The State of Pakistan

The gravity of the problem —Dr Manzur Ejaz

2009-12-23T07:19:00.002-05:00

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2009\12\23\story_23-12-2009_pg3_3

Investors were avoiding Pakistan even before the Taliban threat and they will remain so even after the Taliban are gone. Pakistan has multiple problems that repulse the foreigners, whether they are investors or tourists

I ran into Mr Eric Lawson, an investor, in a conference organised by a Pakistani group. My unusual take on Pakistan’s troubles intrigued him quite a bit and he asked me to get together sometime. After six months, out of the blue he called me and invited me over for dinner in a downtown Spanish restaurant.

I have passed from that street hundreds of times but I never noticed the Restaurant Hispania where a bottle of wine can cost up to $ 500 or above. Mr Lawson, noticing my shocked state of mind, laughed and told me that most of the people around us were from the World Bank and IMF being dined-wined and wowed by developing world governments. This restaurant runs on the loan/aid money given to developing countries or people like me who make money in those countries in other ways, he added.

After we were settled, he asked me as to what was going on in Pakistan and if the military could eliminate the Taliban insurgency. I told him that I was reasonably optimistic that the military will prevail because it was their creation. In the past, the military was not confronting them sincerely because of their misplaced fairytale policy of getting strategic depth in Afghanistan. Now, the military has learnt the lesson as suicide bombings kill people near the capital of Islamabad. I further added that I hope investors like you can return to Pakistan, and ended my explanation with a smile.

“No, you are wrong here. I hope your optimism is realistic as far as the Taliban are concerned. But the Western investors are not going to return to Pakistan even then. Investors were avoiding Pakistan even before the Taliban threat and they will remain so even after the Taliban are gone. Pakistan has multiple problems that repulse the foreigners, whether they are investors or tourists,” he told me.

“I know there is immense corruption in Pakistan and foreigners do not know how to deal with it. But so are most of the developing countries where the US and European investors and tourists readily go. What is special about Pakistan other than this?” I asked.

He became a little frustrated and impatient and promptly busted out “No, this is where Pakistanis do not get it. We all know about corruption in the developing world and we know how to deal with it and make money. But Pakistan’s problem is Islamisation and restrictions on personal liberties and most aspects of entertainment that we consider a necessary part of life. Why would we go to a prison-like country to make money when we have better choices all around? Why not to go to India or China where we can make money and enjoy life as we like to.”

I could not fully appreciate his highly negative characterisation of Pakistan and could not resist rebutting in pointing out: “If you are talking about unavailability of alcohol, you as foreigners can buy it from any five-star hotel. Oh, and if you are talking about other entertainment, that is also arranged easily.” To keep the atmosphere pleasant, I joked, “By creating some hurdles in your way, we provide you the chance to save some money.”

He was more upset now and almost yelling “You guys will never understand us. We make money to spend it not like you guys who earn to horde. This is why we progressed and you did not.” He went on, “To answer your take on alcohol and so-called other entertainment by which you probably meant prostitutes, I will say we are neither addicted to alcohol or prostitutes. We enjoy these things as you enjoy tea and company. The difference may be that we have female friends along with males, which is rare in your societies. Buying alcohol from five-star hotels feels just like stealing and drinking like thieves. We want to go out to bars of different kinds where we can see and meet different types of people and enjoy their company for a while.”

I was more perplexed than ever and did not know how to respond to him. After having lived three decades in the West I knew what he was talking about. But for face saving I threw my last argument, “Pakistan is not the only ideological state. Israel, Saudi Arabia and some others are ideological too and you do business in those countries.”

He laughed whole-heartedly and said, “Thank you. I was expecting this excuse much earlier. This is a favourite excuse Pakistanis use. But let me tell you that Israel may be too cruel for Palestinians, but it is an open society like any European nation. Saudi Arabia can afford any ideology because of its oil wealth and tribal society. Furthermore, not many investors go there except oil companies and the Saudis have created free zones for foreigners that Pakistan cannot. Your society is very poor but relatively open-minded. You can neither feed them like Saudi Arabia nor create islands for foreigners because society is very vocal. You are stuck by imposing an ideology that you cannot afford. Therefore, you will remain stuck even after the Taliban are gone. And, the worst part is that even intelligent people like you do not appreciate the gravity of the problem.”

I did not know what to say and decided to move the conversation to Obama’s healthcare plan instead.

The writer can be reached at manzurejaz@yahoo.com

Afghanistan and Pakistan: Anatomy of a Proxy War

2009-12-11T07:26:00.002-05:00

Obama's Afghan surge and new strategy attempt sophistication and nuance, but fail to grasp the terrible complexities of the Afghan war. In his speech the President noted two key issues: Afghanistan's rampant corruption and the problematic role of Pakistan. But these problems are more vexing than he admits.

I know the depth of these problems from study and from years of -- sometimes bitter and disappointing -- experience working in Afghanistan. From 2001 until very recently I was intimately involved with Afghan security and intelligence agencies; helped to create the Afghan National Security Council; did reconstruction work; trained NATO forces for deployment; and traveled across much of the country by road, in the process coming to know many of its local and regional leaders.

First, the issue of a "credible" Afghan partner. Obama wants Karzai to fight corruption and he wants to sidestep Karzai to effectively deliver aid. Good luck with that.

But what about the heart of the strategy, the Afghan National Army? This force is supposed to "stand up as we stand down." Sadly this is a phantom Army. Made up from the recombined remnants of Northern Alliance militias, held together by British and American money and training, it has nowhere near the numbers needed nor claimed. Drug addiction and demoralization are rampant among its soldiers.

Most importantly, the ANA is a largely Tajik army. Tajiks are the second largest ethnic group in Afghanistan and are based in the north of the country. The Pashtun are the largest group and dominate the south. The Taliban draws its support from the Pashtun. Tajik and Pashtuns are bitter rivals.

In the eyes of Tajik leaders, Karzai (a Pashtun) isn't "their" president, and this isn't "their" war, nor are Tajiks too keen on getting killed in it, as many US soldiers have noticed.

Even if Tajik forces were willing to fight and replace NATO soldiers, sending the Tajik dominated ANA into the south to control the Pashtun would not amount to a "national army" fighting "its own" war. The Pashtun would and do see these Tajiks as invaders.

In short, this is not the force that will beat the Taliban.

What about our other ally, Pakistan? Regardless of what they tell you, the Pakistani military is not on America's side. They pretend to be because they enjoy receiving billions and billions of dollars in aid every year, but in the end the Pakistani Army is obsessed with India. Their fear of India means they want a weak Islamic Afghanistan behind them.

The Pakistani officer class sees the current Afghan government as allied to India and thus hostile to Islamabad -- which it is. India supported the communist government of Afghanistan and then the northern Alliance and now the Karzai government. It is heavily involved in Afghanistan. But Pakistan is determined that it will dominate Afghanistan once we, the foreigners, leave.

Despite its weakness, Afghanistan's political leaders have always coveted large areas of Pakistan: the Pashtun inhabited North West Frontier Province, (the NWFP) and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (the FATA). Afghanistan lost these regions to what was British India in 1893 when it accepted the so-called "Durand line" which is now the border with Pakistan.

In the 1950s and early 60s, Afghanistan did its best to destabilise Pakistani control in these regions, and actually sent armed tribal groups to invade them. This did much to encourage Islamabad's later enthusiastic support of the US-back Mujahadeen in the late 1970s and 1980s.

In the Pakistani military's view, the international community will leave Afghanistan, as they did after the Soviets left, and indeed as Obama has promised to do. When that happens Pakistan feels that it must be in position to install a friendly regime in Kabul, one that will expel the Indian advisors, spies, diplomats, contactors, etc and provide a potentially friendly area to the rear of Pakistan in the event of another major war with India. This is the Pakistani idea of "strategic depth."

Who would be that friendly government: most likely, the Taliban.

And if they cannot get a friendly government in Kabul, an ungoverned Afghanistan is better than the present Indian dominated one.

This pro-Taliban stance remains the Pakistani position, despite the blow back from their encouragement of extremist Islamic groups. Pakistan uses radical jihadist groups as proxies in Indian-administered Kashmir.

Sometime it looks different, because the Pakistanis do just enough by way of arresting Arabs and other Islamic extremists to keep the US happy. Bluntly speaking, the Pakistanis desperately need the US money (billions every year, year on year) to equip themselves in the build up against India.

And the Pakistan military is being forced to push back the various newly formed Pakistani Taliban groups. So it can look like the Pakistani's really are US allies. But that is an illusion.

Whilst the Pakistani Taliban maintain strong connections with the Afghan Taliban and other Islamic rebels and extremists, the Pakistani military regards the two forces as entirely separate. In their eyes, the Pakistani Taliban are dangerous rebels, whereas the Afghan Taliban are the next government of Afghanistan; and must be kept on good terms and assisted at every juncture.

It has taken US intelligence, military and diplomats years to see this and they still don't quite know what to do about it.

The Afghan Taliban created themselves almost spontaneously in 1994, with the intention of improving justice and security, and removing illegal checkpoints and local warlords. But the Pakistani intelligence, the ISI, soon began supporting them. And soon this vigilante force became a religious army of Pashtun nationalists, believing that they have a god-given right to rule.

This Pakistani encouragement of radical Islam in Afghanistan and in Kashmir has seriously "blown back." Much of the Pashtun areas of Pakistan are now in rebellion and the Pakistani Taliban does not answer to the ISI. From here it may seem like one single movement and threat however, it is essential to understand that Pakistani military and intelligence officers regard the two Taleban organizations (or clusters of organizations) as separate.

The present action against the Pakistani Taliban is just that. The Pakistan has, definitively, not moved against the Afghan Taliban. In fact, the Afghan Taliban leadership remains secure in Pakistan. Indeed they are widely thought to have moved the Quetta Shura (Mullah Omar's command structure) to Karachi, to protect it from possible air strikes.

Powerful elements in Pakistan will continue to support the Pashtun insurgency in Afghanistan no matter what Islamabad's government says or does. This is only one of many problems affecting Afghanistan, but it is the core problem.

Unless the international community can address the proxy fight between Pakistan and India at a political level -- through a settlement on the line of control through Kashmir and a guarantee of security for Pakistan -- it is unlikely that Pakistan's support of the Afghan Taliban can be stopped. And without that stabilizing Afghanistan is very unlikely.

Bob Churcher is a former British Army Officer with a degree in history. He served in Northern Ireland and Africa and has spent the last 20 years in conflict or post-conflict environments, including, the Balkans, East Timor and Afghanistan.

Can China Deliver in Pakistan?

2009-12-03T08:48:00.000-05:00

The success or failure of President Barack Obama's new Afghanistan strategy will depend on numerous international factors, from the contributions of Washington's NATO allies to the performance of Afghanistan's beleaguered government.

However, few factors loom larger than Pakistan.

Indeed, the Obama administration has conceded that unless Islamabad intensifies its efforts against Taliban and al-Qaida forces based in Pakistan, the Afghanistan plan will likely fail. Predictably, the U.S. government has renewed pressure on Pakistan to launch a more aggressive campaign against militancy within its borders.

However, Washington has little credibility and leverage in Pakistan, and Pakistani mistrust of the United States runs high. According to one poll from earlier this year, 64 percent of Pakistanis regard America as an enemy, and only 9 percent see it as a partner. Such sentiments pose a major challenge to the development of an expanded strategic partnership with Pakistan, which Obama reportedly offered to Islamabad in recent weeks.

Given these unsavory views of the United States, Washington's appeals for stronger Pakistani action against extremism could easily fall flat -- unless they are accompanied by similar pleas from nations with more credibility in Pakistan.

Enter China. Since this spring -- and presumably during Obama's discussions with his Chinese counterpart, President Hu Jintao, last month in Beijing -- Washington has been asking China to help stabilize Pakistan. This makes good sense. Pakistan's instability jeopardizes critical Chinese interests (.pdf), and the time has never been more ripe for Beijing to lean on its longstanding ally.

Ten thousand Chinese workers reside in Pakistan, and a fair number of them have been kidnapped or killed in the last few years. Additionally, Pakistan's northwest frontier has provided a sanctuary for Uighur separatist militants from China's Xinjiang province, some of whom have trained in Pakistani camps before returning to China. In April, Chinese officials alleged that the Uighur East Turkestan Islamic Movement -- the likely perpetrator of a deadly attack on Chinese border police before last year's Beijing Olympics -- had established its military headquarters in Pakistan.

Meanwhile, China has provided much of the funding and labor for the construction of a port in the southern Pakistani city of Gwadar. This port, which became operational earlier this year, gives China a strategic foothold near the Persian Gulf, facilitating the transit of Chinese energy resources from the Gulf back to China. However, Gwadar lies in the combustible province of Baluchistan, home to a separatist insurgency and alleged refuge for the Afghan Taliban's leadership.

In short, Pakistan's instability threatens the security of China's citizens, its government, and its energy imports -- a trifecta of threats that Beijing can ill-afford to ignore.

Beijing's high credibility in Pakistan ensures that its concerns will be taken seriously. The two governments have enjoyed warm relations since the 1960s, and Beijing has invested billions of dollars in economic aid, dam construction, energy development, and other infrastructure projects across Pakistan. One 2009 survey reveals that 80 percent of Pakistanis view China as a partner. And in a 2009 public opinion poll assessing perceptions of world leaders, 80 percent of Pakistanis expressed confidence in Hu -- the highest level of Pakistani support for any world leader mentioned.

Unsurprisingly, whenever China has demanded something of Islamabad, the latter has often complied. Many observers believe former Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf launched his 2007 offensive against radicals holed up in Islamabad's Red Mosque after Beijing, angered by the kidnapping of Chinese engineers in Pakistan, pressured him to do so.

Today, however, China has much more at stake. Beijing must quietly yet forcefully impress upon Islamabad the fact that Pakistan's problems threaten the critical interests of its chief benefactor and ally.

Ultimately, Washington's greatest concern should be neither Beijing's willingness to nudge Islamabad, nor the receptiveness of Islamabad's civilian leadership to Beijing's entreaties.

Rather, the big question is how Pakistan's undisputed powerbroker -- the military -- chooses to respond to Chinese pressure. The army has already demonstrated in Swat, and more recently in the tribal area of South Waziristan, that it is determined to crush Pakistan-based Taliban forces that target Islamabad. However, other militants based in Pakistan cross the porous border with Afghanistan to fight American troops and the government of Hamid Karzai in that country. Certain elements within Pakistan's security institutions consider these anti-Kabul forces a strategic asset, regarding them as a hedge should international forces one day withdraw from Afghanistan.

If such sentiments carry the day, the effectiveness of Chinese cajoling could be limited -- and achieving Beijing's and Washington's shared goal of a stable Pakistan will grow ever more challenging. Nonetheless, enlisting China's help will go a long way toward promoting better stability in Pakistan -- and, by extension, in Afghanistan.

Michael Kugelman is program associate with the Asia Program at the Washington-based Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, where he specializes in South Asia. He can be reached at michael.kugelman@wilsoncenter.org.

Contingency

2009-12-03T00:33:00.001-05:00

Thursday, December 03, 2009
Parvez Iqbal

More surprising than the recent statement of British prime minister Gordon Brown asking Pakistan to "do more" is the surprise that our Foreign Office has shown on this statement. Similar statements have simultaneously emanated from Britain's first cousin, the United States.

In a letter addressed to our president, personally delivered by Obama's national security advisor James L Jones, the US president has asked for Pakistan to take action against five extremist outfits: Al Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban, the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Haqqani group. He went on to say that ambiguity in Pakistan's relationship with any of them could no longer be ignored. This might well have been a ploy to becalm those in his own country who want to see an end to the Afghan conflict and were opposing deployment of additional forces. But the tone is too serious to be taken lightly. Jones has been quoted as saying bluntly that if Pakistan cannot deliver, the United States may be impelled to use any means at its disposal to rout insurgents based along Pakistan's borders with Afghanistan. "Any means" could obviously include movement of US troops across the border into Pakistan's tribal areas, or beyond if need be.

Add to all this the announcement by Obama about additional US troops for Afghanistan, and one does not then have to ask the US to define its future strategy for that country. Every piece of that strategy is falling into place. Remain ready to move into Pakistan if needed. Obama had just not being alluding to this possibility in his election campaign speeches and interviews, he had referred to it directly time and again. His broad smiles appear deceptive now.

Before our Foreign Office gets "surprised" again, we should have our own strategy and contingency plans ready for any eventuality that might develop with US forces moving across the border if Pakistan "fails to deliver." Our forces are already taking care of the TTP in South Waziristan. The other two groups, Al Qaeda and Lashkar-e-Taiba, are underground and other than covert actions like physical capture or targeted killings through drone attacks, overt large-scale conventional military action against them is not possible.

So if the US military planners have been tasked to keep contingency plans ready for a ground offensive into Pakistani territory, it would most likely be initiated first into North Waziristan against the Haqqani group, which is being blamed for the attacks on US and NATO forces in Afghanistan. What would the options be for Pakistan's response, other than a statement of surprise from the Foreign Office, of course?

Protest statements, like those for the drone attacks, would be futile. Even school kids can by now tell us that. Military response? The army, already committed against the TTP, would be compelled to seek direction from the government to commit forces for deploying forces to stop the Americans. This would not be a matter which any sovereign country could gulp sitting back. Drone attacks are one matter, territory and sovereignty are another. To divert the attention of our military, even the smallest of misadventures by India on our eastern borders, with or without American elbowing, would really complicate matters. The dilemma, or call it a catch -22 situation, if you will, would be whether to continue the support to the US in its war effort, or openly tell them they are on their own. If the Haqqani group gives them a bloody nose, will we say "so be it"? The possibilities are more complex and more in number than a dice with six sides can cope with.

The writer is a retired commodore. Email: greenfields48 @yahoo.com

Obama's Afghanistan mis-speech

2009-12-03T00:30:00.002-05:00

When Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton pulled the Al Qaeda card on Pakistanis during her visit to the Islamic Republic, many thought it was classic Clintonian rage unfettered. Last week, Prime Minister Gordon Brown first congratulated President Zardari on his country's successful jihad against terrorists and then hung up the phone and told the BBC that Pakistan needs to do more against Al Qaeda. That was chalked up immediately by followers of British politics to Brown's now legendary incompetence. Perhaps, he read the briefing notes all wrong, or forgot to take his medication, we all thought. After all, this is the man that has single-handedly brought the greatest era of Labour politics and its dominance in Britain to a pathetic end.

But of course, Secretary Clinton (being the Obama administration's sharp-toothed diplomatic supremo) and PM Brown (continuing Tony Blair's legacy of being the US government's poodle) were just setting up the ball for Obama to smash. Unlike what we've come to expect from President Obama, however, this was no smash. A less thunderous or less effective Obama speech is hard to conceive of.

If President Obama is the Muhammad Ali of political oratory, then his much-anticipated Afghan strategy speech was, at least to his admirers (even those from faraway places like Islamabad) as bitter as Ali's 1971 loss to Joe Frazier at Madison Square Garden. It was his first grand failure. In the past, Obama's oratory skills have helped him do the things he was looking to get done (Reverend Wright, Election Night, healthcare). His effectiveness is borne of the clarity he creates and the trust he engenders.

At West Point on Tuesday, President Obama was least like himself than we've ever known him. He was guarded, defensive, and less than entirely convincing. The biggest reason for the speech's failure is that it deliberately skirted around the central issue that plagues the American war in Afghanistan.

If there is one overwhelming area of consensus among pundits that think about these things for a living, it is concerning where the epicenter of America's problem in Afghanistan lies. That place is Pakistan. More specifically, it is Pakistan's willingness and its ability to take on and defeat, decisively, those terrorists that would either themselves, or through proxies, seek to harm the United States.

President Obama's speech almost entirely ignored this aspect of his country's Afghanistan strategy. Where he didn't ignore it, he fudged the issues so grandly that his talking points were eerily similar to some of the most emphatically unrealistic analysis of what is going on in Pakistan these days. In the most distressing part of Obama's speech, he repeated the spurious link between extremism and the security problems in Pakistan, saying "…as innocents have been killed from Karachi to Islamabad, it has become clear that it is the Pakistani people who are the most endangered by extremism. Public opinion has turned. The Pakistani Army has waged an offensive in Swat and South Waziristan. And there is no doubt that the United States and Pakistan share a common enemy."

Pakistani public opinion is decidedly against extremist groups and extremism -- but even a cursory look at the data and the news would disabuse anyone of the notion that Pakistan and the United States face a common enemy.

For Pakistani decision makers (and cynics are welcome to insert all the acronyms here that they like, but the fact is that the military and politics of this country are ultimately inextricable) Pakistan's enemies are those terrorists that are killing Pakistanis. America's enemies are those that are killing Americans.

It is true that Pakistanis are getting killed at the hands of FATA-based terrorists, and that Americans (soldiers) are getting killed at the hands of the same militants. That is about where the similarities end.

The FATA-based terrorists that attack Pakistan have been, and will continue to be, hunted down by the Pakistani military because it makes eminent political and strategic sense to do that. But the terrorists that operate in Afghanistan (from FATA), seeking to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan do not pose a threat to Pakistan. At least, that is what the calculus of Pakistani decision makers has been, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. Pakistan might take action against them, off and on, but will do so purely as a secondary proxy for American military power. The Pakistani military, in that case, will represent a better investment for US power than either the US military or the mercenaries that it uses, where it can. But the motivation for such piecemeal action against terrorists targeting Afghanistan will always be material. That's not how wars are won.

The Kandahari Taliban represent an even more complex creature, and I deliberately categorise them separately from the FATA-based terrorists that are killing American soldiers. Many within the Kandahari Taliban are ready to embrace their Poppalzai brother in Kabul, and snub both the hardcore elements within their ranks, as well as the Dostum and Masood proxies that have had an uncontested run of Afghanistan's spoils since 2001-2002. Pragmatists in the Karzai camp, as well as among both US military and diplomatic circles, know that the end-game in Kabul will require accommodation with such Taliban.

President Obama could have tried to outline these broad strokes to his audience at West Point and around the world in his speech. Instead, he chose to continue a dangerous tradition of dealing with Pakistan clandestinely. This is a deeply fascinating choice of strategy. Constant efforts to buy, coerce or cajole Pakistan's military and political elite into doing things that they consider suicidal simply has not worked. Pakistan's government will take the money, but it will not deliver the product.

It did not work for eight years under the Bush and Mush tag team. It was never going to work with a PPP government whose strongest instrument is a dislocated former Islamist Pakistani intellectual who has as keen an understanding of Pakistani politics, as Sarah Palin does of Russian geography. Now, with the PPP government buckling under the weight of its own broken promises, it seems Richard Holbrooke has convinced people that a hybrid diplomatic relationship, with six toes in the General Headquarters of the Pakistani military, and four in service of the president and prime minister -- whoever wins the skirmish -- is going to somehow yield success in getting Pakistan to take on the Taliban of Afghanistan.

This would not make for a very good suspense thriller. The ending is the same as the beginning. Pakistan will not abandon the Kandahari Taliban or any other proxies of Pakistani power that will be useful in Kabul. The regional imbalances that drive existential fears in Pakistan don't make Pakistan less committed to having influence in Kabul; they make Pakistan more committed to it.

Of course, Pakistan enjoys no moral authority whatsoever in Afghanistan. But it does enjoy being the only other country that Pakhtuns call home. It does enjoy an extremely long border with Afghanistan. It does enjoy clandestine services that have 30 years of experience in cultivating and leveraging assets in Afghanistan that have a demonstrated record of strategic success. Ethnically, geopolitically and in terms of intelligence, Pakistan has an insurmountable advantage in Afghanistan.

The seven-week victory of the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan in 2001 was an illusion that was aided by General Musharraf's sleight of hand, and the kind of firepower that America is unlikely to use again in the near future. As an alternative to the Kandahari Taliban, despite the presence of 100,000 US and NATO troops, billions of dollars and the support of 43 countries, the Northern Alliance has failed its sponsors.

Continued reliance on the Northern Alliance to provide good governance, on the US military and NATO to hold territory, and on Pakistan to take on the Kandahari Taliban are all delusions. President Obama's refusal to recognise the immobility of America's position in his speech is his greatest failure to date.

The writer advises governments, donors and NGOs on public policy. He can be reached through his website www.mosharrafzaidi.com

The Other Face Of Pakistan

2009-12-02T08:31:00.002-05:00

I have just returned from Pakistan where I was invited to support the efforts of women on the ground who are refusing to be terrified and silenced in the face of recent bombings and attacks. This was my fifth trip to Pakistan over the last fifteen years. I was there in 1994 when I followed a group of 500 Bosnian refugees who were promised swimming pools, bungalows and jobs, and ended up essentially stranded for five years at the Haji Complex, a barren site in Rawalpindi for pilgrims on the way to Mecca. That support offered by the Pakistani government to the Bosnian refugees was more than most were offering at the time. I went back to Pakistan in 1999 when I first met RAWA (Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan) and traveled with them into Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, leaving from Peshawar, through the Khyber Pass. I have made this trip several times since then. I was there in 2003 when women activists and artists presented the first production of The Vagina Monologues, a clandestine production in Islamabad that afterwards moved to public performances in Lahore and Karachi.

I was not prepared for the new Islamabad that I met, a city essentially under siege. A maze of 50 check points. People hardly leaving their houses. Schools closed for a month at a time. The fancy Serena Hotel surrounded, a fortress. The U.S. embassy an enclave, protected by miles of stone barricades and elaborate barbed wire. Inside the embassy is another world, a getaway, a club, a café, Pilates classes, and a shopping bazaar imported for the 800 or so American employees the day I was there. No one allowed out. A resident of Islamabad told me, "There weren't barricades and now there are. We're appalled. We're under threat... Because they're targets, we're targets. There were bomb blasts near us and all the windows were blown out of my house. My sister refuses to sleep in a room alone."

There is sense of musical chairs. If you move fast enough and are clever enough, the suicide bomber will not land on you. Every place is a target. One woman told me that she has come to make arbitrary decisions. She doesn't go to the Jinnah market. It feels central. This constant guessing and not knowing makes for terrible and constant anxiety. Everyone seems traumatized in one way or another.

I did a survey, asking people who they thought was doing the bombing and I got many answers. Most people said they had no idea. They did not know the political intentions of the bombings, didn't know who the bombers were or what they wanted. One person told me "...with the Contras [in Nicaragua] and the Tamils [in Sri Lanka], their intent was clear. Here it is an invisible evil. No one is claming it." Many thought it was the work of the Pakistani Taliban although no one thought all the bombings were done by them (the Taliban itself has only claimed responsibility for some of the bombings). There were many rumors and conspiracy theories. Since there is now talk of Blackwater operating in Pakistan, there are those who believe the U.S. is in cahoots with the Taliban (the theory is that if the U.S. has a deliberate foreign policy to keep the streets destabilized, they would have an excuse to intervene and occupy), or that the ISI (the Pakistani intelligence agency) is in cahoots with the U.S. and they are behind the bombings to turn the population against the Taliban. Some thought it was the Pakistani army, or the Taliban within the army. Several people talked about the fact they when they arrest people for the bombings, the stories die quickly and when there is a bomb blast police hose down the area and erase the evidence. Some thought the violence was sponsored by the Indian government. One woman from Swat told me, "We, the common people don't know what's going on. We are pawns. We are suffering at their hands. Whatever their plan is we wish they would get on with it."

