Chatham House 6-7pm Monday October 11 Pakistan, its journalists and the stories the West forgets

School of Oriental & African Studies 6-8pm Wednesday October 13
Brunei Theatre, Thornhaugh Street, Russell Square, London WC1H 0XG Pakistan’s journalists – lifting the lid

Guardian Foundation, 7pm Friday October 15
Kings Place 90 York Way London N1 9GU

For more information contact Mustafa Qadri on email[at]mustafaqadri.net

SPEAKER BIOGRAPHIES

Rahimullah Yusufzai

Through three decades of war in neighboring Afghanistan, Pakistani journalist Rahimullah Yusufzai has been the ultimate fixer, the man foreign reporters—from Lawrence Wright to Seymour Hersh—go to for the lay of the land or to arrange a hard-to-get interview with a militia commander. The fifty-six-year-old resident editor of The News, Pakistan’s largest English-language daily, was the first to report on the Taliban movement from Kandahar and has interviewed the Taliban chief Mullah Omar and Osama bin Laden on several occasions.

Beena Sarwar

Beena Sarwar is a journalist and documentary filmmaker focusing on human rights, gender, media, and peace with extensive experience with the print media and television in Pakistan and abroad. She was the founding editor of weekly The News on Sunday, Pakistan, in 1994, has been the OpEd Editor of daily The News, and is Contributing Editor in Pakistan for monthly Himal Southasian, Kathmandu. Since completing her Masters in Television Documentary (Goldsmiths College, University of London, 2001) she has made several documentaries and worked as a producer with Geo Television news, Pakistan’s first 24-hour news channel. She was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University, where she returned a Fellow at Harvard University’s Carr Center for Human Rights Policy, working on a book about democratic struggles in Pakistan.

Quatrina Hussain

Quatrina is the director of Current Affairs at Express News television station and host of popular political talk show Siyasi Log that provides contrasting perspectives from leading political personalities on various issues of national and international importance. Based in Islamabad, Quatrina keeps a check on the most topical happenings in the political nerve centre of the country.

Mustafa Qadri

Mustafa is an independent journalist based in Pakistan who writes regularly for the Guardian’s Comment is Free website, The Australian newspaper and is a Pakistan correspondent for Radio National Australia. He is responsible for organising the journalists’ visit to London.

Mustafa Qadri
guardian.co.uk, Monday 8 February 2010 08.00 GMT

Memory spans are short in modern politics, but even by those standards the relative ease with which the discourse on Afghanistan has shifted from fighting the Taliban to negotiating with them is remarkable.

Even more incredible is our collective refusal to admit the obvious. The Taliban are stronger than ever because the US chose a heavy-handed, unilateral military response to the 9/11 attacks. What’s more, the insurgency is now more ideologically aligned with al-Qaida than ever before. Thanks to bin Laden’s network, the Taliban have changed from rag-tag army to deadly insurgency and, most ominous of all, they believe they are more than a match for the world’s only superpower.

Some will say that the climate following the deadly attacks on the US nearly nine years ago made it impossible to take the more nuanced approach now being attempted. Diplomacy back in 2001 was left to the Taliban. As the US began its carpet bombardment of Afghanistan, however, Mullah Omar expressed a willingness to hand bin Laden over provided the US gave evidence of his culpability. Any extradition, he added, would have to be to a neutral country and not the US.

The offer was flatly rejected in October 2001, along with an earlier suggestion to try bin Laden in a domestic or international tribunal. It is impossible to judge in hindsight the veracity or practicality of these overtures. But as US-led foreign and Afghan forces meander through an increasingly violent and destabilising war that has killed thousands of Afghans and hundreds of foreign nationals, including 253 British soldiers, the decision to favour unilateral war over diplomacy has proved disastrous.

The Afghan war is also a political liability for foreign governments embroiled in it. A majority of voters in most countries involved in the International Assistance Force for Afghanistan, including Britain, want their troops to return home. Western planners have realised that there can be no hope of a withdrawal in the foreseeable future unless there is dialogue with the Taliban.

This is no simple task. On the one hand, negotiating with the Taliban is a victory for realism. They may represent one of the most fanatical and oppressive streams of Islam, but the Taliban are now the dominant social movement in Afghanistan’s Pashtun population, the country’s largest ethnic group who inhabit the regions of the south and east – major frontlines in the current conflict. Support for the Taliban among Pashtuns, far from universal before 2001, has increased because the US and its allies decided to invade their country.

But these facts should not detract from other truths. There can be no doubt that the Taliban and the warlords backing the pro-US regime in Kabul pose a long-term threat to the development of Afghanistan, particularly for its women and minorities. New research suggests that support for the Taliban is based not on ideology but social ties, cultural affinities and the hope that the insurgents can improve living conditions more than President Karzai’s hopelessly corrupt administration.

Karzai is a product of the US decision to unilaterally invade Afghanistan. Along with resentment towards the US for installing the Karzai regime, however, many Afghans are also openly hostile to regional powers, especially Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, for promoting conflict in their country even after the Soviets left in 1989. Interestingly, Afghans view India more favourably than any other foreign presence in their country – up to 71% of them according to one recent opinion poll – including the UN. It cannot be a coincidence that there are no Indian soldiers in Afghanistan. India has invested billions of dollars in developing the country’s civil infrastructure. India’s involvement in Afghanistan is not an act of charity and it has a long history of supporting former Northern Allies warlords widely implicated in atrocities. But in post-2001 Afghanistan, the soft power of Indian development assistance has accrued enormous goodwill.

