June 2010′s B-side has two central themes. The first is a focus on Islam and its status in the Islamic State of Pakistan thanks to an excellent article by Ayaz Amir. The second focus on Afghanistan, looks at the prospects of the approaching endgame via an open letter written by David Miliband to General David Petreus. Huma Yusuf’s article looks at Afghanistan’s new riches and its geopolitical implications amidst the fear of a new ’great game’, fun and games indeed. June 2010′s B-side contents include:

• The Blasphemy Around Us by AYAZ AMIR
• How to End the War in Afghanistan by DAVID MILIBAND
• Afghanistan’s New Riches by HUMA YUSUF

The first article is written by one of my favourite columnists, the one and only Ayaz Amir.

The Blasphemy Around Us by Ayaz Amir

If Islam stands for anything, it is for a just society, free from want and oppression. There is, thus, in Islam no blasphemy greater than a child dying of hunger, a child begging for bread, a woman drowning herself and her children, as has frequently happened in the Islamic Republic, because the burden of life was too much for her, a man throwing himself before an onrushing train because of poverty.

We are moved by these things, but only up to a point. The holy fathers, the registered doctors of the faith, self-appointed arbiters of right and wrong in the Islamic Republic, can be counted upon to take out processions and raise their banners, not to speak of their voices, in defence of the faith, even when it is not quite clear what is imperilled or what is at stake. But when was the last time anyone heard of a procession, foaming at the mouth, taken out against hunger and deprivation?

All of Islam, the entire corpus of Islamic thought, as I have mentioned many a time, can be boiled down to that one cry of the Caliph Omar, that he, the Commander of the Faithful, would be called to account on the Day of Judgment if a dog is hungry by the banks of the Euphrates. Not, mark you, a child or a man hungry by the banks of the Euphrates, but a dog. This, and not the anger, the fire and brimstone pouring forth from over-pitched loudspeakers, is the Islamic ideal.

But who cares for the substance of Islam? We talk of subverting the Constitution. More than any constitution, it is our faith whose truth we have subverted. In no other Islamic country on earth, with the exception perhaps of Saudi Arabia, is more lip-service paid to Islam. We can do nothing without invoking the name of Islam, start nothing without reciting from the Quran. Yet, to look at our collective life–a byword for corruption and all the ills that the human mind can imagine–is to get the impression that no society is more committed to the vice of doublespeak than ours.

Hypocrisy as pervasive as this should lead to a measure of tolerance, some indulgence for the weaknesses of others and our own. But our hypocrisy is of a special kind, enclosed in a straitjacket of self-righteousness. We live not in a state of denial. That would be putting it mildly, because denial is an escape from reality. We have created a reality of our own. Oblivious of our iron begging bowl, oblivious of the fact that, but for the largesse of, if not infidels at least of non-Muslims, we would be a broke nation, we really subscribe to the fiction that we are a fortress of Islam.

Not only that, but that Pakistan was created for a special purpose, to fulfil a divine mission. I am not joking. Serious people subscribe to such uplifting thoughts. The army chief, Gen Ashfaq Kayani, whom one would otherwise take to be a rational person, in a sombre moment declared that Pakistan was a fortress of Islam.

If this is the sturdiest fortress Islam has then Islam, truly speaking, is in mortal peril. And the foam-at-the-mouth brigade, led by our assorted holy fathers, now scattered in more denominations and factions than a reasonably smart mind can figure out, are perhaps right to come out, in all their unsuppressed anger, in defence of the faith.

Our army, not all of NATO’s might, is the lynchpin of America’s war in Afghanistan. You might suppose this would give us some leverage. Yet it is a measure of our beleaguered circumstances that, although we try to put up a brave face, we end up succumbing to American pressure. The operations the army ends up launching are those which America wants.

Why is it that the US seems to have us on a leash? Something seriously wrong with the fortress of Islam and its army dedicated to jihad in the name of Allah –the battle slogan bestowed on the army by Gen Zia — should this really be the case?

Are standards of justice in the Islamic Republic the same for everyone? Pakistan exists at several levels: for the ultra-privileged, the privileged, the semi-privileged, and, through several other gradations, down to the very bottom of the social heap where life can be very tough. For a country that calls itself an Islamic Republic this is blasphemy. Different schools for different people is blasphemy. Inequality of all kinds is blasphemy. Why do we close our eyes to these things? Why is our anger so selective? Why isn’t it excited by the misery, wretchedness and squalor lying all around us?

True, we aren’t the only luckless nation or country on earth. Many others are in worse circumstances than us. There is also much we can be grateful for. But other countries, even the worst, do not call themselves fortresses of Islam or Christendom. They do not wear, in and out of season, the masks of self-righteous anger that we do. We have enough real grievances to redress. Our real problems are mounting, not dissolving. Why, then, must we go looking for grievances? Why must we be perpetually on a voyage of exploration looking for slights even when anything perceived as a slight was never intended as one?

Why can’t we be more assured of our faith and our beliefs? Why must we think that unless we are always ready with spear and fireball our faith will be under threat? This doesn’t say much for our self-confidence or the trust that we place in our beliefs.

Islam existed for 800 years in Hindustan and it was never in danger. We created a state in the name of Islam just 63 years ago and Islam has been in danger ever since. Why can’t we let go a bit? If Islam has been around for 1,400 years, it is not because of us or Osama bin Laden but because of its intrinsic strength. It is not a fragile vessel that we should always be rushing to its defence. In any event, the best defence of Islam is the creation of a just society, a society attuned to the understanding that the best homage to the All-knowing and the Almighty is the pursuit of knowledge and learning, and that the highest good is a level playing field.

Turkey (then the Ottoman Empire) was as Islamic in 1914 as it is now. But it was the Sick Man of Europe then and the very name Turk was an expression of abuse. Turkey speaks with a stronger voice today. Why? Because it has come of age and has done well by itself. Confidence is a gift of achievement and will come only when we turn from slaying imaginary dragons to getting down to solving our all-too-real problems.

Imagine the Lahore High Court directing the ministry of foreign affairs to move a resolution regarding defamation in the UN General Assembly. Are we living in the real world?

Every voyage of discovery, every attempt to clasp the moon in the Ninth Heaven and seize turtles deep down in the Five Seas, every path-breaking journey in the realm of knowledge has been undertaken by the human mind unfettered, the mind liberated of its chains, the mind unblocked by fear or superstition. That is the one prerequisite without which no advance is possible.

Religions are many, and more power to them. The light of knowledge is one and indivisible. Down the centuries its burning flame has passed from hand to hand, kept in trust, even if unknowingly, for all of humanity by different civilisations: Phoenician, Assyrian, Egyptian, Chinese, Greek, Muslim, Christian, and so on. Salvation in this world has come only to those whose paths have been illumined by this light.

But for us to be able to reach out for this torch requires a certain cast of mind, a certain temper of the soul. As our frequent rages all too vividly testify, we have yet to arrive at that stage. Will we ever be there? Will we even begin the journey? Our eternal preoccupation with chimeras of our own making suggests that we are still a long way off from the starting point.

Published in The News

WASIM VIEW-Ayaz Amir’s article is pure class. In it Amir reminds Pakistanis and Muslims more widely of the glorious Islamic traditions and heritage which we have as individuals and as a collective betrayed. Amir is right in declaring that all of Islam can be summarised in the example of Hazrat Umar (RA) and I must quote Amir entirely:

‘All of Islam, the entire corpus of Islamic thought, as I have mentioned many a time, can be boiled down to that one cry of the Caliph Omar, that he, the Commander of the Faithful, would be called to account on the Day of Judgment if a dog is hungry by the banks of the Euphrates. Not, mark you, a child or a man hungry by the banks of the Euphrates, but a dog. This, and not the anger, the fire and brimstone pouring forth from over-pitched loudspeakers, is the Islamic ideal’

On blasphemy, Amir has drawn attention to the real and daily blasphemy we see each day in Pakistan in the poverty of the masses and the pilferage of the ruling elite. The Ahmadi issue is small talk compared to the big picture of a Pakistan, that has betrayed its Islamic foundations and thus is at unease with itself and her people. 

Amir’s other points in the article are the regular rants of the left against Pakistan as an fortress of Islam and are cheap shot points made easier given the hijacking of Pakistan as an Islamic state by the mullahs who opposed its very creation. The sad truth is that the liberal or moderate Pakistani fears the Islamic state owing to Zia’s so-called Islam while the rest of Pakistan dreams of a true Islamic state.

Both sleep uneasy bemoaning their today and tomorrow forgetting the yesterday of Hazrat Umar (RA) was our yesterday too, indeed it was that yesterday that Allama Iqbal and the Quaid-e-Azam wanted to replicate in Pakistan, and that dream lives on.

The second article is the first of two that focuses on Afghanistan. The article is an open letter written by David Miliband the former British Foreign Secterary written to General David Petreus,  and in it Miliband looks at Afghanistan’s endgame.

How to End the War in Afghanistan by David Miliband

Dear David Petraeus,

You and I both know the Afghan mission is at a decisive moment. Stanley McChrystal was a remarkable commander who had the fierce loyalty of the men and women under his command. He brought rigour and drive as well as compassion to the mission in Afghanistan. President Obama’s decisive action to put you in charge shows the urgency and importance that the President rightly attaches to this mission. There is now a race against time to persuade the Afghan people that the correct strategy is in place and show our own people it can succeed.

The first time we met, you told me there is no way to kill your way to victory in a counter insurgency. As we have discussed, the purpose of military effort and civilian improvement is to create the conditions for political settlement. The battle for power is fought in the minds of the local population, insurgents and western publics.

Better Afghan Security Forces are necessary but not enough. Better schooling and economic opportunities are vital for the loyalty of the Afghan people. But none of them are durable or possible without a political settlement. We need the tribes inside the system, al qaeda outside, and the neighbours onside. The process required is therefore two-pronged – national and regional.

First, include the excluded. Within Afghanistan, a political settlement needs arrangements, whether formal or informal, to ensure that the legitimate tribal, ethnic, and other groups that feel excluded from the post-Bonn political settlement are given a real stake in the political process and are able to compete for political representation. A peace settlement must include the vanquished as well as the victors. All of this would encourage Afghans to play a part in building stability and security so that and this is a key objective of many of the insurgents the international forces will be able to withdraw from combat, initially into a training and support role, and then altogether.

Second, go local. The provincial and district governors and their associated assemblies of elders should be given new governing powers, so they have the confidence, competence, and capacity to govern in the best interests of those they represent. Recruiting the right people for these jobs is essential and in view of the challenges of upholding justice and the rule of law, the police chief and local magistrates are equally important.

Third, a new legislative process should be established not necessarily involving constitutional change between President and parliament, in order to give parliamentarians a real stake in the success of the political settlement.

Fourth, underpinning all this must be a more concerted effort to prevent and reduce the corruption that corrodes trust. President Karzai’s promises to tackle the culture of impunity and to establish a new anti-corruption unit are only a start.

Regionally, all of Afghanistan’s neighbors and the key regional powers must recognise two simple facts: no country in the region, let alone the international community, will again allow Afghanistan to be dominated, or used as a strategic asset, by a neighboring state; and the status quo in Afghanistan is damaging to all. Crime, drugs, terrorism, and refugees spill across its borders when Afghanistan’s great mineral wealth and agricultural land should instead be of benefit to the region.

There will be no settlement in Afghanistan without Pakistan’s involvement, but India, Russia, Turkey, and China are also key. Moreover, the Iranian regime whose nuclear policies have flouted the UN and that has a record of attempting to destabilize its neighbors must acknowledge that the best way to protect its investments or promote the interests of Afghans that share its Shia faith is to work to promote peace, not undermine it.

I know there is an argument over when the time is right to go down the political track, but in truth it has already begun. It is shaped and reshaped every day in the minds of the people. The job of the Afghan government, with our strong support, should be to define a political endgame that creates a stake for all those willing to live within the Afghan constitution – and then march towards it.

You have said yourself that 70 to 80 per cent of the insurgency are not ideologically linked to al-Qaeda. Engagement with those who have been involved in attacks is difficult. But allowing space for discussion to bring people from the insurgency into Afghan society, removing the violence, is not appeasement. It is exactly what we want to achieve: the end of the war, with the sustainable capacity in the country to prevent its restart.

Now is a time for determination but also clarity. We are counting on you.

Yours,

David

Published in The Telegraph

WASIM VIEW- David Miliband’s open letter is the first signal that Britian and the West more widely are moving towards some form of an endgame in Afghanistan. Miliband is of course right in calling for the ‘inclusion of the excluded’ which obviously is a codeword for bringing to the table of peace the Taliban, the Haqqani group and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar.  

Miliband is right too in supporting Pakistan’s central role in bringing peace to Afghanistan and the wider region, however he overstates the role of India, China, Turkey and Iran all of whom cannot make or break Afghanistan like Pakistan can and has in the past as we have found to our collective cost a la Pakistan’s strategic depth scorched earth policy.

David Miliband is right in asking for a political settlement with the Taliban and other excluded but indigenous groups given they control most of the country and has openly called for an endgame in Afghanistan, I support him in that endeavour, the Afghanistan endgame must end, and the sooner the better.

The final article too looks at Afghanistan in particular its vast mineral reserves. the focus is not on an endgame but rather the continuing ’great game’.

Afghanistan’s New Riches by Huma Yusuf

Nine hundred and eight billion dollars. That is the price tag a report issued by the Pentagon and US Geological Survey put on Afghanistan’s untapped mineral wealth some days ago.

Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s spokesman described the valuation as “the best news we have had over many years”. But for Pakistan, the presence of vast reserves of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and lithium across the Durand Line may only spell more trouble.

Historically, the discovery of mineral wealth leads to greater political instability. Writing in Bloomberg’s Businessweek, Amity Shlaes points to Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Russia and Sierra Leone as examples of places where the unexpected discovery of oil or minerals led to rampant corruption, gang violence, military takeovers and worse. The only way for such resources to lead to posterity, argues Shlaes, is for nations to have clear, protected property rights. These, however, will be hard to come by in Afghanistan, where basic governance remains a pipe dream.

In this context, the dollar value assigned to Afghanistan’s mineral resources could prove to be a curse, rather than a blessing. Analysts expect the Taliban to put up a stronger fight to retain control of areas believed to be mineral-rich. Moreover, Afghan tribes, the government in Kabul and foreign mining companies will also be vying for their share of the minerals. A consequent increase in turf wars, violence and political instability will inevitably prolong Pakistan’s security problems.

More fighting in Afghanistan means Pakistan’s ‘jihadi factory’ — training camps, recruitment centres, financing through kidnapping and other crime — will have renewed impetus. Rhetoric that calls for protecting ‘Muslim’ wealth from western colonisers will no doubt spur recruitment. Unemployed young men on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border will also readily fight on behalf of different camps in the hope of getting rich quick by procuring some of the promised wealth.

Moreover, the US Geological Survey’s findings show that mineral deposits are present along the border with Pakistan. This will raise the question of whether the resources extend into Fata and other areas, including Balochistan. Even without the benefit of an international survey, one can imagine Baloch nationalist groups and Fata-based tribes stepping up their resistance to state incursions in an attempt to control the wealth their lands might yield. Given Pakistan’s terrible record of distributing revenue from natural resources fairly, such resistance would not be uncalled for; it would, however, further weaken the state.

In the short term, the announcement of mineral wealth in Afghanistan will fuel conspiracy theories about US plans for the region, thereby further destabilising Pakistan’s political infrastructure, which currently runs on aid dollars. The fact is, the initial geological survey of Afghanistan was completed by the US in 2007, but its findings were not publicised then.

This delay has led to theories that the media’s celebration of Afghanistan’s newfound mineral wealth is a way for Washington to justify ongoing troop presence in the region. Vast mineral wealth is being seen as the ‘war booty’ that has driven US involvement in Afghanistan for almost a decade now. If taken up by the religious rightwing in Pakistan, this conspiracy theory would fan anti-US feelings.

In the longer term, the increased confidence of an economically sound Afghanistan would make the Pakistan Army more rigid in its dependence on ‘strategic assets’ to ensure security. Here’s why: many Afghans are fed up of Pakistan meddling in their country’s affairs and allegedly propping up the Taliban. They are impatient with Karzai, who has shown a willingness to engage with Pakistan in preparing for a post-US-withdrawal Afghanistan. The recent resignations of the Afghan interior minister and intelligence chief indicate that frustration with Islamabad and mistrust of its goals are prevalent at even the highest levels.

An Afghanistan that is enjoying a minerals-driven economic boom, however, would be more assertive in demanding national and political sovereignty. There would be less tolerance for the Pakistan Army’s need to keep a handle on developments in Kabul as a way to ensure strategic depth. Indeed, Islamabad could quickly find itself sidelined.

A mining boom in Afghanistan could also make the Pakistan Army’s concerns about encirclement seem more real. Interestingly, the new Afghan minister for mines was in India, soliciting bids for the auction of an iron deposit estimated to be worth $5bn, when the Pentagon report hit international headlines. Days later, CNBC reported that Afghanistan had invited Indian companies to prospect for and extract minerals. The Indian mines minister has also announced that Afghan geologists would visit India in July for training and to establish avenues for Indo-Afghan cooperation in this field.

Kabul’s desire for Indian involvement in its mineral industry is primarily a way to offset Chinese control of Afghan resources. Ever since China signed a $3bn deal to mine copper in Logar province, Kabul and Washington have worried that Beijing could dominate investments in Afghanistan’s mineral wealth. But the Pakistan Army will not entertain the dynamics of this great game, and instead see Indian investments in Afghanistan as a way to undermine Pakistan’s involvement in that country.

In such a scenario, the army would certainly redouble its efforts to maintain ‘strategic assets’ that could be deployed against India as well as a hostile Afghanistan. In other words, Afghanistan’s future economic prosperity could reiterate Pakistan’s reputation for state-sponsored terrorism and ‘double games’, an outcome that would irreparably damage Pakistan’s economic and diplomatic prospects on the world stage.

What one should hope for instead is an economically viable, and thus stable, Afghanistan which has prospered thanks to Indian investment in mining and Pakistani investment in overall infrastructure (roads, railroads, buildings). Such regional economic cooperation is the key to long-term political stability and security.

Published in Dawn

WASIM VIEW- Forever the bearer of bad news, Afghanistan is for once  at the centre of some good news owing to the discovery of its vast mineral resources. Yusuf’s tiemly article looks at this good news within a wider political and geopolitical context and many of her observations deserve comment.  On the political field, it is obvious as the night follows day that the Afghan power elites will  be motivated by the $1 trillion dollar prize that awaits them should they use the mineral resources correctly.

The $1 trillion dollar prize however will be contested by the present leadership led by Karzai who will have to take on the Taliban who already control most of Afghanistan including many areas where the mineral resources are speculated to lay. Afghanistan’s numerous and notorious druglords and warlords sadly cannot be forgotten for they too will claim a share in the booty,  and so history will repeat itself so expect more blood and tears from Kabul to Kandahar with an Afghanistan facing yet more internal strife as one and all compete to secure the prize of $1 trillion dollars.

Yusuf is rignt to warn of the dawn of a new ‘great game’ in the region and is right in highlighting the geopolitical impact of the mineral find in terms of Pakistan-India tensions given India’s desire to help Afghanistan secure its mineral resources. Pakistan is unlikely to stand idle in this new great game especially given the fact that the mineral riches have been found near the Pakistan border and could also be found located in FATA and Balochistan.

For Pakistan, a prosperous and stable Afghanistan remains a pipe dream irrespective of the mineral riches given Pakistan’s history with the Afghan state and its psyche. Turmoil seems to be never far away in Afghanistan and thus I fear that the mineral riches will serve as a new incentive for the spilling of blood and guts in Afghanistan and the wider region. The colonial policy of divide and rule is continuing no doubt given that Afghanistan’s mineral resources were found not in recent weeks as reported but were located in a US Geological Survey in 2007.

One is left to marvel at the US government who have used what is old but good news to motivate NATO to stay the course and so share the Afghan booty just as NATO is gettting a hammering. At the same time the mineral resources booty will serve to motivate many Afghans to a ruthless pursuit of profit pitting Afghan versus Afghan and is remniscient is it not of a divide and rule policy brought to the region by the colonialists many decades ago. 

• Kashmir Solution: Imperative for Peace by KHURSHID MEHMOOD KASURI
• Power-less Pakistan by CHARLES K. EBINGER & KASHIF HASNIE
• Faisal Shehzad’s Anti-Americanism by PERVEZ HOODBHOY

Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri is the former Foreign Minister of Pakistan and the author of the first article. Mr Kasuri focuses on an issue close to my heart, Kashmir.

Kashmir Solution: Imperative for Peace by Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri

The biggest problem between Pakistan and India currently is the absence of trust. Anything that addresses this trust deficit is, therefore, helpful. For this reason I warmly welcome the initiative by The Times of India Group and the Jang Group of Pakistan to initiate the project ‘Aman Ki Asha’. Media can help remove suspicions about each other. This is all the more important because the existing suspicions and distrust about each other have been further exacerbated by irresponsible and distorted stories carried by sections of the media in both the countries in the first instance.

For this reason, this initiative is very important. I sincerely hope the other media groups will also play their role. It was precisely for this purpose that earlier on, I had convened a meeting of seven former Foreign Ministers of Pakistan and India in Lahore. Our Indian counterparts have promised to carry the process further by inviting us to Delhi later on during the year.

The Times of India has asked me to write an article on the need for resolving the Kashmir issue and as well as on the direction in which this process is headingí. Some people in both countries may well say that, after all, both Pakistan and India are important countries and could go their own way. It was for good reason that Prime Minister Vajpayee said that you can change history but not geography during a debate in the Lok Sabha.

Moreover, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh echoed similar sentiments also in a debate in the Lok Sabha, where he said as neighbours it is our obligation to keep our channels open. Unless we want to go to war with Pakistan dialogue is the only way forward. I was encouraged to note during the recent meeting of the Aman Ki Asha in Lahore that some distinguished Indian participants said that India felt the need to resolve the issue of Jammu & Kashmir inter alia for two reasons.

Firstly, that India being a democracy could not resort to force in Jammu & Kashmir for an indefinite period, and, secondly, that India could achieve its real potential and play a major role on the world stage only after resolving its disputes with Pakistan.

Speaking for myself I can say with confidence that as a politician all my life, belonging to a political family as I do, also as one who has been elected a member of parliament from a constituency in Central Punjab on the Indian border – and as former Foreign Minister for five years, I can say with confidence that peace with India is not only in the national interest of Pakistan but can also be sold to the people of Pakistan provided it is peace with honour.

History teaches us that only peace with honour can be lasting. India is a big country and may have extra regional ambitions. As far as Pakistan is concerned, our very doctrine is one of minimum credible deterrence aimed at protecting Pakistanís national security.

Another reason that gives me confidence is that every major political party of Pakistan supports a negotiated settlement. This implies that if India were to show flexibility, Pakistan would reciprocate similarly. In this connection it is correct that while the agreement was arrived at during our tenure in office, former Prime Ministers Nawaz Sharif and Atal Behari Vajpayee showed leadership and courage in restarting this process in February 1999 when Mr. Vajpayee undertook his famous bus journey on the invitation of the then Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif.

Similarly, Mohtarama Benazir Bhutto during both her tenures made concerted efforts to improve the relationship between the two countries. MQM, ANP and even Jamiat Ul Ulema Islam, under the leadership of Maulana Fazal Ur Rehman, have supported a negotiated settlement on Kashmir.

Perhaps one reason why there is such a strong need for a negotiated solution of Kashmir is the recognition in both countries that Pakistan and India have tried everything in their power to enforce their version of a Kashmir settlement. They had fought five wars including two minor ones in the Runn of Katch and in Kargil. There had been various mobilizations of troops, including the largest one since First World War (Operation Parakram), in which a million soldiers remained eye ball to eye ball for almost a year. After Nuclearization of South Asia, following tests by India and Pakistan, war between the two countries has become nearly impossible.

That being the case, it was equally clear that any solution we found would not be an ideal one from the perspective of the Kashmiris, Pakistanis and the Indians. It could be the best under the circumstances. It had to be one that the Kashmiris would accept, and one, that the leaderships of India and Pakistan could sell to their respective peoples whose perspectives were radically different. It would seem to many people that such a solution could just not be found.

