Mai Jori Jamali is making big news in Pakistan, and for all the right reasons. Mai Jori Jamali has decided to stand in the bye-election for PB-25 Jaffarabad-1. What makes her candidature newsworthy and even inspiring is her bio-data and the fact that she is an ordinary citizen who seeks only to improve and serve Pakistan.

Mai Jori  is the illiterate wife of a poor farmer and the mother of nine children. Her daily chores include a walk of  two kilometres to fetch water for the daily needs of her poor household. Mai Jori has lived and is living a life of sweat and toil as are the ruled of Pakistan who number in their millions, whilst the rulers and fatcats of Pakistan plunder and plot away. For Mai Jori Jamali, the rubicon has been crossed, the poor in Jaffarabad can take no more, and she has decided to make a stand. 

Mai Jori Jamali’s stand  is all the more inspiring because she hails from Ghulam Mohammed village in Baba Kot in Balochistan. Baba Kot is an area that made infamous for the burying alive three innocent Balochi women for alleged fornication. This dishonourable act was  defended as a tribal custom  by a sitting Cabinet Minister and the current Deputy Chairman of the Senate no less. The women of Baba Kot degraded and buried alive, did not die that day, rather they live on, in Mai Jori Jamali.

Mai Jori Jamali represents a new Pakistan that was born after 9 March 2007, a date which transformed Pakistan for the better three years ago today. It is a new Pakistan which seeks to rebel against the status quo and the elites who fear change and the loss of their privileges. The Mai Jori Jamali  story is all the more inspiring because she is a Balochi woman from Balochistan. 

Mai Jori Jamali is already a heroine for the poor Balochi masses and showcases a true Balochi narrative, hidden under the sad truth that Balochistan has been neglected and usurped by the powerful feudals and sardars for too long who reside in Islamabad and Quetta acting as king-makers and as the sole champions of Balochistan.  Mai Jori Jamali and ordinary Balochis like her have proved that the reality is somewhat different in Balochistan and that people seek empowerment and their ‘huqooq’ from leaders within Balochistan and without.  

Mai Jori Jamali has campaigned on providing empowerment and has led a ‘Huqooq March’ in recent days lambasting Balochistan’s feudal lords for robbing the poor of their rights. Her struggle is a noble one and merits our full support, a video clip of the the march is shared below:

Credit goes to Awab Alvi at Teeth Maestro for leading from the front on the Mai Jori Jamali story as shown here and to Adil Najam at ATP as shown here for painting the big picture on this inspiring story. Huma Yusuf covers the story in detail and writes in Dawn an excellent article which is shared below: 

Issue-based Politics by Huma Yusuf

PAKISTAN is a nation desperately in need of heroes. Our politicians dissimulate, our cricketers disappoint, and our celebrities self-destruct. It is reassuring, then, when a hero — or in this case, heroine — emerges from unlikely circumstances, giving this jaded polity something to believe in.

Largely neglected by the mainstream media, Mai Jori Jamali has been the darling of the Pakistani blogosphere this past week. She is the illiterate wife of a farmer and a mother of nine who has filed papers to contest the by-election for a vacant Balochistan Assembly seat, PB-25 Jaffarabad.

In the election, Mai Jori is up against Mir Attaullah Bulledi — an independent candidate with the support of the PML-N as well as prominent sardars and a former federal minister — and Nasir Khan Jamali, the PPP candidate (Baloch nationalist parties have boycotted the polls). Unlike her competitors, Mai Jori boasts no land-holdings, financial resources, political patrons or influence. Her campaign is supported by the Awami Party, and has been funded by contributions from her constituency. At a series of meetings with civil society activists and members of her community at the end of January, Mai Jori raised a little over Rs11,000, which she used to travel to the district headquarters, process her nomination papers and settle election fees.

Chances are, Mai Jori will lose the election. But Pakistani politicians can learn a lesson or two from her campaign, which focuses on empowering Baloch women. Rather than play up ethno-nationalist sentiment or engage in the power plays of established political parties, she has articulated a platform that forms the basis of her campaign.Mai Jori hails from Ghulam Muhammad Jamali village, which is in the same district as Baba Kot, a remote village that gained notoriety in 2008 when three women and two teenaged girls were allegedly buried alive after being shot in a series of honour killings. At the time, Senator Sardar Israrullah Zehri had defended the barbaric incident by describing it as a ‘tribal custom’.

The Asian Human Rights Commission also reported that the provincial government had tried to keep the killings out of the media. Given this background, and the continuing prevalence of violence against women, Mai Jori’s candidacy is being seen as a stand against ‘customs’ that permit the routine abuse of women’s rights in the area. By framing her campaign as a rejection of violence against women, Mai Jori has earned the attention of blogs such as Teeth Maestro and All Things Pakistan, and, far more importantly, voters in her constituency. Lately, Mai Jori and her female supporters embarked on a ‘Huqooq March’ (march for rights), which entails door-to-door campaigning through a number of villages. At each stop, she has reportedly been greeted by hundreds of peasant women eager to push back against the repression that defines their lives.

The grassroots appeal of Mai Jori’s campaign is the latest in a string of telltale signs that Pakistan is readying for issue-based politics. As voters become more informed owing to higher literacy levels and pervasive media coverage, they are more interested in campaigns that seek to address specific issues and injustices. No doubt, ethno-nationalist, dynastic, faith and image-based politics (which deploy media strategies for political gain) continue to dominate the Pakistani political landscape. But the following examples suggest that a new trend is imminent. Last year, rightwing parties, including the PML-N, the Jamaat-i-Islami, and the Tehrik-i-Insaf (PTI), established themselves as a decisive force in the political arena by rallying around the issue of the restoration of an independent judiciary. Their ongoing popular appeal and ability at the time to join hands with unlikely partners — such as the legal community and journalists — stemmed from their focus on one concrete problem, the plight of the judiciary.

Since then, the rightwing parties have enhanced their political cache by uniting people with different political viewpoints (many of whom have open reservations about the PML-N or PTI’s ideological underpinnings) on the basis of one issue after another, from the NRO (National Reconciliation Ordinance) to Blackwater. In this political strategy, the parties are no doubt taking a page from the Muttahida Majlis-i-Amal, which won elections in 2002 by riding the wave of anti-Americanism that resulted from US-led attacks in Afghanistan in October 2001.

Interestingly, to counter widespread anti-American sentiment, the Obama administration too is focusing on specific issues, rather than lofty rhetoric about freedom, democracy and historic alliances. Since Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s trip to Pakistan in October last year, US officials have been emphasising Washington’s support for our energy, rather than security, needs. Ms Clinton announced a ‘signature’ $125m grant to improve energy output and efficiency, and in January, the Ministry of Water and Power was allocated $16.5m to boost the capacity of hydroelectric plants.

Separately, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement has embraced issue-based politics in recent months to broaden its appeal from urban Sindh to the middle classes in Punjab and even Gilgit-Baltistan. The party has taken an unambiguous stand on issues that affect the everyday lives of Pakistanis — local government and creeping Talibanisation — and has enjoyed national prominence as a result.

The true power of issue-based politics could become apparent as political parties seek constituencies in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata). This week, Prime Minister Yousuf Gilani reiterated that the Political Parties Act would be extended to Fata as soon as military operations in the area conclude.

There will be little currency in the tribal belt for the ethno-nationalist and dynastic politics that define Pakistan’s major political parties. To function in a region with a unique tribal and linguistic culture, political parties will have to focus on the issues that matter at the grassroots — economic development, education, health and infrastructure. If such a strategy succeeds in Fata, Pakistan may just see a shift towards issue-based politics across Pakistan. Perhaps then a woman like Mai Jori could win an election on the strength of her message.

Win or lose, Mai Jori Jamali is  the real winner for she has given hope to the poor of Pakistan.

The great Hasan Charles Le Gai Eaton is no more. The man mountain who inspired millions of Muslims to find God in their lives has departed to his eternal abode in heaven. Brother Gai Eaton as I fondly called him, is, was and will remain forever an inspiration to me personally as it was his book Islam and the Destiny of Man which inspired my interest in Islam and changed my life forever.

Brother Gai Eatons’ books will forever remain masterpieces that nourish the soul by planting the seed of submission to a greater being in God for people of all faiths even none.  The books were works of pure genius for Muslims like me who sought a meaning for their being and more widely their faith beyond  the pathetic, often cursory and cosmetic exercise of blind rituals alone. For true meaning of our purpose in life, contrast Brother Gai Eaton’s views on the transit state of man, happy in life and happier in death as it heralds a return of man to a great Creator.  

Regular readers will know of the unwritten Other Pakistan rule of writing and publishing posts only on Pakistani issues. This rule has been overruled today and I make no apology for that. The loss of Brother Hasan Charles Le Gai Eaton to me personally and to the Muslim world at large  is so vast that he leaves a void no-one is ever likely to fill.

Brother Gai Eaton has inspired me to live a life in service to ALLAH.  In his death, I selfishly mourn the loss of his towering intellect and genius which has no parallels. Where giants once walked, midgets can only now pose for Hasan Charles Le Gai Eaton’s are not born often.

• 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.  

Courtesy of Stop the Deportation of Pakistani Students

Haji Hazrat Ali shows a photo of his son Muhammed who was arrested on terrorism charges in the UK many moons ago. Unfortunately the Pakistani students issue and their continued incarceration in the UK is yesterday’s news. In a Pakistan bedevilled daily by death and destruction, the Pakistani students who were accused of terrorism in the UK and their plight is a story forgotten by many.

Eight out of the ten students who were arrested were forced to leave the UK, deported with their dignity and reputation in tatters irrespective of the fact that all eight were released without a single charge of terrorism. The blundering British Prime Minister Gordon Brown who had warned of ‘ a very big terrorist plot’ was made to eat his words, yet his government showed a disdain for justice and fairplay in  deporting the innocent students back to Pakistan on national security grounds even after their release.