An extensive survey carried out by the Asia Foundation last year found that the central thing on Afghan minds is not the Taliban or the US, but access to education and employment for both men and women. And as Khalid Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner, points out, poverty is a far greater cause of death in Afghanistan than war.

In the rush to end our participation in the Afghan war it is important to remind ourselves that what Afghanistan needs is not an end to foreign involvement but an acceptance that it was a victim of the international community’s collective interference long before bin Laden plotted the 9/11 attacks.

Talking to the Taliban should not mean appeasing extremists in exchange for a quick withdrawal. Rather, solving this morally ambiguous conflict will require a commitment to engage with all Afghans over a long period of time.

Getting out of Afghanistan won’t be cheap. Mustafa Qadri takes a look at the West’s new hope for a solution to its Afghanistan problem

After much anticipation, Western leaders have finally put some meat on their previously bare-bones proposals for stabilising Afghanistan over the next few years. The short story is that President Obama is sticking to the plan he outlined in his speech at West Point last year, whereby he intends to hand responsibility for the country’s governance and security back to the Afghan authorities over a five-year period starting from 2011.

That is a polite way of saying that he hopes the US-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), which includes around 2000 Australian service personnel, will be out of the country by 2016.

Whether or not the force’s leadership continues to see that as realistic or desirable is another matter, but a few signals of how this may actually unfold were revealed at the major international conference on the Afghan situation that was held in London last week. The conference identified three main aims: improve governance and delivery of aid; improve security by beefing up Afghan forces, escalating the US-led war and trying to win the support of Taliban militants; and increasing the involvement of neighbouring countries in this process.

In a significant change, conference attendees agreed to give Afghan authorities direct control of half of all aid flagged for the country. With the corruption-mired regime of President Karzai holding the reins however, governance issues are likely to remain a big problem. For his part, Karzai has promised more robust institutional oversight of his government and the funding it receives from abroad, including the set-up of an anti-corruption unit and tribunal. To be sure, the guiding hand of foreign bureaucrats will assist him in this attempt. For political and practical reasons, Karzai’s international backers cannot afford a repeat of last year’s farcical elections that saw the great political survivor returned as President amid widespread vote rigging.

From next year the ISAF hopes to expand the Afghan National Army (ANA) from around 100,000 to 170,000 troops, but meeting that target will be a challenge. Like the Afghan police forces, the ANA has a high attrition rate: according to US Defence Department statistics, one in four recruits quit the army last year. Another problem with the army is that it is dominated by ethnic Tajiks throughout its upper and lower ranks. Given that the Tajiks are fierce historical rivals of the Pashtuns, the ethnic group from which the Taliban emerged and in whose territories most of the conflict has been waged, there are serious doubts as to the ANA’s ability to provide unity, and not just security, for Afghanistan.

The new policy strategy will also seek to attract lower and middle rank Taliban members, and potentially even senior warlords, away from the insurgency to fight either in or alongside ANA forces. A fund of up to US$500 million has been proposed for this purpose including AUD$25 million from Australia. A further US$1.5 billion is already available to US commanders to fund overtures to Afghan militants although little is known about it. It is possible the US will use these funds to woo the most powerful Taliban commanders although any such move could be too politically explosive to disclose publicly.

President Karzai has offered to integrate key Taliban commanders into the formal political set up of Afghanistan. Officially, the US has been cool on this proposal. Like all other governments involved with Afghanistan, the Obama Administration wants to avoid accusations from its domestic political opponents that it is appeasing extremists. Nevertheless, policy wonks and elite observers have for at least the past two years accepted that negotiations with the Taliban are inevitable. Privately, some on the US side are looking favourably at this approach because it could open the way towards an exit strategy.

There are practical reasons to support a negotiated settlement with the Taliban. These insurgents are, as President Karzai remarked recently, “sons of the Afghan soil”. The aversion many people have toward their oppressive social precepts cannot erase the fact that the Taliban is now the most organised political movement within the Pashtun community, the largest ethnic group in Afghanistan and the dominant force in the countries south and east.

Geostrategically, the idea of talking to the Taliban has gained traction ever since the final year of the Bush White House in 2008. Like previous empires, the US has realised that it cannot achieve a straightforward military victory in Afghanistan, partly due to that country’s size and remoteness, and partly due to the widespread popular resistance to foreign military presences in the country. Although difficult to quantify, a raft of recent research suggests that most rank-and-file members of the Taliban fight not for religious reasons but to defend against foreign occupation of their homeland, or because they feel that the Taliban are a more effective and legitimate authority than the highly corrupt and ineffectual regime of President Hamid Karzai, a regime that is almost totally dependent on foreign assistance for its survival.

In much the same vein, Taliban leader Mullah Omar has publicly ruled out negotiations with US-led forces until all foreign troops leave Afghanistan, a demand he has made ever since US forces invaded in late 2001. However, with the US building a massive new embassy in Kabul and an extensive network of military bases, it is questionable whether they do in fact intend to ever leave the country entirely.

