February 2010′s B-side
February’s B-side goes beyond the constant headache of Afghanistan and brings into focus Pakistan-India relations. Kashmir is king in the B-side as it should be more often. False accusations that border on deliberate lies against Pakistan are tackled too, and tackled head-on with February 2010′s B-side contents including:
- Lets Refocus Kashmir, not Kabul by DOUG SAUNDERS
- Taking on the Taliban by STEVE COLL
- Home Truths by FATIMA BHUTTO
The first article is written by Doug Saunders, a Canadian Pultizer Award winning journalist. Saunders focus is all on the K word that can secure peace in South Asia, Kashmir and only Kashmir.
Lets Refocus Kashmir, not Kabul by Doug Saunders
Acting like an especially convivial nightclub manager, Pervez Musharraf storms the room and opens with a joke: “You should come to Pakistan – it’s the most happening place in the world, where there’s never a dull moment!”
There is nervous laughter. The man who was the military ruler of Pakistan for seven years would like to get back into politics, this time by election. “I’m no longer a military man,” he says, “so I cannot take over anything.” Even more nervous laughter. The generals, in Pakistan, are never far from power.
For decades, Pakistan has served the world as a large and obstreperous military force that inconveniently happens to have a nation attached. Nowadays, as far as the West is concerned, it mainly acts as the denominator in what the military calls “Af-Pak,” the war against the Taliban.
The week began with an exceptionally non-dull moment that confirmed this view, and showed what has changed since Mr. Musharraf’s departure in 2008. Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency said that, with the help of the CIA, it had captured the Taliban’s second-ranking Afghan leader, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, in northern Pakistan. This was considered a huge aid to the current Afghan military surge, in which Canada’s soldiers are playing a spearhead role, and a new phase in Pakistani-Western co-operation.
Throughout most of the Afghan war, Pakistan’s military and Mr. Musharraf had argued that, while it was worth using its soldiers to expel the Pakistan-based Taliban from places such as the Swat valley and North Waziristan, they weren’t interested in going after the Afghan Taliban leaders headquartered along the border in Pakistan.
Islamabad told the increasingly exasperated U.S. and NATO leaders that Pakistan wanted to stay friendly with the Afghan Taliban because it was worth maintaining influence over Afghan affairs. And, it said, the Pakistani army was too busy with other conflicts to risk opening another front against the Afghan forces. Those “other conflicts” are the root of everything that’s wrong with Pakistan, and everything that’s been wrong with the way we’ve treated this country.
Most Pakistani soldiers have never been deployed along the country’s northwest border with Afghanistan. They are overwhelmingly concentrated on the eastern border, preparing for a showdown with India that will never occur, at outrageous expense.
Mr. Musharraf drives this point home: After some perfunctory remarks about the Taliban, his talk is all about India’s plots, India’s intransigence, India’s dangerous meddling in Afghan affairs, India’s unwillingness to reason, India’s problem with Islamic extremism within its own borders, and even, heaven help us, India’s secret responsibility for fomenting Islamism within Pakistan. This is not just Mr. Musharraf’s view. The army chief of staff, General Ashfaq Kayani, said in a briefing this week that Pakistan’s No. 1 one threat remains India.
The Indian threat is a constant and popular trope in Pakistani politics. It is used by every elected leader to gain victory, and by every military dictator to justify seizing power. It’s a national obsession but one that kills. Pakistan officially spends 5 per cent of its national income on military-related expenses, compared with 0.7 per cent on health, according to Unicef. That makes Pakistan one of the biggest military spenders in the world, while having appalling infant-mortality rates, an average lifespan below 50, and education and literacy levels far below its neighbours.
While there’s no real danger of the Taliban’s taking over Pakistan, electorally or militarily, there’s a danger of Pakistanis becoming destitute and hospitable to terrible ideas – largely because we’ve turned the country into an anti-India military force.
The two nuclear powers came very close to resolving their Kashmir conflict in 2008. But the Mumbai terror attacks (carried out by Pakistanis) made such talks politically impossible until after Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had got a national election out of the way, and that occurred last year.
On Thursday, there was an even more important non-dull moment: India said it will resume talks to try to resolve the Kashmir dispute. Mr. Singh acknowledged that India’s impressive economic and human-development progress was being jeopardized by this simmering, expensive conflict. For India, resolution is worth a loss of face. For Pakistan, it never will be.
Never mind Af-Pak: The world urgently needs to fix Kash-Pak. We must do everything we can to make these peace talks work, for everything, including the Afghan conflict and the lives of hundreds of millions of people, depends on Pakistan’s generals being proved wrong.
