Pakistan: Now or Never?

Taliban talks and Mullah Omar’s Eid message

Since reading Mullah Omar’s lengthy Eid message on his view of Afghanistan’s future, I have been trying to work out, without success, what it means for prospects of talks with the Taliban. It is a piece of evidence without context, available to anyone to bolster whatever argument they care to submit.

Pakistani writer Ahmed Rashid described the message from the Afghan Taliban leader as “the longest and by far the most forward-looking political message he has ever sent”.

“Mullah Omar does not rule out negotiations with the Americans or sharing power with the present Afghan government and he emphatically says that the Taliban have no interest in monopolizing power,” he wrote. “For the first time he admits that the Taliban have been negotiating with the Americans, but he insists these talks have been about the release of prisoners and are not a political dialogue.”

Mark Sedwill, Britain’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, said on Twitter of the message: ”Interesting shift of tone. But need Taliban to match words with action and commit to peace process.”

Mullah Omar’s message coincided with a lengthy AP story on talks between the United States and the Taliban which offered a half-full half-empty snapshot of where things stood -  these had evolved into substantive negotiations, it said, before Afghan officials scuttled them by leaking the name of the Taliban negotiator.

We have known for a while that the Americans were holding direct talks with the Taliban, and according to Rashid, by acknowledging this, ”Mullah Omar is sending a clear message to his fighters that future political talks are a possibility, while signaling to the Americans that he may eventually be prepared to broaden the scope of the dialogue and those already participating in it.”

Among the more conciliatory sections in Mullah Omar’s message is a call for “a real Islamic regime which is acceptable to all people of the country. All ethnicities will have participation in the regime … Since Afghanistan has vast arable land, rich mines and high potential of energy resources, therefore, we can make investments in these sectors in conditions of peace and stability … the policy of the Islamic Emirate is not aimed at monopolizing power. Since Afghanistan is the joint homeland of all Afghans, so all Afghans have right to perform their responsibility in the field of protection and running of the country. The future transformations and developments would not resemble the developments following the collapse of communism … strict measures will be taken to safeguard all national installations, government departments and the advancements that have been occurred in private sector. Professional cadres and national businessmen will be further encouraged, without any discrimination, to serve their religion and country.”

from Afghan Journal:

America in Afghanistan until 2024 ?

The Daily Telegraph  reports that the status of forces agreement that the United States and Afghanistan are negotiating may allow a U.S. military presence in the country until 2024 .  That's a full 10 years beyond the deadline for withdrawal of U.S. combat troops and handing over security responsibilities to Afghan forces.

The negotiations are being conducted under a veil of security, and we have no way of knowing, at this point at least, if the two sides are really talking about U.S. troops in the country for that long. ( The very fact that a decade after U.S. troops entered the country there is no formal agreement spelling out the terms of their deployment is in itself remarkable)

But it does seem more likely than not that there there will be a U.S. military presence, however small, in Afghanistan beyond 2014, and that is going to force the players involved in the conflict and those watching from the sidelines with more than a spectator's interest to rethink their calculations.

Indeed, the talk of an extended force deployment may be an attempt to reverse the perception that America was in full retreat following President Barack Obama's announcement  of a drawdown that many in the military believe has only hardened the resolve of the Taliban insurgents and their backers in Pakistan to wait out the departure.

Now with troops, including a sizeable element of Special Forces, backed by the United States' aggressive and unparalleled air power, to be based in the turbulent south and east of the country beyond 2014, the  players have to shuffle their cards again. For those elements in the Taliban who may have explored the idea of reconciliation, the plan for a long-term U.S.military involvement in the country has just made their task even more  difficult.

For Pakistan, the country most affected by what happens in Afghanistan, the idea that the United States is not going to walk away, sharpens its dilemma and once again goes to the heart of its role as a conflicted partner in the war against Islamist militancy.  On the face of it, a U.S. military presence next door means continued pressure on Pakistan to act against the militant groups that operate from its soil. It means the drones will continue to fly in its skies and fire missiles at will.

