Mustafa Qadri » Barack Obama

After the Lahore shrine bombings, nothing seems sacred

mustafa — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 10:05:10 +0000

Pakistan must reverse its policy of sitting idle as Islamists blur the line between legitimate civil society and militancy

Mustafa Qadri,
guardian.co.uk, Friday 2 July 2010 16.04 BST

After last night’s bombings in Lahore, an ancient sanctuary, which for centuries was a place for prayer and meditation, has been rudely introduced to Pakistan’s very modern conflict. Nothing short of a shift in national culture will rescue the soul of Pakistan’s Islamic traditions.

In these troubled times of bombings, heatwaves and chronic power shortages, millions have flocked to the shrines of the mystic saints, trying to cajole good fortune out of arguably the most unfortunate period in our country’s history. No saint is more venerated than Dhata Ganj Baksh, the great mystical Muslim saint of the 11th century, who is buried in Lahore. When twin blasts exploded in his mausoleum they destroyed more than just the lives of 43 people and their families.

A Muslim believes his or her fate is already written. Many will now be wondering what they have done to deserve this punishment. Others,including the Taliban, have immediately blamed foreign powers.

Many blame the US for bringing conflict to their region. This is not entirely misplaced – terrorism has increased, not abated, ever since the Obama administration escalated the “AfPak” conflict against al-Qaida and the Taliban by ramping up troop numbers and drone strikes.

But, even so, this latest massacre will make even more Pakistanis abdicate responsibility for reforming our society.

Dhata’s shrine has not changed much since I first visited it as a child three decades ago, only now the pacific ambience has been somewhat ruined by the security guards and metal detectors, which did disturbingly little to prevent the attacks.

Like the Haj pilgrimage, a visit to Dhata’s shrine is a humbling experience. Rich and poor, men and women, all mingle amid the crowded mass. Sadly, this also made it the perfect target for a suicide bombing.

It cannot be a coincidence that the attacks came just over a month after the slaughter of about 90 people in two mosques belonging to the Ahmadi minority sect. Although there has been far greater coverage and condemnation this time around than back in May, the fact that both a minority sect and mainstream Sufi Muslims have been targeted proves that our shared Islamic heritage is a threat to those behind the violence.

Hitherto reluctant to expand the military conflict to Punjab, Pakistan’s army will feel the pressure of local and international demands to do precisely that. But any response dominated by military means would be a disaster, creating even greater instability and, as more civilians are killed by the army’s rough anvil, undoubtedly create more insurgents and leading to more bombings. This is a matter for civil authorities – the provincial and federal government, the police and the courts – to take the lead.

Now more than ever, Pakistan must institute a clear and effective system for the regulation of its religious seminaries, mosques and Islamic welfare organisations. A recent government proposal to restrict coverageof the violence and criticism of the state is a backward step.

True, Punjab has become saturated with welfare fronts for jihadist groups involved in violence here and in neighbouring India. But part of the problem is that Islamic welfare organisations with links to jihadists have stepped in where the state has been absent, providing meals, education and medical services to poor citizens who would otherwise go without.

This does not mean that we are a population of jihadists; rather, that the state has either sat idle or aided Islamists as they deliberately blurred the line between legitimate civil society and militancy. The state must proactively begin the long, slow and difficult process of rolling this back.

As I’ve argued before, one of the key reasons the public has rallied against the militants is a sense that those behind the attacks are not Islamists or even Pakistanis, but foreigners. This mindset creates a dangerous conspiracy theory culture, but it does have one clear advantage. It is difficult for most to be critical of something that is sacred to them, such as their faith. But in blaming outsiders for the violence, people demonstrate their rejection of violence, which they consider antithetical to Islam. Of course, that rejection is at times somewhat hypocritical. Consider, for instance, those who blamed India for the anti-Ahmadi attack in May while giant religious banners openly called the Ahmadi apostates worthy of death.

Lahore has been filled with protests from religious parties, shopkeepers and others throughout today. As it is Friday, the mosques have been crowded with worshippers listening to their local imams railing against the violence with varying degrees of hyperbole and prescience.

Then there is the voice of Dhata Ganj Baksh, a preacher born in Persia, who went on an astonishing lifelong journey through the Middle East and central Asia before ending his days in Lahore. Dhata’s lyrical poetry, laced heavily with notions of love, the ephemeral beauty and power of God, and the necessity of humility in worldly affairs, transformed him into a legend for well over 10 centuries. We would do well to honour the spirit behind the verse.

[Published on The Guardian's Comment Is Free Website here: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/jul/02/lahore-shrine-bombings-pakistan]

Empty diplomacy in Afghanistan

mustafa — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:53:07 +0000

Negotiating with the Taliban is too little, too late – western allies need to fix the socioeconomic mess started long before 9/11

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.

