Pakistan - A nation under attack

American drones overhead, Taliban troops on the offensive, and the horrifying rise of child kidnapping - Pakistan is in pieces, writes Robert Fisk, in a devastating portrait of a country thwarted by violence and corruption

Pakistan ambushes you. The midday heat is also beginning to ambush all who live in Peshawar, the capital of the North West Frontier Province. Canyons of fumes grey out the vast ramparts of the Bala Hisar fort. "Headquarters Frontier Force" is written on the ancient gateway. I notice the old British cannon on the heights - and the spanking new anti-aircraft gun beside it, barrels deflected to point at us, at all who enter this vast metropolis of pain. There are troops at every intersection, bullets draped in belts over their shoulders, machine guns on tripods erected behind piles of sandbags, the sights of AK-47s brushing impersonally across rickshaws, and rubbish trucks and buses with men clinging to the sides. There are beards that reach to the waist. The soldiers have beards, too, sometimes just as long.

I am sitting in a modest downstairs apartment in the old British cantonment. A young Peshawar journalist sits beside me, talking in a subdued but angry way, as if someone is listening to us, about the pilotless American aircraft which now slaughter by the score - or the four score - along the Afghanistan border. "I was in Damadola when the drones came. They killed more than 80 teenagers - all students - and, yes they were learning the Koran, and the madrasah, the Islamic school, was run by a Taliban commander. But 80! Many of them came from Bajaur, which would be attacked later. Their parents came afterwards, all their mothers were there, but the bodies were in pieces. There were so many children, some as young as 12. We didn't know how to fit them together."

The reporter - no name, of course, because he still has to work in Peshawar - was in part of the Bajaur tribal area, to cover negotiations between the government and the Taliban. "The drones stayed around for about half an hour, watching," he says. "Then two Pakistani helicopter gunships came over. Later, the government said the helicopters did the attack. But it was the drones."

An Islamabad garden now, light with bright oak trees and big birds that bark at us from the branches, beneath which sit two humanitarian workers, both Europeans who have spent weeks in the Swat valley during and after the Pakistani army's offensive against the Taliban. "There were dozens - perhaps hundreds - executed by the army. They were revenge killings by the soldiers, no doubt about it. A number of people we had reported to us as arrested - they were later found dead. What does that mean? The Americans and the Brits were aware of this, of course they were, and they intervened with the government. But what does this say about the army? In one village, two bodies lay in the street for two days - it was a way of showing the local people what would happen to them if they supported the Taliban. What does this say about the army? Can they control Pakistan like this?"

Some 70 per cent of the Pakistani army come from Punjab, and 80 per cent of retired army officers come from Punjab. In a few days, Punjab will pay for this.

But lest the Taliban appear in freedom-fighter mode, here is a different account of the Swat valley by one of Pakistan's most eloquent journalists, Owais Tohid, reporting from the city of Mingora. Read, as they say, and inwardly digest. "Splotches of red blood still stain Ziarat Gul's memory: his sister was gunned down by the Taliban and her body placed at the chowk [square] where I stand... A year ago, Gul's sister, Shabana, was shot three times by the bearded and turbaned men." Shabana was a singing and dancing girl, of whom there are many in the tribal areas; they perform at weddings, while the men play harmoniums and the stringed rabab.

Back to Owais Tohid. "Her body was then strewn with currency notes, CDs of her performances, and her photographs. Pooled in blood, nobody was allowed to her body until the next day. Gul, his father and two cousins were the only ones to offer funeral prayers and bury her the next morning..." Shabana's friend Shehnaz, a famous dancing girl, was a witness to the murder: "I switched off the light and peeped through a hole; I could see the door was broken. Shabana sat on the floor and Taliban carrying Kalashnikovs and rocket-launchers stood around her. Some carried swords. I heard Shabana beg them to spare her life. She was pleading, 'Don't kill me, don't kill me.' But then one of the Taliban said, 'We warned you ... we even offered you our mujahid to marry, but you continued to dance...' Shabana continued pleading..." Shehnaz heard the gunshots.

I wonder if all these tales are true. Alas, they are. Not far from Peshawar last month, a dancing troupe was returning from a party in Hindko Damaan, when armed men surrounded their vehicle at 3am. Afsana, one of the girls, had her two sisters, Salma and Sana, alongside her in the car, and her stepfather, Azizur Rahman. Her brother, in a following car, argued with the gunmen, who were demanding money. So they shot Afsana dead. She had just divorced, and danced to earn money for her family. Three other girls have been murdered outside Peshawar in the past fortnight.