I traveled to Rawalpindi, a bustling and madly crowded town right next to the capital. Once outside Islamabad, where the international groups and embassies are stationed and where western hotels exist, there is hardly a checkpoint. No security, no protection for the majority of the population who seem to be on the frontlines of the killing. It is very reminiscent of Iraq and the Green Zone. I go to visit a safe house run by a long time activist Shahnaz Bukhari. The house provides support and refuge for women who have been acid burned -- usually by their husbands. I meet Fauzia*, a 48-year-old woman, who is fully covered in a black chador. After we talk for a while and she begins to trust me, she removes the black veil and her face is a monstrous vision, melted and swollen, no ears, no eyes, she is completely blind. When she was young she married a man who did not like to work. She was working many jobs to support him and their family. She discovered he secretly got married to another women using her money. Eventually she asked for a divorce. After six years of being separated, he started blackmailing her to give him their kids or money. She had bought a plot of land. He was after it. She finally gave it to him, thinking he would leave her alone. She brought him the documents for the land. He said he was satisfied and wouldn't take the kids. He sent them out to have sodas to celebrate. Then he burnt her with acid. Threw it in her face. She told me, "When I say my prayers, I pray that he has been crippled. I don't want him to die. I want him to suffer." She brought her case to court. Her husband came once and then he vanished. She is now speaking out, standing up, showing her face. She wants other women to punish these perpetrators. There are 2,000 burn cases a year. The government is not supporting these cases or women. She is trying to create a network to pressure hospitals and everyone involved to support the women.

At the shelter, I am surprised to find a very handsome young man, Naeem*, and his very adorable son. They are dressed in matching gray cotton suits. It is only a few minutes into the interview that I realize Naeem is really Abaaz*, a 24-year-old woman. Abaaz was married off when she was 13 to a man who was 26. He abused her, tortured her mentally. He threw her out when she was 17 because he took another woman. Abaaz was left on her own with a child on the streets. She had to find a way to survive. She went to a men's barber and had her hair cut. Then she found suitable clothing, lowered her voice and changed her name. She got a vending stand and sells fruits and vegetables. She has achieved success with her business and her identity and is able to support herself and son. I asked her if she is happy living like this. "No, I do not like living as a man. My heart knows how I feel. But I am more secure. No one harasses me. I have learned street slang like the boys use. I mainly have male friends." I ask her son how he feels. "I call my mother brother Naeem in the streets, but I do not like that she can't be a woman. I want her to be in the house. At home she is different. She can be my mother." I ask if she will get married again. She says, "I can't be that fool again." She worries about money. She wants her son to go to school. She tells me it's embarrassing to be a boy. "When things are favorable, I'll be a girl again. The shawl, the symbol of my pride, I had to leave. I'll be happy when my son grows up and I can sit at home in my chair and wear my shawl. I will be happy then when I can live my last years as a woman."

I return that evening to Islamabad and am joined by a group of very powerful women. We talk for hours. I meet Samar Minallah -- an activist lawyer. She focuses primarily on highlighting problems of women in the Northwest Province of Pakistan. She has been fighting a practice called "retribution" where girls are traded to resolve conflict between men. Recently she was involved in a case where a man killed another man's dog and instead of a fight ensuing, the man who killed the dog gave the aggrieved man 15 girls between the ages of six months to seven years old. These girls then became the aggrieved man's possessions, to be raped, enslaved, treated in any way the man desired. Fifteen girls for one dead dog. This is a common practice. A practice Samar has been fighting against. In the case of the dog, she called the father of the girls and asked if it was true. She recorded the conversation. The father proudly announced that he had traded his daughters. Samar went to the human rights commission of Pakistan. She reported the case to a policeman. The father called Samar's son and told him "Your mother is going to die very soon." Fortunately, Samar was able to prosecute the case and the man went to jail. She then told me of the story that has put her life in much bigger jeopardy.

"I live in Swat. In April, I was told that a 16-year-old girl had been flogged by the Taliban. Beating women has nothing to do with our culture or religion. The girl had come from a far off village in Swat. She had refused a marriage proposal from a good for nothing Taliban boy. The boy then claimed the girl had an illicit relationship with her father-in-law. The woman was flogged publicly. Many photographed and videoed the flogging on their mobile phones and sent it around." Samar took the video and posted it on Facebook. She posted it with her name and email. She attached a message, "If you don't wake up today, this will happen to you." Because she identified herself, her life was immediately endangered. When I asked her why she took such a risk, she said "No one is taking responsibility for anything. There is no credibility or impact if you do not sign your name or take responsibility." The Taliban told Samar they were sending five suicide bombers to her house. This did not stop her. They tried to discredit her. They said it was a 14 year old video, said she manufactured it in her house. They said she was a known mad woman. Certain people stopped taking her phone calls. Some people removed her from their Facebook. She went on Pakistani TV. Samar did not use a drone or an AK-47, but she put the Taliban on the defensive. They demanded she be handed over, (like the 15 girls) but her actions spurred a revulsion and Pakistan people mobilized in the streets to protest. The Taliban claimed Samar had damaged their reputation in the international press. They put a fatwa against her. "I was shattered because of my children. I cried on the phone afraid for my children. I had the option of leaving Pakistan. To leave for me would have been death. I have a role to play in the theater against women's rights violations. A few embassies called and asked if I wanted asylum. I would never leave Pakistan. My daughter was crying because she couldn't leave her cats. I felt guilty I had done this to my kids. My friends gave us refuge." Samar stopped talking publicly for three months. Now she is back at it, fighting the cases. "I'm in a make shift home now. No landline. It's not just the Taliban I am afraid of. It is the Taliban mind set. Most suicide bombers are clean-shaven, look just like us. I am still getting horrible emails from people I don't know. People will get brownie points in heaven for killing me. Of course I am afraid of getting picked up, abused, raped, tortured. That is the most terrifying, not death. There are hundreds of missing people in Pakistan. But how can I stop. How can I let them win?"

The condition of women has never been elevated in Pakistan (I do not single Pakistan out as I have yet to find a country where the status of women is elevated), but the current climate of terror, militarism, and Talibanization has escalated and licensed a brutal gender oppression, inhumanity and violence. A male leader from Chitral, a formerly progressive town in the frontier told me, "The Taliban hasn't arrived yet physically, but they have mentally. Already women are not going out of the house, leaving jobs, covering themselves when they have never been covered."

Religious extremism is a kind of plague. It seizes the mind, body and soul. It creates a kind of slow terror that invades cell by cell and feeds off the preexisting patriarchal traditions and conditioning in women. Then, there are the various practices that enforce that conditioning: acid burning, retribution, honor killing, flogging, burying women alive, etc. Some of these stories get out to the West from time to time; but, what rarely gets out are the stories of women who are resisting this violence and fighting with their lives for human rights.

After listening to many women's stories, I am struck with their brilliance in constructing strategies that are not rooted in war or violence, but rather in courage, enabling justice, transformation and real security. There is another Pakistan -- the Pakistan of women academics running women studies programs, women demonstrating in front of the judiciary, speaking out on television, fighting law suits in protection of women's rights, harboring and giving refuge to women who are acid burned. There is the mother obsessively seeking justice for her daughter who she believes was poisoned by a Mullah after he raped her, the woman fighting off the Taliban after they murdered her husband in Swat. Activists like Tahira Addullan, who has been in the human rights and women's movement 30 years, always threatened, arrested twice, fiercely fighting for the restoration of an independent judiciary. And, Nighat Rizvi, who produced a sold out event to raise awareness about violence against women in the middle of a paralyzed city, and who screened her documentary on the inhumane conditions for women in the recent IDP camps.

These women understand that the major threat to Pakistan is not terrorism but poverty, malnutrition, (60 percent of the children are now born moderately stunted) lack of education, HIV, violence against women, and corruption of the government. Women who know that the U.S. war in Afghanistan escalates violence in Pakistan, that computer driven drones killing hundreds of innocent people enrages those who lose their loved ones and that creates more terrorists. They know their lives are being manipulated, that the millions of dollars the U.S. sends never reaches them or the people (but goes to the corrupt leaders and elites). That the future of their country is essentially in their hands, as the government, the army, the security forces are not focused on the struggles that occupy their daily existence.

As I leave Pakistan, I think of Fauzia, Abaaz and Samar. One reveals her destroyed face to stop the burning of others, one disguises her face to support her child and protect her security, one uploads an explosive video on Facebook to expose and stop a hideous practice. Each one of these strategies involved creativity, originality, bravery and very little money. I think the U.S. government and the military, the Pakistani government and army could all take heed from the vision and bravery and work of women like these. The change needs to come from the ground. Religious extremism is a virus. It feeds on poverty, malnutrition, humiliation, sexism and fear. As President Obama gets ready to formally announce his plans for a troop increase in Afghanistan, we must recognize that putting more US troops on the ground will only increase the violence, bombings and terror in the region. Our strongest methods of inoculation are to feed, help educate and honor the people of Pakistan and Afghanistan and to support the women, providing them with resources to do what they need to do, what they know how to do.

*Names have been changed to protect their identity.

Eve Ensler, a playwright and activist, is the founder of V-Day, a global movement to end violence against women and girls.

The Taliban mindset —By Dr Khalil Ahmad

2009-12-01T23:42:00.000-05:00

http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2009\12\02\story_2-12-2009_pg3_2

The fundamental rights of the citizens, which found a mention as far back as in 1928 in the Nehru Report, remained a chimera in Pakistan until the lawyers’ movement brought them to the streets in 2007

In order to secure constitutional protection for the Muslims of the subcontinent, the Muslim League argued for a homeland in a separatist language, on the basis of a different religious identity. However, since the Congress would not budge on the issue, the Muslim League went ahead with its demand for Pakistan.

Thus the constitutional issue was merged into a religious one. Naturally when Pakistan came into being, Quaid-e-Azam Muhammad Ali Jinnah found himself facing a dilemma: the Muslim League had been using the rhetoric of separate religious identity and now he wanted to make the new homeland a religiously neutral state as is evident from his speech of August 11, 1947. That it could not happen, and the controversy lives to this day, is evident. Also, that a constitution could not be framed until 1973, or while a few were framed and enforced, whatever their merit was, they could not survive, is sufficient to demonstrate the point that transforming the constitutional issue (especially the right to religious freedom) into a religious one proved disastrous for the new homeland.

It provided various elites, including the military and religious groups, with an excuse to exploit the absence of a constitution to their benefit. It was they who tried their best to ensure that no constitution should prevail in Pakistan.

The fundamental rights of the citizens, which found a mention as far back as in 1928 in the Nehru Report, remained a chimera in Pakistan until the lawyers’ movement brought them to the streets in 2007. Socialism, populism, religion, ‘enlightened moderation’ and a mixture of parasitism and welfare state completely eclipsed the issue of fundamental rights in the country.

All the politics through the last six decades can be summarised as thus: from the very beginning, a constitutional issue, i.e. the issue of fundamental rights of individual citizens was confused with the issue of the state’s control of individual citizens’ lives, i.e. the State’s right to determine what is best for its citizens, including their religion.

Principally, the only point of a constitution is its ability to protect the life, property and other fundamental rights of individual citizens. Also, the state’s control of its individual citizens is a relic of the monarchical past where the ruler was the law, and acted like a father or mother taking care of his subjects. When the rule of law is supreme, it means the laws and the state give equal protection to every citizen’s life, property and other rights. That is why all attacks on the constitution first require the suspension of these fundamental rights.

That brings us to two beliefs: first, that it is right to deprive others of their natural freedom, and second, that it is not. Whether those who deprive others of their freedom also try to control their lives or not is beside the point; what is important is whether this deprivation is achieved by force or by (false) law. That such rule of law, ensuring the fundamental rights of each citizen to live life as they wish, was missing in Pakistan, created a vacuum which many groups and parties — religious, sectarian, ethnic and otherwise — and conglomerations of intellectual, political, business and military elites rushed to fill. It is obvious that this vacuum was deliberately kept intact and even prolonged.

In fact, what is happening around us in Pakistan today again proves that the nature of the crisis is constitutional. It explains the onslaught of the Taliban as a violent resurrection of that mindset, which was never dealt with constitutionally. The absence of a constitution and, when we had one, its sheer violation by all elites — intellectual, religious, political, business, and military — strengthened that mindset.

Additionally, this mindset was deliberately strengthened by all the elites to perpetuate their rule and hegemony, and to protect their parasitism. It was nourished, nurtured, and trained at the cost of constitutional provisions relating especially to fundamental rights and religious freedom.

What was sowed by the intellectual, political, religious, business, and military elites is today beginning to rear its ugly head and its consequences are affecting ordinary citizens in the form of absolute insecurity that threatens their very existence without any reprieve in sight. This tragedy is deeper than our imagination can fathom. The number of hardcore Taliban in Pakistan may well be smaller than is repeatedly being claimed these days by the political and military elites — hundreds or thousands who will be wiped out in months. But who can enumerate the number of “soft” Taliban living amongst us?

This “soft” category can be divided into active and passive. Religious groups and parties fall into the active, while the passive are those ordinary citizens who are unaware of their own Taliban mindset. This passive category openly believes in depriving others of their freedom and controlling their lives according to its own scheme of thought. That may be why we see no mass agitation against the Taliban in spite of them killing fellow Pakistanis indiscriminately.

To fight this war we first have to admit that we are in the midst of an intellectual as well as a real war. The constitution of 1973 should be the rallying point for all who do not believe in depriving others of their freedoms and who believe in the fundamental human rights ensured in the constitution. Not only will that help us fight both the hardcore and soft Taliban but will also help to bring harmony, peace, stability and happiness to Pakistan.

The writer is founder/head of the Alternate Solutions Institute, http://asinstitute.org a think tank dedicated to the cause of personal freedom and rule of law. He can be contacted at: khalil@asinstitute.org

Breaking America's Silence on Pakistan

2009-11-24T10:42:00.000-05:00

Hillary Clinton's truth-telling is necessary and overdue.

By SUMIT GANGULY

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered an especially blunt, if long overdue, message to Pakistan last week. Talking to reporters in Lahore, she said she found it "hard to believe" that local authorities did not know where key members of al Qaeda had taken refuge. Her message set off another firestorm of criticism from both the government and the Pakistani press.

Though belated, Mrs. Clinton's remarks were entirely apt and, one hopes, mark a departure from U.S. policy under former President George W. Bush, and more recently, under President Barack Obama. Apologists for Pakistan in both administrations argued it was necessary to overlook the country's unwillingness to be more forthcoming on counterterrorism operations because of the U.S. dependence on Pakistan's goodwill to supply the International Security Assistance Force in Afghanistan. Though superficially correct, this reasoning overlooks the fact that Pakistan extracts significant rents for the use of its territory for this purpose and has also been the beneficiary of some $11 billion in American largesse over the past eight years.

Pakistan has helped the U.S. seize a number of key al Qaeda operatives on its soil, including Abu Zubaidyah, Ramzi Bin al Shibh, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu-Faraj-al-Libi, among others. Nevertheless, the Pakistani security establishment, especially in recent days, has done little to place the remnants of al Qaeda under a military anvil. Nor has it shown any willingness to disrupt and dismantle Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, two anti-Indian terrorist organizations known to have significant ties to al Qaeda. Instead Islamabad has relied on every possible subterfuge to protect them, such as asserting that evidence against the two groups is inadequate and placing Lashkar-e-Taiba's leader under arrests and then releasing him. These organizations have been allowed to thrive despite Indian, American and international pressure.

The security establishment's dalliance with these terrorist groups and unwillingness to hunt down the remnants of al Qaeda might seem to be a puzzle. The Pakistani Taliban, which has close links with al Qaeda, has been wreaking havoc across the country and has attacked key civilian and military targets with impunity in Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Lahore and Peshawar. These attacks have shaken many ordinary Pakistanis from their complacency and have contributed to a growing sense of urgency in addressing the country's domestic security.

But the security establishment's terrorist links are also logical. For several decades Pakistan's security apparatus has cultivated and worked with a host of Islamist militants to pursue its perceived strategic interests in Afghanistan and in Indian-controlled Kashmir. It remains unwilling to end this partnership. While it has finally mounted a military campaign against the Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan, a loose umbrella group of tribal factions in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, the security force still believes it is capable of distinguishing among these various Islamist terrorist organizations as friends and foes of the state. More to the point, it remains unwilling to stop using these entities to pursue its goals of installing a pliant regime in Afghanistan and sapping Indian resources in Kashmir.

Officials within the Bush and Obama administrations have been aware of these long-standing goals. Nevertheless, to elicit the Pakistani security establishment's cooperation, however limited, they refrained from blunt, unequivocal public criticism. Now that Mrs. Clinton has finally broken the deafening silence on the subject, the U.S. needs to sustain the pressure. A high-level American official's carefully crafted and deftly delivered speech can serve as a much-needed wake-up call. However, it would be irresponsible on the part of the administration not to follow up this verbal volley with firm actions.

The U.S. needs to hold the Pakistani security establishment to account. Despite the fanfare surrounding the current military operations in the tribal regions, foreign media coverage has been severely restricted. It is thus difficult to assess the vigor with which these operations are being conducted and to measure their effectiveness. Washington could insist on greater transparency to ensure that these operations are yielding meaningful results. This would include arresting and charging key leaders and shutting down their camps at Muridke, just outside Lahore. The administration should simultaneously insist that the Pakistani security forces finally launch an offensive against Lashkar-e-Taiba and not resort to sophistry to downplay its ties to al Qaeda and its involvement with terror in Kashmir and other parts of India.

A failure to sustain pressure on the Pakistani security establishment would have widespread adverse consequences for the country, for the region and for the U.S. The costs of homegrown terrorism to Pakistan's society have been more than apparent the past several weeks. The attack on the United Nations Mission in Kabul last week while Mrs. Clinton was in Islamabad underscored the dangers that these Pakistan-based groups pose for the region. Unless the sanctuaries these entities have long enjoyed in west Pakistan are finally denied, the U.S.-led effort to stabilize Afghanistan could be in serious jeopardy.

Mr. Ganguly is a professor of political science and director of research of the Center on American and Global Security at Indiana University.

2009-11-24T10:28:00.000-05:00

By MATTHEW ROSENBERG

ISLAMABAD -- The Islamist militant group behind the deadly attack in Mumbai one year ago remains a potent force determined to strike India and the West, and a source of acrimony between South Asia's nuclear-armed rivals, say officials and members of the militant faction.

Indian officials and experts say at least six new plots against Mumbai by the Pakistan-based group, Lashkar-e-Taiba, have been disrupted in the 12 months since 10 gunmen wrought three days of havoc on India's financial capital, killing 166 people.

Lashkar's infiltration of India's part of Kashmir is again on the upswing, the officials say; and a U.S. citizen with alleged ties to Lashkar was recently arrested in Chicago, evidence of the group's reach, U.S. officials say.

"Our aims are the same today as they were 10 years ago," said a man who identified himself as a former Lashkar militant now working with its charity arm. "We are waging war on the enemies of Islam."

U.S. officials and experts say hitting India remains the primary focus for Lashkar, which was nurtured in the 1990s by Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency for use as a proxy against Indian forces in the divided Himalayan region of Kashmir. Pakistan banned the group in 2002 and officials here say they cut ties with it at the time.

But no one disputes that Lashkar continued to operate from Pakistan, repeatedly striking Indian targets in recent years. Another Mumbai-style attack, say officials from both countries, risks sparking a fourth war between the neighbors.

At the very least, Lashkar's continued existence presents a major obstacle to peace between the rivals. The tension also jeopardizes U.S. efforts in Afghanistan by keeping the bulk of Pakistan's sizable army focused on India, not the Taliban, say U.S. officials.

Yet Lashkar endures today because Pakistan's pledges to dismantle it in the wake of the Mumbai attack remain largely unfulfilled, say U.S., Indian and some Pakistani officials.

The group's long ties to Pakistan's powerful security establishment and the deep roots it has put down in towns and villages through its charity arm leave the government with a difficult challenge. Many Pakistanis still doubt Lashkar's role in the attack, and officials here privately say they fear a popular backlash if they move too forcefully against the group.

Timeline

* Nov. 26, 2008: 10 men from the Pakistan-based militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba begin a gun-and-grenade assault on targets in Mumbai, lasting nearly three days and leaving at least 174 people dead.
* Dec. 11, 2008: Pakistan moves against Jamaat-ud-Dawa, the charity front of Lashkar, arresting the group's leaders and shuttering its offices a day after the U.N. sanctioned the group. Days earlier, Pakistan also began arresting suspected members of Lashkar.
* Jan. 5, 2009: India gives Pakistan its first dossier of what it says is evidence that Lashkar orchestrated the Mumbai attack. The two countries have since repeatedly exchanged additional dossiers, although each side has complained about the information provided by the other.
* Jan. 6, 2009: After weeks of denials, Pakistan acknowledges that the single gunmen captured by Indian police in Mumbai, Mohammed Ajmal Kasab, is a Pakistani citizen.
* Feb. 12, 2009: Pakistan publicly acknowledges for the first time that the Mumbai attack was partly planned on its soil and says it has arrested most of the key plotters, including the alleged operations chief of Lashkar, Zaki ur-Rehman Lakhvi.
* June 2, 2009: A Pakistani court orders the founder of Lashkar, Hafiz Mohammed Saeed, released from house arrest, finding that the government does not have enough evidence to hold him. Mr. Saeed maintains that he runs a charity, nothing more.
* July 20, 2009: The single attacker captured by Indian police, Mohammaed Ajmal Kasab, confesses in open court that he took part in the assault. He says he was trained by Lashkar in Pakistan.

Pakistani officials also worry about taking on a potent enemy as they are trying to beat back the Taliban, which has killed hundreds of people in terrorist attacks in Pakistan since early October.

U.S. officials and analysts also say factions within Pakistan's military still see Lashkar as a potential weapon to be used in any future conflicts with India. Lashkar "has historically been Pakistan's most reliable proxy against India and elements within the military clearly wish to maintain this capability," according to a report this week by security analyst Stephen Tankel in the CTC Sentinel, published by the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

Pakistan, following India and the U.S., concluded in the weeks after the Mumbai attack that it was carried out by Lashkar. Islamabad moved against the group, arresting dozens of people and banning its charity wing, Jamaat-ud-Dawa.

But most of those arrested have since been released and the trial of seven still-jailed Lashkar suspects, including the group's alleged chief of operations, has been repeatedly delayed.

U.S. officials, experts and Lashkar members say the group's few thousand fighters are still training at camps and safe houses, many of them in Pakistan's part of Kashmir.

Money is still flowing into its charity arm, which is now operating under a new name, Falah-i-Insaniat, according to Western officials and members of the group. The charity is best known for aiding victims of the 2005 earthquake and refugees from a Pakistani army offensive against the Taliban in the Swat Valley this year.

India and Pakistan have exchanged a series of dossiers detailing what they know about the attack's planning and execution, but each side complains the information provided by the other is insufficient.

Pakistani officials, for example, say India hasn't given them enough evidence to try Lashkar's founder, Hafiz Mohammaed Saeed, who has been in and out of house arrest since the attack. On Friday, Mr. Saeed preached a sermon to thousands of followers at the Jamia al Qadisa Mosque in the eastern city of Lahore.

"No power on the earth can defeat Muslims if they follow the God's path," preached Mr. Saeed, who says he runs a charity, and nothing more. "You can see what has happened to the American forces in Iraq and Afghanistan."

Pakistani officials say the men awaiting trial are the key players in the group, especially the alleged operations chief, Zaki ur-Rehman Lakhvi.

"Pakistan's political and military leadership endeavors to bring all terrorists, including those involved in Mumbai attack, to justice.... Any reports to the contrary are false and misleading," said Farahnaz Ispahani, a spokeswoman for Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari. "The least we seek from the international community is recognition of our struggles."

U.S. officials say Pakistan's civilian leadership -- especially President Zardari and Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani -- remains committed to dismantling Lashkar. They are far less certain about Pakistan's military and its spy agency, the ISI. Both deny aiding Lashkar.

An ISI officer said "maybe a handful" of retired officers work with Lashkar. The officer said the agency maintains informal contacts needed to monitor the group.

The officer added that Pakistan is facing multiple Taliban attacks every week and has to prioritize when it comes to moving against militants. "Which choice do you think we should make? Defend ourselves or defend India?" he said.
—Zahid Hussain in Lahore contributed to this article.

Speaking of Pakistan

2009-11-24T10:24:00.000-05:00

The U.S. and India must take steps to deepen their cooperation against South Asian terrorism.

By C. CHRISTINE FAIR

Pakistan is likely to loom large in the meetings between President Obama and Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh this week. Partly that's because Thursday is the first anniversary of the Mumbai hotel attacks that claimed 173 lives, including four Americans—attacks perpetrated by terrorist groups based in Pakistan. More broadly, there is a growing realization that Washington and New Delhi have many common security interests in Pakistan, which is a key country both to U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and to the fight against Islamist terrorism.

So amid the fanfare of the Obama administration's first state visit, both sides will quietly focus on how they can best protect each other from the terrorist threats emanating from Pakistan. Americans are now more aware than ever of the threats India faces. Before the "11/26" assault, few Americans had ever heard of Lashkar-e-Taiba, a Pakistan-based terrorist group operating largely, but not exclusively, in India. Though the attack was not India's deadliest—that was the 1993 attack on Mumbai's stock exchange—it changed the world's understanding of terrorism in India as real-time television footage streamed into American and European living rooms. It catalyzed discussions in Washington and Delhi about Lashkar-e-Taiba and the danger that group and its fellow travelers pose not just to India but to other countries.

India and the U.S. share a common vision of a stable, democratic, civilian-controlled Pakistan at peace with itself and its neighbors. But they have often disagreed on how best to achieve this end. It is unlikely that Mr. Singh's visit will yield an immediate consensus, but will likely continue to focus on law enforcement and counterintelligence cooperation.

Since 9/11, Delhi has watched warily as Washington enlisted Pakistan's help against al Qaeda by providing conventional military assistance and other allurements such as such as aid for Pakistan's participation on the war on terrorism. In total Pakistan has received more than $15 billion since 9/11. Washington had applied only episodic pressure on Pakistan to shut down militants operating in and against India and the disputed border region of Kashmir. Washington has wanted to encourage Pakistan to fight those militants that it can and will fight, even if Islamabad opposes actions against groups like Lashkar and the Afghan Taliban. And Washington needs Pakistan's support to fight the war in Afghanistan. Washington used to see Lashkar and other "Kashmiri groups" as India's problem, caring about these militant outfits only if they directly threatened U.S. interests. The United States and India have for too long been fighting their own, parallel wars on terror.

The 11/26 attack has changed regional and international dynamics, ultimately to Pakistan's disadvantage. First, Pakistan's inaction toward Lashkar and its front organization Jamaat-ul-Dawa puts to rest any doubt about Pakistan's commitment to retaining the organization as a strategic reserve to do the state's bidding in the region. Pakistan's failure to take meaningful action against Lashkar came to the fore in April 2009 when the organization, with the tacit assent of the government, provided high-visibility assistance to Pakistanis displaced by military action in Swat. It is now obvious, despite Islamabad's recent efforts to pursue the Pakistan Taliban and the sanctuaries it provides to al Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban, that the Pakistan government is part of the problem of international terrorism.

Second, whereas Lashkar was previously a "niche specialty" for counterterrorism experts within the U.S. government, now nearly every policy, law-enforcement, intelligence and military agency has dedicated resources to protect the U.S., its friends and its assets from Lashkar. The Mumbai attack lent increased urgency to deepening U.S.-India cooperation centered on joint law enforcement and counterterrorism concerns. While less "sexy" than military-to-military engagements, this kind of Indo-U.S cooperation is vital to securing both nations against future terrorist threats.

Third, the proximity of Lashkar to Pakistan's intelligence and security services, along with continued revelations about those services' assistance to the Afghan Taliban, remind the U.S. and others that the Pakistan government continues to fight a selective war on terror, preserving those militant groups that serve the state's foreign policy goals. This has forced many analysts and policy makers to acknowledge that Pakistan is unlikely ever to abandon terrorism as a tool of foreign policy even while domestic terrorists tear at the fabric of the state.