Pakistan’s growing democracy

Pakistani politics can be infuriating, petty, violent and often downright incomprehensible. So it is easy to miss what is actually quite a remarkable transformation in the way it governs itself. For perhaps the first time in its 64 years of existence, Pakistan is trying to figure out in detail how to make democracy work.

In a country traditionally dominated by the centralising authority of the military, the government which took office in 2008 is devolving power to the provinces. It is talking about breaking up Punjab, Pakistan’s most populous province and traditional recruiting ground of the army, by creating a new Seraiki province in south Punjab. It is extending some political rights into the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) by reforming the draconian Frontier Crimes Regulations, a British colonial-era system designed to control rather than govern the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan.

In other words, it is introducing into the system mechanisms which, in theory at least, make it easier for people to negotiate their disputes with the state without taking up arms. By decentralising, it could also become harder for the army to launch a military coup (though it currently shows no inclination to do so), thus beginning the process of making democracy irreversible. And perhaps most importantly, it offers a way of accommodating Pakistan’s ethnic diversity.

As Pakistani columnist Mosharraf Zaidi wrote this month, “decentralisation has been, stealthily, one of the central and most definitive issues in Pakistani democracy.”  And whatever the petty and self-serving politics behind the various positions taken by different political parties, he wrote, “Pakistanis should be pleased that decentralisation represents the very heart of political discourse in Pakistan in 2011.”

Pakistan’s inability to accommodate ethnic diversity has a painful history.  At its worst, it led to the bitter civil war in 1971 when then East Pakistan, resentful of the domination of West Pakistan, broke away with Indian help to become the new state of Bangladesh.   But it is at its  most insidious not for what it fails to do, but for what it requires in its place — an over-reliance on a particular, but contested, interpretation of Islam as the only force which can unite Pakistan, and a need for real or imagined external enemies (it used to be India, now it extends to the United States) to pull the country together in a defensive huddle.

So for all its fitful and frustrating progress, the effort to build democracy is likely to be the real story of Pakistan in the coming year or so, ahead of elections due by 2013.  Rightly or wrongly, people believe the United States is preparing to leave the region, and attention is turning to domestic politics as the place where Pakistan’s future will be contested. Relations with the United States and India will of course continue to play a role, as will the Islamist militants waging a campaign of gun and bomb attacks inside Pakistan, but many of the influences that will shape that political contest are less obvious.

Among these is the separatist insurgency in Baluchistan, Pakistan’s largest but least populated province,  where demands for outright independence appear to be gaining strength over aspirations for greater autonomy. The area is rich in resources, home to Gwadar port — meant to give China access to the Arabian Sea and Gulf oil supplies – and arguably more strategically significant than Afghanistan.  Although the insurgency has not yet come to dominate political discourse, it is an unpredictable wild card which could prompt some to call for greater, centralised, and therefore military control, and others for even more decentralisation.

When there are no people in Pakistan

Rarely does a story reveal so much so unintentionally as this month’s article in the New Yorker by Nicholas Schmidle reconstructing the May 2 raid by U.S. forces who found and killed Osama bin Laden in the Pakistani garrison town of Abbottabad. The article, beautifully written in the genre of Black Hawk Down, purports to tell the inside story of the Navy SEALS on the raid, right down to what they were thinking, or indeed, in the case of one of them, what he had in his pockets.

The problem, as reported initially by The Washington Post, was that Schmidle had not actually spoken to any of the SEALS involved in the raid but relied on the accounts of others who had debriefed the men. That, along with his failure to disclose this fact in the article, has prompted a vivid debate on Twitter and elsewhere, both about journalistic ethics and the accuracy of the story.

C. Christine Fair, a South Asia expert at Georgetown University in the United States, complained that the lack of transparency on the sourcing of the story was an “egregious exercise of incaution”  that left it impossible for readers to judge its credibility.  It was an issue, she said, that went beyond journalism, but played into conspiracy theories about American policy and particularly about whether bin Laden was dead at all.  That those theories are alive and well was highlighted by this story in Pakistan’s The News, claiming that all witnesses to bin Laden’s death were killed in a U.S. helicopter crash in Afghanistan on  August 5. Actually, although members of SEAL Team 6 were among the dead, none of them had been involved in the raid.