It was precisely to find such a formula that the two leaderships directed their representatives involved in the backchannel to remain engaged. No wonder the non-papers went to and fro innumerable times. The backchannel negotiators met in different locations in many countries to preserve the secrecy of the process. They brought the drafts to the principals in both the countries, where changes were made and sent back to the other side and so on and so forth. It was after approximately three years of such pains taking work, which sometimes even involved changing punctuation in different drafts, that the two governments felt that they had agreed on the draft of an agreement towards the end of 2006 beginning 2007. They felt that on the basis of this draft they would be in a position to present an agreement to their respective constitutional authorities for their approval. It was felt that this draft would be acceptable to an overwhelming majority of Kashmiris, Indians and Pakistanis.

The major features of the draft Kashmir agreement involved, inter alia, a gradual demilitarization as the situation improved, self governance and a joint mechanism involving Kashmiris from both sides as well as presence of Pakistani and Indian representatives in this process. The purpose was to improve the comfort level of Kashmiris. The joint mechanism envisaged cooperation in various fields including exploitation of water resources and hydro-electric power.

Self governance also provided maximum possible powers to Kashmiris to manage their political, economic, financial and social matters and those pertaining to economic development as well as for enhanced travel and economic interaction on both sides of the LOC. For practical purposes, as for as the Kashmiris on both sides are concerned, the border would be made irrelevant for movement of goods and people. The agreement though not ideal, was the best possible under the circumstances.

The agreement provided for a review after 15 years. The Pakistani and Indian sides realized that in view of the history of the Jammu & Kashmir dispute, no solution that they could think of, would be an ideal one since it had to be made acceptable to all three. We were aware of the fact that there would be overwhelming support for this agreement; but, we also realized that there would be criticism from some sections in Kashmir, Pakistan and India.

In the very nature of things, it is impossible to produce a solution which will be equally acceptable to every one. It was for this reason that we decided that the arrangement that we had arrived at would need a review at the end of 15 years during which its implementation would be monitored with great care by all the parties concerned, and in the light of the experience, this arrangement could be further improved.

Another question that people sometimes ask me in hushed tones these days, now that President Musharraf is no longer in power, is whether the agreement that we have arrived at had the support of the Pakistan Army. Of course, it had the support of all the stakeholders. It is unthinkable that an issue of this nature could be negotiated without having all the stakeholders on board. Besides the Foreign Office and the Presidency, the Military was appropriately represented.

Former President Musharraf in response to a question whether he took into confidence his Corps Commanders, is on record in saying on more than one occasion that he used to take everyone on board. Furthermore, Pakistan Army high command is highly disciplined and sophisticated and understands clearly that national security is a very broad concept and military preparedness is only one, albeit, a very important component of it.

The concept of national security includes economic and political stability and a settlement with India on honourable terms strengthens Pakistanis national security. It is also pertinent to mention here that while President Musharraf may not be on the scene presently, institutional thinking does not change so rapidly Ofcourse, for tactical reasons, adjustments are made keeping in view time and circumstance. I am aware of the current differences between Pakistan and India on Afghanistan following President Obamaís announcement regarding Americaís intentions in Afghanistan. If trust deficit between the two countries can be bridged, all differences between the two countries can be resolved.

Before I conclude, I would like to welcome the statement of Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gillani that efforts are being made through the backchannel to resolve all outstanding issues with India. It is important that negotiations be resumed soon because Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s government with which we negotiated the agreement is still in power, and, the BJP, the other major national party in India, had started the process during the tenure of former Prime Minister Vajpayee.

I welcome the statement of our Prime Minister, despite being in the opposition, because I believe that in matters of national interest one has to rise above the spirit of partisanship. I am sure Indian politicians would have a similar approach. There is no need to reinvent the wheel. A lot of detailed work has been done and we can start from where we left. This piece was commissioned for and published in the Times of India.

Published in The News

WASIM VIEW- Kasuri’s article is a must read for all Pakistanis as it details how the Kashmir dispute has been debated and discussed over recent years.  As a Pakistani Kashmiri, I can comment on the issue and Kasuri’s proposals without fear and favour and I will do so.

Before I pass comment, its need to be stated at the outset that Kashmir is, was and will always be for me at least the jugular vein of Pakistan. That said it is also clear from the lessons of six decades that the geopolitical environment in South Asia is fashioned by hostile Pakistan-India relations, both of whom are opposed to the Kashmiri independence which many Kashmiris still aspire to. Therefore the most credible solution to the Kashmir dispute must be based on a compromise and with reference point, the much trumpeted solution to the Kashmir dispute needs to be read.

The so-called Kashmir agreement that Pakistan and India negotiated on the back channels is shared in Kasuri’s article. The Kasuri Kashmir solution included gradual demilitarization, self governance and a joint mechanism that involved Kashmiris from both sides as well as presence of Pakistani and Indian representatives in this process. The purpose was in Kasuri’s words to improve the comfort level of Kashmiris.

The joint mechanism envisaged cooperation in various fields including exploitation of water resources and hydro-electric power. Self governance also provided maximum possible powers to Kashmiris to manage their political, economic, financial and social matters and those pertaining to economic development as well as for enhanced travel and economic interaction on both sides of the LOC. For practical purposes, as for as the Kashmiris on both sides are concerned, the border would be made irrelevant for movement of goods and people. The agreement provided for a review after 15 years.

My views on the agreement is that there is no such agreement until it is signed and  more importantly implemented, thus it is premature for a seasoned politician like Kasuri to argue otherwise. On the specifics I do agree with Kasuri albeit with a number of provisos ‘that the agreement though not ideal, was the best possible under the circumstances’. The provisos include the level of Kashmiri support for the agreement and how this is to be ascertained via referenda or other ways.

Demilitirazation is another concern given India has a smell for Kashmiri blood and how it will be achieved is a key make-or-break issue. Other questions include self-governance means what exactly and how bound are both Pakistan and India to the joint-mechanism given India has a history of breaking accords in Kashmir and in the region more widely a la the Indus Water Treaty.

All in all, Kasuri’s Kashmir solution has many questions that need answering before it can be fairly assessed. Nevertheless on the evidence before me, I believe it could be a step forward.

The second post looks at Pakistan’s power problems in detail within the broader vision of Pakistan-US relations.

Power-less Pakistan by Charles K. Ebinger & Kashif Hasnie

Pakistani leaders preoccupied with a Taliban insurgency and political infighting also face an explosive issue that could damage the credibility of governments for years to come: nationwide power outages. Attention was refocused on the energy crisis after recent high profile talks in Washington in which long-time allies, the United States and Pakistan, outlined steps to refurbish power stations in Pakistan.

Many Pakistanis, who face hours of crippling power cuts each day, doubt their government will take decisive action, despite a U.S. warning that the crisis threatens this nuclear armed nation’s economic and political stability.

The promised 4 Es – Employment, Education, Energy, Environment – of the current Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) government are falling apart. Promises of tackling the recent energy crisis by building 8,000 Megawatts (MW) of new coal, solar, hydroelectric and wind electric generation plants have fallen through the cracks of the proverbial dilatory Pakistani political and bureaucratic elites.

Small towns and villages are experiencing power outages from 20 to 22 hours daily, whereas large cities such as Karachi, Lahore, Hyderabad, Faisalabad, Peshawar and Quetta are without power for at least half of every day as a result of shortages in power generation. An ageing transmission and distribution system, power theft, large commercial losses owing to poor billing and collection systems, and a power tariff scheme in desperate need of revision, are reasons for the current crisis.

With power demand at about 14,680 MW and current supply at 10,200 MW, the power supply shortage stands at 4,480 MW, which provides fertile ground for social and economic chaos. Nevertheless, despite these “apparent” dire power shortages there is a path forward if only Pakistan embarks on a vigorous action program where it produces energy to its full capacity while ending power theft, improving billings and collections while reducing its technical losses. After researching the gap between the demand and supply and total capacity (19,000 MW) of electricity, we came to the following reasons for the shortage:

1. Hydropower contributes 6,500 MW of energy in the total energy mix of Pakistan. Recent excessively dry seasons, mismanagement and trans-boundary water issues have restricted this capacity to only 1,500 MW. Resulting in a shortage of 4,000 MW.

2. Independent Power Plants (IPPs) produce 6,250 MW. Due to non-payment in the energy pyramid, a circular debt (currently around $1.3 billion) has been created, resulting in a shortage of 1,500 MW.

3. Government owned power generation plants are underutilized. Most of them working way far below their capacity, either because of lack of funds for maintenance or unavailability of spare parts.

4. Power infrastructure, especially in transmission and distribution is old and defective, causing heavy line losses of electricity.

5. Power theft. Public and private theft of power contributes to 32% of the ‘line losses.’

Keeping the above factors in mind, we know that the relevant Pakistani authorities are trying their best to gather foreign financial and technical assistance to address this crisis. A new $125 million USAID Energy Program will upgrade five major power stations, replace more than 11,000 tube wells producing water for agriculture, and boost Pakistan’s overall power production by 10 percent.

In mid-January, U.S. Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan Ambassador Richard C. Holbrooke launched the first phase of these energy projects in Islamabad, announcing the United States will contribute up to $1 billion to the energy sector. Technical support from the U.S. also is being provided by the private sector, when GE’s CEO, Jeff Immelt met President Asif Ali Zardari last year, resulting in signing a Memorandum of Understanding this year to help Pakistan in the energy, water and transportation sectors.

But the crisis cries out for far more help than that being offered. Pakistan’s energy crisis which has raged for more than 40 years is more due to ill planning, short sightedness of successive governments, including the current one, mismanagement and corruption. For the government of Pakistan and the international donor community wanting to help them, here is an agenda of actions that will begin to stabilize the country’s economic and political future.

1. Both, the Sui Northern Gas Pipelines and the Sui Southern Gas Company Limited should make it a priority to produce a 300-400 million cubic feet of gas which is well within their reach if gas tariffs are raised to economic levels. This will provide enough gas to fuel an additional 2,000 MW of electricity in the mix. The circular debt between every company in the electricity mix – PEPCO, WAPDA, IPPs, fuel suppliers and refineries – need to be settled to bring modern accounting practices into the sector. Until this is done there can be no real assessment of the future economic and financial needs of the sector.

2. The power infrastructure should be upgraded with a modern efficient grid. Without such an investment there will be little improvement even if major new generation facilities are built.

3. Accounts receivables from the public and private sector, including the military, for electricity should be recovered. Nothing is ‘free’ and electricity is no different.

4. The relationship of furnace oil and natural gas prices should be monitored closely. Since furnace oil is more expensive, its excessive use has contributed $571 million out of the current $1.3 billion of circular debt.

5. Energy prices throughout the economy must be rationalized and raised to the level required to pay for their full cost while returning a profit to the producers. Where subsidies are required for social reasons they should be targeted and paid for out of government revenues not by energy producers.

6. Government owned power generation companies should be technologically refurbished. This could close the demand and supply gap by 1,500 MW.

7. Finally, Pakistan needs to manage its water resources more efficiently. Historically, Pakistan has been a very ‘water conscious’ country. At independence, despite British efforts to steal its valuable water resources for India, Pakistan obtained access to the headwaters of the Indus and the rivers of the Punjab. The country has made great strides in dealing with water logging and salinity in the world’s largest contiguous irrigation system. During the 1960s, the Harvard Water Program worked closely with Pakistani experts to negotiate the classic Indus Water Treaty. During this time, Pakistani engineers built the giant Tarbela Dam, the largest reservoir in the world formed by an earthen dam. Today, Pakistan faces the “Malthusian-plus” challenge of dealing with rapidly growing water demands (for energy, agriculture and people) from a resource base that is likely to change substantially as the glaciers of the western Himalayas melt and monsoon patterns change under the onslaught of climate change.

We were compelled to write this article to highlight the fact that even if the Taliban and its Pakistani allies were to disappear tomorrow, Pakistan in the absence of a plan to deal with its energy crisis will remain in darkness – literally and figuratively.

If Pakistan is to emerge economically healthy and politically stable, the U.S. must realize, given the stakes involved and its own growing political and military involvement, that its commitment must be a sustained one. One that may need to last for decades not months or years!

With promises and prospects of a long term engagement, we believe that ‘smart American power’ projection lies in addressing issues such as energy and water. While short term aid and a few promises can start to mend a relationship, sustained partnerships as we have learned in Afghanistan, require a lot more.

Published by The Brookings Institution

WASIM VIEW- The power crisis in Pakistan is perhaps the most pressing live issue facing the Pakistani masses today. Ebinger & Hasnie’s article is nothing less than a masterpiece of an article for it details both the problem and the solution to Pakistan’s power crisis. Indeed the article sets the US in particular a challenge that can be institutionalised in the ongoing Pakistan-US strategic dialogue, namely how the US will help Pakistan tackle its power crisis.

The article needs to be considered in the background of the love-fest between Shah Mehmood Qureshi and Hillary Clinton during the recent Pakistan-US strategic dialogue which was high on style and offered little in substance to helping Pakistan. Mr Qureshi would do well to send this very article to Hillary Clinton from his desk in Pakistan’s Foreign Office adding these words ‘ Pakistan expects US action and support on all of the solutions put forward in the article as per the Pakistan-US strategic dialogue, its time to stop talking the talk, lets walk the walk, PS the $125m offered to Pakistan on energy is a pittance compared to the cost Pakistan has endured in financial terms alone of $35bn, so get moving Madame Secterary and fast!

As a critic of the way America has used and abused Pakistan since 9/11, I still am ready to give Uncle Sam a chance to redeem herself in the eyes of the ordinary Pakistani whom they kill via drones and much more. And so, let the one test of so-called Pakistan-US friendship be this, can the US deliver on projects that add many hundreds of megawatts of electricity by 2012, I for one suspect that the US will not rise to the challenge for security not solar-powered energy is all that America cares for vis a vis Pakistan.

The final article focuses on Pakistan-US relations and particularly so-called anti-Americanism and is written by the one and only, Pervez Hoodbhoy.

Faisal Shehzad’s Anti-Americanism by Pervez Hoobhoy

The man who tried to set off a car bomb in Times Square was a Pakistani. Why is this unsurprising? Because when you hold a burning match to a gasoline tank, the laws of chemistry demand combustion.

As anti-US lava spews from the fiery volcanoes of Pakistan’s private television channels and newspapers, a collective psychosis grips the country’s youth. Murderous intent follows with the conviction that the US is responsible for all ills, both in Pakistan and the world of Islam.

Faisal Shahzad, with designer sunglasses and an MBA degree from the University of Bridgeport, acquired that murderous intent. Living his formative years in Pakistan, he typifies the young Pakistani who grew up in the shadow of Ziaul Haq’s hate-based education curriculum. The son of a retired air vice-marshal, life was easy as was getting US citizenship subsequently. But at some point the toxic schooling and media tutoring must have kicked in.

There was guilt as he saw pictures of Gaza’s dead children and related them to US support for Israel. Internet browsing or, perhaps, the local mosque steered him towards the idea of an Islamic caliphate. This solution to the world’s problems would require, of course, the US to be destroyed. Hence Shahzad’s self-confessed trip to Waziristan.

Ideas considered extreme a decade ago are now mainstream. A private survey carried out by a European embassy based in Islamabad found that only four per cent of Pakistanis polled speak well of America; 96 per cent against.

Although Pakistan and the US are formal allies, in the public perception the US has ousted India as Pakistan’s number one enemy. Remarkably, anti-US sentiment rises in proportion to aid received. Say a good word about the US, and you are labelled as its agent. From what TV anchors had to say about it, Kerry-Lugar’s $7.5bn may well have been money that the US wants to steal from Pakistan rather than give to it.

Pakistan is not the only country where America is unpopular. In pursuit of its self-interest, the US has waged illegal wars, bribed, bullied and overthrown governments, supported tyrants and undermined movements for progressive change. Paradoxically America is disliked more in Pakistan than in countries which have born the direct brunt of its attacks — Cuba, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. Why?

Drone strikes are a common but false explanation. Foreign Minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi implicitly justifies the Times Square bombing as retaliation but this does not bear up. Drone attacks have killed some innocents but they have devastated militant operations in Waziristan while causing far less collateral damage than Pakistan Army operations.

On the other hand, the cities of Hanoi and Haiphong were carpet-bombed by B-52 bombers and Vietnam’s jungles were defoliated with Agent Orange. Yet, Vietnam never developed visceral feelings like those in Pakistan.

Finding truer reasons requires deeper digging. In part, Pakistan displays the resentment of a client state for its paymaster. US-Pakistan relations are transactional today but the master-client relationship is older. Indeed, Pakistan chose this path because confronting India over Kashmir demanded big defence budgets. In the 1960s, Pakistan entered into the Seato and Cento military pacts, and was proud to be called ‘America’s most allied ally’. The Pakistan Army became the most powerful, well-equipped and well-organised institution in the country. This also put Pakistan on the external dole.

The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, even as it brought in profits, deepened the dependence. Paid by the US to create the anti-Soviet jihadist apparatus, Pakistan is now being paid again to fight that war’s blowback. Pakistan then entered George W. Bush’s war on terror to enhance America’s security — a fact that further hurt its self-esteem. It is a separate matter that Pakistan fights that very war for its own survival and must call upon its army to protect the population from throat-slitting fanatics.

Passing the buck is equally fundamental to Pakistan’s anti-Americanism. It is in human nature to blame others for one’s own failures. Pakistan has long teetered between being a failed state and a failing state. The rich won’t pay taxes? Little electricity? Contaminated drinking water? Kashmir unsolved? Blame it on the Americans. This phenomenon exists elsewhere too. For example, one saw Hamid Karzai threatening to join the Taliban and lashing out against Americans because they (probably correctly) suggested he committed electoral fraud.

Tragically for Pakistan, anti-Americanism plays squarely into the hands of Islamic militants. They vigorously promote the notion of an Islam-West war when, in fact, they actually wage armed struggle to remake society. They will keep fighting this war even if America were to miraculously evaporate. Created by poverty, a war culture and the macabre manipulations of Pakistan’s intelligence services, they seek a total transformation of society. This means eliminating music, art, entertainment and all manifestations of modernity. Side goals include chasing away the few surviving native Christians, Sikhs and Hindus.

At a time when the country needs clarity of thought to successfully fight extremism, simple bipolar explanations are inadequate. The moralistic question ‘Is America good or bad?’ is futile.

There is little doubt that the US has committed acts of aggression, as in Iraq, and maintains the world’s largest military machine. We know that it will make a deal with the Taliban if perceived to be in its self-interest — even if that means abandoning the Afghans to bloodthirsty fanatics. Yet, it would be wrong to scorn the humanitarian impulse behind US assistance in times of desperation. Shall we write off massive US assistance to Pakistan at the time of the earthquake of 2005? Or to tsunami-affected countries in 2004?

In truth, the US is no more selfish or altruistic than any other country. And it treats its Muslim citizens infinitely better than we treat non-Muslims in Pakistan.

Instead of pronouncing moral judgments on everything and anything, we Pakistanis need to reaffirm what is truly important for our people: peace, economic justice, good governance, rule of law, accountability of rulers, women’s rights and rationality in human affairs. Washington must be resisted, but only when it seeks to drag Pakistan away from these goals. More frenzied anti-Americanism will produce more Faisal Shahzads.

Published in Dawn

WASIM VIEW- Hoodbhoy’s  article could have been written by an American neo-con like Richard Perle for its content are full of pro-US drivel and a rejectionism of many US crimes against Pakistan and the wider world. Hoodbhoy is right to bemoan many ills of the Zia era and army rule, a price which Pakistanis pay for in blood on a daily basis in the form of a bigoted state as evidenced in Lahore in recent days.

However Hoodbhoy for the main part of the article is plainly lost at sea for he makes childish and elementary schoolboy-type points to support his views. The intellectual rigour and cogent arguments that are synonmous with supposed intellectuals of his stature go missing when he chooses to support drone attacks in Pakistan.

The best evidence of this is demonstated shown when he foolishly brackets Pakistan with Vietnam and asks why Pakistan has visceral feelings towards America due to the drone attacks when Vietnam does not. To quote Hoodbhoy ‘the cities of Hanoi and Haiphong were carpet-bombed by B-52 bombers and Vietnam’s jungles were defoliated with Agent Orange. Yet, Vietnam never developed visceral feelings like those in Pakistan’. The answer to his ludicrous point is this, that Vietnam was at war with America whilst Pakistan is supposedly an ally of America, Vietnam was a foe and treated accordingly and Pakistan is a friend and not treated accordingly, rather it is treated as a foe as the drone attacks prove and that is why Mr Hoodbhoy, Pakistanis have such visceral feelings against America, duh!

The rest of the Hoodbhoy article is an exercise in futility  for all it does is reaffirm his liberal credentials and includes a cheap shot attack on  the media for its supposed ‘media tutoring’ of Faisal Shehzad, which is an unproven allegation.

On the more substantive point, Hoodbhoy is right to bemoan Faisal Shahzad’s acts in New York which are undefendable. Indeed I will go further in my condemnation and say that many Pakistanis like me are disgusted by his actions which have sullied Pakistan’s name once again in the world and want to see him face a fair trial and face exemplary punishment if he is found guilty. The Faisal Shahzads of this world are the enemies of Pakistan, period. On that point at least, Wasim Arif and Pervez Hoodbhoy are on the same page.

April’s B-side begins by passing comment on an optimistic view of Pakistan’s future whilst retaining focus on regular pet hates such as the dreaded drones. In the final article the troubling questions arising from the Benazir Bhutto UN Report  are explored. April 2010′s B-side contents include:

• Room for Optimism by MOHSIN HAMID
• The Obama Doctrine: Kill don’t Detain by ASIM QURESHI
• Questions, More Questions by KAMRAN SHAFI

Room for Optimism by Mohsin Hamid

Ever since returning to live in Pakistan a few months ago, I’ve been struck by the pervasive negativity of views here about our country. Whether in conversation, on television, or in the newspaper, what I hear and read often tends to boil down to the same message: our country is going down the drain.

But I’m not convinced that it is.

I don’t dispute for a second that these are hard times. Thousands of us died last year in terrorist attacks. Hundreds of thousands were displaced by military operations. Most of us don’t have access to decent schools. Inflation is squeezing our poor and middle class. Millions are, if not starving, hungry. Even those who can afford electricity don’t have it half the day.

Yet despite this desperate suffering, Pakistan is also something of a miracle. It’s worth pointing this out, because incessant pessimism robs us of an important resource: hope.

First, we are a vast nation. We are the sixth most populous country in the world. One in every 40 human beings is Pakistani. There are more people aged 14 and younger in Pakistan than there are in America. A nation is its people, and in our people we have a huge, and significantly untapped, sea of potential.

Second, we are spectacularly diverse. I have travelled to all six of the world’s inhabited continents, and I have seen few countries whose diversity comes close to matching ours. Linguistically, we are home to many major languages. And I mean major: Punjabi is spoken in Pakistan by more people than the entire population of France, Pushto by more than the population of Saudi Arabia, Sindhi by more than Australia, Seraiki by more than the Netherlands, Urdu by more than Cuba, and Balochi by more than Singapore.

Nor is our diversity limited to language. Religiously we are overwhelmingly Muslim, but still we have more non-Muslims than there are people in either Toronto or Miami. We have more Shias than any country besides Iran. Even our majority Sunnis include followers of the Barelvi, Deobandi and numerous other schools, as well as, in all likelihood, many millions who have no idea what school they belong to and don’t really care.

Culturally, too, we are incredibly diverse. We have transvestite talk-show hosts, advocates for “eunuch rights”, burka-wearers, turbaned men with beards, outstanding fast bowlers, mediocre opening batsmen, tribal chieftains, bhang-drinking farmers, semi-nomadic shepherds, and at least one champion female sprinter. We have the Communist Mazdoor Kissan Party and we have Porsche dealerships. We are nobody’s stereotype.

This diversity is an enormous advantage. Not only is there brilliance and potential in our differences, a wealth of experience and ideas, but also our lack of sameness forces us to accommodate each other, to find ways to coexist.

Which brings me to our third great asset. ‘Tolerance’ seems a strange word to apply to a country where women are still buried alive and teenagers have started detonating themselves in busy shopping districts. Yet these acts shock us because they are aberrations, not the norm. Pakistan is characterised not by the outliers among its citizens who are willing to kill those unlike themselves, but by the millions of us who reject every opportunity to do so. Our different linguistic, religious and cultural groups mostly live side by side in relative peace. It usually takes state intervention (whether by our own state, our allies or our enemies) to get us to kill one another, and even then, those who do so are a tiny minority.