India has taken important steps under the leadership of Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram, who is keen to make sweeping changes in India's domestic security arrangements. He wants to learn from India's past mistakes and from other countries, including the U.S. This is an opportunity for Washington and Delhi to explore ways to deepen intelligence sharing, to continue developing contacts between local and federal law enforcement agencies, expand government and non-governmental engagement on the nature of the terrorist threat and best practices to counter it, and to deepen the focus on maritime security cooperation to limit the maritime opportunities for a variety of illegal actors.

Mr. Singh's visit reminds us all that while India and the U.S. have come a long way since 2000, there is much work to be done in jointly securing the safety of their citizens from groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba. Whether both states will rally to the challenge remains to be seen.

Ms. Fair is an assistant professor in the security studies program at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University.

How Azad is `Azad Kashmir'

2009-11-17T00:59:00.001-05:00

If you want to study the situation in Pakistan Occupied Kashmir and cannot go to even the minuscule part of this region designated as `Azad Kashmir', the best place to go to is England. Bradford, Birmingham, Nottingham, Luton, Slough and Southall are perhaps even better sources of information about the POK than Muzaffarabad, Mirpur, Bagh Rawalakot and Kotli. For the Kashmiris living in Britain breathe free air that it not much available in the so-called Azad Kashmir. Even if you so much as apply for a job you have to sign an affidavit saying you believe in the ideology of "Kashmir banega Pakistan" (Kashmir will become Pakistan).

I happened to be in England on the eve of recent election in `Azad Kashmir'. Meeting `Azad' Kashmiris in Britain proved revealing. The politically active among them have organised themselves on the lines of politics back home. Nearly all political organisations and ideologies are represented. They all appear to be working against India and, except JKLF, pro-Pakistan. Their activities range from the ridiculous to the more sober. I come across some Tehrik-e-Kashmir activists in Birmingham attempting to impose a boycott of Tilda rice supposedly imported from India. They are aware that India is far too big and powerful a country with a vast capacity to take losses to be bothered with such nonsense. But they think this helps them spread hatred against India. On the other hand they are making a serious and somewhat successful attempt at lobbying political parties, media and bureaucracy to convince them of the genuineness of their case against what they call Indian occupation of Kashmir and serious human rights violations.

But this is a superficial impression. Beneath the surface, most of them are disgusted with Pakistan and many of them find India's handling of its part of Kashmir, despited the obvious difficulties and current hostilities, more commendable. Several people, for instance, mentioned that while India has respected Kashmir's age-old practice of not allowing outsiders to settle down in the valley, Pakistan has allowed over 28,000 Afghan families to settle down and fleece the local populace in the name of Jihad. These Afghans are even more exploitative that the Hindu baniya ever was, they point out.

The comparisons are endless. Kashmiris in the valley are better educated and better skilled. They have their own university with medical and engineering colleges. Some of us, particularly Mirpuris may be more prosperous, they say, but that is only because we managed to come to England when we were virtually thrown out of Pakistan as we lost our livelihood in the wake of the construction of Mangla Dam. The reference to Mangla Dam always brings out either complete silence in pro-Pakistan circles or vociferous protest from those who are not so particular about living with Pakistan. This Dam is said to supply 65% of the electricity needs of Pakistan, but the so-called Azad Kashmir does not get any royalty. Pakistan's Water and Power Development Agency (WAPDA) is estimated to be earning over Rs. 50 crores from the electricity produced at Mangla, thought the total budget of the Azad Kashmir is in the vicinity of Rs. 10 crores.

The most talked about issue, of course, is that of Northern Areas which has been virtually swallowed by Pakistan Army. It comes in the news periodically only when there are Shia-Sunni clashes in the area of firing by the Army to quell anti-government demonstrations. In a historic judgment when a Kashmiri chief justice of the High Court dared to say a couple of years ago that the area was a part of Kashmir and had been illegally occupied by Pakistan Army, he instantly became a hero. Similar enthusiasm was shown by the Kashmiris towards Raja Mumtaz Hussain Rathore, the last PPP `Prime Minister' of the so-called Azad Kashmir, who started taking up the issue of Northern Areas followed his dismissal and detention by the last Nawaz Sharif government.

This leads any discussion in the direction of almost complete denial of democracy to the so-called Azad Kashmir. While India has at least one or two free and fair elections in the valley, notably in 1977 and 1983, the Pakistani Establishment has dismissed and installed governments of `Azad Kashmir' at will. The only party that has not been able to do so is Ms. Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan People Party as it is not considered a part of Establishment even when in power.

It is hardly surprising in view of such perceptions of the Pakistani Kashmiris that they throw out Sardar Qayyoom's obscurantist Muslim Conference which has ruled them for most of the last half a century at the first available opportunity. They did that in 1990 and they have done that now. Sardar Qayyoom's protestations of massive rigging by the PPP government in Islamabad is unbelievable. All that she had to do to win elections there was not to concede Sardar Qayyoom's demand of allowing the Army to conduct elections.

ELECTION EXPOSE SIMMERING DISCONTENT IN POK OBSCURANTIST INDIA-BAITERS FACE MASSIVE DEFEAT

Sardar Abdul Qayyoom Khan's ruling Muslim Conference has been virtually wiped out in the small part of Pakistan Occupied Kashmir (POK) designated as "Azad Kashmir" where generally farcical elections are held intermittently to buttress the fiction of its Azadi. He has blamed massive rigging for his defeat. This is predictably music to Indian ears. We have ourselves faced similar allegations in international as well as sections of national media in regard to recent elections in our part of Kashmir. But by playing up Sardar Qayyoom's incredible claims in our media and in the diplomatic circuit, we are simply playing in the hands of Pakistan's right wing obscurantists, Army and the Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI).

Indian media pundits and bureaucrats may have valid reasons to regard the ruling Pakistan People Party headed by Ms Benazir Bhutto and even its so-called Azad Kashmir branch as communal or obscurantist and anti-India. Obviously they must have more impeccable sources of information and intelligence. But the people of the so-called Azad Kashmir have been consistently told since the formation of PPP itself that it is secular, anti-Islam, anti-Pakistan and pro-India. The Pakistani media, the Sardar Qayyoom government, indeed the entire Pakistani Establishment has indulged in this propaganda on the largest possible scale for years. And yet they have chosen to give a massive mandate to this supposedly secular, progressive, pro-India party. Whether or not the PPP is secular and pro-India is not the issue. The fact that despite this widespread perception, the people of this piece of POK have chosen to elect it again must mean something to us in India. There is so clearly some message in this massive PPP victory and we should try to understand and interpret it in this light. Our hatred for Pakistan seems to have blinded us and we are reacting mindlessly.

Sardar Qayyoom's party has ruled the so-called Azad Kashmir (I prefer to use this term rather that the popular POK, as this area is actually less than half of the POK) for most of the last half a century. He has himself ruled as President as well as Prime Minister for decades. he retains the love and affection of the military-bureaucratic and feudal-industrialist complex that rules Pakistan as ever. He is the darling of the obscurantist elements in the Pakistani Opposition, despite his son Sardar Ateeq's shenanigans. he had himself come to power in the present instance through a farcical election following an undemocratic and immoral, though constitutional and legal, dismissal and even detention of the last Prime Minister Raja Mumtaz Hussain Rathore who headed a duly elected People's Party government.

The rule in Pakistan is that the movement changes hands in Islamabad, the so-called Azad Kashmir government is dismissed and a new one installed through a farce of an election unless this happens to be a Muslim Conference government headed by Sardar Qayyoom. Following this glorious tradition the last Muslim league government headed by Mr. Nawaz Sharif had dismissed Mr. Mumtaz Rathore, detained him and installed Sardar Qayyoom. But Ms. Benazir Bhutto's PPP has never been allowed to follow this tradition. When she came to power a couple of years ago, she was widely expected to reinstall Mumtaz Rathore. She would not have required to rig the elections to do so. For reasons that we will discuss later the people of the so-called Azad Kashmir are fed up with the Sardar Dynasty. Indeed Ms. Bhutto is not capable of rigging elections there or anywhere else.

Ms. Bhutto came to power for the first time having won elections that followed President Zia-ul-Haq's death in August 1988, she was told that as chairperson of the Kashmir Council, she had the power to dissolve the Kashmir Assembly order fresh elections. She was considering the popular demand for dismissal of the Muzaffarabad government. But Sardar Qayyoom criticised Ms. Bhutto's policy of normalisation with India "to undo the Islamic ideology and weaken the Pakistan Army". He wrote to President Guhlam Ishaq Khan: "We will not allow a pro-India government in Azad Kashmir," He made it clear that he would not accept the electoral verdict if the PPP won. And despite all the pressure from the people of Pakistan Occupied `Azad' Kashmir and her party she could not topple the Sardar government. Sardar Qayyoom completed his tenure in 1990.

Informed people are aware that Pakistan is ruled by a troika. A Pakistan Prime Minister can only do things with the concurrence of Washington and the local Establishment which includes the Army, ISI, Bureaucracy, Business, Feudal and Obscurantist elements. Ms. Bhutto's PPP was allowed to stay in power because for a variety of reasons not germane to this discussion she was for the moment begin tolerated by the two other parts of the troika. But she had very obvious limits to her power. She had enough powers thought to ensure that elections in the so-called Azad Kashmir are not rigged by any part of the troika including the Pakistani Establishment which would have loved to see Sardar Qayyoom back in power. All that she needed to do was not to concede Sardar Qayyoom's persistent demand to allow the Army to conduct the elections.

Why did Ms. Bhutto allow Sardar Qayyoom during her second term to continue for so long and complete his full term again is thus no mystery. She was under intense pressure from the Sardar government. But she continued to be so incensed with Mr. Nawaz Sharif who had earlier dismissed and detained the PPP Prime Minister Raja Mumtaz Rathore that she was seriously considering taking them on in this case. This was when, according to my sources in PPP, a new element entered into the picture which proved decisive and finally saved the Sardar government.

President Laghari of Pakistan visited India and met a delegation of Kashmir valley's pro-Pakistan leaders. This delegation pleaded with him to persuade Ms. Bhutto not to dismiss Sardar Qayyoom. Their argument was that in the absence of Sardar Qayyoom the network supporting militancy in the valley would be disturbed. A PPP government there can obviously not be trusted to support the right wing network. Their second argument was even more important. Islamabad dismissing a duly elected Muzaffarabad government without any apparent reason, thought constitutionally valid and legal, would be clearly immoral and undemocratic that it would weaken their case that Kashmir's identity and autonomy would better protected by Pakistan that it is with India. Even though Pakistan has a history of such undemocratic dismissals, this particular dismissal at the height of militancy in the Valley would prove disastrous, so pleaded Hurriyat leaders. Despite all his sophistication and persuasive arguments, my sources tell me, it took President Laghari two and a half hours of intense pleading to dissuade Ms. Bhutto from dismissing Sardar Qayyoom's government.

One wonders if the pro-Pakistan Hurriyat leaders in the valley are now pleading with Sardar Qayyoom not to accuse PPP government in Islamabad and his own government in Muzaffarabad of massive rigging in the elections. For, this too weakens their case of Kashmir's accession with Pakistan. It brings to light the farcical nature of `Azadi' in the so-called Azad Kashmir. Of course, even this so-called Azadi is not available to the hapless people of the majority area of the Pakistan occupied Kashmir designated as Northern Areas. The vast areas of Gilgit and Baltistan have simply vanished from the face of the earth as far as the Pakistan Constitution and other legal documents are concerned, though until 1954, Pakistan used to supply maps that showed these territories as a part of Kashmir.

The Muslim Conference alleging massive rigging is indeed ridiculous. The People's Party massive mandate in Azad Kashmir represents not so much its own popularity as it articulates the disgust of the `Azad' Kashmiris with Pakistani Establishment. The Muslim Conference is seen as this Establishment's local representative despite its regional character. Ironically, the People's Party Kashmir unit is seen as more representative of the regional aspirations despite this Party's all-Pakistan character.

The plight of Azad Kashmiris calls for a separate write-up. What we can say here is that economic factors like lack of development of any industry, communication facilities, exploitation of Mangla dam for providing electricity to 65 per cent of Pakistan without any compensation, no local university, no local bank, no new bridges over the river Jhelum and so on do weight heavily on the minds of `Azad' Kashmiris, what they resent most is their virtual slave status in the Constitution, new tensions in the wake of settlement of over 28,000 Afghan families, militant training camps and the inevitable rise of obscurantism due to almost uninterrupted half-a-century rule of the Muslim Conference. They have been told for years now that the accession of Kashmir valley to Pakistan is round the corner. But neither the proud Suddhan tribals, nor the wealthy Mirpuris (most of them have relatives in England) are prepared to accept the inevitable domination of the better educated and numerically stronger `hatos' as they contemptuously refer to the Kashmiris of the valley in case Kashmir is united.

An Open Letter:
What are you doing with Hurriyat, Yasin Malik?

It is easier for an Indian to sympathise with you, regardless of the folly of your pursuit. With your emaciated body, you are the only Gandhi-like figure on the kashmir horizon. Despite your militant past, the country appeared to have accepted your protestations of peade when you renounced violence. Released from captivity, you received the best media attention any Kashmiri leader had got, perhaps with the solitary exception so Shabir Shah. But when you went on fast for three days in Delhi nevently to focus attention on human rights violations in Kashmir, there was hardly an mediaperson or realy any one else around. I wonder if you have been wondering why.

I wanted to ask you-what are doing with Hurriyat, Yasin Saheb?-when I visited you on the second day of your fast. But you were in no dondition to converse. You have been taking so much on yourslef, despite ill-health. Also, the question would have been a trifle awkward with so many Hurriyat leaders, including Chairman Mirwaiz Omar Farooq surrounding you.

You and Shabir Shah are the two prominent leaders who are associated with peaceful means of protest as well as what is called the third option, independence from both India and Pakistan. As other members of the Hurriyat Conference still stand for accession with Pakstan your association with Hurriyat has always been rather intriguing. Now this question has acquired some urgency with the recent declarations of the Hurriyat chief during his recent trip abroad. At a news conference in Washington, he said: "No Third Option exists on Kashmir. All components of All-Parties Hurriyat Conference, despite their diversity have accepted this. The Kashmiris have to decide in a plebiscite whether they should opt for India or Pakistan."

Hurriyat's total and rather desperate dependence on Pakistan become even more pronounced during the last SAARC foreign ministers' conference in Delhi. Senior Hurriyat leaders like Umar Farooq, Sayed Ali Shah Geelani adn Professor Abdul Ghani met the visiting Pakistani foreign minister Sahabazda Yaqub Khan and criticised Islamabad's efforts to improve trade relations with India. They felt Pakistna's business interests might overshadow the political aspirations of the people of Jammu and Kashmir. Since Pakistan seemed keen to remove trade barriers with India under the SAARC agenda, they feared it might ultimately not give that much importance to the Kashmir issue.

That Pakistan was getting ready to dump the Kashmiris and perhaps concentrate on improving its battered economy had become clear to me, Yasin Shaeb, several months ago. You couldn't have forgotten what happened in Leicester, U.K. last August. Expartriate Kashmiri leader Dr. Ayyub Thukar had organised a conference of Kashmiri leaders from India Pakistan as well. No one turned up from Pakistan. This became particularly embarrassing for the organisers because two people arrived even from India - the present writer and Mr. Subodh Kant Sahai. Finally, Islamabad, probably after much coaxing and cajoling, instructed its deputy High Commissioner in London to attent the conference who was able to reach there only for the last session.

One can hardly blame Pakistan, though, for this state of affairs. In the case of proxy wars this is almost routine. This is what Shah of Iran did with Mulla Barzani's Kurdish secessionist movement in Iraq. This is what Saddam Hussain does with Iranian Kurdish secessionists in Iran. Support them, use them, sell them and dump them is virtually the norm.

As Pakistani pro-occupation with tis impending political and economic disintegration grows, Hurriyat is bound to grow even more desperate. It is bound to shout louder and louder from rooftops higher and higher ist protestations of loyality to Pakistan. It is for leaders like you, Yasin Saheb, to think if Hurriyat is correctly representing your point of view. Shabbir Shah has proved smarter. He has manoeuvered himself out of Hurriyat at the right time. I wonder if you would reconsider your position vis-s-vis Hurriyat before it is too late for you to extricate yourself out of the mess that Hurriyat is beginning to sense it has got itself into.

"What you mean 'we,' kemosabe?"; Pakistani anti-American attitudes and their implications

2009-11-17T00:38:00.000-05:00

Howard Schweber
Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison
Posted: November 16, 2009 08:58 PM

In a classic Mad Magazine cartoon (that I dimly recall), the Lone Ranger and Tonto are surrounded by a horde of hostile Indian warriors. The Lone Ranger says to Tonto "what do we do, now?," to which Tonto replies, "what you mean 'we,' kemosabe?"

One has the impression that the Obama administration feels like that is the response it has been getting from Pakistan, and indeed doubts about Pakistan's status as a U.S. ally are nothing new. One thing that has received renewed attention of late, however, is the extent of anti-American sentiment of Pakistanis. Awareness of hostility to America among Pakistanis received a jolt with the publication of an Al Jazeera/Gallup poll in July 2009. In that poll, Pakistanis identified the U.S. as a greater threat to Pakistan (59%) than either the Taliban (11%) or India (18%). In that same poll, an overwhelming 67% of respondents opposed U.S. operations on Pakistani soil. A Pew Research poll in August 2009 confirmed these findings, but added some interesting nuances. While no fewer than 69% of respondents expressed concern that extremist forces could seize control of the country, 64% continued to describe the U.S. as an "enemy" and only 9% described it as a "partner."

At the same time, there were elements in the Pew poll results that muddied the waters. By a margin of 53% to 29%, respondents said it was important that U.S.-Pakistani relations improve, an odd statement about an "enemy." Even more confusing, 72% support continued U.S. financial and humanitarian aid, and 63% support the U.S. continuing to provide support to the military. In a beautiful illustration of the principle that question order matters in polling design, when the question about U.S. missile strikes against extremist leaders was asked after the series of questions about U.S. support and cooperation generally, support for such strikes soars to the 47% level.

Many Americans find Pakistani anti-Americanism baffling. Americans see a nation whose military was built and is supported largely by American money, facing a threat from America's own enemies, whose government professes to be an American ally at every opportunity. Certainly the drone attacks cause resentment, but they have caused far fewer deaths than attacks by extremists or the Pakistani Army's campaigns against those forces. So how, from the American perspective, is anti-American sentiment to be explained?

There are three narratives that help Americans explain Pakistani hostility: let's call them the "secret enemy" narrative, the "two-faced government" narrative, and the "quagmire" narrative. It is important to recognize that all three of these narratives have purchase because they appear against a background of general negative American attitudes toward Pakistan. In a 2007 Gallup poll, 64% of respondents had a negative view of Pakistan, a number that is generally consistent with results dating back to before 9/11.

The Secret Enemy Narrative

The first narrative is one that posits Pakistan as nothing less than a U.S. enemy, or, at a minimum, as an ally of U.S. enemies. The key claim here is that Al Qaeda and Taliban forces fighting U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan have safe havens in Pakistan, where they are sheltered and supported by the Pakistani military and intelligence establishments. In addition, while there have always been a trickle of stories about cooperation between Pakistan's military and intelligence services and Taliban or Al Qaeda forces, lately that trickle has become a torrent. This week, French investigative magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguiere is going to publish a book in which he accuses Pakistani government and military officials of supporting Al Qaeda. David Rohde's account of his capture by Taliban forces cites U.S. officials statements' that Pakistani military and intelligence forces provide money, supplies, and strategic planning to Taliban groups, specifically including the group led by Mawlawi Haqqani. The Haqqani network is a special point of contention between the U.S. and Pakistan, as it is blamed for many of the attacks on U.S. forces in Afghanistan. (For an extended report on the background of the Haqqani network and its relationship with the ISI, see this report by the Institute for the Study of War.)

One also hears a great deal of this narrative from within the U.S. military. In October Col. David Haight, the U.S,. military commander of forces in Wardak, sent an e-mail to his forces encouraging them not to lose heart after months of lethal fighting. Among other things, the commander commented "We knew that the summer months would bring increased enemy activity. Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader headquartered at the Quetta Shura in Pakistan, transmitted that Wardak would be his main effort." The Pakistani Army's unwillingness to take action in Quetta was one of the key points at issue in Pakistani opposition to the current U.S. aid bill. Similarly, the announcement that the Pakistani Army had reached a truce deal with two Taliban commanders - Maulvi Nazir and Hafiz Gul Bahadur - as part of the South Waziristand operation was greeted by both Stars and Stripes and Yahoo News with the headline "Pakistan cuts deal with anti-American militants." (The link to that story in Stars and Stripes, interestingly, no longer functions. The title can be found with an internal search result here; Yahoo!'s publication of the original AP story can be found here.

A variation on the "secret enemy" narrative is the "indifferent ally" narrative, in which Pakistan is willing to fight against Taliban and other extremist forces when it suits them, and to continue supporting those same groups when it doesn't. As Rep. Jane Harman is quoted as saying in today's New York Times, "They are focused on who they think are threats to them. Period." (This in a generally sympathetic treatment of Pakistan that emphasizes the need for the U.S. to demonstrate a long-term "commitment" in Afghanistan.) Those extremist groups who, according to this account, Pakistan's military and intelligence forces do not think of as a threat include groups that operate in Afghanistan and those that launch attacks against India. As I wrote earlier, there is some reason to believe that the Pakistani leadership has begun to rethink their relationships with these groups, but as of yet there has been no concrete action to suggest a change in what is at any rate a murky policy.

The policy implications of the secret enemy narrative are sobering. If Pakistan is dominated by an anti-American population led by pro-Taliban forces (or some variation of that theme), then prospects for the future in not only Pakistan but also Afghanistan are dim, indeed. During the campaign, candidate Obama spoke of sending troops across the Pakistani border; if one accepts the "secret enemy" narrative, we need to hear more of that talk.

The Two-Faced Government Narrative

The second narrative is the "two-faced government" narrative. In this second story, the Pakistani governments stand accused of appealing to anti-American sentiment among the Pakistani people, who would (or might) otherwise recognize that their true interests are with the Americans. The drone attacks are Exhibit A, just as they are Exhibit A for anti-American sentiment in Pakistan. For months, Pakistani government officials complained that the drone attacks constitute violations of Pakistani sovereignty. But way back in February, U.S. officials (not to mention Google Maps images released by the London Times) confirmed the fact that the drones were being flown out of Shamsi air base, a fact reported in the Pakistani press.

Yet Zardari and other government officials continue to criticize the Americans' actions. In this second narrative the Pakistani government and military leadership appear as opportunistic con artist. The argument is that the U.S. is being played for suckers in the War on Terror as it was once similarly played throughout the Cold War. The most recent piece of this story was the report by Associated Press that out of $8.6 billion in U.S. military aid given to Pakistan between 2002 and 2008 only $500 million actually went to pay for operations against the Taliban or in support of U.S., forces in Afghanistan, while the remaining $8.1 billion - a staggering 94% -- was diverted to purchase weapons systems for use against India and for domestic subsidies. This year, the U.S. has promised a 5-year $7.5 billion military aid package, with a proposal for an additional $7.5 billion for the period from 2015-2019. The new aid bill caused great controversy in that it required Pakistan to "continue to cooperate" on nuclear weapons, make "significant efforts" against terrorist groups "such as ceasing support"; and ensuring that Pakistani security forces are "not materially and substantially subverting the political or judicial processes of Pakistan." From the American side, the explanation is simple: the Pakistani leadership will not accept any oversight of any kind on how it uses American money, which it has every intention of using for its own purposes that have little to do with American priorities. (This is all basic and public information, but for an extended essay treatment of this narrative, go here.)

The approach that this understanding seems to recommend is tough love: force the Pakistani leadership to acknowledge its dependence on the U.S., make them spend U.S. dollars the way they were intended to be spent rather than being diverted toward military preparations for future conflict with India. In short, compel the Pakistani leadership to become democratic, transparent, and pro-American under threat of being cut off. Then the people, or at least a lot of them, will realize that their true interests lie with America, after all.

The quagmire narrative

The third narrative is the "quagmire" narrative. This account, popular on the American Left, holds that American presence in Pakistan - and Afghanistan, for that matter -- can only cause resentment and inspire further resentment. Like the Pakistani respondents to the Pew Research poll, Americans who take this view favor humanitarian aid and intelligence cooperation, but nothing more. This is not by any means a uniquely American view. Writing in Le Monde Diplomatique, Muhammad Idrees Ahmad, Nov. 2 2009 quotes Pakistani political analyst Asif Ezdi explaining that "the wellspring of Islamic militancy in Pakistan is to be found in the alienation of the mass of the population by a ruling elite that has used the state to protect and expand its own privileges, pushing the common man into deeper and deeper poverty and hopelessness."

The quagmire narrative leads to an argument for disengagement. If the Pakistani leadership chooses not to take action against Al Qaeda and Taliban forces that operate in Afghanistan, terrorist groups that launch attacks against India, and groups that set off bombs inside Pakistan, that is their own business. Besides, goes the argument, it is only American and NATO presence in Afghanistan that provokes (some of) these attacks in the first place. If future attacks against the U.S. are launched by Al Qaeda forces within Pakistan, or if military conflict with India or a radical takeover of Pakistan become imminent threats, well, America can jump off that bridge when we come to it.

And so, kemosabe?

None of these narratives is quite persuasive, and none of the policy prescriptions I have mentioned are particularly attractive, yet both the narratives and the prescriptions have elements of truth sufficient to keep them going. Meanwhile, beyond the policy there is the politics. Obama and anyone else trying to persuade us to adopt a particular strategy has to be able to make make sense to Americans of the otherwise deeply confusing fact that an awful lot of Pakistanis seem to see the conflict in their country as America's war even as bombs go off in marketplaces in Peshawar.

United States, Pakistan: The Decade Ahead

2009-11-17T00:36:00.002-05:00

Foreign Policy In Focus
www.fpif.org
Zia Mian | November 3, 2009

The United States has charted out its relationship with Pakistan for the next 10 years. The recently approved multi-billion-dollar U.S. economic and military aid packages for Pakistan, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's recent visit there, suggest that this Pakistan policy will be much like the one Washington followed for the last 50 years. For their part, Pakistanis are unlikely to change their views of the United States and may even become more hostile.

In the meantime, Islamist militants have escalated their brutal war on the people and the state of Pakistan. The state, with U.S. encouragement and support, may respond with ever greater violence of its own. It is hard to know how much more Pakistan can bear.
A Matter of Principle

President Barack Obama recently signed the Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act (more prosaically the Kerry-Lugar-Berman Bill), a five-year, $7.5 billion aid package, with a promise of more to come. It includes language proposing a subsequent tranche of $7.5 billion of aid for 2015 to 2019. There is yet more money for Pakistan in the 2010 defense budget. The Kerry-Lugar-Berman aid comes on top of the more than $15 billion the United States has given Pakistan since 2001, of which more than $10 billion has been military aid.

The new package includes a requirement for the secretary of state annually to certify on behalf of the president that, among other things, Pakistan is:

* "[C]ontinuing to cooperate...in efforts to dismantle supplier networks relating to the acquisition of nuclear weapons-related materials"
* "[M]aking significant efforts towards combating terrorist groups...such as ceasing support, including by any elements within the Pakistan military or its intelligence agency, to extremist and terrorist groups," and
* Ensuring that its "security forces...are not materially and substantially subverting the political or judicial processes of Pakistan."

These conditions attracted howls of outrage from Pakistan's politicians and stern words from its military leaders. The United States immediately backtracked.

Senator John Kerry (D-MA) and Congressman Howard Berman (D-CA), after whom the bill is named, and respectively chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Foreign Affairs Committee, issued a Joint Explanatory Statement, explaining that the "legislation does not seek in any way to compromise Pakistan's sovereignty, impinge on Pakistan's national security interests, or micromanage any aspect of Pakistani military or civilian operations. There are no conditions on Pakistan attached to the authorization of $7.5 billion in non-military aid."

