Mustafa Qadri
guardian.co.uk, Thursday 25 March 2010 16.35 GMT

Like siblings locked in an endless rivalry, India and Pakistan have bickered for well over six decades. Transforming that rivalry into a mature, productive relationship will be difficult. But the consequences of continued animosity will be much worse.

Two words punctuate the dangers of one of the world’s longest running cold wars: nuclear weapons. For years both countries have militarised at a breathtaking pace based on a shared belief that the other may attack at any moment. Although the international community regularly calls for a scale-back of forces in the heavily fortified Indo-Pak border, many of the same nations, spearheaded by the United States and Russia, have been happy to sell billions of dollars’ worth of deadly weaponry to India and Pakistan, escalating the risks and magnitude of any future conflict.

Such hypocrisy is compounded by the fact that most citizens in the subcontinent remain desperately poor and deeply frustrated by generations of neglect and exploitation by elites to whom they are invisible except when it is politically expedient. Politicians opportunistically drum up jingoistic diatribes, complete with rent-a-crowd protesters, against our neighbours, who can be conveniently blamed for everything, but mostly terrorism. It doesn’t help that India and Pakistan have gone to war on four occasions and have a history of supporting violent insurgencies in each other’s territory.

The sad irony is that we Desis remain bound at the cultural hip – be it our love for cricket, Bollywood and Pakistani tele-dramas, or class consciousness. Travel restrictions mean only a handful of us ever get to meet one another, creating a dangerous isolation that feeds racist stereotypes and turns dialogue into a political liability.

Practicalities have meant that diplomatic back channels have remained open, even in the darkest of days that followed the murderous rampage through Mumbai in 2008 or theattack on the Indian parliament in 2001. But along with terrorism, regional pretensions have stymied conciliation. Both India and Pakistan have strived to be ever more incorporated into the American imperial project at the expense of the other. Both complain that the US favours the other at their expense. As you read this, a high-level Pakistani delegation is in Washington trying to convince the Obama administration to endorse a civilian nuclear energy programme akin to that it has already reached with India. For their part, Indian lobbyists argue that US reliance on Pakistan for its strategy in Afghanistan sidelines India’s successful trade and development approach to stabilising that troubled country.

If there are any silver linings amid the grey clouds of competition, it is the fact that normalising relations would be a boon for business in both countries. This is greatly hampered, however, by the lack of an effective business lobby in Pakistan – like everything else here, the economy is firmly dominated by generals. When Pakistan recently signed a gas pipeline deal with Iran, the world’s second largest supplier, India was notable by its absence. India was originally part of the venture only to withdraw owing to its present frosty relationship with Pakistan.

Much of that frost comes from the snowy peaks of Jammu and Kashmir, the Himalayan region India and Pakistan have fought three wars over. Resolving this dispute is pivotal to normalising relations, but observers on both sides of the border are unanimously pessimistic this will occur in the foreseeable future. It is “not clear who can sell” peace in Kashmir, says Dr Harsh Pant from Kings College. Only an Indian government led by the rightwing BJP, Pant argues, could accept the kind of overture from Pakistan that in 2007 nearly commenced concrete steps towards resolving the dispute because voters trust it more on national security issues. In opposition, however, the BJP has been happy to score political points against the current Congress-led government, claiming its overtures to Pakistan represent appeasement of the enemy. Civilian observers in Pakistan are sceptical their army would ever endorse any such move because the Kashmir issue is its raison d’être.

Civilian leaders in both countries, and particularly India’s prime minister Manmohan Singh, have pushed for continued talks between officials from their elected civilian governments. “Dialogue is the only way forward” says Indian analyst Kanti Bajpai, because “everything else India has tried”, including the threat of war following the 2001 Indian parliament attack, has failed to change the dynamic. The perennial problem is the subservience of Pakistan’s civilian government to military planners in Rawalpindi. Sadly, Pakistan’s president Asif Zardari has proved incapable of breaking that imbalance. But, says Kamran Shafi from Dawn newspaper, it would help Pakistan’s civilian leaders if India were to “draw down its [troop levels] in Kashmir” and maintain government to government dialogue as it has done.

It may seem simplistic, but building relationships is the key to peace in the subcontinent in the foreseeable future. Even now our expatriates freely mingle abroad at universities and in professional circles. Our retired military men routinely swap war stories over bottles of aged scotch whiskey in international capitals. Despite the barriers, the informal relationships we forge are, in the words of one Indian correspondent recently returned from Pakistan, “the key to peace”. To achieve peace, the subcontinent’s largest siblings must grow out of old rivalries.

