No individual has influenced the course of US military strategy more over the last 10 years than Osama bin Laden. In an age of increasingly narrow ideologies, Osama has been the standard bearer for international terrorism. Beyond that simple equation, however, lies a complex, contradictory chain of events that over the last decade has seen Australian forces caught in the unending US war in Afghanistan.

In what is probably the most accurate statement on his passing, Afghan officials termed bin Laden’s death a “symbolic victory”. Afghans have suffered more than any others at the hands of Osama bin Laden, but they are well aware that his death will not bring them a better future.

For a time bin Laden’s ability to evade the most powerful and sophisticated military force in human history gave him a superhuman aura. But as the body count rose the ultimate futility of his terrorism has become ever more evident. For in every conflict in which Osama engaged — from Afghanistan and Iraq to Pakistan and Somalia — even other Islamists eventually realised that his al Qaeda lacked any sustainable vision for Muslim majority societies.

There is no question that Osama’s radical politics were a product of autocratic regimes across the Arab world. Some were aligned with the West, others, like Syria, are still official enemies. Most now face unprecedented challenges from grassroots movements that make a mockery of Western notions of moderate and non-moderate Muslim states.

Al Qaeda’s brand of violent, radical politics too has been swept aside by the soft power of popular politics. Last week the Hamas movement signed a peace agreement with the secular Fatah in Egypt. Both were under immense pressure from ordinary Palestinians to reach such a settlement. In Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood has replaced militancy with political negotiations. Inevitably these developments have their uncertainties. But for societies fatigued by oppression and war they are welcome developments.

It is time the West read these important signals. When the former US pro-consul in Iraq Paul Bremer announced the capture of Saddam Hussein before a packed news conference the hall erupted into loud celebrations. This time, the celebrations are relatively muted.

In a week dominated by the spectacle of the Royal Wedding, one cannot help but feel the theatre of bin Laden’s death obscures the moral and tactical questions we need to answer.

Will his murder reduce the terrorism threat or weaken the insurgency our troops are fighting alongside others in Afghanistan and Pakistan? And why has it taken so long to find bin Laden? That last question is especially prescient given that he was found living in a house in Abbottabad, a settled, urban part of Pakistan’s north-west that is home to many serving and retired military personnel, including some of my own distant relatives.

Only hours after bin Laden’s assassination was announced, unknown assailants torched a NATO supply convoy and killed four policemen in the nearby region of Attock.

Mindful of further devastating attacks, Pakistan’s military has been averse to emphasising its role in the joint operation with US forces that led to bin Laden’s death. Militant groups are expected to mount fresh attacks. That includes Tehreek-e-Taliban, the Pakistani branch of the Islamist insurgency that is more closely aligned to Al Qaeda than its Afghan counterparts.

It is easily forgotten now, but the key moment in bin Laden’s war against the West was 1990. In that year Saudi Arabia invited US troops into the desert kingdom to end Saddam Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait. Bin Laden considered it a sacrilege for American soldiers to be present on the same soil as Mecca, for Muslims the most sacred place on earth. Already disillusioned by the Saudi regime, this was what convinced Osama to engage in high-profile terrorism in the hope of arousing global Muslim animosity towards the US.

The tragic irony is that the international community played a pivotal role in giving Osama international prominence well before Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

Underwritten by the US and Saudi Arabia and managed by Pakistan’s military, the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980s brought bin Laden and other extremists to the fore. The Soviet Union’s eventual withdrawal from Afghanistan and subsequent collapse convinced militant Islamists that their violence could make politics and the global system redundant.

Recent events prove the opposite to be true. Bin Laden is not the only one who was seeking shelter from this conflict. Millions of innocent civilians remain homeless throughout Pakistan, while in neighbouring Afghanistan and in Iraq and many other places the victims of a decade of war continue to suffer.

Liquidating terrorists like Osama bin Laden will not end the terrorism threat. It is grievance and poverty in all its shades — of livelihoods, of opportunities and ideas — that ultimately breeds the conditions in which terrorism is born.

Mustafa Qadri,
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 15 March 2011 12.52 GMT

The admission by Pervez Musharraf, the former Pakistan president, of British complicity in torture on BBC2′s The Secret War on Terror should not surprise anyone. What is more disheartening is the prospect that authorities remain complicit in torture despite the denials and all that has happened over the past 10 years.