The ability to hold our noses and put up with fellow citizens we don’t much like is surely a modern Pakistani characteristic. It could be the result of geography and history, of millennia of invading, being invaded, and dealing with the aftermath. Europe learned the value of peace from World Wars One and Two. Maybe we learned our lesson from the violence of partition or ’71. Call it pragmatism or cosmopolitanism or whatever you want, but I think most Pakistanis have it. I’ll call it coexistence-ism, and it’s a blessing.

Over the past 60-some years, with many disastrous missteps along the way, our vastness, diversity and coexistence-ism have forced us to develop (or to begin to develop, for it is a work in progress) our fourth great asset: the many related components of our democracy. Between India and Europe, there is no country with a combination of diversity and democracy that comes close to ours. Other than Turkey, the rest are dictatorships, monarchies, apartheid states or under foreign occupation.

We, on the other hand, are evolving a system that allows our population to decide how they will be ruled. Many of our politicians may be corrupt and venal, but they are part of a lively and hotly contested multiparty democracy. Many in our media may be immature or serving vested interests, but collectively they engage in a no-holds-barred debate that exposes, criticises, entertains and informs — and through television they have given our country, for the first time in its history, a genuine public space. Our judges may have a rather unusual understanding of the correct relationship between legislature and judiciary, but they are undoubtedly expanding the rule of law — and hence the power of the average citizen — in a land where it has been almost absent.

As I see it, the Pakistan project is a messy search for ways to improve the lives of 180 million very different citizens. False nationalism won’t work: we are too diverse to believe it. That is why our dictatorships inevitably end. Theocracy won’t work: we are too diverse to agree on the interpretation of religious laws. That is why the Taliban won’t win.

Can democracy deliver? In some ways it already is. The NFC award and, hopefully, the 18th Amendment, are powerful moves towards devolution of power to the provinces. Too much centralisation has been stifling in a country as diverse as ours. That is about to change. And the pressure of democracy seems likely to go further, moving power below the provinces to regions and districts. Cities like Karachi and Lahore have shown that good local governance is possible in Pakistan. That lesson can now start to spread.

Similarly, democracy is pushing us to raise revenue. Our taxes amount to a tiny 10 per cent of GDP. After spending on defence and interest on our debt, we are left with precious little for schools, hospitals, roads, electricity, water and social support. We, and especially our rich, must pay more. American economic aid comes to less than nine dollars per Pakistani per year. That isn’t much, and the secret is: we shouldn’t need it. New taxes, whether as VAT or in some other form, could give us far more.

Our free assemblies, powerful media and independent judiciary collectively contain within them both pressures to raise taxes and mechanisms to see that taxes actually get paid. This is new for Pakistan. Our number one war shouldn’t be a war on terrorists or a cold war with India or a war against fishing for the ball outside off-stump (although all of those matter): it should be a war on free riders, on people taking advantage of what Pakistan offers without paying their fair share in taxes to our society. Luckily this war looks like it is ready to escalate, and not a moment too soon.

I have no idea if things will work out for the best. The pessimists may be right. But it seems mistaken to write Pakistan off. We have reasons for optimism too.

Published in Dawn

WASIM VIEW- There is no doubt that the doom and gloom factory in Pakistan churn outs negativity about Pakistan day in and day out. Pakistan of course has many ills and many problems, in fact too many ills and too many problems. However the very same Pakistan also has endless scope for potential and progress as opined by Mohsin Hamid in his excellent article.

The facts speak for themselves and the most relevant fact is this;  that a respected author in his own right has left the calmer climes of the West to return to live in Pakistan.  Indeed it is a testament to a progressive and optimistic Pakistani future which Mohsin Hamid and others subscribe too even amidst the doom and gloom. Hamid is right in bemoaning that many a Pakistani has given up on the country and are actively seeking an exit, yet his return is akin to the return of a prodigal son, and a beacon of hope to Pakistanis inside and outside of the country that Pakistan can turn and is turning the corner.

Hamid’s article is a must read for all Pakistanis especially those who are ready to give up on Pakistan for it is full of hope and inspiration, for it envisions a better Pakistan, an ‘other’ Pakistan that Mohsin Hamid and I and 180 million Pakistani’s desperately desire.

The second article continues to drone on about the dreaded drones that grace Pakistan with their presence and brings to the fore the ignored till now, the Obama doctrine of state terrorism.

The Obama Doctrine: Kill don’t Detain by Asim Qureshi

In 2001, Charles Krauthammer first coined the phrase “Bush Doctrine”, which would later become associated most significantly with the legal anomaly known as pre-emptive strike. Understanding the doctrine with hindsight could lead to a further understanding of the legacy that the former administration left – the choice to place concerns of national security over even the most entrenched norms of due process and the rule of law. It is, indeed, this doctrine that united people across the world in their condemnation of Guantánamo Bay.

The ambitious desire to close Guantánamo hailed the coming of a new era, a feeling implicitly recognised by the Nobel peace prize that President Obama received. Unfortunately, what we witnessed was a false dawn. The lawyers for the Guantánamo detainees with whom I am in touch in the US speak of their dismay as they prepare for Obama to do the one thing they never expected – to send the detainees back to the military commissions – a decision that will lose Obama all support he once had within the human rights community.

Worse still, a completely new trend has emerged that, in many ways, is more dangerous than the trends under Bush. Extrajudicial killings and targeted assassinations will soon become the main point of contention that Obama’s administration will need to justify. Although Bush was known for his support for such policies, the extensive use of drones under Obama have taken the death count well beyond anything that has been seen before.

Harold Koh, the legal adviser to the US state department, explained the justifications behind unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) when addressing the American Society of International Law’s annual meeting on 25 March 2010:

“[I]t is the considered view of this administration … that targeting practices, including lethal operations conducted with the use of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), comply with all applicable law, including the laws of war … As recent events have shown, al-Qaida has not abandoned its intent to attack the United States, and indeed continues to attack us. Thus, in this ongoing armed conflict, the United States has the authority under international law, and the responsibility to its citizens, to use force, including lethal force, to defend itself, including by targeting persons such as high-level al Qaeda leaders who are planning attacks … [T]his administration has carefully reviewed the rules governing targeting operations to ensure that these operations are conducted consistently with law of war principles …

“[S]ome have argued that the use of lethal force against specific individuals fails to provide adequate process and thus constitutes unlawful extrajudicial killing. But a state that is engaged in armed conflict or in legitimate self-defense is not required to provide targets with legal process before the state may use lethal force. Our procedures and practices for identifying lawful targets are extremely robust, and advanced technologies have helped to make our targeting even more precise. In my experience, the principles of distinction and proportionality that the United States applies are not just recited at meeting. They are implemented rigorously throughout the planning and execution of lethal operations to ensure that such operations are conducted in accordance with all applicable law.”

The legal justifications put forward by Koh are reminiscent of the arguments that were used by John Yoo and others in their bid to lend legitimacy to unlawful practices such as rendition, arbitrary detention and torture. The main cause for concern from Koh’s statements is the implication that protective jurisdiction to which the US feels it is entitled in order to carry out operations anywhere in the world still continues under Obama. The laws of war do not allow for the targeting of individuals outside of the conflict zone, and yet we now find that extrajudicial killings are taking place in countries as far apart as Yemen, the Horn of Africa and Pakistan. From a legal and moral perspective, the rationale provided by the State Department is bankrupt and only reinforces the stereotype that the US has very little concern for its own principles.

Despite the legalities of what is being conducted, the actuality of extrajudicial killings, especially through UAVs is frightening. The recent revelations by WikiLeaks on the killing of civilians by US Apache helicopters in Iraq has strongly highlighted the opportunities for misuse surrounding targeting from the air. In the Iraq case, there were soldiers who were supposed to be using the equipment to identify so-called combatants, and yet they still managed to catastrophically target the wrong people. This situation is made even worse in the case of UAVs, where the operators are far removed from the reality of the conflict and rely on digital images to see what is taking place on the ground.

Conservative estimates from thinktanks such as the New American Foundation claim that civilian causalities from drone attacks are around one in three, although this figure is disputed by the Pakistani authorities. According to Pakistani official statistics, every month an average of 58 civilians were killed during 2009. Of the 44 Predator drone attacks that year, only five targets were correctly identified; the result was over 700 civilian casualties.

Regardless of the figures used, the case that extrajudicial killings are justified is extremely weak, and the number of civilian casualties is far too high to justify their continued use.

A further twist to the Obama Doctrine is the breaking of a taboo that the Bush administration balked at – the concept of treating US citizens outside of the US constitutional process. During the Bush era, the treatment of detainees such as John Walker Lindh, Yasser Hamdi and Jose Padilla showed reluctance by officials to treat their own nationals in the way it had all those of other nationalities (by, for instance, sending them to Guantánamo Bay and other secret prisons). The policy of discrimination reserved for US citizens showed that there was a line the US was not willing to cross.

At least, today, we can strike discrimination off the list of grievances against the current president. The National Security Council of the US has now given specific permission to the CIA to target certain US citizens as part of counter-terrorism operations. Specifically, Anwar al-Awlaki has been singled out for such treatment, as it has been claimed that he was directly involved in the planning of the Major Hasan Nidal killings and the Christmas Day bomber attacks. Indeed, it is claims such as this that bring the entire concept of targeted assassinations into question. The US would like us to believe that we should simply trust that they have the relevant evidence and information to justify such a killing, without bringing the individual to account before a court.

The assumption that trust should be extended to a government that has involved itself in innumerable unlawful and unconscionable practices since the start of the war on terror is too much to ask. Whatever goodwill the US government had after 9/11 was destroyed by the way in which it prosecuted its wars. Further, the hope that came with the election of Barack Obama has faded as his policies have indicated nothing more than a reconfiguration of the basic tenet of the Bush Doctrine – that the US’s national security interests supersede any consideration of due process or the rule of law. The only difference – witness the rising civilian body count from drone attacks – being that Obama’s doctrine is even more deadly.

Published in The Guardian

WASIM VIEW- The Qureshi article has nothing new in it for Pakistanis as the real Barack Obama is known to us thanks to his doctrine of state terrorism via the deadly drones that daily bombard Pakistan. Yet for the wider Guardian readership the Qureshi article and its contents will be new and newsworthy. Indeed readers will observe how so little has changed since under the Obama Administration since the good old days of Dubya Bush.

Good old Guantanamo of course remains open, whilst extrajudicial killings and rendition continue to replace universal human rights a la ‘change has come to America’. For Pakistan and Pakistanis, the state killing of civilians by way of drone attacks are extrajudicial killings and nothing less and clearly against all norms in international law. The Qureshi article serves in that sense to draw attention to this US war crime against Pakistan, whilst in the meantime the drones continue on their deadly path to Pakistan.

The final article focuses on the many questions that remain unanswered even after the Benazir Bhutto UN Report.

Questions, More Questions by Kamran Shafi

So then, the UN report is out, setting many cats on many dovecotes (or is it mongooses on snake pits?), even hitherto forbidden dovecotes. Good I say, and bully for the UN Commission to say out loud what needed to be said, particularly outing the term ‘the establishment’.

Felicitations to it too for so methodically laying out the quite glaring facts gleaned, no doubt, after months of painstaking work ferreting out the truth from a bureaucracy trained all its life to obfuscate matters if not lie outright to protect itself and its bosses.

So unnerved are the denizens of these snake pits that the ‘ghairat brigade’ is marching once again, this time to denounce the report as yet another Kerry-Lugar bill-like attempt (of the Israeli/Indian/American/Jewish/Hindu/Christian confederacy of course) to undermine Pakistan’s ‘sovereignty’.

Of course, in their blind (and deaf) zeal to protect the establishment, they completely overlook the fact that whilst the wording of the Kerry-Lugar bill is exactly as it always was, the establishment goes on unashamedly receiving US aid: weapons, equipment, cash, whatever. Its ‘fury’ was just for show, mere posturing.

What in God’s name was the ISI’s Rawalpindi detachment commander Col Jehangir Akhtar doing at the Rawalpindi General Hospital after the assassination of Ms Benazir Bhutto and while her body was lying in the hospital? Why did his superior, Maj-Gen Nusrat Naeem, first refuse to admit that he had spoken to Prof Mussadiq, the doctor handling Ms Bhutto’s case (to hear directly from the professor that Ms Bhutto was really, really dead!), and then upon being ‘pressed further’ admit it?

Why did Rawalpindi’s city police officer (another silly designation leftover from Gen Naqvi Sahib’s tinkering with a perfectly adequate system) sneeringly ask a respected person like Prof Mussadiq, who was medical superintendent of the hospital to boot, if an FIR had yet been registered in the case when the professor asked if he should go ahead with carrying out a post-mortem examination on Ms Bhutto? Post-mortems are not held before a FIR, so could the ex-CPO tell us why an FIR had not been registered and the post-mortem carried out? Why, indeed, was the scene of the crime hosed down within hours of the assassination, an assassination, mark, of a person of such exalted status as a twice-elected prime minister and the leader of the largest political party in the whole blessed country? It goes without saying that let alone someone of the rank of a CPO, even an inspector general of police would not by himself dare order the washing of a place where such an important person had been murdered. This is the Land of the Pure, do we not know all of this?

It is a damning report, this one, and flings several well-deserved brickbats at our establishment which I have often described as venal and self-serving and mindless and cruel. It says clearly that it was mystified “by the efforts of certain high-ranking Pakistani government authorities to obstruct access to military and intelligence sources … that the investigation was severely hampered by intelligence agencies and other government officials, which impeded an unfettered search for the truth”.

Far more importantly it says that the ISI “conducted parallel investigations, gathering evidence and detaining suspects”. And that “evidence gathered from such parallel investigations were selectively shared with the police”. The commission also “believes that the failure of the police to investigate effectively Ms Bhutto’s assassination was deliberate”.

The officials, “in part fearing intelligence agencies’ involvement, were unsure of how vigorously they ought to pursue actions, which they knew, as professionals, they should have taken”. Whilst this is absolutely scandalous, as a citizen of this hapless and luckless country I have to once again thank the commission for so clearly saying that our agencies of state are a law unto themselves.

Last but not least, the speeding away of the back-up vehicle with VIP passengers aboard has not been adequately explained. What possessed Babar Awan, Rehman Malik, Tauqeer Zia and far more than all of them put together, Farhatullah Babar to drive hotfoot to Zardari House after they had heard the explosion?

Or is it that they did not hear anything; simply did not know what the devil was going on because while the leader was driving slowly through the crowd, they were rushing pell-mell to Islamabad to prepare for Benazir’s next engagement? We must hear in detail from these four, and soon.

Before we go elsewhere let us close this with a quote from the commission itself: “It remains the responsibility of the Pakistani authorities to carry out a serious, credible criminal investigation that determines who conceived, ordered and executed this heinous crime of historic proportions, and brings those responsible to justice. Doing so would constitute a major step towards ending impunity for political crimes in this country.” How well put, gentlemen.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we hear disconcerting stories from Swat and North Waziristan. Are the Taliban on the march again we ask ourselves amid reports that beheadings are once again the flavour of the times, and that attacks on our forces are once again being carried out with impunity? Where are Muslim Khan and his other cohorts said to be under arrest? Have they been charged with the crimes against humanity they have clearly committed as we saw them admit on TV? There are so many questions and no answers.

Why has the Swat flogging video been challenged two years and more after the flogging happened, by nameless people writing in certain newspapers: articles that have no by-line, no date? Why is their and more than them the newspaper’s memory so selective?

Do they not remember the selfsame Muslim Khan say on live TV the day after the video was shown that the woman was lucky she was only flogged, for her crime deserved being stoned to death? Who is orchestrating this new attempt to paint the Taliban in better colours than those they deserve? The establishment has learnt no lessons from this country’s sad history, my friends — we are in for very great trouble unless the political parties continue to face down the establishment jointly.

PS: I continue to believe that Benazir was killed by a bullet — the professional stance of the shooter, his close proximity to his target, the flying dupatta, and the fact that she fell down before the bomb exploded all point to this theory. Indeed, is the dupatta missing because it has a bullet hole in it? Questions, questions.

Published in Dawn

WASIM VIEW- Kamran Shafi is a sane Pakistani voice and a leading commentator on all things Pakistan and Pakistani. Shafi is right to praise the Benazir Bhutto report that in essence stated the obvious and right too in asking the many questions he has put in his article concerning the role of the military and the ISI in particular.

Given that the stench arising from past military acts of commission and omission remain in the air today, Shafi is right to ask what ISI officers like Jehangir Akhtar and Nusrat Naeem were doing and ordering possibly when dealing with the hospital administration at Rawalpindi General Hospital.

The hoo-haa over the post-mortem and the lack therof is a key question too as is the deliberate destroying of evidence by the police on orders from a dark force no doubt. The PPP do not escape attention with Messrs Malik and Awan in the dock too for their acts of omission a la a Mercedes drive to Zardari House whilst Bhutto lay dying in her car. The missing dupatta of Benazir Bhutto and the gunshot theory too has many takers at least one in Kamran Shafi and is worth investigating too.

On matters non-Benazir Bhutto, Shafi is too right in highlighting the about face of the Pakistan military especially vis a vis the Kerry-Lugar bill. To end, Shafi is also right to ask when will the Muslim Khans of the vile Taliban face justice, I hope it is soon and it is by a public hanging and nothing less.

• My Fatwa Against the Terrorists Creed by DR TAHIR UL QADRI
• Into the Terrifying World of Pakistan’s Disappeared by ROBERT FISK
• Victory for Obama from an Unlikely Quarter-Pakistan by FAREED ZAKARIA

Religious edicts in the form of a fatwa, do not make news too often. A fatwa issued by Dr Tahir ul Qadri has made headline news and rightly so.

My Fatwa Against the Terrorists Creed by Dr Tahir ul Qadri

I have been compelled to issue a fatwa – a comprehensive theological refutation of Islamist terrorism – because of what has been happening in Pakistan over the past year. Terrorists are bombing mosques during Friday prayers, they are burning schools, killing women. They are digging bodies out of graves, cutting off their heads and hanging the bodies from trees.

My 600-page fatwa is based on all four schools of jurisprudence: Hanafi, Shafii, Hanbali and Maliki, and the Shia school of Jafari. I have consulted hundreds of classical Islamic texts, the scholars, fiqh and the Hadith. The main theme is this: any act of terrorism such as suicide bombing cannot be justified in any way. There are no conditions, no pretexts or exemptions. It is condemned by the Quran and the Sunna.

Killing Muslims and non-Muslims through terrorist activities and using violent aggression to impose their mistaken and misplaced ideology is a fundamental rejection of faith. Such acts make the people carrying out the attacks unbelievers, or kufr.

Some scholars have said to me that we know suicide bombing is forbidden but to say that this is an act of an unbeliever is going far. I am not saying anyone who kills is an unbeliever. I say one who is committing acts of terrorism on the basis that it is sanctioned and lawful by Islam is an unbeliever.

The Quran says those who kill in mosques, burn people, blow them up, they will suffer the torments of hellfire. This is one aspect.

A second aspect I have examined is the justification that Muslim rulers in Arab countries or non-Muslims are not enforcing Islamic law so there is an obligation to fight against them. This is absolutely wrong. In no context is any organisation allowed to take up arms on their own and say we are defending Muslim land or we are avenging the aggression of non-Muslim powers. This is a matter for a state and its government.

The holy Prophet Mohammed told his companions that bad rulers would come and the people would curse them and the rulers would curse their people. The companions asked should they not fight them with swords if this time comes? And the holy Prophet said that no, they were not allowed as far as they were Muslims.

As for adopting the defence that the attacks are against foreign aggression, this is the privilege and responsibility of the state to stand up and to fight according to international law. If groups and individuals start taking revenge it will create global anarchy and there will be no rule of law, there will be just killing of mankind.

There is a prophecy of the Prophet Mohammed. He mentioned that the Kharijites would emerge continuously in Islamic history. The Kharijites believed that whoever did not agree with their philosophy was an unbeliever and should be killed. They wanted to resolve everything through the sword and through power. They rose up in the time of the rightly guided Caliphs, Usman and Ali, and fought against them.

This hadith, which appears in dozens of books, says the holy Prophet Mohammed said they would emerge again and again in different centuries until the final time of the anti-Christ. They would arrive more than 20 times. They would keep changing names and appear for the last time as part of the anti-Christ’s army. They would slaughter people.

Al Qa’eda is an old evil with a new name. They are the Kharijites with a new name. They are misguided today like the Khawarij youth were misguided at that time. They were brainwashed although they were religious people who prayed and fasted.

Those who have already decided to become suicide bombers are totally brainwashed. I exclude them from this discussion because they are blind. I am trying to reach the majority who have not reached that stage but have extremist tendencies and are proceeding in that direction.

There are thousands of extremists running websites and applying misguided ideas. The radicals who have no access to classical authorities are misguided and give the wrong concept of jihad. This religious ruling is particularly important for Britain and the western world, where the majority of Muslims are of south Asian origin.

We have seen examples of extremist groups targeting vulnerable young people from these communities to carry out their acts of violence – from training them as suicide bombers to brainwashing students across British universities. I am sure that the hundreds of authorities I have quoted will allow them to rethink, to see that whatever they were taught was wrong.

The fatwa has appeared in Urdu, and English and Arabic translations have been started. It will be translated into many other languages and distributed through the internet accompanied by videos, summaries and talks. We will do whatever is possible to reach the youth with the Almighty Allah’s help and grace.

Already it is happening. We have been contacted by the Afghan president Hamid Karzai’s office and they want a copy to translate into Persian and Pashto. And so it will go.

There have been many other fatwas that condemn suicide bombings and there have been verbal resolutions against it. They were very brief, maybe one or two pages signed by hundreds of scholars and they did not contain many references. These brief declarations were not able to answer the questions or address all the concerns. I thought there was a need to address every major concern, every major and minor aspect which has already been planted in people’s minds.

In Pakistan, some religious scholars have condemned the military action in the Swat valley and North-West Frontier Province, or they have said they already have condemned suicide bombings and acts of terrorism. Some have felt they have fulfilled their duty. But by simply condemning the Pakistani military action or staying silent they are creating doubt in the minds of the common people and youth.

While Muslims resist and fight terrorism and are not ready to accept its remotest possible link with Islam, there are some who are also seen supporting it. Instead of opposing and condemning it openly they confuse the issue.

After this fatwa more scholars will become courageous and stand up.

A few are scared. A friend of mine who recently condemned suicide bombing in Pakistan was assassinated.

This grand fatwa, when it is in the hands of everybody, will give people courage, clarity and motivation.

Published in The National

WASIM VIEW- Suicide bombing is a Satanic curse that haunts Pakistan and the wider Muslim world daily. It is an act of rebellion against ALLAH and a crime against humanity and is haraam or forbidden in Islam. Thus the detailed fatwa against suicide bombing by Dr Tahir ul Qadri’s is most welcome and the need of the hour.

Qadri’s fatwa is coined by him to be a ‘grand fatwa’ and it is grand because it is ‘a comprehensive theological refutation of Islamist terrorism’. A comprehensive 600-page fatwa based on all four schools of Islamic jurisprudence found that ‘any act of terrorism such as suicide bombing cannot be justified in any way. There are no conditions, no pretexts or exemptions. It is condemned by the Quran and the Sunna’.

Qadri’s fatwa is a great service to Islam, because it reaffirms the Islamic viewpoint and tackles head-on the Muslim apologists for terrorism as well as those supporting Jihadi enterprises across the world. Qadri makes it crystal clear for all when he declares that ‘killing Muslims and non-Muslims through terrorist activities and using violent aggression to impose their mistaken and misplaced ideology is a fundamental rejection of faith. Such acts make the people carrying out the attacks unbelievers, or kufr. I say one who is committing acts of terrorism on the basis that it is sanctioned and lawful by Islam is an unbeliever’.

The modern day Muslim delight in undertaking jihad across borders is also tackled head-on especially the justification that Muslim rulers in Arab countries or non-Muslims are not enforcing Islamic law so there is an obligation to fight against them. Qadri rightly declares this ‘as absolutely wrong, in no context is any organisation allowed to take up arms on their own and say we are defending Muslim land or we are avenging the aggression of non-Muslim powers. This is a matter for a state and its government’.