But the drones dominate the tribal lands. They killed 14 men in just one night last month, at Datta Khel in north Waziristan. The drones come in flocks, and five of them settled over the village, firing a missile each at a pick-up truck, splitting it in two and dismembering six men aboard. When local residents as well as Taliban arrived to help the wounded, the drones attacked again, killing all eight of them. The drones usually return to shoot at the rescuers. It's a policy started by the Israeli air force over Beirut during the 1982 siege: bomb now, come back 12 minutes later for a second shot. Now Waziristan villagers wait up to half an hour - listening to the shrieks and howls of the dying - before they try to help the wounded.

The drones - Predators and Reapers, or "Shadows", as the Americans call them when they follow US troops into battle - have acquired mythical proportions in the minds of Pakistanis, a form of spaceship colonialism, imperialism from the sky, caught with literary brilliance by A H Khayal in the daily newspaper The Nation, when he asked where the drones come from: "The masses are piteously ignorant. They just don't know that the drones are not material creatures. Actually, they are spiritual beings. They don't need earthly runways for taking off... They live in outer space, beyond the international boundaries of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

"When they feel hungry, they swoop down and kill innocent Afghani women and children. They eat the corpses and fly back to their spacial residences for a siesta. When they again feel hungry, they again swoop down and kill another lot of innocent women and children. Having devoured the dead bodies, they fly back to their bedrooms in space. It has been going on and on like this for years."

Indeed it has. But where do the drones come from? When President Hamid Karzai flew into Islamabad last month, the entire Pakistani cabinet turned up to welcome this fraudulently elected satrap of the United States. Many are the Pakistanis who found this a natural circumstance. Was not their own President, Asif Ali Zardari, another of Washington's corrupt satraps, his minions heading to Washington only two weeks later to plead for a vast increase in the $7.8bn (£5.1bn) of aid which Congress voted Pakistan last year? "There was a time when America did not trust you," Pakistan's Prime Minister, Yousuf Gilani, lectured the upper house of his federal parliament. "You were their ally, but they did not trust you. Now they are trusting you and holding a strategic dialogue."

It was enough to make the average Pakistani squirm. After Hillary Clinton arrived last November to berate the students of Pakistan on their anti-Americanism - and to hint that their government must surely know the location of al-Qa'ida's top men in the tribal lands - the Foreign Minister, Shah Mehmood Qureshi, set off to Washington last week with his chain-smoking army commander, General Ashfaq Kayani, with the biggest begging bowl in Pakistani history. President Barack Obama wants an exit strategy in Afghanistan and realises - at last - that only Pakistan can provide this. But he also wants to support India as a bulwark against China, and the Pakistanis know that Delhi's agents are trying to control Afghanistan.

But what struck Pakistanis about Karzai's visit was not his cloying remarks about the fraternal love of the Afghan and Pakistani people - "India is our close friend but Pakistan is like a twin brother," he piously observed - but his astonishing statement that the devastating missile attacks against Pakistan by pilotless US drone aircraft were not being launched from inside Afghanistan.

"We are not responsible for these attacks," he said. "They are being carried out by a powerful sovereign country, namely the United States, which is also a close ally of Pakistan. They [the drones] don't fly from our territory but in our airspace, and it is beyond our capacity to stop them." Karzai looked subdued, apologetic, meekly sympathising with Gilani over the growing number of civilian casualties.

Karzai was (for once) telling the truth. The drones launched from the Kandahar airbase are attacking the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban inside the international frontier. The drones attacking Pakistan come from - Pakistan.

In fact, the Americans launch them from a Pakistan Air Force base at Terbile, 50 miles west of Islamabad. US officers were also interested in using the Peshawar airfield - the same runways employed by the old U-2 spy planes, from which Gary Powers took off over the Soviet Union during the Cold War - and the Taliban spent weeks trying to discover the headquarters from which the Americans were directing the drones. They eventually decided that the US drone control centre was on the highest floor of the Marriott Hotel in Islamabad.

They were wrong. US officers did stay at the Marriott, but they were not air force personnel. This, however, was the reason the Marriott was attacked by a suicide bomber in 2007, and then again with a truckload of explosives on 20 September 2008 - not because President Zardari had just given his first speech to parliament a few hundred metres away, but because the Taliban were trying to destroy the "brain" behind the drones. At least 54 civilians were killed - most of them Pakistanis - and 266 wounded. The drone attacks continued, more than ever after Barack Obama became US President.