That may militate against an end to hostilities in the foreseeable future, but there is anecdotal evidence to suggest that Mullah Omar is more flexible than his rhetoric suggests. According to some media reports, Omar has flagged the possibility of a renegotiation of the national constitution with other Afghan leaders — the Taliban considers the current one illegitimate owing to Western involvement in its drafting. Another demand is the integration of ethnic Pashtun Taliban forces into the Tajik-dominated Afghan National Army.

Most significant of all, however, was Omar’s statement last November during the Muslim holy festival of Eid, that a future Taliban government would not pose a threat to neighbouring countries, a clear suggestion that al Qaeda would no longer be welcome.

Subtle as it is, comments such as these have reverberated loudly in Washington and Brussels, headquarters of the NATO alliance that is running ISAF. They are seen as significant developments, given the Taliban’s reputation for refusing to compromise on its core principles.

In truth, however, foreign leaders are desperate to end a conflict that looks unwinnable. As nearly every country fighting in Afghanistan is doing so in spite of majority opposition to the war at home, their presence in this devastated Central Asian nation has become a massive political liability for many governments.

That is why another aim of the London Conference was to increase the involvement of Afghanistan’s neighbouring countries in its stabilisation, but apart from confirmed US allies India and Pakistan, key regional powers China and Russia took a back seat at the negotiations. Iran, another one of Afghanistan’s pivotal neighbours, did not even send a delegation to the London conference, saying the event was only being held “to increase military presence in Afghanistan, and does not deal fundamentally with Afghan woes nor count on regional capacities to resolve the problems”.

Perhaps that was too harsh a rebuke but the fact remains that, despite attempts to move from conflict to conciliation, the US is still calling the shots and it is still looking for a military solution.

Source URL: http://newmatilda.com/2010/02/01/afghanistan-exit-fee

Mustafa Qadri
guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 27 January 2010 15.10 GMT

With his chequered past and unlikely rise to the top, it is understandable that Asif Ali Zardari has faced constant calls to resign ever since becoming president of Pakistan two years ago. The central focus of the grievances has been Pakistan’s supreme court where a raft of charges have been submitted against Zardari and most of the senior leaders of the ruling Pakistan Peoples party by a motley mix of political parties, private citizens, and the court itself.

But in the glasshouse that is Pakistani politics the risk is that perceptions of judicial independence will be shattered by all the stone throwing. To understand the fracas it is necessary to consider recent history. After public pressure forced the Zardari government to reinstate Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, there was widespread celebration that at last Pakistan had found one institution that was above the cronyism that has plagued political life here.

Tables turn quickly in Pakistan. So it is perhaps no surprise that almost immediately the reconstituted supreme court began hearing challenges against members of the Zardari government. That included a petition by the chief justice himself against the National Reconciliation Ordinance, an amnesty granted by former President Pervez Musharraf after the United States pushed him to welcome Zardari and his wife, the former prime minister Benazir Bhutto, who was assassinated in 2007, back into Pakistani politics.

Last December the Chaudhry supreme court ruled the NRO was unconstitutional, opening the floodgates for the current cases. Although attention has focused on charges against Zardari, the irony is that many of those bringing them have a history of intimidating the courts, disavowing them for being un-Islamic or have themselves faced charges ranging from corruption to murder at some point in their career.

What makes the current drama intriguing is the way that age-old double standard has become enmeshed with new political twists. Historically incapable of reining in the powerful, the courts have always been a favoured forum for otherwise disparate opposition groups to occasionally forget their mutual disdain in order to channel their common enmity towards whoever happens to be in government. The difference now is that, for the first time, the powerful are fearful of Pakistan’s highest court. That exposes it to the risk of being swept along with the political zeitgeist.

As the country continues to struggle with terrorism and a flagging economy, Asif Zardari, long considered uncritically obedient to diktats from Washington, has become emblematic of a government that most Pakistanis find easy to hate and impossible to love. Known derisively as “Mr 10%” for his alleged embezzlement of government revenues while his wife was prime minister in the 1990s, the president has faced several lawsuits in Pakistan, Britain, France and Switzerland over the last 15 years. Although most of them were dropped after the NRO, the supreme court’s ruling that it was unconstitutional has breathed new life into Pakistan’s courts and at least two cases in Switzerland and France.

Like any politician, Zardari will do everything in his power to cling to the presidency. In a departure from what has hitherto been an aloof tenure, he has begun a countrywide speaking tour aimed at rousing public confidence. But, ironically, there is a good chance he will agree to curtail his legal and de facto powers as president. Already he has transferred the authority to launch Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal to the prime minister, a largely symbolic gesture given the army’s control of military affairs.

Yet Zardari still retains the power to appoint the chief of army staff, the most powerful post in the country, and dismiss the National Assembly. With General Ashfaq Kayani‘s term as army chief set to expire this year and parliament the only institution with the lawful power to revoke his presidential immunities, Zardari retains key bargaining chips should his situation deteriorate.

As president, Zardari enjoys constitutional immunity from criminal prosecution. But some legal experts argue that it does not preclude civil suits. Some, invoking nebulous provisions of the constitution inserted by the Islamist dictator Zia ul-Haq in 1985, have called for his removal on the grounds of poor character. Whatever the result of these arguments, it is clear that Zardari will be exposed to a toxic cocktail of civil and criminal charges the moment he leaves office.