But perhaps that should not be surprising. Over the weekend, senior US state department spokesperson Phillip Crowley was forced to resign for saying the treatment of alleged whistleblower Bradley Manning was“ridiculous… counterproductive and stupid”. His comments came afterManning claimed to be stripped naked and forced to parade in front of his guards and placed on ‘punitive’ suicide watch.

President Obama has backtracked on one of the first promises of his tenure. When he approved the continuation of the Guantánamo Bay detention camp this month, despite an earlier promise to close the controversial facility within a year of coming to office, Obama effectively endorsed the inhumane and degrading treatment of 172 terrorism suspects that must surely be tantamount to torture. In Afghanistan, an even larger detention centre at Bagram airbase, known as the “New Guantánamo”, was touted as an alternative to the Cuban naval base. Now it appears both will be in continuous operation into the foreseeable future.

Bagram and Guantánamo are only two parts of an international network of detention facilities across the globe where western governments can escape the prying checks and balances that ought to be the measure of any civilised society.

Like the earlier claims within elite circles to have been fooled by Tony Blair’s dossier and the invasion of Iraq, assertions by British intelligence authorities that they did not know terrorism suspects would be tortured in Pakistan must be met with extreme scepticism.

Successive prime ministers have been happy to describe Pakistan as the centre of global terrorism, but it has also been a centre for western outsourcing of torture. For years, Amnesty International and several other rights groups have reported on the widespread use of torture at all levels of Pakistan’s law enforcement and security authorities, in neighbouring Afghanistan, and in every one of the countries used as rendition sites by Britain and the US. Officials in Whitehall cannot plead ignorance of this reality.

When British torture victim Binyam Mohammad revealed he was strung upside down and beaten with a strap after being sent to Pakistan by British intelligence, it should have immediately resonated with reports of the treatment of thousands of Pakistanis held in secret detention by their intelligence agencies.

“Never once,” said Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan’s leader for the first seven years after the September 11 attacks, did British authorities tell him not to torture terrorism suspects. He argues that the silence was tantamount to “tacit approval” of what Pakistan security authorities were doing.

In last night’s programme, former CIA chief Michael Hayden justified the use of waterboarding on terrorism suspects, as one of the “heroic choices” that unearthed a “treasure trove” of information.

One of the oldest devices used to conceal abuse is to clothe them in the language of necessary precaution. The eternal argument in favour of torture in secret detention facilities is that our world is a dangerous place and that extraordinary measures must be taken to maintain our safety.

But torture is an unreliable method for obtaining information on suspected terrorists. Study after study has shown that victims of torture will tell their tormentors whatever they want to hear to end their ordeal. Moreover, victims of torture are often so mentally and physically injuredby the experience that their value as witnesses is irreparably damaged, a key reason for the difficulty in convicting alleged terrorists the world over. Most important of all, torture and other abuse in detention is a moral aberration. Our support or involvement in these practices effectively signals that there is no distinction between us and the enemies we rightly describe as extremists.

Last year MI6′s Sir John Sawers arrogantly proclaimed that torture was not an abstract question “for philosophy courses or searching editorials”, but “real, constant, operational dilemmas”. Ironically, it is proponents of torture who are most liable to drift to abstractions and hypothetical scenarios to justify abuses such as waterboarding that destroy real lives and condemn democratic, plural societies like Britain to the scorn usually reserved for the most repressive regimes. Officials like Sawers use equally esoteric bureaucratic hurdles to maintain plausible deniability over their complicity in torture.

The detainee inquiry set up by David Cameron’s government is a welcome development. But it has regrettably stated that it is not obliged to comply with international and European standards of human rights. Last month Amnesty International and eight other organisations called on the British government to, among other things, ensure that the inquiry has a mechanism to independently decide what evidence should be made public, and powers to compel evidence.

“And this also has been one of the dark places of the Earth,” says Conrad’s protagonist in Heart of Darkness as he travels down the river Thames. And just as we learn in that cautionary tale, a sordid dark trail still links distant torture chambers to the heart of our governments. Unless and until that link is broken, and all individuals guilty of or complicit in torture are brought to justice, we cannot hope to keep our societies truly safe.

[This article first appeared in The Guardian on March 15, 2011: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/libertycentral/2011/mar/15/torture-pervez-musharraf-tacit-approval]

By Mustafa Qadri

It has been a relatively quiet winter in Peshawar with few bombings. There’s a sense that life is slowly returning to normal. But take a short drive north of the city and the situation is quite different.