The idea that Pakistan is inherently dangerous is a mantra used by those who ignore history and avoid the complicated reality

According to Kapil Komireddi in these very pages, the demise of Pakistan is “inevitable” because it has since foundation been a source of division and extremism. This is not a new argument. Virtually every western analyst, now happily joined by a chorus of Indian observers mysteriously bereft of regional contexts and history, believes that the Pakistan state, as opposed to merely extremists within its borders, is the single greatest threat to international peace and security.

On paper, there is much to support this line of thinking. Pakistan is, after all, a highly mismanaged, corrupt developing state that has fostered religious extremism for decades while continuing to build a formidable nuclear arsenal. The prospect of the Taliban getting its hands on Pakistan’s nukes is the stuff of nightmares, and Dick Cheney’s dreams. It is hard to think of a more frightening scenario.

With the exception of North Korea, no nuclear-armed nation is as scrutinised as Pakistan. Yet nuclear proliferation is on the rise worldwide. According to the Pentagon, Pakistan is expanding its nuclear arsenal more quickly than any other country. But India is not far behind and, along with China, Russia and the United States, is busy improving the size and quality of its weapon delivery systems.

On closer reflection, the idea that the Pakistan state is inherently dangerous turns out to be a lazy mantra used by those who wish to ignore history and avoid a more complicated reality.

A nation state is a rather nebulous concept at the best of time. But when a state as hurriedly created (in 1947), poorly managed and with as many centres of power as Pakistan is in question, it becomes difficult to establish diabolical intent, though not impossible.

Pakistan society is as divided as it is diverse, and its elites reflect these traits. Within the army, the most powerful institution in the country, there are careerists, Islamists and khaki businessmen more consumed with wealth accumulation via shady army welfare trusts than nuclear jihad. That is not to say the army is incapable of Machiavellian strategies. For decades, it has looked to install a pro-Pakistan regime in Afghanistan.

Following the war with the Soviets in Afghanistan, and generous encouragement of the US and Saudi Arabia, the army looked to radical Islamists to fulfil this role. It is also true that much of Pakistani society, including the army, has a pathological fear of India-engineered oblivion. Even now there are strong suggestions the army is supporting anti-India militancy in Kashmir.

Along with commentators such as Komireddi, the US has routinely and very publicly criticised Pakistan for refusing to shift the lion’s share of its troops stationed along the border with India (most of them are in Kashmir).

It is true that the army has been slow to react to the Taliban insurgency within Pakistan. Only last month did it finally decide to mount decisive action against Taliban encroachment in the country, and this after years of reaching peace agreements that saw the insurgents move into as much as 11% of the country.

But these sobering details do not an evil empire make.

Spare a thought for the Indian army. As the security analyst Farrukh Saleem wrote recently:

The Pakistan army looks at the Indian army and sees its 6,384 tanks … 672 combat aircraft … its six out of 13 Indian corps that are strike corps … [all] pointing their guns at Pakistan … deployed to cut Pakistan into two halves. The Pakistan army looks at the Taliban and sees no Arjun main battle tanks, … no 155mm Bofors howitzers, no Akash surface-to-air missiles, no BrahMos land attack cruise missiles, no Agni intermediate range ballistic missiles, no Sukhoi Su-30 MKI air superiority strike fighters, no Jaguar attack aircraft, no MiG-27 ground-attack aircraft, no Shakti thermonuclear devices, no Shakti-II 12 kiloton fission devices and no heavy artillery.

This year alone, India will spend close to $40bn (US) on its armed forces, up to eight times as much Pakistan. It has fought four major wars with Pakistan and, in each, matched its much smaller rival in bellicosity and provocation.

Such facts do not to absolve Pakistan’s army of responsibility for stifling militancy. But to consider Pakistan’s role in creating the instability currently engulfing the subcontinent without considering India is like studying the Cuban missile crisis without reference to American warheads pointed towards the then Soviet Union.

And therein lies the problem for so many Indians and Pakistanis. Lost in the west’s division between good and bad third-world citizens, many have become blind to their country’s own ills. It was in India, after all, that a pogrom arranged by fanatical Hindu groups assisted by the Gujarat government led to the murder of thousands of Muslims and Christians.