Today, two students remain incarcerated in the UK as they have decided to fight their deportation and we at OP support their cause and pledge to continue our campaign to secure their release. The full details of the scandal have been shared by an investigative report by Declan Walsh in The Guardian and I share it below:

Pakistani Students Fight To Clear Their Names After Arrest In Anti-Terror Raids

A group of Pakistani students arrested but not charged after anti-terrorist raids last April are fighting to clear their names after MI5 claims that they belong to al-Qaida or are a threat to national security.

The 10 students were released without charge after the raids in Manchester, Liverpool and Lancashire, but eight have been forced to leave Britain and two remain in jail fighting deportation.

The Guardian has interviewed seven of those sent to Pakistan, who say their lives have been ruined – their studies over, money lost and little prospect of being able to travel to the west again – because of thin and speculative evidence.

Their accounts, corroborated by Home Office papers and police interview notes, raise questions about the basis of the raids. No evidence of bomb-making equipment or a specific plot emerged. Photographs used by police as evidence of “commando” training in north Wales were on Facebook, the students say, and innocent dinners were misconstrued as terrorist planning meetings.

Recently a young London woman has emerged whose testimony, lawyers say, challenges an email at the heart of the case against the students.

“The whole thing is rubbish. There was no bomb factory, no link to al-Qaida and they know it,” said Janas Khan, 25, a business student now back in Peshawar. “They just wanted to get us out of the country to avoid embarrassment.” Khan said his life had been ruined by the experience.

The case has strained relations between Britain and Pakistan, whose prime minister Yousaf Raza Gilani met Brown in London today. Pakistani officials have insisted the students are innocent and disputed Brown’s description of the case as a “very big terrorist plot”.

Gilani said he had discussed the students with the foreign secretary, David Miliband, after his meeting with Brown and Miliband had promised him he would facilitate British visas for the students.

Pakistan’s high commissioner to the UK, Wajid Shamsul Hasan, said of the men: “They have been clean-slated. Two of them are testing their cases here.”

Papers lodged with the special immigration appeals commission show the case hinges on their association with a Peshawar student, Abid Naseer, 23, a computer student at Liverpool John Moores University, seen as the “central figure” behind the alleged plot, with supposed links to al-Qaida and a foreign-based terror cell.

Home Office papers relating to the other Pakistanis contain an MI5 assessment that Naseer “acted in support of AQ attack planning activities within the UK. The security service assesses that the network co-ordinated by Abid Naseer is engaged in operational activity with the most likely explanation being that it is attack planning against unspecified UK targets. The security service assesses that [name of student] has acted in support of Naseer’s terrorism related activities in the UK … given the likely attack plans the network are assessed to have been involved in at the time of their arrest, they may seek to re-embark on their planned activity if permitted to remain in the UK.”

The eight who returned to Pakistan did so rather than stay in maximum security jail for months awaiting an appeal against deportation.

Lord Carlile, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, supported the arrests in a report last week but said police should have taken advice from the crown prosecution service and had they done so fewer might have been held.

Ten Pakistani students and one British-Pakistani man were arrested. As the students were questioned the press linked them to plots, including attacks on Old Trafford, home of Manchester United, the city’s Arndale shopping centre and a nightclub. Police searched 25 houses, examined dozens of laptops and mobile phones and recorded 222 interview tapes. But after 14 days they were released without charge. The British citizen, Hamza Shinwari, walked free. But the Home Office moved to deport the Pakistanis, describing them as a threat to national security. The Home Office case relies partly on secret evidence – believed to be MI5 intercepts and informant statements – which it has refused to disclose to the students or their lawyers.

In interviews with the Guardian in three Pakistani cities, seven of the men said their al-Qaida reputations were hurting their ability to find jobs or even reconnect with friends. All challenged the Home Office to disclose the secret evidence. “If there is something, let it come into the open. We will happily face a trial,” said accountancy student Shoaib Khan.

The British government is of course left disgraced and degraded after the scandal. On the Pakistani side, the Pakistan government has as usual performed miracles in doing nothing except for arranging visas for the deported students which is not an achievement but proof of how concerned the rulers of Pakistan are with the state of Pakistani citizens abroad.

The Pakistani public in the UK and elswhere have largely been apathetic at best in following let alone in agitating on the issue. All in all the Pakistan students and their forgotten story represent a glimpse of what is wrong with Pakistan today, with a government impotent to act on behalf of her citizens whilst the Pakistani people remain forever-ready to act as silent spectators watching from the sidelines only to bemoan all manner of problems.

Inertia turns to action only when another Yousaf from Multan faces the problem himself, until then he will sit and tell the story of a problem in this case the arrest and deportation of Pakistani students to others. Just imagine what would have happened if one of the Pakistani students arrested and deported was from our ruling elite, imagine the Yousaf from Multan is not a poor labourer or a middle-class government official but the Yousaf who resides in PM House.

Imagine if Mr Gilani found his son to be caught up on allegations of terrorism, or worse our future saviour Bilawal Bhutto Zardari was arrested on terrorism charges and deported. I wonder how the Pakistani government would act then?, the answer is sadly so obvious it need not be stated nor written. It is this truth that it is an indictment on us as Pakistanis and on Pakistan as a whole for we care only when we are affected in person.

Readers will know that President Zardari in line with the esteemed office he holds, issued a shut up call in a public speech as shared below:

It is poetic justice that today the President himself has been forced to shut up after his failed judicial coup. The President has been forced to shut up and silent is the Presidency for the time being, or at least till the next crisis given his judicial coup of recent days has failed miserably. 

As is now routine during the Zardari presidency, President Zardari first blunders amidst much bravado and grandstanding, yet when faced with opposition the President backs down in supersonic speed. And so the shut up call the President issued in a public speech has come back to haunt him as today the President is forced to bite his lip.

The Chief Justice of Pakistan acted with good intention in seeking to defuse the crisis even though some brother judges did not agree with his meeting with the Prime Minister at PM House. The Chief Justice has shown that the judiciary is not partisan by consulting with the PM on the appointment of judges at PM House. Indeed learned jurists have criticised the meeting for going against the Judicial Code of Conduct and I would agree normally that it is not conducive for the head of the judiciary and the executive to meet. 

PM Gilani did well too in saving the day as per his usual flip-flops that raised the political temperature in one day, only for a retraction thanks to the counsel of the great Aitzaz Ahsan culminating in a now legendary dinner meeting in the Supreme Court. A weak President Zardari is left even weaker and it is hoped that the President will learn from the episode, I fear he will not. 

Pictures are said to say a thousand words, as they clearly do above. President Zardari is in dire of a prayer after the events of February 13. The sacrificial black lambs that are legendary in the confines of the Presidency, will be needed aplenty to ward off the evil and the folly of the President’s actions in his failed attempt to force the appointment of judges to the Supreme Court of Pakistan.

The President in his infinite wisdom has decided to force the elevation of Justice Khawaja Sharif to the Supreme Court and Justice Saqib Nisar as the Acting Chief Justice of the Lahore High Court. The decision goes against the wishes of the Chief Justice of Pakistan and more importantly the Constitution in particular Article 177.  The Supreme Court acted in an Special Bench with the legal position made clear by the short order as  published on the Supreme Court website. The short is is shared below and reads as follows:

Constitution Petitions No.2, 3 & 4 of 2010

ORDER

Today two notifications, one relating to the appointment of Mr. Justice Khawaja Muhammad Sharif, Chief Justice of the Lahore High Court as a Judge of the Supreme Court and the other with regard to the appointment of Mr. Justice Mian Saqib Nisar, Senior Puisne Judge of the Lahore High Court as Acting Chief Justice of that Court have been issued by the Government of Pakistan, Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs Division under the signatures of Malik Hakam Khan, Draftsman/Additional Secretary.

The said notifications read as under: – “No.F.2(1)/2010-A.II.- In exercise of the powers conferred by Article 177 of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, the President is pleased to appoint Mr. Justice Khawaja Muhammad Sharif, Chief Justice of Lahore High Court as Judge of the Supreme Court of Pakistan with immediate effect.

No.F.1(2)/2009-A.II.- In exercise of the powers conferred by Article 196 of the Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, the President is pleased to appoint Mr. Justice Mian Saqib Nisar, Judge, Lahore High Court as Acting Chief Justice of the said High Court with effect from the date of the notification of the appointment of Mr. Justice Khawaja Muhammad Sharif, Chief Justice of Lahore High Court as Judge of the Supreme Court of Pakistan.”

2. The Additional Registrar, who appeared on Court’s call, informed the Court that a news was telecast in the electronic media regarding the aforesaid notifications and it was also in the news that Mr. Justice Mian Saqib Nisar would be administered oath by tomorrow morning (Sunday), which necessitated the hearing of this case as an urgent one and this Bench was constituted.

Since it was an important matter, the Additional Registrar was directed to issue notice to the learned Attorney General including through telephone and we retired for a while until we were informed about the service of the notice upon the learned Attorney General. After some time we were informed by the Court Associate that the Additional Registrar, after informing the learned Attorney General through telephone about the hearing of the case had come to the Court, so we re-assembled.

3. The Additional Registrar, in his report stated that he informed the learned Attorney General for Pakistan through telephone who told him (Additional Registrar) that he was in Karachi at the moment and that the last scheduled flight from Karachi to Islamabad had already departed at 7:00 p.m., he expressed his inability to appear before the Court. Since the matter was of urgent nature, as stated earlier, steps would be required to be taken by the Governor of the Punjab to administer oath to Mr. Justice Mian Saqib Nisar as Acting Chief Justice of the Lahore High Court by tomorrow morning, hearing could not be postponed without passing an appropriate interim order.