To make sure that everyone understood that the United States would not impose any penalties on Pakistan if the certification conditions were violated, they emphasized that "this certification could be waived if the determination is made by the Secretary of State in the interests of national security that this was necessary to continue such assistance."
Backwards into the Future

The backtracking was to be expected. When it comes to Pakistan, there's a long history of the United States waiving both principles and legal obligation "in the interests of national security." Pakistan's government, and especially its army, learned early on to take advantage of this characteristic style of U.S. foreign policy.

The United States has been giving economic and military aid to Pakistan for over 50 years. It started in 1954, as part of a U.S. effort to recruit Pakistan as a Cold War ally. Pakistan was located in a key region, close to both the Soviet Union and the Middle East. Pakistan's leaders invited and welcomed this alliance. It brought them American political, economic, and military assistance, all of which they hoped to use in their contest with India.

The results were catastrophic. Pakistan's generals seized power and ruled for over a decade, with generous support from Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. In the United States' seemingly endless war to defend democracy, nary a word was said about what was actually happening to democracy in Pakistan.

U.S. money helped create a much larger army than Pakistan could afford on its own, equipped it with new American weapons, and trained young Pakistani officers in the United States in modern warfare. Bolstered by their alliance, Pakistan's generals went to war with India in 1965. It went badly, and America didn't come to their aid. The only war that mattered to America was the one against the Soviet Union.

The 1970s saw a superpower détente. The U.S.-Pakistan relationship languished, and U.S. aid to Pakistan dried up. The United States began to pressure Pakistan not to follow India in developing nuclear weapons.

But 1979 brought the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, an intervention incited by the United States. The United States needed an ally bordering Afghanistan to help organize and fight its proxy war. Pakistan's generals were more than happy to oblige. The army had taken power again in 1977 and was under international pressure to restore civilian rule and to give up Pakistan's nascent nuclear weapons program.

The demands to restore democracy and give up the bomb quieted down. Instead, money and weapons poured in. The Pakistan army bought new American fighter jets and other high-tech weapons that could serve in a war with India. It worked with the United States to raise, train, fund, and equip an international Islamist army to fight in Afghanistan. With American help, Pakistan's generals learned how to organize guerrilla fighters, how to provide a safe haven, and how to cover their tracks. The rest is history.

There was, however, U.S. legislation banning all but food aid to Pakistan because of its nuclear weapons program. Throughout the 1980s, the U.S. president annually signed a waiver covering this legislation. Once the Soviets were gone, the waiver ended. By then, Pakistan had built the bomb and the A.Q. Khan network was illicitly buying and selling knowledge and technology for a nuclear weapons program. The United States imposed sanctions that lasted a decade.

The army staged another takeover, with General Musharraf seizing power in 1999. Another layer of sanctions were imposed. The United States demanded a restoration of democracy as well as an end to Pakistan's nuclear weapons program.
The War This Time

In the wake of September 11, again "in the interests of national security," the United States lifted all sanctions and aid poured into Pakistan for the third time. Democracy and nonproliferation were set aside.

Kathy Gannon, a veteran reporter on Pakistan for the Associated Press, recently broke the news that out of a total of $8.6 billion in American military aid given to Pakistan between 2002 and 2008, only $500 million was actually used by the Pakistani army to cover its costs in helping the U.S. war in Afghanistan and against the Taliban. Instead, the government used some of the money to buy advanced American weapons for the next war with India.

General Mahmud Durrani, who was Pakistan's ambassador to the United States under Musharraf explained that "Pakistan insisted and America agreed...we have to strengthen our overall capacity...The money was used to buy and support capability against India." Money also "went to things like subsidies," which served to artificially boost Pakistan's economy and prop up public support for the Musharraf government.

The Pakistan army's orientation is apparent to U.S. officials. It took U.S. pressure for the army to launch its attacks on the Taliban in Swat and now in South Waziristan. But as one administration official told The New York Times "the perception in the Pakistani military is that this is a surgical strike. They go and clear out Swat and Waziristan and then they can go back to fighting the Indians."

Nuclear weapons, so long the center of U.S. concerns about Pakistan, are no longer an issue. This is despite Secretary of State Clinton telling the press corps on the airplane to Islamabad that "we always talk about proliferation with everybody that I meet with, and we will certainly raise it with Pakistan." In her press conference with Pakistan's foreign minister two days later, Clinton did not once mention the issue of Pakistan's nuclear weapons. Under the Bush administration, the United States began helping pay to keep Pakistan's nuclear weapons, materials, and facilities safe, no questions asked. This will likely continue.
Governments and Peoples

There are, however, more than just government officials and generals who decide what happens as part of the U.S.-Pakistan relationship. The Kerry-Lugar-Berman bill claims that the "people of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan and the United States share a long history of friendship and comity." There is little evidence of this mutual friendship to be seen in Pakistan.

Pakistani public opinion continues to be deeply hostile toward the United States. The most recent Pew survey, carried out in summer 2009, reported that the "image of the United States is overwhelmingly negative in Pakistan."

Barely 16% of Pakistanis have a favorable view of the United States. This is an enduring opinion. Almost 70% in the poll saw the United States in an unfavorable light, about the same percentage as was the case in 2007, and even as long ago as 2002. The election of Obama has had little effect in Pakistan, unlike in many other countries. In fact, more Pakistanis claim to have a positive view of Osama bin Laden than of Barack Obama.

But this is only half the story. The Pew poll found that over 60% of Pakistanis think the United States is an enemy of Pakistan. Similarly, an August 2009 Gallup Pakistan poll asked people "Who do you think is the greatest threat for Pakistan?" Given a choice between the Taliban, India, and the United States, almost 60% picked the United States, while less than 20% picked India and around 10% said the Taliban.

In the United States, public opinion has turned against the war in Afghanistan, with almost 60% opposed to sending more troops — and half of these people want American troops brought home. The war is costly in lives, money, and honor. But almost 40% of Americans, and many in the military, want to send more soldiers. For them, victory is the only option, no matter how long it takes or at what cost. To balance these competing demands there are some, including President Obama and Vice-President Biden, who wish to fight this war from afar. They hope to reduce American casualties and the cost of war by increasing the use of special forces, drones, and air strikes.
The Breaking Point

A key source of public hostility in Pakistan toward the United States is the use of missile attacks from unmanned U.S. drones. An October 2009 assessment found 87 reported U.S. missile strikes inside Pakistan since such attacks started in 2004. The tempo is clearly increasing. There were only nine missile attacks between 2004 and 2007. There were 36 attacks in 2008. There were 42 attacks by the end of September 2009.

It is estimated that there have been almost a thousand casualties from these attacks. Some of these casualties were certainly civilians rather than al-Qaeda or Taliban leaders and fighters. The UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial Executions Philip Alston has questioned whether "these Predators, are being operated in a framework which may well violate international humanitarian law and international human rights law." He has, in particular, demanded that "the United States…reveal more about the ways in which it makes sure that arbitrary executions, extrajudicial executions, are not in fact being carried out through the use of these weapons."

The widespread public outrage in Pakistan against the U.S. missile attacks is not due to the number of casualties or the possible violations of international law. The Taliban, al-Qaeda and affiliated Islamist insurgent groups in Pakistan have killed many more people in their bomb attacks, while the Pakistan army has killed as many if not more in its campaign against these groups.

In October, militants killed over 200 people and injured many hundreds more, including in the massive attack on a market in Peshawar, timed it seems to coincide with Hillary Clinton's arrival in Pakistan. The Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies, which produces monthly estimates on political violence in the country, reported that in September 2009 alone militants killed over 190 people and injured over 550, while the Pakistan army's operations led to over 370 deaths. The previous six months had a much higher toll, with a total of over 6700 people killed (including those from drone attacks).

This cruel arithmetic seems lost to many in Pakistan, who view this war through an aggrieved nationalism and embattled faith, and a learned hostility both towards their rulers and American policy in the world.

Today, the United States is about as unpopular as al-Qaeda and the Taliban. This is good news in that it shows a dramatic decline in public support and sympathy for al-Qaeda and the Taliban. Pakistanis are finally realizing the terrible consequences of the violent ideology that drives these groups and underlies the brutal war that they have unleashed on the country. Some 80% of Pakistanis now fear Islamic extremism and almost 70% worry that radical Islamist groups might seize power.

Pakistan's people are besieged. Even though they arebeset by the Islamists' war on society and state, surveys show that for ordinary Pakistanis the most important issues today are those of bread and butter, of inflation, poverty, and unemployment. They are ruled by an elite driven by self-interest rather than the public good and dominated by an army that is a power unto itself. A domineering, almost colonial structure of national government inflames struggles for provincial and minority rights that have spilled over into demands for secession. The economy caters to the greed of the westernized elite and the military rather than providing for basic needs. Above it all hovers America's seemingly endless search for national security above all else.

Pakistan, wrote the late Eqbal Ahmad, suffers from five profound crises: the crises of legitimacy, state power, integration, economy, and external relations. To help Pakistan solve any of these problems, the United States needs to delink its assistance from its security policy. Economic assistance cannot be payment to fight America's war. It must be aid that supports democracy, good governance, decentralization, equitable economic growth, and regional peace above all else. There should be no question of waivers. Channelling American aid to Pakistan exclusively through the United Nations and independent international nongovernmental aid organizations would be one step in this direction.

Zia Mian is a physicist with the Program on Science and Global Security at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University and a columnist for Foreign Policy In Focus.

CIA says it gets its money's worth from Pakistani spy agency

2009-11-16T07:50:00.001-05:00

It has given hundreds of millions to the ISI, for operations as well as rewards for the capture or death of terrorist suspects. Despite fears of corruption, it is money well-spent, ex-officials say.

By Greg Miller
November 15, 2009
Reporting from Washington

The CIA has funneled hundreds of millions of dollars to Pakistan's intelligence service since the Sept. 11 attacks, accounting for as much as one-third of the foreign spy agency's annual budget, current and former U.S. officials say.

The Inter-Services Intelligence agency also has collected tens of millions of dollars through a classified CIA program that pays for the capture or killing of wanted militants, a clandestine counterpart to the rewards publicly offered by the State Department, officials said.

The payments have triggered intense debate within the U.S. government, officials said, because of long-standing suspicions that the ISI continues to help Taliban extremists who undermine U.S. efforts in Afghanistan and provide sanctuary to Al Qaeda members in Pakistan.

But U.S. officials have continued the funding because the ISI's assistance is considered crucial: Almost every major terrorist plot this decade has originated in Pakistan's tribal belt, where ISI informant networks are a primary source of intelligence.

The White House National Security Council has "this debate every year," said a former high-ranking U.S. intelligence official involved in the discussions. Like others, the official spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the subject. Despite deep misgivings about the ISI, the official said, "there was no other game in town."

The payments to Pakistan are authorized under a covert program initially approved by then-President Bush and continued under President Obama. The CIA declined to comment on the agency's financial ties to the ISI.

U.S. officials often tout U.S.-Pakistani intelligence cooperation. But the extent of the financial underpinnings of that relationship have never been publicly disclosed. The CIA payments are a hidden stream in a much broader financial flow; the U.S. has given Pakistan more than $15 billion over the last eight years in military and civilian aid.

Congress recently approved an extra $1 billion a year to help Pakistan stabilize its tribal belt at a time when Obama is considering whether to send tens of thousands of additional troops to Afghanistan.

The ISI has used the covert CIA money for a variety of purposes, including the construction of a new headquarters in Islamabad, the capital. That project pleased CIA officials because it replaced a structure considered vulnerable to attack; it also eased fears that the U.S. money would end up in the private bank accounts of ISI officials.

In fact, CIA officials were so worried that the money would be wasted that the agency's station chief at the time, Robert Grenier, went to the head of the ISI to extract a promise that it would be put to good use.

"What we didn't want to happen was for this group of generals in power at the time to just start putting it in their pockets or building mansions in Dubai," said a former CIA operative who served in Islamabad.

The scale of the payments shows the extent to which money has fueled an espionage alliance that has been credited with damaging Al Qaeda but also plagued by distrust.

The complexity of the relationship is reflected in other ways. Officials said the CIA has routinely brought ISI operatives to a secret training facility in North Carolina, even as U.S. intelligence analysts try to assess whether segments of the ISI have worked against U.S. interests.

A report distributed in late 2007 by the National Intelligence Council was characteristically conflicted on the question of the ISI's ties to the Afghan Taliban, a relationship that traces back to Pakistan's support for Islamic militants fighting to oust the Soviets from Afghanistan.

"Ultimately, the report said what all the other reports said -- that it was inconclusive," said a former senior U.S. national security official. "You definitely can find ISI officers doing things we don't like, but on the other hand you've got no smoking gun from command and control that links them to the activities of the insurgents."

Given the size of overt military and civilian aid to Pakistan, CIA officials argue that their own disbursements -- particularly the bounties for suspected terrorists -- should be considered a bargain.

"They gave us 600 to 700 people captured or dead," said one former senior CIA official who worked with the Pakistanis. "Getting these guys off the street was a good thing, and it was a big savings to [U.S.] taxpayers."

A U.S. intelligence official said Pakistan had made "decisive contributions to counter-terrorism."

"They have people dying almost every day," the official said. "Sure, their interests don't always match up with ours. But things would be one hell of a lot worse if the government there was hostile to us."

The CIA also directs millions of dollars to other foreign spy services. But the magnitude of the payments to the ISI reflect Pakistan's central role. The CIA depends on Pakistan's cooperation to carry out missile strikes by Predator drones that have killed dozens of suspected extremists in Pakistani border areas.

The ISI is a highly compartmentalized intelligence service, with divisions that sometimes seem at odds with one another. Units that work closely with the CIA are walled off from a highly secretive branch that has directed insurgencies in Afghanistan and Kashmir.

"There really are two ISIs," the former CIA operative said. "On the counter-terrorism side, those guys were in lock-step with us," the former operative said. "And then there was the 'long-beard' side. Those are the ones who created the Taliban and are supporting groups like Haqqani."

The network led by Jalaluddin Haqqani has been accused of carrying out a series of suicide attacks in Afghanistan, including the 2008 bombing of the Indian Embassy in Kabul.

Pakistani leaders, offended by questions about their commitment, point to their capture of high-value targets, including accused Sept. 11 organizer Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. They also underscore the price their spy service has paid.

Militants hit ISI's regional headquarters in Peshawar on Friday in an attack that killed at least 10 people. In May, a similar strike near an ISI facility in Lahore killed more than two dozen people. Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, who served as ISI director before becoming army chief of staff, has told U.S. officials that dozens of ISI operatives have been killed in operations conducted at the behest of the United States.

A onetime aide to former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice described a pointed exchange in which Kayani said his spies were no safer than CIA agents when trying to infiltrate notoriously hostile Pashtun tribes.

"Madame Secretary, they call us all white men," Kayani said, according to the former aide.

CIA payments to the ISI can be traced to the 1980s, when the Pakistani agency managed the flow of money and weapons to the Afghan mujahedin. That support slowed during the 1990s, after the Soviets were expelled from Afghanistan, but increased after the Sept. 11 attacks.

In addition to bankrolling the ISI's budget, the CIA created a clandestine reward program that paid bounties for suspected terrorists. The first check, for $10 million, was for the capture of Abu Zubaydah, a top Al Qaeda figure, the former official said. The ISI got $25 million more for Khalid Shaikh Mohammed's capture.

But the CIA's most-wanted list went beyond those widely known names.

"There were a lot of people I had never heard of, and they were good for $1 million or more," said a former CIA official who served in Islamabad.

Former CIA Director George J. Tenet acknowledged the bounties in a little-noticed section in his 2007 memoir. Sometimes, payments were made with a dramatic flair.

"We would show up in someone's office, offer our thanks, and we would leave behind a briefcase full of $100 bills, sometimes totaling more than a million in a single transaction," Tenet wrote.

The CIA's bounty program was conceived as a counterpart to the Rewards for Justice program administered by the State Department. The rules of that program render officials of foreign governments ineligible, making it meaningless to intelligence services such as the ISI.

The reward payments have slowed as the number of suspected Al Qaeda operatives captured or killed by the ISI has declined. Many militants fled from major cities where the ISI has a large presence to tribal regions patrolled by Predator drones.

The CIA has set limits on how the money and rewards are used. In particular, officials said, the agency has refused to pay rewards to the ISI for information used in Predator strikes.

U.S. officials were reluctant to give the ISI a financial incentive to nominate targets, and feared doing so would lead the Pakistanis to refrain from sharing other kinds of intelligence.

"It's a fine line," said a former senior U.S. counter-terrorism official involved in policy decisions on Pakistan. "You don't want to create perverse incentives that corrode the relationship."

greg.miller@latimes.com

Times staff writer Alex Rodriguez in Islamabad contributed to this report.

Pakistan Taliban taps Punjab heartland for recruits

2009-11-16T07:48:00.001-05:00

Pakistanis are increasingly concerned over the deadly collaboration between Punjabi militants from Sargodha and the Taliban.

By Alex Rodriguez
November 16, 2009
Reporting from Sargodha, Pakistan

One by one, recruits from Pakistan's Punjab heartland would make the seven-hour drive to Waziristan, where they would pull up to an office that made no secret of its mission.

The signboard above the office door read "Tehrik-e-Taliban." In a largely ungoverned city like Miram Shah, there was no reason to hide its identity.

The trainees from Sargodha would arrive, grab some sleep at the Taliban office and afterward head into Waziristan's rugged mountains for instruction in skills including karate and handling explosives and automatic rifles.

"Someone recruits them, then someone else takes them to Miram Shah, and then someone in Miram Shah greets them and takes them in," said Sargodha Police Chief Usman Anwar, whose officers this summer arrested a cell of returning Punjabi militants before they could allegedly carry out a plan to blow up a cellphone tower in this city of 700,000. "It's an assembly line, like Ford Motors has."

The arrests of six Punjabi militants in Sargodha in two raids Aug. 24 illustrated a burgeoning collaboration between Punjabi militants and northwestern Pakistan's Taliban that has Pakistanis increasingly concerned as the government focuses its military resources on Taliban and Al Qaeda militants in South Waziristan.

Military commanders say their troops assumed control of most of South Waziristan just three weeks after launching a large-scale offensive aimed at uprooting the Pakistani Taliban near the Afghan border. Troops are now clashing with Taliban fighters in Makeen, the hometown of slain Pakistani Taliban leader Baitullah Mahsud.

However, evidence is growing that militants in Punjab, Pakistan's most populous province, could prove just as dangerous as the Taliban militants from the country's northwestern region that includes South Waziristan and other parts of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA.

Pakistan has been broadsided by a nationwide wave of terrorist strikes in recent weeks, and several of those attacks have involved militants from Punjab either masterminding or carrying out the violence.

A daring Oct. 10 commando raid on the army's headquarters in Rawalpindi, a heavily guarded complex that is Pakistan's equivalent of the Pentagon, was engineered by a Punjabi militant who also organized the deadly ambush of the Sri Lankan cricket team in March.

Punjabi extremists were also believed to be behind near-simultaneous attacks on three police buildings in Lahore that killed 14 people on Oct. 15.

Years ago, the agendas of the Pakistani Taliban and Punjabi militant organizations such as Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Jaish-e-Muhammad moved in different directions. Whereas the Taliban has long focused its attacks on Pakistan's Western-allied government, Punjabi groups, which, like the Taliban, are Sunni Muslims, have traditionally targeted Indian forces in the disputed Kashmir region and members of Pakistan's Shiite Muslim minority.

Now, however, the missions of the Taliban and Punjabi militants seem to have merged. Law enforcement officials and analysts say the catalyst was the government's 2007 siege of the Red Mosque in Islamabad where Islamic extremists held scores of people hostage. The eight-day siege in the Pakistani capital ended in the deaths of more than 100 people.

Then-President Pervez Musharraf ordered security forces to seize the mosque after militants at the sprawling compound set fire to the capital's Environment Ministry building. The siege had been preceded by months of challenges to Musharraf's leadership from the mosque's radical leaders, including an insistence that Pakistan adopt Islamic law.

After the siege, Punjabi militant groups that had been tolerated -- and in some cases fostered -- by Pakistani authorities viewed the government as an enemy.

Experts say Pakistan has neglected to adequately brace for the threat posed by Taliban-trained Punjabi militants. Their cells have spread throughout Punjab province, and law enforcement officials say Punjabi militants have established their own training camps in southern Punjab, a desolate wasteland where the police presence is minimal and a feudal society dominates.

"At the moment, the government is bewildered. It doesn't know how to manage this challenge coming from Punjabi militants," said Hasan Askari Rizvi, a Lahore-based security analyst.

"In the past, Punjab militants were merely facilitating the Taliban. But now they have joined with the Taliban to engage in terrorist attacks."

Southern Punjab provides militant groups a haven to train and reconnoiter. Like the Taliban's primary stronghold in Waziristan, vast tracts of southern Punjab are regarded as tribal areas where rule is laid down by local sardars, or feudal leaders. In some places, the only glint of law enforcement comes in the form of the poorly trained border military police, who take orders largely from feudal leaders, said Maj. Gen. Yaqub Khan of the Pakistan Rangers Punjab.

In an interview on Pakistan's Express News television channel in mid-October, Khan said militants freely move between South Waziristan and the tribal area surrounding the southern Punjab city of Dera Ghazi Khan.

Khan said the jurisdiction of his paramilitary force, which is under the control of the Interior Ministry, is limited to securing a gas pipeline.

"There are no police in the region," he said. "We have confirmed reports that terrorists gather and get training in this region, and they have definite linkage with militants fighting in FATA."

Pakistanis in Dera Ghazi Khan and surrounding villages fear that, as the government continues its crackdown on Taliban militants along the Afghan border, fleeing Taliban fighters may attempt to establish themselves in southern Punjab.

"No one is serious about preventing the Talibanization of our area," said Khawaja Mudasar Mehmood, a Dera Ghazi Khan politician with the ruling Pakistan People's Party. "We face spillover from South Waziristan. Taliban militants are already passing into this area, and the border military police can't prevent it."

In Sargodha, the link to the Taliban is Mohammed Tayyab, who heads the Punjabi Taliban cell in Miram Shah and had close ties with Mahsud, said Anwar, the Sargodha police chief. Tayyab has been accused of engineering the November 2007 suicide bombing attack on a Pakistani air force bus in Sargodha that killed eight people.

After several raids, Tayyab and his militant group are keeping a lower profile in Miram Shah, but they still tap Sargodha for fresh recruits and train them in Waziristan, Anwar said. A primary conduit for recruitment was a madrasa, or Islamic seminary school,run by the father of four brothers who were arrested by Sargodha police in August, accused of planning an attack on the cellphone tower.

"Likely recruits at the madrasas are teens, 14 or 15, without strong links to family," Anwar said. "Poverty is a factor, but having no social links, no future, is the main cause."

Law enforcement officials say the military offensive in South Waziristan has accelerated collaboration among Punjabi militants, the Pakistani Taliban and Al Qaeda. Punjabi militants have been waging the attacks on behalf of their Taliban and Al Qaeda allies, government officials say, hoping to erode popular backing for military operations in Waziristan.

The problem with battling militancy in Punjab is that the government cannot undertake a crackdown on the scale of the offensives against the Taliban in northwestern Pakistan's Swat Valley or in Waziristan, experts say. Punjab is too densely populated and many in the province still cling to the belief that Pakistan's next-door enemy, India, is behind much of the terrorism in Punjab.

"People don't really recognize Punjabi militants as a threat, or they think these terrorist groups are agents of foreign countries," said Rizvi, the analyst. "So when you start arguing that the roots of the problem lie outside Pakistan, then you don't recognize the threat actually emerging here."

alex.rodriguez@latimes.com

Pakistan's Problems

2009-11-15T17:28:00.001-05:00

Pakistan has three problems -- Fauji, Feudal and Faith. While a moderate amounts of each is fine, probably even beneficial, it becomes a problem if you get an extreme dose of it. Unfortunately, Pakistan got a large dose of all three Fs.

Pakistanis (irrespective of their standing in society) exult gossip, paranoia, superstition, and conspiracy theories more than science or history.

Pakistani people?s obsession with India is understandable because they don't understand what is going wrong with their country for the last 60 years or they don't have a say in their countries matters and feel helpless.
They have seen how Indian has embraced western/British concept called democracy and molded to it own advantage i,e unity in diversity and secularism.
The problem with Pakistan is that there no sound or unifying idea or basis behind its creation. Even if the country intended to be a strictly theocratic state and a leader popular and strong enough to impose that ideal, Pakistan would have been better off than it is now. Jinnah had no realistic vision, he was a dying man who just wanted to go out in style. You create a nation on the basis of religious division and then want it to be secular? That's insanity, and so since inception, crooks have filled the void of a unifying raison d'etre. The country's only hope is to implode and have something better re-built from its ashes. Don't count on the masses of Pakistanis waking up out of their slumber otherwise.

Says an Indian: "As long as the ISI officers and the Pakistani Army is getting whacked, this Indian is happy! Let the Pakistanis win it albeit with lots of losses to their Army so that they cannot continue their undeclared war against India for the last 30 years! Martyrs hardly, when the ordinary citizens of Pakistan contribute voluntarily to terrorist organizations such as LeT, JeM. Let them understand the deadly consequences of supporting terrorists! Then perhaps the Pakistani society will shed its delusional conspiracy theory, just as the 1971 defeat at the hands of India removed an earlier delusion of 10 Indian soldiers being equivalent to 1 Pakistani soldier."

Blame for the recent spate of bombings is being laid at the door of foreign powers by many ordinary Pakistanis. Why?
Ask the perpetrators of a victim culture obsessed with the West and Israel, whilst indifferent to the genocide in Darfur, the manifest injustices of the Saudi regime or indeed any patch of land unfortunate enough to find itself under the juristiction of Sharia.

"The images of fellow Pakistani men, women and children being martyred on our television screens "
Once upon a time, words had a meaning, and methinks that "being martyred" had something to do with being killed for one's beliefs, or indeed, choosing death rather than giving up or compromising one's beliefs.
Frankly, I think it would help also with the conspiracy theories you bemoan here if you could bring yourself to call a spade a spade: Pakistani men, women and children are murdered in cold blood by brutal fanatics from their own land who couldn't care less how many they kill and maim in pursuit of their goals.

INTERVIEW-French magistrate details Lashkar's global role

2009-11-14T08:27:00.000-05:00

By Myra MacDonald

PARIS, Nov 13 (Reuters) - Pakistan's army once ran training camps for the Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group with the apparent knowledge of the CIA, an example of complicity that raises questions about the current state of the nuclear-armed nation.

So says former French investigating magistrate Jean-Louis Bruguiere, author of a new book that provides rare insight both into alleged past army support for the Lashkar-e-Taiba and to the group's connections to a global network linked to al Qaeda.

The question of Pakistani military support for Islamist militants is crucial for the United States as it tries to work out how to stabilise the country and neighbouring Afghanistan.

Bruguiere bases the information in his book on international terrorism, "Ce que je n'ai pas pu dire" ("What I could not say") on testimony given by jailed Frenchman Willy Brigitte, who spent 2-1/2 months in a Lashkar-e-Taiba training camp in 2001/2002.

In an interview, Bruguiere said he was convinced Lashkar-e-Taiba, first set up to fight India in its part of the divided Himalayan region of Kashmir, had become part of an international network tied to al Qaeda.

"Lashkar-e-Taiba is no longer a Pakistani movement with only a Kashmir political or military agenda. Lashkar-e-Taiba is a member of al Qaeda. Lashkar-e-Taiba has decided to expand violence worldwide," he told Reuters.

He was "very, very anxious about the situation" in Pakistan, where militants are staging a series of bloody urban attacks to avenge a government offensive against their strongholds.

"The problem right now is to know if the Pakistanis have sufficient power to control the situation," he said.