Afghanistan — The Exit Fee

mustafa — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 20:20:16 +0000

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

Pakistan is losing this great game

mustafa — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 07:39:38 +0000

Barack Obama’s surge in Afghanistan worries Pakistan – when the US leaves, it will still have to deal with the Taliban

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.

Should He Stay Or Should He Go?

mustafa — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 08:13:02 +0000

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

All eyes on Iran

mustafa — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 05:45:00 +0000

All Eyes On Iran

The fallout from its controversial presidential election has left Iran in a similar position to that faced by Iraq in the lead-up to the US-led invasion, writes Mustafa Qadri

At no point in recent memory has the Islamic Republic of Iran dominated headlines as it has these past four weeks. Virtually all Western governments and mainstream commentators have rushed to condemn the Iranian Government’s violent crackdown on opposition protesters.

Key Western European countries Britain, France and Germany have led the charge. German Chancellor Angela Merkel likened Iran to the repressive East German state of the Cold War period while French President Nicolas Sarkozy described the elections as a “fraud”.

Yet no government has been under more pressure to chastise Iran than the United States. Although President Barack Obama has voiced concern over the crackdown on dissent, he has steered clear of questioning the veracity of the poll that saw incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad returned to power.

Within the Obama Administration, however, Vice President Joe Biden has led a camp that favours a more antagonistic approach to Iran. Biden followed earlier remarks about possible election rigging — a stance at odds with the official Administration policy of non-interference in Iran’s domestic affairs — with the assertion last weekend that the US would not stand in the way of Israel were it to consider an attack on Iran. Nor it seems, according to the London Times, would the Saudi Arabian Government.

Thanks to the pioneering work of respected political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, the role of the Israel Lobby in shaping United States policy on the Middle East over the past several years is already well known. But even this year, the powerful American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, has been pushing for new United States sanctions on Iran, this time to penalise countries that purchase gas from it. According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, AIPAC activists have been lobbying the Obama Administration hard. This follows a long history of belligerency towards Iran that includes the aforementioned threats of unilateral armed attacks on its territory.

Iran continues to suffer from economic sanctions placed on it by the UN Security Council over its nuclear power program. In contrast, Israel already possesses a formidable nuclear arsenal while the United States is assisting Saudi Arabia, the one country whose national ideology most closely resembles that of the Taliban, to develop its nuclear power program.

It is perhaps not surprising then that establishment commentators in Iran — both in government and in the media — have looked to foreign conspiracies to explain the violence. Even before his election victory speech, Ahmadinejad had implied that mainstream political opponents like Mir Hossein Mousavi were being supported by foreign powers. The recent arrest of British embassy staff was allegedly in response to Britain’s “central” role in fomenting violent unrest in the country.

Allegations such as these often verge on the paranoid — throughout the recent election campaign, Ahmadinejad frequently implied that reformist opposition politicians were seeking to destabilise the country with the assistance of foreign powers. Over the past few weeks, former protesters have been shown on television claiming to have been “provoked” into causing mayhem on the streets by Western media like the BBC and Voice of America. References by Iranian authorities to interference from abroad play on Iranians’ collective memory of their country’s exploitation by foreign powers, be they Russia, Britain or the United states, in centuries past.

All of this, along with the proliferation of commentary on the lack of democracy and freedom in Iran, places the vital Middle Eastern nation in an eerily similar position to that faced by Iraq under Saddam Hussein just prior to the March 2003 invasion of the country by the United States.

On that occasion as now, commentators spoke of the West’s responsibility to help Middle Eastern societies attain democracy.

There is unquestioningly a deficit of democracy and political freedom in Iran. One of the features of the fallout from the recent presidential elections has been the swift and often brutal clampdown on popular dissent, as demonstrated by the arrest of several reformist politicians and street-level clashes between police and protesters that have killed scores and injured hundreds more.

There is strong evidence to suggest that the elections were at least partially rigged. On 22 June, Iran’s Guardian Council, the institution that oversees elections, admitted that more votes were collected than actual voters in 50 cities.

Yet the Guardian Council affirmed Ahmadinejad, the candidate it is widely believed to have preferred in the first place, as victor after a partial recount of votes. It is unlikely that we will ever conclusively know if, and to what extent, the elections were rigged.

High profile opposition leaders like the recent presidential candidates Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, and Nobel Peace Prize winning human rights activist Shirin Ebadi risked imprisonment by calling for the elections to be annulled.

As the protests have died down, it is unclear whether the groundswell of support for reformist politicians will lead to an institutional shift away from the conservative power-base that has existed since the 1979 revolution.

