Mustafa Qadri

August 22, 2010

• Last Updated: August 16. 2010 9:00PM UAE / August 16. 2010 5:00PM GMT

When the UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon described flood-ravaged Pakistan as the worst natural disaster he had ever seen, he was not merely describing the extent of the devastation. He was also underlining the extent to which the outside world has yet to adequately react to what the UN describes as the most catastrophic natural disaster in its history.

Given Haiti’s devastating earthquake earlier this year, the Burma cyclone two years ago and the tragic Asian tsunami of 2004, that is an astonishing statement.

And yet, the numbers speak for themselves: out of a nation of 180 million, one in 10 people and one third of the nation’s land mass have been affected by the floods; six million need immediate food aid and at least two million have been made homeless. It is a trauma that is impossible to fully comprehend.

Despite the chaos and grief of the Pakistan floods, however, there now exists a unique opportunity to improve the international community’s relationship with this troubled country.

An international campaign of solidarity with Pakistan, similar to those which popularised the Haiti earthquake and the Asian tsunami, is required. We must all play a part in raising awareness, donating to charities, and organising local and international events.

But Pakistan requires more than just sympathy or large-scale humanitarian assistance. With its Islamist threats, political volatility and nuclear arsenal, few will not have recognised the importance of ensuring Pakistan’s long-term survival to promote international peace and security.

Indeed, as the experience of political violence has escalated in Pakistan, its people have felt increasingly disconnected from the outside world. That is a dangerous situation for all.

Rather than just focusing on the plight of Pakistan, it is important for the international media to promote a more positive image of the country by focusing on the tireless efforts of Pakistan’s civil society, welfare organisations, and government and military personnel, who have been working alongside humanitarian workers to aid flood victims. Such service illustrates that Pakistan’s population is not caught up in terrorism but hard working and decent.

Many Pakistanis feel a deep sense of victimhood fuelled by the international perception that their country is the centre of global terrorism. There is a sentiment here, and not without good reason, that the world rarely remembers the sacrifices Pakistan has made in this global conflict.

More Pakistan citizens have died as a consequence of terrorism and counterterrorism than any other country in recent years. To travel on a Pakistani passport is to expect almost certain harassment by customs officials the world over. As authorities struggle to cope with this latest crisis, the risk is that these old grievances mix with a new, raw sense of neglect.

The resentment created by all these factors is keenly stoked by al Qa’eda, the Taliban and other Islamist groups who champion the notion that the world is out to get Pakistan. A recent Pew Research Centre survey revealed that an astonishing 59 per cent of Pakistanis view the US as an enemy.

Beyond external concerns, however, are worries of persistent inflation, which has made staple foods like wheat and dhal a luxury, and a chronic shortage of energy that leaves homes and businesses without electricity for large periods of time. Following the recent floods, those concerns have magnified.

The US, along with the UAE, Saudi Arabia, the UK and Canada, has been quick to pledge multi-million dollar humanitarian assistance. The US has also provided helicopters for relief missions (although the scale of its airborne assistance has been greatly curtailed by the decision to escalate the war in neighbouring Afghanistan).

China, however, which on paper is one of Pakistan’s strongest allies, has pledged a paltry $7 million thus far. India, which has pledged only $5 million of its total $500 million aid budget, has missed a monumental opportunity to develop bridges at a time when real and imagined torrents continue to divide the subcontinent’s two largest nations.

All of these pledges are a fraction of what is required to provide the food, medicine, temporary housing and other assistance urgently needed.

For too long, tragedy has been the main source of unity in Pakistan. Just as Pakistanis have marched together to depose dictators and demand better living conditions, the floods have united otherwise disparate ethnic, linguistic and religious communities like never before in a shared experience of grief. This natural disaster has not discriminated against ethnic Punjabis – long resented by other minorities for dominating the state – Sindhis, Pashtuns or Balochis, the latter two of which have already been ravaged by destructive insurgencies.

Now more than ever, Pakistan, its government, and its people need our support. Out of this unprecedented tragedy comes an opportunity to prove that the world is committed to the well-being of Pakistan. In so doing, we guarantee regional and global security far more effectively than any troop surge or drone strike ever could.

Mustafa Qadri is a journalist based in Pakistan. You can see his work at mustafaqadri.net

[First appeared in The National newspaper on August 17, 2010: http://thenational.ae/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100817/OPINION/708169914&SearchID=73400858303357]

FEW will not have been moved by images of flood-ravaged Pakistan.