4. Article 177 of the Constitution of Islamic Republic of Pakistan provides that a Judge of the Supreme Court shall be appointed by the President after consultation with the Chief Justice of Pakistan. The Additional Registrar stated that according to the record of this Court no consultation had taken place by the President with the Hon’ble Chief Justice of Pakistan regarding the appointment of Mr. Justice Khawaja Muhammad Sharif, Chief Justice of the Lahore High Court as Judge of the Supreme Court. In the light of the statement of Additional Registrar and also the note submitted by him and placed on the file of Constitution Petitions No.2,3 and 4 of 2010 relating to the same/almost the same matter, already pending before this Court in which notices had been issued and a larger Bench constituted for 18-2-2010, the notification of the appointment of Mr. Justice Khawaja Muhammad Sharif as a Judge of the Supreme Court, prima facie, appears to have been issued in violation of the provisions of the Constitution, particularly, Article 177, hence the same is suspended subject to notice to the Federation of Pakistan through Secretary, Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs Division, the Attorney General for Pakistan and the learned Advocate General Punjab. Mr. Justice Khawaja Muhammad Sharif shall continue to perform his duties as Chief Justice of the Lahore High Court until further orders of this Court. No steps to administer oath to him will be taken.

5. In view of the suspension of notification No.F.2(1)2010-A.II. dated 13.2.2010 regarding the appointment of Mr. Justice Khawaja Muhammad Sharif as a Judge of the Supreme Court, the office of Chief Justice of Lahore High Court will not fall vacant, therefore, the second notification No.F.1(2)/2009-A.II of even date regarding the appointment of Mr. Justice Mian Saqib Nisar as Acting Chief Justice of the Lahore High Court cannot be acted upon. Therefore, the same too is suspended. In consequence, Mr. Justice Mian Saqib Nisar will also continue to perform his duties as a Judge of the Lahore High Court until further orders. Resultantly, no steps including administering of oath to Mr. Justice Mian Saqib Nisar as Acting Chief Justice of Lahore High Court shall be taken by the concerned functionaries.

6. The Draftsman/Additional Secretary, Ministry of Law, Justice and Parliamentary Affairs, under whose signatures the aforesaid notifications have been issued, is directed to appear in Court on 18.02.2010, the date already fixed in the titled cases. The Registrar of the Lahore High Court shall also appear on the said date.

Crisis after crisis, it does seems that the nation of Pakistan can never sleep easy. President Zardari would do well to pull back from the brink by pondering and reflecting on his actions of today. The present trichotomy of powers debate needs not be repeated here so long as all institutions keep to their prescribed roles as afforded to them by the constitution. The simple fact is that Parliament must make laws that govern Pakistan as per the constitution, the executive must govern Pakistan as per the constitution and the judiciary must provide justice and interpret the constitution as per the constitution.

The government has defended its actions on the basis of acting as per the constitution and as per the now famed ‘Al-Jihad Trust or Judges case’ of 1996. The charge against the judiciary is a serious one accusing it of being partisan and applying judicial precedents as per its whims. However the government forgets conveniently in my opinion, that it is the sole perogative of the judiciary to interpret the constitution and to change its mind as the constitution is a living document, relevant for all times.

Furthermore the government is well aware that the  right to set judicial precedent and set aside judicial precedent is exclusive to the judiciary. The disgraced doctrine of necessity of Justice Munir enjoys its position in judicial precedent to this day and was followed bu judges decades after the judgement. Today that judicial precedent is set aside by Justice Ifthikhar and his brother judges and that too is judicial precedent and so  thus the point is made.

The mala fide intentions of the Zardari-Gilani tag team in their pathetic attempt of a judicial coup are laid bare when we retrace the actions of the same government before the NRO judgement and even further back in the heydays of the Dog(gar) court. The out of turn appointments numbering in double figures to the high courts and Supreme Court under Dog(gar) were sanctioned by the President and Prime Minister. However today the same esteemed gentlemen cry fowl at the so-called out of turn appointment of one Justice Saqib Nisar to the Supreme Court even though the same gentleman have accepted all other recommendations of the Chief Justice before February 13.  Clearly the NRO judgement has hurt the otherwise genteel Messrs Zardari and Gilani, hence their about turn.

The lesson for the smiling President must be that the constitution is supreme and that Pakistan will rise and fall only on this count. It is high time the President of Pakistan, Asif Ali Zardari acts on this count and this count alone.

Amnesia as defined by the now legendary Wikipedia website, the fountain of no and all knowledge states that it is ’a condition in which memory is disturbed or lost’. It is with great regret that Other Pakistan informs readers that the legendary human rights hero Ansar Burney has succumbed to the condition and we ask readers to pray for his swift recovery to good health.

Ansar Burney is of course a household name in Pakistan who is respected the world over for his work in the field of human rights. The same Ansar Burney was once upon a time a hero of mine, a hero that soon reached zero when Burney sold his soul to the devil in joining the Musharraf regime that ushered in martial law in 2007.

As the caretaker Federal Minister for Humans Rights during the martial law of Musharraf, Ansar Burney deliberately and consciously sided with a khaki king who had suspended the fundamental rights of every single citizen by his declaration of a so-called ‘emergency’. In doing so, Burney had by his acts of ommission at least become a signatory and a supporter of the suspension of the human rights of the entire Pakistani nation. To cap it all off, Burney achieved this distinction whilst holding the office of Federal Minister for Human Rights, such was the magic of the man!

Burney’s achievements in human rights during the Musharraf martial law regime are too many to list and includes the house arrest of  the Chief Justice of Pakistan and his brother judges in the Supreme Court and High Courts.  A post written at the time aptly titled ‘Burney’s Betrayal’ as shown here charts his stellar achievements and is worth a read.

Unfortunately Ansar Burney is but a shadow of that great man, for he has suffered a great deal since those glorious heydays of human rights under his ministry serving at the pleasure of Pervez Musharraf. Today Burney is stalked by the cruely of amnesia that has wiped out his memory of such history and nightmares past.

Burney is today cursing the Zardari-Gilani tag team for allowing the massacre of innocents in Karachi. Burney’s blood boils at the plight of the ordinary Pakistani in Karachi and elsewhere, with him forseeing the day of an upcoming  and bloody revolution as reported in The News and as shared below:

Burney Flays Politics on Karachi Dead Bodies

Chairman of the Ansar Burney Trust and former Federal Minister for Human Rights Ansar Burney has strongly condemned the apathy of the government over the human rights situation in Karachi.

Burney said the situation was becoming worse day by day and in the last four days, the citizens of Karachi had lost their more than two dozen innocent loved ones, and the power hungry, sitting in the government or in opposition, were enjoying their dirty game against humanity, says a press release issued on Tuesday.

He said everyone knows who the killers are but unfortunately the most corrupt and power hungry politicians were quiet on the issue, even they themselves are patronising the killers while sitting in safe government palaces. Burney said that this was all dirty politics and these corrupt politicians had made the blood of innocent human being so cheap that a goat or hen seems more expensive. He said that after some gap, one could see bloodshed in Karachi, and after losing dozens of precious lives three political party offices would sit together and announce ‘oh it’s ok, there will be no problem and the matter will be solved’, and the citizens would notice that immediately the killing was stopped like someone switches the button off. After some time, it again starts like earlier, and again it stops after meetings.

Ansar Burney said that such dirty acts of corrupt and killer politicians were taking the country towards anarchy and if such practices continue, it may harm the solidarity and integrity of the country.

He said that the citizens of Karachi had now become fed-up after taking dead bodies of their loved ones to graveyards on their own shoulders. Burney warned the government and politicians that their act was taking the nation towards a ‘bloody revolution’ and if they did not open their eyes it would take them to hell.

He said Karachi has now totally gone into the hands of land mafia, and killers of humanity and citizens of the port city are now looking towards God. Burney asked “whether this was the democracy that Pakistani people were waiting for a long time where corrupt and killer politicians are enjoying the taste of murder of innocents.

Readers are advised to pay close attention to  the use of strong language with Burney bemoaning government and opposition apathy to the human rights situation in Karachi. Burney’s vitroil is aimed at the politicians who he accusses of playing a ‘dirty game against humanity’.

It is this statement that hurts fans like me the most, because its now crystal clear that Burney’s amnesia has forced him to lose his bearings somewhat given that Burney would not forget that it was he as the Federal Minister for Human Rights under Musharraf’s martial law who played a leading role in that most dirtiest game against the humanity and dignity of Pakistan and her citizens.  Beware the curse of amnesia!

Other Pakistan can only but pray for Ansar Burney and others like him, indeed we wish him well in his fight against amnesia.  

Good news stories from Pakistan are rare nowadays. The despair that haunts and stalks the ordinary Pakistani from Karachi to Khyber has many ugly faces and includes the fear of death and destruction as unleashed by the vile Taliban. Rampant inflation and loadshedding are two more gifts of the Gilani government and the list can go on and on. However in a desert of pessimism, there is an oasis of hope in the story of one, Naveed Asif.  

The Naveed Asif story  is a story that will move you and renew your faith in Pakistan and its great potential. Saadia Khalid has detailed Naveed’s story of hope  in The News and it is shared below:

Hats Off To Young Achiever Despite Adversity by Saadia Khalid

All praise for 17-year-old Naveed Asif, who after getting second position in the Board of Intermediate & Secondary Education (BISE), Lahore, proved that one could achieve the highest targets through hard work and determination despite unfavourable circumstances.

Social connectivity sites, including Facebook, these days are full of pictures and write-ups to honour the achievement of this young boy. The youngsters are writing comments and forwarding the post regarding Naveed.

According to the youth, this young boy from Nahranwali village, Okara is undoubtedly a source of pride for the whole nation and inspiration for the youth. Despite his school being seven kilometres away from his house, which he used to reach on foot every day, Naveed scored 919 marks in Matric in the Humanities group of boys and got second position in BISE Lahore.

According to the reports, on the day of the event organised to honour the position holders, the boy entered the spacious Alhamra Hall, Lahore, unnoticed in his ragged clothes and worn out sandals. It was a function where everyone was dressed up and entered with an utter sense of pride. Probably Naveed didn’t know that his achievement was worth a pride. After looking around for a while, he could not find a seat for himself and preferred to sit on the stairs.