The village of Adezai marks the boundary between Peshawar city and the tribal areas and is under constant attack from Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan, or the Pakistan Taliban Movement.

Once a quiet little hamlet, Adezai now looks more like a medieval fortress, a veritable Alamo looking out towards the Khyber Pass and regions under Taliban control. A point not lost on Lashkar member Irshad who takes me up a tower that looks like it could very well be part of a medieval castle.

“I think that our village is a battlefield,” Irshad said. “We are fighting for our village and everyone is trying their best. Inshallah Taliban is finished quickly, because before Taliban was coming from these front two mountains. So we started firing from this gun and from every home. This two, three hundred home, from all home they are firing, they [Taliban] run away from here. They are not doing anything.”

The night before suspected Taliban militants blew up two homes on the outskirts of Adezai. Only a few months earlier the local girls’ school was also blown up.

The situation has forced the men of Adezai, mostly farmers and day labourers, to become soldiers. Irshad and others even left their jobs overseas to defend their homes.

“We are thinking that we have saved Peshawar from destruction because we are in the frontline,” Irshad said. “If you see in Matani, Sarakhoa that is near Peshawar, they have no Taliban. Because of us, because we are in the frontline.

As we talk, the hum of an Army helicopter is heard from above — heading off on an operation against the Taliban in Khyber tribal agency.

Mustafa Qadri: What would happen to you if you went to one of the neighbouring tribal areas?
Irshad: Our neighbouring areas are Taliban.
Mustafa Qadri: What would they do to you?
Irshad: They will kill us. If we go there in Dera Dum Khel they will kill us. It is very simple.
Mustafa Qadri: And if you capture one of them?
Irshad: Yeah we kill them because they are the enemies of Islam, they are enemies of our country, they are enemies of us.
Mustafa Qadri: It is a stark equation – kill or be killed – made ever more stark by the fact that the men of Adezai personally know many of the people who fight with the Taliban, as lashkar member Hafiz Sajid Raza explains.

“Yes we still know quite a few Taliban, some came from our village and those from outside our village I know about 80 percent because I was involved in local elections and in sporting tournaments from before the fighting, volleyball and cricket, you get to know people better,” Hafiz said. “There’s one man called Qari Ayub, he’s also a school teacher. He used to come to our school here frequently when I was a student, and at volleyball tournaments. Now he’s a Taliban commander.”

Mustafa Qadri: Have you ever killed any Taliban?
Hafiz: Yes, the Taliban who killed my father in Karachi. We captured his brother, who is also involved in the Taliban, and we killed him. Just one bullet to the head and he was dead.

In the afternoon, Lashkar members take me to a hilltop used by the Taliban to fire rockets at the village.

Mustafa Qadri: It’s such a beautiful landscape. It’s just green and sand colour. And there’s a bit of a dust, a mist on the horizon. It looks like you’re a few hundred years ago in the past. And only 20 minutes drive away from Peshawar city.
Irshad: This is a point they are coming from this side. We are doing duty every night here. That is a danger point because above this point is another village. They have no control nothing.

Irshad: Mustafa you see this one? It is rocket launcher is fired from our hujra. At night Taliban is coming to this mountain so we firing from our hujra and we targeted this space.
Mustafa Qadri: There’s a big, big hole in the ground!
Irshad: Yes this is big, big hole because this is rocket launcher.
Mustafa Qadri: The call to prayer rings out at dusk and night falls on the village … young men gather in the hujra, something of a community safe house at the heart of Adezai village, waiting for their turn in the night patrols.

Eventually, Irshad, tells me it is time to go.

It’s the dead of night right now. It’s about 11 if not 12 a.m. night. This is the time when the Taliban strike. We’ve just left the hujra which is the main meeting place in the village. We’re going to be scoping the entire village. You can see these big walls around. It’s like we’re basically about to patrol the edges of the castle. We’re really on the frontline here.

“You can see that every night people are doing duty from different, different homes,” Irshad said.

While on patrol I ask some of the lashkar members looking out for possible Taliban attacks what their guard duty entails. I ask Hafiz Sajid Raza, whom we met earlier, how often they do these patrols.