Now in their second week, the floods are believed to have affected one-third of Pakistan’s land and just over one-tenth of the entire population. In a nation of more than 170 million, that is an astonishing number.

According to the UN, the Pakistan floods represent the greatest natural disaster in the organisation’s 62-year history.

Yet out of this grief comes a unique opportunity to develop a positive link between Pakistan and the West and, by extension, improve our collective international security.

Given its political instability, the threat of terrorism, and its nuclear arsenal, we can ill afford to let Pakistan collapse. A major global program highlighting the need to help Pakistan would send a powerful challenge to the perception, keenly stoked by al-Qa’ida, the Taliban and other Islamist groups, that the world is out to get Pakistan.

Australia , along with Saudi Arabia, the US, Britain and Canada have been quick to pledge humanitarian assistance. The US has also provided helicopters for relief missions, although the scale of its airborne assistance has been greatly curtailed by the decision to escalate the war in neighbouring Afghanistan. China, on paper one of Pakistan’s strongest allies, has pledged a paltry $US7 million ($7.8m) thus far. India, which has pledged only $US5m of its total $US500m aid budget, has missed a monumental opportunity to develop bridges at a time when real and imagined torrents continue to divide the subcontinent’s two largest nations.

But all of these pledges are a fraction of what is required to provide the food, medicine, temporary housing and other assistance urgently needed. It is also a small fraction of what was raised for the Haiti earthquake earlier this year, the Asian tsunami of 2004 or even the earthquakes that hit neighbouring Kashmir in 2005.

Not only do the flood victims deserve more, the goodwill generated by our charity would be a major victory in the battle for hearts and minds our leaders, generals and security officials so often tout in the so-called war against international terrorism.

To understand the importance of goodwill, remember that ordinary Pakistanis feel besieged by a world that considers them a terrorist threat even though more of their lives have been lost to terrorism in recent years than anywhere else in the globe.

Consider, also, that a recent Pew Research Centre survey revealed that an astonishing 59 per cent of Pakistanis view the US as an enemy. The greatest security concern for Pakistanis is India, according to the poll, not al-Qa’ida or the Taliban.

More than security concerns, however, Pakistanis are wary of persistent inflation that has made staple foods such as wheat and dhal a luxury and a chronic shortage of energy that leaves homes and businesses without electricity for large periods of every day. After the recent floods, those concerns have magnified.

The floods have destroyed Pakistan’s prime grain belt in southern Punjab, costing what the World Bank estimates conservatively to be $US1 billion in lost wheat crop. In truth, this is just the tip of the iceberg. Only in time will a more accurate picture of the devastation emerge, although the total economic, human and political losses may never be discovered.

But it is already clear that the floods have united Pakistan’s disparate ethnic, linguistic and religious communities as never before in a shared experience of grief. The disaster has not discriminated against ethnic Punjabis – long resented by other minorities for dominating the state – Sindhis, Pashtuns or Balochis, the latter two already ravaged by destructive insurgencies. Dangerously, all Pakistanis have now developed a shared sense of resentment towards civilian officials who appear helpless to assist them while the military and civil society, including questionable Islamist charities, pick up the humanitarian slack.

The humanitarian side of things is already happening in earnest. Along with increasing that assistance, however, it is now time to start major publicity campaigns to highlight the situation in Pakistan. Just as occurred after the Asian tsunami and the Haiti earthquake, we must all play a part in raising awareness, donating to charities and organising local and international events such as concerts involving Pakistani and world entertainers. Rather than just focusing on the plight of Pakistan, moreover, it would help for the international media to promote a more positive image of Pakistan. Thankfully, there is no need to invent it. All they need do is focus on the tireless efforts of Pakistan’s civil society, welfare organisations, government and military personnel, often working side by side with humanitarian workers from all over the world, including Australia. This would demonstrate the truth that, like most of us, Pakistanis are not terrorists but hard-working, decent people.

Resentment is a powerful political weapon in Pakistan. For too long, anti-Western sentiment has been exploited by Pakistan’s elite and Islamists to divert attention from their own responsibilities to the nation. Unfortunately, we in the West have too often blindly supported those very groups out of a misguided sense that only they can offer stability. But out of this miserable monsoon comes an opportunity to prove that we are committed to the wellbeing of Pakistan. In so doing, we help protect our own security too.