Naveed Asif is an orphan and his mother works as a labourer to bear his educational expenses. It was something unbelievable for the two when they were told about Naveed’s achievement. “We were really terrified by the door knock late night and it was astonishing to know that the BISE team actually visited my place to inform me about my position. My happiness knew no bounds but my mother’s happiness was far greater than mine. It was just like a dream come true,” he said. “You may deem it ridiculous but I ever said to my mother that I wanted to be like Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah, as I ever considered him my role model,” he said.

Naveed had received a huge round of applause as he narrated his circumstances to Punjab Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif during the ceremony. His inspiring achievement moved the CM to make an announcement of financial assistance for this ambitious student, ordering the Punjab government to transfer Rs3 million in his account, so he could continue his studies.

The achievement of Naveed Asif has been highlighted by the newspapers, TV channels and magazines as well as on websites and several social connectivity sites but it fuelled a heated discussion and raised many questions, such as if a boy living in a village – deprived of the basic facilities and studying in a government school – could bring such laurels, why not the rest of the youth, who are bestowed with all such blessings? Why the rest of the youth does not want to become like Quaid-e-Azam? Why do we not try to get the best of what is available rather criticising the system?

It is still not evident as to what will come out of such discussions but hats off to this young achiever, who made all of us feel proud, as he achieved what he aspired for instead of criticising the system or the circumstances.

Other Pakistan applauds Naveeed Asif for he is a ray of hope of a better Pakistan. Naveed has done Pakistan proud and we wish him well as he seeks to emulate our greatest role model, the Quaid-e-Azam. 

January’s B-side is the first of a new year and of a new decade, yet its focus remains on issues historical, issues that have plagued Pakistan for decades. The two A’s of America and Afghanistan remain the key focus  for Pakistan as we enter 2010, a year in which the Obama surge is expected to perform its magic.

January’s B-side post contents include:

• Why does Pakistan hate the United States by CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS
• Afghanistan:What Could Work by RORY STEWART
• Our Commitment to Pakistan by ROBERT GATES

The first article is a hard-hitting one and is written by the one and only Christopher Hitchens, why Pakistan hates America is the subject.

Why does Pakistan Hate the United States by Christopher Hitchens

Give credit to the vice president: He really does enjoy politics and “can’t see a room without working it,” as a colleague of mine half-admiringly remarked last Wednesday morning. We were waiting to enter the studio and comment after Biden had finished his interview with the Scarborough/Brzezinski team, in which the main topic was Afghanistan.

Exiting, he chose to stop and talk to each of us. Not wanting to waste a chance to be a bore on the subject, I asked him why he had mentioned India only once in the course of his remarks. Right away Biden managed the trick—several good politicians have mastered this—of reacting as if the question had been his own idea. Of course, he said, it was vexing that Pakistan preferred to keep its best troops on the border with India (our friend) rather than redeploying them to FATA—the so-called Federally Administered Tribal Areas—where they could be fighting the Taliban and al-Qaida (our enemy).

My flesh was pressed, and it was on to the next. The newspapers that morning revealed that Pakistani authorities showed no interest in apprehending a Taliban leader in Afghanistan whom they considered an important asset. The newspapers the following morning reported that Pakistan was refusing to extend the visas to U.S. Embassy and other American personnel, resulting in a gradual paralysis of everything from intelligence-gathering to the maintenance of helicopters.

Several questions arise from this. The first: Who is in charge of policy in the area? When some hard words had to be spoken to President Hamid Karzai about the dire and ramshackle nature of his regime, it was the vice president who drew the job of delivering them. For the rest of the time, the Af-Pak dimension is supposedly overseen by Richard Holbrooke, who seems lately to show some outward signs of discontent. Yet on one day Secretary of State Hillary Clinton may appear on the tarmac at Kabul or Islamabad. On another it will be Secretary of Defense Robert Gates or the CIA or any number of a series of generals. If this is really a “team of rivals,” it doesn’t seem to have had the effect of clarifying policy differences by debate. It looks more like one damn thing after another.

The next question is a version of an older one. Why do the Pakistanis hate us? We need not ask this in a plaintive tone of “after all we’ve done for them,” but it is an apparent conundrum nonetheless. The United States made Pakistan a top-priority Cold War ally. It overlooked the regular interventions of its military into politics. It paid a lot of bills and didn’t ask too many questions. It generally favored Pakistan over India, which was regarded as dangerously “neutralist” in those days, and during the Bangladesh war it closed its eyes to a genocide against the Muslim population of East Bengal. During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, Washington fed the Pakistani military and intelligence services from an overflowing teat and allowed them to acquire nuclear weapons on the side.

This, then, is why the Pakistani elite hates the United States. It hates it because it is dependent on it and is still being bought by it. It is a dislike that is also a form of self-hatred of the sort that often develops between client states and their paymasters. (You can often sense the same resentment in the Egyptian establishment, and sometimes among Israeli right-wingers, as well.) By way of overcompensation for their abject status as recipients of the American dole, such groups often make a big deal of flourishing their few remaining rags of pride. The safest outlet for this in the Pakistani case is an official culture that makes pious noises about Islamic solidarity while keeping the other hand extended for the next subsidy. Pakistani military officers now strike attitudes in public as if they were defending their national independence rather than trying to prolong their rule as a caste and to extend it across the border of their luckless Afghan neighbor.

This is, and always was, a sick relationship, and it is now becoming dangerously diseased. It’s not possible to found a working, trusting, fighting alliance on such a basis. Under communism, the factory workers of Eastern Europe had a joke: “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.” In this instance, the Pakistanis don’t even pretend that their main military thrust is directed against the common foe, but we do continue to pay them. If we only knew it, the true humiliation and indignity is ours, not theirs.

This will continue to get nastier and more corrupt and degrading until we recognize that our long-term ally in Asia is not Pakistan but India. And India is not a country sizzling with self-pity and self-loathing, because it was never one of our colonies or clients. We don’t have to send New Delhi 15 different envoys a month, partly to placate and partly to hector, because the relationship with India isn’t based on hysteria and envy. Alas, though, we send hardly any envoys at all to the world’s largest secular and multicultural democracy, and the country itself gets mentioned only as an afterthought. Nothing will change until this changes.

One reason the Pakistani army coddles the Taliban in Afghanistan is because it has recently been told that the United States will not be deploying there in strength for very much longer. Who can blame them for basing their future plans on this supposition and continuing to dig in for a war with India that we are helping them to prepare for? Meanwhile, though, it is the Afghans who get the lectures about how they need to shape up. “Lots of luck in your senior year” was the breezy way in which the vice president phrased his message to Kabul as I watched. (I wonder how that translates into Pushtun.) Speed the day when the Pakistanis are publicly addressed in the same tones and told that the support they so much despise is finally being withdrawn.

Published in Slate Magazine

WASIM VIEW- Christopher Hitchens is loved and loathed by probably too many people. That said both his supporters and even his opponents accept albeit grudgingly his status as an intellectual par excellence. That is not to say that Hitchens has exhibited any of his intellectual prowess in this article which is no more than an immature outburst against Pakistan.

Hitchens article focuses on a key international issue that has past, present and future geostrategic implications namely Pakistan-US relations. However Hitchens article is possibly one of the worst-ever written on Pakistan-US relations for Hitchens hometruths are anything but truths.

Hitchens first truth is that America made ‘Pakistan a top-priority Cold War ally. It overlooked the regular interventions of its military into politics. It paid a lot of bills and didn’t ask too many questions’. The statement is of course a lie and not a white one either. Worse the statement proves that Hitchens is now in need of urgent patient care (readers can call 911) for he clearly suffers from memory problems or selective amnesia as evidenced by Hitchens saying that Uncle Sam has overlooked military rule in Pakistan.

Hitchens if  treated for his memory loss and other related ailments will wake up and remember the truth that America has in fact been the chief sponsor and supporter of military intervention in Pakistan, condemning army rule in public whilst cheerleading its existence to a crescendo in private. It is an open secret that America has supported and sustained military intervention in Pakistan from Ayub to Musharraf and Hitchens who is a well read man does a great disservice to his reputation by writing such nonsense.

The remainder of the article is mostly written in the same way full of Hitchens howlers marked by a blinkered and selective reporting of history plus Hitchens trademark misplaced arrogance. The reference made by Hitchens to ‘genocide in East Bengal’ is indicative of such an approach for it is used to prove that the US stood by Pakistan even under the most trying of times. Yet in drawing attention to East Pakistan, Hitchens scores not one but two own goals.

The first own goal is described as so, for drawing attention to America’s neutrality at best to genocide a fantastic feat repeated many a time by America since 1971 be it in Palestine or Rwanda. The second own goal is a monumental one as Hitchens reminds Pakistan how America ‘during the Bangladesh war it closed its eyes to a genocide against the Muslim population of East Bengal’. Hitchens boasts of US support for Pakistan at that time, yet for Pakistanis that same episode has a very different narrative.

Pakistanis recall the East Pakistan experience as stellar proof that American has never delivered for Pakistan. Indeed our ally and cuddly forever friend figure, America is remembered for enjoying the view at that time including USS Enterprise which enjoyed the sea air of the Bay of Bengal whilst Pakistan was dismembered. For Pakistanis, America like China and other so called allies watched the fun from close quarters as India declared war and succeeded in destroying the real Pakistan.

Hitchens is of course right in recalling with fondness the fact that ‘during the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, Washington fed the Pakistani military’ to act as its shooters Hitchens forgets to say, forgetful again he forgets the support from Uncle Sam for an ace shooter in one, Osama Bin Laden too. Hitchens is also right in declaring the US-Pakistan relationship in glowing terms as ’this is, and always was, a sick relationship, and it is now becoming dangerously diseased. I echo that sentiment but for very different reasons as detailed already.