As a journalist writing about Pakistan, I would be wary of taking too strong a stance either way – the expression “people who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones” springs to mind. I would probably split the difference and say that the more transparency on sourcing the better when it comes to Pakistan. We are all subject to manipulation and propaganda when we rely on unnamed sources, so much so that a journalist friend in Islamabad made the case to me that we should collectively decide to use only named sources. (For the record, I would try to counter that manipulation by seeking out two or more sources, preferably of different nationalities in different countries, to corroborate a story.)

At the same time, unlike a news story, a magazine article like this one is closer to book form where the demands of stylistic coherence require a huge effort of imagination, not of invention, but of empathy. It requires laborious questions about the kind of details we would not normally have time to ask – like the contents of someone’s pockets. We cannot entirely judge it by the same standards as we would apply to daily, or even weekly news. 

That said, what we do have in front of us with the New Yorker’s reconstruction of the bin Laden raid is a text. We know it exists since we can link to it (primary sourcing). Where we will differ is over interpretation.

In a post over the weekend which prompted me to re-examine the New Yorker story, Jakob Steiner at RugPundits complained about Orientalism. That in turn led me to look at how small a role Pakistanis play in the story. Pause here, and consider that Pakistan is a country of some 180 million people of diverse religious, social, linguistic and cultural backgrounds. People who fret about their children’s education and grieve for their parents like the rest of us. People who in the office will bitch around the water cooler, and over dinner  talk about the weather. And yes. I simplify people’s lives, because those of us who live them (signpost irony here) know how simple they are.

from Photographers:

Retracing my steps in Pakistan

On August 7, 2010, with a camera in hand, I dropped into a flooded village on an army helicopter that was delivering food aid to marooned villagers. As a crewman slid the door open to find solid ground, I leaped out, took some photographs, and managed to get back on before the chopper departed.

Time stamps on the images show the hover-stop lasted less than the length of an average song. For those three minutes, my thoughts were focused on finding an image that would bring the Pakistan floods story to life.

After getting back to base, I worded the caption, “Marooned flood victims looking to escape grab the side bars of a hovering Army helicopter which arrived to distribute food supplies in the Muzaffargarh district of Pakistan's Punjab province August 7, 2010.”

I never got a chance to speak to the villagers in my image. Trapped in the belly of the chopper, I did not even know where we had descended. All I could confirm was that I had leaped onto a graveyard, where the winds from the propellers threw me from one dirt mound to another.

On July 30, 2011, nearly one year later, I found the village and my subjects.

India and Pakistan: moving out of intensive care

The joint statement released after the meeting of the foreign ministers of India and Pakistan was so predictably cautious that inevitably attention focused on Pakistan’s glamorous new  foreign minister, Hina Rabbani Khar, and  her designer accessories (a Hermes Birkin handbag, we were told.) Much of the debate was about whether it was sexist to comment on her appearance/question her competence; whether she had performed well in her television interviews (CNN-IBN is here); and whether it was appropriate for a minister to be so expensively attired. (See Dawn’s slideshow for some snarky captions.)

But that debate was also irrelevant. Nobody ever expected policy on India and Pakistan to be set by the foreign ministers. In Pakistan, it is heavily influenced by the army; in India, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh is driving it.   The two ministers were simply expected to deliver that policy with tact and conviction.

The heavy lifting in rebuilding India-Pakistan ties, soured by the November 2008 attacks on Mumbai,  had in any case already been carried out by their top diplomats, foreign secretaries Nirupama Rao and Salman Bashir.  Their aim, according to an ANI profile of Rao, was to take the India-Pakistan relationship off life-support and bring it into the incubator stage.

So how far did the joint statement - so detailed that it had to have been the product of weeks of work by diplomats behind the scenes — achieve that aim?

The main caveat is that nobody is entirely clear where the Pakistan army stands on the peace process. But equally, since only the military and its Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency have the power to deliver on security measures, the likelihood is that it was consulted well in advance.

Among the pointers and questions on where talks go from here, based on the joint statement, are:

- As expected, there was no reference to Afghanistan, since this has never been included within the formal peace process between India and Pakistan. Yet with many suggesting both countries have an interest in discussing stability in Afghanistan it remains unclear how they will find a mechanism to incorporate this into their peace talks.