Qadri too rules on acts of foreign aggression and states clearly that ‘this is the privilege and responsibility of the state to stand up and to fight according to international law. If groups and individuals start taking revenge it will create global anarchy and there will be no rule of law, there will be just killing of mankind’. Qadri’s labelling of Al-Qaeda as the infamous and doomed Kharijites is noted especially when he declares ‘Al Qa’eda as an old evil with a new name, they are misguided today like the Khawarij youth were misguided at that time. They were brainwashed although they were religious people who prayed and fasted’.

Qadri’s fatwa is comprehensive and a must read for all Muslims as it can serve to save the fools amongst us our midst especially those in Pakistan who apologise for the Taliban. The universal acclaim the fatwa has received is well deserved and I am encouraged to know that it is being translated in many languages. Dr Tahir ul Qadri has served humanity and Islam in authoring the grand fatwa against suicide bombing, terrorism and Al-Qaeda and I commend him for his efforts.

The second article is more of a report written by one of my favourite journalists, indeed he is an institution, Robert Fisk.

Into the Terrifying World of Pakistan’s Disappeared by Robert Fisk

If you want to know how brutally Pakistan treats its people, you should meet Amina Janjua. An intelligent painter and interior designer, she sits on the vast sofa of her living room in Rawalpindi – a room that somehow accentuates her loneliness – scarf wound tightly round her head, serving tea and biscuits like the middle-class woman she is. And although neither a soldier nor a policeman has ever laid a hand on her, she is a victim of her country’s cruel oppression. Because, five years ago, her husband Masood became one of Pakistan’s “disappeared”.

It is a scandal and a disgrace and, of course, a crime against humanity. Ask not where Masood Janjua has gone – Amina does ask, of course, all the way up to the President – for he has entered that dark world wherein dwell up to 8,000 of Pakistan’s missing citizens, men, for the most part, seized from their homes or from the streets by cops and soldiers on the orders of spies and intelligence agents and Americans since 11 September, 2001. In Lahore alone, there are 120 “torture houses” just for the missing of the Punjab. Their shrieks of pain from the basements could be heard by residents – who complained only that the buildings might provoke bomb attacks. In Pakistan today, preservation counts for more than compassion.

Masood Janjua was 44 when he was “disappeared” on 30 July 2005. He ran an IT college and a travel agency, the father of two boys – Mohamed and Ali, and a girl, Aisha. He just never came home. Nobody saw what happened. Amina, who was 40 at the time, glows when she speaks of him. “We were so extremely close, so happy, our world was so heavenly – we were always visiting friends, having parties at home. He was so caring and kind to our children, so affectionate. That he should be taken from me! I think it was a very big mistake that they did. But when they do it – like this – they never say they were wrong.”

“They”. Everyone I talk to here talks about “they”. Many refuse to talk in case it provokes “them” to undertake a quick execution. “They” is the Inter-Services Intelligence. “They” is military intelligence. “They” are the Americans, some of them present – according to the few “disappeared” who have been released – during torture sessions. The Defence of Human Rights Pakistan (DHRP), the movement which Amina founded with 25 other bereft families, has gathered evidence of English-speaking interrogators who calmly ask victims questions during their torment. Ironically, Amina lives in a military district of Rawalpindi, beside an old British barracks, where US soldiers are observed in Pakistani uniforms – sometimes female American soldiers dressed, so she says, in the uniforms of Pakistani military paramedics.

Even more ironic was the first word she had of her husband after he disappeared. “When I went to the Supreme Court to demand his return, witnesses came forward to say they saw Masood inside an army barracks here in Rawalpindi, very close to his family. Just think – it was within walking distance from our home! He was inside a cell at 111 Brigade barracks. It was so sad for me – it was as if they were being cynical, to keep him so close to his family.”

Amina Janjua found that one of the court witnesses lived in Peshawar and she travelled to the North West Frontier Province to speak to him five months after her husband disappeared. “He had been in the army facility in Rawalpindi. The prisoners were kept in solitary confinement and only when they were taken to the lavatory did they come close to other prisoners. They were forced to wear big hoods – hoods that went right down and covered their shoulders – and the detainees would get no chance to talk to another human being. This man said my husband was there – he even heard the guard call him ‘Janjua’.”

There is evidence that Pakistan’s “disappeared” are moved around, between barracks and interrogation centres and underground torture facilities in different towns and cities. There are also terrible rumours – fostered, some say, by the security authorities – that the army has thrown detainees from helicopters, that the cops dispose of bodies at night by dumping them in swamps or in open countryside so that decay and animal mutilation will cover the marks of torture before the bodies are found. But Amina Janjua believes most of them are alive. You might say she has to believe that.

“After 9/11, everyone was worried. People were ruthlessly disappeared after the New York attacks. No one knew why their loved ones were taken. The first few months were like hell for me. Then I regained my consciousness and said I could not accept all this. I said I would fight. I said I would get my husband back.” Brave words. Brave lady.

So she turned to the only brave institution still fighting in Pakistan: the lawyers and the judges and the courts. So far, the Supreme Court in Islamabad and the Lahore High Court have squeezed around 200 detainees out of the maw of the country’s security apparatus – those, that is, who were still in Pakistan. Many are known to have been freighted off to the tender mercies of the Americans at Bagram in Afghanistan, where Arab detainees have long ago testified to being beaten and sodomised with broom sticks. There have been prisoner murders, too, in Bagram, the jail that President Barack Obama refuses to close.

“At the beginning, I went to the International Red Cross about Masood,” Amina Janjua says. “I saw them over several months. There was no progress. My father-in-law went to many people, he even went to President Musharraf – he trained in the military with Musharraf and they knew each other very well – and Musharraf said, ‘I will do something for you’– but he never did. After that, when we called the President’s house, they would start avoiding us. We wrote to all the Pakistan intelligence agencies. All said my husband could not be found.”

Many families have been given false hopes. “In some villages way out in the country,” Amina recalls, “families were told by the authorities that their sons were coming home. These were poor people but they were so happy, so delighted. They would hold a party and give out sweets and slaughter valuable animals to show their happiness. But then the sons didn’t come home. Can you imagine treating people like this?”

Amina Janjua’s fraudulent hope came in a phone call in 2006, a year after Masood’s disappearance. “We had our first breakthrough when the military secretary of the President called Masood’s father to say that his son was alive and that they had heard about him, though he had been ill – in a fever. That was our first sign of relief.

“Then he started avoiding us again. There was no message after that. Then we were told ‘No, he is not with us, but we are making every effort because the President has made this request to help you.’ I went on asking senior people in the army what had happened to my husband, and they – I put it like this – they started shivering. They would shudder. They could not disclose any information.”

Teaching herself law and fighting her own case, Amina Janjua returned to the Supreme Court. “When I did this, I started hearing of many other cases and things that are happening. And that’s when I realised. It’s not about ‘missing’ people – this is about abduction. I started organising files on these abducted people and eventually I had 788 families on my list and I started conducting research. And we got about 200 prisoners released. The courts ordered this. They were all still in Pakistan. Others, we know, had been taken to Bagram, three or four to Guantanamo Bay where at least we knew they were alive.”

But Amina’s research could prove terrifying. She discovered not only that abducted men were alive. They were also dead. “I suspected some of them had died,” she said. “I know of three prisoners who are dead. One was Mohamed Shafiq; he was a coach driver and they released his death certificate – it said he died of ‘some illness’. He was in his 40s. One of the prisoners, a businessman called Said Menon, died shortly after he was released.

“All of the 200 we got released had been tortured. Initially, it was very ruthless – they were not allowed to sleep; there were beatings and thrashings; they were hanged upside down. There was loud music. There were actual torture rooms where the things were done to them. The prisoners told us they didn’t think their torturers were human beings at all. The faces of the torturers, they said, were horrifying. It was no longer a real world for them. The torturers seemed so powerful, like monsters, so big.”

The questions they were asked were repetitive, according to Amina Janjua. Where are the guns? Where are the weapons? Where is Mullah Omar? Two prisoners described to Amina’s committee how they were made to wear orange jumpsuits, shaven till they were bald and taken for questioning to Islamabad. “They were interrogated by foreigners – they could see them. They were English-speaking. They didn’t know if they were Americans or British.”

The DHRP now holds public protests in all the cities of Pakistan where the prisoners have their homes – in Lahore, Sagoda, Quetta, Faisalabad, Karachi, Peshawar – but the families focus on Islamabad where they demonstrate their fury and their anguish outside the Supreme Court and the offices of President Asif Ali Zardari and the Prime Minister, Yousuf Raza Gilani. The DHRP files show that there are 1,700 missing from Baluchistan alone. At least 4,000 appear to be in the hands of the Pakistani interior ministry, while 2,000 have been handed over to what the DHRP describes as “foreign agencies” – usually, the Americans. Perhaps 750 of the missing Pakistanis are believed to have been taken by the Americans – illegally, of course – to Bagram, the Policharki prison outside Kabul, or to Herat in western Afghanistan.

Published in The Independent

WASIM VIEW- Robert Fisk is an a colossus in the field of journalism and one of the most respected journalists in his field. Fisk is in Pakistan at present and he is very welcome as are his writings.

Fisk reports on the missing people of Pakistan and the story of Mohammed Janjua who disappeared during Musharraf’s rule and remain missing today. Fisk is right to declare this as the brutality of the Pakistani state and right again in declaring such evil as a crime against humanity.

The real news of the Fisk report is that it brings to focus the true cost of 9/11 which is felt in Pakistan to this day.  Writing for a mainly Western audience, his readers will benefit from knowing how Pakistani citizens have had to pay for 9/11 in drones and in the disappearances of ordinary citizens. Thus the real cost of the 9/11 revenge war are laid bare in Fisk’s writings and it is this, ordinary Pakistanis have paid and continue to pay the highest price.

The final article is written by Fareed Zakaria who looks at the never-ending headache, Pakistan-US relations.

A Victory for Obama from an Unlikely Quarter-Pakistan by Fareed Zakaria

President Obama gets much credit for changing America’s image in the world—he was probably awarded the Nobel Prize for doing so. But if you asked even devoted fans to cite a specific foreign-policy achievement, they would probably hesitate. “It’s too soon for that,” they would say. But in fact, there is a place where Barack Obama’s foreign policy is working, and one that is crucial to U.S. national security—Pakistan.

There has been a spate of good news coming out of that complicated country, which has long promised to take action against Islamic militants but rarely done so. (The reason: Pakistan has used many of these same militants to destabilize its traditional foe, India, and to gain influence in Afghanistan.) Over the past few months, the Pakistani military has engaged in serious and successful operations in the militant havens of Swat, Malakand, South Waziristan, and Bajaur. Some of these areas are badlands where no Pakistani government has been able to establish its writ, so the achievement is all the more important. The Pakistanis have also ramped up their intelligence sharing with the U.S. This latter process led to the arrest a month ago of Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the deputy leader of the Afghan Taliban, among other Taliban figures.

Some caveats: most of the Taliban who have been captured are small fish, and the Pakistani military has a history of “catching and releasing” terrorists so that they can impress Americans but still maintain their ties with the militants. But there does seem to be a shift in Pakistani behavior. Why it’s taken place and how it might continue is a case study in the nature and limits of foreign-policy successes.

First, the Obama administration de-fined the problem correctly. Senior ad-ministration officials stopped referring to America’s efforts in Afghanistan and instead spoke constantly of “AfPak,” to emphasize the notion that success in Afghanistan depended on actions taken in Pakistan. This dismayed the Pakistanis but they got the message. They were on notice to show they were part of the solution, not the problem.

Second, the administration used both sticks and carrots. For his first state dinner, Obama pointedly invited Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh—clearly not Pakistan’s first choice. Obama made clear that America would continue to pursue the special relationship forged with India under the Bush administration, including a far-reaching deal on nuclear cooperation. But at the same time, the White House insisted it wanted a deep, long-term, and positive relationship with Pakistan. Sens. John Kerry and Dick Lugar put together the largest nonmilitary package of U.S. assistance for the country ever. Aid to the Pakistani military is also growing rapidly.

Third, it put in time and effort. The administration has adopted what Central Command’s Gen. David Petraeus calls a “whole of government” approach to Pakistan. All elements of U.S. power and diplomacy have been deployed. Pakistan has received more than 25 visits by senior administration officials in the past year, all pushing the Pakistani military to deliver on commitments to fight the militants.

Finally, as always, luck and timing have played a key role. The militants in Pakistan, like those associated with Al Qaeda almost everywhere, went too far, brutally killing civilians, shutting down girls’ schools, and creating an atmosphere of medievalism. Pakistan’s public, which had tended to downplay the problem of terrorism, now saw it as “Pakistan’s war.” The Army, reading the street, felt it had to show results.

These results are still tentative. Pakistan’s military retains its obsession with India—how else to justify a vast budget in a small, poor nation? It has still not acted seriously against any of the major militant groups active against Afghanistan, India, or the United States. The Afghan Taliban, the Haqqani group, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and many smaller groups all operate with impunity within Pakistan. But the Pakistani military is doing more than it has before, and that counts as success in the world of foreign policy.

Such success will endure only if the Obama administration keeps at it. There are some who believe that Pakistan has changed its basic strategy and now understands that it should cut its ties to these groups altogether. Strangely this naive view is held by the U.S. military, whose top brass have spent so many hours with their counterparts in Islamabad that they’ve gone native. It’s up to Obama and his team to remind the generals that pressing Pakistan is a lot like running on a treadmill. If you stop, you move backward, and, most likely, you fall down.

Published in Newsweek

WASIM VIEW- Fareed Zakaria is an Indian-American foreign policy analyst who has struggled to contain his loyalties to both flags in the article above. The Indian view on Pakistan and her alleged terrorism against India comes through in each paragraph, implied politely amidst the big story of President Obama’s success in Pakistan which Zakaria deems to be deserving  of a round of applause.

Zakaria bases his views on the recent successes against the Taliban and he is right to highlight improved Pakistan-US coordination in intelligence and military circles. However such successes are arbitary and come and go, as do the more regular bouts of mistrust in the world of Pakistan-US relations. For a respected foreign policy analyst like Zakaria to declare recent successes as the almost final word on Pakistan being a successful foreign policy experiment for Obama is plain and simple, an untruth.

Evidence against Zakaria’s hypothesis is plentiful with the much sexed-up Pakistan-US strategic dialogue of recent days ending with laughs and very little in substance. Zakaria should rather take note that the Obama Administration are failing in Pakistan with every drone attack that degrades Pakistan and  increases the body count of innocents,. These are ordinary Pakistanis who have perished and will perish in the coming months of April and May and many moons thereafter, die only to feed the monster of revenge that is America, and this is success?

• 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.  

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!

December’s B-side is the final B-side of 2009 and is noteworthy for three reasons. First, it marks the first year of B-side posts published on Other Pakistan and as so is  time to take stock of the year and the key issues that Pakistan has faced in the year. Such reflection is the need of the hour and can be done by a re-read of the B-side posts as shown here. 

Secondly December’s B-side post is special in that this December, four articles are analysed instead of the normal trio of three. Thirdly the authors of the articles are household names for many a reason and include both the former and current President of Pakistan. December’s B-side contents include:

• How To Mend Fences With Pakistan by ASIF ALI ZARDARI
• The Afghanistan-Pakistan Solution by PERVEZ MUSHARRAF
• A Troop Surge Can Only Magnify The Crime Against Afghanistan by MALALAI JOYA
• Kissinger’s Fantasy is Obama’s Reality by PANKAJ MISHRA

The first article is written by the current President of Pakistan and is a must read especially for the critics of the man that is Asif Ali Zardari.

How To Mend Fences With Pakistan by Asif Ali Zardari

NOW that President Obama has recommitted the United States to stand with Pakistan and Afghanistan in our common fight against terrorism, extremism and fanaticism, it would be useful for Americans and Pakistanis to consider what has brought us to this point — and what the conflict’s true endgame must be.

Despite the noise created by an often hyperactive press in Pakistan (an essential and preferable alternative to the censorship that prevailed during my country’s military dictatorships), and the doubts expressed in America, Pakistan’s democratically elected government is unambiguously on the right path toward establishing a moderate and modern nation.

Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani and I are working closely with our national assembly and our military and intelligence agencies to defeat the Taliban insurgency and the Qaeda-backed campaign of terrorism. Simultaneously, we are pursuing policies that will re-establish Pakistan as a vibrant economic market and finally address the long-neglected weaknesses in our education, health, agriculture and energy sectors. This isn’t just rhetoric — it is an active policy with new budget priorities and a reoriented national mindset.

Over the last weeks I have moved forcefully to re-establish the traditional powers of the presidency as defined in the parliamentary model on which our Constitution is based. Our Constitution was distorted and perverted by military dictators who usurped the legal powers of Parliament. In accordance with the manifesto of the Pakistan Peoples Party, I am working toward strengthening the separation of powers of the presidency from those of the prime minister. Recently, I voluntarily handed back the chairmanship of the National Command Authority that exercises control over Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal. Contrary to some of the commentary on the subject, this is not a sign of weakness, but rather a demonstration of the vitality of Pakistani democracy.

As President Obama has noted, Pakistan’s military has courageously executed important actions in the Swat Valley and South Waziristan against terrorists who threaten all of us. Pakistan has paid an enormous price in blood and treasure. But this is a price we are willing to pay. Every day across our land, cowards distort our religion of peace, Islam, by slaughtering innocent people. Three thousand civilians, including my wife, Benazir Bhutto, and 2,000 soldiers and police officers have been killed in the last eight years. Just last week 40 people died in a mosque while at Friday prayers, including 10 children. This is our war as well as America’s.

Yet in both countries there is deep suspicion toward the other. Many Americans still wonder, despite our sacrifices, if Pakistan is doing all it can to fight terrorism. Some resent what they believe is an absence of gratitude in Pakistan for American aid. But consider the history as seen by Pakistanis.

Twice in recent history America abandoned its democratic values to support dictators and manipulate and exploit us. In the 1980s, the United States supported Gen. Muhammad Zia ul-Haq’s iron rule against the Pakistani people while using Pakistan as a surrogate in the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. That decade turned our peaceful nation into a “Kalashnikov and heroin” society — a nation defined by guns and drugs. In its fight against the Soviets, the United States, as a matter of policy, supported the most radical elements within the mujahedeen, who would later become the Taliban and Al Qaeda. When the Soviets were defeated and left in 1989, the United States abandoned Pakistan and created a vacuum in Afghanistan, resulting in the current horror.

And then after 9/11, the United States closed its eyes to the abuses of the dictatorship of President Pervez Musharraf, providing support to the regime while doing little to help with social needs or encourage the restoration of democracy. For Pakistanis, it is a bitter memory.

Public mistrust of the United States also stems from regional issues, specifically policies concerning India. I know it is the conventional wisdom in Washington that my nation is obsessed with India. But even to those of us who are striving toward accommodation and peace, the long history and the unresolved situation in Kashmir give Pakistanis reason to be concerned about our neighbor to the east. Just as the Israeli-Palestinian dispute cannot be resolved without accommodating the Palestinian people, there cannot be permanent regional peace in South Asia without addressing Kashmir.

The recent upset in Pakistan over the Kerry-Lugar legislation, which President Obama signed into law and which requires the secretary of state to report to Congress on military and civil progress in Pakistan, shows how sensitive many here are to what they see as unfair treatment by the United States. It would be helpful if the United States, at some point, would scrutinize India in a similar fashion and acknowledge that it has from time to time played a destabilizing role in the region.

The perceived rhetorical one-sidedness of American policy often fuels the conspiracy theories that abound here — theories that blame the West for all of our ills. Pakistan’s elected democratic leadership is itself a victim of some of these conspiracy theories, but our American partners must understand their origins and work with us to turn public opinion around.

Although we certainly appreciate America’s $7.5 billion pledge over the next five years for nonmilitary projects in Pakistan, this long-term commitment must be complemented by short-term policies that demonstrate American neutrality and willingness to help India and Pakistan overcome their mutual distrust. It could start by stepping up its efforts to mediate the Kashmir dispute.

In recent days, I have thought often of something my wife, Benazir,  wrote in the days before her death: “It is so much easier to blame others for our problems than to accept responsibility ourselves.” Benazir added that conspiracy theories and “toxic rhetoric” were “an opiate that keeps Muslims angry against external enemies and allows them to pay little attention to the internal causes of intellectual and economic decline.”

The free world stands with President Obama in the effort to defeat the extremism that threatens us all. Pakistanis are on the frontlines in this battle.

But we need help. We need the support of our allies in war but also to help build a new Pakistan that promises a meaningful future to our children. We are not looking for — and indeed reject — dependency. We don’t need or want (nor would we accept) foreign troops to defeat the insurgency, and we seek trade more than aid from you in the future. It is an economically viable and socially robust democratic Pakistan that will be the most effective long-term weapon against terrorism, extremism and fanaticism. This is the necessary endgame. And this is how history will judge victory.

Published in The New York Times

WASIM VIEW- Asif Ali Zardari is the current President of Pakistan and like his predecessor is no favourite of mine. However Zardari has pleasantly surprised me in this article in his honest appraisal of Pakistan-US relations over recent decades.

For once, Zardari has presented the Pakistani position with conviction as evidenced by the tenor of the following sentence in his article ‘twice in recent history America abandoned its democratic values to support dictators and manipulate and exploit us’. Zardari mindful of the might of the dollar does of course engage in serenading Sam and his Uncle at times yet delivers many a knockout blow and a harsh truth in this surprisingly impressive article.

Zardari’s article hits a sixer when he refers to Indian evil and tackles head-on the lie of the so-called American conventional wisdom that Pakistan is obsessed with India. Zardari is right and honest in highlighting India’s destabilising role in the region and in reminding America that peace in the region can only arrive when the Kashmir issue is resolved and even asks for US mediation!

On the negative side. Zardari does deliver a cheap shot when he refers to the ‘noise created by an often hyperactive press in Pakistan’ at the start of his article. Such public criticism of the Pakistani press in an article for the foreign media is unbecoming of the office he holds and shows him to be a small man as such trivial issues are not discussed in articles in the foreign media by heads of state.

The second article is written by the war criminal and usurper Pardes Pervez Musharraf. Pardes because the commando general who was so bold and brave is now reduced to only a paper tiger with little bite for he now hides in London after destroying Pakistan yet he has the cheek to offer the pearls of wisdom in the article below:

The Afghanistan-Pakistan Solution by Pervez Musharraf

My recent trip to the United States has been an enriching experience, during which I had a very healthy discourse with the American public and an opportunity to understand their concerns about the war in Afghanistan. One question I was asked almost everywhere I went was, “How can we stop losing?”

The answer is a political surge, in conjunction with the additional troops requested by Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Quitting is not an option.

A military solution alone cannot guarantee success. Armies can only win sometimes, and at best, create an environment for the political process to work. At the end of the day, it is civilians, not soldiers, who have to take charge of their country.

After decades of civil war and anarchy, the Taliban established control over 95% of Afghanistan in 1996. Unfortunately, the Taliban imposed their strict interpretation of Islam on the country. Nevertheless, I proposed to recognize the Taliban regime, in the hope of transforming them from within. Had my strategy been enacted, we might have persuaded the Taliban to deny a safe haven to al Qaeda and avoided the tragic 9/11 attacks.

Another golden opportunity to rescue the Afghan people emerged after the United Nations sanctioned international military operation launched after 9/11. Having liberated Afghanistan from the tyranny of al Qaeda and Taliban, the U.S. had the unequivocal support of the majority of Afghans. The establishment of a truly representative national government which gave proportional representation to all ethnic groups—including the majority Pashtuns—would have brought peace to Afghanistan and ousted al Qaeda once and for all. Unfortunately this did not happen.

The political instability and ethnic imbalance in Afghanistan after 9/11 marginalized the majority Pashtuns and pushed them into the Taliban fold, even though they were not ideological supporters of the Taliban. The blunder of inducting 80,000 troops of Tajiks into the Afghan national army further alienated the Pashtuns.

Meanwhile, Pakistan forcefully tackled the influx of al Qaeda into our tribal areas, capturing over 600 al Qaeda and Afghan Taliban leaders, some of them of very high value. We established 1,000 border checkposts and even offered to mine or fence off the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, but this never came to pass. The Afghan government, led by President Hamid Karzai, had no writ outside of Kabul, and the insufficient ground troops of the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) allowed the Taliban to regroup. The 2004 invasion of Iraq shifted the focus and also contributed to the Taliban gaining ground in Afghanistan.

Al Qaeda terrorists who fled from Afghanistan came to Pakistan and settled initially in South Waziristan. Through successful intelligence and law-enforcement operations, we eliminated al Qaeda from our cities and destroyed their command, communication and propaganda centers. They fled to the adjoining North Waziristan, Bajur and Swat regions.