The second article written by Rory Stewart focuses the other A that keeps Pakistan awake at night, Afghanistan,  and on a possible way forward for her and the region.

Afghanistan:What Might Work by Rory Stewart

Cool poker-players, we are tempted to believe, only raise or fold: they only increase their bet or leave the game. Calling, making the minimum bet to stay, suggests that you can’t calculate the odds or face losing the pot, and that the other players are intimidating you. Calling is for children. Real men and women don’t want to call in Afghanistan: they want to dramatically increase troops and expenditure, defeat the Taliban, and leave. Or they just want to leave. Both sides—the disciples of the surge and the apostles of withdrawal—therefore found some satisfaction in one passage in President Obama’s speech at West Point on December 1:

I have determined that it is in our vital national interest to send an additional 30,000 US troops to Afghanistan. After 18 months, our troops will begin to come home.

But the rest left them uneasy. This was not, as they might have imagined, because he was lurching between two contradictory doctrines of increase and withdrawal, but because the rest of his speech argued for a radically different strategy—a call strategy—which is about neither surge nor exit but about a much-reduced and longer-term presence in the country. The President did not make this explicit. But this will almost certainly be the long-term strategy of the US and its allies. And he has with remarkable courage and scrupulousness articulated the premises that lead to this conclusion. First, however, it is necessary to summarize the history of our involvement and the conventional policies that have long favored surge and exit.

A legion of arguments almost drove Obama away from this new moderate position over the last ten weeks of discussion. There was our general fear in Afghanistan and Pakistan of the modern demons, which policy experts dub “insurgency, terrorism, civil war, human rights–abusing warlords, narcotics, weapons of mass destruction, and global jihad” and the spawn of “safe havens, rogue, fragile, and failed states.” There was our developing sense, over the last eight years, that the status quo was unacceptable.

From 2001, sections of the international community attempted to assist the Afghan government in the construction of a state. The British Department for International Development put 80 percent of its funds into direct budgetary support for the Afghan government and NGOs implemented health, education, and rural development projects as contractors for the Afghan government. Such efforts were described by NATO as a “comprehensive approach to security, governance and economic development” in which the UN, an apparently benevolent Karzai government, NATO, and the NGOs would all play their part—largely in concert because there was no perceived conflict between their aims and values.

Challenges from warlords, druglords, lack of funds, and lack of government authority were to be met through cen- tralization, disarmament of opposition groups, crop eradication, coordination, and closer partnership. It was assumed that it would be possible within a reasonable time (some documents claimed within seven years) to build a stable centralized state, largely independent of foreign support, arranged around the rule of law and a technocratic administration, with a vibrant economy based on lawful commerce and trade. Few expected the Taliban to reemerge. Comparisons were drawn with the development of Korea or Singapore.

Eight years later this seems a tragic fantasy. Frustrated by lack of progress, the US and its allies have oscillated giddily between contradictory policies. The British government that once championed more generous budgetary support for the Kabul government now portrays it as corrupt, semi-criminal, ineffective, and illegitimate. “Warlords” such as Gul Agha Shirzai, who we once demonized, are now tolerated or even praised, and are almost certain to be given good positions in the new Karzai government. We armed militias in 2001, disarmed them through a demobilization program in 2003, and rearmed them again in 2006 as community defense forces. We allowed local autonomy in 2001, pushed for a strong central government in 2003, and returned to decentralization in 2006. First we tolerated opium crops; then we proposed to eradicate them through aerial spraying; now we expect to live with opium production for decades.

Meanwhile, the Karzai government and the nations involved in Afghanistan have fallen into a cruel and dysfunctional arranged marriage that seems too often to lack common values, common projects, trust, and even patience. Each undermines the other’s legitimacy. NATO is blamed for being associated with a corrupt and illegitimate administration; the Karzai government is blamed by Afghans for bombarding civilians and for accepting the support of foreign infidels. And each has sought to shift blame to the other side.

Many of these tensions were illustrated in the first week of November: five British soldiers were killed by the Afghan policeman they were training; nine Afghan policemen, trying to come to the rescue of lost American servicemen, were killed by a coalition bomb; five UN election observers were killed by the Taliban in their Kabul guesthouse, causing the UN to begin to withdraw its staff. A PBS journalist interviewed President Karzai:

Margaret Warner: “The UN did reluctantly withdraw about two thirds of its foreign staff…. What impact is that likely to have?”

Hamid Karzai: No impact. No impact.

Margaret Warner: So you don’t care if they return?

Hamid Karzai: They may or may not return. Afghanistan won’t notice it. We wish them well wherever they are.

Even an optimist would now describe Afghanistan as a poor, dangerous country, struggling to survive in the face of jihadist ideology, insecurity, and poor governance. It is now hoped that good development in Afghanistan might allow it over decades to draw level with Pakistan. The Taliban have a growing presence even outside their traditional heartland in the south and east of Afghanistan and they mount attacks on previously safe areas and communities. Civil war is now seen as very likely. Comparisons are drawn with Somalia.

Through all these bewildering years, a subtle and refined edifice of justification for troop increases has emerged, in which arguments are categorized by type and family and reinforced with analogies and precedents, in a structure in which each claim supports another. The tone, history, and arguments in this liturgy are not only the product of soldiers, spies, explorers, journalists, administrators, writers, aid workers, professors, think-tank directors, and politicians. They have been developed by the great alliances of NATO and the UN and have drawn on World Bank economists, veterans of Iraq and the frontier, linguists with decades of experience in rural Afghanistan, and even, occasionally, Afghans. The creed, hammered out in the great international councils of Washington, Bonn, and Paris, runs as follows:

Afghanistan is an existential threat. It is the epicenter of international terrorism and the epitome of a failed state. We must fight in Afghanistan for six reasons: (1) to protect the United States and the rest of NATO from terrorist attack; (2) to protect Pakistan and the region; (3) to protect the credibility of the United States and NATO; (4) to protect the Afghan people; (5) to defeat the Taliban; and (6)to create an effective, legitimate, stable state.

Our enemies include corruption, drugs, poverty, and insecurity and we will address them through governance and capacity- building, alternative livelihoods, a regional solution, a comprehensive approach, and an exit strategy. The surge worked in Iraq. We have a moral obligation to the Afghan people. By abandoning them in 1989, we created the conditions that led to September 11. We must, therefore, implement counter-insurgency operations across the spectrum.

Just as Buddha’s fourth noble truth can be divided into an eightfold path, so each justification, need, ethical claim, doctrine, precedent, and analogy of this modern metaphysics can be further subdivided. Thus the article of faith that our operations in Afghanistan are crucial to the stability of Pakistan can conventionally be defended by reference to the need for a two-sided pincer movement against the Taliban on the border; worries about safe havens, failed states, and global jihad; the support for drone attacks in Pakistan conveyed in one opinion poll on the frontier and by one Pakistani general; the appearance of the Taliban “only sixty miles from Islamabad.” And the possibility that mad mullahs will seize the nukes.

Each argument echoes much deeper assumptions about the world: a belief in the moral imperative of humanitarian intervention, backed by our failures in Rwanda and our success in the Balkans; a maximal vision in which no one good (“security,” for example) can be achieved without the achievement of every other good (such as “development” or “the rule of law”); a rhetorical tradition in which all goods are seen as consistent and mutually reinforcing; and an Enlightenment faith that there is nothing intrinsically intractable about Afghan culture and society and that all men can be perfected (to a Western ideal) through the application of reason and the laws of social science.

But perhaps more importantly there are our more recent theories about the global order. There is the credit we take for the success of postwar Germany, democracy in Eastern Europe post-1989, and economic growth in South and East Asia. There are our apparent mistakes with Mossadeq in Iran in the 1950s; fighting in Vietnam in the 1960s, Latin America in the 1980s, and Somalia in the 1990s; the September 11 attacks; North Korea today; and the different lessons we have chosen to take about working against the popular will, supporting dictators, leaving, or failing to act. All of this experience is reflected in our division of the world into friendly, puppet, rogue, fragile, and failed states and our anxieties about instability, insurgency, terrorism, or weapons of mass destruction.

All these fears, frustrations, and doctrines contributed to the relentless logic that drove Obama to state, last year, “We must win in Afghanistan”; and to claim that Bush failed in Afghanistan because he did not invest enough resources. Even Obama’s latest speech began with the story of how Afghanistan fell and September 11 occurred because “the attention of America and our friends had turned elsewhere,” and the speech reminded us of “a nuclear-armed Pakistan,…NATO’s credibility,…failed states.”

Such arguments explain why he sent an extra 17,000 troops last March, insisting that “there is an uncompromising core of the Taliban. They must be met with force, and they must be defeated,” and he committed the US to “promote a more capable and accountable Afghan government” and “advance security, opportunity and justice.” This is also why he announced a more maximalist counterinsurgency strategy in the March White Paper and appointed a new commanding general, Stanley McChrystal, to implement it.

By agreeing to a counterinsurgency strategy, Obama implicitly committed to all the doctrine contained in a two-hundred-page field manual, derived from the analysis of seventy-three previous insurgencies. “Full-spectrum counter-insurgency,” or COIN, the President was informed in the manual, “is all-encompassing.” It is expressed in aphorisms such as “the center of gravity is the population” and “we are not being out-fought but out-governed”; and mottoes like “Clear, Hold, Build.” It includes economic development, infantry tactics, political negotiation, building capacity for governance, and eliminating “high-value” targets using predator drones. The soldiers, according to the COIN doctrine, need to have considerable cultural sensitivity, knowledge, and good fortune. They must work in close and constructive concert with a credible local government. They need to be able to control the borders and protect communities during the lengthy process of reconstruction.