The war, however, is now directed at the Pakistani army - although the authorities try to portray the Taliban's targets as purely civilian. The assault on the police torture centre in Lahore on 8 March was merely a warning. Nine policemen were among the 18 dead at a building known for its night-time torture sessions - local inhabitants had complained many times about screams from the basement, not because of the abuse taking place there but because it made their homes a target for bombers. They were right. The worst suicide bombing of the year had already occurred at a volleyball field in Lakki Marwat, when the killer murdered 105 people - many of them policemen and Frontier Corps personnel. On 4 February, another suicide bomber - after a long surveillance operation by the Pakistani Taliban - struck a military convoy in the Koto area of the Lower Dir district. He killed three schoolgirls, a Frontier Corps policeman - and three US soldiers. Since 11 September 2001, more than 5,700 men and women have been killed in insurgent attacks in Pakistan. This is revenge for the army's offensives in Swat and Waziristan.

The double suicide attack on two army vehicles in Lahore, the Punjabi capital, on 12 March was thus merely the most brazen assault on the Pakistani military. Both killers destroyed themselves next to two army trucks - killing 14 soldiers - in the garrison city, shaming the security authorities and provoking the local chief minister, Shahbaz Sharif, to plead shamefully with the Taliban to spare his capital in future. Attack another city, was the implication. Sixty-one men and women were killed - most of them, of course, civilians - and hundreds wounded. Within 24 hours, another suicide bomber attacked an army checkpoint in the North West Frontier Province at Saidu Sharif, killing 14 people, most of them soldiers and policemen.

Even the military were surprised by the determination of the Pakistani Taliban to assault them. Four days after the attack in Lahore, the police found 1,500 kilos of explosives and two suicide vests in Iqbal Town in the Punjabi capital, along with Russian-made hand grenades and rifle ammunition. The next day, they discovered another 3,000 kilos of explosives in the same area. Amir Mir, the most accurate of Pakistani journalists amid the chaos of what is in fact a war, has calculated that 321 Pakistanis have been killed and more than 500 wounded in 15 suicide bombings across Pakistan in the first 70 days of 2010. This is up from 'only' 11 suicide bombings in the same period last year.

The Institute for Peace Studies in Pakistan has been recording every act of violence in the country since the 2001 attack on America, and concludes that just in 2009 12,632 men and women - civilians, soldiers, Taliban militants, even victims of inter- tribal battles - were killed. Of the dead, 3,021 were killed by insurgents, 6,329 in Pakistan army operations, 1,163 in army-Taliban battles, 700 in border violence, and 1,419 in other violence, including drone missiles.

The scorecard for death over the past four years - I'm afraid that death in Pakistan is today much like a tally - is truly awful. In 2005, a mere 216 Pakistanis were reported killed. In 2006, 907 Pakistanis died; in 2007, 3,448; in 2008, 7,997. By 2009, the total number of victims in just five years came to more than 25,000. When I twice visited Lahore, it felt like a city under martial law, thronged with troops and checkpoints, its bridges and ancient British ministries and schools laced with soldiers in steel helmets.

In just two weeks in March - far from Lahore - lawlessness reached epic proportions. On 14 March, four men were killed in the Khyber tribal area. In Quetta on 17 March, a retired policeman, a member of a "sectarian organisation", and two construction workers were shot dead or blown up. A day later, 10 men of the Mehsud tribe - quite possibly militants - were killed in a five-missile US drone attack. In a suburb of Peshawar on the same day, three Frontier Force soldiers and two policemen were shot dead. In Karachi that day, two political leaders, their lawyer and a taxi driver were shot. Within 24 hours, a prominent Quetta lawyer was kidnapped. By the end of the same week, the Pakistani Taliban publicly announced that it intended to murder the Pakistani Interior Minister, Rehman Malik. And there would be more attacks across the country, the Taliban said, in revenge for the American drone attacks. "Just wait for our reaction," the Taliban's spokesman, Azam Tariq, said.

The Pakistani military responded in the time-honoured way. The Taliban's attacks were "a clear sign of frustration and desperation" on the part of the militants. The director of the CIA, Leon Panetta, declared from the safety of Washington that the drone assaults - and other attacks, unspecified - were "the most aggressive operation that the CIA has been involved in in our history. The CIA's offensive in the Pakistan tribal region had driven Osama bin Laden and his colleagues into hiding - where they have presumably been since 2001 - leaving al-Qa'ida "rudderless and incapable of planning sophisticated operations".

