn hours of Jan. 29, a CIA Predator aircraft flew in a slow arc above the Pakistani town of Mir Ali. The drone’s operator, relying on information secretly passed to the CIA by local informants, clicked a computer mouse and sent the first of two Hellfire missiles hurtling toward a cluster of mud-brick buildings a few miles from the town center.

The missiles killed Abu Laith al-Libi, a senior al-Qaeda commander and a man who had repeatedly eluded the CIA’s dragnet. It was the first successful strike against al-Qaeda’s core leadership in two years, and it involved, U.S. officials say, an unusual degree of autonomy by the CIA inside Pakistan.

Having requested the Pakistani government’s official permission for such strikes on previous occasions, only to be put off or turned down, this time the U.S. spy agency did not seek approval. The government of Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf was notified only as the operation was underway, according to the officials, who insisted on anonymity because of diplomatic sensitivities. [complete article]

NEWS: The end of Musharraf?

The end of Musharraf?
By Ron Moreau and Zahid Hussain, Newsweek, February 19, 2008

Pakistani voters dealt President Pervez Musharraf and his Pakistan Muslim League-Q a humiliating defeat in Monday’s general elections. The opposition Pakistan People’s Party of the late former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, and the Pakistan Muslim League-N of former prime minister Nawaz Sharif trounced Musharraf’s forces. A sizable victory will allow these two moderate, mainstream parties to combine with several other smaller allies and form a government with a two-thirds majority in the National Assembly. To make matters worse for Musharraf and his allies, the PPP has won control of the provincial assembly in the key southern province of Sindh, and Sharif’s PML-N of the provincial assembly in Punjab, the country’s richest, largest and most influential region. “It’s amazing what has happened to Pakistan,” says retired Pakistani Army Lt. Gen. Talat Masood. “The people have strongly spoken in favor of democracy, moderate forces, the rule of law—and against Musharraf.” [complete article]

OPINION: Pakistan’s history is suffering

Pakistan kicked me out. Others were less lucky
By Nicholas Schmidle, Washington Post, February 3, 2008

The police came for me on a cold, rainy Tuesday night last month. They stood in front of my home in Islamabad, four men with hoods pulled over their heads in the driving rain. The senior officer, a tall, clean-shaven man, and I recognized one another from recent protests and demonstrations. Awkwardly, almost apologetically, he handed me a notice ordering my immediate expulsion from Pakistan. Rain spilled off a nearby awning and fell loudly into puddles.

I asked, somewhat obtusely, what this meant. “I am here to take you to the airport,” the officer shrugged. “Tonight.”

The document he’d given me provided no explanation for my expulsion, but I immediately felt that there was some connection to the travels and reporting I had done for a story published two days earlier in the New York Times Magazine, about a dangerous new generation of Taliban in Pakistan. I had spent several months traveling throughout the troubled areas along the border with Afghanistan, including Quetta (in Baluchistan province) and Dera Ismail Khan, Peshawar and Swat (all in the North-West Frontier Province). My visa listed no travel restrictions, and less than a week earlier, President Pervez Musharraf had sat before a roomful of foreign journalists in Islamabad and told them that they could go anywhere they wanted in Pakistan.

The truth, however, is that foreign journalists are barred from almost half the country; in most cases, their visas are restricted to three cities — Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi. In Baluchistan province, which covers 44 percent of Pakistan and where ethnic nationalists are fighting a low-level insurgency, the government requires prior notification and approval if you want to travel anywhere outside the capital of Quetta. Such permission is rarely given. And the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), where the pro-Taliban militants are strong, are completely off-limits. Musharraf’s government says that journalists are kept out for their own security. But meanwhile, two conflicts go unreported in one of the world’s most vital — and misunderstood — countries. [complete article]

NEWS & ANALYSIS: Debatable targets

Al-Qaida claims responsibility for shooting attack near Israeli Embassy in Mauritania
Haaretz, February 3, 2008

Al-Qaida claimed responsibility early Sunday morning for Friday’s shooting attack near the Israeli Embassy in Mauritania that wounded three French nationals.

The international terrorist organization urged Muslim states to cut all ties to Israel. Mauritani, an Islamic republic that straddles black and Arab Africa, is one of the few Arab League states to have diplomatic relations with Israel.

Israeli sources said they believe the embassy was not in fact the target of the attack, but rather an adjacent restaurant frequented by foreign diplomats. The attack followed recent public calls by political parties in Mauritania for the government to sever ties to Jerusalem. [complete article]

Al Qaeda said to focus on WMDs
By Josh Meyer, Los Angeles Times, February 3, 2008

After a U.S. airstrike leveled a small compound in Pakistan’s lawless tribal regions in January 2006, President Pervez Musharraf and his intelligence officials announced that several senior Al Qaeda operatives had been killed, and that the top prize was an elusive Egyptian who was believed to be a chemical weapons expert.

But current and former U.S. intelligence officials now believe that the Egyptian, Abu Khabab Masri, is alive and well — and in charge of resurrecting Al Qaeda’s program to develop or obtain weapons of mass destruction.

Given the problems with previous U.S. intelligence assessments of weapons of mass destruction, officials are careful not to overstate Al Qaeda’s capabilities, and they emphasize that there is much they don’t know because of the difficulty in getting information out of the mountainous area of northwest Pakistan where the network has reestablished itself. [complete article]

Al-Qaeda ‘killing’ spawns doubts
By Rahimullah Yusufzai, BBC News, February 2, 2008

It was unusual for Islamist websites to break the news of the death of an important al-Qaeda operative as they did this week in the case of Abu Laith al-Libi.

Two such websites – Ekhlaas.org and as-Sahab – which usually carry statements from al-Qaeda leaders, reported the story.