The problem was also "to know if all the members of the military forces and the ISI (Inter-Services Intelligence agency) are playing the same game. I am not sure," he added.

Pakistan has long been accused of giving covert support to Lashkar-e-Taiba, which was blamed for last year's attack on Mumbai in which 166 people were killed. It denies the allegation and has banned the organisation.

NEW FORM OF TERRORISM

Bruguiere said he became aware of the changing nature of international terrorism while investigating attacks in Paris in the mid-1990s by the Algerian Armed Islamic Group (GIA).

These included an attempt to hijack a plane from Algiers to Paris in 1994 and crash it into the Eiffel Tower -- a forerunner of the Sept. 11 2001 attacks. The plane was diverted to Marseilles and stormed by French security forces.

This new style of international terrorism was quite unlike militant groups he had investigated in the past, with their pyramidal structures and political objectives.

"After 1994/1995, like viruses, all the groups have been spreading on a very large scale all over the world, in a horizontal way and even a random way," he said.

An early encounter with Lashkar-e-Taiba came while he was investigating shoe-bomber Richard Reid, who tried to set off explosives on a transatlantic flight from Paris in 2001.

This investigation led to a man, who Bruguiere said was the Lashkar-e-Taiba's representative in Paris, and who was suspected of helping Reid -- an accusation he denied. Bruguiere said the link to Reid was not proved in court.

Brigitte, a Frenchman originally from France's Caribbean department of Guadeloupe, had gone to Pakistan shortly after Sept. 11 to try to reach Afghanistan. Unable to make it, he had been sent to a Lashkar centre outside Lahore. A man named Sajid Mir became his handler.

"He quickly understood that Sajid belonged to the regular Pakistan army," wrote Bruguiere.

After 1-1/2 months, he was taken with four other trainees, two British and two Americans, to a Lashkar camp in the hills in Punjab province. The Toyota pick-up which took them there passed through four army check-points without being stopped.

During his 2-1/2 month stay at the camp, Bruguiere says, Brigitte realised the instructors were soldiers on detachment. Military supplies were dropped by army helicopters.

Brigitte said he and other foreigners were forced four times to leave the camp and move further up into the hills to avoid being caught by CIA officers.

They were believed to be checking if Pakistan had kept to a deal under which the Americans turned a blind eye to Lashkar camps in Punjab provided no foreigners were trained there.

In return, Bruguiere said, Pakistan under then president Pervez Musharraf helped track down leaders of al Qaeda.

"DOUBLE STANDARDS"

Western countries were at the time accused by India of double standards in tolerating Pakistani support for Kashmir-focused organisations while pushing it to crack down on militant groups which threatened Western interests.

Diplomats say that attitude has since changed, particularly after bombings in London in 2005 highlighted the risks of "home-grown terrorism" in Britain linked to militant groups based in Pakistan's Punjab province.

After leaving the camp accompanied by Sajid, Brigitte was sent back to France.

Sajid then ordered him to fly to Australia where he joined a cell later accused of plotting attacks there. Tipped off by French police, Brigitte was deported from Australia in 2003 and convicted by a French court of links to terrorism.

Bruguiere said he had personally questioned Brigitte in the presence of his lawyer to check his testimony. Information provided by Brigitte was also cross-checked by French police based on mobile phone and e-mail traffic.

Bruguiere went to Pakistan himself in 2006 as part of his investigations into the deaths of 11 Frenchmen in a bombing outside a hotel in Karachi in 2002.

He stepped down as France's best-known counter-terrorism expert in 2007 and now represents the EU on the Terrorist Finance Tracking Program in Washington. (Editing by Bill Maclean and David Stamp)

A nuclear power's act of proliferation

2009-11-13T07:55:00.000-05:00

Accounts by controversial scientist assert China gave Pakistan enough enriched uranium in '82 to make 2 bombs

By R. Jeffrey Smith and Joby Warrick
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, November 13, 2009

In 1982, a Pakistani military C-130 left the western Chinese city of Urumqi with a highly unusual cargo: enough weapons-grade uranium for two atomic bombs, according to accounts written by the father of Pakistan's nuclear weapons program, Abdul Qadeer Khan, and provided to The Washington Post.
The uranium transfer in five stainless-steel boxes was part of a broad-ranging, secret nuclear deal approved years earlier by Mao Zedong and Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto that culminated in an exceptional, deliberate act of proliferation by a nuclear power, according to the accounts by Khan, who is under house arrest in Pakistan.
U.S. officials say they have known about the transfer for decades and once privately confronted the Chinese -- who denied it -- but have never raised the issue in public or sought to impose direct sanctions on China for it. President Obama, who said in April that "the world must stand together to prevent the spread of these weapons," plans to discuss nuclear proliferation issues while visiting Beijing on Tuesday.
According to Khan, the uranium cargo came with a blueprint for a simple weapon that China had already tested, supplying a virtual do-it-yourself kit that significantly speeded Pakistan's bomb effort. The transfer also started a chain of proliferation: U.S. officials worry that Khan later shared related Chinese design information with Iran; in 2003, Libya confirmed obtaining it from Khan's clandestine network.
China's refusal to acknowledge the transfer and the unwillingness of the United States to confront the Chinese publicly demonstrate how difficult it is to counter nuclear proliferation. Although U.S. officials say China is now much more attuned to proliferation dangers, it has demonstrated less enthusiasm than the United States for imposing sanctions on Iran over its nuclear efforts, a position Obama wants to discuss.
Although Chinese officials have for a quarter-century denied helping any nation attain a nuclear capability, current and former U.S. officials say Khan's accounts confirm the U.S. intelligence community's long-held conclusion that China provided such assistance.
"Upon my personal request, the Chinese Minister . . . had gifted us 50 kg [kilograms] of weapon-grade enriched uranium, enough for two weapons," Khan wrote in a previously undisclosed 11-page narrative of the Pakistani bomb program that he prepared after his January 2004 detention for unauthorized nuclear commerce.
"The Chinese gave us drawings of the nuclear weapon, gave us kg50 enriched uranium," he said in a separate account sent to his wife several months earlier.
China's Foreign Ministry last week declined to address Khan's specific assertions, but it said that as a member of the global Non-Proliferation Treaty since 1992, "China strictly adheres to the international duty of prevention of proliferation it shoulders and strongly opposes . . . proliferation of nuclear weapons in any forms."
Asked why the U.S. government has never publicly confronted China over the uranium transfer, State Department spokesman Philip J. Crowley said, "The United States has worked diligently and made progress with China over the past 25 years. As to what was or wasn't done during the Reagan administration, I can't say."
Khan's exploits have been described in multiple books and public reports since British and U.S. intelligence services unmasked the deeds in 2003. But his own narratives -- not yet seen by U.S. officials -- provide fresh details about China's aid to Pakistan and its reciprocal export to China of sensitive uranium-enrichment technology.
A spokesman for the Pakistani Embassy in Washington declined to comment for this article. Pakistan has never allowed the U.S. government to question Khan or other top Pakistani officials directly, prompting Congress to demand in legislation approved in September that future aid be withheld until Obama certifies that Pakistan has provided "relevant information from or direct access to Pakistani nationals" involved in past nuclear commerce.
Insider vs. government
The Post obtained Khan's detailed accounts from Simon Henderson, a former journalist at the Financial Times who is now a senior fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and who has maintained correspondence with Khan. In a first-person account about his contacts with Khan in the Sept. 20 edition of the London Sunday Times, Henderson disclosed several excerpts from one of the documents.
Henderson said he agreed to The Post's request for a copy of that letter and other documents and narratives written by Khan because he believes an accurate understanding of Pakistan's nuclear history is relevant for U.S. policymaking. The Post independently confirmed the authenticity of the material; it also corroborated much of the content through interviews in Pakistan and other countries.
Although Khan disputes various assertions by book authors, the narratives are particularly at odds with Pakistan's official statements that he exported nuclear secrets as a rogue agent and implicated only former government officials who are no longer living. Instead, he repeatedly states that top politicians and military officers were immersed in the country's foreign nuclear dealings.
Khan has complained to friends that his movements and contacts are being unjustly controlled by the government, whose bidding he did -- providing a potential motive for his disclosures.
Overall, the narratives portray his deeds as a form of sustained, high-tech international horse-trading, in which Khan and a series of top generals successfully leveraged his access to Europe's best centrifuge technology in the 1980s to obtain financial assistance or technical advice from foreign governments that wanted to advance their own efforts.
"The speed of our work and our achievements surprised our worst enemies and adversaries and the West stood helplessly by to see a Third World nation, unable even to produce bicycle chains or sewing needles, mastering the most advanced nuclear technology in the shortest possible span of time," Khan boasts in the 11-page narrative he wrote for Pakistani intelligence officials about his dealings with foreigners while head of a key nuclear research laboratory.
Exchanges with Beijing
According to one of the documents, a five-page summary by Khan of his government's dealmaking with China, the terms of the nuclear exchange were set in a mid-1976 conversation between Mao and Bhutto. Two years earlier, neighboring India had tested its first nuclear bomb, provoking Khan -- a metallurgist working at a Dutch centrifuge manufacturer -- to offer his services to Bhutto.
Khan said he and two other Pakistani officials -- including then-Foreign Secretary Agha Shahi, since deceased -- worked out the details when they traveled to Beijing later that year for Mao's funeral. Over several days, Khan said, he briefed three top Chinese nuclear weapons officials -- Liu Wei, Li Jue and Jiang Shengjie -- on how the European-designed centrifuges could swiftly aid China's lagging uranium-enrichment program. China's Foreign Ministry did not respond to questions about the officials' roles.
"Chinese experts started coming regularly to learn the whole technology" from Pakistan, Khan states, staying in a guesthouse built for them at his centrifuge research center. Pakistani experts were dispatched to Hanzhong in central China, where they helped "put up a centrifuge plant," Khan said in an account he gave to his wife after coming under government pressure. "We sent 135 C-130 plane loads of machines, inverters, valves, flow meters, pressure gauges," he wrote. "Our teams stayed there for weeks to help and their teams stayed here for weeks at a time."
In return, China sent Pakistan 15 tons of uranium hexafluoride (UF6), a feedstock for Pakistan's centrifuges that Khan's colleagues were having difficulty producing on their own. Khan said the gas enabled the laboratory to begin producing bomb-grade uranium in 1982. Chinese scientists helped the Pakistanis solve other nuclear weapons challenges, but as their competence rose, so did the fear of top Pakistani officials that Israel or India might preemptively strike key nuclear sites.
Mohammed Zia ul-Haq, the nation's military ruler, "was worried," Khan said, and so he and a Pakistani general who helped oversee the nation's nuclear laboratories were dispatched to Beijing with a request in mid-1982 to borrow enough bomb-grade uranium for a few weapons.
After winning Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping's approval, Khan, the general and two others flew aboard a Pakistani C-130 to Urumqi. Khan says they enjoyed barbecued lamb while waiting for the Chinese military to pack the small uranium bricks into lead-lined boxes, 10 single-kilogram ingots to a box, for the flight to Islamabad, Pakistan's capital.
According to Khan's account, however, Pakistan's nuclear scientists kept the Chinese material in storage until 1985, by which time the Pakistanis had made a few bombs with their own uranium. Khan said he got Zia's approval to ask the Chinese whether they wanted their high-enriched uranium back. After a few days, they responded "that the HEU loaned earlier was now to be considered as a gift . . . in gratitude" for Pakistani help, Khan said.
He said the laboratory promptly fabricated hemispheres for two weapons and added them to Pakistan's arsenal. Khan's view was that none of this violated the 1968 Non-Proliferation Treaty, because neither nation had signed it at the time and neither had sought to use its capability "against any country in particular." He also wrote that subsequent international protests reeked of hypocrisy because of foreign assistance to nuclear weapons programs in Britain, Israel and South Africa.
U.S. unaware of progress
The United States was suspicious of Pakistani-Chinese collaboration through this period. Officials knew that China treasured its relationship with Pakistan because both worried about India; they also knew that China viewed Western nuclear policies as discriminatory and that some Chinese politicians had favored the spread of nuclear arms as a path to stability.
But U.S. officials were ignorant about key elements of the cooperation as it unfolded, according to current and former officials and classified documents.
China is "not in favor of a Pakistani nuclear explosive program, and I don't think they are doing anything to help it," a top State Department official reported in a secret briefing in 1979, three years after the Bhutto-Mao deal was struck. A secret State Department report in 1983 said Washington was aware that Pakistan had requested China's help, but "we do not know what the present status of the cooperation is," according to a declassified copy.
Meanwhile, Chinese Premier Zhao Ziyang promised at a White House dinner in January 1984: "We do not engage in nuclear proliferation ourselves, nor do we help other countries develop nuclear weapons." A nearly identical statement was made by China in a major summary of its nonproliferation policies in 2003 and on many occasions in between.
Fred McGoldrick, a senior State Department nonproliferation official in the Reagan and Clinton administrations, recalls that the United States learned in the 1980s about the Chinese bomb-design and uranium transfers. "We did confront them, and they denied it," he said. Since then, the connection has been confirmed by particles on nuclear-related materials from Pakistan, many of which have characteristic Chinese bomb program "signatures," other officials say.
Hans M. Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, said that except for the instance described by Khan, "we are not aware of cases where a nuclear weapon state has transferred HEU to a non-nuclear country for military use." McGoldrick also said he is aware of "nothing like it" in the history of nuclear weapons proliferation. But he said nothing has ever been said publicly because "this is diplomacy; you don't do that sort of thing . . . if you want them to change their behavior."
Warrick reported from Islamabad. Staff researcher Julie Tate in Washington and Beijing bureau assistant Wang Juan contributed to this report.

Powder Keg Chronicles: The real trouble, Pakistan

2009-11-11T08:47:00.000-05:00

For the current “great game” in Southern Asia, Pakistan is central to the region’s future stability. Created in 1947, out of predominantly Muslim areas of the old Indian Raj, it has never fully achieved a stable political system.

Its society is fractured between a variety of ethnic groups that transcend its various borders; its political system alternates between repressive military rule, unstable democratic intervals and periods such as now that have an awkward balancing act between civilians and the military. In the past several decades, two of its presidents have been assassinated. Furthermore, while the country was formally established as a state for the Muslims of South Asia, Pakistan has yet to evolve a stable social agreement on the role of Islam in Pakistani politics. Moreover, Islamic fundamentalists have continued to operate out of Pakistan to carry out terror attacks in Pakistan’s major neighbour, India, most recently in the coordinated assaults in Mumbai.
Beyond all these concerns, however, it must not be forgotten that Pakistan is a nuclear power. Pakistan has a population six times larger than Afghanistan’s, it borders on Iran, India and China, and it has a clutch of nuclear warheads. Its neighbours and allies alike may worry that its missiles, nuclear warheads - and the technology and knowledge to create more of them - are not or might not be under full security and control. Should things begin to spin out of control, they could be dispersed surreptitiously to others.
Except for some technological improvements, contemporary descriptions of the ongoing military campaign in Pakistan’s northwest frontier regions might just as well have come from Winston Churchill’s memoir of his time with the Malakand Field Force on their mountain manoeuvres in the same region. The military forces roll forward, artillery fires into the hills and soldiers set up check points to inspect the baggage of long lines of civilians or refugees from the fighting. Then, too, there are those inevitable communiqués pointing to the military’s successes in capturing insurgents, strategic villages and towns - or in pushing the warrior tribes back into the distant hills.
These days, most of al-Qaeda’s leadership is ensconced in Pakistan’s mountainous northwest frontier, not in Afghanistan. In recent months, US Vice President Joe Biden has quietly become the major proponent within the Obama administration to recalibrate America’s primary attention in the region on Pakistan, rather than, as has been the case for the past eight years, on Afghanistan. In strategic terms, it may be a no-brainer.
From their side, once again, Pakistan’s army is moving northward to carry out its earlier promise – this time with more finality than in several previous campaigns – to deal with the insurgents in this mountainous region. This time, however, their effort comes just as there has been a shattering wave of coordinated attacks, not only against top Pakistani security installations, markets and schools scattered all over the northern half of the country and in Lahore, as well as at army headquarters in Rawalpindi and the capital, Islamabad, itself.

Photo: A policeman points a gun at an unruly crowd, comprising of people uprooted by the military offensive in South Waziristan, as they gather at a distribution point for internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Dera Ismail Khan, located in Pakistan's restive North West Frontier Province, November 6, 2009. Pakistani soldiers have entered an important militant bastion in South Waziristan, security officials said on Friday, as gunmen wounded an army brigadier and his driver in a drive-by shooting in the capital. REUTERS/Akhtar Soomro
To many analysts, these attacks may indicate al-Qaeda, the Taliban and other militant groups (some once actually nurtured by the Pakistani government) are coming together in a loose alliance with the goal of bringing the Pakistani state to its knees. For example, an umbrella group for the Pakistani Taliban, Tehrik-e-Taliban, ultimately claimed responsibility for the recent attacks in Lahore. But the style of the attacks may also be revealing growing ties between the Taliban and al-Qaeda – as well as what are known as “jihadi” groups operating out of southern Punjab, Pakistan’s largest province, analysts said.
For years, the Pakistani government turned a blind eye to some of these Punjabi groups, including Jaish-e-Muhammad and Lashkar-e-Jhangvi operating in India. Part of the problem seems to be that many Pakistani citizens consider these groups to be allies in just causes such as fighting India, the US and Shiite Muslims. But, concurrently, they have become entwined with the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and in the process they seem to have turned back on the state that permitted them to exist in the first place.
These new attacks also highlight the expanding challenges for the Obama administration as it tries to bolster Pakistan’s civilian government, as well as encourage the military to press its campaign against the Taliban. In October, Obama signed the legislation that provided aid to Pakistan to the tune of some $7.5 billion over five years. The offer of the aid package prompted friction between Pakistan’s military and civilian leadership over the conditions for the aid —greater civilian oversight of the military and halting support for militant groups in India — which some army officers and politicians considered infringements on Pakistan’s sovereignty. The White House noted the shared interests of the countries in its statement on the aid signing, but there was no signing ceremony - an apparent response to a distinct lack of appreciation for all that money.
The wave of attacks inside Pakistan may now be adding more pressure on the Pakistani government to really crack down on the militants. Says Khalid Aziz, a former chief secretary of North-West Frontier Province, “The national narrative in support of jihad has confused the Pakistani mind. All along we’ve been saying these people are trying to fight a war of Islam, but there is a need to transform the national narrative.”
The recent attacks also drove home the point that the government can no longer hide the alliance between the Taliban in South Waziristan and the forces in Southern Punjab, said Zaffar Abbas, a prominent journalist at the English-language newspaper, Dawn. And, according to Farrukh Saleem, executive director for the Centre for Research and Security Studies in Islamabad, too many Pakistanis do not see the “jihadi” groups as the enemy. Says Saleem, “They feel America is in the region, the Pakistani Army is fighting for an American army and the ‘jihadis’ have a right to retaliate.”
After the 9/11 attacks in 2001, when Pakistan joined the US in the campaign against terrorism, then-president Pervez Musharraf’s government formally banned those “jihadi” groups. But the groups have entrenched domestic and political constituencies, as well as shadowy ties to former military officials and their families, analysts said. Punjab is the major recruiting centre for the Pakistani Army and it hosts more army divisions than any other province. But the insurgent groups as well “proliferate and operate with impunity, literally under the nose of Pakistan’s army,” said Georgetown University’s Christine Fair.
The current offensive, by itself, however, is unlikely to be a deathblow to the entrenched militants, who have networks across the country, including with groups once nurtured by the state as proxies in efforts against India. The militants under attack now could escape to other parts of Pakistan's semi-autonomous tribal belt or cities in its heartland.
Since the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, the Pakistani army's three attempts to dislodge Taliban fighters from South Waziristan have ended in truces that left the Taliban largely in control of that region. This time, the military has said there will be no deals, although there have apparently been some, to avoid jeopardising gains won earlier this year when Pakistani soldiers overpowered the Taliban in Swat.
One can only imagine what might happen if the Pakistani government or military command and control truly came under siege and state collapse loomed. Or if some portions of its nuclear technology and weaponry were seen to be in danger of coming under the control of religious insurgents. India, the self-proclaimed hegemonic power on the subcontinent, would assuredly be thinking about pre-emptive action. Should that happen, how would China respond, or the many Muslim fundamentalist irregular groups, for that matter?
More than a century ago, Otto von Bismarck, contemplating the European security order he had largely created after the unification of Germany, mused that “some damn thing in the Balkans” had the power to upset his carefully contrived balance of power. For Americans – and for Indians - it may not be Afghanistan that is the most difficult question to contemplate. As Biden has been advocating within Obama administration councils, it is Pakistan’s future that is the one to watch most closely. And it doesn’t look good at all.
By Brooks Spector
Main Photo: Firefighters extinguish a fire as rescue workers and residents watch in the aftermath of a bomb explosion in Peshawar, located in Pakistan's restive North West Frontier Province, October 28, 2009. A car bomb ripped through a crowded market killing 90 people in Pakistan's city of Peshawar on Wednesday, just hours after Washington's top diplomat arrived pledging a fresh start in sometimes strained relations. REUTERS/K.Parvez

Wednesday 11 November, 2009

Inside Balochistan’s Ravaged Heartland

2009-11-10T07:52:00.002-05:00

Harried by the Taliban on one side and the State on the other, Balochis remain hunted in their own land, reports QURRATULAIN ZAMAN

Force of arms A Baloch Marri tribesman carries a shell during clashes with Pakistani troops
PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

IF YOU want to know what is happening in Pakistan’s troubled province of Balochistan, just go to Sariab Road, in its capital, Quetta. Most people who live on its 6-km stretch are Baloch. For the Hazaras, Punjabis and Pashtuns — the other groups in this multi-ethnic city — Sariab Road is ilaqaghair (a no-go area).
After crossing the railway tracks that separate Sariab Road and Quetta Cantonment — or “Pakistan”, as the Baloch nationalists call it — the first thing you notice is an army tank to welcome you, next to a chauki or fortified post. Nationalist slogans and the emblems of banned militant organisations such as the Baloch Liberation Army (BLA) and the Baloch Republican Army (BRA) adorn the walls: “We want freedom from Pakistan!” “No to Gwadar port!” “Red salute to the martyrs of Balochistan!”
Vehicles of the paramilitary Frontier Corps (FC) are parked on both sides of the road. Opposite Sariab Road police station stands the new red brick building of Asaap newspaper. “Asaap” is a combination of the Balochi words for “fire” and “water.” “Our commitment to the land is so strong, we’ll cross both fire and water,” is emblazoned next to the entrance. Below, in bold letters: “If you want to know, understand, think or speak Balochistan, read Asaap.”
The building is quiet and empty. There is no furniture or human presence on the ground floor. On the first floor, Asaap’s editor, Abid Mir, is sitting in a small corner room. He is reluctant to talk. “We closed down the newspaper because of tremendous tremendous pressure and intimidation from the Pakistan government and security agencies.” The last edition of the newspaper came out on August 18. But Abid Mir still comes to the office everyday. One of the most influential Urdu newspapers in the province, Asaap has been denied government advertisements for the last four years. As there is little commerce or industry in Balochistan, few advertisements come from the private sector. Once, Asaap would publish Baloch writers and run stories about missing people. Now, Abid Mir the proud Baloch earns a living by teaching Pakistan’s national language, Urdu, at the nearby Balochistan University.
The university’s main gate is on Sariab Road, too. However, immediately behind it lies another gate – a sandbagged army post. However, it is the grey vardee (uniform) of the FC that can be seen all over the place. A whopping 500 FC troops are posted here to maintain law and order in Balochistan University.
The university, which was closed for two months because of the “law and order situation,” reopened recently after Eid. Amjad, a 24 year-old former president of the Baloch Student Organisation (BSO) is one of the few students who has returned. “You feel you’ve entered a garrison, not a university,” he remarks, adding, “The FC took away 26 Baloch students last week. My friend Mujeeb was among those kidnapped. Pakistan’s security agencies have left no political option for us. They have turned all liberal forces into radicals by torturing them.”

Wary Paramilitary forces on patrol in the lands of the Baloch Bugti tribe
PHOTO: AP

Rebel The BNP’s Akbar Mengal greets supporters after an anti-terrorism court orders his acquittal
PHOTO: REUTERS

Battle-ready A Baloch Marri tribesman prepares BM-12 rockets during a clash with Pakistani troops
PHOTO: GETTY IMAGES

According to him, the BSO serves as a nursery for nationalists who are in hiding or fighting in the mountains. The student leader’s father was an active member of the established Balochistan National Party (BNP), which has traditionally stood by Pakistan, demanding more rights for the Balochis. But he and his brothers advocate a “free” Balochistan. “We have convinced our father after many long fights and arguments; today, he is a radical like me.”
Amjad remembers when he was a patriotic Pakistani. As a teenager, he proudly put up a poster of Kargil war hero Captain Karnal Sher Khan. “Pakistan needs to reflect upon what made me hate Pakistan,” he says. “They make us feel like slaves. If I wear western clothes, I can move freely in Quetta city. However, if I wear my baggy Baloch salwar, I am sure to be strip-searched.”
FRIENDLY AND polite, law student Shahzeb Baloch says he was picked up by the intelligence agencies in March. “They tortured me everyday,” says Shahzeb. “During interrogation, my hands were tied and I was blindfolded. They kept accusing me of being a RAW agent and insisted that I had provided weapons to militants. Their aim is to terrorise Balochis, but after this episode I have no fear left in me. Earlier, I had 80 percent hatred for them; after my return, it’s 100 percent.” The Baloch students say that the Pakistani authorities have no idea how to tackle the militancy and that is why they started picking up politically aware students who demanded more rights.
“The BSO is a progressive student organization,” says Shahzeb. “We have no connection with militant organisations like the BLA or the BRA, but we do support them politically. That is why many of our leaders are detained by security agencies. They are trying to weaken the movement and kill the idea of azadi (freedom).”
The BSO has an active women wing, with 700 registered female members. For the offence of treason, 25-year-old Karima Baloch was fined Rs 150,000 and sentenced to three years in jail by an antiterrorist court; her appeal is pending. “Baloch women have come out to fill the gap created when our men were taken away or killed,” says Karima, who has been campaigning for missing Balochis. Her own family members have disappeared.
Advocate Kachkol Ali’s house is also on Sariab Road. Ali is well known in Quetta. He was the opposition leader in the last Provincial Assembly and represented another moderate party, the National Party (NP). In April 2009, three of his clients — well-known Baloch separatist leaders — were abducted from his office in the town of Turbat. Five days later, their mutilated corpses were found. Ali accuses Military Intelligence (MI) and the ISI of the abduction. Today, he is bitter. “We hate Pakistan so much that it is better we separate.’’
HOWEVER, A host of moderate Baloch political parties advocate more autonomy and more rights for Balochis over the huge natural resources in their province. All of them boycotted the 2008 elections. Possibly the most influential of them is the BNP’s Mengal group, which has boycotted parliamentary politics for the last decade.
The BNP demands only that which Pakistan demands for Kashmir: “We want the UN to conduct a referendum here,” says party general secretary Habib Jalib. “The people will decide whether we want to stay with Pakistan or not. We don’t demand anything from Pakistan. They have made us into a colony. But unfortunately, some Balochis are working with the colonial rulers.”
After the 2008 elections, the provincial government has been headed by the Pakistan People’s Party, with a Baloch, Aslam Raisani, as chief minister. “Separatist leaders keep demanding independence for Balochistan, just like it was demanded for Bangladesh, but we won’t let it happen,” says Suraya Ameeruddin, PPP senator from Balochistan. “Our president Asif Ali Zardari asked for forgiveness from the Balochis for the murder of Akbar Bugti and other slain leaders. It is a fact that the Balochis have been deprived of their rights. But how can we give away such a big province with so many national resources?” The PPP government has promised to bring development to the impoverished province. Says Ameeruddin, “Once these frustrated young Baloch get jobs and facilities, they’ll stop joining the ranks of the BLA or the BRA. They will stand with us.”
The Baloch Republican Party (BRP) is considered to be the political face of the underground, separatist BRA. Hundreds of BRP activists have disappeared. Party chief Brahamdagh Bugti, a grandson of Akbar Bugti, is in hiding. For many youngsters, the handsome 28-year-old Brahamdagh is a Che Guevara-like figure. Officials say he is in Afghanistan and have accused India of supporting him through its consulates there. But party leader Dr Abdul Hakeem Lehri rubbishes all claims that the movement is run by a “foreign hand”: “If Pakistan had any real evidence that India supports us, would they have spared us? Every Baloch household has a reason to fight with them. The story of a foreign hand is just to satisfy the Pakistani elite.”
Like many Baloch separatist leaders, Lehri is disillusioned and bitter. “Our fight is with the establishment in Islamabad. They think they have seven lakh soldiers. But Russia had 20,000 warheads. Do they think this rotten nuclear bomb is going to work for them? Someone is going to steal it soon anyway!”
To add to this, the Afghan Taliban’s central command is reported to be in Quetta. While the Pentagon is sure enough of their presence there to mull drone attacks on them, Pakistan has officially denied any Taliban presence in the province. However, a top security official in Quetta admits that the Afghan Taliban leaders are relaxing there. “They are in the opposition these days in their country, so they are here. If Karzai could live in Quetta for ten years, what’s wrong with it? They are not a threat to us until and unless we disturb them. American drone attacks will only provoke them,” he warns.
Malik Siraj Akbar is the bureau chief of the English national newspaper Daily Times and is intimately familiar with Balochistan and its people. He says that Islamabad has always focused on curbing Baloch nationalism and the separatist movement in the province and has ignored the influx of Taliban. “For Islamabad, a Baloch is a trouble maker and a Talib is a friend. They have always been protecting the Taliban and Afghan refugees in order to create a demographic imbalance.”