Do not be surprised, then, if Zardari flees the country once his presidency ends, or if the Obama administration demands that he be left unmolested as a private citizen – much as the Bush administration protected former president Pervez Musharraf from prosecution when he resigned in August 2008. How does the supreme court fit into this? No one really knows. With the ball firmly in the court, however, it remains to be seen if the judges will pursue the military, mullahs and other politicians with the same vigour as they are pursuing Asif Zardari.

Already ravaged by high inflation, massive energy shortages and political turmoil, Pakistan has been shocked by bombings in most of its major cities, writes Mustafa Qadri

Pakistan is enduring the most brutal spate of political violence since the Punjab-dominated Army was implicated in mass slaughter in 1971. Despite military victories in large swathes of the tribal areas that are home to the Taliban, Pakistan’s major cities have been rocked by an escalating series of violent events that, according to one estimate, have claimed 544 lives in a little under three months.

Where once the bombings were primarily concentrated in or near the tribal areas, such as the cities of Peshawar and Dera Ismail Khan, these recent bomb blasts and shootings have hit several of the largest cities in the country.

The bombings of the two biggest cities of the Punjab, the most populous and influential of Pakistan’s provinces — Lahore in May and Multan earlier this month — are a sign of this shift. The carnage in Multan was followed by an attack on a mosque in a heavily fortified part of Rawalpindi where many Army personnel traditionally gather for Friday prayers. This last attack left 40 dead, including a major-general and 16 children of senior military officers.

This was the second major attack on Rawalpindi, the city which houses the headquarters of Pakistan’s Army, in as many months. In October, militants attempted to breach Army headquarters, leading to a 22-hour siege and hostage crisis that badly humiliated the country’s senior generals.

The Taliban hail from the remote and poorly developed tribal areas along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, and not from the big cities. This makes claims that they are responsible for these recent bombings all the more destabilising for Pakistan — but it also has many here querying whether the Taliban actually is responsible for the well coordinated attacks.

Pakistan’s media, religious groups and government authorities rarely use the term “Taliban” when discussing the current violence. That is because in Pakistan the Taliban are still associated with the anti-US resistance in neighbouring Afghanistan. There is also a widespread perception that the Taliban regime in Afghanistan that existed before the US-led invasion of 2001 was, although perhaps theologically primitive, an honest political broker that provided the troubled central Asian nation with an unprecedented level of stability and promoted the virtues of Islam.

For observers in the West this may sound absurd. But a little over two decades ago, Islamist militants waging what they considered a holy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan were called “freedom fighters” by then US President Ronald Reagan, (not to mention by Rambo).

For many in Pakistan, the Afghan Taliban inherited the mantle of freedom fighters from the conflict in the 1980s. While the Pakistan security establishment has retained informal links with Afghan Taliban commanders and their allies after the September 11, 2001 attacks on the US, for their part, the Afghan Taliban has largely avoided the anti-Pakistan insurgency.

Noting this distinction, retired civil and military officials contacted by newmatilda.com say they are sceptical about Taliban involvement in the bombings inside Pakistan. They blame foreign governments, particularly India, the United States and Israel for the current violence.

According to Pakistan Interior Minister Rehman Malik, the senior civilian bureaucrat charged with counterterrorism activities, India is responsible for much of the terrorism.

This claim was echoed by intelligence officials interviewed by newmatilda.com in the national capital of Islamabad and Peshawar, the largest and strategically important city on Pakistan’s northwest frontier. Mufti Zubair Usmani from the Jamia Darul Uloom, in Karachi, the largest mainstream religious seminary in the country, says the Pakistan Taliban “is an instrument of RAW [the Research and Analysis Wing of the Indian Prime Minister’s Office, one of India’s top spy agencies] … Whoever is doing things in Pakistan is doing it to defeat Pakistan [which] happens to be in a strategic location [and] an atomic power. Because of this, the violence will continue.”

Provincial and federal intelligence officials interviewed by newmatilda.com privately deliver remarkably similar conclusions, citing secret intelligence from the interrogation of captured Taliban operatives and other sources that suggest Indian and Afghan government involvement.

Adding intrigue to this already confusing situation, the Pakistan Taliban tends to deny responsibility for some of the bombings, especially those that kill high numbers of civilians. They have even blamed the private military contractor Blackwater, now known as Xe Services, and Pakistan’s own intelligence agencies for the most devastating attacks while taking responsibility for those that target the military.

Both the Army and the Taliban claim to fight in the name of Islam  so blaming foreigners and avoiding the more sobering and likely reality that Muslim Pakistanis are killing one another helps both sides rally popular support.

It’s little help in this volatile environment for the US to be openly speaking of escalating its highly destabilising drone war inside Pakistan. Last week, at least 15 people were killed by an American drone assault on a suspected military compound on the border with Afghanistan.

Powerless to control the spiraling violence, it is no wonder that many Pakistanis are convinced that foreigners, and not the Taliban, are the greatest source of instability in their country.

Source URL: http://newmatilda.com/2009/12/22/who-behind-violence-pakistan

Journalism is a dangerous profession in Pakistan. But a vibrant, relatively free press still exists in this volatile country

Mustafa Qadri
guardian.co.uk, Friday 19 December 2009 18:00 GMT

For as long as anyone cares to remember, journalism has been a dangerous profession in Pakistan. Although of late much of the attention has focused on the risks to foreign journalists, the situation for local reporters is equally, if not more, parlous.