Mustafa Qadri is an Australian journalist based in Pakistan

[This first appeared in The Australian newspaper on August 17, 2010: http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/world/aiding-pakistan-will-protect-wests-security/story-e6frg6ux-1225906031662]

SECURITY | SOUTH ASIA | PAKISTAN

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

‘Collateral damage’ in AfPak hurts the US too

The bombardment of civilians in Afghanistan undermines the security credentials of western forces in the region

o Mustafa Qadri
o guardian.co.uk, Friday 8 May 2009 16.30 BST

The timing may have been a disaster for Washington, but for villagers in Afghanistan’s south it was far worse. A day after a US bombing killed up to 120 civilians in Afghanistan’s southern Farah province, President Obama asked the visiting presidents of Afghanistan and Pakistan, Hamid Karzai and Asif Ali Zardari, to step up their attacks on Taliban and al-Qaida militants.

The US secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, expressed “personal regret” for the loss of lives as she looked in the direction of Karzai who, along with Zardari, addressed the media in the White House last Wednesday.

But in Afghanistan there were howls of condemnation and protests.

Bodies were being piled into trucks near the Bala Boluk district in Farah where the bombing occurred. If estimates of more than a hundred fatalities prove accurate, it will represent the greatest loss of life in a single day since the US invasion of Afghanistan commenced in October 2001.

Casualties are inevitable in any war. But, as with Iraq since 1990, it seems those directing the conflict from western capitals are not the ones whose societies are bearing the greatest losses. That price is paid by ordinary Afghans and Pakistanis.

According to US airforce figures, 438 bombs were dropped over Afghanistan by American planes last April – a record number.

Last year was the worst for civilians caught up in the war against the Taliban that started in 2001. According to the Afghanistan Rights Monitor, 3,917 civilians were killed, more than 6,800 wounded and 120,000 were forced to leave their homes.

In neighbouring Pakistan, the conflict has proved a humanitarian catastrophe for villagers along the tribal belt that hugs the Durand line and the lower Himalayas in the north-west. It is estimated that up to a million have been displaced by the conflict with the Taliban in Pakistan, while unknown thousands of civilians have been killed. Pilotless US aircraft have killed around 700 of them. Only a handful of those – around 14 – were militant leaders.

For years now Afghan officials have been asking American forces to take greater care in their operations to prevent civilian casualties. Their Pakistani counterparts have constantly warned against military operations which, by harming so many civilians, stoke greater support for the Taliban.

“Afghans are human beings, too,” President Karzai remarked at a media conference two years ago. That applies equally to Pakistanis caught in the conflict, but the fact is often lost in the heady rhetoric about defeating extremism and keeping our western borders secure from terrorism.

As usual, US officials announced an investigation into the Farah bombing. Whether it will lead to a demonstrable reduction in civilian casualties is uncertain. US military officials were quick to claim that the bombing was called in by Afghan National Army forces and could not be compared to the devastating aerial attack in Azizabad that claimed 90 civilian lives last August. The US had earlier said that a handful of Taliban fighters had been killed during the raid, only to later acknowledge that civilians had died, albeit far fewer than the 90 claimed by the Afghan government and an independent UN investigation.

In the meantime, the war talk has reached fever pitch. Despite calls for increased non-military aid aimed at improving socioeconomic conditions in areas most at risk of Taliban infiltration, the key thrust will be massive military operations by US and Pakistan forces.

In Congress last week, US defence secretary Robert Gates requested $400m for the Pakistan Counterinsurgency Fund aimed at training and arming Pakistani soldiers. The fund is effectively Centcom commander David Petraeus’s money tin and would give the general a freer hand in directing operations by Pakistani forces.

A further $1bn in immediate or military aid has been proposed for Pakistan from a pool of requested “emergency” funds.

The Obama administration has praised Pakistan’s recent return to military operations against the Taliban. The army is presently engaged in massive operations in the north-west of the country where militants had infiltrated into the Buner valley, a few hours’ drive west of the capital Islamabad, and Dir, further west towards the Afghan border.

In Dir, like Kohat and Dera Adam Khel to the south, districts to which I travelled recently, popular support for the Taliban is high thanks to ethnic loyalties and simmering resentment over inequality and civilian casualties. The Taliban derive mostly from the Pashtun communities indigenous to Pakistan’s tribal areas, but non-Pashtun recruits, particularly from poor rural communities in southern and western Punjab, are believed to be increasing.

Fighting has recommenced in the Swat valley after Taliban militants who spilled out into neighbouring districts – like Buner and Dir – failed to abide by the terms of a recent peace agreement between the provincial government and a local pro-Taliban religious movement.