‘If I wear my traditional Baloch clothes in Quetta city, I am sure to be strip-searched,’ says a student

However, let alone the Baloch, local Hazaras and even Pashtuns are perturbed by the strong presence of the Taliban. Hazaras are mainly Shiites and came to Quetta because they were persecuted in Afghanistan. Now, regular targeted killings of Hazaras in the city have intimidated them.
One Hazara who is working with an NGO in the city says, “We can easily be identified as Hazaras by our appearance. Sunni extremists kill us because we are Shias. Every morning, I set out for work, not knowing if I will return home in the evening.”
Slain Baloch leader Nawab Akbar Bugti’s son Talal Bugti, who heads his father’s Jamhoori Watan Party (JWP), says, “The Taliban are outlaws and dacoits. I am in favour of drone attacks on them but they have been given protection by the army’s Corps Commander, Quetta.” Contrary to his nephew, the guerrilla fighter Brahamdagh, Talal Bugti and his party are agitating for more autonomy within Pakistan and a higher rent for the Bugti land under which the massive Sui gas fields lie. He however, believes that the Baloch issue will not be solved under the current dispensation. “Their bosses and godfathers in the intelligence agencies have not given them the authority. It is beyond their power to talk about our interests,” says Talal.

‘How can we give away such a large province with so many natural resources?’ asks a Pakistani senator

MUKHTAR CHALGIRI is regional director of the Strengthening Participatory Organization (SPO), a leading Pakistani NGO. “No one is as frightened by these target killings as we are, because they are targeting the educated, enlightened and progressive voices of Quetta. Some people don’t want progressive thought in Balochistan. So far, 35 intellectuals have been killed in Quetta city.”
Chalgiri says security forces and intelligence agencies have strong economic and political interests in Balochistan. And they still believe they can manage the situation. “The ISI and MI are overconfident. They say that they broke the USSR and played well in Afghanistan,” he says.
Even after a year and a half of democracy in Pakistan, Balochistan is still waiting for President Zardari’s promises to be fulfilled. The Balochs still feel that they are governed by the army and treated as second-class citizens. Their hatred for the centre and the big brother Punjab is growing. The divide between the various “nationalist” parties is being bridged by their radicalization. The calls for an independent Balochistan are getting louder, not only from feudal sardars but from the educated middle and lower middle class. But in Islamabad nobody seems to hear them as Pakistan is pre-occupied with its war in Waziristan.

In the Land of the Taliban

2009-11-10T07:48:00.000-05:00

An OLD Article: yet still relevant.