These websites and al-Qaeda and its affiliates usually deny any report of their operatives’ deaths because the loss of a leading member of the network could be demoralising for its rank and file.

This change could mean one of two things. [complete article]

NEWS: Musharraf vs. Chaudhry

Ex-military men want Musharraf to hand judge power
By Augustine Anthony, Reuters, January 31, 2008

A group of retired senior military officers said on Thursday President Pervez Musharraf should hand over power to the judge he sacked three months ago to ensure national elections are fair.

The backing for deposed Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry from old generals, air marshals, admirals and intelligence chiefs coincided with protests by lawyers in support of the judge and the independence of the judiciary. [complete article]

Pakistani justice breaks silence
By Salman Masood, New York Times, January 31, 2008

Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, the former chief justice of Pakistan who was removed last year when President Pervez Musharraf imposed a state of emergency, has finally broken his silence.

A letter from Mr. Chaudhry to Western officials was circulated Wednesday. It lambasted Mr. Musharraf for quashing Pakistan’s independent judiciary and illegally detaining him and his family, and noted that the Supreme Court had not had a chance to rule on whether it was legal for Mr. Musharraf to run for re-election in December.

It was Mr. Chaudhry’s second public statement since the start of emergency rule on Nov. 3, when he was confined to his official residence. On Nov. 6, he made a telephone address to opposition lawyers in Islamabad, urging the nation to rise up for the restoration of the Constitution. Emergency rule was lifted Dec. 15. [complete article]

NEWS & ANALYSIS: The geopolitical turbulence centered in Pakistan

U.S. plays matchmaker to Pakistan, Israel
By M K Bhadrakumar, Asia Times, January 31, 2008

[A] geopolitical turbulence … is steadily enveloping the South Asian region. Much of the turbulence is being commonly attributed to the concerns of the international community over radical Islam and terrorism in the region or over the safety of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons or of the specter of the Pakistani state withering away into anarchy under the sheer weight of its current political difficulties. But the factors underlying the volatility go deeper than that.

What is becoming apparent is that a series of maneuvers by regional powers is gradually building up in the coming period. Arguably, the heightened tensions around Pakistan are as much a symptom of these geopolitical maneuvers as of an intrinsic nature. Democracy deficit, political assassination, ruling elites, misgovernance, corruption, popular alienation, poverty and economic disparity, religious fanaticism – these are common to almost all countries of the South Asian region. Pakistan is certainly not an exception.

At the epicenter of the geopolitical turbulence in the region lies the rapidly expanding strategic partnership between the United States and India. The developing US-India strategic axis is triggering a large-scale realignment among regional powers, especially involving Pakistan.

As a leading commentator of the official Russian news agency put it recently, “Not without help from the great powers, India has gone so far ahead in the sphere of arms that it is pursuing its national interests from the Persian Gulf to the Malacca archipelago. Islamabad justifiably believes that the United States is ready to support India’s claims to the status of a world power in exchange for its efforts to deter China and Iran … [while] Pakistan still remains the main partner of the United States and Western Europe in the region’s anti-terrorist coalition.” [complete article]

U.S. homes in on militants in Pakistan
By Syed Saleem Shahzad, Asia Times, January 30, 2008

Another piece of the United States’ regional jigsaw is in place with the completion of a military base in Afghanistan’s Kunar province, just three kilometers from Bajaur Agency in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

Pakistani intelligence quarters have confirmed to Asia Times Online that the base, on a mountain top in Ghakhi Pass overlooking Pakistan, is now operational. (This correspondent visited the area last July and could clearly see construction underway. See A fight to the death on Pakistan’s border Asia Times Online, July 17, 2007.)

The new US base is expected to serve as the center of clandestine special forces’ operations in the border region. The George W Bush administration is itching to take more positive action – including inside Pakistan – against Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda militants increasingly active in the area and bolstering the insurgency in Afghanistan. [complete article]

Pakistani Taliban grows bolder, taking fight to doorstep of frontier city
By Tim Johnson and Jonathan S. Landay, McClatchy, January 28, 2008

Islamic militants known as the Pakistani Taliban have extended their reach across all seven of Pakistan’s frontier tribal regions and have infiltrated Peshawar, the provincial capital, heightening U.S. concerns that an insurrection may be broadening in the nuclear-armed nation.

Fighting over the weekend spilled into previously peaceful parts of the tribal belt that borders Afghanistan and intensified in South Waziristan, Bajour and Mohmand. In Bannu, southwest of Peshawar, gunmen fleeing police took dozens of schoolchildren hostage for several hours Monday before tribal elders brokered a deal offering them safe passage, state-run television reported.

“It’s worsening day by day,” said Safraz Khan, a political scientist at the University of Peshawar. “People feel vulnerable. People feel scared.” [complete article]

INTERVIEW: Sibel Edmonds

Sibel Edmonds: ‘Buckle up, there’s much more coming.’
By Luke Ryland, Dissident Voice, January 29, 2008

In the last few weeks, London Times has run a series of articles about the so-called ‘Sibel Edmonds case’: (For sale: West’s deadly nuclear secrets,’ FBI denies file exposing nuclear secrets theft‘ and ‘Tip-off thwarted nuclear spy ring probe‘)

Former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds stumbled into a world of espionage, nuclear black market, narcotics trafficking, money laundering, and corruption at the highest levels of the US government.

I interviewed Sibel on Sunday regarding the current investigation and reporting by the Times, the failures of the US media, and last week’s decision by the Bush administration to legalize the sale of nuclear technology to Turkey, in an apparent effort to exonerate prior criminal activity by officials in his administration. [complete article]