Mustafa Qadri: How often do you do this?
Hafiz: Every night, daily, two or three guys do a circuit around the village, check on the patrols. If there’s an emergency, they gather all the young men.
Mustafa Qadri: And how long have you been doing this?
Hafiz: It’s been around three years now, every night we go on patrol until at least 2 in the morning.

Another Lashkar member he is out on patrol until even later.

Lashkar member: Every night I am on duty until five in the morning.
Mustafa Qadri: Why?
Lashkar member: We are fighting against the Taliban to stop their atrocities.

Another night, another night patrol passes. This time thankfully with few disruptions.

But it is only a matter of time before the fighting commences again. Two days after I left Adezai, the Taliban again bombed the girls’ school that had already been damaged by an earlier attack.

A stark reminder that for the people of Adezai, this conflict is not a distant war but an everyday matter of survival.

[This report was first broadcast by Public Radio International (the global network of US National Public Radio) on March 10, 2011.

Mustafa Qadri

Last Updated: Nov 23, 2010

Over the weekend the leaders of Nato unanimously agreed to start withdrawing from Afghanistan by 2014. Timed so as not to clash with the expected re-election bid of the US president Barack Obama in 2012, the announcement comes at a moment when the US-led war against al Qa’eda and the Taliban is being escalated, not scaled down. The agreement on Afghanistan arrives as the US is placing pressure on Pakistan to expand the war to the restive, large province of Balochistan. Both decisions reflects a dangerous over-reliance on heavy-handed military solutions to regional problems that are largely political in nature.

It is difficult to conceive now, but in 2002, following the US invasion of Afghanistan the previous year, the Taliban were largely defeated and al Qa’eda bereft of its ability to stage attacks from Afghan soil. As the US commenced its bombardment of Afghanistan, the Taliban expressed a willingness to hand Osama bin Laden over to the coalition forces, on the condition that the superpower provide them evidence of his culpability in the attacks on September 11, 2001 and that his extradition be to a neutral country and not the US.

The offer was rejected in October 2001, as was an earlier suggestion, mooted by the Taliban and sympathetic religious groups in neighbouring Pakistan, to try bin Laden before a domestic or international tribunal.

We have no way of knowing now whether those offers were genuine or even practical. But we know the results of the last eight years. US-led and Afghan forces meander through an increasingly violent and destabilising war that has killed thousands of Afghans and foreign nationals. The costs of conflict are clear.

Most ominous of all, the strategy of targeting insurgent commanders – often with unmanned drone strikes – has created space for younger, more radical leaders who are more ideologically inclined towards al Qa’eda’s world view than the Taliban’s more limited focus on Afghanistan.

The decision has also increased support for the Taliban in the region, although such sentiments are not without reservations. “If the Taliban succeed, it will mean Pakistan will go backwards,” said Sohail Janvi, a business man who lives in the semi-tribal city of Kohat in Pakistan, a few hours’ drive from the Afghan border. “But,” he adds, “the government gives us nothing [and] we do not want Americans here,” referring to the US drone strikes that have killed scores of civilians in the past four years in Afghanistan and also near the border with Pakistan.

People living close to Taliban-held parts of Pakistan’s Orakzai tribal agency say that they often hear drones whirling overhead like giant, distant flies. The drones do instill fear but whether or not they are particularly good at dividing terrorists from civilians is an open question. The panic caused by the drones has also done much to support well-worn and crudely simplistic conceptions of the United States as a cruel empire bent on subjugating the Muslim world.

The Obama administration has escalated the drone strikes in its first two years, undertaking nearly four times as many attacks in that time than occurred in all eight years of the Bush presidency.

The Taliban are indeed repressive fanatics who marginalise women and have provided sanctuary to al Qa’eda. But escalating the US-led war in Afghanistan and Pakistan has transformed the Taliban into a Pashtun freedom force in a way that no rebel leader could have done on his own.

“Yes, they are freedom fighters because they are fighting against what they call foreign occupation of Afghanistan,” says Daud Khattak, a journalist based in Peshawar. “The Taliban don’t fight for political gain or money but want freedom from American slavery,” explained a resident of Dir, a mountainous Pashtun region bordering the tribal areas.

So long as the West’s presence in Afghanistan is primarily defined by military force, its relationship to ordinary Afghans will be based primarily on violence. By their very nature, armies must intimidate and coerce the population into accepting their authority. The coalition’s most important local allies in the three provinces of Afghanistan hardest hit by the insurgency are warlords who are widely believed to have grown rich and powerful by keeping civilians in fear and capitalising on the drug trade.