By ELIZABETH RUBIN

One afternoon this past summer, I shared a picnic of fresh mangos and plums with Abdul Baqi, an Afghan Taliban fighter in his 20’s fresh from the front in Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan. We spent hours on a grassy slope under the tall pines of Murree, a former colonial hill station that is now a popular resort just outside Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad. All around us was a Pakistani rendition of Georges Seurat’s “Sunday on La Grande Jatte” — middle-class families setting up grills for barbecue, a girl and two boys chasing their errant cow with a stick, two men hunting fowl, boys flying a kite. Much of the time, Abdul Baqi was engrossed in the flight pattern of a Himalayan bird. It must have been a welcome distraction. He had just lost five friends fighting British troops and had seen many others killed or wounded by bombs as they sheltered inside a mosque.
He was now looking forward to taking a logic course at a madrasa, or religious school, near Peshawar during his holiday. Pakistan’s religious parties, he told me through an interpreter, would lodge him, as they did other Afghan Taliban fighters, and keep him safe. With us was Abdul Baqi’s mentor, Mullah Sadiq, a diabetic Helmandi who was shuttling between Pakistan and Afghanistan auditing Taliban finances and arranging logistics. He had just dispatched nine fighters to Afghanistan and had taken wounded men to a hospital in Islamabad. “I just tell the border guards that they were wounded in a tribal dispute and need treatment,” he told me.
And though Mullah Sadiq said they had lost many commanders in battles around Kandahar, he and Abdul Baqi appeared to be in good spirits, laughing and chatting loudly on a cellphone to Taliban friends in Pakistan and Afghanistan. After all, they never imagined that the Taliban would be back so soon or in such force or that they would be giving such trouble to the Afghan government of Hamid Karzai and some 40,000 NATO and U.S. troops in the country. For the first time since the fall of 2001, when the Taliban were overthrown, they were beginning to taste the possibility of victory.
As I traveled through Pakistan and particularly the Pashtun lands bordering Afghanistan, I felt as if I were moving through a Taliban spa for rehabilitation and inspiration. Since 2002, the American and Pakistani militaries have focused on North Waziristan and South Waziristan, two of the seven districts making up Pakistan’s semiautonomous tribal areas, which are between the North-West Frontier Province and, to the south, Baluchistan Province; in the days since the 9/11 attacks, some tribes there had sheltered members of Al Qaeda and spawned their own Taliban movement. Meanwhile, in the deserts of Baluchistan, whose capital, Quetta, is just a few hours’ drive from the Afghan city of Kandahar, the Afghan Taliban were openly reassembling themselves under Mullah Omar and his leadership council. Quetta had become a kind of free zone where strategies could be formed, funds picked up, interviews given and victories relished.
In June, I was in Quetta as the Taliban fighters celebrated an attack against Dad Mohammad Khan, an Afghan legislator locally known as Amir Dado. Until recently he was the intelligence chief of Helmand Province. He had worked closely with U.S. Special Forces and was despised by Abdul Baqi — and, to be frank, by most Afghans in the south. Mullah Razayar Nurzai (a nom de guerre), a commander of 300 Taliban fighters who frequently meets with the leadership council and Mullah Omar, took credit for the ambush. Because Pakistan’s intelligence services are fickle — sometimes supporting the Taliban, sometimes arresting its members — I had to meet Nurzai at night, down a dark lane in a village outside Quetta.
My guide was a Pakistani Pashtun sympathetic to the Taliban; we slipped into a courtyard and behind a curtain into a small room with mattresses and a gas lamp. In hobbled a rough, wild-looking graybeard with green eyes and a prosthetic limb fitted into a permanent 1980’s-era shoe. More than a quarter-century of warring had taken its toll on Nurzai’s 46-year-old body but not on his spirit. It was 10 at night, yet he was bounding with energy and bombast about his recent exploits in Kandahar and Helmand. A few days earlier, Nurzai and his men had attacked Amir Dado’s extended family. First, he told me, they shot dead his brother — a former district leader. Then the next day, as members of Dado’s family were driving to the site of the first attack, Nurzai’s men ambushed their convoy. Boys, cousins, uncles: all were killed. Dado himself was safe elsewhere. Nurzai was mildly disappointed and said that they had received bad information. He had no regrets about the killings, however. Abdul Baqi was also delighted by the attack. He would tell me that Dado used to burn rocket casings and pour the melted plastic onto the stomachs of onetime Taliban fighters he and his men had captured. Abdul Baqi also recalled that during the civil war that ended with the Taliban’s seizure of Kabul, Dado and his men had a checkpoint where they “grabbed young boys and robbed people.”
Mullah Omar and his followers formed the Taliban in 1994 to, among other things, bring some justice to Afghanistan and to expel predatory commanders like Dado. But in the early days of Karzai’s government, these regional warlords re-established themselves, with American financing, to fill the power vacuum that the coalition forces were unwilling to fill themselves. The warlords freely labeled their many enemies Al Qaeda or Taliban in order to push the Americans to eradicate them. Some of these men were indeed Taliban. Most, like Abdul Baqi, had accepted their loss of power, but they rejoined the Taliban as a result of harassment. Amir Dado’s own abuses had eventually led to his removal from the Helmand government at United Nations insistence. As one Western diplomat, who requested anonymity out of personal safety concerns, put it: “Amir Dado kept his own prison, authorized the use of serious torture, had very little respect for human life and made security worse.” Yet when I later met Amir Dado in Kabul, he pulled out a letter that an officer in the U.S. Special Forces had written requesting that the Afghan Ministry of Defense install him as Helmand’s police chief and claiming that in his absence “the quality of security in the Helmand Province has dramatically declined.”
One Place, Two Stories
I went to Afghanistan and Pakistan this summer to understand how and why the Taliban were making a comeback five years after American and Afghan forces drove them from power. What kind of experience would lead Afghans to reject what seemed to be an emerging democratic government? Had we missed something that made Taliban rule appealing? Were they the only opposition the aggrieved could turn to? Or, as many Afghans were saying, was this Pakistan up to its old tricks — cooperating with the Americans and Karzai while conspiring to bring back the Taliban, who had been valued “assets” before 9/11?
And why has the Bush administration’s message remained that Afghanistan is a success, Iraq a challenge? “In Afghanistan, the trajectory is a hopeful and promising one,” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wrote on the op-ed page of The Washington Post earlier this month. Afghanistan’s rise from the ashes of the anti-Taliban war would mean that the Bush administration was prevailing in replacing terror with democracy and human rights.
Meanwhile, a counternarrative was emerging, and it belonged to the Taliban, or the A.C.M., as NATO officers call them — the Anti-Coalition Militia. In Kabul, Kandahar and Pakistan, I found their video discs and tapes in the markets. They invoke a nostalgia for the jihad against the Russians and inspire their viewers to rise up again. One begins with clattering Chinooks disgorging American soldiers into the desert. Then we see the new Afghan government onstage, focusing in on the Northern Alliance warlords — Abdul Rashid Dostum, Burhanuddin Rabbani, Karim Khalili, Muhammad Fahim, Ismail Khan, Abdul Sayyaf. It cuts to American soldiers doing push-ups and pinpointing targets on maps; next it shows bombs the size of bathtubs dropping from planes and missiles emblazoned with “Royal Navy” rocketing through the sky; then it moves to hospital beds and wounded children. Message: America and Britain brought back the warlords and bombed your children. In the next clip, there are metal cages under floodlights and men in orange jumpsuits, bowed and crouching. It cuts back to the wild eyes of John Walker Lindh and shows trucks hauling containers crammed with young Afghan and Pakistani prisoners — Taliban, hundreds of whom would suffocate to death in those containers, supposedly at the command of the warlord and current army chief of staff, General Dostum. Then back to American guards wheeling hunger-striking Guantánamo prisoners on gurneys. Interspliced are older images, a bit fuzzy, of young Afghan men, hands tied behind their backs, heads bowed, hauled off by Communist guards. The message: Foreigners have invaded our lands again; Americans, Russians — no difference.
During the period from 1994 to 2001, the Taliban were a cloistered clique with little interest in global affairs. Today they are far more sophisticated and outward-looking. “The Taliban of the 90’s were concerned with their district or province,” says Waheed Muzhda, a senior aide at the Supreme Court in Kabul, who before the Taliban fell worked in their Foreign Ministry. “Now they have links with other networks. Before, only two Internet connections existed — one was with Mullah Omar’s office and the other at the Foreign Ministry here in Kabul. Now they are connected to the world.” Though this is still very much an Afghan insurgency, fueled by complex local grievances and power struggles, the films sold in the markets of Pakistan and Afghanistan merge the Taliban story with that of the larger struggle of the Muslim umma, the global community of Islam: images of U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Israelis dragging off young Palestinian men and throwing off Palestinian mothers clinging to their sons. Humiliation. Oppression. Followed by the same on Afghan soil: Northern Alliance fighters perching their guns atop the bodies of dead Taliban. In the Taliban story, Special Forces soldiers desecrate the bodies of Taliban fighters by burning them, the Koran is desecrated in Guantánamo toilets, the Prophet Muhammad is desecrated in Danish cartoons and finally an apostate, Abdul Rahman, the Afghan who was arrested earlier this year for converting to Christianity, desecrates Islam and is not only not punished but is released and flown off to Italy.
It is not at all clear that Afghans want the return of a Taliban government. But even sophisticated Kabulis told me that they are fed up with the corruption. And in the Pashtun regions, which make up about half the country, Afghans are fed up with five years of having their homes searched and the young men of their villages rounded up in the name of counterinsurgency. Earlier this month in Kabul, Gen. David Richards, the British commander of NATO’s Afghanistan force, imagined what Afghans are thinking: “They will say, ‘We do not want the Taliban, but then we would rather have that austere and unpleasant life that that might involve than another five years of fighting.”’ He estimated that if NATO didn’t succeed in bringing substantial economic development to Afghanistan soon, some 70 percent of Afghans would shift their loyalty to the Taliban.
Nation-Building, Again
In the middle of Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand Province, a metal sign tilts into the road advertising the New York English Language Center. It is a relic of the last American nation-building scheme. Half a century ago, this town, built at the confluence of the Arghandab and Helmand Rivers, was the headquarters for an ambitious dam project partly financed by the United States and contracted out to Morrison-Knudsen, an engineering company that helped build Cape Canaveral and the Golden Gate Bridge.
Lashkar Gah (literally, “the place of soldiers”) was to be a model American town. Irrigation from the project would create farms out of the desert. Today you can still see the suburban-style homes with gardens open to the streets, although the typical Afghan home is a fort with walls guarding the family’s privacy. Those modernizing dreams of America and Afghanistan were eventually defeated by nature, culture and the war to drive the Russians out of Afghanistan in the 1980’s. What remains is an intense nostalgia among the engineers, cooks and farmers of Lashkar Gah, who remember that time as one of employment and peace. Today, Lashkar Gah is home to a NATO base.
Down the road from the base stands a lovely new building erected by an N.G.O. for the local Ministry of Women’s Affairs. It is big, white and, on the day I visited, was empty except for three women getting ready to leave. “It’s so close to the foreigners, and the women are afraid of getting killed by car bombs,” the ministry’s deputy told me. She was a school headmistress and landowner, dressed elegantly in a lime-colored blouse falling below the knees and worn over matching trousers. She weighed the Taliban regime against this new one in terms of pragmatic choices, not terror or ideology. She said that she had just wrapped up the case of a girl who had been kidnapped and raped by Kandahari police officers, something that would not have happened under the Taliban. “Their security was outstanding,” she said.
Under the Taliban, she said, a poppy ban was enforced. “Now the governors tell the people, ‘Just cultivate a little bit,”’ she said. “So people take this opportunity and grow a lot.” The farmers lease land to grow poppies. The British and the police eradicate it. The farmer can’t pay back the landowner. “So instead of paying, he gives the landowner his daughter.”
A few weeks before I arrived in Helmand, John Walters, the director of the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy, told reporters that Afghan authorities were succeeding in reducing opium-poppy cultivation. Yet despite hundreds of millions of dollars being allocated by Congress to stop the trade, a United Nations report in September estimated that this year’s crop was breaking all records — 6,100 metric tons compared with 4,100 last year. When I visited Helmand, schools in Lashkar Gah were closed in part because teachers and students were busy harvesting the crop. A prosecutor from the Crimes Department laughed as he told me that his clerk, driver and bodyguard hadn’t made it to work. They were all harvesting. It requires a lot of workers, and you can earn $12 a day compared with the $2 you get for wheat. Hence the hundreds of young, poor Talibs from Pakistan’s madrasas who had flocked to earn that cash and who made easy converts for the coming jihad.
Walters had singled out Helmand for special praise. Yet just a short drive from the provincial capital, I was surrounded by poppy farmers — 12-year-old boys, 75-year-old men — hard at work, their hands caked in opium paste as they scooped figlike pulp off the bulbs into a sack tied around their waists. One little boy was dragging a long poppy stem attached to a car he had made out of bulbs. Haji Abdul, a 73-year-old Moses of a man, was the owner of the farm and one of those nostalgic for the heyday of the Helmand Valley project. He had worked with Americans for 15 years as a welder and manager. He was the first to bring electricity to his district. Now there was none.
“Why do you think people put mines out for the British and Italians doing eradication when they came here to save us?” He answered his own question: “Thousands of lands ready for harvest were destroyed. How difficult will it be for our people to tolerate that! You are taking the food of my children, cutting my feet and disabling me. With one bullet, I will kill you.” Fortunately he didn’t have to kill anyone. He had paid 2,000 afghanis per jerib (about a half acre) of land to the police, he told me, adding that they would then share the spoils with the district administrator and all the other Interior Ministry officials so that only a small percentage of the poppy would be eradicated.
When I asked Manan Farahi, the director of counterterrorism efforts for Karzai’s government, why the Taliban were so strong in Helmand, he said that Helmandis had, in fact, hated the Taliban because of Mullah Omar’s ban on poppy cultivation. “The elders were happy this government was coming and they could plant again,” Farahi told me. “But then the warlords came back and let their militias roam freely. They were settling old scores — killing people, stealing their opium. And because they belonged to the government, the people couldn’t look to the government for protection. And because they had the ear of the Americans, the people couldn’t look to the Americans. Into this need stepped the Taliban.” And this time the Taliban, far from suppressing the drug trade, agreed to protect it.
A Dealer’s Life
The Continental Guest House in Kandahar, with its lovely gardens, potted geraniums and Internet access in every room, was mostly empty when I arrived, a remnant of the city’s recently stalled economic resurgence.
To find out how the opium trade works and how it’s related to the Taliban’s rise, I spent the afternoon with an Afghan who told me his name was Razzaq. He is a medium-level smuggler in his late 20’s who learned his trade as a refugee in Iran. He was wearing a traditional Kandahari bejeweled skull cap, a dark blazer and a white shalwar kameez, a traditional outfit consisting of loose pants covered by a tunic. He moved and spoke with the confident ease of a well-protected man. “The whole country is in our services,” he told me, “all the way to Turkey.” This wasn’t bravado. From Mazar-i-Sharif, in northern Afghanistan, he brings opium in the form of a gooey paste, packaged in bricks. From Badakhshan in the northeast, he brings crystal — a sugary substance made from heroin. And from Jalalabad, in the east on the road to Peshawar, he brings pure heroin. All of this goes through Baramcha, an unmanned border town in Helmand near Pakistan. Sometimes he pays off the national soldiers to use their vehicles, he said. Sometimes the national policemen. Or he hides it well, and if there is a tough checkpoint, he calls ahead and pays them off. “The soldiers get 2,000 afghanis a month, and I give them 100,000,” he explained with an angelic smile. “So even if I had a human head in my car, they’d let me go.” It’s not hard to see why Razzaq is so successful. He has a certain charm and looks like the modest tailor he once was, not a man steeped in illegal business.
Razzaq’s smuggling career began in Zahedan, a remote and unruly Iranian town near the border with Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is filled with Afghan refugees who, like Razzaq and his family, fled after the Russian invasion in 1979. Razzaq apprenticed as a tailor under his father and eventually opened his own shop, which the Iranians promptly shut down. They said he had no right as a refugee to own a shop. He began painting buildings, but that, too, proved a bureaucratic challenge. He was paid in checks, and the bank refused to cash them without a bank account, which he could not get.
Razzaq was newly married with dreams of a good life for his family. So one day he took a chance. “I had gotten to know smugglers at my tailoring shop,” he told me over a meal of mutton and rice on the floor of my hotel room. “One of them was an old man, so no one ever suspected him. The smugglers asked me to go with him to Gerdi Jangel” — an Afghan refugee town in Pakistan — “and bring back 750 grams of heroin to Zahedan. The security searched us on the bus, but I’d hidden it in the heels of my shoes, and of course they didn’t search the old man. I was so happy when we made it back. I thought I was born for the first time into this world.”
So he took another chance and managed to fly to Tehran carrying four kilos in his bag. Each time he overcame another obstacle, he became more addicted to the easy cash. When the Iranian authorities imported sniffing dogs to catch heroin smugglers, Razzaq and his friends filled hypodermic needles with some heroin dissolved in water and sprayed the liquid on cars at the bus station that would be continuing on to Tehran, Isfahan and Shiraz. “The dogs at the checkpoint went mad. They had to search 50 cars. They decided the dogs were defective and sent them back, and that saved us for a while.” Eventually, he said, they concocted a substance to conceal the heroin smell from the new pack of dogs.
After the fall of the Taliban, Razzaq moved back to Helmand, built a comfortable house and began supporting his extended family with his expanding trafficking business. Razzaq’s main challenge today is Iran. While the Americans have turned more or less a blind eye to the drug-trade spree of their warlord allies, Iran has steadily cranked up its drug war. (Some 3,000 Iranian lawmen have been killed in the last three decades battling traffickers.) To cross the desert borders, Razzaq moves in convoys of 18 S.U.V.’s. Some contain drugs. The rest are loaded with food supplies, antiaircraft guns, rocket launchers, antitank missiles and militiamen, often on loan from the Taliban. The fighters are Baluch from Iran and Afghanistan. The commanders are Afghans.
Razzaq’s run, as he described it, was a scene out of “Mad Max.” Three days were spent dodging and battling Iranian forces in the deserts around the earthquake-stricken city of Bam. Once they made it to Isfahan, however, in central Iran, they were home free. They released the militiamen, transferred the stuff to ordinary cars and drove to Tehran, where other smugglers picked up the drugs and passed them on to ethnic Turks in Tabriz. The Turks would bring them home, and from there they went to the markets of Europe.
Should he ever run into a problem in Afghanistan, he told me, “I simply make a phone call. And my voice is known to ministers, of course. They are in my network. Every network has a big man supporting them in the government.” The Interior Ministry’s director of counternarcotics in Kabul had told me the same thing. Anyway, if the smugglers have problems on the ground, they say, they just pay the Taliban to destroy the enemy commanders.
Razzaq has at times contemplated getting out of the smuggling trade, he said, but the easy money is too alluring. Depending on the market, he can earn from $1,500 to $7,500 a month. Most Afghans can’t make that in a year. Besides, he said, “all the governors are doing this, so why shouldn’t we?”
Losers Become Winners
In December 2001, not long after the Taliban were routed, I visited the Shah Wali Kot district, several hours’ drive on unpaved roads from Kandahar, a Mordor land of rock mountains shaped like sagging crescents and mud-baked houses melting into the dunes. The Taliban leaders had fled, mostly to Pakistan. Gul Agha Shirzai, formerly a local warlord and soon-to-be new governor, and his soldiers had swarmed into power while the Americans set up their operations base in Mullah Omar’s Xanadu-like residence. I was with a large group of Populzai, the clan of the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai.
We were in a big guest room with more than a dozen men gathered in a circle, all wearing the kind of turbans that look like gargantuan ice-cream swirls. The ones in black turban swirls were giggling, chatting and slapping one another on the back. The ones in white turban swirls were sulking, grumbling or mute. In this group, the miserable white turbans were Taliban men. They had just lost their pickup trucks, weapons, money, prestige and jobs, all of which had gone to the gleeful black turbans.
Today those miserable white turbans have taken to the mountains to fight. The gleeful black turbans are under siege. I saw one of the black turbans this summer, the Shah Wali Kot district leader, in the garden of the Kandahar governor’s palace. He was a mess. He chuckled loudly when I asked him how it was back in Shah Wali Kot. “Frankly, we are just defending ourselves from the Taliban,” he said. “Our head is on the pillow at night, but we do not sleep.”
That small division among the Populzai in Shah Wali Kot echoes the larger division of the Pashtun into two main branches: the Durrani and the Ghilzai. The Durrani, Karzai’s tribe, have dominated for the last two centuries in Afghanistan and regard themselves as the ruling elite. In the south, the Ghilzai were often treated as the nomadic, scrappy cousins. With the exception of Mullah Omar, who had been a poor Ghilzai farmer, the leaders of the Taliban tended to be Durrani. These days, the perception among the southern Ghilzai is that they are persecuted, that the jails are filled with their people, while the Durrani in the south received all the Japanese, U.S. and British contracts and jobs. From what I could gather during my weeks in Afghanistan, these perceptions were mostly true. But even if they were exaggerated, such perceptions, in an illiterate society, have a way of quickly morphing into reality.
Take Panjwai, a district just outside Kandahar, where hundreds of Taliban massed this summer, taking advantage of the changeover from American soldiers to a NATO force of Canadian troops. One afternoon I met a red-haired propagandist and writer for the Taliban in a Kandahar office building. With his slight lisp, chain-smoking habit and eclectic reading — French novelists and Arabic philosophers — he seemed more a tormented graduate student than the landless villager from Panjwai he was. Panjwai is a mishmash of tribes, and the Taliban were exploiting the grievances of the Nurzai, a tribe that has felt persecuted and unfairly targeted for poppy eradication. Traders in Kandahar, he said, were donating money to the Taliban. Landowners were paying them to fight off eradicators. The Taliban were paying poor, unemployed men to fight. And religious scholars were delivering the message that it was time for jihad because the Americans were no different from the Russians. Just a few weeks earlier, the Taliban went on a killing spree in Panjwai. They beheaded a tribal leader in his home, shot another in the bazaar and hanged a man near a shrine with a note tacked on his body: “SPY.”
The Taliban were feeling bold enough that one afternoon Mullah Ibrahim, a Taliban intelligence agent, dropped by my hotel for lunch. He was a Ghilzai, from Helmand, and told me he had tried to lead a normal life under the official amnesty program. Instead, he was locked up, beaten and so harassed by Helmandi intelligence and police officers that his tribal elders told him to leave for Pakistan and join the Taliban there. Then, about a year ago, he decided that he was tired of fighting and living as a fugitive and accepted a reconciliation offer from an Afghan general. Pakistani intelligence got wind of this and imprisoned him; upon his release, the Pakistanis gave him money and a motorbike and pressured him to go back to war. He is still tired of war, but the Pakistanis won’t let him live in peace, and now if he tries to reconcile with the Kabul government, he told me, the Taliban will kill him.
When fighting broke out on the main highway near Kandahar, I saw that the police had tied up a group of villagers — but the Taliban had all escaped. One of those village men, his hands bound behind his back, told me that he had peeped out from his house earlier that day and saw some 200 Taliban with new guns and rocket launchers. They wanted food and threatened him and other villagers. “But I am not afraid of them,” he said loudly. “I am only afraid of this government.” Why? “Look at what they do. They can’t get the Taliban, so they arrest us. We have no hope from them anymore. And when we call and tell them Taliban are here, no one comes.” As an engineer from Panjwai who had been an Afghan senator during the Communist era told me: “We are now like camels. In Islam, a camel can be slaughtered in two different ways.
“The Taliban are using rivalries and enmities between people to get soldiers, the same tactics as the mujahedeen used against the Russians,” the engineer continued. “Just like in Russian times they come and say, ‘We are defending the country from the infidels.’ They start asking for food. Then they ask the people for soldiers and say, ‘We will give you weapons.’ And that’s how it starts. And the emotions are rising in the people now. They are saying, ‘Kaffirs have invaded our land.”’
Qayum Karzai, the president’s older brother and a legislator from Kandahar, seemed utterly depressed when I met him. “For the last four years, the Taliban were saying that the Americans will leave here,” he said. “We were stupid and didn’t believe it. Now they think it’s a victory that the Americans left.”
With the Americans on their way out and the NATO force not yet in control, the Kandahar Police were left on the front line: underfinanced, underequipped, untrained — and often stoned. Which is perhaps what made them so brave. One afternoon I ran into a group who said their friends had just been killed when a Talib posing as a policeman served them poisoned tea. A shaggy-haired officer in a black tunic was standing by his pickup, freshly ripped up by a barrage of bullets, and staring at my feet. “I envy your shoes,” he said, looking back at his own torn rubber sandals. “I envy your Toyota,” he said and laughed. And then looking at my pen and notebook, he said, “I envy you can read and write.” It’s not too late, I offered feebly, but he tapped his temple and shook his head. “It doesn’t work anymore,” he said. “I smoke hash. I smoke opium. I’m drinking because we’re always thinking and nervous.” He was 35. He had been fighting for 20 years. Four of his friends had been killed in the fighting the other night. He had to support children, a wife and parents on a salary of about $100 a month. And, he said, “we haven’t been paid in four months.” No wonder, then, that the population complained that the police were all thieves.
At Kandahar’s hospital I met a 17-year-old policeman (who had been with the police since he was 14) tending to his wounded friend. He was in a jovial mood, amazed he wasn’t dead. He said they had been given an order to cut the Taliban’s escape route. Instead they were ambushed by the Taliban, ran out of bullets and had no phones to call for backup. “We ran away,” he said with a nervous giggle. “The Taliban chased us, shouting: ‘Hey, sons of Bush! Where are you going? We want to kill you.”’
Last month, NATO forces struck back around Panjwai with artillery and aerial bombardments, killing an estimated 500 Taliban fighters and destroying homes and schools. But unless NATO can stay for years, create a trustworthy police force and spend the millions necessary to regenerate the district, the Taliban will be back.
Deciding to Fight
Inside the old city walls of Peshawar, Pakistan, a half-hour drive from the Afghan border, in a bazaar named after the storytellers who enthralled Central Asian gold and silk merchants with their tales of war and tragic love, sits the 17th-century Mohabat Khan Mosque. It is a place of cool, marble calm amid the dense market streets. Yousaf Qureshi is the prayer leader there and director of the Jamia Ashrafia, a Deobandi madrasa. He had recently announced a pledge by the jewelers’ association to pay $1 million to anyone who would kill a Danish cartoonist who caricatured the Prophet Muhammad. Qureshi himself offered $25,000 and a car. I found Qureshi seated on a cushion behind a low glass desk covered with papers and business cards — ambassadors, N.G.O. workers, Islamic scholars, mujahedeen commanders: he has conversed with them all. His office resembles an antiques shop, the walls displaying oversize prayer beads, knives inlaid with ivory and astrakhan caps. It was day’s end, and Qureshi was checking the proofs for his 51st book, called “The Benefits of Koran.”
Qureshi told me that he meets with Pakistan’s president, Pervez Musharraf, about twice a year. Qureshi understands Musharraf’s predicament: “The heart of this government is with the Taliban. The tongue is not.” He didn’t claim total insider knowledge, but he said, “I think they want a weak government and want to support the Taliban without letting them win.” Why? “We are asking Musharraf, ‘What are you doing,’ and he says: ‘I’m moving in both ways. I want to support the Taliban, but I can’t afford to displease America. I am caught between the devil and the deep sea.”’
Not long ago, Qureshi said, he received three emissaries from Mullah Omar who wanted Qureshi to warn another religious leader to stop preaching against the Taliban. “I refused,” he said. Later Sheikh Yassin, one of the messengers, was arrested by the I.S.I., Pakistan’s military intelligence service. So why, I asked, does Qureshi say the I.S.I. is supporting the Taliban? “That is the double policy of the government,” he replied. Even in the 1990’s, he said, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was supporting the official Afghan government of Burhanuddin Rabbani while the I.S.I. was supporting his opponent, Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, as he rained thousands of rockets upon Rabbani’s government and the citizens of Kabul. Qureshi told me that if he and local traders didn’t want Al Qaeda or the Taliban to flourish, then they wouldn’t. “We are supporting them to give the Americans a tough time,” he said. “Leave Afghanistan, and the Taliban and foreign fighters will not give Karzai problems. All the administrators of madrasas know what our students are doing, but we won’t tell them not to fight in Afghanistan.”
The new Taliban fighters in Afghanistan are of three basic types. There are the old war-addicted jihadis who were left out of the 2001 Bonn conference, which determined the postwar shape of Afghan politics and the carve-up of the country. There are the “second generation” Afghan refugees: poor, educated in Pakistan’s madrasas and easily recruited by their elders. And then there are the young men who had jobs and prestige in the former Taliban regime and were unable to find a place for themselves in the new Afghanistan.
Coincidentally, there are also now three fronts. One is led by Mullah Omar’s council in Quetta. The second is led by Jalaluddin Haqqani, a hero of the jihad against the Soviets who joined the Taliban. Although well into his 80’s, he orchestrates insurgent attacks through his sons in Paktia, Khost and Paktika, the Afghan provinces close to Waziristan, where he is based. Finally, there is Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the former leader of Hezb-i-Islami, the anti-Soviet fighters entrusted with the most money and arms by the U.S. and Pakistan. He had opposed the Taliban, living in uneasy exile in Iran until the U.S. persuaded Tehran to boot him out; he sneaked into the mountainous eastern borderlands. Since the early days of Karzai’s government, he has promised to organize Mullah Omar’s followers with his educated cadres and finance their jihad against Karzai and the American invaders. Old competitors are coming together in much the way the mujahedeen factions cooperated to fight the Russians. Hekmatyar adds a lethal ingredient to this stew: his ties and his followers extend all through Afghanistan, including the north and the west, where he is exploiting factional grievances that have nothing to do with the Pashtun discontent in the south.
An Afghan I met outside Peshawar — for his safety he asked me not to use his full name — was typical of the 20-something Talibs who had flourished under the Taliban regime. He was from Day Chopan, a mountainous region in Zabul Province, northeast of Kandahar. When the Northern Alliance and the Americans took Afghanistan, he escaped through the hills on an old smuggling route to the North-West Frontier Province.
It was familiar terrain. A.’s father had been a religious teacher who studied in Sami ul-Haq’s famous Haqqaniya madrasa near the Khyber Pass and preached jihad for Harakat, one of the southern mujahedeen parties whose members filled Mullah Omar’s ranks. Those old ties still bind and have provided a network for recruiting. A. grew up in madrasas in the tribal Pashtun lands of Waziristan, where he learned to fire guns as a child in the American-financed mujahedeen camps. As a teenage religious student in Wana, the capital of South Waziristan, he would go door to door collecting bread for his fellow Talibs. Behind one of those doors, he saw a girl and fell in love. When his father wouldn’t let him marry the girl, he threatened to go fight in Afghanistan. His father would not relent, and A. signed up at the local Taliban office in Peshawar. “We got good food, free service, everything was Islamic,” he told me. “It was the best life, rather than staying in that poor madrasa.” His father soon did relent, and A. became engaged, but he was only 15 and had no money. So he went back to the Taliban and was soon working beside the deputy defense minister. “Of course, then there were bags of money,” he said.
A., now 28, was living in an Afghan refugee village that used to belong to Hekmatyar’s group. Weak with malaria, he was nevertheless plump and jovial, even funny at times. Only when the Pakistani intelligence services came up did his already sallow hues pale to old bone.
After fleeing the American bombardment in 2001, he told me, the Taliban arrived in Pakistan tattered, dispersed and demoralized. But in the months after the collapse, senior Taliban leaders told their comrades to stay at home, keep in touch and wait for the call. Some Taliban told me that they actually waited to see if there was a chance to work with Karzai’s government.
“Our emir,” as A. referred to Mullah Omar, slowly contacted the commanders and told them to find out who was dead and who was alive. Those commanders appointed group commanders to collect the underlings like A. Weapons stashed away in Afghanistan’s mountains were excavated. Funds were raised through the wide and varied Islamic network — Karachi businessmen, Peshawar goldsmiths, Saudi oil men, Kuwaiti traders and jihadi sympathizers within the Pakistani military and intelligence ranks.
Mullah Omar named a 10-man leadership council, A. explained. Smaller councils were created for every province and district. Most of this was done from the safety of Pakistan, and in 2003 Mullah Omar dispatched Mullah Dadullah to the madrasas of Baluchistan and Karachi to gather the dispersed Talibs and find fresh recruits. Pakistani authorities were reportedly seen with him. Still, neither Musharraf nor his military men in Baluchistan did anything to arrest him.
It was a perfect job for Dadullah, whose reputation for bravery was matched by his savagery and his many war wounds, collected in more than 25 years of fighting. In 1998, his fighters slaughtered hundreds of Hazaras (Shiites of Mongol descent) in Bamiyan Province, an act so brutal it was even too much for Mullah Omar, who had him disarmed at the time. Dadullah’s very savagery, filmed and now often circulated on videotape, coupled with his promotional flair, were just the ingredients Omar needed to put the Taliban back on the map.
Today, Quetta has assumed the character of Peshawar in the 1980’s, a suspicious place of spies and counterspies and double agents. It is not just the hundreds of men in typical Afghan Pashtun clothing — the roughly wound turbans, dark shalwar kameez, eyes inked with kohl — who squat on Thursday afternoons outside the Kandahari mosque in the center of town, comparing notes on the latest fighting in Helmand or the best religious teachers. Rather, as I wandered the narrow alleyways of the Afghan neighborhoods, my local guides would say, “That’s where Mullah Dadullah was living” or “That’s where Mullah Amir Khan Haqqani is living.” (Haqqani is the Taliban’s governor in exile for Zabul Province.) Mullah Dadullah is now a folk hero for young Talibs like A. And all the Taliban I met told me that every time Dadullah gives another interview or appears on the battlefield, it serves as an instant injection of inspiration.
By 2004, A. said, he was meeting a lot of Arabs — Saudis, Iraqis, Palestinians — who taught the Afghans about I.E.D.’s (improvised explosive devices) and suicide bombings. “They taught us how to put explosives in plastic,” he told me. “They taught us wiring and triggers. The Arabs are the best instructors in that.” But now the Afghans are doing fine on their own. Pakistani jihadis in Afghanistan received their training, they told me, from Pakistani officers in Kashmir.
The southerners have also forged ties with the Pakistani Taliban in Waziristan. There is a free flow of arms and men between Waziristan and the Afghan provinces across the border. According to A., even Uzbeks from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan have joined some of the fighters now in A.’s home mountains in Day Chopan.
It was disheartening to hear A. describe his first encounter with Americans, who were trying to set up a base in a remote region of Zabul. Though they were building a road where no roads had gone before, he could perceive that asphalt only as a means for the Americans to transport their armored vehicles and occupy Muslim lands. A friend of his joined us as we were talking. He had just arrived in Pakistan from the Day Chopan region and said that the Americans were like a cyclone of evil, stealing their almonds and violating their Pashtunwali (the Pashtun tribal laws). In this instance, he meant the law by which even a cousin will not enter your house without knocking first.
A. is now a media man in Pakistan, coordinating the editing of films for discs, censoring them in case there are commanders who don’t want their faces seen and distributing them. He proudly offered me the latest disc of Mullah Dadullah beheading some “spies for the Americans.” He said he had sold 25,000 CD’s about the fighting in Waziristan.
He was full of contradictions. He said that if he didn’t have a house in Day Chopan, he would never spend a single night there because there was no education, no electricity, no power, nothing, just a heap of stones. Yet he did not want America to change all that. “We don’t like progress by Americans,” he declared. “We don’t like roads by Americans. We would rather walk on tired feet as long as we are walking in an Islamic state.”
Was it all just bravado speaking? Was an opportunity to build bridges to young men like A. somehow lost or just neglected? It was hard to tell. But when the I.S.I. subject came up again, his tone changed. “They are snakes,” he told me. He said that they were trying to create a new, obedient leader and oust the independent-minded Mullah Omar, and for that, the real Taliban hated them. Then he said: “I told you that we burn schools because they’re teaching Christianity, but actually most of the Taliban don’t like this burning of schools or destroying roads and bridges, because the Taliban, too, could use them. Those acts were being done under I.S.I. orders. They don’t want progress in Afghanistan.” An Indian engineer was beheaded in Zabul in April, he said, and that was also ordered by Pakistan, which, from fear of the influence of its enemy, India, was encouraging attacks on Indian companies. “People are not telling the story, because no one can trust anyone, and if I.S.I. knows I told you,” he said, he would be dead.
Pakistan’s Assets
There are many theories for why Pakistan might have wanted to help the Taliban reconstitute themselves. Afghan-Pakistani relations have always been fraught. One among the many disputes has to do with the Durand Line, the boundary drawn up by the British in 1893 partly to divide the Pashtun tribes, who were constantly revolting against the British. The Afghan government has never recognized this line, which winds its way from the Hindu Kush mountains of North-West Frontier Province 1,500 miles down to the deserts of Baluchistan, as its border. Nor have the Pashtun tribes. The Pakistanis may hope to force Karzai to recognize the Durand line in exchange for stability.
Another theory is that Musharraf must appease the religious parties whom he needs to extend his power past the end of his term next year. Musharraf bought them off, gave them control of the North-West Frontier Province and Baluchistan and let them use the Taliban. And finally, the Pakistanis see Afghanistan as their rightful client. They want an accommodating regime, not Karzai, whose main backers are the U.S. and India, Pakistan’s nemesis.
Pakistan’s well-established secular Pashtun nationalist political leaders remain distraught that their lands have again become sanctuaries for the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani religious parties, which, since elections in 2002, rule these provinces and are completing a Talibanization of the region. The secular leaders point to another layer in Pakistan’s games: keeping the tribal areas autonomous enables Pakistan’s intelligence services to ward off the gaze of Westerners and keep their jihadis safely tucked away.
One thing you notice if you visit the homes of retired generals in Pakistan is that they live in a lavish fashion typical of South America’s dictatorship-era military elite. They control most of the country’s economy and real estate, and like President Musharraf, himself a former general, they do not want to relinquish power.
Although there is a secularist strain in the Pakistani military, it has been aligned with religious hard-liners since the army’s inception in 1947. Many officers still see their duty as defending the Muslim world, but their raison d’être has been undermined by the fact that though Pakistan was founded as a refuge for South Asia’s Muslims, more Muslims today live in India. They seem to envy the jihadis’ clarity. The militants had no identity crises. According to Najim Sethi, a prominent Pakistani journalist, military officers often have “a degree of self-disgust for selling themselves” to the Americans, and they still bear a grudge against the United States for abandoning them after the Afghan jihad and, more recently, for sanctioning Pakistan over its nuclear program. The standard army phrase about the Americans was, he said, “They used us like a condom.”
Officers spoke to me as if they were simply translating the feelings of the jihadis for a tone-deaf audience, but they sounded more like ventriloquists. One retired colonel I spoke to was a relative of a Taliban leader from Waziristan, Abdullah Massoud, who had earned both sympathy and reverence for his time in Guantánamo Bay. Massoud was captured fighting the Americans and the Northern Alliance and spent two years there, claiming to be a simple Afghan Talib. Upon his release, he made it home to Waziristan and resumed his war against the U.S. With his long hair, his prosthetic limb and impassioned speeches, he quickly became a charismatic inspiration to Waziristan’s youth.
Since 2001, some of Waziristan’s tribes have refused to hand over Qaeda members living among them. Under intense American pressure, Pakistan agreed for the first time in its history to invade the tribal areas. Hundreds of civilians and soldiers were killed. American helicopters were seen in the region, as were American spies. The militants (with some army accomplices) retaliated with two assassination attempts against Musharraf late in 2003. He struck back, but as the civilian casualties mounted and the military began to balk at killing Pakistanis, Musharraf agreed to a deal in the spring of 2004 whereby the militants would give up their guests in return for cash. Pakistani officers and the militants hugged and shed tears during a public reconciliation. But the militants did not relinquish their Al Qaeda guests, and they took advantage of the amnesty to execute tribal elders they said had helped the Pakistani military. The tribal structure in Waziristan was devastated, and the Taliban took to the streets to declare the Islamic emirate of Waziristan. Since Musharraf signed a truce with the militants last month, attacks launched from Waziristan into Afghanistan, according to NATO, have risen by 300 percent.
“Muslim governments are not able to face the Americans,” the retired colonel from Waziristan said, explaining the mujahedeen mind-set. “If Muslim governments should stand up against duplicity and foreign hegemonic designs, and they don’t, who will? Someone has to stand up to defend the Muslim countries, and it’s this that gives the jihadis the courage and zeal to stand up to the worst atrocities. This is the core issue of the mujahedeen movement. You call it the war on terror. The mujahedeen call it jihad.” And so, essentially, did he.
One afternoon, in the midst of a monsoon, I sought out one of the founders of the pro-jihadi strategy, the retired general Mirza Aslam Beg. He lived in Rawalpindi, the military capital half an hour from Islamabad, in a brick and tile-roofed mansion with a basketball hoop, flowing greenery and Judy, his one-eyed cocker spaniel. The house was immaculate, with marble floors, rugs, fine china and porcelain on display behind glass and an amusing portrait of Aslam Beg as a young, Ray-Banned, pommaded officer. His mansion sits across the street from Musharraf’s.
Aslam Beg played a leading role in the military’s creation of “asymmetrical assets,” jargon for the jihadis who have long been used by the military as proxies in Kashmir and Afghanistan. He was chief of the army staff from 1988 to 1991, while the Pakistani nuclear scientist A.Q. Khan was selling the country’s nuclear technology to Iran, Libya and North Korea. Beg held talks with the Iranians about exchanging Iranian oil for Pakistani nuclear skill.
Aslam Beg likes to remind visitors that he was one of a group of army officers trained by the C.I.A. in the 1950’s as a “stay-behind organization” that would melt into the population if ever the Soviet Union overran Pakistan. Those brigadiers and lieutenant colonels then trained and directed the Afghan jihadis.
In the 1980’s, “the C.I.A. set up the largest support and administrative bases in Mohmand agency, Waziristan and Baluchistan,” Aslam Beg told me. “These were the logistics bases for eight long years, and you can imagine the relations that developed. And then Chechens, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Saudis developed family relations with the local people.” The Taliban, he said, fell back after 2001 to these baselines. “In 2003, when the U.S. attacked Iraq, a whole new dimension was added to the conflict. The foreign mujahedeen who’d fought in Afghanistan started moving back to Afghanistan and Iraq.” And the old Afghan jihadi leaders stopped by the mansion of their mentor, Aslam Beg, to tell him they were planning to wage war against the American occupiers.
As the rain outside turned to hail, banging against the windows, Aslam Beg ate some English sandwiches that had been wheeled in by a servant. “As a believer,” he went on, “I’ll tell you how I understand it. In the Holy Book there’s an injunction that the believer must reach out to defend the tyrannized. The words of God are, ‘What restrains you from fighting for those helpless men, women and children who due to their weakness are being brutalized and are calling you to free them from atrocities being perpetuated on them.’ This is a direct message, and it may not impact the hearts and minds of all believers. Maybe one in 10,000 will leave their home and go to the conflicts where Muslims are engaged in liberation movements, such as Chechnya, Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan and Kashmir. Now it’s a global deterrent force.”
The Authentic Jihad
The old city of Lahore, with its broad boulevards and banyan-tree canopies, remains the cultural and intellectual heart of Pakistan. It is home to a small elite of journalists, editors, authors, painters, artists and businessmen. Najam Sethi, editor in chief of The Friday Times, and his wife, Jugnu Mohsin, the publisher, are popular fixtures among this crowd. Like so many of Pakistan’s intellectuals, they have had their share of run-ins with government security agents. For pushing the bounds of press freedom, Sethi was dragged from his bedroom during Nawaz Sharif’s reign, beaten, gagged and detained without charge. Musharraf, in his new autobiography, claims that Nawaz Sharif wanted him to court-martial Sethi for treason, an act that seemed ludicrous to him, and he refused.
I met him one afternoon at the newspaper’s offices as he was preparing his weekly editorial. He is a tall, affable man with smiling eyes and large glasses. And he got right down to business, providing an analysis of why Pakistan had decided to bring its “assets” — by which he meant the Taliban and Kashmiri jihadis — off the shelf.
In the days following 9/11, when Musharraf gathered together major editors to tell them that he had no choice but to withdraw his support for the Taliban, Sethi raised the touchy issue of the other jihadis. He said that if Musharraf was abandoning the Taliban, he would have to abandon the sectarian jihadis (fighting the Shiites), the Kashmir jihadis, all of the jihadis, because they were all trained in mind by the same religious leaders and in body by the same Pakistani forces.
In January 2002, Musharraf gave an unusually long televised speech to the nation. He reminded the people that his campaign against extremism was initiated years before and not under American pressure. He vowed that Pakistan would no longer export jihadis to Kashmir, that he was again placing a ban on several jihadi organizations, that camps would be closed and that while the madrasas were mostly educating the poor, some were centers of extremist teaching and would be reformed. A month later, Musharraf was at the White House next to President Bush, who praised him for standing against terrorism.
Sethi characterized Pakistani authorities as believing that the U.S. in Iraq “will be a Vietnam.” He said: “Afghanistan will be neither here nor there. So we cannot wrap up our assets. We must protect them.” The I.S.I. realized it could help deliver Al Qaeda to the U.S. while keeping the Taliban and the jihadis on the back burner. At the same time, Musharraf’s moderate advisers were telling him that holding on to those assets would eventually boomerang. And soon enough, the assets began to come after Musharraf — while the people of Pakistan were turning against him for being pro-American. “So going after jihadis who were protecting the Taliban came to a halt,” Sethi said.
Meanwhile the landscape next door in Afghanistan was changing. The warlords were back in action. The drug economy was surging. By 2003 and 2004, Musharraf’s men were becoming hysterical about what they saw as a growing Indian presence in Afghanistan, particularly the Indian consulates in Kandahar and Jalalabad, the Pashtun strongholds that Pakistan considered its own turf. Karzai was doing business with Indians and Americans and was no longer a Pashtun whom Pakistanis would want to do business with.
As Sethi spoke, I recalled a meeting I had with one of Kandahar’s prominent tribal leaders. He recounted a visit from a former Pakistani general who had been active in the I.S.I. The general invited Kandahar’s leaders to lunch and warned them not to let the Indians put a consulate in Kandahar and to remember who their real benefactors were. Today there is a consulate there, and Indian films and music are sweeping through the Pashtun lands. What is more, many Pakistanis believe India is backing the Baluch insurgency in Pakistan’s far south, clouding the prospects for the new, Chinese-built port in Gwadar. The port is Pakistan’s single largest investment in its economic future and has been attacked by Baluch rebels.
In many ways, Pakistani policy is already looking beyond both Karzai and the Americans; they believe it is prudent to imagine a future with neither. That future will be shaped by the past: the past with India, the past with the Soviet Union, the past with America. For Pakistan’s hard-liners, at least, the obvious choice was to take their assets off the shelf and restart the jihad.
A Difficult Choice
On the wall outside the Eid Ga madrasa, in Kuchlak, a parched town near Quetta, Afghan students and teachers were debating the merits of jihad. One boy had just fled an American assault on Day Chopan in Zabul Province. He had never been to Pakistan before. He was frenzied, in shock. As a student from Kandahar led the others in dusk prayer, a young boy whispered to me, “I like America.” They were hardly a unified group. One young Helmandi told me, “We want our traditions of Islam and Sharia, not your democracy,” while another argued for peace. Then the Helmandi asked, with genuine confusion: “Why are Muslims being tortured everywhere in the world, and no one is there to stand up for them? But if you touch one Westerner, the sky is on your head?”
Most madrasas in Pakistan are run by the Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, the religious-party alliance that has joined with Musharraf to keep the popular parties of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif from regaining power. The J.U.I. madrasas usually endorse jihad, although even here I met madrasa students who were against the war. They subscribed to a vision of jihad as a struggle for self-improvement and the improvement of society. Mawlawi Mohammadin, a cleric from Helmand, went so far as to tell me that these are the true roots of jihad, though he confessed that his is a lonely voice. He was afraid of everyone — Taliban, Pakistani intelligence, even his pupils. “If we start openly supporting Karzai, we could be killed by our own students,” he told me with nervous laughter. Only a month earlier, a Taliban official from Helmand who had reconciled with Karzai’s government was gunned down by assassins on a motorbike in Quetta.
Mohammadin said that it is now open season for jihad in Afghanistan under J.U.I. guidance. Government ministers were even attending funerals to praise Pakistani Pashtuns who had died fighting in Kandahar. He estimates that there are some 10,000 Taliban fighters in Baluchistan. Despite the intimidation, he says he feels that his mission is to steer his students away from war.
One of these was Mohamed Nader, who had just attended a cousin’s funeral and was wondering what it all meant. His cousin’s family was poor, and without their knowledge, he had gone to earn money first by harvesting poppies in Helmand and then by fighting for the Taliban. Finally he was killed. Among the biggest problems, Nader told me, was that the cohesion of the Afghan family has been shredded by decades of poverty and refugee life in Pakistan. In a typically strong Afghan family, young adults obey their parents, even asking for permission to go fight. But here, boys just run off.
Rahmatullah was one of those who had run off and returned. He was skinny and disheveled, having just faced heavy fighting in Kandahar. Though an Afghan, he had grown up in Baluchistan, near the border, in an area where he said 200 fighters were now living. The mullah at his madrasa told all the students that it was time for jihad. And the I.S.I. was paying cash. But his father was old and against the war; he pleaded with him to abandon fighting. So he sent Rahmatullah to his friend Mohammadin, hoping he might open another path for his son. Rahmatullah told me that he wasn’t sure yet which mullah he would listen to.

The Afghan-Pakistan militant nexus

2009-11-09T00:10:00.000-05:00

The US has declared the Afghan-Pakistan border region to be the new frontline in its war against Islamic militants. Click on the provinces or the links below the map to see how militants operate on either side of the border. (Text: M Ilyas Khan)

Helmand, Chaghai
Kabul's writ has never run strong in the remote southern plains of Helmand province. For this reason, it has emerged as the most significant Taliban stronghold in Afghanistan. Further south, across the border in Pakistan, lies the equally remote Noshki-Chaghai region of Balochistan province.
Since 9/11 this region has been in turmoil. In the Baramcha area on the Afghan side of the border, the Taliban have a major base. From there they control militant activities as far afield as Nimroz and Farah provinces in the west, Oruzgan in the north and parts of Kandahar province in the east. They also link up with groups based in the Waziristan region of Pakistan.
Commander Mansoor Dadullah, a one-time Taliban chief of the province who has since developed differences with the Taliban leadership, comes from Helmand, but he has currently shifted his operations to Zabul province and across the border into Balochistan.
Taliban from Baramcha region move freely across the border, and often take their injured to hospitals in the Pakistani town of Dalbandin in Chaghai.
The Helmand Taliban have been able to capture territory and hold it, mostly in the south of the province. They constantly threaten traffic on the highway that connects Kandahar with Herat.
British troops have a major base in the town of Gereshk, along the Kandahar-Herat road. Fresh American troops have also been deployed in the area. They have recently pushed back the Taliban from some of their strongholds, bringing the Garmsir area of the province under government control.