From 2004 onwards, we witnessed a gradual shift in the terrorist center of gravity. The Taliban started to re-emerge in Afghanistan and gradually gained a dominant role. They developed ties with the Taliban in Pakistan’s tribal areas, especially in North and South Waziristan. With a grand strategy to destabilize the whole region, the Taliban and al Qaeda established links with extremists in Pakistani society on the one hand and with Muslim fundamentalists in India on the other. They pose a grave threat to South Asia and peace in the world.

We now have to deal with a complex situation. Casualties suffered by our soldiers in the line of duty will not go wasted only if we are able to fully secure our next generations from the menace of terrorism. The exit strategy from Afghanistan must not and cannot be time related. It has to ask, “What effect do we want to create on the ground?” We must eliminate al Qaeda, dominate the Taliban militarily, and establish a representative, legitimate government in Afghanistan.

The military must ensure that we deal with insurgents from a position of strength. The dwindling number of al Qaeda elements must be totally eliminated, and the Taliban have to be dominated militarily. We must strengthen border-control measures with all possible means to isolate the militants on the Afghanistan and Pakistan sides.

The Pakistan military must continue to act strongly. Operationally, we must raise substantially more forces from within the tribal groups and equip them with more tanks and guns. On the Afghan side, the U.S. and ISAF troops must be reinforced. All of this must be done in combination with raising additional Afghan National Army troops, with significant Pashtun representation. Exploiting tribal divisions, we should also raise local militias.

On the political front, we need an invigorated dialogue with all groups in Afghanistan, including the Taliban. Afghanistan for centuries has been governed loosely through a social covenant between all the ethnic groups, under a sovereign king. This structure is needed again to bring peace and harmony. We have to reach out to Pashtun tribes and others who do not ideologically align themselves with the Taliban or al Qaeda. I have always said that “all Talibans are Pashtun, but all Pashtuns are not Taliban.” Pakistan and Saudi Arabia can play pivotal roles in facilitating this outreach.

Pakistan and Afghanistan were shortsightedly abandoned to their fate by the West in 1989, in spite of the fact that they were the ones who won a victory for the Free World against the Soviet Union. This abandonment lead to a sense of betrayal amongst the people of the region. For the sake of regional and world peace, let us not repeat the same mistake.

Published in The Wall Street Journal

WASIM VIEW- The author of the article is not  and will never be on my Christmas card list, just like the present President of Pakistan.  General Musharraf is a usurper and a war criminal who has destroyed Pakistan and her institutions and this must be stated at the outset.

The Musharraf article can be best summarised as a wasted endeavor of a fallen and a failed general imparting war advice to a failing US army in Afghanistan. Worse the article offers and promises more ignominy for Pakistan with Musharraf favouring the US surge that will adversely affect Pakistan not least Balochistan. That said what can one expect from Musharraf for he is the author of Pakistan’s present position which is close to a living hell. The land of the pure is burning from Bajaur to Bolan thanks to the decisions of one Pervez Musharraf.

In terms of the article I nearly fell of my chair when I read that ‘armies can only win sometimes, and at best, create an environment for the political process to work. At the end of the day, it is civilians, not soldiers, who have to take charge of their country’. Coming from a usurper who took over Pakistan armed with a gun its shocking to see Musharraf’s respect for the political process, how cute! Furthermore it is a shame the commando general never actioned his own advice when he was in office not least in dealing with Nawab Akbar Bugti via the political process as he now advocates, for that death has sowed the seeds of discontent in Balochistan.

The rest of the Musharraf article concentrates on the past, present and future of Afghanistan as seen by the commando general and much of it is an exercise in futility. Most notable is Musharraf’s desire to reach out to the Pashtun tribes in Afghanistan, on that I can agree and not much else.

The third article is writen by an Afghan heroine covered in  August’s B-side shown here- it is the one and only Malalai Joya. In the article Joya rubbishes President Obama’s new US policy in Afghanistan with her words worth their weight in gold for Joya represents the authentic and true voice of Afghanistan.

A Troop Surge Can Only Magnify The Crime Against Afghanistan by Malalai Joya

After months of waiting, President Obama is about to announce the new US strategy for Afghanistan. His speech may be long awaited, but few are expecting any surprise: it seems clear he will herald a major escalation of the war. In doing so he will be making something worse than a mistake. It is a continuation of a war crime against the suffering people of my country.

I have said before that by installing warlords and drug traffickers in power in Kabul, the US and Nato have pushed us from the frying pan to the fire. Now Obama is pouring fuel on these flames, and this week’s announcement of upwards of 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan will have tragic consequences.

Already this year we have seen the impact of an increase in troops occupying Afghanistan: more violence, and more civilian deaths. My people, the poor of Afghanistan who have known only war and the domination of fundamentalism, are today squashed between two enemies: the US/Nato occupation forces on one hand and warlords and the Taliban on the other.

While we want the withdrawal of one enemy, we don’t believe it is a matter of choosing between two evils. There is an alternative: the democratic-minded parties and intellectuals are our hope for the future of Afghanistan.

It will not be easy, but if we have a little bit of peace we will be better able to fight our own internal enemies – Afghans know what to do with our destiny. We are not a backward people, and we are capable of fighting for democracy, human and women’s rights in Afghanistan. In fact the only way these values will be achieved is if we struggle for them and win them ourselves.

After eight years of war, the situation is as bad as ever for ordinary Afghans, and women in particular. The reality is that only the drug traffickers and warlords have been helped under this corrupt and illegitimate Karzai government. Karzai’s promises of reform are laughable. His own vice-president is the notorious warlord Fahim, whom Brad Adams of Human Rights Watch describes as “one of the most notorious warlords in the country, with the blood of many Afghans on his hands”.

Transparency International reports that this regime is the second most corrupt in the world. The UN Development Programme reports Afghanistan is second last – 181st out of 182 countries – in terms of human development. That is why we no longer want this kind of “help” from the west.

Like many around the world, I am wondering what kind of “peace” prize can be awarded to a leader who continues the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and starts a new war in Pakistan, all while supporting Israel?

Throughout my recent tour of the US, I had the chance to meet many military families and veterans who are working to put an end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. They understand that it is not a case of a “bad war” and a “good war” – there is no difference, war is war.

Members of Iraq Veterans Against War even accompanied me to meet members of Congress in Washington DC. Together we tried to explain the terrible human cost of this war, in terms of Afghan, US and Nato lives. Unfortunately, only a few representatives really offered their support to our struggle for peace.

While the government was not responsive, the people of the US did offer me their support. And polls confirm that the US public wants peace, not an escalated war. Many also want Obama to hold Bush and his administration to account for war crimes. Everywhere I spoke, people responded strongly when I said that if Obama really wanted peace he would first of all try to prosecute Bush and have him tried before the international criminal court. Replacing Bush’s man in the Pentagon, Robert Gates, would have been a good start – but Obama chose not to.

Unfortunately, the UK government shamefully follows the path of the US in Afghanistan. Even though opinion polls show that more than 70% of the population is against the war, Gordon Brown has announced the deployment of more UK troops. It is sad that more taxpayers’ money will be wasted on this war, while Britain’s poor continue to suffer from a lack of basic services.

The UK government has also tried to silence dissent, for instance by arresting Joe Glenton, a British soldier who has refused to return to Afghanistan. I had a chance to meet Glenton when I was in London last summer, and together we spoke out against the war. My message to him is that, in times of great injustice, it is sometimes better to go to jail than be part of committing war crimes.

Facing a difficult choice, Glenton made a courageous decision, while Obama and Brown have chosen to follow the Bush administration. Instead of hope and change, in foreign policy Obama is delivering more of the same. But I still have hope because, as our history teaches, the people of Afghanistan will never accept occupation.

Published in The Guardian

WASIM VIEW- ‘It is a continuation of a war crime against the suffering people of my country’ is the signature sentence of the Malalai Joya article and it refers to her reaction to President Obama’s troop surge.

What is important about Joya’s article is that its written by an Afghan woman, a daughter of the Afghan soil who knows her country inside out and so when she writes that ‘by installing warlords and drug traffickers in power in Kabul, the US and Nato have pushed us from the frying pan to the fire’, such words are not mere rhetoric but the harsh truth. Joya is right in declaring that Obama’s troop surge will amount to pouring fuel on those flames and is right too in ‘wondering what kind of “peace” prize can be awarded to a leader who continues the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan, and starts a new war in Pakistan, all while supporting Israel?’

Joya finishes her article with a truth some may say with a warning that ‘instead of hope and change, in foreign policy Obama is delivering more of the same. But I still have hope because, as our history teaches, the people of Afghanistan will never accept occupation’. I echo the sentiments of Joya and recall the fact that Afghanistan remains the graveyard of empires, let the American empire be warned.

The final article is written by an Indian author and is a must read for it is written with an independent mind and concludes that the celebrity President Obama will fail in Afghanistan unless and until he focuses effort on resolving the Kashmir issue.

Kissinger’s Fantasy is Obama’s Reality by Pankaj Mishra

Meeting George Bush at the White House to discuss Afghanistan, the Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid once marvelled at how a “US president could live in such an unreal world, where the entire military and intelligence establishments were so gullible, the media so complacent, Congress so unquestioning – all of them involved in feeding half-truths to the American public”.

The masters of war and delusion are still flourishing. Widening his campaign of extrajudicial execution by drone missiles within Pakistan, Barack Obama seems far from abandoning an anachronistic American faith in superior firepower; the militarism of our new Nobel peace laureate seems constrained only by its steep financial costs.

Unabashed about their cheerleading in Iraq, many mainstream American journalists and columnists continue to resemble court scriveners of the kind the Mughal emperors employed: “intense”, “methodical” and “rigorous” were some of the adjectives used to describe Obama’s protracted decision-making on Afghanistan. As for the decision itself, Fareed Zakaria, fresh from a “small lunch” with the president at the White House, expressed the new liberal-hawk consensus when he exulted: “Obama is a realist by temperament, learning, and instinct.”

Actually, Obama’s idea of sending 30,000 more soldiers to help subdue the Taliban, reinforce the corrupt regime in Kabul, and assassinate more people in Pakistan until the inevitable American retreat, seems a particularly incoherent fantasy. Perhaps Zakaria means that Obama is a “realist” in the same way as Henry Kissinger was praised as one, doggedly pursuing “national interests” through the world’s manifold complexity. After all, Obama invoked Kissinger’s apparently prestigious imprimatur when he proposed to bomb “safe havens” for terrorists in Pakistan during his presidential debate with John McCain last year.

Certainly a more historically grounded realism would acknowledge that Pakistan, a nuclear-armed nation with a highly politicised postcolonial population, is not Cambodia – the hapless country Kissinger and Nixon devastated after failing to make Vietnam fall in line with American national interests. Or that the Pashtuns, though never colonised and hardly ever a nationality, have repeatedly proved more effective than the most organised anti-colonial movements in expelling foreign occupiers from their land.

Unleashing greater firepower on Afghanistan and Pakistan, Obama could have learned from the shrewd psychological realism of his early hero, James Baldwin. “Force,” Baldwin wrote during Kissinger and Nixon’s last desperate assault on Indochina, “does not reveal to the victim the strength of his adversary. On the contrary, it reveals the weakness, even the panic of his adversary and this revelation invests the victim with patience.”

The Taliban, predictably resurgent as a result of Nato’s blunderbuss tactics, may now choose to lie low for a while. The general respite from violence may even prove long enough for Obama’s intellectual courtiers to declare that the surge in Afghanistan has “worked”. As in Iraq, a new cycle of suicide bombings may then begin; but America, and its media, will have already turned away.

The realism of American foreign policy, it seems, can only be selective and ephemeral, as American elites endlessly calibrate their national interests – invading, bombing and abandoning vast regions as they please, leaving other people to pick up the pieces.

Obama’s long speech on Afghanistan barely mentioned Pakistan, which in 2005 suffered a single suicide attack and now – after the intensified American-led or directed assaults on Afghanistan, Swat and Waziristan – suffers several such outrages in a week. In the same speech Obama did not refer even once to India, with which Pakistan has fought three wars over Kashmir, and whose military occupation of the Muslim-majority valley remains the biggest recruiting tool for jihadists in Pakistan, such as those who led the terrorist attack on Mumbai a year ago. (Not much exaggeration is needed to indoctrinate them: an Indian human rights group last week published evidence of the mass graves of nearly 3,000 Muslims allegedly executed over the last decade by Indian security forces near the border with Pakistan.) Obama will of course speak of Afghanistan’s neighbours when another jihadi assault on India, which is very likely, brings India and Pakistan closer to war, endangering America’s campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaida. But it is also true that the historical and geopolitical relationships between India, Pakistan and Afghanistan may be too fraught for American foreign policy realists to reckon with.

In 1971, India facilitated the secession of Pakistan’s easternmost province (now Bangladesh), provoking Pakistan’s humiliated army and intelligence officials to pursue a policy of creating “strategic depth” against India by seeking Pashtun clients inside Afghanistan. In the 1990s, Pakistani officials who helped supply the mujahideen during the CIA-led anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan turned to fuelling the popular insurgency in India-ruled Kashmir, which since 1989 has claimed more than 80,000 lives. Throughout the decade, Pakistan’s highly secretive intelligence agency, the ISI, trained and financed militant Islamist groups for jihad in Kashmir – even as it settled on the Taliban as its proxy in Afghanistan, which had been abruptly abandoned by the US following the Soviet withdrawal.

Obama himself identified Kashmir as the rusty nail in south Asia’s body politic a month before he was elected. Discussing the situation in Afghanistan, he told Joe Klein of Time magazine that “working with Pakistan and India to try to resolve the Kashmir crisis in a serious way” were “critical tasks for the next administration”. But, assuming the presidency, Obama inherited other, more strategic as well as lucrative national interests.

The Bush administration had wished to build up India as a strategic US ally and counterweight to China in Asia. Encouraged by an assertive Indian-American lobby, and American arms manufacturers, Bush offered an exceptionally generous civil nuclear agreement to India – which, unlike Iran, has long refused to sign the non-proliferation treaty. India is now finally an open market for US defence companies: Lockheed Martin alone hopes to cut deals worth $15bn over the next five years.

Of course, as China increasingly underwrites the American economy, notions of “containing” the Middle Kingdom through pro-America allies now look like some idle cold-war game-playing in Condoleezza Rice’s state department. But the Bush administration’s decision to legitimise India’s nuclear status, and to help project the country as a rising superpower, has stoked an old paranoia in Pakistan (and indeed in China, which, breaking from its policy of befriending previously hostile neighbours like Vietnam and Mongolia, has recently assumed its harshest stance towards India in decades).

American officials often complain that Pakistan’s security establishment is “obsessed” with India. Seen through the perspective of American national interests, the obsession seems purely irrational, a frustrating diversion from the urgent task of combating anti-American extremists. But Pakistan sees India as gaining “strategic depth” in its own backyard, using Afghanistan – where India has poured over a billion dollars in aid since 2001 and has four consulates in addition to its embassy in Kabul – to support secessionists in the troubled ¬ Pakistani province of Baluchistan.

Pakistan’s leaders – who are convinced that America will abandon Islamabad just as it did Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 – will play the same charade with Obama that General Musharraf’s foreign minister once frankly described as, “First say yes, and later say but”. They may well launch a few token crackdowns on militants but are unlikely to abandon the possibility of allowing some to remain in order to unleash them, at a later date, on India-ruled Kashmir. As always, the road to stability in Pakistan and Afghanistan runs through the valley of Kashmir; and in making south Asia’s primary conflict disappear, Obama now seems yet another exponent of that exhausted genre of magical realism.

Published in The Guardian

WASIM VIEW- Mishra’s article is well-written as you would expect from an author. It is also hard-hitting and truthful, take for example his condemnation of US drones referring to them as a ’campaign of extrajudicial execution’. More words of wisdom that I concur with include ‘Obama’s idea of sending 30,000 more soldiers to help subdue the Taliban, reinforce the corrupt regime in Kabul, and assassinate more people in Pakistan until the inevitable American retreat, seems a particularly incoherent fantasy’.

I was not surprised or startled when Mishra opines that ‘Obama’s long speech on Afghanistan barely mentioned Pakistan, which in 2005 suffered a single suicide attack and now – after the intensified American-led or directed assaults on Afghanistan, Swat and Waziristan – suffers several such outrages in a week’. The US impact is no longer measured in simple proofs of the legendary taste of the pudding anymore but in the blood bowl of innocents that die daily as Uncle Sam asks Pakistan to ‘do more’.

Mishra’s views on Kashmir and India as a proud Indian are a breath of fresh air and prove that honest individuals reside on the eastern side of Pakistan’s border. On Kashmir Mishra is only too right in whose military occupation of the Muslim-majority valley remains the biggest recruiting tool for jihadists in Pakistan, such as those who led the terrorist attack on Mumbai a year ago. (Not much exaggeration is needed to indoctrinate them: an Indian human rights group last week published evidence of the mass graves of nearly 3,000 Muslims allegedly executed over the last decade by Indian security forces near the border with Pakistan.) I concur entirely.

On India, Mishra revisits history when he says that ‘In 1971, India facilitated the secession of Pakistan’s easternmost province (now Bangladesh), provoking Pakistan’s humiliated army and intelligence officials to pursue a policy of creating “strategic depth” against India by seeking Pashtun clients inside Afghanistan. In the 1990s, Pakistani officials who helped supply the mujahideen during the CIA-led anti-Soviet jihad in Afghanistan turned to fuelling the popular insurgency in India-ruled Kashmir, which since 1989 has claimed more than 80,000 lives. Once again I concur.

Mishra is right in reminding the celebrity President Obama that ‘working with Pakistan and India to try to resolve the Kashmir crisis in a serious way were critical tasks for the next administration’. In his final conclusion Mishra writes that ‘as always, the road to stability in Pakistan and Afghanistan runs through the valley of Kashmir; and in making south Asia’s primary conflict disappear, Obama now seems yet another exponent of that exhausted genre of magical realism’. Once again I concur with the brilliant and true words of Pankaj Mishra who has proved in this article that Indians like Pakistanis can speak the raw truth on Pakistan, India and Kashmir and hats off to him for doing so.

November’s B-side covers a wide canvas and begins by looking at the vitroil directed at Pakistan and her nuclear status in the form of continous allegations of proliferation by Dr AQ Khan. The second article looks at the potential of the wider South Asia region if the IPI gas pipeline dream is realised linking Pakistan with Iran and India . The final article centres on Afghanistan and at Matthew Hoh’s resignation letter,  the now famous and for some infamous official who has resigned from the US Foreign Service for its flawed policies in Afghanistan.

November’s B-side contents include:

• A Nuclear Power’s Act of Proliferation by R. JEFFERY SMITH & JOBY WARWICK
• Energising Peace by SALEEM H. ALI & PARAG KHANNA
• Resignation Letter by MATTHEW HOH

The first article is an article if I can call it that, which claims to detail Pakistan’s nuclear proliferation story and is a charge sheet against the land of the pure.

A Nuclear Power’s Act of Proliferation by R. Jeffery Smith & Joby Warwick

In 1982, a Pakistani military C-130 left the western Chinese city of Urumqi with a highly unusual cargo: enough weapons-grade uranium for two atomic bombs, according to accounts written by the father of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons program, Abdul Qadeer Khan, and provided to The Washington Post.

The uranium transfer in five stainless-steel boxes was part of a broad-ranging, secret nuclear deal approved years earlier by Mao Zedong and Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto that culminated in an exceptional, deliberate act of proliferation by a nuclear power, according to the accounts by Khan, who is under house arrest in Pakistan.

U.S. officials say they have known about the transfer for decades and once privately confronted the Chinese — who denied it — but have never raised the issue in public or sought to impose direct sanctions on China for it. President Obama, who said in April that “the world must stand together to prevent the spread of these weapons,” plans to discuss nuclear proliferation issues while visiting Beijing on Tuesday.

According to Khan, the uranium cargo came with a blueprint for a simple weapon that China had already tested, supplying a virtual do-it-yourself kit that significantly speeded Pakistan’s bomb effort. The transfer also started a chain of proliferation: U.S. officials worry that Khan later shared related Chinese design information with Iran in 2003, Libya confirmed obtaining it from Khan’s clandestine network.

China’s refusal to acknowledge the transfer and the unwillingness of the United States to confront the Chinese publicly demonstrate how difficult it is to counter nuclear proliferation. Although U.S. officials say China is now much more attuned to proliferation dangers, it has demonstrated less enthusiasm than the United States for imposing sanctions on Iran over its nuclear efforts, a position Obama wants to discuss.

Although Chinese officials have for a quarter-century denied helping any nation attain a nuclear capability, current and former U.S. officials say Khan’s accounts confirm the U.S. intelligence community’s long-held conclusion that China provided such assistance.

“Upon my personal request, the Chinese Minister . . . had gifted us 50 kg [kilograms] of weapon-grade enriched uranium, enough for two weapons,” Khan wrote in a previously undisclosed 11-page narrative of the Pakistani bomb program that he prepared after his January 2004 detention for unauthorized nuclear commerce.

“The Chinese gave us drawings of the nuclear weapon, gave us kg50 enriched uranium,” he said in a separate account sent to his wife several months earlier.

China’s Foreign Ministry last week declined to address Khan’s specific assertions, but it said that as a member of the global Non-Proliferation Treaty since 1992, “China strictly adheres to the international duty of prevention of proliferation it shoulders and strongly opposes . . . proliferation of nuclear weapons in any forms.”

Asked why the U.S. government has never publicly confronted China over the uranium transfer, State Department spokesman Philip J. Crowley said, “The United States has worked diligently and made progress with China over the past 25 years. As to what was or wasn’t done during the Reagan administration, I can’t say.”

Khan’s exploits have been described in multiple books and public reports since British and U.S. intelligence services unmasked the deeds in 2003. But his own narratives — not yet seen by U.S. officials — provide fresh details about China’s aid to Pakistan and its reciprocal export to China of sensitive uranium-enrichment technology.

A spokesman for the Pakistani Embassy in Washington declined to comment for this article. Pakistan has never allowed the U.S. government to question Khan or other top Pakistani officials directly, prompting Congress to demand in legislation approved in September that future aid be withheld until Obama certifies that Pakistan has provided “relevant information from or direct access to Pakistani nationals” involved in past nuclear commerce.

Insider vs Government

The Post obtained Khan’s detailed accounts from Simon Henderson, a former journalist at the Financial Times who is now a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and who has maintained correspondence with Khan. In a first-person account about his contacts with Khan in the Sept. 20 edition of the London Sunday Times, Henderson disclosed several excerpts from one of the documents.

Henderson said he agreed to The Post’s request for a copy of that letter and other documents and narratives written by Khan because he believes an accurate understanding of Pakistan’s nuclear history is relevant for U.S. policymaking. The Post independently confirmed the authenticity of the material; it also corroborated much of the content through interviews in Pakistan and other countries.

Although Khan disputes various assertions by book authors, the narratives are particularly at odds with Pakistan’s official statements that he exported nuclear secrets as a rogue agent and implicated only former government officials who are no longer living. Instead, he repeatedly states that top politicians and military officers were immersed in the country’s foreign nuclear dealings.

Khan has complained to friends that his movements and contacts are being unjustly controlled by the government, whose bidding he did — providing a potential motive for his disclosures.

Overall, the narratives portray his deeds as a form of sustained, high-tech international horse-trading, in which Khan and a series of top generals successfully leveraged his access to Europe’s best centrifuge technology in the 1980s to obtain financial assistance or technical advice from foreign governments that wanted to advance their own efforts.

“The speed of our work and our achievements surprised our worst enemies and adversaries and the West stood helplessly by to see a Third World nation, unable even to produce bicycle chains or sewing needles, mastering the most advanced nuclear technology in the shortest possible span of time,” Khan boasts in the 11-page narrative he wrote for Pakistani intelligence officials about his dealings with foreigners while head of a key nuclear research laboratory.

Exchanges with Beijing

According to one of the documents, a five-page summary by Khan of his government’s dealmaking with China, the terms of the nuclear exchange were set in a mid-1976 conversation between Mao and Bhutto. Two years earlier, neighboring India had tested its first nuclear bomb, provoking Khan — a metallurgist working at a Dutch centrifuge manufacturer — to offer his services to Bhutto.