Pakistan surely deserves better than this nonsense. Embedded with the Pakistani military, writers such as Michael O'Hanlon in The New York Times remind their readers that America's $17bn in aid since 2001 comes to only half Pakistan's costs in the "war on terror", a battle to which the Pakistani army is now fully committed (or so he believes). This, however, does not explain the scores of soldiers who have surrendered to the insurgents over the past 12 months, nor the weird double-game being played by the Pakistani security services, who captured senior members of the Afghan Taliban only to find themselves condemned by Hamid Karzai's corrupt government for breaking up the secret communications between the Afghan government and its enemies. The US was "extremely gratified" by Pakistan's arrests, President Obama's envoy, Richard Holbrooke, says. In other words, the Americans would control contacts with the Afghan Taliban - not their local ruler, Hamid Karzai.

And all the while, the 'security' experts who dominate the American press have been sowing their suspicions through the dumbed-down intelligence world of the West. For while we bomb the tribal regions with our drones, we are told to fear the imminent theft of Pakistan's nuclear weapons. Terrorists, we are told in a West Point journal, may take the country's atomic arms for use against us - note how this threat never seems to apply to our trusted ally, India - and mythical accounts are told of three separate attacks by "terrorists" (unnamed, of course) on Pakistan's nuclear facilities in the last three years. In the past we were told that Muslim "nationalists" might hijack Pakistan's nuclear weapons. Now the danger is supposed to come from "Islamists". In fact, the real danger is much closer to home.

Seventy per cent of NATO's ammunition, vehicles and food in Afghanistan still transits through Pakistan, along with 40 per cent of its fuel. The Taliban's attacks on these convoys - both the Pakistani and Afghan versions of the movement (for they are not the same) - have over the past two years netted some incredible dividends, which NATO has not seen fit to disclose. Gunmen have managed to steal three separate - disassembled but complete - military helicopters and a clutch of American Humvee armoured vehicles, one of which was used by the Pakistani Taliban's leader, Hakimullah Mehsud. At least 62 Humvees were burned out in just one raid near Peshawar in 2008.

And all this, you have to remember, takes place against the profound corruption of Pakistani society, from the shoe-shine boy to the president, Asif Ali Zardari, Benazir Bhutto's widower, whose own venality is so legendary that only rarely does it cause discussion. Only once in the last month has it been mentioned - when Zardari, addressing a conference on Sufism and peace, announced that he was not afraid of death, that he represented "nothing more than a speck in the universe" and would donate his body organs on his death. Within hours, five people - including my taxi driver, a hotel waiter, the owner of an Islamabad bookshop, a Pakistani humanitarian worker and a lawyer - made precisely the same comment to me: "Zardari will donate his body organs to the people - but not his dollars!"

Thank God, I suppose, for the Pakistani press, as brave, as disillusioned and as tough as any media folk in the West. The 'oil mafia' which siphoned off billions of rupees during Musharraf's rule, the four cabinet ministers living in government houses but claiming rent (shades of Westminster's very own), the massive financial irregularities in the Punjab education department, all have been exposed in Pakistan's newspapers. "The government," reported The News International on 11 March, "has removed yet another officer of impeccable integrity, the chief Commissioner, Islamabad, Shahid Mehmood, within 90 days of his posting, after he allegedly refused to accommodate the 'wishes' of certain political masters." Now that's what I call reporting. The luckless Mehmood, it turned out, had rashly frozen a land deal which involved a certain Asif Ali Zardari, the President of Pakistan.

Pakistanis - in other words, most of the 150 million men and women who live in penury in this nuclear state - simply no longer believe in the authorities who claim to govern them. When an increase in bus fares brought hundreds - and then thousands - of young people onto the streets of Islamabad's suburbs last month, the police opened live fire on the demonstrators. Western embassy personnel were confined to their bunkers - US diplomats are not even allowed to go grocery shopping at the best of times - and Zardari's government then announced that the protesters had been "imported", brought into the capital from "surrounding areas".

Where does a foreigner - a real one, like me - go to understand this beautiful, ferociously angry, ripped-up, intelligent, hopelessly overcrowded, war-smitten country?