But Afghan warlords are notoriously fickle, switching sides as the fortunes of war change. A number of key Islamist warlord allies of the Afghan president Hamid Karzai, for example, are ideologically identical to the Taliban but chose to throw their lot with the US-backed Afghan leader as a matter of expediency.

By contrast, the Taliban say that they fight for freedom from western influence. Its core membership still considers Mullah Omar its leader and, over the last nine years, has not wavered from calling for foreign troops to withdraw. Rahimullah Yusufzai, the first journalist to interview Omar when the Taliban first emerged from Kandahar in 1994, says that talk of negotiating with the Taliban is premature. “They are confident, [and] in no mood to talk. Even if it takes another decade, they would wait for foreign troops to withdraw before taking negotiations seriously,” Mr Yusufzai says.

In the face of this reality, America’s ability to change Afghanistan is dramatically limited. Now is the time for US-led forces to shift responsibility for securing Afghanistan to regional powers like China, India, Iran, Pakistan, and even Russia, who are are better situated to assist the troubled country. Even this is far from a simple or foolproof option. But local and regional actors are better suited to forge a peace through political means because they have the most to lose from instability in Afghanistan.

With their troops already in the country, the US and its ISAF allies could then help mediate a power arrangement underwritten by regional powers. But as the US-led forces continue their current escalation, it is not at all clear that they will be in a position to withdraw even in 2014.

Mustafa Qadri is an Australian journalist based in Pakistan

[This article appeared in The National newspaper on Tuesday November 23, 2010: http://www.thenational.ae/the-national-conversation/comment/natos-tactics-and-timetable-strengthen-afghan-radicals?pageCount=0]

Mustafa Qadri
guardian.co.uk, Friday 1 October 2010 13:30 BST

The fact that a troubled al-Qaeda sympathiser has been branded the daughter of Pakistan speaks for the madness that has engulfed our region. There is no place for sanity in the present climate of hypocrisy and outrage that stoked by American double standards.

On the streets of Karachi, Pindi and Lahore they came in their tens of thousands brandishing fists and images of Aafia Siddiqui with her sunken features and desperate expression. “Americans are dogs!” some chanted. Others preferred “Zardari is a traitor!” Before long effigies and American flags went up in flames as well.

Protesters gathered over the past two weeks to condemn the ruling by a New York court last Thursday that saw Siddiqui, a Pakistani doctor,sentenced to 86 years in prison for attempting to kill US soldiers and FBI agents in Afghanistan. Siddiqui also stands accused of raising funds for al-Qaida.

But Siddiqui has been painted as a victim owing to mysteries surrounding her sudden disappearance in 2003 along with her three young children and her visibly traumatised reappearance in 2008 amid allegations of kidnapping and rape by American captors. The whereabouts of her youngest child, eight-year-old Suleiman, remain unknown.

Political parties of every hue have jumped on the bandwagon. Even the MQM, the most staunchly anti-Islamist political party in Pakistan has demanded her extradition to Pakistan. The government – led by the Pakistan People’s party – spent $US2m on Siddiqui’s legal costs in the US.

It would be wrong, and arrogant, to dismiss the Aafia hysteria as populism alone – the anger is genuine. But to surrender to it would also be a mistake.

The anger in Pakistan over Siddiqui is about justice, or the lack of it. Everyday life in Pakistan makes a mockery of good conscience. It is impossible to be a saint here because the moral quandaries are ubiquitous, be it as you pretend to ignore the man with stumps for legs crawling across the market pavements, or you contact a cousin to facilitate a business deal. Nothing is straightforward here.

The one word used by every citizen I’ve met in Pakistan, be they in Sindh, Punjab, Pakhtunkhwa or Balochistan is insaaf, or justice. “There is no justice here,” is the most common sentence I have heard in the last four years.

Aafia reminds us that injustice is not merely a domestic malaise but a global problem. Just as each of us have our local and national masters, so our leaders have their patrons in Washington. From the vantage point of Pakistan, none of these actors behaves lawfully.

Remember that this international conflict with militant Islam has always been branded as a battle between the civilised and the uncivilised. Countless essays and journals have been printed trying to convince us that we are in this mess because Muslims are simply struggling to modernise. And yet in its conduct of this war the west has rarely lived up to the standards of justice and democracy that are supposed to distinguish it from the Islamist foe.