First consider that virtually all the on-the-ground news you read from Pakistan, especially from conflict zones, has been gathered by a local reporter under considerable personal risk. That is certainly the case for journalists working in the northwest frontier where the Taliban are most active. “I [do some] work for Voice of America,” one veteran reporter, who requested anonymity, told me in the safety of a hotel room in Islamabad. “Even now, I do not tell [the Taliban he interviews] that. It would mean certain death.”

Only last week, the Guardian’s Ghaith Abdul-Ahad and two other journalists were kidnapped by an unknown gang in a region bordering Pakistan’s tribal areas. Although they were thankfully released on Wednesday, many others have not been so lucky.

Despite the risks, journalists like Abdul-Ahad remain a vital part of keeping the powerful accountable. Earlier this year, for instance, the media was at the forefront of exposing attempts by the current and previous Pakistan government to crack down on supporters of the current chief justice of Pakistan. Other scandals, like illegal commodity syndicates allegedly involving the ruling elite, have also been brought to public attention thanks to independent media.

Of course, Pakistan’s press is far from perfect. Although this year most outlets have exposed the brutalities of the Pakistan Taliban, over the past eight years that the insurgency has existed many either voiced sympathy for them or ignored their excesses. Even now many commentators refuse to refer to the insurgents as Taliban and instead suggest that there are foreign hands in most everything that occurs in this country.

The government has also on occasion criticised the media for broadcasting graphic images of the violence that has rocked the major cities for exacerbating the fears of an already panicked population. It has also shut out independent reporting from the frontlines, making it difficult to determine the success or destructiveness of army operations.

Some journalists have even been threatened or killed in mysterious circumstances, leaving many to suspect covert government involvement.

Kamran Shafi, the noted columnist from the Dawn newspaper, had bullets fired into his Islamabad home last month in what is widely believed to be an attempt by Pakistan’s security establishment, or elements within it, to silence one of the more independent and critical voices in the media.

A decade earlier, Najam Sethi, another veteran journalist, was detained by federal intelligence agents because of the perceived “anti-Pakistan” bias of his reporting. Sethi was released owing largely to his high profile and international lobbying. But most journalists do not have these protections.

Back in February, the bullet-ridden body of Musa Khankhel was found in the Swat valley a day after reporting on a peace deal between a pro-Taliban cleric and the government. Although no conclusive investigations were held, Khankhel’s employer GeoTV believes state intelligence murdered Khankhel out of fear he would expose the reality that the peace agreement was actually aiding the Taliban’s advance into the region. Khankhel had previously survived two assassination attempts by what he claimed were state security forces.

The government is not monolithically opposed to the press. Nor is it the only one that intimidates journalists. Expose the misdemeanours of gangsters or religious groups and you could face anything from death threats to rent-a-crowd mobs outside your residence, hurling profanities and garbage.

How is it then that a vibrant, relatively free press has survived in such a volatile country with a long history of autocratic rule? There appears to be three main reasons. First, the media are the modern incarnation of the subcontinent’s ancient literary traditions where laureates reflected the moods and aspirations of entire communities. It helps that Pakistan’s poetic languages describe the most heinous and beautiful of things in highly allegorical terms. This heritage finds a natural ally in the popular media.

Second, with power so highly concentrated, the media has been one of the only ways that information ever seeps out of the elite and into the mainstream. Allied to this is the third reason: the powerful are so dependent on the weak – be they servants, functionaries or relatives – that it is near impossible to keep things secret.

All the more reason why journalists don’t die of boredom in Pakistan.

Mustafa Qadri
guardian.co.uk, Friday 11 December 2009 16:00 GMT

There is more to President Obama’s policy shift in central Asia than more boots in Afghanistan. For Pakistan it represents an escalation of US drone strikes in the tribal areas and continued pressure on its army to immediately engage the Taliban and al-Qaida despite the practical complexities of the task.

The fundamental problem for Pakistan is that Obama’s acceleration of the war against the Taliban has been calculated largely on the basis of domestic US political demands and not those of the region, let alone Pakistan. Already under intense pressure at home from the financial crisis and the unpopularity of the US presence in Afghanistan, Obama must deliver some semblance of victory before he bids for a second term as commander-in-chief in 2012.

The strange paradox of US policy for “AfPak”, however, is that the troop surge represents the storm before the calm. No matter what the rhetoric at West Point was, the message from the Obama administration is that the US will leave Afghanistan in the foreseeable future.

According to the veteran journalist Saleem Shahzad, Pakistan’s army has already approached key commanders in the pro-Afghan Taliban resistance to ensure that, in the event of a US withdrawal, Pakistan is viewed as a friendly Muslim nation. Not entirely coincidentally, last month the Afghan Taliban chief Mullah Omar rejected the latest call for peace talks from the president, Hamid Karzai. Well aware that time is on his side, Omar has consistently refused negotiations until all foreign armies have left Afghanistan.

For Pakistan, this makes disarming the Afghan Taliban within its borders even less appealing than it already was. For starters, Pakistan security forces have had to extensively rely on pro-Afghan Taliban commanders in North and South Waziristan to capture the main sanctuaries of the Hakeemullah Mehsud-led Pakistani Taliban.

Unlike its Afghan cousin, the Pakistan Taliban movement seeks to overthrow the Pakistan state. Because it is an existential threat to Pakistan, current operations are aimed at eliminating this branch of the Taliban.