Raza Kazim admits only to being in his eighties, but he has a perfunctory, almost irritatingly child-like way of twining his thin fingers together while trying to define his love of country, his belief in the worth of Pakistan. His is speaking over the throb of the air-conditioners, as an unprecedented spring heat warms up the Lahore trees outside his home. He brings in two frozen cans of Murree beer and is vexed that I won't join him. I can see why he led the first strike in his Indian school's history.

"I benefited vastly from the Raj," he says. "It wasn't a love-hate relationship - it was a love-adversarial relationship. My heart went out to the 'Quit India' movement, and I was coming from the peasantry. It was a time when peasants could be flogged for two rupees. I had a belief in freedom and in 1946, I took a leap of faith and feeling."

Some faith. Some feeling. Kazim is a kind of 'guru' - in the original meaning of the word, an elderly advisor/oracle for generations of Pakistani politicians - and his involvement in the Indian National Congress of British India, then in the Muslim League and later in the Pakistan People's Party, have turned him into the Malcolm Muggeridge - or perhaps Tony Benn - of Pakistan. A lawyer and ex-Communist whose philanthropy has produced the Sanjan Nagar School Institute of Philosophy and Arts, and the inventor of a stringed musical instrument intended to preserve South Asian classical music as a modern art form, he has two qualifications for Pakistani sainthood: he was kidnapped by military intelligence in 1984, and has been jailed five times between 1950 and 1985. His other quality is historical; he still thinks the date is 1947 and he smiles when he realises that I agree with him.

"August 1947 was a kind of competition between Hindus and Muslims," he recalls, the fingers beginning to twist around each other, the lamp-light reflecting his baldness as dusk brings out the big birds in the garden. "Who would give a better account of freedom? I never had a sense of India being divided. It was like the people were split into two teams. Who would score more runs off freedom?"

Freedom at midnight, I murmured. At what cost? "Yes, there was bloodshed in Bihar. There was bloodshed in Delhi, a lot of bloodshed in the Punjab - but that was action and reaction. Then it spread into the Deccan area. They (the new Indian state) took soldiers from the Punjab whose children had been murdered here and whose women had been abducted here, and sent them to the Deccan area where they bashed the heads of [Muslim] children against pillars. Yes, I know what happened in those trains.

"The political capital made out of these killings is another story - a bad story, but a different story. The events were capitalised. But bloodshed didn't begin with Pakistan. The first genocide of Indian history took place in the Punjab in 3,000 BC - it was a conflict between feudal and pastoral

Kazim had it easy. "On 13 September, 1947, I came on a plane to Pakistan as guest of the Indian communications minister. I came with my gramophone records, books and poetry, and two sets of clothes." It is a very post-colonial story. While the masses tore each other to pieces below, Kazim's plane soared above the bloodbath to drop him as a witness to the mass looting of the new Pakistan's most beautiful city, Lahore.

"People think of the properties taken from the Hindus and Sikhs, but the most important things were the jobs, the business, the vacancies, and grabbing those properties. The educated people looted and took things away in trucks - these were the people who were going to run the country. It became a sign of patriotism that you forged property papers to homes in India that you never had - this was thought to be a patriotic duty because the Indians had three times as many claims against us. The bureaucracy had been civil servants under the British system - they were middle-level bureaucrats in India, who had suddenly become senior bureaucrats in Pakistan." Mohammad Jinnah, the founder of the state, who died in 1948 - Kazim went to his funeral - "had a weakness for flattery. He didn't keep good company."

I've heard this story before, albeit less eloquently told. Pakistan existed, but there was no sign of a developing society or the creation of a nation. "We have still not made a society," Kazim says. "People have to take something out of their personal lives and invest it in our society." There is a pause here, then Kazim's voice rises. "WE ARE STILL IN 1947!" Pakistan obtained its freedom under the Indian Independence Act - but there is nothing called the Pakistan Independence Act."

Another room now, in what Pakistani reporters still call a "posh" area of Islamabad. (When they bring themselves into their own stories, by the way, Pakistani journalists call themselves "scribes", rather than our self-denigrating "hacks"). But the air conditioner is just as noisy. Now it is another lawyer, Aitzaz Ahsan, hero of the 'Long March' of spring 2009 which eventually secured the reinstatement of Iftikhar Chaudhry as Chief Justice after the abdication of America's favourite dictator, the president-general Pervez Musharraf. Ahsan's new book, The Indus Saga and the Making of Pakistan suggests that there were two culturally different regions of the land which the British called India, that there was a continuous social and political order in the Indus region - the bit that became Pakistan - that was quite different from that of the rest of India.