It is almost impossible to say what counterinsurgency does not include. But it almost always requires more troops. I first heard almost a year ago that General Petraeus was pressing for another 40,000 troops. When I finally saw McChrystal in Kabul in October, he had completed his report and formally requested another 40,000 troops. Obama could not refuse the bulk of the general’s requests without being personally blamed for the future of Afghanistan.

Little wonder that some called (in the President’s words) “for a more dramatic and open-ended escalation of our war effort—one that would commit us to a nation-building project of up to a decade.” How could they ask for any other course when they argued from within a conceptual prison, founded on fears, boxed in by domestic political calculations, restricted by misleading definitions, buttressed by syllogisms, endorsed by generals, and crowned with historical analogies? Yet this is what the President said about full-scale escalation:

I reject this course because it sets goals that are beyond what can be achieved at a reasonable cost, and what we need to achieve to secure our interests. As President, I refuse to set goals that go beyond our responsibility, our means, or our interests. And I must weigh all of the challenges that our nation faces. I don’t have the luxury of committing to just one. Indeed, I’m mindful of the words of President Eisenhower, who—in discussing our national security—said, “Each proposal must be weighed in the light of a broader consideration: the need to maintain balance in and among national programs.”

I felt as though I had come to hear a fifteenth-century scholastic and found myself suddenly encountering Erasmus: someone not quite free of the peculiarities of the old way, and therefore haunted by its elisions, omissions, and contradictions; but already anticipating a reformation. Obama’s central—and revolutionary—claim is that our responsibility, our means, and our interests are finite in Afghanistan. As he says, “we can’t simply afford to ignore the price of these wars.” Instead of pursuing an Afghan policy for existential reasons—doing “whatever it takes” and “whatever it costs”—we should accept that there is a limit on what we can do. And we don’t have a moral obligation to do what we cannot do.

The US must husband its resources to meet other strategic challenges. Obama’s description of these is still narrowly focused on failed states and terrorism: it does not include the threats posed by states such as China or Russia, still less Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon, or Kashmir, and it does not attempt to compare the conflict in Afghanistan to the risks posed by climate change or threats to the supply of food in poor nations. But he names Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia as posing challenges. The US responsibility to the Afghan people is only one responsibility among many and “the nation that I’m most interested in building is our own.” He emphasizes the competing demand of domestic priorities and costs:

Over the past several years, we have lost that balance. We’ve failed to appreciate the connection between our national security and our economy.

Or to return to poker, he argues that we have limited chips and the amount we stake in Afghanistan should reflect the amount we stand to gain and the likelihood of winning.

This may imply that Obama has given up and is in favor of a rapid exit. (I, for one, have rarely managed to convince anyone during the last four years that I can be both against troop increases and against withdrawal.) But Obama opposes precipitate withdrawal. He acknowledges that although “our responsibility, our means, or our interests” are limited, they exist in Afghanistan. We have a certain responsibility to the Afghan people who would suffer a civil war if we withdrew. This would initially be between the Taliban and the Karzai government, but it could expand (as it did in the 1990s) into more fragmented local conflicts, fueled by neighboring countries, in which no faction is strong enough to win or weak enough to give up the fight, and in which Afghans are plunged back into anarchy, cruel conflict, and poverty.

We have the means, however, to make a positive contribution and we have an interest in preventing a defeat that would wreck our hopes, humiliate the United States and NATO, embolden our enemies, and weaken our allies (and not only in Pakistan). He implies that just because we cannot do everything does not mean we can do nothing.

Obama’s objectives in remaining in Afghanistan are as follows:

We must deny al Qaeda a safe haven. We must reverse the Taliban’s momentum and deny it the ability to overthrow the government. And we must strengthen the capacity of Afghanistan’s security forces and government so that they can take lead responsibility for Afghanistan’s future…. And we will also focus our assistance in areas—such as agriculture—that can make an immediate impact in the lives of the Afghan people.

In other words, he would continue to use intelligence and special forces to keep the pressure on Osama bin Laden. He would continue to deliver humanitarian assistance and economic development aid particularly to the many poor and neglected communities who want to work with us in the north and center of Afghanistan. In addition (which differentiates this model from the strictly counterterrorism approach), he would retain a sufficiently robust presence to prevent the Taliban from ever gathering an army or mounting a conventional threat or rolling artillery and tanks up the highway to take an Afghan city like Kabul. And combine US military presence with political action and incentives to keep tribal leaders and other regional power brokers on our side and away from the Taliban. And ultimately, through all these techniques, decrease the likelihood of civil war, increase the likelihood of a political settlement with the Taliban, and leave Afghanistan in twenty years’ time a more stable and prosperous country than it is today.

This strategy assumes that the Afghan Taliban are less of a threat to Pakistani stability and NATO than they appear. It also assumes that a counterinsurgency strategy and Iraq-style surge will not—on their own—succeed and a state-building strategy will not work. Obama still needs to find the language to express these insights without falling into the trap of withdrawal.

There are, in reality, no inescapable connections between Afghanistan and Pakistan, al-Qaeda and the Taliban. There are positive and negative effects of our Afghan operations on Pakistan, (positive, through increasing pressure on the Taliban; negative, through inflaming Islamist anti-US sentiment in Pakistan and driving “bad guys” over the border into Afghanistan). But the future of Pakistan will be determined predominantly by factors internal to Pakistan, such as the military, the feudal system, and the relationship between the institutions of Islam and the Pakistani state. Similarly, although al-Qaeda and the Taliban cooperate and share funding, they are still largely divided between a non-Afghan group focused on international terrorism and Afghan–Pakistani groups whose primary aim is to drive foreign troops from Afghanistan and spread Islamist rule in Pakistan. You could at least in theory defeat the Taliban without eliminating al-Qaeda, and the Taliban could return to power in Afghanistan without bringing back al-Qaeda.

The counterinsurgency strategy and surge in Iraq led to a drop in violence (against predictions), but the same will not happen in Afghanistan. The Iraq insurgency was the movement of a minority sectarian group, the Sunnis, whose supporters have been driven from most of the neighborhoods in the capital city and whose leaders were tribal figures with a long-standing relationship to the central government. The Shia-dominated Baghdad government was a powerful, credible force, from the majority ethnic and sectarian group, and was supported by mass political parties, with their own militias. The challenge for Petraeus and his predecessors in Iraq was to grasp this political opportunity; provide support, money, and status to the losing Sunni groups to separate them from al- Qaeda; and convince Nouri al-Maliki to disengage from some of the Shia militias and endorse the settlement. In Afghanistan, neither the Karzai government nor the Taliban have the history, the structure, or the incentives to foster such a deal.

Afghanistan contains a diffuse rural insurgency spread among a population of 30 million people, 80 percent of whom are scattered among 20,000 remote, often mountainous villages. It is different from Iraq, where the insurgency was largely centered around the flat urban areas surrounding Baghdad. Nor is it like the much smaller Malaya of the 1950s, where the British in their antiguerrilla operations were able to move villagers to walled and guarded camps. At least half of Afghanistan (a country almost the size of Texas) is now threatened by insurgency, and the COIN doctrine requires sufficient troops to secure and protect the population areas.

This is why the architects of the COIN doctrine are calling for a ratio of one “trained counterinsurgent” (a category that includes Afghans, if they have been given the necessary skills) for every fifty members of the population or a combined total that would amount in Afghanistan to 600,000 troops, if they intended to cover the country (though most theorists believe it is only necessary to cover half). The effective, legitimate Afghan government, on which the entire counterinsurgency strategy depends, shows little sign of emerging, in part because the international community lacks the skills, the knowledge, the legitimacy, or the patience to build a new nation. In short, COIN won’t work on its own terms because of the lack of numbers and a credible Afghan partner and in absolute terms because of the difficulties of the country and its political structures.

But equally history does not doom the allies to absolute failure. The situation may not be that of Iraq in 2006 or Afghanistan in 1988, but neither is it Afghanistan in 1842, still less in 330 BC (even if we actually understood the victories of the Victorians or Alexander). Pakistan may not be a failed state and mullahs may not be a hand’s breadth from its nukes; but Pakistan is facing serious instability and a moderate, constructive policy in Afghanistan could at least prevent Afghanistan from con- tributing further to its instability. The US and its NATO allies would be able to survive withdrawal from Afghanistan but it would be damaging to their reputations. While we cannot write a blank check to Afghans, we would like to prevent their country from falling into civil war, which would probably result in tens of thousands of deaths. It makes sense to stay, if we can maintain a realistic, affordable, and legitimate presence in Afghanistan and do some good.

It is difficult to find the appropriate language to express such insights. A moderate, light policy runs against a natural tendency to invest extravagantly in defending against even minor threats to our national security (the reverse of our systematic tendency to “lowball,” i.e., to undercompensate for, or underprice, risk in our banking system or the environment). This partly reflects a general, ancient view of the “night watchman” state, involved not in internal regulation but in security. It is partly because terrorism seems a much more immediate and horrifying prospect than financial collapse, climate change, or threats to food security and is more directly linked to loss of life (even if the other issues ultimately may kill many more people). And our culture puts a very high value on life (though a higher value on the lives of our own citizens than on those of other nationals).

We would prefer, therefore, to believe that any war in which we engage is a vital threat to our very existence—in which case the odds of victory are irrelevant and any sacrifice is justified. And there must be a defined end. It would be difficult for a president to argue that we should sacrifice lives without winning in order to prevent something worse (although we build dams when we can’t control the flow of water and employ a police force when we can’t end crime).

We would be revolted by someone who tried to calculate how many lives the objectives in Afghanistan were worth (fifty? a thousand?). And these are all healthy intuitions: we would not want to be in a world where lives were treated simply as units, to which we assigned a definite and explicit expendable value in a grand cost-benefit analysis. But these intuitions still reinforce an all-or-nothing approach to foreign policy.