Pakistan, India and the possibility of change

Pakistan has been defined – sometimes by itself, sometimes by outsiders – as “not India” for so long that it has almost become set in stone. Conventional wisdom would have it that Pakistan can unite its many different ethnic and sectarian groups only by setting itself up in opposition to India and stressing its Muslim identity against Indian secularism and pluralism.  In particular, its powerful army has thrived in part because of that traditional enmity with India.

Yet viewing Pakistan through such a simple prism can be misleading, especially if by freeze-framing it within a historical perspective, it denies the possibility of change.

In many conversations during a trip I just made to Pakistan, I found the subject of India to be remarkable largely for its absence.  The United States is of course popularly perceived as a bigger enemy now, but even talk of relations with America – the big obsession of the western media — was dwarfed by an inwards focus on Pakistan itself.

In a four-hour discussion with his officers in May, Pakistan Army chief General Ashfaq Pervez Kayani made no mention of India, but said that he worried about the weak economy being a threat to Pakistan.  Then in a speech to a conference on deradicalisation in July, he urged “all elements of national power” to work together on a national strategy to counter  terrorism — echoing a line frequently made by the army that Pakistan’s national security depends on better governance and an improved economy. 

Speaking at the same conference alongside Kayani, Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani did mention India, but that was to stress the need for better relations. He made the same point in an interview last week, adding that he hoped India could “play a good role” in Afghanistan, where both countries have traditionally been rivals for influence.

None of that is to suggest a sea-change in Pakistan’s view of India — its military in particular remains configured for war with its much bigger neighbour.  And given that Pakistan’s foreign and security policies — including once nurturing militant groups to fight in Afghanistan and Kashmir – have been shrouded in secrecy for decades, few would dare say with certainty exactly what is going on.

But there is a change, at least in relative terms. Pakistan has so many internal problems – the Taliban insurgency,  a weak economy, poor governance, political, ethnic and sectarian violence - that “the Indian threat” has receded, while the fear of internal threats to national security has grown. And amongst people not in positions of authority, the conversation is far more likely to be about power cuts and price rises.

from FaithWorld:

In Ahmadis’s desert city, Pakistan closes in on group it declared non-Muslim

(Ahmadis stand over graves of victims of an attack on one of their mosques, in Rabwah, May 29, 2010/Stringer)

At the office of what claims to be one of Pakistan's oldest newspapers, workers scan copy for words it is not allowed to use -- words like Muslim and Islam. "The government is constantly monitoring this publication to make sure none of these words are published," explains our guide during a visit to the offices of al Fazl, the newspaper of the Ahmadiyya sect in Pakistan.

This is Rabwah, the town the Ahmadis built when they fled the killings of Muslims in India at Partition in 1947, and believing themselves guided by God, chose a barren stretch of land where they hoped to make the Punjab desert bloom. Affluent and well-educated, they started out camping in tents and mud huts near the river and the railway line. Now they have a town of some 60,000 people, a jumble of one- and two-storey buildings, along with an Olympic size swimming pool, a fire service and a world class heart institute.

Yet declared by the state in the 1970s to be non-Muslims, they face increasing threats of violence across Pakistan as the country strained by a weakening economy, an Islamist insurgency and internecine political feuds, fractures down sectarian and ethnic lines.

"The situation is getting worse and worse," says Mirza Khurshid Ahmed, amir of the Ahmadi community in Pakistan. "The level of religious intolerance has increased considerably during the last 10 years."

The town, renamed Chenabnagar by the state government since "Rabwah" comes from a verse in the Koran, is now retreating behind high walls and razor wire, awaiting the suicide bombers and fedayeen gunmen who police tell them are plotting attacks. Last May, 86 people were killed in two Ahmadi mosques in Lahore, capital of Punjab; others were attacked elsewhere in the province. Many fled to Rabwah where the community gives them cheap housing and financial support.

from Afghan Journal:

On the Afghanistan-Pakistan border : cutting off the nose to spite the face

Pakistan's defence minister has threatened to move forces away from the Afghan border, where they are deployed to fight al Qaeda and the Taliban, if the United States cuts off aid to the cash-strapped country. Ahmed Mukhtar's logic is that Pakistan is essentially fighting America's war on the Afghan border, and if it is going to put the squeeze on its frontline partner, then it will respond by not doing America's bidding.