Fascism has an old pedigree in India – the anti-British nationalist Subhash Chandra Bose, who fought with the Japanese against Her Majesty’s forces during the second world war, marvelled at Hitler’s reinvigoration of the German state. At the last Indian elections, the fascist Bajrang Dal and Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh parties openly lobbied on a Hindu supremacist platform. The reflections with the Taliban could not be clearer.

Many in Pakistan still refuse to accept that there is homegrown extremism in their country. They remain convinced that Indian, Israeli or American agencies (or all three in collusion) are stoking the flames of extremism to discredit Pakistan because it is the only Muslim nation with nuclear weapons. All the while, Pakistani school children continue to be fed lies about Indian designs over the country and the virtues of Pakistan’s historically inept army.

For Indians, as for Pakistanis, the tired routine of pointing the finger across the border has served little other purpose than to deflect attention away from the very pressing problems at home. The sad irony is that India and Pakistan still share much the same tribulations some six decades after they were sliced apart.

guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009

(First published at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/jun/18/pakistan-india-taliban)

Mustafa Qadri 10-Jun-2009

Has South Asia really only brought us grief, Madhav? I don’t think that’s entirely fair, though I admit I’ve increasingly found myself asking that very same question while travelling through the southern mega city of Karachi last week.

In the markets and shops of Saddar Town, where almost anything imaginable can be found, the dusty facades of British-era townhouses are seen fading into history. Much like Pakistan since partition, the buildings have become increasingly dilapidated and neglected and, with them, so too much of our rich history.

‘There is no justice here’ is the most common phrase I hear in Pakistan, and I’ve been to every corner of this diverse, beautiful and sometimes brutal country. Indeed, much of the popular support for recently reinstated Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry was a direct consequence of the incredible inequity faced by ordinary citizens.

Spare a thought, then, for the Lahore High Court which, last Tuesday, ordered the release of Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, a religious leader placed under house arrest over alleged links to last November’s murderous Mumbai attacks. ‘His release has disturbed us all,’ said US Special Envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke, an understandable and widely held sentiment.

The court released Saeed on the grounds that government lawyers had not provided sufficient evidence to warrant his arrest. He has been released by the courts on similar grounds on at least two prior occasions, a record that has led the Indian government to conclude that Pakistani authorities are not doing their best to investigate Saeed.

The release order could not have come at a worse time for India-Pakistan relations. Already soured by events at Mumbai, it came a day after India’s minister for external affairs publicly advocated a thaw in the icy relations between the two countries, and a week after Pakistan’s ambassador in Washington spoke of the need to put the issue of mutual nuclear disarmament back on the table.

There are good reasons to presume Hafiz Mohammad Saeed’s involvement, at least vicariously, in the Mumbai attacks. He may not have helped organise the audacious assault that killed 173 people in one of the great cities of the subcontinent. But his stewardship of the anti-Indian Lashkar-e-Tayaba has for years been loud and active. Dossiers given to Pakistani officials by their Indian counterparts also shed considerable light on Lashkar’s involvement in Mumbai, as has tenacious investigative journalism, much of it by our own reporters.

But in a democracy, people deserve their day in court. If an individual is to be found guilty and sentenced to prison, their crimes must be established beyond a reasonable doubt, based on the evidence. The irony of this latest drama is that the Lahore High Court’s decision to order Saeed’s release proves its independence while, at the same time, exposing the executive’s incompetence.

Speaking of court cases, there has been intense scrutiny of the trial of Ajmal Kasab, the lone surviving gunman from Mumbai. How have the Indian courts been dealing with highly politicised cases like Kasab’s, Madhav?

(Article originally published at: http://www.the-diplomat.com/article.aspx?aeid=14389)

JIHAD: THE STRUGGLE CONTINUES

Mustafa Qadri 02-Mar-2009

Mustafa Qadri investigates the organisations believed by many to have been behind the Mumbai terrorist attacks

When 10 gunmen terrorised central Mumbai for three days last November, effectively holding an emerging great power to ransom, elements from within Pakistan were immediately suspected. No other single event has so focused the world’s attention on the international threat posed by militancy in Pakistan.

Indian authorities claimed that Mohammad Ajmal Kasab, the lone gunman captured alive at Mumbai, was a Pakistani with links to the banned militant organisation Lashkar-e-Toiba. But it took Pakistan more than a month to agree that Kasab was Pakistani. The admission, finally made by Minister for Information Sherry Rehman on 9 January, followed weeks of public denials of any link between Pakistan and the Mumbai attacks.