Siddiqui is emblematic of this brazen hypocrisy, a fact not lost on Pakistanis. Contrast her to US soldiers implicated in war crimes in Iraqand the marines who killed Afghans for sport. None of them is likely to receive 86 years in prison. This double standard is what fuels the outrage. It is the same double standard that, in Pakistan, sees some sit in high office while others languish in prison.

Pakistan’s leaders underwrite America’s missile war in the tribal areas – whose civilian casualties, President Asif Zardari said, according to Bob Woodward’s latest book, “do not worry me.” In the minds of most Pakistanis this puts the lie to any pretensions the US might have to being the world’s saviour.

But Pakistan is not immune to hypocrisy either. Where were the protests for Mukhtaran Mai, the rape victim who became one our bravest human rights activists? In 2005, then-president Musharraf infamously claimedthat Mai got herself raped to get a visa to the west, giving voice to a sentiment shared by many. There has been little protest over Umar Cheema, a courageous investigative reporter who was kidnapped and tortured by what he claims were secret government agents because of a string of stories that exposed the corruption of our military and civilian leaders. And what of Balochistan, the province where fresh stories of enforced disappearance and rape filter out every week but never get investigated?

We have lost our moral compass. With our cricketers disgraced, our cinemas and shrines increasingly targeted and our bread baskets flooded, outrage has become our premier national pastime. There is plenty to be outraged about, but outrage won’t bring us jobs or electricity or return our crops. Like any addict, we need to drop our habit of outrage and victimhood. Of course, that will not happen any time soon.

[This article first appeared in The Guardian on Friday October 1, 2010: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/oct/01/pakistan-aafia-siddiqui-outrage]

SECURITY | SOUTH ASIA | PAKISTAN

http://the-diplomat.com/2010/08/09/why-us-can%e2%80%99t-drop-pakistan/

Mustafa Qadri,
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 29 July 2010 18.15 BST

News of Cameron’s visit may have been sidelined by Pakistan’s worst-ever air disaster. Yet his speech in Bangalore, India, has fast become infamous here. It isn’t so much the substance of his remarks that have raised our collective ire. We have already heard ad nauseum that Pakistan must end its double game of supporting both the militants and US-led forces in the region. No, what irked was the fact that they were uttered in the heart of elite India. Coming from a first-term British prime minister on his first official tour of the south Asian country, Cameron’s comments inevitably fed the perception that the world, and especially India, is out to get Pakistan.

A similar sentiment has followed the voluminous WikiLeaks allegations of massive ISI support for the Afghan insurgency. Namely, that the leak is part of a deliberate smear campaign against the military, Pakistan’s most robust national institution. Along with this, the British prime minister’s comments “will reignite the hatred Pakistanis have for the west”, according to Khurshid Ahmed, a Pakistani senator and vice-president of Jamaat-e-Islami, Pakistan’s largest Islamic political party. His sentiments are echoed by commentators in the Urdu press.

Some have rightly noted Cameron’s positively dismissive attitude to India’s oppressive crackdown in Jammu and Kashmir. In fact, the deafening silence over yet another bloody Indian response to Kashmiri protests is but the tip of the iceberg. Cameron’s comments coincide with a proposal to sell civil nuclear technology and British military jets to India. In contrast, Pakistani demands for a similar nuclear deal with the west have been met with consistent refusal. War is peace, and good business, it seems. As Pakistan’s high commissioner to the UK noted here on Wednesday, “a bilateral visit aimed at earning business could have been done without damaging the prospects of regional peace”.

To most people here, Britain does not register much. The US is the main player, whether for better or worse, and most of the anti-western rhetoric vented from the mass media or mosques focuses on Washington and its “AfPak” war. Whereas most would not have thought much of Britain’s role in our region otherwise, the first, loud message emanating from Cameron’s government is distinctly pro-Indian. The fact that his comments were immediately trumpeted by Indian media outlets – readily accessible on satellite televisions across the border – will serve to confirm this in Pakistani eyes.

Pakistan’s foreign office noted that the country is as much a victim of terrorism as neighbouring Afghanistan and India. The overwhelming perception here is that Pakistan’s effort in the war against al-Qaida and the Taliban have been largely ignored. Cameron’s comments will further stoke a dangerous “damned if we do, damned if don’t” mentality that leads many to conclude that this is not our war.