Once the boosted US-led force engages the Taliban and its allies in Afghanistan it will be difficult for Pakistan to retain the sensitive ceasefires that enable access to strategic regions of the tribal areas and ensures that the Afghan Taliban do not join Mehsud’s insurgency in Pakistan. “Pakistan cannot fight on all fronts [at once],” explains Tariq Khan, inspector general of the Frontier Corp, the country’s key paramilitary outfit in the tribal areas.

Pakistan has been confronted with some sobering realities. Many of the Pakistan Taliban’s fighters and key commanders like Mehsud have fled their hideouts and are still at large. The violence has escalated; almost every one of Pakistan’s major cities has been rocked by devastating bombings that have claimed about 500 lives in two months, even though the Afghan Taliban has not been directly involved in the violence.

The terrifying truth is that in the absence of social and political solutions, no amount of police sleuthing or security checkpoints will ever prevent a committed foe with many thousands of young suicide bombers from transforming the suburbs of Pakistan into a warzone. If the Afghan Taliban were to join the fray it would be an even bigger massacre.

Despite this, Washington has continued to press Pakistan to escalate its ground offensives with apparent ignorance or reckless indifference to the consequences for Pakistan.

According to media reports, the CIA has decided to expand drone strikes deeper into the tribal areas and the province of Baluchistan – a larger and more restive and remote region of Pakistan than the tribal areas. Any such expansion will no doubt greatly destabilise Pakistan as the insurgents push deeper into the country to avoid being hit and intense hostility to the drone strikes reaches fever pitch.

When Pakistan recaptured the scenic Swat Valley from the Taliban between May and August, western capitals lauded its resolve to finally defeat extremism. As soon as that and other battles had been waged and won, however, Pakistan was publicly cajoled by Washington, and occasionally London, for not accelerating the war even further. For so many Pakistanis, whether members of the elite or not, it all feels like a giant game that Pakistan can never actually win.

]]> http://mustafaqadri.net/wp/articles/pakistan-is-losing-this-great-game/feed/ 0 http://mustafaqadri.net/wp/articles/the-other-battle-for-pakistan/ http://mustafaqadri.net/wp/articles/the-other-battle-for-pakistan/#comments Sat, 05 Dec 2009 16:23:19 +0000 mustafa http://mustafaqadri.net/wp/?p=582 Now that an amnesty providing immunity to thousands has expired, Pakistan’s supreme court has the chance to showcase its merits

Mustafa Qadri
guardian.co.uk, Saturday 5 December 2009 18.00 GMT

It may be more a matter of wits than weapons, but the battle for control of Pakistan‘s executive branch of government is as significant for the country as the war against the Taliban. Resolving this latest crisis, the fiercest tussle over the stewardship of the country since Pervez Musharraf was ousted from the presidency in August 2008, will determine the future of Pakistan’s parliamentary democracy for many years to come.

Although ostensibly centred on current President Asif Ali Zardari’s immunity from a raft of court cases, the dispute has engulfed many of the most senior members of government.

It all boils down to a national reconciliation ordinance drawn up by Musharraf in November 2007 when he was still president. As his popularity and legitimacy plummeted, the Bush administration pushed for a power sharing arrangement between the general and one of his great rivals, the slain former prime minister Benazir Bhutto who was living in exile between Dubai and London at the time. But a raft of court cases against Bhutto, her husband Asif Zardari, and many of their cohorts precluded an easy return to Pakistan to contest national elections. The NRO effectively gave them the immunity they desperately need to return to politics.

Following victory in national elections last year, the Pakistan People’s party, under Asif Zardari’s stewardship following Bhutto’s assassination in December 2007, formed a coalition government with a number of other parties and pressed for the NRO to be passed as law. But parliament and the supreme court conspired to scupper those plans, leaving the controversial amnesty to expire last Saturday, 28 November.

As far as we know, 8,041 individuals were given immunity under the NRO. They include Hussain Haqqani, Pakistan’s influential ambassador to the United States, and Rehman Malik, a key Zardari lieutenant and spearhead of the civilian administration’s push against extremists. Pakistan’s high commissioner to Britain, Wajid Shamsul Hassan, is also on the NRO list. So is the Britain-based head of the Muttahida Quami Movement, Altaf Hussain who, along with two of his deputies, faces more charges than any other individual on the list.

The charges against the thousands on the list, alleging everything from corruption, abuse of authority and even murder, make for harrowing reading. And although the government claims it will not protect anyone from the court’s findings, there can be no doubt that many of the charges are politically motivated. Virtually every prominent politician in Pakistan has faced or is facing a court case lodged by their foes.

But in among the mudslinging and the uncertainty it has created, the move to refer the NRO to the courts is a powerful, if indirect endorsement for the rule of law and parliamentary democracy. The government, faced with a hostile mix of political opponents and opportunists, says it will abide by any court rulings against those on the NRO.

A revitalised supreme court headed by Iftikhar Chaudhry, the fiercely independent chief justice who survived first Musharraf and then Zardari’s attempt to remove him, is expected to rule on the legality of the NRO in the not too distant future. He has already set a supreme court bench to commence hearings against those named in the NRO from Monday 7 December.

What the court eventually determines will also likely determine the fate of the present government.