The conflicting signals reflect the tensions within Pakistan’s civilian and military leadership as to the most appropriate response to the crisis. According to a senior army officer contacted by The Diplomat, civilian authorities have been put under pressure to avoid scrutiny of possible Pakistan military intelligence links in the attacks, even if they are indirect.

The ensuing saga, which continues with Pakistan now admitting the attacks were partly planned on its soil, has brought to light an organisation hitherto little known outside the subcontinent. Lashkar-e-Toiba, or Army of the Pure, has been implicated in several attacks in India, including a daring and deadly December 2001 assault on the Indian parliamentary quarter in New Delhi. Then, as with Mumbai, in what have been described as ‘fidayeen’ attacks, the gunmen sought to maximise casualties and continue their assault until killed.

Lashkar-e-Toiba was established in the late 1980s with assistance from Pakistan’s powerful covert operations agency, the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI). Thanks to massive United States largesse, the ISI became a semi-independent institution answerable only to the army’s top brass. Although that funding was aimed at training and arming mujahidin to fight the Soviets in Afghanistan, the Pakistan army soon concluded that this same militancy could serve their interests in the unending clash over Indian-controlled Kashmir.

‘The army realised – if it worked so well in Afghanistan, why not use [the same militants] to fight Pakistan’s wars,’ explains Farrukh Saleem from the Centre for Research and Security Studies in Islamabad.

Lashkar-e-Toiba, an offshoot of the religious welfare organisation Jamaat-ud-Dawa, was created precisely for this purpose. The Line of Control separating Indian and Pakistani Kashmir is one of the most militarised on the planet. Conventional wars in the region, of which the two countries have already fought three, have inevitably ended in stalemate.

In contrast, Jihadi militias like Lashkar are able to cross the border with a minimum of equipment, wreaking havoc and terrifying Indian soldiers before either being killed or melting back into Pakistan. ‘All we had was some provisions, our rucksacks and Kalashnikovs,’ recalls Shakeel (not his real name), one such militant who narrowly escaped capture by Indian soldiers after his squad was encircled deep inside Indian-controlled Kashmir.

Ever since Mumbai, Pakistan has been under extreme pressure, particularly from the United States and India, to crack down on Jamaat-ud-Dawa and Lashkar-e-Toiba. Both have been listed as terrorist organisations by Pakistan and the United Nations Security Council.

Crackdown is ‘cosmetic’

In December 2008, shortly after Mumbai, authorities arrested most of Jamaat and Lashkar’s senior members, including Jamaat’s founder, Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, and key Lashkar commanders Zaki-ur-Rehman Lakhvi and Zarar Shah. According to a January report in the Wall Street Journal, both Shah and Lakhvi confessed to involvement in the Mumbai attacks under interrogation from Pakistani authorities. The US also claims to have intercepted phone calls between Shah and one of the attackers at the Taj Mahal hotel.

Whether their arrests will lead to an end to the organisations’ operations or their links to the Pakistan army remains unclear. Saeed was also placed under house arrest after the 2001 attacks in New Delhi, but was released a year later, once international attention subsided.

Ayesha Siddiqa, a Pakistani security analyst, believes Pakistan’s response to Mumbai is largely cosmetic. Her seminal book, Military Inc., lifted the lid on the Pakistan army’s cronyism and graft, methodically documenting the manner and means with which it effectively controls the country.

‘There is no shift in the relationship between militant organisations and Pakistan,’ Siddiqa says. ‘The crackdown was a drama.’

Yet, at present, Jamaat-ud-Dawa’s welfare activities, which have no direct relationship with Lashkar-e-Toiba’s militancy, remain entirely frozen. ‘Jamaat-ud-Dawa is a welfare organisation, they are not terrorists,’ argues Emir Mohammed Husain Mehanti, a leader of Pakistan’s largest and relatively moderate mainstream religious political party, Jamaat-e-Islami. ‘Because of the [Security Council’s and Pakistan’s] ban, hospitals, schools, clinics, all have been closed down. What happens to the women and children, the people who depend on these services?’

Hafiz Mohammad Saeed is a popular figure in Pakistan, not least because of Jamaat-ud-Dawa’s charitable work throughout the poverty-stricken country. Jamaat volunteers, for instance, were the first to assist victims of the October 2005 earthquakes in Pakistani Kashmir, which killed more than 70,000. ‘In some places they [were] even rescuing [Pakistan army] soldiers from their [devastated] outposts,’ recalls a senior bureaucrat.