Khan said he and two other Pakistani officials — including then-Foreign Secretary Agha Shahi, since deceased — worked out the details when they traveled to Beijing later that year for Mao’s funeral. Over several days, Khan said, he briefed three top Chinese nuclear weapons officials — Liu Wei, Li Jue and Jiang Shengjie — on how the European-designed centrifuges could swiftly aid China’s lagging uranium-enrichment program. China’s Foreign Ministry did not respond to questions about the officials’ roles.

“Chinese experts started coming regularly to learn the whole technology” from Pakistan, Khan states, staying in a guesthouse built for them at his centrifuge research center. Pakistani experts were dispatched to Hanzhong in central China, where they helped “put up a centrifuge plant,” Khan said in an account he gave to his wife after coming under government pressure. “We sent 135 C-130 plane loads of machines, inverters, valves, flow meters, pressure gauges,” he wrote. “Our teams stayed there for weeks to help and their teams stayed here for weeks at a time.”

In return, China sent Pakistan 15 tons of uranium hexafluoride (UF6), a feedstock for Pakistan’s centrifuges that Khan’s colleagues were having difficulty producing on their own. Khan said the gas enabled the laboratory to begin producing bomb-grade uranium in 1982. Chinese scientists helped the Pakistanis solve other nuclear weapons challenges, but as their competence rose, so did the fear of top Pakistani officials that Israel or India might preemptively strike key nuclear sites.

Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, the nation’s military ruler, “was worried,” Khan said, and so he and a Pakistani general who helped oversee the nation’s nuclear laboratories were dispatched to Beijing with a request in mid-1982 to borrow enough bomb-grade uranium for a few weapons.

After winning Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping’s approval, Khan, the general and two others flew aboard a Pakistani C-130 to Urumqi. Khan says they enjoyed barbecued lamb while waiting for the Chinese military to pack the small uranium bricks into lead-lined boxes, 10 single-kilogram ingots to a box, for the flight to Islamabad, Pakistan’s capital.

According to Khan’s account, however, Pakistan’s nuclear scientists kept the Chinese material in storage until 1985, by which time the Pakistanis had made a few bombs with their own uranium. Khan said he got Zia’s approval to ask the Chinese whether they wanted their high-enriched uranium back. After a few days, they responded “that the HEU loaned earlier was now to be considered as a gift . . . in gratitude” for Pakistani help, Khan said.

He said the laboratory promptly fabricated hemispheres for two weapons and added them to Pakistan’s arsenal. Khan’s view was that none of this violated the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty, because neither nation had signed it at the time and neither had sought to use its capability “against any country in particular.” He also wrote that subsequent international protests reeked of hypocrisy because of foreign assistance to nuclear weapons programs in Britain, Israel and South Africa.

U.S. Unaware of Progress

The United States was suspicious of Pakistani-Chinese collaboration through this period. Officials knew that China treasured its relationship with Pakistan because both worried about India; they also knew that China viewed Western nuclear policies as discriminatory and that some Chinese politicians had favored the spread of nuclear arms as a path to stability.

But U.S. officials were ignorant about key elements of the cooperation as it unfolded, according to current and former officials and classified documents.

China is “not in favor of a Pakistani nuclear explosive program, and I don’t think they are doing anything to help it,” a top State Department official reported in a secret briefing in 1979, three years after the Bhutto-Mao deal was struck. A secret State Department report in 1983 said Washington was aware that Pakistan had requested China’s help, but “we do not know what the present status of the cooperation is,” according to a declassified copy.

Meanwhile, Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang promised at a White House dinner in January 1984: “We do not engage in nuclear proliferation ourselves, nor do we help other countries develop nuclear weapons.” A nearly identical statement was made by China in a major summary of its nonproliferation policies in 2003 and on many occasions in between.

Fred McGoldrick, a senior State Department nonproliferation official in the Reagan and Clinton administrations, recalls that the United States learned in the 1980s about the Chinese bomb-design and uranium transfers. “We did confront them, and they denied it,” he said. Since then, the connection has been confirmed by particles on nuclear-related materials from Pakistan, many of which have characteristic Chinese bomb program “signatures,” other officials say.

Hans M. Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, said that except for the instance described by Khan, “we are not aware of cases where a nuclear weapon state has transferred HEU to a non-nuclear country for military use.” McGoldrick also said he is aware of “nothing like it” in the history of nuclear weapons proliferation. But he said nothing has ever been said publicly because “this is diplomacy; you don’t do that sort of thing . . . if you want them to change their behavior.”

Warrick reported from Islamabad. Staff researcher Julie Tate in Washington and Beijing bureau assistant Wang Juan contributed to this report.

Published in Washington Post

WASIM VIEW- The Washington Post is known to Pakistanis for its favourite pastime, we can call it Pakistan pastime and it involves demonising Pakistan on a daily basis. The Smith & Warwick article must be read in that context and is basically a charge-sheet against Pakistan and China and their nuclear partnership.

The crux of the article is that China helped Pakistan in the early stages of our nuclear programme via secret uranium transfer as per a deal done by Mao Zedong and Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto in the late 70’s.  More damaging allegations against Pakistan and China (absurd allegations if you ask me) make up the majority of the article with the Washington Post basing its claims on evidence via some supposed correspondence between Dr AQ Khan and one Simon Henderson.

Henderson declares his motivations in sharing these state secrets ‘because he believes an accurate understanding of Pakistan’s nuclear history is relevant for U.S. policymaking’. In that statement Henderson’s motives are made clear for one and all to understand and they need not any elaboration. To conclude the article deserves little attention for it is a soap opera of a story and at best, mere conjecture.

The second article is written by a Pakistani and an Indian and looks at the potential of a South Asia of peace and prosperity via the IPI pipeline and deserves readers attention.

Energising Peace by Saleem. H Ali & Parag Khanna

The lessons of geography appear to be ignored by policymakers in Washington D.C. these days. The Obama administration is pursuing tenuous negotiations with Iran regarding its supply of low-enriched uranium, in the hopes of taking the first step to erase the longstanding animosity between the two countries. It is also rethinking its Afghanistan and Pakistan policy to emphasize reconstruction and economic development. These two strategies are unfortunately disconnected — despite the fact that Afghanistan shares a 600-mile-long strategic border with Iran.

Neither a “surge” of troops and aid in Afghanistan, nor negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program without addressing its regional isolation, will bring Central Asia much closer to stability. The United States must support a policy that addresses the major deficiency all these countries share in common: a lack of clean, affordable energy for their poor populations. Only natural gas pipelines, not military supply lines, can do this.

The United States has so far been ambivalent about using Central Asia’s natural resources to guide its policy, confounding the prospects for pipeline development. Yet without an energy infrastructure, individual U.S. reconstruction programs are going to struggle to get off the ground. For example, the Reconstruction Opportunity Zones (ROZs) established in Pakistan’s tribal areas, which provide goods produced in these areas with duty-free access to the U.S. market, will have little impact without a steady energy supply to fuel local industry. Pipelines and power lines can be a much more significant economic stimulus. By providing energy for power-starved nations, they can empower microeconomic activity through lower fuel and electricity costs.

Natural gas pipelines can also provide an impetus for a diplomatic breakthrough with Iran. Two proposed pipeline routes currently offer the greatest opportunity to solidify regional integration and create lasting stability: the route from Iran via Pakistan to India (IPI), and from Turkmenistan via Afghanistan and Pakistan to India (TAPI). But thus far, the U.S. had sought to hinder international commerce with Iran, lobbying only for pipeline routes that avoid Iranian territory. It actively lobbied against the proposed Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) project – even despite its tacit acceptance of the pipeline that runs between Iran and Turkey. This Iran-Turkey pipeline, which traverses Turkey’s volatile Kurdish region, also exemplifies how security along such infrastructure can be adequately provided, even in conflict zones.

The IPI pipeline might represent the most promising confidence-building measure with Iran. Furthermore, recent discussions surrounding TAPI actually route it through Iran as well. If this turns out to be the case, it will force the U.S. to accept that the stabilization of Pakistan and Afghanistan requires a rapprochement with Iran. Since demand for gas in South Asia continues to skyrocket, the U.S. should encourage both projects and actively link their implementation to its conflict resolution strategy for the region. Détente with Iran need not wait for a nuclear breakthrough.

Furthermore, depending on the route of the pipeline, Afghanistan could earn as much as $100 million per year from transit fees of pipelines, providing a necessary boost for Afghanistan’s perpetually aid-dependent government.

These pipelines will aid, not hinder, America’s efforts to provide economic relief to Pakistan as well. Even with the fairly high prices for gas Iran offers to Pakistan, IPI could save the country between $652 million and $1.17 billion annually, depending on the price of oil. This is approximately the same amount as the Kerry-Lugar legislation would deliver in non-military aid each year to Pakistan. According to government reports, Pakistan currently has an energy shortfall of between 3000 and 4000 megawatts (MW), while India’s shortfall is estimated to be between 15,000 and 20,000 MW. For this reason, the development of energy projects were a focus of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s recent visit to Islamabad – however, the talks reportedly ignored the regional context of this issue.

Finally, given concerns about climate change, natural gas pipelines offer donors an opportunity to limit the output of carbon emissions. Natural gas is likely to be the cleanest and most cost-effective fuel to meet Pakistan and India’s energy shortfall. Apart from its use in power plants, natural gas is also being used in the transportation sector. The significance of compressed natural gas (CNG) in India was highlighted as early as 1998, when the Supreme Court ruled that all commercial vehicles in New Delhi should switch to natural gas by 2001 due to pollution concerns from diesel and petrol engines. Pakistan already has more than a million cars on CNG and ranks third in global CNG use after Brazil and Argentina. What’s more, while oil is still largely transported across the globe by a fleet of more than 38,000 pollution-causing marine tankers, 93% of the world’s gas continues to be supplied through pipelines.

Natural gas development offers a unique opportunity to tackle strategic, diplomatic, and environmental goals at the same time. Even in the world’s most turbulent region, there is a possibility for renewed trade along what ancient merchants knew as the Silk Road.

If we genuinely want to stabilize this crisis zone without a heavy American footprint, new energy-based Silk Roads are the solution.

Published in Foreign Policy

WASIM VIEW- The Ali & Khanna article is a good one and is written by a Pakistani and an Indian and is not as far as I know, not another waste of a time of a confidence building measure! The article is nevertheless well worth a read and centres on the potential of the South Asia region based on the use of ‘natural gas pipelines, not military supply lines’.

Ali & Khanna do their best work in showing the key links, moreover the lack of them in terms of US policies towards Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan.  In summary US-Iran relations are not the best and the nuclear issue remains a big stumbling block, meanwhile Afghanistan remains under US occupation under Karzai of Kabul whilst Pakistan suffers from American influence in almost all things Pakistan.

The conclusion Ali & Khanna make and I agree with it is that the US footprint in the region is heavy and failing as opportunities for peace and partnership are neglected and even discouraged by Uncle Sam with the US opposition to the IPI and TAPI gas pipelines being a case in point. The solution is for the US to grow up from its childlike opposition to a partnership approach in the region with Ali & Khanna arguing that ‘natural gas development offers a unique opportunity to tackle strategic, diplomatic, and environmental goals at the same time… If we genuinely want to stabilize this crisis zone without a heavy American footprint, new energy-based Silk Roads are the solution’. I could not agree more.

The final article is a  look at Matthew Hoh’s resignation letter, a letter that rocked the US for it detailed US folly in Afghanistan, I need not say any more for the letter does all the talking.

Resignation Letter by Matthew Hoh

US Foreign Service Officer Matthew P. Hoh,

Senior Civilian Representative, Afghanistan

September 10, 2009

Ambassador Nancy J. Powell

Director General of the Foreign Service and Director of Human Resources

U.S. Department of State

2201 C Street NW

Washington, D.C. 20520

Dear Ambassador Powell,

It is with great regret and disappointment I submit my resignation from my appointment as a Political Officer in the Foreign Service and my post as the Senior Civilian Representative for the US Government in Zabul Province. I have served six of the previous ten years in service to our country overseas, to include deployment as a US Marine office and Department of Defense civilian in the Euphrates and Tigris River Valleys of Iraq in 2004-2005 and 2006-2007. I did not enter into this position lightly or with any undue expectations nor did I believe my assignment would be without sacrifice, hardship or difficulty. However, in the course of my five months of service in Afghanistan, in both Regional Commands East and South, I have lost understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan. I have doubts and reservations about our current strategy and planned future strategy, but my resignation is based not upon how we are pursuing this war, but why and to what end. To put simply: I fail to see the value or the worth in continued US casualties or expenditures of resources in support of the Afghan government in what is, truly, a 35-year old civil war.

This fall will mark the eighth year of US combat, governance and development operations within Afghanistan. Next fall, the United States’ occupation will equal in length the Soviet Union’s own physical involvement in Afghanistan. Like the Soviets, we continue to secure and bolster a failing state, while encouraging an ideology and system of government unknown and unwanted by its people.

If the history of Afghanistan is one great stage play, the United States is no more than a supporting actor, among several previously, in a tragedy that not only pits tribes, valleys, clans, villages and families against one another, but, from at least the end of King Zahir Shah’s reign, has violently and savagely pitted the urban, secular, educated and modern of Afghanistan against the rural, religious, illiterate and traditional. It is this latter group that composes and supports the Pashtun insurgency. The Pashtun insurgency, which is composed of multiple, seemingly infinite, local groups, is fed by what is perceived by the Pashtun people as a continued and sustained assault, going back centuries, on Pashtun land, culture, traditions and religion by internal and external enemies. The US and NATO presence and operations in Pashtun valleys and villages, as well as Afghan army and police units that are led and composed of non- Pashtun soldiers and police, provide an occupation force against which the insurgency is justified. In both RC East and South, I have observed that the bulk of the insurgency fights not for the white banner of the Taliban, but rather against the presence of foreign soldiers and taxes imposed by an unrepresentative government in Kabul.

The United States military presence in Afghanistan greatly contributes to the legitimacy and strategic message of the Pashtun insurgency. In a like manner our backing of the Afghan government in its current form continues to distance the government from the people. The Afghan government’s failings, particularly when weighed against the sacrifice of American lives and dollars, appear legion and metastatic:

• Glaring corruption and unabashed graft
• A President whose confidants and chief advisors comprise drug lords and war crimes villains, who mock our own rule of law and counternarcotics efforts
• A system of provincial and district leaders constituted of local power brokers, opportunists and strongmen allied to the United States solely for, and limited by, the value of our USAID and CERP contracts and for whose own political and economic interests stand nothing to gain from any positive or genuine attempts at reconciliation
• The recent election process dominated by fraud and discredited by low voter turnout, which has created an enormous victory for our enemy who now claims a popular boycott and will call into question worldwide our government’s military, economic and diplomatic support for an invalid and illegitimate Afghan government.

Our support for this kind of government, coupled with a misunderstanding of the insurgency’s true nature, reminds me horribly of our involvement with South Vietnam; an unpopular and corrupt government we backed at the expense of our Nation’s own internal peace, against an insurgency whose nationalism we arrogantly and ignorantly mistook as a rival to our own Cold War ideology.

I find specious the reasons we ask for bloodshed and sacrifice from our young men and women in Afghanistan. If honest, our stated strategy of securing Afghanistan to prevent al-Qaeda resurgence or regrouping would require us to additionally invade and occupy western Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, etc. Our presence in Afghanistan has only increased destabilization and insurgency in Pakistan where we rightly fear a toppled or weakened Pakistani government may lose control of its nuclear weapons. However, again, to follow the logic of our stated goals we should garrison Pakistan, not Afghanistan. More so, the September 11th attacks, as well as the Madrid and London bombings, were primarily planned and organized in Western Europe; a point that highlights the threat is not one tied to traditional geographic or political boundaries. Finally, if our concern is for a failed state crippled by corruption and poverty and under assault from criminal and drug lords, then if we bear our military and financial contributions to Afghanistan, we must reevaluate and increase our commitment to and involvement in Mexico.

Eight years into war, no nation has ever known a more dedicated, well trained, experienced and disciplined military as the US Armed Forces. I do not believe any military force has ever been tasked with such a complex, opaque and Sisyphean mission as the US military has received in Afghanistan. The tactical proficiency and performance of our Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines is unmatched and unquestioned. However, this is not the European or Pacific theaters of World War II, but rather is a war for which our leaders, uniformed, civilian and elected, have inadequately prepared and resourced our men and women. Our forces, devoted and faithful, have been committed to conflict in an indefinite and unplanned manner that has become a cavalier, politically expedient and Pollyannaish misadventure. Similarly, the United States has a dedicated and talented cadre of civilians, both US government employees and contractors, who believe in and sacrifice for their mission, but they have been ineffectually trained and led with guidance and intent shaped more by the political climate in Washington, DC than in Afghan cities, villages, mountains and valleys.

“We are spending ourselves into oblivion” a very talented and intelligent commander, one of America’s best, briefs every visitor, staff delegation and senior officer. We are mortgaging our Nation’s economy on a war, which, even with increased commitment, will remain a draw for years to come. Success and victory, whatever they may be, will be realized not in years, after billions more spent, but in decades and generations. The United States does not enjoy a national treasury for such success and victory.

I realize the emotion and tone of my letter and ask that you excuse any ill temper. I trust you understand the nature of this war and the sacrifices made by so many thousands of families who have been separated from loved ones deployed in defense of our Nation and whose homes bear the fractures, upheavals and scars of multiple and compounded deployments. Thousands of our men and women have returned home with physical and mental wounds, some that will never heal or will only worsen with time. The dead return only in bodily form to be received by families who must be reassured their dead have sacrificed for a purpose worthy of futures lost, loved vanished, and promised dreams unkept. I have lost confidence such assurances can anymore be made. As such, I submit my resignation.

Sincerely,

Matthew P. Hoh

Senior Civilian Representative

Zabul Province, Afghanistan

Cc: Mr. Frank Ruggiero

Ms. Dawn Liberi

Ambassador Anthony Wayne

Ambassador Karl Eikenberry

Published in Antiwar.com

WASIM VIEW- In the very first paragraph of his resignation letter, Hoh is crystal clear and damning in his verdict (even General McChrystal clear) that he has lost ‘understanding of and confidence in the strategic purposes of the United States’ presence in Afghanistan’. Hoh rightly draws comparisons with the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and concludes of the US that ‘we continue to secure and bolster a failing state, while encouraging an ideology and system of government unknown and unwanted by its people’.

Hoh speaks more home-truths later in his later and is right to equate the problems of Afghanistan to a ‘pashtun insurgency’. Hoh is right also in drawing parallels with Vietnam and for declaring that the US can aim for a draw at best. The blatant contradictions in the US policy of preventing an Al-Qaeda resurgence in Afghanistan are laid bare when Hoh rightly makes the point that to achieve such an objective would mean that the US would ‘need to   additionally invade and occupy western Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan, Yemen, etc’.

Hoh  rounds on the flawed Obama doctrine for Afghanistan by making the point that ’to follow the logic of our stated goals we should garrison Pakistan, not Afghanistan. More so, the September 11^th attacks, as well as the Madrid and London bombings, were primarily planned and organized in Western Europe; a point that highlights the threat is not one tied to traditional geographic or political boundaries’.

All in all, Hoh’s resignation letter must be seen as a mayday distress call to an American leadership that is clearly blind to its failures. Just as President Obama prepares to announce a new Afghanistan policy including sending more US troops in the coming days, some choice words in Hoh’s letter act as a warning that will go unheeded and will haunt Obama in years to come, that ‘eight years into war, no nation has ever known a more dedicated, well trained, experienced and disciplined military as the US Armed Forces. I do not believe any military force has ever been tasked with such a complex, opaque and Sisyphean mission as the US military has received in Afghanistan’.

October’s B-side continues to focus on the scourge that is America’s continued influence in Pakistan, even her indirect rule of Pakistan. The much lauded and derided Kerry-Lugar bill  is a key focus in the B-side whilst two alternative strategies for ending the occupation by America of Afghanistan are explored.

October’s B-side contents include:

• With Friends Like the US, Pakistan Doesnt Need Enemies by SIMON TISDALL
• Don’t Try to Arrest the Sea: An Alternative Approach to Afghanistan by MEHAR OMAR KHAN
• 10 Steps to Victory in Afghanistan by VARIOUS NEW YORK TIMES COMMENTATORS

The first article is written by the Simon Tisdall who is the assistant editor of the respected British daily The Guardian and a respected foreign policy commentator. The title of the article is indicative of its contents and it is well worth a read.

With Friends Like the US, Pakistan Doesnt Need Enemies by Simon Tisdall

As the Obama administration dithers over what to do for the best in Afghanistan, neighbouring Pakistan is paying an increasingly heavy price. Like a spate of previous Taliban attacks in recent days, today’s mayhem in Lahore underscored fears that the principal consequence of Washington’s Afghan paralysis, albeit unintended, is the further destabilisation of the Pakistani state.

Pakistanis might be forgiven for wondering whether, with friends like these in Washington, who needs enemies? The rumbling row over a $7.5bn, five-year US aid package is a case in point. Imperious conditions attached to the bill by a Congress reluctant to send more unaccounted billions “down a rat hole”, as Democrat Howard Berman charmingly put it, were condemned as insulting and colonialist in Pakistan.

By linking the cash to tighter civilian control of Pakistan’s military, Washington was trying, clumsily, to strengthen Asif Ali Zardari’s government. But it achieved the exact opposite. The president was accused of failing to defend the country’s sovereignty, much as he has failed to halt escalating American cross-border air raids, and the occasional covert ground incursion, on targets inside Pakistan.

After hurried consultations in Washington, Shah Mahmood Qureshi, Pakistan’s foreign minister, obtained an “explanatory document” from Congress this week that he said effectively waived some of the bill’s more objectionable caveats. But this is unlikely to silence critics who draw on deep anti-American sentiment among the Pakistani public dating back to the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan and the launch of George Bush’s “global war on terror”.

“Poll after poll shows Pakistanis increasingly do fear the threat posed by Islamic extremists … but they believe the US is an even bigger danger to their country,” Bruce Riedel of the Brookings Institution was quoted as saying this week. Many Pakistanis rated the threat posed by the US to their independence and security above that from historical foe India, he said. “Any time you out-poll India as the bad guy in Pakistan you are in deep trouble.”

Intense Obama administration pressure on Pakistan to root out the Tehrik-e-Taliban (Taliban Movement of Pakistan), close allies and collaborators of the Afghan Taliban, resulted in this spring’s costly military offensive in Swat, in North West Frontier province, which displaced hundreds of thousands of civilians.

Yet the Swat campaign is likely to be dwarfed by an imminent Pakistani army offensive in South Waziristan, in the ungoverned tribal areas adjacent to Afghanistan. Although senior Pakistani officials deny they are doing Washington’s bidding, it’s no secret that US commanders are increasingly focused on both sides of Afghanistan’s eastern border with Pakistan, where Taliban militants and their foreign jihadi and al-Qaida allies have staked out common ground ignoring national boundaries.

Pakistan’s Taliban leader, Hakimullah Mehsud, who replaced Baitullah Mehsud after the latter was killed in a US drone missile strike in August, said in a recent video that attacks such as today’s in Lahore would quickly cease if the government stopped behaving like a US lackey and broke its American alliance. If that happened, Mehsud said he would turn his guns on India, presumably in Kashmir. To many Pakistanis, that may not sound such a bad idea.

The realisation that Washington is stoking a conflict approaching all-out civil war is gradually dawning in the US. New York Post columnist Ralph Peters drew a comparison with post-invasion Iraq. “Civil war never quite happened [there]. Yet no one seems to notice that we’re now caught up in two authentic civil wars – one in Afghanistan, the other in Pakistan,” he said. By lumping the two together in one “Afpak” policy, the Obama administration had effectively made both problems worse.

Neither extra US troops, nor extra aid, nor more “hugs-not-slugs counterinsurgency nonsense” was the answer, Peters argued. “The only hope for either beleaguered territory (these really are territories, not authentic states) is a decision by its own population to fight and defeat the Taliban.”

The impulse, fanned by this sort of imperial hubris, to get out of Afghanistan, or at least to narrow the fight to a counter-terrorism campaign against al-Qaida, has gathered US adherents in recent months. But a Washington Post editorial argued this week that with al-Qaida much reduced, the Taliban in both countries now constituted the main enemy. Pakistan was moving towards “full-scale war”, it said. Pulling back in Afghanistan could have disastrous, possibly fatal consequences there, too.