The simple process of naming our past and present strategies already generates and restricts our response. Thus by naming operations in Afghanistan a counterinsurgency, we may feel compelled to deploy one trained counterinsurgent for every fifty members of the population; by labeling our approach “an Afghanistan–Pakistan strategy,” we imply that our actions in Afghanistan are vital to the security of Pakistan; by putting the Taliban in the category of those pursuing a global jihad, we conclude that we cannot negotiate with them; by naming Afghanistan a terrorist safe haven or a failed state, we conclude that failure (or even a light “footprint”) is not an option.

Obama deftly avoided all these words and traps in his speech, perhaps because he has become aware of their extreme implications. There was no talk of victory. His aim was no longer to defeat but to contain the Taliban: to “deny it the ability to overthrow the government.” He explicitly rejected a long “nation-building project.” He talked not of eliminating but of keeping the pressure on al-Qaeda. He did not speak of a moral obligation to the Afghan people. He did not specify any necessary logical connections between the Taliban, al-Qaeda, Afghanistan, and Pakistan. He asserted that “there’s no imminent threat of the [Afghan] government being overthrown.” He emphasized that “we will support efforts by the Afghan government to open the door to those Taliban who abandon violence and respect the human rights of their fellow citizens.” He did not draw parallels with the surge in Iraq. And most strikingly of all, whereas he had referred four times in March to insurgency, now he stated that “unlike Vietnam, we are not facing a broad-based popular insurgency.”

Such moderate analysis disappointed those who wanted a call to arms. The West Point cadets in the audience yawned, stared at the floor, and clapped only halfheartedly. Bush’s surge in Iraq was a troop increase of only 20 percent; Obama’s contributions to Afghanistan since he took office will more than double US troop presence on the ground. Bush spoke at a time of overwhelming public opposition to the war and with one of the lowest popularity ratings ever recorded; but it was Bush, not Obama, who spoke about determination, commitment, victory, and doing whatever it takes. Obama sounded like those he criticized for wanting to “simply maintain a status quo in which we muddle through.”

But this moderate tone gains Obama the leverage that Bush lacked. As long as the US asserted that Afghanistan was an existential threat, the front line in the war on terror, and that, therefore, failure was not an option, the US had no leverage over Karzai. The worse Afghanistan behaved—the more drugs it grew and terrorists it fostered—the more money it received. If it sorted out its act, it risked being relegated to a minor charitable recipient like Tajikistan. A senior Afghan official warned me this year “to stop referring to us as a humanitarian crisis: we must be the number one terrorist threat in the world, because if we are not we won’t get any money.” By asserting convincingly that Afghanistan is not the be-all and end-all and that the US could always ultimately withdraw, Obama escapes this codependent trap and regains some leverage over the Afghan government. In his politer words:

It must be clear that Afghans will have to take responsibility for their security, and that America has no interest in fighting an endless war in Afghanistan.

But perhaps even more importantly, defining a more moderate and limited strategy gives him leverage over his own generals. By refusing to endorse or use the language of counterinsurgency in the speech, he escapes their doctrinal logic. By no longer committing the US to defeating the Taliban or state-building, he dramatically reduces the objectives and the costs of the mission. By talking about costs, the fragility of public support, and other priorities, he reminds the generals why this surge must be the last. All of this serves to “cap” the troop increases at current levels and provide the justification for beginning to reduce numbers in 2011.

But the brilliance of its moderate arguments cannot overcome that statement about withdrawal. With seven words, “our troops will begin to come home,” he loses leverage over the Taliban, as well as leverage he had gained over Karzai and the generals. It is a cautious, lawyerly statement, expressed again as “[we will] begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011.” It sets no final exit date or numbers. But the Afghan students who were watching the speech with me ignored these nuances and saw it only as departure.

This may be fatal for Obama’s ambition to “open the door” to the Taliban. The lighter, more political, and less but still robust militarized presence that his argument implies could facilitate a deal with the Taliban, if it appeared semi-permanent. As the President asserted, the Taliban are not that strong. They have nothing like the strength or appeal that they had in 1995. They cannot take the capital, let alone recapture the country. There is strong opposition to their presence, particularly in the center and the north of the country. Their only hope is to negotiate. But the Taliban need to acknowledge this. And the only way they will is if they believe that we are not going to allow the Kabul government to collapse.

Afghanistan has been above all a project not of force but of patience. It would take decades before Afghanistan achieved the political cohesion, stability, wealth, government structures, or even basic education levels of Pakistan. A political settlement requires a reasonably strong permanent government. The best argument against the surge, therefore, was never that a US operation without an adequate Afghan government partner would be unable to defeat the Taliban—though it won’t. Nor that the attempt to strengthen the US campaign will intensify resistance, though it may. Nor because such a deployment of over 100,000 troops at a cost of perhaps $100 billion a year would be completely disproportional to the US’s limited strategic interests and moral obligation in Afghanistan—though that too is true.

Instead, Obama should not have requested more troops because doing so intensifies opposition to the war in the US and Europe and accelerates the pace of withdrawal demanded by political pressures at home. To keep domestic consent for a long engagement we need to limit troop numbers and in particular limit our casualties. The surge is a Mephistophelian bargain, in which the President has gained force but lost time.

What can now be done to salvage the administration’s position? Obama has acquired leverage over the generals and some support from the public by making it clear that he will not increase troop strength further. He has gained leverage over Karzai by showing that he has options other than investing in Afghanistan. Now he needs to regain leverage over the Taliban by showing them that he is not about to abandon Afghanistan and that their best option is to negotiate. In short, he needs to follow his argument for a call strategy to its conclusion. The date of withdrawal should be recast as a time for reduction to a lighter, more sustainable, and more permanent presence. This is what the administration began to do in the days following the speech. As National Security Adviser General James Jones said, “That date is a ‘ramp’ rather than a cliff.” And as Hillary Clinton said in her congressional testimony on December 3, their real aim should be to “develop a long-term sustainable relationship with Afghanistan and Pakistan so that we do not repeat the mistakes of the past, primarily our abandonment of that region.”

A more realistic, affordable, and therefore sustainable presence would not make Afghanistan stable or predictable. It would be merely a small if necessary part of an Afghan political strategy. The US and its allies would only moderate, influence, and fund a strategy shaped and led by Afghans themselves. The aim would be to knit together different Afghan interests and allegiances sensitively enough to avoid alienating independent local groups, consistently enough to regain their trust, and robustly enough to restore the security and justice that Afghans demand and deserve from a national government.

What would this look like in practice? Probably a mess. It might involve a tricky coalition of people we refer to, respectively, as Islamists, progressive civil society, terrorists, warlords, learned technocrats, and village chiefs. Under a notionally democratic constitutional structure, it could be a rickety experiment with systems that might, like Afghanistan’s neighbors, include strong elements of religious or military rule. There is no way to predict what the Taliban might become or what authority a national government in Kabul could regain. Civil war would remain a possibility. But an intelligent, long-term, and tolerant partnership with the United States could reduce the likelihood of civil war and increase the likelihood of a political settlement. This is hardly the stuff of sound bites and political slogans. But it would be better for everyone than boom and bust, surge and flight. With the right patient leadership, a political strategy could leave Afghanistan in twenty years’ time more prosperous, stable, and humane than it is today. That would be excellent for Afghans and good for the world.

Meanwhile, Obama’s broader strategic argument must not be lost. He has grasped that the foreign policy of the president should not consist in a series of extravagant, brief, Manichaean battles, driven by exaggerated fears, grandiloquent promises, and fragile edifices of doctrine. Instead the foreign policy of a great power should be the responsible exercise of limited power and knowledge in concurrent situations of radical uncertainty. Obama, we may hope, will develop this elusive insight. And then it might become possible to find the right places in which to deploy the wealth, the courage, and the political capital of the United States. We might hope in South Asia, for example, for a lighter involvement in Afghanistan but a much greater focus on Kashmir.[*]

I began by saying that “calling” in poker was childish and that grownups raise or fold. But there is another category of people who raise or fold: those who are anxious to leave the table. They go all in to exit, hoping to get lucky but if not then at least to finish. They do not do this on the basis of their cards or the pot. They do it because they lack the patience, the interest, the focus, or the confidence to pace themselves carefully through the long and exhausting hours. They no longer care enough about the game. Obama is a famously keen poker player. He should never be in a hurry to leave the table.

Published in The New York Review of Books

WASIM VIEW- Stewart’s article looks at President Obama’s surge strategy and reads between the lines, a readiness or a hope on the part of the US to remain engaged in South Asia for the long-term. In the article, Stewart does well to chart unknowingly to him the failures of NATO and the leading powers in not turning Afghanistan to a ‘Korea of Singapore’.

Stewart’s conclusions on the contradictory Afghanistan policies of Britain over recent years are a must read for all British citizens especially for those families who have lost loved ones including soldiers. Stewart has worked for the British Foreign Office and is himself a historian of some note and is also a prospective parliamentary for the Conservative Party. Thus Stewart’s insights are particularly useful for a British audience as his article provides clues as to why Britain has failed in Helmand and elsewhere in Afghanistan.

As Stewart himself writes ‘we armed militias in 2001, disarmed them through a demobilization program in 2003, and rearmed them again in 2006 as community defense forces. We allowed local autonomy in 2001, pushed for a strong central government in 2003, and returned to decentralization in 2006. First we tolerated opium crops; then we proposed to eradicate them through aerial spraying; now we expect to live with opium production for decades’. And rule Brittania they used to say!

Stewart’s article goes further in detailing NATO and Uncle Sam’s collective failure by recognising that ‘the Taliban have a growing presence even outside their traditional heartland in the south and east of Afghanistan and they mount attacks on previously safe areas and communities. Civil war is now seen as very likely. Comparisons are drawn with Somalia’. Is this not more evidence of failure if any was still needed.

That said Stewart remains the eternal optimist as per the British tradition and remains very positive on what President Obama can achieve in Afghanistan and more widely in South Asia. The dreaded K word is uttered and its not referring to Kabul for Stewart asks for the US ‘to deploy the wealth, the courage, and the political capital of the United States.…for a lighter involvement in Afghanistan but a much greater focus on Kashmir’. I could not agree more.