But this issue is bigger than Cameron or even Britain’s relations with the subcontinent. Fed on a steady diet of victimhood and international intrigue, we in Pakistan tend only to see that which we wish to see. The prime minister’s comments querying Pakistan’s involvement in the AfPak war may have played well in India. But they also point to lingering international doubts over our ability or willingness to root out extremism from our soil. The irony is that, rhetoric aside, little else will change in our relationship with the west. The west will continue to seek greater access to Indian markets while its relationship with Pakistan’s will remain steeped in the language and interests of the war in Afghanistan.

[Published in The Guardian’s Comment Is Free website here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/29/pakistan-damned-if-we-do-damned-if-we-dont]

According to one report, failed New York bomber Faisal Shahzad was trained by Lashkar-e-Toiba, the Pakistan-based militant group blamed for the 2008 Mumbai attacks, to fight in Kashmir before deciding to target the US instead. The veracity of that claim is unknown. But it is clear that events in Afghanistan and Pakistan are inextricably linked to Indian-controlled Kashmir.

Many of the young men fighting alongside the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan cut their teeth against Indian forces in Kashmir. Before the September 11 attacks, several groups fighting in Kashmir trained their cadres in Afghanistan. Like so many of these militants, al-Qa’ida’s chief military commander in North Waziristan, Mohammad Ilyas, is a Kashmiri who learned his trade against the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s.

Pakistan’s leaders, particularly its military establishment, have from the founding of the nation in 1947 used the Kashmir issue to rally popular support and justify a bloated budget that starves the economy of resources necessary to alleviate poverty. Even when Pakistan has been richly patronised by the US first as a bulwark against communism and latterly Islamist militancy, much of the largesse has instead been put towards deterring India.

Many in Pakistan view Kashmir as a rightful part of the nation owing to its majority-Muslim population. That has created significant popular support for militant outfits such as Lashkar-e-Toiba, especially in the Punjab, which shares geographic and cultural ties with Kashmir. Punjab is the political and cultural heartland of Pakistan, and most of its soldiers are recruited from there. This makes it politically difficult for Pakistan’s leaders to crack down on Punjab-based militants in the same fashion as those from the Pashtun tribal areas.

In the wake of the Mumbai attacks, however, it is safe to say the strategy of supporting asymmetrical warfare in Kashmir has finally backfired for Pakistan. Atrocities committed by Pakistan-based militants have obscured Indian abuses in Kashmir including a brutal crackdown of pro-independence rallies last year, extra-judicial detention of activists and widespread allegations of torture and intimidation.

But the militancy merely represents one aspect of a long-running feud between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. Both countries have traded barbs over their alleged support for separatists in each other’s territory. India says Pakistan is not doing enough to curtail jihadists who target Indian interests in Kashmir and Afghanistan, where Indians have been attacked. Some Indian analysts claim Pakistan is also supporting a Maoist insurgency in India’s rural heartland. Pakistan has retorted with vocal claims of an Indian hand in the recent spate of bombings that have rocked major cities and support for ethnic separatists in the restive and strategically pivotal Balochistan province. .

Along with this clandestine war, access to water will probably be an impediment to improved Indo-Pak relations. India routinely restricts Pakistan’s access to water as several key rivers flow from Indian-controlled Jammu and Kashmir.

Both countries are also vying for US patronage. Pakistan recently implored Washington to normalise ties over the country’s nuclear power program, citing the double standard under which India is recognised as a nuclear power despite its earlier breaches of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. India complains that US strategy in Afghanistan is far too reliant on Pakistan, effectively sidelining India’s successful trade and development programs in that troubled Central Asian country. It also notes that Pakistan has a history of misappropriating US military aid to fight India instead.

As high-level diplomacy restarts this year — it ended after the Mumbai attacks — there is hope that the subcontinent’s two largest nations may just be back on the long road to normalised relations. But the perennial obstacle is knowing who speaks for Pakistan.

With its overriding influence over the state, the army overrules Pakistan’s elected government on matters of security, including policy towards India. As a result, even if relations continue to improve, it’s difficult for Indian officials to know precisely how solid the promises are. “Dialogue must remain spearheaded by the elected governments of both nations,” says Pakistani journalist Kamran Shafi. But, he adds, it would also help Pakistan’s civilian leaders if India were to continue to “draw down its [troop levels] in Kashmir” and continue dialogue.