By this measure and others, only one conclusion is possible: Pakistan is already so destabilised by US actions since 9/11 that it cannot be left to fend for itself. In such tortuous logic is found the death of empires.

Published in The Guardian

WASIM VIEW- The title of Tisdall’s article leaves little need for me to comment, except for me to echo his sentiments. Tisdall pinpoints and lays bare the failure of the US in Afghanistan and its resultant price paid by the ordinary Pakistani in blood and tears daily. What makes it worse is that this is an US Administration led by the celebrity President, one Barack Obama who enjoyed goodwill and support not only in Pakistan but across the world. As I wrote in my post Drones and the Obama Speech, actions speak louder than words as demonstrated by the disgrace that is the Kerry-Lugar bill which devalues and diminishes Pakistan as a nation and as a proud people. 

The second article offers a credible and sensible approach for improving Afghanistan and consequently is likely to be ignored by Uncle Sam!

Don’t Try to Arrest the Sea: An Alternative Approach to Afghanistan by Mehar Omar Khan

Over the last three months that I’ve spent in the United States, I’ve heard with concern and trepidation the growing calls for a possible pull out from Afghanistan. No sane citizen of our world, let alone a Pakistani infantry officer who may soon end up being another name on an ever-growing list of the fallen soldiers in the war against terror, enjoys thinking about the painful possibility of our world’s greatest military power and history’s most inspiring nation retreating in the face of an onslaught by Kalashnikov-wielding bearded barbarians riding on the back of motorcycles, hungry horses and perspiring mules. What is being realized with increasing intensity is the pain of a seemingly endless and bloody war for almost a decade now; the pressure of a US public opinion that’s almost irreversibly weary of war (at least for now); the misery of a mismatch between resources and mandate; the rising groans of despairing allies unwilling to persevere and, the scary scarcity of success stories. However what needs to be realized is the fact that abandoning Afghanistan will be an unmitigated tragedy.

For the United States, I believe, Afghanistan is not a case of ‘success or failure’. The USA is too big and too powerful to fail against a collection of miserable fanatics holed up in the treacherous mountains of Southern Afghanistan. It’s instead a case of doing too much with too little care and attention. It’s a challenge (still quite surmountable) aggravated by ditching smart choices and contracting wrong compulsions.

The current US approach to fixing Afghanistan is impressive in detail but seriously flawed in design. Despite recent adjustments reflected most profoundly in Gen McChrystal’s Counterinsurgency Directive, the ship is still headed for rough seas. The overall design continues to be based on ‘mending and reforming’ Afghanistan the country – as a whole. The brass-tacks continue to be muddied by unclear strategic intent. The ‘reform route’ continues to be pursued ‘top-down’. Too many coalition personnel and too many international dollars still reside in Kabul or at best in the provincial headquarters. The majority of Afghans continues to stare angrily from the sidelines while a few thugs rule the streets and corridors of Kabul. Too many criminals continue to be respectable and powerful despite being in the neighborhood of so many well-meaning people. While too many US soldiers continue to die, radical surgery is still being pended in favor of cosmetics.

What is being tried is too much. What needs to be done is economizing the force and maximizing the effect. What needs to be done is to increasingly get smarter or leaner in physics and more effective and skillful in chemistry. What is being done is more and more of physics. What is

needed is more skill. What is being poured in is more troops. US public opinion is rightly angry about all of this. Why should young men continue to fall for a ‘losing cause’?

But is it a case of a ‘losing cause’ or one of a ‘badly managed success’. I believe it’s the latter. And it is with this belief that I want to suggest an alternative approach to what is being done. This approach is embedded in the belief that troops required to manage or govern Afghanistan will never be ‘enough’ and the right route is ‘bottom up’ and ‘hub to spokes’ and not the reverse. I also believe that promise and prosperity is the only magnet that can wean desperate people away from violence and that Afghanistan is too big to be made prosperous all-together. Hence the process of rebuilding and development will have to be ‘selective’ to start with.

The approach, suggested hereunder, is based on some ‘can’t do’ and some ‘can do’ principles for Afghanistan. The identification of what can be done has to be based on a dispassionate recognition of what can’t be done.

First, therefore, the ‘can’t do’ part:

Can’t ‘govern’ this country: It is historically incorrect to call Afghanistan a country or even a place. It has always been and is a people. Afghanistan represents a people who have always been divided and loosely managed; never properly ‘governed’ at any level even in the loosest sense of that word. Any effort to reverse that historical trend or reality will be a terribly misdirected investment of blood and money. Afghans, vastly ignorant as well as illiterate, have never been clever enough to submit to a central authority. ‘Liberal democracy’, ‘united vision’, a ‘social contract’, ‘tolerant co-existence’, ‘civil society’, ‘civil debate’, ‘national discourse’ – are all misnomers largely tossed around in a small section of expatriate community residing in the West. Hence, even the smartest bunch of people can’t govern this place as a whole.

Can’t ‘protect’ all Afghans: The emphasis in the ISAF Counterinsurgency Directive on ‘protecting the civilians, instead of killing the Taliban’ in unachievable in its entirety. Coalition troops can never reach the numbers necessary to extend adequate protection to the populace across Afghanistan. It will only give an additional propaganda tool to the Taliban, in addition to increasing the range of their target zone. Every suicide bombing will now be seen and portrayed as a sign of coalition’s failure to deliver on its ‘promise’ of ‘protecting’ the people. And promises mean a lot in that medieval society. My proposed ‘approach’ addresses this dilemma.

Can’t have ‘total’ peace: In Afghanistan, peace has always been relative – both in time as well as space. In that unfortunate part of the world, ‘peace’ has mostly meant ‘less fighting’ or ‘fighting contained to a few a tribes in a few pockets’ or ‘bloodletting restricted to family feuds’. Afghans are fatally skillful in digging up reasons to fire and fight. No amount of money, time or effort can reverse this tragic historical reality in a space of few years. It will instead take sincere national leadership and international commitment spanning generations – something very hard to come by.

Can’t have ‘rivers of milk and honey’ flowing in a few years: After centuries of war, Afghanistan is now way ‘beyond a quick or economical repair’. Too much is required to be set right and built anew. Roads, hospitals, schools and colleges – nothing is there. Attitudes, dreams,

aspirations, ideals, sense of unity, and a ‘unifying’ sense of patriotism – again, nothing is there. It’s all broken; shattered by wounds and trauma inflicted by unkind times and endless misery. Brigades of straight-thinking US soldiers with scant support or commitment from Afghan ‘national’ leadership or international community (if there ever were two things by those names) can’t do it in decades, let alone years.

Can’t do it without Pashtuns: Like it or not, Afghanistan has always been a Pashtun country. Many as they are though, Uzbeks, Tajiks and Hazaras have always been the ‘outsiders’. Regardless of who holds the banner (the Taliban or anyone else) Pashtuns will never cease fighting unless given their leadership role in Kabul. They have always shed blood for the defense of their ‘right’ on the throne of Kabul. One can’t mess with that ‘right’ without incurring serious consequences. What we are facing in Afghanistan is ‘Pashtun Intifada’. It is only ‘led’ by bearded mullahs calling themselves ‘Taliban’. Take out Taliban and the insurgency will continue.

Now what ‘can be’ done:

The list is very short. Don’t try to arrest the sea. Create islands. Having gone well past the phase of breaking the back of Al-Qaeda and dispersing the Taliban, concentrate on ‘creating and building’ examples. Set the beacon and you’ll see that all the lost ships and boats will come ashore. Here’s how to do it.

First and foremost, believe that it’s not God that drives these people crazy; it’s poverty. Believe that Pashtuns don’t submit to the Taliban out of sheer love for the one-eyed Mullah Omar; its deprivation and fear that drives this herd to the first man holding the flag of power and promise. Raise your flag higher than the Mullah’s and the half-blind lunatic will be devoured by Pashtuns. What is being done is unfortunately not the right way of raising the banner. It defies the logic of ‘can’t do’s’ given above. The Pashtun face of the country is not sufficiently visible.

Kabul or the Provincial Reconstruction Teams will NOT work. Provinces are too big a governance laboratory for Afghanistan. Instead, pick a few districts (nothing more than that) in the heart of areas worst-afflicted by the Taliban-led insurgency. Invest heavily in these districts.

Do it in two phases; first craft the message, then two, let the message spread itself.

Here’s is how to create the message. In selected (preferably non-contiguous) districts, give them an honest and polished leadership from ‘amongst themselves’, a transparent and efficient court, a model Pashtun police heavily armed with both weapons and motivation, schools (separate for girls and boys), a few hospitals, electricity, money for farming and setting up small businesses through a few efficiently functioning banks, paved roads, a model transport system and, not the least, build a beautiful grand mosque and an FM station that recites Quran with Pashtu translation 24/7. If possible, build a few plants and job-creating projects around mineral mines and informal fire-arms industry. Let these people serve as an example for rest of the Pashtun country. Having created these models, international community can then work ‘upwards’ and ‘outwards’ to include more and more areas and tribes.

Simultaneously the governance, right from district up to Kabul must be painted with an unmistakable Pashtun color. As of now, Pashtuns are being seen and treated like Sunnis of Iraq. In reality they are a majority and deserve to be empowered like Shias in Iraq.

A few examples of model districts would unmistakably mean this: that the USA means good and only good; that Islam is not the sole monopoly of Mullah Omar; that Islam and Quran can co-exist with banks and schools and hospitals and businesses; that life without bloodshed is a good life and that what Americans do is better than what Taliban do or plan to do. The approach will give Pashtuns an irresistibly attractive reason to ditch the message and manipulation of the Taliban in addition to stripping Mullah Omar and his Al Qaeda cohorts off their narrative and their manifesto.

Militarily, the coalition must hold fast to these model districts as bases and let the Taliban fester and sulk in the outlying, ungoverned margins. Their lack of ability to give in their areas of influence what coalition gives in its area of control will delegitimize them in due course of time. This may sound like giving away vast swathes of land to Taliban. In reality, it means a considerable improvement on the current situation. The Taliban structure of governance stands on a foundation of both fear and promise. The existing effort to pursue them everywhere leaves them surviving everywhere. They thrive on the coalition chasing their shadows. This new approach of excluding them from selected pockets will progressively deprive them of targets for violence and an audience for propaganda. Their brutalities in areas without coalition presence will discredit them while doing no harm to coalition’s image. Relative peace in coalition-governed districts will fuel discontent in Taliban-controlled districts. It will also give coalition and Afghan Forces the strategic advantage of operating from the ‘interior lines’ instead of having to hopelessly roll up the Taliban from the margins to the center.

Such ‘model district projects’ should not be the responsibility of the USA alone. Other members of the international community must also partake by taking up a district each.

These islands of peace and prosperity, though small, will be seen by all the lost mariners in the sea (of chaos and cruelty). It is my sincere belief that these model districts will serve as the ‘clarion call’. Pashtuns, hungry for food and promise, will come running and rally to the cause that gives hope of a better future, of peace and of return to the ‘throne of Kabul’.

Major Mehar Omar Khan, Pakistan Army, is currently a student at the US Army Command and General Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. He has served as a peacekeeper in Sierra Leone, a Brigade GSO-III, an instructor at the Pakistan Military Academy in Kakul, and as Chief of Staff (Brigade Major) of an infantry brigade. He has also completed the Command and Staff Course at Pakistan’s Command and Staff College in Quetta.

Published in the Small Wars Journal

WASIM VIEW- Khan’s article is an authoritative one and well worth considering for implementation due to two key reasons. First and foremost, Khan writes the article aided by real-time knowledge of the key issues since he is a Pakistani soldier who has served in the frontline and therefore has been there and got the t-shirt as it were. Secondly Khan is a Pashtun and knows his people well and can advise on a way forward that takes into account tribal and cultural customs with a view to bringing peace in Afghanistan and the wider region.

Khan begins his excellent article by congratulating the US and her military prowess and at the same time ridicules their timid opponents that are the Afghan Taliban. However in doing so he has missed the key point which is that the Taliban are native to the country unlike Uncle Sam and for good or bad (and its bad) will have a say in its future for a long time, indeed America must learn this truth fast.

Khan‘s article is the first article I have read for a long time that focuses on problems and crucially solutions for Afghanistan. The Americans could do far better if they pay attention to Khan’s can’t do and can do list and then decide on an exit strategy as Khan is so right when he labels the insurgency in Afghanistan as a ‘Pashtun Intifada’ that will continue with or without the Taliban. Khan ‘s ‘ islands of peace’ or model districts plan is well thought out and makes eminent sense and would serve NATO and the people of Afghanistan far better than the current chaos strategy that is being employed with supreme failure. That said I still believe that the sooner Uncle Sam and NATO, wake up and smell the ‘koffee from Kabul’ and leave this volatile region, the better it will be for all.

The final article for October’s B-side must be read as it shows why the US is failing and will fail in Afghanistan.

10 Steps to Victory in Afghanistan by Various New York Times Commentators

Reform or Go Home

COUNTERINSURGENCY is only as good as the government it supports. NATO could do everything right — it isn’t — but will still fail unless Afghans trust their government. Without essential reform, merely making the government more efficient or extending its reach will just make things worse.

Only a legitimately elected Afghan president can enact reforms, so at the very least we need to see a genuine run-off election or an emergency national council, called a loya jirga, before winter. Once a legitimate president emerges, we need to see immediate action from him on a publicly announced reform program, developed in consultation with Afghan society and enforced by international monitors. Reforms should include firing human rights abusers and drug traffickers, establishing an independent authority to investigate citizen complaints and requiring officials to live in the districts they are responsible for (fewer than half do).

Other steps might include a census and district-level elections (promised since 2001, but never held), fair and effective taxation to replace kickbacks and extortion, increased pay to diligent local officials, the transfer of more budgetary authority to the provinces and the creation of local courts for dispute resolution.

If we see no genuine progress on such steps toward government responsibility, the United States should “Afghanize,” draw down troops and prepare to mitigate the inevitable humanitarian disaster that will come when the Kabul government falls to the Taliban — which, in the absence of reform, it eventually and deservedly will.

— DAVID KILCULLEN, a former adviser to Gen. David Petraeus and the author of “The Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One”

End Suicide Attacks

TO win in Afghanistan, the United States and its allies must prevent the rise of a new generation of anti-American terrorists, particularly suicide terrorists.

The metric for measuring this threat is not the amount of territory controlled by the Taliban or Al Qaeda, but the number of people willing to be recruited as suicide terrorists. These individuals are motivated not by the existence of a terrorist sanctuary, but by deep anger at the presence of foreign forces on land they prize.

This is why the number of suicide attacks in Afghanistan, overwhelmingly against military targets, has skyrocketed as United States and NATO forces have increasingly occupied the country from 2006 on. There were nine attacks in 2005, 97 in 2006, 142 in 2007, 148 in 2008 and more than 60 in the first six months of this year.

It is imperative to decrease the number of suicide attacks. Given the ethnic divisions of the country, our best tactic is to use political and economic means to empower local Pashtuns to feel that they have greater autonomy from both Taliban and Western domination, and less need to respond violently.

A similar strategy toward Sunni groups in Anbar Province reduced anti-American suicide terrorism in Iraq and is our best way forward in Afghanistan.

— ROBERT A. PAPE, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago and the author of “Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism”

If You Can’t Beat Them, Let Them Join

WITHIN a year, we must persuade large numbers of insurgents to lay down their arms or switch to the government’s side. Afghanistan’s doughty warriors have a tradition of changing alliances, but success will require both military operations focused on the insurgent leadership and, even more important, incentives for fighters at the local level.

Mid-level insurgents and their followers should be offered a chance to join a revised version of the Afghan Public Protection Force. These local self-defense forces should be expanded and tied to legitimate local governing structures — both official and tribal. The majority of development funds should be funneled to leaders to strengthen local governance and development and pay the militias’ salaries.

Local self-defense forces in Colombia, Peru, South Vietnam and, most recently, Iraq, have proved very successful. The creation of a viable force like this is the single most important benchmark for the counterinsurgency effort in Afghanistan.

— LINDA ROBINSON, the author of “Tell Me How This Ends: Gen. David Petraeus and the Search for a Way Out of Iraq”

Pump up the Police

FOR all the disputes over strategy, virtually everyone agrees that we need to strengthen the Afghan security forces, make them true partners and put them in the lead. Afghans want lasting security, and they want it to have an Afghan face.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top American commander there, wisely wants to double the size of the Afghan Army and increase the police forces to 160,000 men. This requires not just money, but also a commitment to send more trainers, embedded advisers and partner units. At the moment, international forces in Afghanistan say they still lack about 30 percent of the trainers and mentors needed to train even the current police force.

Creating effective security forces will also require more aid to create a functioning local justice system with courts, lawyers and jails. This will take at least a decade, so for the short term we should assist efforts to revive Afghanistan’s traditional justice systems.

— ANTHONY CORDESMAN, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies

Kick Out Corruption

TO defeat the insurgency, the Afghan government and its main partner, the United States, need to win the confidence of the public. Accountability must replace the widespread immunity enjoyed by officials who abuse their power.

Despite all the problems with our recent election, the incoming government will have a chance to start fresh, and a proper vetting of all new officials is the place to begin. This means establishing strict accountability mechanisms for high officials in the districts and provinces as well as in the ministries and directorates in Kabul. Simply shuffling abusive and incompetent officials among offices — as has been the norm over the past eight years — keeps the public from getting the governmental services it needs.

While the corruption in Kabul is well known, the alliances that American and other foreign forces have made at the local level with abusive officials and influential figures have emboldened those Afghans and alarmed the Afghan public. These alliances must be examined and stopped. The next government should make a statement by quickly clearing out some of the most blatantly corrupt officials.

— NADER NADERY, a commissioner on the Afghanistan Independent Human Rights Commission

Learn to Tax From the Taliban

SKEPTICS of state-building proposals question whether the Kabul government — now almost fully dependent on foreign aid — will ever be able to support the military and police forces being trained. Yet there has been comparatively little investment by the international community in helping Kabul collect taxes, even though insurgents and corrupt officials have proved it can be done.

In addition to collecting taxes from the illegal opium trade, Taliban forces extort money from trucks carrying legal cargo through their territories and demand “protection fees” from local businesses, even hitting up construction projects financed by NATO.

Government officials also take illegal kickbacks — one governor in the eastern part of the country is reported to earn as much as $10 million a month extorting trucking firms. But this money doesn’t end up in state coffers — it just lines the governor’s deep pockets.

The “civilian surge” should include tax experts who could help federal and provincial officials develop mechanisms for collecting revenue — and make sure that money ends up where it belongs.

— GRETCHEN PETERS, the author of “Seeds of Terror”

Polls Have the Power

BY and large, my generation of military professionals trained for and thought about what we might call “Type A” war — modern war, featuring the clash of mechanized forces fielded by industrial states. Happily, we never had to fight the Soviets on the northern German plain, though Operation Desert Storm showed we might have been pretty good at it, had the balloon gone up.

In Afghanistan we’re fighting a “Type B” war that is in some of its essentials “postmodern.” Like postmodernism itself, the concept has a variety of meanings and may not represent a coherent set of ideas. But one thing is clear: the Type B enemy likely has little to lose — no territory to protect, few important targets at risk, perhaps even no life worth living. Thus the Type A objective of fatally weakening an opponent by destroying assets important to his success — in theory, a measurable process — is replaced in Type B war by the much more complicated, essentially unquantifiable task of defeating him.

In time, democracies tire of war, as well they should. Thus, the single most important factor a Type B enemy counts on is time. The outcome in Afghanistan may be determined already, simply because we’ve been there for eight years. The strategic center of gravity is American public opinion, which will tell us when we’ve run out of time. If you want to know how we are doing in Afghanistan, read the polls in America.

— MERRILL McPEAK, the chief of staff of the Air Force from 1990 to 1994

Take a Risk

WHILE in Afghanistan last summer as part of Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s initial assessment team, I found many American and other international units more focused on protecting themselves than protecting the Afghan population. Traveling through the allegedly secure city of Mazar-i-Sharif with a German unit, for example, was like touring Afghanistan by submarine. What little I saw of the city was through a small slit of bulletproof glass in an armored personnel carrier. (While I was a light-infantry officer in both the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, I had never before traveled in an armored personnel carrier.) The Germans offered their assessment of security in the region, but since they lack regular face-to-face contact with the people living there, why should I trust their analysis? Can they speak with authority on the degree to which an insurgent campaign of intimidation is having an effect when they themselves keep the Afghans at such a distance?

It’s not just the Germans, though. Some American and other allied commanders also insist on protective measures that hamper troops from interacting with the population and gathering information on what is driving the conflict at the local level.

After eight years of war with little to show for American and allied efforts, many Americans have tired of the campaign in Afghanistan and are wary of putting our soldiers in greater danger. But if we are to be successful in Afghanistan, it is a risk we must take.

— ANDREW McDONALD EXUM, a fellow at the Center for a New American Security

Don’t Believe That We Can Afford to Lose

AMERICA cannot achieve even the minimal objective of preventing Al Qaeda from re-establishing safe havens in Afghanistan without a substantial increase in forces over the coming year. The Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan’s south is growing. The Afghan and international forces there now cannot reverse that growth. They may not even be able to stem it. That is the assessment of the top American commander there, Gen. Stanley McChrystal.

President Obama said in August, “If left unchecked, the Taliban insurgency will mean an even larger safe haven from which Al Qaeda would plot to kill more Americans.” Some of his advisers now say the opposite: Taliban control will not lead to terrorist havens. Why not? Osama bin Laden first built camps in the territory of a Taliban leader, Jalaluddin Haqqani, in the mid-1980s. Relations between Al Qaeda and the Taliban remain close. Even if they do not invite Al Qaeda in, could they, unlike Pakistan, keep Al Qaeda out? The president was right: the triumph of the Taliban will benefit Al Qaeda.

Rejecting General McChrystal’s request for more forces leaves two options. The United States withdraws and lets Afghanistan again collapse into chaos, or it keeps its military forces and civilians in harm’s way while denying them the resources they need to succeed. Neither is acceptable.

— FREDERICK KAGAN, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and KIMBERLY KAGAN, the president of the Institute for the Study of War

Pakistani Patronage

THE government of Pakistan, through its intelligence agency, has long been a patron of the Afghan Taliban, and Gen. Stanley McChrystal recently warned that the collaboration continues. Pakistan sees the relationship as a way of hedging its bets in Afghanistan, an asset in its confrontation with India.

It is difficult to define a clear benchmark for ending that aid because the Pakistanis refuse to acknowledge that any relationship exists. But let us consider it to have ended or gone into remission if, a year from now, six consecutive months have gone by with no credible reporting of the sort that underlay the general’s observation.

The significance of this benchmark is threefold. First, Pakistani patronage is an impediment to subduing the Taliban. Second, it is an excellent gauge of how well or poorly NATO’s campaign in Afghanistan is going. Continued Pakistani dealing with the Taliban would reflect Islamabad’s judgment that it is going poorly enough that bets still must be hedged. Third, an end to the relationship would eliminate one of the biggest paradoxes in the rationale for the counterinsurgency: the Pakistani government that our efforts in Afghanistan are supposedly helping to save is assisting the forces from which we are trying to save it.

— PAUL R. PILLAR, a former national intelligence officer for the Near East and South Asia at the C.I.A. and a professor in Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program

Published in the New York Times

WASIM VIEW- The New York Times has attempted to bring together many diverse voices in this useful article with a view to finding a way out for the US from the graveyard that is Afghanistan. From Kilcullen to Nadery, most of the commentators offer only a quick fix and little else save for blue sky thinking that will never see the light of day.

Kilcullen’s views are a case in point with its narrow focus on the mayor of Kabul aka the Afghan President plus his love for a loya jirga that he promises will solve Afghanistan’s ills. Remember this is the same man who predicted Pakistan would fall in six months to the Taliban!

The article is a good one to read as it showcases (read names and shames) the best strategic and foreign policy minds of the US and their pearls of wisdom all offering nothing in the way of a long-term strategy for success. A simple compare and contrast exercise is worthwhile and can be done so by reading Mehar Omar Khan’s article covered in the B-side already. Readers will conclude than whilst Khan makes good sense in identifying the problems and providing credible solutions, the ten experts called on by the New York Times offer only rants, muddled thoughts and patchwork.