The final article is written by Robert Gates, the US Defence Secretary. It is addressed to a Pakistani audience and is an effort in words alone.

Our Commitment to Pakistan by Robert Gates

Nearly 25 years ago, in 1986, I arrived in Islamabad for my first visit to Pakistan to meet with this country’s military leaders and see firsthand the training of the Afghan resistance along the border. At the time, our two countries were working together in unprecedented ways to combat a common foe. As part of this effort, our militaries went to school together; our intelligence services shared insights; and our leaders consulted each other on strategic issues. The long-standing friendship was based on a great sense of mutual commitment, purpose, and benefit.

I was still in government in the early 1990s, when the Soviet Union left the region and the US largely abandoned Afghanistan and cut off defense ties with Pakistan – a grave mistake driven by some well-intentioned but short-sighted US legislative and policy decisions.

Thankfully, times have changed. Even so, much is still made in the media of a “trust deficit” between our nations. As I meet with Pakistan’s civilian and military leaders during my visit, I will emphasize that the United States wishes to relinquish the grievances of the past – grievances held by both sides – and instead focus on the promise of the future. I will repeat President Obama’s message that the United States is fully committed to a stable, long-term, strategic partnership with a democratic Pakistan – an enduring relationship based on shared interests and mutual respect that will continue to expand and deepen in the future on many levels, from security cooperation to economic development.

Today, Pakistan and the United States are allied against a common threat. As the people of Pakistan are all too aware, violent extremists attack innocent civilians, government and religious institutions, and security forces – all in an effort to undermine this country and its culture. The tremendous sacrifice of so many Pakistani troops – nearly 2,000 in the last three years – speaks to both their courage and their commitment to protect their fellow citizens. It also speaks to the magnitude of the security challenges this country faces – and need to for our two nations to muster the resolve to eliminate lawless regions and bring this conflict to an end.

The United States and the rest of the international community understand the gravity of the situation and applaud Pakistan’s drive to restore peace to all parts of the nation. To this end, the United States has increased efforts to help the Pakistani military develop the capabilities – and acquire the equipment – necessary to deal with a threat of this size and complexity. This effort includes revitalizing our military exchanges, education, and training programs. With all of our military-to-military relations, the guiding principle for the United States is doing whatever we can to help Pakistan protect its own sovereignty and destroy those who promote the use of terror in this country and plan attacks abroad. At the same time, the US recognizes that military aid alone will not help Pakistan solve the problem of violent extremism, and has, accordingly, expanded civilian assistance to invest in the potential of the Pakistani people.

I know there is concern that an increased US presence in Afghanistan will lead to more attacks in Pakistan. It is important to remember that the Pakistani Taliban operates in collusion with both the Taliban in Afghanistan and Al Qaeda, so it is impossible to separate these groups. If history is any indication, safe havens for either Taliban, on either side of the border, will in the long-run lead to more lethal and more brazen attacks in both nations – attacks of the kind that have already exacted a terrible civilian toll. Maintaining a distinction between some violent extremist groups and others is counterproductive: Only by pressuring all of these groups on both sides of the border will Afghanistan and Pakistan be able to rid themselves of this scourge for good – to destroy those who promote the use of terror here and abroad.

Even as our countries deal with the great challenge along the border, the United States recognizes Pakistan’s important regional and global leadership role – especially on matters like combating piracy and illicit narcotics trafficking, two areas where Pakistan has already made valuable contributions. One of the chief reasons for my visit is to develop a broader strategic dialogue – on the link between Afghanistan’s stability and Pakistan’s; stability in the broader region; the threat of extremism in Asia; efforts to reduce illicit drugs and their damaging global impact; and the importance of maritime security and cooperation. In all of this, Pakistan can play a central part in maintaining good relations among all countries in Asia – a precondition for security in this part of the world.

My visit comes at a critical time for the region. Many challenges remain, but I believe there is reason for hope and optimism. With common goals and collaboration on a range of issues, a new generation of Pakistanis and Americans is learning what it means to be long-term allies, partners, and friends – united in an effort to renew and strengthen the bonds of trust between our nations.

Published in The News

WASIM VIEW- Robert Gates is synonymous with Mr Predator and Mrs Reaper aka the drones. Gates words in the form of an article have to be ignored given Gates then serving in the Buffoon Administration himself ordered drone attacks on the people of Pakistan. Today he holds the same position with more firepower under another Buffoon Administration and once again is ordering endless drone attacks in Pakistan.

Gates article though is an interesting read for it is measured to sings the praise of Pakistan and charts his own illustrious past and present vis a vis Pakistan. Gates writes lucidly on Uncle Sam’s mistakes in abandoning Pakistan, yet the same Gates errs in the article when he writes ‘thankfully, times have changed’, when he knows that the opposite is clearly true.

Gates is only too well aware that Pakistan is owed funds for counter-terrorism operations amounting to $2bn. The kind words of the Kerry-Lugar bill too are a testament to our strong relationship and of course I remain sorry for droning on and on about the drone attacks. As is always the case, American actions speak louder than words.

Gates concludes his article with words that leave me speechless and wordless, for US actions under both Bush and Obama negate his point. Gates says that ‘a new generation of Pakistanis and Americans is learning what it means to be long-term allies, partners, and friends – united in an effort to renew and strengthen the bonds of trust between our nations’. Pakistanis from FATA, those still alive yet and not killed by Gates drones are excluded of course!

Breaking News: PM Gilani can actually govern Pakistan.

Yes I know its a shock for many readers to read the above statement and many will have fallen off their respective chairs by now. And so I will repeat the breaking news that the Prime Minister of Pakistan, Syed Yousaf Raza Gilani can actually govern!

The evidence of such a tall claim and some may say a wild allegation has come via an investigative report by Kamran Khan which proves that the PM personally and his government as a whole have excelled in the governance of issuing guns or weapon licences for countless prohibited weapons.

PM Gilani’s health scandal as covered in my last post here shamed him and his office. The PM has scored a brace now by once again shaming his high office by personally ensuring licenses were given for prohibited weapons against all norms and rules. Given such weapons are after all prohibited to one and all, the entire episode shows the respect the chief executive has for rules and worse his open contempt for the rule of law.

Worse the PM has added to the woes of the macho state of Pakistan which is already awash with guns galore, for now the nation has new toys to play shoot and kill with, thanks to the good governance that Prime Minister Gilani has promised to the masses. Instead of providing security and sanity to a nation terrorised by the guns of terrorists, the PM has wilfully presided over the arming of a nation already armed to its teeth.

In such an instance ”The Guns of Gilani’ and not Navarone come to mind. Kamran Khan details the governance of the Gilani gunshop and the report is shared below:

Arm Merchants in Rs20 Billion Trade

Since the last week of March 2008, more than 38,800 people have been issued licences of prohibited weapons such as Kalashnikov, MP5, G3 and Uzi, mostly on direct orders of the prime minister and minister of state for interior.

Most alarmingly, these licences were issued without any police verification or an official check on the background of the applicants, according to an investigation by this correspondent. A whopping 100,000 licences of non-prohibited bore weapons, such as revolvers and pistols, were also issued without any police verification whatsoever during the same 21-month period.

There is no formal or official procedure in the country for a common Pakistani to properly apply for a prohibited bore weapon license other than finding a member of the National Assembly or the Senate having direct connections with the prime minister or minister of state for interior for the approval of license, hence prohibited bore licenses are a precious commodity and arms dealers charge a premium of up to Rs 200,000 for such a license.

Sources in arms dealers’ community estimate liberal issuance of prohibited and non-prohibited weapons licences by the government since April 2008 has generated Rs 20 billion business for weapons dealers in sale of automatic, semi-automatic weapons in addition to massive earnings in selling the prohibited and non-prohibited licences of weapons. The situation also raised serious questions about the exact source of weapon supplies to arms dealers.

Massive monetary attraction, besides other reasons, may have contributed to immense pressure on Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani from parliamentarians to favour them with his special powers to issue licences for all sorts of weapons.

As parliamentarians pressed the prime minister for more and more licences, he introduced an unprecedented quota of weapons licences in September last year by allowing 25 licences per year of prohibited weapons and 20 licences per month of non-prohibited weapons for each member of the National Assembly and the Senate. He extended the favour to MPAs also by allotting them five prohibited weapons licenses per year.

Since March 2008 till June 2009, the prime minister ordered issuance of 22,541 licences of prohibited weapons, mostly making orders on plain papers with certain names scribbled on them presented to him by various MNAs and senators.

In two months after assuming the office of minister of state for interior in April 2009, Tasnim Ahmed Qureshi issued a record 5,986 licences of prohibited weapons, including more than 100 licences that ended up at the Inter Risk (Pvt) Ltd, the security company contracted by the United States Embassy in Pakistan. Inter Risk owners are now facing prosecution for possessing a large cache of illegal weapons.

Qadir Nawaz, the personal secretary of the minister of state for interior, was arrested in the case, while the issuance of about 6,000 prohibited weapons licences in just two months on the direct order of the minister of state is still being probed by the relevant agencies.

This incident caused uproar in the government security services about the scale of corruption and security risks in weapons license system. The prime minister, though rejected allegations of ministerial level involvement in the weapons scam, announced a ban on issuance of licences in June last year.

“If parliament believes in accountability, justice and fair play, it should allow a neutral and thorough probe into the prohibited weapons license case and examine who were those 39,000 people whose names were recommended by various senators and MNAs for Kalashnikovs and Uzis licences as well as those 100,000-plus people who received licences for pistols and revolvers,” said an interior ministry official.

Kudos to ATP and Adil Najam who has led the focus on the issue as shown here and deplored the acts of the PM in issuing so many weapon licences. To end I will echo Adil’s last sentence, do stop issuing the licences Mr Prime Minister!