Kandahar, Quetta
Kandahar has the symbolic importance of being the spiritual centre of the Taliban movement and also the place of its origin. The supreme Taliban leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, made the city his headquarters when the Taliban came to power in 1996. Top al-Qaeda leaders, including Osama Bin Laden, preferred it to the country's political capital, Kabul.
As such, the control of Kandahar province is a matter of great prestige. The first suicide attacks in Afghanistan took place in Kandahar in 2005-06, and were linked to al-Qaeda. Kandahar has seen some high-profile jailbreaks and assassination attempts, including one on President Karzai.
The Afghan government has prevented the Taliban from seizing control of any significant district centre or town. International forces have large bases in the airport area as well as at the former residence of Mullah Omar in the western suburbs of Kandahar city.
But the Taliban have a strong presence in the countryside, especially in southern and eastern areas along the border with Pakistan. Afghan and Western officials have in the past said the Taliban have used Quetta, the capital of the Pakistani province of Balochistan, as a major hideout as well as other Pakistani towns along the Kandahar border.
Areas on the Pakistan side stretching north-eastwards along the border from Quetta to the town of Zhob are inhabited by Pashtun tribes.
Mullah Omar is thought by some to be hiding in Kandahar or Helmand. Others suspect he is in Pakistan's tribal areas.
Taliban activity in Balochistan is largely related to operations inside Afghanistan and is of no immediate concern to Islamabad.

Zabul, Toba Kakar
Afghanistan's Zabul province lies to the north of Kandahar, along the Toba Kakar mountain range that separates it from the Pakistani districts of Killa Saifullah and Killa Abdullah. The mountains are remote, and have been largely quiet except for a couple of occasions when Pakistani security forces scoured them for al-Qaeda suspects.
Reports from Afghanistan say militants use the area in special circumstances. In early 2002, Taliban militants fleeing US forces in Paktia and Paktika provinces took a detour through South Waziristan to re-enter Afghanistan via Zabul. Occasionally, Taliban insurgents use the Toba Kakar passes when infiltration through South Waziristan is difficult due to intensified vigilance by Pakistani and Afghan border guards.
Zabul provides access to the Afghan provinces of Ghazni, Oruzgan and Kandahar. There are few Afghan or foreign forces in the area, except on the highway that connects Qalat, the capital of Zabul, to Kandahar in the south-west, and Ghazni and Kabul in the north.
Taliban activity along parts of this highway has forced government officials, aid workers and journalists to give up travelling on this road.

Kurram, Orakzai, Khyber
As the Pakistani military strategists who organised Afghan guerillas against the Soviets in the 1980s discovered to their delight, Kurram is the best location along the entire Pakistan-Afghanistan border to put pressure on the Afghan capital, Kabul, which is just 90km (56 miles) away. But because the region is inhabited by a Shia tribe that opposes the Taliban for religious reasons, the Taliban have not been able to get a foothold here.
The Taliban, with their primary interest in the war in Afghanistan, have also steered clear of Orakzai tribal district because it does not share a border with Afghanistan and is therefore of no strategic value.
But Taliban groups motivated by sectarian strife, or those trying to drive Pakistani forces out of the tribal region, have set up bases both in the Lower Kurram region, where there are few Shias, and Orakzai.
This area links up with the town of Mir Ali in North Waziristan to the south, and Afridi tribal territory in Darra Adamkhel and Khyber in the north. It is overseen by Hakimullah Mehsud (alias Zulfiqar Mehsud), a deputy of top Pakistani Taliban commander Baitullah Mehsud and a cousin of Qari Hussain, another deputy of Baitullah Mehsud's who is known for running training camps for suicide bombers in South Waziristan.
Hakimullah Mehsud is believed to command an armed force of more than 2,000 fighters of varying ability. From their bases in Orakzai and areas north of Mir Ali in North Waziristan, these fighters have tried to squeeze the Shias of Upper Kurram valley and those living in the Hangu distict of Pakistan's North West Frontier Province (NWFP).
Over the past year, they have also infiltrated Khyber region and forged ties with mostly criminal groups that have been operating there in the guise of Taliban. One such group is led by Mangal Bagh. Apart from kidnappings-for-ransom and car-jacking, these groups have also been involved in looting supplies being shipped to international forces in Afghanistan via a road that connects the Pakistani port of Karachi with the country's north-west and passes through Darra Adamkhel-Khyber region.
These groups have also carried out rocket attacks and bombings inside Peshawar city, the capital of NWFP. More recently, they are suspected of setting fire to hundreds of trucks carrying Nato supplies at a transit terminal in Peshawar.

Paktika, Khost, Paktia
Taliban sanctuaries in South Waziristan and North Waziristan directly threaten Paktika, Khost and Paktia provinces of Afghanistan. The US-led forces have large bases in the Barmal region of Paktika and in Khost, and several outposts along the border to counter infiltration. Pakistani security forces also man hundreds of border checkposts in the region.
However, infiltration has continued unabated with many hit-and-run attacks on foreign troops.
Tribal identities are particularly strong in Paktika, Khost and Paktia. During the Taliban rule of 1997-2001, these provinces were ruled by their own tribal governors instead of the Kandahari Taliban who held power over the rest of the country. In the current phase of the fighting they co-ordinate with the militants in Kandahar and Helmand, but they have stuck with their own leadership that dates back to the war against the Soviets in the 1980s.
The veteran Afghan militant Jalaluddin Haqqani is based in North Waziristan. He is an old man now and has stood aside to allow his son, Sirajuddin Haqqani, to lead the anti-US offensive in the region.

South Waziristan
South Waziristan, a tribal district in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata), is the first significant sanctuary Islamic militants carved for themselves outside Afghanistan after 9/11. Militants driven by US troops from the Tora Bora region of Nangarhar province in late 2001, and later from the Shahikot mountains of Paktia in early 2002, poured into the main town, Wana, in their hundreds. They included Arabs, Central Asians, Chechens, Uighur Chinese, Afghans and Pakistanis. Some moved on to urban centres in Punjab and Sindh provinces. Others slipped back into Afghanistan or headed west to Zhob and Quetta and onwards to Iran. But most stayed back and are fighting the Pakistani army.
Unofficial estimates by informed circles put the current number of these foreign fighters at "several hundred". They have concentrations in parts of South and North Waziristan and Bajaur in Fata region, and have also fanned out to conflict zones in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province (NWFP), such as Swat and Buner.
The eastern half of South Waziristan is inhabited by the Mehsud tribe and the main militant commander here is Baitullah Mehsud. He heads perhaps the largest militant group in Pakistan, with an estimated strength of more than 15,000 armed men, although the "hard core" of his fighters is much smaller.
The western half, along the border with Afghanistan, is Ahmedzai Wazir territory where Maulvi Nazir commands roughly 8,000 to 10,000 militants. Again, most of these cannot be considered battle-hardened and whether they would fight to the last is unclear.
The Mehsuds only live on the Pakistani side, while the Wazirs inhabit both sides of the border. This partly explains the direction the two commanders have taken over the last few years. Maulvi Nazir's men have largely focused on the war in Afghanistan, and have only recently had some problems with Pakistani forces, apparently due to continued missile strikes by suspected US drones which they believe have tacit Pakistani support.
Baitullah Mahsud has been fighting Pakistani forces since 2006, when he set up Tehrik Taliban Pakistan (TTP), an umbrella organisation for anti-Pakistan groups operating in Orakzai, Bajaur and Swat regions.
Early this year, Baitullah Mehsud and Maulvi Nazir entered into a three-way partnership with another ethnic Wazir commander, Hafiz Gul Bahadur, who heads the militants in neighbouring North Waziristan. Their aim is to organise joint defence if they come under attack. Pakistan says its military is now preparing for a full-scale assault on Mehsud forces.

North Waziristan
North Waziristan is dominated by the Wazir tribe that also inhabits the adjoining Afghan provinces of Paktika and Khost. North and South Waziristan form the most lethal zone from where militants have been successfully destabilising not only those provinces but others such as Paktia, Ghazni, Wardak and Logar. Groups based in the Waziristan region are known to have carried out attacks in the Afghan capital, Kabul, as well.
Current estimates put the number of armed militants in North Waziristan at more than 10,000. A much smaller number are battle hardened. They are led by Hafiz Gul Bahadur, a veteran of the 1992-96 Afghan civil war who later joined the Taliban. Like Maulvi Nazir in South Waziristan, he has largely focused on the fighting in Afghanistan and has had little friction with Pakistani forces since a 2006 peace deal. In fact, Taliban loyal to him have confronted foreign fighters based in the eastern North Waziristan town of Mir Ali, who have been attacking Pakistani troops in the region. But he, too, is perturbed over drone attacks in the region, and considers Pakistan responsible for them.
North Waziristan is also the home base of another veteran Afghan militant, Jalaluddin Haqqani. His main responsibility has been to organise Taliban resistance to Western forces in Afghanistan, but he has wielded considerable influence over the top commanders in South and North Waziristan. He is also reported to have maintained links with sections of the Pakistani security establishment and is known to have mediated peace deals between the Pakistani government and the Wazir and Mehsud commanders in the region. Mr Haqqani is now an old man, and his son Sirajuddin has taken over most of his work.

Nangarhar
The Afghan government has a comparatively firmer grip on the situation in Nangarhar. This is partly due to the compulsion to keep the supply route for Western forces - which connects the Pakistani city of Peshawar with Kabul and passes through Nangarhar - safe.
But there are pockets of resistance in the area. The main Taliban commander here is Anwarul Haq Mujahid, son of a former mujahideen commander, Mohammad Younus Khalis. This group was responsible for offering protection to Osama Bin Laden in the Tora Bora caves soon after 9/11. In recent months militants from the region have been linking up with the so-called Haqqani network in the Paktika-Khost-Paktia region.

Mohmand, Bajaur, Kunar
Analysts have long suspected Pakistan's Bajaur tribal region to be the hiding place of Osama Bin Laden, Ayman al-Zawahiri and other top al-Qaeda leaders. As such, it is where suspected US drones launched their earliest missile strikes. One drone strike in January 2006 was said to have narrowly missed Ayman al-Zawahiri, although it killed nearly 18 others. Another strike nine months later killed 80 people at a religious seminary which US and Pakistani officials said was training militants.
The dominant militant group in Bajaur, and those in the neighbouring Mohmand tribal region, became members of the Baitullah Mehsud-led Tehrik Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which was formed soon afterwards. Militants in both areas have since fought Pakistani forces inside their respective tribal zones, and have also carried out attacks in the cities of Peshawar, Charsadda and Mardan. They also conducted the first attacks against security forces in the Malakand region, where a fully fledged insurgency is currently continuing in and around the Swat valley.
Maulvi Faqir Mohammad is the chief commander of the Taliban in Bajaur. He is said to lead a force of nearly 10,000 armed militants. The "hard core" of his force is a good deal smaller. A year-long military operation against the militants in Bajaur ended early this year, followed by a peace agreement under which the dominant tribe in Bajaur, the Mamunds, agreed to surrender the entire TTP leadership to the government. But that has not happened. The Taliban are back in control in most areas outside the regional capital, Khaar, and Maulvi Faqir Mohammad continues to use his sermons, broadcast from an FM radio station, to whip up support for the Taliban.
In Mohmand, about 5,000 militants led by Omar Khalid have been resisting attempts by the security forces to clear them from southern and south-eastern parts of the district in order to reduce pressure on Peshawar and Charsadda. How many militants would stay to face a sustained offensive is unclear.

Oruzgan, Ghazni, Wardak, Logar
Initially the Taliban were unable to maintain sustained pressure on the country's south-central highlands. But with safe sanctuaries in the border region - from the Baramcha area of Helmand province in the south, to some parts of Pakistani Balochistan, Waziristan and Bajaur and Mohmand to the east - the Taliban now have the capacity to render roads in this region unsafe.
Training camps run by al-Qaeda and Taliban groups have multiplied in secure border regions over the past few years. Safe havens have also afforded the militants endless opportunities to find new recruits. The Waziristan region is also known to be a haven for young suicide bombers trained in remote camps. The Taliban also appear to have had access to sophisticated military equipment and professionally drawn-up battle plans.
The strategy appears to be the same as in the 1980s - "death by a thousand cuts". Sporadic attacks on the security forces and the police have grown more frequent over the years, and have also crept closer to Kabul. At the same time, the Taliban have destroyed most of the education infrastructure in the countryside, a vital link between the central government and the isolated agrarian citizenry.
Oruzgan has mostly come under pressure from groups in Kandahar and Helmand. These groups, as well as those based in the Waziristan-Paktika-Khost region, have also moved up the highway via Ghazni to infiltrate Wardak to the west and Logar to the east. Safe and quiet until less than three years ago, both these provinces are now said to be increasingly infiltrated by Taliban fighters.
But they still do not have the capacity to confront troops in open battle, or capture and keep towns.

Swat
Swat, a former princely state in northern Pakistan, was governed by a British-era law which a court declared unconstitutional in the early 1990s. That triggered a violent campaign for Islamic law to be introduced in Swat and other areas of the Malakand region of which it is part. The Swat insurgency was effectively put down in 1994 but it re-emerged after 9/11, attracting many battle-hardened militants from Waziristan, Bajaur and the neighbouring district of Dir.
The campaign of the Swat militants has been the most destructive anywhere in Pakistan. They have targeted security forces, police, secular politicians and government-run schools.
By early April 2009, Sharia law had been imposed as part of a deal between the authorities and the local Taliban. However, the militants failed to disarm completely in line with the accord and their fighters spread to neighbouring districts, prompting international concern. Their move into Buner took them to within 100km (60 miles) of Islamabad while their presence in Dir district, which shares a border with Afghanistan, may threaten international forces based in the Afghan province of Kunar.
Pakistani forces are currently engaged in a renewed offensive to weaken the militants in Swat and to prevent them from consolidating their positions in Buner and Dir districts. The army says it has cleared several areas of militants. The city of Mingora in Swat was retaken in May.

Pakistan's film industry is in collapse

2009-11-08T23:58:00.002-05:00

Lollywood, a once-robust movie-making machine, has fallen victim to religious-based government policies, cable TV and DVD piracy.

By Alex Rodriguez

November 8, 2009

Reporting from Lahore, Pakistan

The Odeon Cinema's creaky, ripped red vinyl seats are mostly empty except for a couple of back rows where a dozen Pakistani men sit slouched, their eyes half-open, legs slung over the seats in front of them. Along the hall's bubble-gum pink walls, rows of fans barely move the hot, dank air. The Odeon's loudspeakers crackle like a ham radio.

The feature on this recent evening is a Pakistani film called "Majajan," a love story. The barely breathing, Lahore-based Pakistani film industry produces less than a dozen movies each year, which explains why every day, three times a day for the last three years, the only movie screened at the Odeon has been "Majajan."

Welcome to Lollywood, or what's left of it. It wasn't always this way. Back in the 1960s and '70s, Lahore buzzed with movie shoots, red-carpet premieres and box-office hits. The Pakistani film industry has always been based here, and though it didn't have the girth or dazzle of Bombay's Bollywood, "Lollywood" thrived in a country staking out an identity distinct from its Indian neighbor.

In their heyday, theaters such as the Odeon had queues of Pakistanis snaking far beyond the box-office window and down Lahore's bustling sidewalks. Moviegoers dressed in their snazziest salwar kameezes and arrived two hours before a showing to secure tickets.

Today, Pakistani cinema has all but vanished, a victim of the VCR, cable television, President Muhammad Zia ul-Haq's Islamization of Pakistani society, and finally DVD piracy. In 1985, 1,100 movie houses operated in Pakistan; today, only 120 are in business. The few directors, producers and cinema owners often rely on second jobs to make ends meet.

Reviving the industry necessitates junking what's left of Pakistani cinema and starting from scratch, says Jahanzaib Baig, a Lahore cinema owner pushing for a revival of Pakistani film. Baig has been lobbying the government to clamp down on DVD piracy, a scourge that keeps Pakistanis from leaving their living rooms to head to cinemas. "We have hit rock bottom," says Baig. "We can only go up. Whatever we had before is not only destroyed but is obsolete in terms of technology and skills. So we're setting the foundation for a new film industry in Pakistan."

Sangeeta, a Lollywood mega-star during the 1970s and one of the few survivors still directing homegrown films, says a revival of the industry can happen only if the Pakistani government lends a hand.

"We need government support," says Sangeeta, now 52. "We need new cameras, new studios. Right now, producers aren't investing because the equipment isn't good."

On the set of a television drama she's shooting, the hardships Sangeeta faces are evident. The cameras are dead ringers for clunky 1980s camcorders. There are no trailers, no craft service, no security to keep Pakistani passers-by from wandering onto the set.

It all seems light years away from her glory days, when all of Lahore fawned over the curvy, vivacious movie star with the dark-eyed appeal. She got her start in show business after coming home from school one afternoon and finding her parents chatting with a Lollywood director looking for a lead actress in his new film, "Bangle."

"When he saw me he said, 'That's my heroine!' " she recalls. She was just 13.

Sangeeta went on to star in more than 100 movies and direct 80. Nowadays, she focuses on directing for television, though last year she directed a film for a producer who wanted a movie about himself.

"Back in the 1970s, our movie industry was in full bloom," Sangeeta says, her eyes beaming behind black-framed Givenchy glasses as she remembers. "It was a great period for us. Everyone felt at home in the studio, and the work was deep in our hearts. Not like today."

The advent of cable television and VCRs drew Pakistanis away from cinemas, but it was President Zia ul-Haq's religious-based policies that sped the industry's demise. Many cinemas were shut down, the rest were heavily taxed. New laws that required producers to have college degrees thinned the ranks of movie makers.

The message Zia ul-Haq's government was sending to society was clear, Baig says: "We were being told that filmmaking was a vulgar and bad business to be in."

As Lollywood's top-shelf creative talent dropped out of the flagging industry, scripts got worse and Pakistanis stopped going to movies. Bollywood filled the void; Indian movies flooded video stores and clogged cable channels. Pakistani filmmakers who stayed in the industry found themselves hamstrung by dwindling budgets.

"In India, they spend $12 million on a movie, and we can spend maybe about $120,000," says Pakistani film producer Jamshed Zafar, who sidelines as an exporter of South Asian spices. "How can we compete?"

One of the only directors still making movies, Syed Noor, has established a film school in Lahore to help seed a new generation of filmmakers. But most directors and producers gave up long ago. Sangeeta says a few went into television; most of the rest live off the incomes of their adult children. Every once in a while, some of them meet at Sangeeta's modest two-story home in a woody Lahore neighborhood to reminisce over tea and screenings of their old movies.

The salve of nostalgia seems to work. Her eyes brighten as she leafs through a pile of movie posters and press photos from her halcyon days: Sangeeta in a Mary Astor-style pillbox hat, Sangeeta in a sari merrily dancing barefoot in the grass, Sangeeta coyly turning away from her mustached lover.

Smiling, she sighs. "I wish I could go back there."

Pakistan's Taliban dilemma

2009-11-08T23:56:00.000-05:00

Despite being relatively few in number, the Afghan Taliban are thriving in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as they take advantage of Islamabad's apparent ambivalence towards them, the BBC's Hugh Sykes reports from Kabul.
Despite their fierce reputation, Afghans are mostly gentle, thoughtful people - deeply courteous, with warm humanity that radiates from luminous eyes.
They are also tolerant and very patient.
There was clear evidence of barefaced election fraud, implicitly insulting people who went out to vote believing that their ballots would count. But there has been peace on the streets.
One man said to me this week: "This is all so crazy I've just stopped thinking - and most of my friends are now simply depressed."
And Afghanistan struggles on.
Despite eight years of international assistance, many places in Kabul are a mess.
Simple demands
Major road intersections are pitted with pools of filthy water as wide as streams, and nearly all the deep concrete gutters by the roadside, that I have seen, are stagnant with waste water and rubbish.
And all along these unhygienic streets, food vendors sell their wares from rickety wooden carts. Bananas on many carts, grapes and pomegranates on others.
Almost everyone I have spoken to here on three visits in less than a year has said their demands are very simple: employment, an end to the corruption that's endemic in the Afghan system, and - security.
Security should be simple, one man pointed out: "The Taliban are a small force compared to the British and American armies…you could beat them if you really want."
There is a suspicion here that the entire Western presence is Afghanistan is deeply cynical, misguided, and fundamentally confused.

The Afghan Taliban leadership and sources of supply are not even in Afghanistan, they are in Pakistan - in Quetta, a city just across the mountains from Kandahar where so many British and American troops have died.
The charge of cynicism arises because the Americans and the British support the Pakistan government - and the Pakistan government at the same time provides sanctuary in Quetta for the Afghan Taliban who are killing US and British troops.
It is like fighting off the enemy at the front door of your home, but leaving the back door unlocked.
Or - imagine the Chicago Police in the 1920s fighting Al Capone, but turning a blind eye to the gun shops where he buys his weapons and ammunition, and even paying protection money to the owners of those shops.
Haroun Mir, director of Afghanistan's Centre for Research and Policy Studies, told me he cannot understand why this surreal situation is tolerated.
"Pakistan gets away with impunity. And instead of being punished, they are rewarded with US aid."
"Why is American public opinion silent about this?"

“ The Afghan Taliban and the Pakistan Taliban are twins and America must now get Pakistan to decide if they are an ally or an enemy ”
Dawood Sultanzoy

What the American public have been hearing on their TV networks has been Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declaring that the United States stands "shoulder to shoulder" with Pakistan.
They have not heard her complaining that Pakistan provides safe haven for the Afghan Taliban who are killing American and British troops.
This double-dealing has to stop, in the opinion of the independent Afghan MP - Dawood Sultanzoy.
He told me that Pakistan should realise that they are creating a "boomerang effect".
"The Afghan Taliban and the Pakistan Taliban are twins," he said, "and America must now get Pakistan to decide if they are an ally or an enemy."
Supply lines
At the moment, Pakistan is both ally and enemy to the USA - ally in the fight against the Pakistani Taliban, but enemy so long as they continue to protect the Afghan Taliban.
Quetta is the crucial element. An entire suburb of that Pakistani city is effectively occupied by the Afghan Taliban and their "Shura" ruling council - including their leader Mullah Omar.
The Afghan Taliban get many of their basic supplies in Quetta - their motorbikes, for example, and their mobile phone SIM cards.
And their supply lines cross the mountains into Afghanistan to the north.
Afghanistan is caught in the middle. Nothing will really change here until this has been resolved.
Pakistan could deny the Afghan Taliban their safe haven in Quetta just across the border from where British and American troops and Afghan civilians are being killed.
The question here in Afghanistan is - why don't they?

One answer is that Pakistan has to hedge its bets. As more and more British and American troops die, pressure from the public in Britain and America to withdraw their forces could become irresistible.
The future of the Afghan government of President Hamid Karzai, already stained by election fraud, would then be uncertain. And the chance of the Taliban returning to power here would sharply increase.
They are already waiting in the wings.
On Friday, Nato-led International Security Assistance Force (Isaf) troops from Poland went to a village in Ghazni province south of Kabul. They distributed blankets, and some radios, and they left.
Twenty minutes later, a dozen Taliban arrived on motorcycles and seized the blankets; they set fire to some of them, and took the rest away for themselves.
The Afghan Taliban are well-organised, well-resourced, patient - and they have good sources of intelligence. They should not be under-estimated.
Pakistan needs smooth relations with whoever is in power in Kabul.
Islamabad was one of the very few capitals where the previous Afghan Taliban regime had an embassy. Only two other countries recognised the Taliban government - Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates.
And after 11 September 2001, the only nation that continued to recognise the Taliban government in Kabul was...Pakistan.

Pakistan rejects unsecured nukes report

2009-11-08T22:43:00.002-05:00

Islamabad, Pakistan (CNN) -- Pakistan angrily defended the security of its nuclear arsenal Sunday after a U.S. magazine reported that the Obama administration wants Pakistan to let Washington help secure its weapons in a crisis.
An article published in the new issue of The New Yorker states that Washington has serious fears about Pakistan's arsenal and has a covert team ready to fly to Pakistan at short notice. The article, written by veteran investigative journalist Seymour Hersh, reports that the Obama administration has been working on "highly sensitive understandings" with Pakistan's military that would let the U.S. military to provide "added security for the Pakistani arsenal in case of a crisis."
And it reported that a "highly classified" emergency response team was activated within the past few months in response to a report that a Pakistani nuclear component had "gone astray." The team was already in Dubai by the time the report turned out to be a false alarm, Hersh's article states, citing an unnamed Pentagon consultant.
Pakistan's foreign ministry blasted the article as "utterly misleading and totally baseless" on Sunday, calling it "nothing more than a concoction to tarnish the image of Pakistan and create misgivings among its people." It accused Hersh of making "several false and highly irresponsible claims by quoting anonymous and unverifiable sources."
"Pakistan's strategic assets are completely safe and secure," the ministry said in a written statement. "The multi-layered custodial controls, which have been developed indigenously, are as foolproof and effective as in any other nuclear weapons state.
"Pakistan, therefore, does not require any foreign assistance in this regard," the statement continued. "Nor will Pakistan, as a sovereign state, ever allow any country to have direct or indirect access to its nuclear and strategic facilities. Any suggestion to this effect is simply preposterous."
Estimates of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal currently range from 60 to 100 weapons. It first declared its status as a nuclear power in 1998, testing five bombs in a tit-for-tat with its south Asian archrival, India.
CNN has not independently confirmed the claims included in Hersh's 6,893-word piece, which appears in The New Yorker's November 16 issue and online. The article quotes a spokesman for U.S. Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said there are "no military units, special forces or otherwise, involved in such an assignment."
And Pakistan accused Hersh of displaying his "well-known anti-Pakistan bias" in the article, which it called "nothing more than a concoction to tarnish the image of Pakistan and create misgivings among its people."
Hersh dismissed accusations in a brief telephone interview Sunday afternoon.
In November 2001, another of his articles on Pakistan's nuclear program stirred a similar controversy. Hersh reported at that time that the United States was making plans to seize or disable Pakistani nuclear weapons to prevent them from falling into the hands of Islamic extremists. That report was met with widespread denials as well.
But Hersh said Sunday there is an "enormous difference" between what the Obama administration is trying to do and what was being considered before.
"They're now saying, 'We're going to help you,' " he told CNN. In addition, he said, the current U.S. plans focus not on removing warheads, but on separating them from the trigger mechanisms used to set them off.
And another goal of the agreements would be to reassure India, which has fought three wars with Pakistan since the two nations won independence from Britain in 1947. Hersh said U.S. officials hope securing Pakistani bombs will convince India to pull troops off the Pakistani frontier, allowing Pakistan to turn more of its military's attention toward battling al Qaeda and Taliban fighters along its northwestern border with Afghanistan -- where U.S. troops have been battling the Taliban since 2001.
"It's all part of the broad strategic scheme," Hersh said. But the plan has had unintended consequences in Pakistan, "one of which is they hate our guts," he said.
Pakistan remains mistrustful of the United States, fearing its nuclear secrets will fall into Indian hands, and "There's an enormous discrepancy between what they say and what they agree to do," Hersh said.
U.S. officials repeatedly have expressed confidence in the security of Pakistan's atomic weapons. But while the Pakistani military is now fighting a Taliban insurgency in its northwest, Hersh reported the greatest fear is the possibility of a mutiny by extremists within the Pakistani military.
Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari discounted that concern, telling Hersh, "A mutiny would never happen in Pakistan."

"Our Army officers are not crazy, like the Taliban," Zardari said. "They're British-trained. Why would they slip up on nuclear security?"

CNN's Matt Smith contributed to this report.