September’s B-side promises to keep Pakistanis awake at night. A doomsday scenario is painted in an article by Stephan Faris on how climate change is going to affect the land of the pure. Fatima Bhutto a favourite of many a Pakistani is the author of the second article and like all of her articles, this article two is well worth its weight in gold. Last but not least Admiral Mike Mullen the US Chairman Joint Chiefs of Staff’s speech is scrutinised.

September’s B-side content includes:

• The Last Straw by STEPHAN FARIS
• My Country of Horror and Possibility by FATIMA BHUTTO
• Getting Back to Basics by Admiral MIKE MULLEN

The first article is written by Stephan Faris and it represents a doomsday scenario for Pakistan, a day of reckoning,  of death and destruction.

The Last Straw by Stephan Faris

Hopelessly overcrowded, crippled by poverty, teeming with Islamist militancy, careless with its nukes—it sometimes seems as if Pakistan can’t get any more terrifying. But forget about the Taliban: The country’s troubles today pale compared with what it might face 25 years from now. When it comes to the stability of one of the world’s most volatile regions, it’s the fate of the Himalayan glaciers that should be keeping us awake at night.

In the mountainous area of Kashmir along and around Pakistan’s contested border with India lies what might become the epicenter of the problem. Since the separation of the two countries 62 years ago, the argument over whether Kashmir belongs to Muslim Pakistan or secular India has never ceased. Since 1998, when both countries tested nuclear weapons, the conflict has taken on the added risk of escalating into cataclysm. Another increasingly important factor will soon heighten the tension: Ninety percent of Pakistan’s agricultural irrigation depends on rivers that originate in Kashmir. “This water issue between India and Pakistan is the key,” Mohammad Yusuf Tarigami, a parliamentarian from Kashmir, told me. “Much more than any other political or religious concern.”

Until now, the two sides had been able to relegate the water issue to the back burner. In 1960, India and Pakistan agreed to divide the six tributaries that form the Indus River. India claimed the three eastern branches, which flow through Punjab. The water in the other three, which pass through Jammu and Kashmir, became Pakistan’s. The countries set a cap on how much land Kashmir could irrigate and agreed to strict regulations on how and where water could be stored. The resulting Indus Waters Treaty has survived three wars and nearly 50 years. It’s often cited as an example of how resource scarcity can lead to cooperation rather than conflict.

But the treaty’s success depends on the maintenance of a status quo that will be disrupted as the world warms. Traditionally, Kashmir’s waters have been naturally regulated by the glaciers in the Himalayas. Precipitation freezes during the coldest months and then melts during the agricultural season. But if global warming continues at its current rate, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates, the glaciers could be mostly gone from the mountains by 2035. Water that once flowed for the planting will flush away in winter floods.

Research by the global NGO ActionAid has found that the effects are already starting to be felt within Kashmir. In the valley, snow rarely falls and almost never sticks. The summertime levels of streams, rivers, springs, and ponds have dropped. In February 2007, melting snow combined with unseasonably heavy rainfall to undermine the mountain slopes; landslides buried the national highway—the region’s only land connection with the rest of India—for 12 days.

Normally, countries control such cyclical water flows with dams, as the United States does with runoff from the Rocky Mountains. For Pakistan, however, that solution is not an option. The best damming sites are in Kashmir, where the Islamabad government has vigorously opposed Indian efforts to tinker with the rivers. The worry is that in times of conflict, India’s leaders could cut back on water supplies or unleash a torrent into the country’s fields. “In a warlike situation, India could use the project like a bomb,” one Kashmiri journalist told me.

Water is already undermining Pakistan’s stability. In recent years, recurring shortages have led to grain shortfalls. In 2008, flour became so scarce it turned into an election issue; the government deployed thousands of troops to guard its wheat stores. As the glaciers melt and the rivers dry, this issue will only become more critical. Pakistan—unstable, facing dramatic drops in water supplies, caged in by India’s vastly superior conventional forces—will be forced to make one of three choices. It can let its people starve. It can cooperate with India in building dams and reservoirs, handing over control of its waters to the country it regards as the enemy. Or it can ramp up support for the insurgency, gambling that violence can bleed India’s resolve without degenerating into full-fledged war. “The idea of ceding territory to India is anathema,” says Sumit Ganguly, a professor of political science at Indiana University. “Suffering, particularly for the elite, is unacceptable. So what’s the other option? Escalate.”

“It’s very bad news,” he adds, referring to the melting glaciers. “It’s extremely grim.”

The Kashmiri water conflict is just one of many climate-driven geopolitical crises on the horizon. These range from possible economic and treaty conflicts that will likely be resolved peacefully—the waters of the Rio Grande and Colorado River have long been a point of contention between the United States and Mexico, for instance—to possible outright wars. In 2007, the London-based NGO International Alert compiled a list of countries with a high risk of armed conflict due to climate change. They cited no fewer than 46 countries, or one in every four, including some of the world’s most gravely unstable countries, such as Somalia, Nigeria, Iran, Colombia, Bolivia, Israel, Indonesia, Bosnia, Algeria, and Peru. Already, climate change might be behind the deep drought that contributed to the conflict in the Darfur region of Sudan and hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Rising global temperatures are putting the whole world under stress, and the first countries to succumb will be those, such as Sudan, that are least able to adapt. Compare the Netherlands and Bangladesh: Both are vulnerable to rises in sea levels, with large parts of their territory near or under the level of the waves. But the wealthy Dutch are building state-of-the-art flood-control systems and experimenting with floating houses. All the impoverished Bangladeshis can do is prepare to head for higher ground. “It’s best not to get too bogged down in the physics of climate,” says Nils Gilman, an analyst at Monitor Group and the author of a 2006 report on climate change and national security. “Rather, you should look at the social, physical, and political geography of regions that are impacted.”

Indeed, with a population half that of the United States crammed into an area a little smaller than Louisiana, Bangladesh might be among the most imperiled countries on Earth. In a normal decade, the country experiences one major flood. In the last 11 years, its rivers have leapt their banks three times, most recently in 2007. That winter, Cyclone Sidr, a Category 5 storm, tore into the country’s coast, flattening tin shacks, ripping through paddies, and plunging the capital into darkness. As many as 10,000 people may have died.

Bangladesh’s troubles are likely to ripple across the region, where immigration flows have been historically accompanied by rising tensions. In India’s northeastern state of Assam, for instance, rapidly changing demographics have led to riots, massacres, and the rise of an insurgency. As global warming tightens its squeeze on Bangladesh, these pressures will mount. And in a worst-case scenario, in which the country is struck by sudden, cataclysmic flooding, the international community will have to cope with a humanitarian emergency in which tens of millions of waterlogged refugees suddenly flee toward India, Burma, China, and Pakistan.

Indeed, the U.S. military has come to recognize that weakened states—the Bangladeshes and Pakistans of the world—are often breeding grounds for extremism, terrorism, and potentially destabilizing conflict. And as it has done so, it has increasingly deployed in response to natural disasters. Such missions often require a warlike scale of forces, if not warlike duration. During the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, for instance, the United States sent 15,000 military personnel, 25 ships, and 94 aircraft. “The military brings a tremendous capacity of command-and-control and communications,” says retired Gen. Anthony Zinni, the former head of U.S. Central Command. “You have tremendous logistics capability, transportation, engineering, the ability to purify water.”

As the world warms, more years could start to look like 2007, when the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs announced it had responded to a record number of droughts, floods, and storms. Of the 13 natural disasters it responded to, only one—an earthquake in Peru—was not related to the climate.

Worryingly, some analysts have suggested the United States might not fully grasp what it needs to respond to this challenge. The U.S. military has been required by law since 2008 to incorporate climate change into its planning, but though Pentagon strategic documents describe a climate-stressed future, there’s little sign the Department of Defense is pivoting to meet it. “Most of the things that the military is requesting are still for a conventional war with a peer competitor,” says Sharon Burke, an energy and climate change specialist at the Washington-based Center for a New American Security. “They say they’re going to have more humanitarian missions, but there’s no discussion at all of ‘What do you need?’” The rate at which the war in Iraq has chewed through vehicles and equipment, for instance, has astonished military planners. “Is this a forewarning of what it’s like to operate in harsher conditions?” Burke asks.

To be sure, some of the more severe consequences of climate change are expected to unfold over a relatively extended time frame. But so does military development, procurement, and planning. As global warming churns the world’s weather, it’s becoming increasingly clear that it’s time to start thinking about the long term. In doing so, the West may need to adopt an even broader definition of what it takes to protect itself from danger. Dealing with the repercussions of its emissions might mean buttressing governments, deploying into disaster zones, or tamping down insurgencies. But the bulk of the West’s effort might be better spent at home. If the rivers of Kashmir have the potential to plunge South Asia into chaos, the most effective response might be to do our best to ensure the glaciers never melt at all.

Stephan Faris is the author of Forecast: The Consequences of Climate Change, from the Amazon to the Arctic, from Darfur to Napa Valley, from which reporting for this article is drawn.

Published in Foreign Policy

WASIM VIEW- The doomsday scenario  for Pakistan painted in the article by Stephan Faris is both real and worrying.  It is no less than a mayday call for Pakistan on how climate change promises to destroy the Pakistan as we know it today. The cataclysmic impact of the melting glaciers of the Himalayas have been showcased in the article and they must make every Pakistani tremble and fear the worst.

It is not rocket science to suggest that the Pakistani government must move fast so that Pakistan can have its own climate change response strategy, One suggestion this scribe can  give straight away is to invite my friend and Nobel Prize winner who served on the UN Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change and an eminent Pakistani,  Dr Adil Najam to report on this issue for the nation. Indeed I personally will ask Adil Bhai’s views on the subject and ask him to lead the nation using his expertise.

Returning to the article, Faris does well to highlight the impact of climate change in Kashmir thus far. However Faris  does hit below the belt when he accuses Pakistan of being careless with its nukes, a charge for which he provides no evidence or even bothers to debate other than a grandstanding and cheap remark at the start of his otherwise excellent article.

The second article is written by a friend and mentor of sorts, the one and only Fatima Bhutto.

My Country of Horror and Possibility by Fatima Bhutto

As the Taliban advances across northern Pakistan, international headlines have declared my country the latest victim of an increasingly hostile fundamentalist regime. Yet those of us who have been living within Pakistan have been watching this unfold every day and know that this is nothing new: The Pakistani Taliban and their brand of extremism has been advancing throughout our country for the last ten years, and they are gaining traction among Pakistan’s people largely because of our own government’s corruption and neglect.

My generation of Pakistanis has come of age under this military and civilian dictatorship, under a government that aids and abets these fundamentalist groups while vastly ignoring the needs of the people. The international community must understand that our government’s corruption—and the United States’ support of this corruption—has not only created enormous poverty but has also created a vacuum that Islamist fundamentalists are filling. This is the heart of the reason why the Taliban has been successful in my country; it is not because we are a country of extremists, or a country of dishonesty.

I would like the world to know that when we say our government does not represent us, we mean it. Pakistanis are not our government; we did not vote for Asif Ali Zardari, our president. We do not vote for our governments, and when we do have elections, they are orchestrated and rigged.

When I travel abroad, there is a perception that because I am Pakistani I must have a beard or be engaged in some kind of jihad. No one factors in that we are a country that has Buddhist, Hindu, Sikh, and Jain heritage. We are a country of people who speak a Hindi-ized Urdu and a Persian-ized Dari. We have so many shades that are not seen by the world because it is more convenient to portray us in a certain way that ignores our history, our realities, and our visions for the future of our country.

As a child growing up in exile from General Zia-ul-Haq’s regime, I understood Pakistan much like the rest of the world understands us now: as a nightmarish place where women are stoned, where public floggings are encouraged, and where the dark shadow of dictatorship looms with a violent and orthodox edge.

For me, it was my father who gave Pakistan its soul. Before he was assassinated by police when I was 14, he would tell me of the various poets and Sufi saints enshrined in Sindh Province; of the orange, pink, and purple painted buses at every traffic light; of the smell of the Indian Ocean, of the taste of Pakcola. It became a sort of romantic place for me, when in reality it was an extremely violent and unpredictable country. When I moved to Pakistan, I came to know early on that beneath this violence is a soul, a heart.

When I moved permanently to Pakistan at age 11, I learned that this heart beats in Karachi. Our pulse is here. It is Pakistan’s largest, most populous city and it is a cross between a refugee camp and a construction site. It is a broken-down city, but there is always something new happening here: a new art exhibit, new graffiti on the walls, new people coming to see what is swirling through our air, what radical new idea is emerging.

But when there is violence, Karachi is also the center. This is a city of immense poverty, and the violence we see is not always physical, though we see our fair share of that too. It is the violence of poverty. Karachi has one of the largest slum populations in the world. We are a very sad city, but because of that we are also a resilient city. There are so many odds against us that we almost shouldn’t be. But somehow we are. That we continue to exist is hopeful for me, that we continue to be a business, artistic, and cultural center in the face of impossible violence is something to recognize and embrace. . . .

But we also must embrace the fact that something is not working, and that something must give for Pakistan and her people to thrive. We are a country that is losing our people day by day to the Taliban because the government has turned their heads from our basic needs, and fundamentalist groups have stepped in to fill the widening gap.

We are a nuclear country that hasn’t been able to eradicate polio per our Millennium Development Goals because we do not have enough electricity to refrigerate the vaccine. And we are a country where parents must choose between sending their children to a school with government teachers who collect salaries but do not teach, or sending them to the madrassa on the next block that teaches radical Islam but provides at least a basic education.

We were all hopeful when Barack Obama was elected the president of the United States. We thought there might be a chance for real change, but the fact is that he has merely continued Bush-era policies that fuel the violence.

We have seen Obama continue the drone missile attacks on northern Pakistan, ordering the first strike on North and South Waziristan during his very first week in office.

I have watched in absolute horror as Obama recently released $1.5 billion in nonmilitary aid to our government. By my last count, Pakistan has received $12 billion in aid from the US since 2002. And it has not helped in the least to make Pakistan, or our neighbors, safer.

By propping up our corrupt government and funding a president who has stolen an estimated $2-3 billion from Pakistan’s people, Obama is not helping to eradicate the “main threat to regional stability”—he’s feeding it. When the Taliban gained control of Afghanistan in 1996, I never imagined that the footage I saw on the news—Afghan women being flogged, beaten, and raped as punishment for crimes that weren’t really crimes at all—would play out in Pakistan’s own streets 13 years later. But now I see it happening to us. Up until recently I felt safe as a woman in my country, but today the situation for Pakistani women is rapidly deteriorating.

This rarely makes international headlines. The Western world seems to identify Pakistan with the fact that we were the first Muslim country to “elect” a woman leader—my aunt, Benazir Bhutto, who was prime minister from 1988 to 1990, and then again from 1993 to 1996, before she was assassinated in 2007. But my aunt did nothing to stop the deterioration of women’s rights in Pakistan. She—just like our current government—capitulated to radical Islam and refused to amend the Shariya Laws that infringe on women’s rights.

The Hudood Laws—put into place in 1979, during the time when my family and I were in exile, then taken out of practice in 2006 by former president Musharraf—are the enactment of Shariya Law and are again gaining traction in Pakistan. As a woman, if your head is not covered in public, you stand out. If you visit a household in a rural or small town, you will be taken to a room away from the men. And, if you commit adultery, your sentence will be death.

We have enormous challenges ahead of us as a country, but I do not believe that we are a lost cause, or that we will succumb to Talibanization just yet. We are a country that has an enormous amount of strength and determination; we are a country of the possible. This strength comes largely from ordinary women doing extraordinary things.

This is a country where women have to push for what they want; they have to push for what they need. And if you push—if you’re loud enough— you make ripples; you make waves. We have women in the arts; women in the NGO sector; women in leadership, but we do not afford women a voice in our media, in our politics, in our communities. It is women like Mukhtar Mai and her rolling courage who are the backbone of Pakistan. These women— and there are many of them who are operating under the radar—are standing up against the Hudood Laws and risking their lives for justice despite the challenges and increasing oppressions.

We are at a crucial point in Pakistan’s history; we have an opportunity to keep Pakistan from going the way of Afghanistan. It starts with showing solidarity and sharing our stories with other women. There is a phenomenal untapped sisterhood of women around the world, and if we tap that support and connect person to person, it will mean much more to Pakistan’s women than Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton giving our corrupt leaders billions of dollars.

When we talk about Pakistan, we must look to what becomes possible if we put money into the hands of grassroots organizations and people’s initiatives. We must turn our efforts to summer camps for girls, media training, teaching handicrafts to women who have been jailed for breaking the Hudood Laws. We must organize to get women ID cards across the country so that they can vote in our elections. All of this is possible; it just requires support. We cannot continue to put our fate in the hands of our government or in the hands of the US government. We cannot continue to ignore the potential of Pakistan’s people and, especially, Pakistan’s women.

We are a young country that emerged out of a heady idealism some 60 years ago, and we cannot let go of this sense of optimism. Milan Kundera said that “the struggle of people against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” I, for one, will not forget the heart and soul of Pakistan that I came to know as a child in exile. I will keep fighting

Published in World Pulse Magazine

WASIM VIEW- Fatima Bhutto’s article is aimed at a female audience in the main and charts the rise and fall of women in Pakistan. The inferior status afforded to women in Pakistan is not a secret but a national shame and Fatima Bhutto does well to highlight this key issue.

Fatima Bhutto’s article is also worth a read for she represents the future of Pakistan not as a Bhutto,  but as a Pakistani in her own right. In that sense, Fatima who I have conversed with by email as a friend and comrade, represents an outlook shared by many which sees Pakistan’s perennial problems yet at the same time can see its potential too.

And so when Fatima Bhutto writes on corruption and how it has crippled Pakistan or when she bemoans US drone strikes,  she speaks the word of the street or chowks from Lahore to Lakki Marwat.  Indeed President Obama and others should take cue from such writings.

All in all I find this article,  like Fatima Bhutto’s other articles  too, one that is alway positive and hopeful of a better tomorrow. Let us pray that Fatima Bhutto’s better tomorrow comes soon for a Pakistani nation that is desperate and deserving for that better day.

The final article is in fact a speech on Pakistan and US actions or the lack of them theroef by Admiral Mike Mullen, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman.

Getting Back to Basics by Admiral Mike Mullen

It is time for us to take a harder look at “strategic communication.”

Frankly, I don’t care for the term. We get too hung up on that word, strategic. If we’ve learned nothing else these past 8 years, it should be that the lines between strategic, operational, and tactical are blurred beyond distinction. This is particularly true in the world of communication, where videos and images plastered on the Web—or even the idea of their being so posted—can and often do drive national security decision making.

But beyond the term itself, I believe we have walked away from the original intent. By organizing to it—creating whole structures around it—we have allowed strategic communication to become a thing instead of a process, an abstract thought instead of a way of thinking. It is now sadly something of a cottage industry.

We need to get back to basics, and we can start by not beating ourselves up. The problem isn’t that we are bad at communicating or being outdone by men in caves. Most of them aren’t even in caves. The Taliban and al Qaeda live largely among the people. They intimidate and control and communicate from within, not from the sidelines.

And they aren’t just out there shooting videos, either. They deliver. Want to know what happens if somebody violates their view of Sharia law? You don’t have to look very far or very long. Each beheading, each bombing, and each beating sends a powerful message or, rather, is a powerful message.

Got a governance problem? The Taliban is getting pretty effective at it. They’ve set up functional courts in some locations, assess and collect taxes, and even allow people to file formal complaints against local Talib leaders. Part of the Taliban plan to win over the people in Swat was to help the poor or displaced own land.

Their utter brutality has not waned, nor has their disregard for human life. But with each such transaction, they chip away at the legitimacy of the Afghan government, saying in effect: “We can give you the stability the government cannot.”

No, our biggest problem isn’t caves; it’s credibility. Our messages lack credibility because we haven’t invested enough in building trust and relationships, and we haven’t always delivered on promises.

The most common questions that I get in Pakistan and Afghanistan are: “Will you really stay with us this time?” “Can we really count on you?” I tell them that we will and that they can, but when it comes to real trust in places such as these, I don’t believe we are even in Year Zero yet. There’s a very long way to go.

The irony here is that we know better.

For all the instant polling, market analysis, and focus groups we employ today, we could learn a lot by looking to our own past. No other people on Earth have proven more capable at establishing trust and credibility in more places than we have. And we’ve done it primarily through the power of our example.

The voyage of the Great White Fleet told the world that the United States was no longer a second-rate nation. The Marshall Plan made it clear that our strength was only as good as it was shared. The policy of containment let it be known we wouldn’t stand for the spread of communism. And relief efforts in the wake of natural disasters all over the world said calmly and clearly: we will help you through this.

We didn’t need a public opinion poll to launch that fleet. We didn’t need a “strat comm” plan to help rebuild Europe. And we sure didn’t need talking points and Power- Point slides to deliver aid. Americans simply showed up and did the right thing because it was, well, the right thing to do.

That’s the essence of good communication: having the right intent up front and letting our actions speak for themselves. We shouldn’t care if people don’t like us; that isn’t the goal. The goal is credibility. And we earn that over time.

Now I’m not suggesting we stop planning to communicate or that we fail to factor in audience reaction, perceptions, or culture.

I recognize the information environment today is much more complex than it was in 1909, or even 1999. As someone who “tweets” almost daily, I appreciate the need to embrace the latest technologies.

But more important than any particular tool, we must know the context within which our actions will be received and understood. We hurt ourselves and the message we try to send when it appears we are doing something merely for the credit.

We hurt ourselves more when our words don’t align with our actions. Our enemies regularly monitor the news to discern coalition and American intent as weighed against the efforts of our forces. When they find a “say-do” gap—such as Abu Ghraib—they drive a truck right through it.

So should we, quite frankly. We must be vigilant about holding ourselves accountable to higher standards of conduct and closing any gaps, real or perceived, between what we say about ourselves and what we do to back it up.

In fact, I would argue that most strategic communication problems are not communication problems at all. They are policy and execution problems. Each time we fail to live up to our values or don’t follow up on a promise, we look more and more like the arrogant Americans the enemy claims we are.

And make no mistake—there has been a certain arrogance to our “strat comm” efforts. We’ve come to believe that messages are something we can launch downrange like a rocket, something we can fire for effect.

They are not. Good communication runs both ways. It’s not about telling our story. We must also be better listeners. The Muslim community is a subtle world we don’t fully—and don’t always attempt to understand. Only through a shared appreciation of the people’s culture, needs, and hopes for the future can we hope ourselves to supplant the extremist narrative.

We cannot capture hearts and minds. We must engage them; we must listen to them, one heart and one mind at a time—over time.

I’m a big fan of Three Cups of Tea by Greg Mortenson. In fact, I had the opportunity this summer to help him open up a new school for girls in the Panjshir Valley. Greg believes that building relationships is just as important as building projects. “The enemy is ignorance,” he told me, “and it isn’t theirs alone. We have far more to learn from the people who live here than we could ever hope to teach them.”

He’s right. We are only going to be as good as our own learning curve. And just the simple act of trying, of listening to others, speaks volumes all by itself.

I know strategic communication as a term of reference is probably here to stay. Regrettably, it’s grown too much a part of our lexicon. But I do hope we take this opportunity under the coming Quadrennial

Defense Review to reexamine what we mean by it. Strategic communication should be an enabling function that guides and informs our decisions and not an organization unto itself. Rather than trying to capture all communication activity underneath it, we should use it to describe the process by which we integrate and coordinate.

To put it simply, we need to worry a lot less about how to communicate our actions and much more about what our actions communicate. I also hope we learn to be more humble, to listen more. Because what we are after in the end—or should be after—are actions that speak for themselves, that speak for us. What we need more than anything is credibility.

And we can’t get that in a talking point.

MICHAEL G. MULLEN

Admiral, U.S. Navy

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff

Published in JCS News

WASIM VIEW- Admiral Mike Mullen is a household name in Pakistan for all the wrong reasons and is the chief soldier for our good friend, one Uncle Sam.

That said, Mullen does makes good sense in his communication to American troops, especially in highlighting how US words often do not meet US actions. Mullen speaks some home-truths that must be heeded if the US is to win support in the world including how the Taliban have succeeded in governance where the might of the US and NATO have failed miserably.

Mullen does well to speak of the Greg Mortensen story and he would do we if he asked for its wider implementation in Pakistan and Afghanistan if Uncle Sam is to see success in the region.

That said the real test for Mullen and the troops he commands, and the leaders he serves  including celebrity President Obama remains the same, will the words he and Uncle Sam say today match their actions on the ground?