So long as he remains head of state, President Zardari will retain immunity from any prosecution. Desperate to remain in office, however, he has already ceded control of the country’s nuclear arsenal to the prime minister. It is expected that he will also concede the powers to dismiss the national assembly and appoint military chiefs. That would be a welcome move as the prime minister is more answerable to the parliament than the president.

Current prime minister Yusuf Raza Gilani has undoubtedly been the biggest winner in this saga. Although installed by Zardari to be a pliant prime minister, he has increasingly drifted away from his orbit. It is well known that he has courted the Sharif brothers, former prime minister Nawaz and Punjab chief minister Shahbaz, who control the largest opposition party and dominate politics in the most populous province of Punjab. If key members of the PPP-led government falls due to the NRO , Gilani, who was a member of Sharif’s party until falling out of favour in the 1990s, could form government with them. To his distinct advantage, Gilani was not on the NRO list because the courts have already cleared him of corruption charges.

The political wrangling certainly reduces Pakistan’s capacity to deal effectively with the three largest crises plaguing the nation: the ongoing war with the Pakistan Taliban, the inability to match energy supplies with demand, and a weak, highly inflationary economy.

With so many Pakistanis sceptical of a democratic process that historically has failed to deliver, however, now is the best opportunity to showcase the merits of Pakistan’s fragile secular institutions.

]]> http://mustafaqadri.net/wp/articles/the-other-battle-for-pakistan/feed/ 0 http://mustafaqadri.net/wp/articles/should-he-stay-or-should-he-go/ http://mustafaqadri.net/wp/articles/should-he-stay-or-should-he-go/#comments Fri, 04 Dec 2009 08:13:02 +0000 mustafa http://mustafaqadri.net/wp/?p=586

A troop surge AND a withdrawal by July 2011? Despite the fuss, Obama’s Afghanistan speech marks very little in the way of new policy, writes Mustafa Qadri

“Unlike Vietnam, we are not facing a broad-based popular insurgency.” Those were President Obama’s confident words as he announced a major US troop surge into Afghanistan earlier this week.

The US may have entered Afghanistan to clean out what was believed to be the key haven for the international terrorist network known as al Qaeda. But in the intervening eight years, America’s main opponents in the deserts and towns of Afghanistan have been the young men of rural Kandahar, Uruzgan, Helmand and so many other areas fighting not for global jihad but for independence from foreign interference. There are key differences between the war in Afghanistan and that in Vietnam — but a lack of a broad-based popular insurgency is not one of them.

Just as his predecessor George W Bush finally chose to shift from nation-building to exit strategy in Iraq, so too has Obama, who has promised to begin bringing American troops home from Afghanistan by around July 2011. Essentially, Obama’s prescriptions for Afghanistan augur more of the same. Although the US military chief in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, had requested 40,000 more soldiers, the Obama Administration’s approval of 30,000 troops — with NATO allies expected to provide a further 5000 — signals broad ongoing approval for the Pentagon’s approach to the problem.

This suggests that the US believes the only way out of Afghanistan is via a major escalation in military operations. The decision was taken in spite of the enormous financial challenge it will present to an ailing American economy still spiralling into debt. According to US government estimates, each one of the new soldiers will cost US$1 million per year — or a staggering US$30 billion in total. The US already spends US$3.6 billion per month in Afghanistan.

For the first time, US planners have hinted that they intend to leave the country. It remains unclear, however, whether this is a genuine pledge or merely an attempt to placate voters in the US and allied countries who are increasingly opposed to sending their soldiers to fight and die in a distant, alien land.

Media speculation about the significance of Obama’s Afghan troop surge announcement this week has been intense but, in spite of the huge sums of money and lives involved, there is little to suggest a major shift in policy — rather, it looks a lot like an escalation of America’s military power. This is not limited to Afghanistan.

People in neighbouring Pakistan have understandably reacted to the US troop surge with trepidation. There are very real fears that the surge will lead to increased violence along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan.

The CIA is eager to push drone strikes into Balochistan, a larger and even more remote and restive region of Pakistan than the tribal areas where most Taliban militants are based. An extension of drone strikes to Balochistan, already highly unpopular among Pakistanis, would heavily destabilise the already troubled South Asian nation.

Although Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Omar is believed to be based in Quetta, the capital of Balochistan, and many rank and file Afghan Taliban use the north of the province as a place to prepare for and rest from attacks inside Afghanistan, Balochistan has not hitherto been a frontline in this conflict. Extending drone strikes into the area will undoubtedly push Taliban forces deeper into Pakistan, inviting more strikes and further destabilising a country already struggling to fight a complex war within its territory.

It doesn’t help that most Pakistanis are extremely hostile to the United States and remain sceptical about the need to combat Islamist extremism within their borders. Conservative military, religious and political elements within Pakistan will find much to fuel anti-American sentiment in such a situation.

No awareness of this hostility was conveyed in Obama’s speech announcing the troop surge. In fact, the President’s rhetoric was so heavily larded with familiar mythologies that, if taken at face value, one could easily have imagined that the eight destructive years of American unilateralism were just a bad dream.

For example, the President reiterated the claim that the US is driven not by the imperial urge for conquest but instead by the impulse to spread freedom and democracy. The US, he added, has no interest in occupying Afghanistan. All the while, in Afghanistan, as in Iraq, the US continues to construct massive military bases and diplomatic enclaves that suggest it intends to have a permanent presence in both countries.