Despite both India and Pakistan reducing troop levels in Kashmir this year, India remains sensitive to foreign interventions over Kashmir, something US President Barack Obama learned himself when, owing to Indian pressure, he back-pedaled on an election campaign offer of a US-brokered resolution. Without pressure on India to accept third-party negotiations, the Kashmir dispute will continue to simmer.

The world can ill afford two nuclear armed nations destabilising each other. It would be myopic to limit our efforts at stabilising the region merely to the war in Afghanistan. Without pressure on India and Pakistan to resolve the Kashmir dispute, and end their atrocities in the region, our efforts in Afghanistan will count for very little.

Mustafa Qadri is a journalist based in Pakistan

[This article was published in The Australian newspaper. Url: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/kashmir-peace-key-to-fixing-afghanistan/story-e6frg6zo-1225871284593]

Mustafa Qadri
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 16 May 2010 13:00 BST

But recent developments in this war suggest that military planners have finally realised the risks of this most dangerous of relationships. Army chief Ashfaq Kayani recently noted that a Taliban society at home and in Afghanistan was not in Pakistan’s interests. In the past, Pakistan supported the Taliban in Afghanistan and its own tribal areas in a quest to achieve “strategic depth” against rival India. Now, Kayani concedes, a stable and friendly Afghanistan is sufficient strategic depth for Pakistan.

This is one of several signs that the military establishment has changed under his stewardship. His promise not to involve the armed forces in public politics as Pervez Musharraf had in the past was borne out by the army’s refusal to support President Asif Ali Zardari’s failed bid to oust Iftikhar Chaudhry, the independent-minded Chief Justice.

Their counter-insurgency capacity has increased from virtual non-existence in 2004 when a new `Pakistan Taliban’ compelled the state to sign a string of ceasefires in the tribal areas to an effective force that has resulted in the capture of important Taliban strongholds along the tribal frontier with Afghanistan.

The difference to years past when military planners heavily patronised the Taliban, says Shuja Nawaz of the Atlantic Council, “is that Pakistan is now facing the spectre of (terrorism by) Taliban groups at home. The immediate enemy is internal now, not India.” In the past two years, about 5000 civilians and 1700 soldiers have been killed.

After Pakistan was compelled to make enemies of the Taliban in 2001, military operations in the lawless frontier with Afghanistan were initially unpopular. Most viewed them as a war pitting fellow Pakistanis and Muslims against each other at the behest of the US. That all began to change as army-led forces showed the resolve to achieve military victory in the Swat valley and adjacent tribal areas. As ordinary Pakistanis were increasingly targeted in the terrorism and security forces took significant casualties, authorities and the media were successful in branding this as Pakistan’s war.

Continued US pressure, tied more than ever to the delivery of billions in civil and military aid, has also played a role. Since last month, Pakistan’s intelligence agencies have facilitated the capture of about half of the senior Afghan Taliban leadership.

These captures have been praised by Washington. But questions remain. How were these senior leaders captured and why now? And will it attempt to eliminate Islamist militants targeting India and Iran, such as Lashkar-e-Toiba and Jundullah, with the same vigour and intent?

These unanswered questions point to the difficult road ahead. Even now, Pakistan’s security establishment feels it must tread a careful line between a belligerent US and the reality that it can’t exert its influence over the entire tribal areas through force alone.

There is a dark side to the military operations, too. In Swat, government rehabilitation efforts have been admirable but in other areas, such as Bajaur and the Waziristans, they have been poor. Security forces have also been implicated in atrocities including the kidnapping and murder of perceived Taliban sympathisers and indiscriminate bombardments that have killed thousands and displaced millions.

Obsessions over India also remain a problem. Although troop levels in the Kashmir region have slightly decreased and both countries have formally recommenced dialogue, observers in Islamabad remain alarmed by India’s growing influence in Afghanistan. India spent close to $US40bn on its armed forces last year, eight times as much Pakistan.

That imbalance means Pakistan cannot totally divorce itself from the Taliban if it is perceived as the only viable ally against Indian influence in Afghanistan once US-led forces leave. It is unclear how these contradictions will resolve themselves. Military success can only provide immediate stability. Maintaining it will require political leadership.

Mustafa Qadri is a journalist based in Pakistan

[This article appeared in The Australian newspaper on Monday March 8, 2010. Url: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/my-enemys-enemy-no-longer-a-friend/story-e6frg6ux-1225837937177]