Published in The Globe and Mail
WASIM VIEW- Saunders article makes eminent sense only in the end with his conclusion that Kashmir and not Kabul should be the focal point for all peace efforts in South Asia. Other than this point, Saunders uses the majority of his article to scold Pakistan and its army in particular for its India-centric focus scoffing with a degree of unprofessionalism Pakistan’s reasons for suspecting her eastern neighbour.
Yet Saunders and other commentators know only too well or conveniently choose to forget the role India has played in sabotaging Pakistan’s progress since 1947. Most of the article is wasted on pilloring the Pakistani army and the Pakistani position on India, with Saunders hoping that with Kashmir resolved the Pakistani generals can sleep easy and make peace with India. I too hope for the same as does the Pakistani nation.
India is again discussed in Steve Coll’s article which focuses mainly on the recent arrest of senior Taliban leaders in Pakistan.
Taking on the Taliban by Steve Coll
The Taliban’s jihad, like rock and roll, has passed from youthful vigor into a maturity marked by the appearance of nostalgic memoirs. Back in the day, Abdul Salam Zaeef belonged to the search committee that recruited Mullah Omar as the movement’s commander; after the rebels took power in Kabul, he served as ambassador to Pakistan. “My Life with the Taliban,” published this winter, announces Zaeef’s début in militant letters. The volume contains many sources of fascination, but none are more timely than the author’s account of his high-level relations with Pakistani intelligence.
While in office, Zaeef found that he “couldn’t entirely avoid” the influence of Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence. Its officers volunteered money and political support. Late in 2001, as the United States prepared to attack Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, the I.S.I.’s then commanding general, Mahmud Ahmad, visited Zaeef’s home in Islamabad, wept in solidarity, and promised, “We want to assure you that you will not be alone in this jihad against America. We will be with you.” And yet Zaeef never trusted his I.S.I. patrons. He sought to protect the Taliban’s independence: “I tried to be not so sweet that I would be eaten whole, and not so bitter that I would be spat out.”
Earlier this month, outside Karachi, Pakistani security services, reportedly accompanied by C.I.A. officers, arrested the Afghan Taliban’s top military commander, Abdul Ghani Baradar, an action that has revived questions about the relationship between Pakistan and the Taliban. The Taliban rose to power with extensive aid from the I.S.I.; the collaboration persisted, if less robustly, after September 11th. More lately, the Pakistani military, of which the I.S.I. is a component, has seemed to waver, striking against some Taliban factions in Pakistan but tolerating or helping others. (As recently as December, U.S. intelligence was collecting evidence of mid-level contacts between the I.S.I. and Taliban factions fighting in Afghanistan.) Mullah Baradar’s arrest, which was followed, last week, by the arrests, in Pakistan, of two other significant Taliban leaders, suggests that the I.S.I. may be further reviewing its calculations. In any event, there are few strategic issues of greater importance to the outcome of President Obama’s Afghan war.
Why might Pakistan consider modifying its strategy? In 2009, Islamist militants, mainly Taliban, carried out eighty-seven suicide attacks inside Pakistan, killing about thirteen hundred people, almost ninety per cent of them civilians, according to the Pak Institute for Peace Studies. Last October, Taliban raiders staged an unprecedented assault on the Army’s General Headquarters, in Rawalpindi. Customarily, Pakistani officers have blamed “bad” Taliban for such domestic raids, while absolving “good” Taliban (who shoot only at infidels in Afghanistan). As the violence on Pakistani soil intensifies, however, it would be natural for Pakistan’s generals to question whether their jihad-management strategy has become mired in false distinctions.
American diplomats have been warning Pakistan for years, to little effect, that support for Islamist extremists would boomerang against its own interests. The Bush Administration made matters worse by delivering several billion dollars of covert aid to the I.S.I. for help against Al Qaeda without holding it to account for coddling the Taliban and other militant groups. The paranoid style of politics in Pakistan makes the American version look quaint. In recent days, there has been speculation that Mullah Baradar’s detention is evidence of some sort of diabolical I.S.I. conspiracy to thwart reconciliation talks between the Taliban and the Afghan President, Hamid Karzai, or to manipulate such talks, or to split the Taliban. (A report in the Times indicates that Baradar’s arrest may have been accidental; in Pakistan’s national psyche, however, there are no accidents.)