Yet there is more to popular Iranian politics than meets the eye. Support for Ahmadinejad remains strong among the working poor throughout the nation for whom economic marginalisation is still a greater concern than political variety. Ahmadinejad’s strident rhetoric may frighten us in the West, but many ordinary Iranians see him as a bulwark against foreign interference that history has taught them to be ever fearful of.

Perhaps the greatest message of the past four weeks has been that real power in Iran rests with Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, the Guardian Council and other institutions — like the Revolutionary Guard and Basjit — dominated by them.

Yet many of the most vocal critics of the establishment, like the wealthy reformist camp mentor and former president Ali Akbar Rafsanjani, are themselves powerful political players.

It is this latter aspect of Iranian political life that makes the country so unique, and paradoxical among the largely authoritarian states of the Middle East where dissent, even from within centres of power, is rarely aired publicly.

That distinction has not been made in public debate in the West. Iran may be repressive, but so too are the Arab-dominated regimes that we consider “moderates” and allies.

In Iran as with most of the Middle East it may well take decades before ordinary citizens will be able to freely and safely challenge the institutions of the state, whether through the ballot box or on the streets.

The broad-based street-level push for greater freedom we have all witnessed in Iran of late has occurred despite, and not because of, the West’s indignation over Iranian authorities. The Iranian establishment might find it convenient to paint protesters as pawns of foreign powers — and Western nations may like to see themselves as bastions of democracy helping to deliver greater freedoms to the oppressed peoples of Iran — but the scale and spontaneity of the nascent pro-democracy movement, and the fact that it cuts across social and economic divides, suggests that its origins are firmly rooted in Iranian soil.

The prospect of a genuinely democratic Iran has been viewed with some hostility by the United States and the major Western nations that follow its lead in the Middle East. Such developments risk undermining the power dynamic that has seen foreign powers and local authoritarian regimes monopolise economic and political life for several centuries.

Perhaps it is the development of a pro-democracy movement from within a country such as Iran that has confounded so many Western observers.

Source URL: http://newmatilda.com/2009/07/13/all-eyes-iran

Obama on Pakistan television

mustafa — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 08:34:47 +0000

US President Obama recently spoke to Dawn News in Washington. It’s something of a coup for Pakistani journalism given that such opportunities are few and far between. Still it’s a fairly sycophantic thing and hence quite disappointing. For instance, there are no hard questions on the around 800 Pakistanis killed by US drone strikes in the country. Or the highly damaging role the US has played in supporting Pakistan’s military since the 1950s, although, encouragingly, Obama did mildly refer to that. But we do learn that Obama can cook keema and dhaal.

Threat to Pakistan’s nukes exaggerated

mustafa — Mon, 11 May 2009 04:53:54 +0000

A 10,000-strong dedicated army unit reportedly guards the nuclear weapons sites, which are dispersed throughout secure parts of Pakistan. And although political instability has plagued the country for decades, the military has been its steely backbone.

‘Collateral damage’ in AfPak hurts the US too

mustafa — Fri, 08 May 2009 17:57:58 +0000

The following report for The Guardian, published today, looks at the recent meetings between the Presidents of the United States, Afghanistan and Pakistan in Washington D.C. and the risks to civilians caught up in the war with the Taliban. It was reprinted in The Khaleej Times on May 12, 2009.

‘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.

Pentagon concerns with Pakistan aid

mustafa — Sat, 02 May 2009 19:25:01 +0000

It appears the Pentagon is opposed to too much oversight of civilian aid to Pakistan, including a provision in a proposed bill that would prevent aid in the event of a military coup:

After promising last month that U.S. aid to Pakistan would no longer be a “blank check,” the Obama administration is attempting to head off efforts in Congress to place tough conditions on the multi-billion dollar assistance package it is seeking for Islamabad.

In comparison, John Bolton of the former Bush Administration proves that he is only partially associated with reality, arguing in the Wall Street Journal that:

To prevent catastrophe will require considerable American effort and unquestionably provoke resistance from many Pakistanis, often for widely differing reasons. We must strengthen pro-American elements in Pakistan’s military so they can purge dangerous Islamicists from their ranks; roll back Taliban advances; and, together with our increased efforts in Afghanistan, decisively defeat the militants on either side of the border. This may mean stifling some of our democratic squeamishness and acquiescing in a Pakistani military takeover, if the civilian government melts before radical pressures. So be it.

History, as ever, is a convenient victim in all of this – decades of US interference in Pakistan’s domestic politics, support for dictators and investment in the very same religious fanatics know terrorising the country have been forgotten. Also as ever, the US paints itself as the only agent for stability. The solution suggested by Bolton and the Pentagon? Bring back the Army.