The situation is precarious for “AfPak”. To avoid international isolation, governments from the two nations must continue the American agenda of overwhelming military response to the Taliban problem. But as these operations continue to claim lives, support for the Taliban can be expected to grow.

For Obama and his western allies in the region, failure to bring stability could have serious political consequences. The consequences for ordinary civilians, however, are already far more dire.

30 April 2009

Karachi, Pakistan – People with a hammer only see nails. This well-worn maxim aptly describes the United States’ relationship with Afghanistan and Pakistan over the past several decades. As early as 1954, the United States identified the country as a bulwark against regional encroachment by the Soviet Union when Pakistan received its first substantial tranche of American military and economic aid.

When US President Barack Obama announced the new “AfPak” (Afghanistan-Pakistan) policy last month, there were hopes that the hammer-and-nails approach – which saw unaccounted billions in military aid showered on the Pakistan army with the assumption that it alone could bring stability – would be shelved. It will take time to fully assess if it has been.

The new AfPak policy promises a more focused approach in a number of ways.

The most obvious is the physical shift from Iraq to Afghanistan. Under George W. Bush the United States had an uncoordinated strategy in Afghanistan, enabling the Taliban, defeated in 2001 and again in 2002, to first recover and then re-emerge. From 2004 onwards the Taliban and two independent allied commanders – Jalaluddin Haqqani and Gulbaddin Hekmatyar – swept into large swathes of southern and eastern Afghanistan and parts of northern Afghanistan in a series of spring and summer offensives.

The idea of negotiating with less extremist elements in the Taliban in Afghanistan was based upon the experience of US and British forces in Iraq, where Sunni militias were paid and trained to fight their former Al Qaeda allies.

The aim of the new differentiation between Al Qaeda and the Taliban is to seek out what has been widely termed “moderate” Taliban. The earlier strategy of treating Al Qaeda and the Taliban as synonymous has brought these two diverse entities closer together, both ideologically and practically. Al Qaeda earned access to one of the most isolated regions on the planet – Waziristan in Pakistan – and the Taliban, who before 2002 had little or no experience in guerrilla warfare or suicide attacks, learnt insurgency techniques. These days Taliban suicide attacks are a weekly occurrence.

For the more extremist elements in the Taliban and for Al Qaeda, the new AfPak policy promises an escalation, rather than a major tactical shift by the United States. Missile strikes are expected to increase in scope and regularity within Pakistan, even though Obama promised that operations would only be conducted with Pakistan’s permission.

The dilemma for Pakistan’s army with the new policy is two-fold. First, it must cooperate with the United States in its pursuit of Taliban in tribal areas to root out extremism and the militant threat in the area. Military and non-military aid to Pakistan promises to be more intricately tied to such cooperation than ever before. Second, the army will either have to get hard on the Taliban that it nurtured for so long in the 1980s or risk Pakistan’s international isolation.

While Pakistan’s infrastructure will surely get a makeover, it will be challenging to develop institutional and social capacity in Pakistan.

Whether there will be a marked improvement in standards of living remains to be seen – the United Nations Human Development Report for 2007-08 conservatively estimates that almost 33 percent of Pakistanis live in poverty.

The most welcome aspect of the new policy is the emphasis on Afghanistan and Pakistan’s civil institutions over individual leaders like Hamid Karzai and Pervez Musharraf. In what many have described as a “civilian surge”, both countries will receive massive injections of cash, projects and experts. Development aid for new schools, roads and clinics has been targeted for Pakistan’s tribal areas, around 7.5 billion US dollars in non-military aid over five years if the Kerry-Lugar bill passes through US Congress.

“Reconstruction opportunity zones”, aimed at facilitating development and foreign investment by offering reduced tariffs and other taxes, are also proposed for those areas along the Pak-Afghan border that are most afflicted by Talibanisation. The hope is that by creating a free trade and industry zone, employment opportunities will attract young men away from the Taliban.

The AfPak policy cannot succeed unless the poverty upon which the militants prey is addressed. No matter what promises Washington, Brussels or Islamabad makes, the simple things like poverty which continue to pose the greatest challenges for ordinary Pakistanis need to be overcome in order to instil faith in a better society based on pluralism, democracy and equal rights.

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* Mustafa Qadri (mustafaqadri.net) is Middle East and South Asia correspondent for The Diplomat magazine and newmatilda.com. This article was written for the Common Ground News Service (CGNews).