The Taliban are a diverse, dispersed guerrilla force with multiple command centers and locally autonomous leaders. Nonetheless, the Afghan Taliban leadership group in which Baradar reigned, known as the Quetta Shura, has exercised significant authority in recent years, particularly over Taliban fighters in southern Afghanistan, where U.S. marines have been fighting house to house. Uncontested sanctuary for Islamist guerrilla leaders in Pakistan contributed to the Soviet Union’s defeat in Afghanistan; the elimination or even the reduction of such a sanctuary for the Taliban (and Al Qaeda) would ease American burdens in Afghanistan by no small margin. American strategists claim to see encouraging changes in Pakistan’s behavior; intelligence-sharing between the United States and Pakistan, severely constrained by mistrust eighteen months ago, has increased.
Unfortunately, the geopolitical incentives that have informed Pakistan’s alliance with the Afghan Taliban remain unaltered. Pakistan’s generals have retained a bedrock belief that, however unruly and distasteful Islamist militias such as the Taliban may be, they could yet be useful proxies to ward off a perceived existential threat from India. In the Army’s view, at least, that threat has not receded. Indo-Pakistani peace negotiations that have been in suspension since the 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack are only just re-starting. Absent a sudden breakthrough that charts the potential for normalizing relations between Pakistan and India—a framework settlement on Kashmir, freer trade, freer borders, and demilitarization—Pakistan’s rationale for preserving the Taliban and similar groups is not likely to change.
The I.S.I., by all accounts, is not a sentimental outfit. Although Zaeef witnessed its senior commanders wail over America’s plan to overthrow the Taliban (one I.S.I. general was “crying out loud, with his arms around my neck like a woman”), he was also savvy enough to take note of Pakistan’s “mixed signals.” Later, Zaeef defied the I.S.I.’s entreaties to break with Mullah Omar and lead a “moderate” Taliban movement; the Pakistanis arrested him, and handed him over to American soldiers, who transferred him to Guantánamo. (He was released in 2005 and has retired in Kabul.) In his memoir, Zaeef titles the chapter about his betrayal “A Hard Realisation.”
There will be more of those. The root problem in this murkiest theatre of the Afghan war is not Pakistan’s national character or even the character of its generals; rather, it involves Pakistan’s interests. The Pakistani Army has learned over many years to leverage its grievances, dysfunction, bad choices, and perpetual dangers to extract from the United States the financial and military support that it believes it requires against India. At the same time, Pakistan’s generals resent their dependency on America. For the I.S.I. to repudiate the Taliban entirely, its officers would have to imagine a new way of living in the world—to write a new definition of Pakistan’s national security, one that emphasizes politics and economics over clandestine war. For now, many Pakistani generals imagine themselves masters of an old game: to be not so sweet that they will be eaten whole by the United States, but not so bitter that they will be spat out.
Published in The New Yorker
WASIM VIEW- Coll’s article begins by laying bare well-known links between Pakistan’s ISI and the Taliban. Such facts are exactly that, facts and will not make breaking news, even on Fox News! Coll’s article centres primarily on the recent arrest of Taliban leaders by Pakistan, Coll is in a crypic mood and ponders if there is more than meets the eye.
ISI-bashing in the US media is a common cause and Coll too lashes out against the ISI and the Pakistani military in his article. Coll bemoans Pakistan’s support for the Taliban, conveniently forgetting Pakistan’s complex geostrategic concerns which are factored in with the knowledge that America has left the region to the mercy of many a monster circa the cold war. Coll’s article does a disservice to his readership by its over-emphasis on ISI-Taliban relations which are the source of much copy in the US and related hoo-ha. The ‘I’ that holds back Pakistan and peace in the region is not the ISI but India and her evil lasting decades, the sooner the Americans wake up to this reality, the better.
The final article is written by the one and only Fatima Bhutto. The article is well-timed as it addresses some of the lies and propaganda against Pakistan that arecommon currency in the West.
Home Truths by Fatima Bhutto
Everybody seems to be an expert on the Islamic Republic of Pakistan these days. You can’t turn left without running into some pundit or pontificating layperson moaning heartily about Pakistan’s future, lording it with their imaginary Pakistan PhDs over all and sundry. Baron- esses, David Miliband, the fellow who reads the news – they’re all Pakistan wonks now.
It used to be that, upon telling someone you hailed from Pakistan, you’d get a benign smile: “Oh, yes, next to India.” Yes, next to India, and Iran and China and Afghanistan. Now, the mere mention of Pakistan elicits a knowing wink. “Where’s Osama hiding, then? Ha ha ha.” We don’t know, he doesn’t send out a monthly newsletter. Detroit, I would venture.