The rhetoric of nation building in the Middle East has been unceremoniously dropped in favour of the development of a viable security state. But even this new goal is implausible.

In order that foreign troops may leave Afghanistan by 2011, the ill-equipped and undisciplined Afghan National Army will have to be transformed into an effective fighting force within 18 months. This will be a very difficult task — one rendered perhaps impossible by the fact that the army is heavily dominated by ethnic Tajiks with whom the Pashtun populations of the south have a fierce rivalry. Even if more Pashtuns and members of Afghanistan’s other ethnic groups are recruited into the Army, it will take significant time and resources to turn them into a force that can provide security to the country.

It is a sobering and depressing picture. There are no easy solutions. But escalating an unwinnable war is the worst option of all.

Source URL: http://newmatilda.com/2009/12/04/escalation-or-withdrawal-afghanistan

Amid daily suicide attacks, the Pakistan Army is closing in on Taliban strongholds — and this time they seem to have the support of the Pakistani people, reports Mustafa Qadri from Islamabad

Pakistan’s once sleepy capital Islamabad has been transformed into something of a fortress, with checkpoints, cement barriers and police dotting the tree-lined streets. There is no doubt about it: Pakistan is at war, and the signs are everywhere. As of last week, the police alone say they have prevented 67 individuals from carrying out suicide attacks, most recently in a dramatic confrontation at a barricade in Islamabad.

But Peshawar, the capital of the frontline North West Frontier Province, has not been so lucky. There have been daily bombings in this ancient city that, since the start of the most recent Pakistan Army invasion into South Waziristan, have claimed around 300 lives. Earlier this month a suicide bomber targeted the powerful Inter Services Intelligence’s Peshawar offices. It is the second high profile attack on the country’s premier spy agency after a similar blast outside its Lahore offices killed more than 20 in May. The very next day another bomber killed 11 people including three children at a check post in Peshawar.

The most gruesome attack, however, was a blast at the crowded Meena Bazaar on 28 October that claimed 118 lives. Images of the aftermath, which were broadcast live by Pakistan’s numerous private news channels, so disturbed ordinary citizens that the Taliban eventually denied responsibility for the blast, claiming the American private military contractor Blackwater, now known as Xe, was responsible.

Those claims have received some currency among the population and have been championed by mainstream political groups like the religious Jamaat-e-Islami — as have claims by state security officials that Indian or other “foreign elements” are responsible.

Following the successful recapture of the Swat valley in the country’s northwest, the war has travelled to South Waziristan where the Army has made major inroads into regions that were considered too remote and impenetrable to be captured. South Waziristan is the central hub of Tehreek-e-Taliban — the Pakistan Taliban movement which, unlike its Afghan cousin, seeks the overthrow of the Pakistan state — and the current operations are aimed squarely at eliminating this branch of the group.

That distinction is pivotal to understanding this conflict: Pakistan’s army has not targeted all Taliban forces within Pakistan territory. Equally significant is the fact that Pakistan forces have not targeted al Qaeda sanctuaries, most of which are hosted by Afghan Taliban warlords in neighbouring North Waziristan.

When we queried the selective nature of Pakistan’s war against the Taliban in South Waziristan, newmatilda.com was told by security officials that Pakistan could not afford to fight every militant group in every tribal area at the same time. “Pakistan cannot fight on all fronts [at once],” Tariq Khan, Inspector General of the Frontier Corp, the main paramilitary force in the region, said in an interview in Peshawar.

According to recent reports, a major rift has emerged among Taliban warlords in Pakistan’s Waziristan region, resulting in many abandoning Tehreek. It’s likely that this rift has been exploited by the Army — veteran observers speculate that Pakistan security officials may have reached a secret deal with some of the other militant groups to isolate the Tehreek leader and his forces.

There also remains an acute concern that the Taliban retains sympathy from elements within Pakistan’s Army, as demonstrated by a recent attempt to invade Army headquarters which was orchestrated by a former officer. A recent report by veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh claimed that US forces had been engaged by Pakistan to safeguard its nuclear weapons in the event of a security crisis, including an attempt to capture them by rogue elements within the Pakistan Army. The allegations were angrily denied by the Army and Washington — but they do raise significant questions about Pakistan’s stability.

This has been a challenging war for Pakistan to say the least. Even in the most stable country, any battle that sets national forces against their own people would risk a serious backlash. Most Pakistanis saw the campaigns against the Taliban between 2004 and 2008 as pitting Muslims against Muslims at the behest of the United States. But that all seemed to change this year as the Taliban’s actions in the northwest Swat valley started to be widely reported by the media. As the Taliban’s excesses became apparent, the public in Pakistan began to rally behind its forces. That support spiked as violence, already familiar throughout the Pashtun-dominated parts of the country in the North West Frontier Province, began increasingly to hit the key political centres of Islamabad, Lahore, and Rawalpindi, where the Army has its headquarters.

For all the traumas, however, Pakistan has not collapsed as was widely predicted and, militarily at least, it has pushed the Taliban out of several key regions of the northwest tribal areas. In the Swat valley, life has even slowly started returning to normal as music shops and girls schools reopen. Ordinary Pakistanis have rallied behind the Army in this latest war against the Taliban.

Source URL: http://newmatilda.com/2009/11/27/make-no-mistake-pakistan-war

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