Markaz Dawa Wal Irshad, the forerunner to Jamaat-ud-Dawa, was founded around 1987 by Hafiz Mohammad Saeed in the midst of strong Pakistani support for anti-Soviet resistance in Afghanistan. It began as a religious seminary, teaching the same kind of ideology that inspired young Pakistani men to fight in Afghanistan. Saeed, a professor at the University of Engineering and Technology in Lahore, along with fellow professor Zafar Iqbal, created a massive religious colony in the town of Muridke just outside Lahore, the capital of the Punjab province in Pakistan.

The complex was meant to rival Atchison College, the British-era grammar school where the Punjab’s elite sent their sons. The difference was, Muridke offered students a rigid interpretation of the salafist school of Islamic thought that originates from the Arabian peninsula, not a secular education based on the British public school model.

Fearing a crackdown on Lashkar, which was eventually banned by Pakistan and the international community in the wake of the 11 September, 2001, attacks on the United States, Saeed channelled Markaz’s welfare activities into a new umbrella organisation named Jamaat-ud-Dawa. Until the crackdowns occurred in December last year, Hafiz Saeed and Jaamat’s other preachers spoke widely and vociferously against India and the West.

Jamaat’s offices throughout Pakistan have now been shut down and its members have gone into hiding, although they remain under close surveillance by Pakistan’s intelligence agencies. Even as The Diplomat interviewed a member of Lashkar-e-Toiba (see page 24) at an inner city madrassa (school), a towering man in a traditional shalwar kamees tunic kept a watchful gaze and proceeded to contact someone on his mobile phone.

At the end of the interview, the tall figure vanished into the crowd.

‘MY DUTY’ — INTERVIEW WITH A LASHKAR JIHADIST

What is the aim of Jamaat-ud-Dawa?
To speak God’s name and to wage jihad [struggle] with anyone who challenges Qur’an.

Who are your enemies?
Those who do not follow the Qur’an [the Muslim holy book]. Every day the infidels are growing [stronger]. Our duty is to end this infiltration [of Pakistan and other Muslim societies by outside influences].

But isn’t India’s presence in Kashmir your main focus?
Of course it is, [but] the infidels are everywhere! This [India and Kashmir] is only one region where we must fight jihad.

Tell me about Jamaat’s membership.
If you go to the mosque and tell people to go [fight] for jihad, no one will come because they are scared. Members of Jamaat-ud-Dawa are those who are willing to fight. Only those who fear nothing but God, who are willing to fight for God’s laws, [are allowed to join] Jamaat-ud-Dawa and Lashkar-e-Toiba.

Are Jamaat-ud-Dawa and Lashkar-e-Toiba the same entity?
Of course! When we do jihad we change our names from Jamaat-ud-Dawa to Lashkar-e-Toiba. However, it is not necessary for all [our members] to be involved in combat. By the grace of God we have many capable people who help in different ways.

Could you give us an example of things your organisation does besides waging jihad?
Most of what we [as Jamaat-ud-Dawa] do is welfare or zakaat [one of the five pillars of Islam whereby a Muslim is obliged to give alms to the poor]. Everyone knows about [the school complex in] Muridke, [but] we have several other schools and welfare centres. We also provide food and dispense medicine.

What is the relationship between Lashkar-e-Toiba and Pakistan?
Everybody [in Pakistan] has a responsibility to fight jihad. Whenever there is [a need for] someone to fight for Pakistan, Lashkar-e-Toiba is the first to respond, [even] before the Pakistan army. In fact, the Pakistan army itself sends [Lashkar-e-Toiba] first.

Was Lashkar-e-Toiba involved in the Mumbai attacks?
Who can say who was behind the Mumbai attacks? A Muslim could not kill innocents. Muslims think of [non-Muslims], too. Islam does not permit this kind of wanton attack. And what do you gain from doing this? God will not honour [the Mumbai attackers] in heaven, so what benefit is there in doing it?

Are you involved in Jamaat-ud-Dawa at the moment?
Right now there are no Jamaat-ud-Dawa activities because they have been cancelled by our leadership [because of the clamp down by Pakistan government authorities]. Right now I am teaching Qur’an at this madrassa.

Where to from here for Jamaat-ud-Dawa?
We don’t know what the future holds for Jamaat-ud-Dawa. They may have closed us down. But the jihad will continue.