Posts
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.
Tuesday, November 24, 2009
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.
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
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.
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.
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
How Azad is `Azad Kashmir'
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
Monday, November 16, 2009
CIA says it gets its money's worth from Pakistani spy agency
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 MillerNovember 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
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
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
Sunday, November 15, 2009
Pakistan's Problems
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.
Pakistanis (irrespective of their standing in society) exult gossip, paranoia, superstition, and conspiracy theories more than science or history.
Saturday, November 14, 2009
INTERVIEW-French magistrate details Lashkar's global role
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)
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)
Friday, November 13, 2009
A nuclear power's act of proliferation
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
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.
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.