But just as no one knows anything certain about Islam in today’s “I’m an authority because I saw a documentary once” age, there is no country with more mythology surrounding it than my Pakistan. Here are my three favourites:
1. Pakistan was created so fundamentalist Muslims – and no one else – would have a country of their own to call home.
In his address to the constituent assembly of Pakistan on 11 August 1947, three days before the country’s independence was to be celebrated, Muhammad Ali Jinnah called for liberty in the new nation. “You are free. You are free to go to your temples, you are free to go to your mosques or to any other place of worship in this state of Pakistan. You may belong to any religion or caste or creed – that has nothing to do with the business of the state.”
Moral of the story? Religious extremists are made, not born. You can thank General Zia ul-Haq, our pro-Islamist president from 1977-88, and his financial backers Mrs Thatcher and Mr Reagan for that. What you have today is not how it’s always been. It is said that the indigenous inhabitants of Sindh, one of the four provinces of Pakistan, were the Dravidians. Then came the Aryans. Then the Arabs. And it was with them – pardon the rush through thousands of years of history – that Islam, and Sufi Islam, came to our lands.
Today, the struggle for the soul of Pakistani Islam is being fought between the qawwali- singing, tolerant Sufis and the puritanical Wahhabi Muslim sect, which has been supported for years with funding from orthodox Sunni Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states.
Who will win? The Sufis, according to Ayeda Naqvi, who teaches Islamic mysticism. “It was Sufis who came and spread the religious message of love and harmony and beauty. There were no swords . . . And you can’t separate it from our culture – it’s in our music, it’s in our folklore, it’s in our architecture. We are a Sufi country.” And it is worth noting that religious, or Islamist, parties have never prospered on a national level in Pakistan. They peaked in 2002, winning 17 per cent of the seats in the National Assembly after the US invasion of Afghanistan, but dropped back to 1 per cent in 2008.
2. Sufis? No, no, no. Pakistan is a nation of madrasa-educated, bearded Taliban enthusiasts.
In fact, it’s not Islamic schools but rampant corruption that’s brought the Taliban and their ilk to the forefront. As Jinnah presciently noted in that same early speech, corruption and bribery are a threat that Pakistan must put down with “an iron hand”. He called corruption (and nepotism, in case you were wondering) our “great evils”. But no one listened. Puppet parliaments, military dictatorships – every single one of them supported by western powers – and corrupt but pliable civilian rulers all but ensured that our young nation’s wealth would be spent on those great evils and little else.
Take the last budget, with its total outlay of 2.5 trillion rupees. Of that, Rs32bn were set aside for education, with another Rs22bn towards higher education. That sounds interesting – not too spectacular, but not too shabby either. Until you read on, that is: Rs166bn were earmarked for the construction of dams; federal ministries walked away with Rs262bn for their own costs; and an income support scheme named after the president’s late wife, under which poor people line up to receive charity cash payments (photo with president optional) received Rs70bn. Our politicians prefer these projects to spending on health and education, because it is easier to siphon off funds from them. So, is it any wonder that Islamists who turn up and build madrasas and medical camps end up becoming popular? No. But we owe that to corruption, not to their attractive political philosophies or their ability to grow beards.
3. Pakistan funds religious terrorists such as the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
But so does the US, notably Sunni militias in Iraq and once even the Taliban in Afghanistan. Find me a country that doesn’t stash its cash in dirty bank accounts and then we’ll talk.
Pakistan’s problems, like Islam’s, are myriad. But CNN doesn’t define them for us. They are the problems faced by most people in my country every day – the difficulty of getting access to drinkable water, the rising price of food, the struggle to secure employment when most people are illiterate, the absence of justice and law and order. But no one wants to be a pretend authority on those subjects when there are US drones to drop bombs on villages and a sexy war on terror to talk up. Let’s not forget that diarrhoea still kills many more children than the Taliban do in our nuclear-armed state. That’s the crux of 21st-century Pakistan’s problems.
Published in The New Statesman
WASIM VIEW- Fatima Bhutto’s article hits the nail on the head in dealing with the lies against Pakistan. The references made to America and the West’s support for terrorists the world over is fact for truth-seeking individuals but a key part of the selective amensia syndrome that has it home in Washington.
Best of all is Fatima Bhutto’s spotlighting of the history of Pakistan as a country that was born to live out the true ideals of Islam as promised by the Quaid-e- Azam when he promised freedom of worship and equal rights for all citizens of Pakistan. The subsequent negation of that ideal came into being thanks to military dictatorships strangling Pakistan every decade or two aided by bedfellow partners like the USA and UK who over many decades have supported khaki kings against the will and the people of Pakistan. Home-truths is an apt title for the article as it tackles head-on the lies many planted with intent against Pakistan, it is an article that is compulsory reading for non-Pakistanis above all.