But  apart from the issue of whether Pakistan can really stand up to the United States  is the question of whether Islamabad can afford to pull back from the Afghan border for its own sake. This is no longer the porous border where movement of insurgents is confined to members of the Afghan Taliban travelling across to launch attacks on foreign forces in their country. Over the past few weeks, the traffic has moved in the reverse direction, with militants crossing over from Afghanistan to attack Pakistani security posts, Pakistani officials say.  These are not armed men sneaking across in twos and threes , but large groups of up to 600 men armed with rocket launchers and  grenades flagrantly crossing the mountainous border to attack security forces and civilians in Pakistan. (It also stands Pakistan's strategy of seeking strategic depth versus India on its head; now the rear itself has become a threat.)

It is not very clear who these raiders are  - which adds to the anxiety - but one obvious  guess is that they could be members of the Pakistan Taliban who have come under pressure in their mountain redoubts in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) from the military and may have found sanctuary just over the border in eastern Afghanistan.  The umbrella organisation is sworn to fighting the Pakistani state and is mainly behind the wave of suicide bombings in the country over the past three years, stepping up the momentum even more after Osama bin Laden's killing, with an audacious attack on a naval base in the southern city of Karachi.

Indeed, the Pakistani military's offensives have been focused on crushing the Tehrik-e-Taliban, and  it is inconceivable that they would thin out on the Afghan border which is where the threat is coming from, at the moment.

There is another, equally worrying challenge. What if the U.S.-led NATO forces were to cross  the border in "hot pursuit" of insurgents? It's not entirely impossible : in May NATO helicopters , pursuing insurgents, were reported to have crossed into North Waziristan which followed another raid back in October in which two Pakistani soldiers were accidentally shot. Two years earlier, in September 2008, American commandos carried out a raid in Pakistan’s tribal areas and killed several people suspected of being insurgents. The attack led to outrage among Pakistan’s leaders — and warnings not to do it again.

With ties testing new lows each week, and America's impatience with the militants growing, the chances of greater aggression on the border have only increased. For Pakistan to pull out from the troubled frontier at this point seems like a self-defeating goal, more than anything else.

from FaithWorld:

Pakistan’s patchy fight against Islamist violence sows confusion

(A man takes a nap next to a poster of Osama bin Laden at the Chauburji monument in Lahore May 13, 2011. The message written on the posters read: "The prayer absentia for martyr of Islamic nation is a duty and a debt"/Mani Rana)

At the rehabilitation center for former militants in Pakistan's Swat valley, the psychiatrist speaks for the young man sitting opposite him in silence. "It was terrible. He was unable to escape. The fear is so strong. Still the fear is so strong." Hundreds of miles away in Lahore, capital of Punjab province, a retired army officer recalls another young man who attacked him while he prayed - his "absolutely expressionless face" as he crouched down robot-like to reload his gun.

Both youths had been sucked into an increasingly fierce campaign of gun and bomb attacks by Islamist militants on military and civilian targets across Pakistan. But there the similarity stops.

One is now being "de-radicalized" in the rehabilitation center in Swat, the northern region which only two years ago was overrun by the Pakistani Taliban and has since been cleared after a massive military operation. He will be taught that Islam does not permit violence against the state and that suicide bombing is "haram" or forbidden.

The other had attacked the minority Ahmadi sect, declared non-Muslim by the state and subject to frequent attacks in Punjab, where many of them live. Though he was arrested after being overpowered by the retired army officer, survivors said many of their neighbors celebrated his act of violence with the distribution of sweets.

The different responses to the two are symptomatic of Pakistan's compartmentalized approach on counter-terrorism and counter-extremism. In some parts of the country - like Swat - violent Islamists are crushed and their beliefs confronted. In others - like Punjab, the heartland province far more important to the stability of Pakistan than the more talked-about tribal areas bordering Afghanistan - they are tolerated while their ideology of religious extremism flourishes.