On Pakistani independence, the structure of state-Raj versus the citizen-native did not change. As Ahsan puts it bleakly, "the military officers who on 14 August, 1947, saluted the raising of the green standard with crescent and star had on the 13 August been saluting the Union Jack. They couldn't change in a day. Somebody else had fought for independence. The 'natives' remained and continued to be denied democratic rights until 1970."

Thus - and Kazim would not agree with this - Pakistanis loved their judges rather than their soldiers, and admired them with a fair degree of cynicism. Rightly so. In 1954, the Governor General dissolved parliament - an act unsustainable in law - but the judges upheld the dissolution. In 1958, the military commander dissolved the assembly, abrogating the constitution. And the country's Supreme Court endorsed the imposition of martial law on the grounds that "a successful coup d'état is an internationally-recognised, legal method of changing a government." Judges reversed this opinion in 1972, ruling that there was no place for a military regime in Pakistan - but it did so only after the military regime had fallen.

Now the army - guardian of the nation of Pakistan, and America's second-best friend in the region (after the Indian army) - is under constant military attack, while obligingly allowing the totally corrupted (and corrupting) politicians to run the vehicle of state under the banner of 'democracy'. Everyone knows that the Inter- Services Intelligence - their leaders appear to be interchangeable with the regular army - continue to succour and guard and lead the Afghan Taliban. They will do so as long as America ignores Pakistan's conflict with India over Kashmir. American soldiers die because of Muslim anger at Washington's support for Israel, as US Commander General David Petraeus suggested last month. But American soldiers also die because of Kashmir. Pakistanis - and here is something which truly unites all of them - believe that America supports India, and that Kashmir is thus ultimately lost to them. So why should they allow America - and Indian money and political influence - to control Afghanistan?

It's sometimes difficult to find the line between aggression and fear in Pakistan. We in the West fear its nuclear weapons without even looking at a map of the country about which we obsess with such devotion.

Every major city - Islamabad, Rawalpindi, Lahore, Karachi, Peshawar, Quetta - is close to the borders of India or Afghanistan. It is a both sump of poverty and a nuclear power, an intelligent nation - its people desire education with the same craving as the Palestinians - with a history that began and ended at the moment of partition, its datelines framed by military coups and imperial hand-outs and, now, by drone attacks and suicide bombers. The latter arrived with a peculiar shock in Pakistan. They started in Lebanon, moved to 'Palestine', then to Iraq and then to Afghanistan - and then to Pakistan. From the Mediterranean to the old Raj, this black-magic rite travelled with incredible speed. And now it has merged with the dirt and corruption and nuclear power of Pakistan.

I tried, in Pakistan, to define the sorrow which so constantly afflicts this country. The massive loss of life, the poverty, the corruption, the internal and external threats to its survival, the existentialism of Islam and the power of the army; perhaps Pakistan's story can only be told in a novel. It requires, I suspect, a Tolstoy or a Dostoyevsky.

But perhaps it is Pakistan's ability to do harm to itself that most struck me - symbolised, I fear, by the latest and most terrible affliction to strike it: child-kidnapping. Steal a little boy or a little girl, ask the parents for money, and kill the infant if they don't pay. When Sahil Saeed, the British-Pakistani boy, was taken, the police and the British embassy helped to bring him home. But journalists covering the story found that the family home was sometimes overwhelmed with other parents, like those of six-year-old Mahnoor Fatima, who was stolen from his family in October of last year and never seen again. "This shows the difference between rich and poor," Mahnoor's mother said. "No one even came to my house to console me... Everything is done here for the rich and the British, but nothing for Pakistanis and the poor."

Near Peshawar, a three-year old girl called Fariha was taken from a wedding party last month, her kidnappers demanding Sterling pounds 8,000 for her life. The parents couldn't pay. So Fariha was killed and thrown into a canal. Her father, a worker at a brick-kiln, later came to the Peshawar Press Club with the body of his daughter to demand punishment for her killers. In Faisalabad two days later, another kidnapped child, seven-year-old Samina Ali, was found dead in a drain after her parents failed to pay a ransom for her. They complained that the police later demanded £120 for handing over her body. A kidnapped boy, a six-year-old identified only as Sharjeel, was also found dead in a drain a few hours earlier.

In the first two months of this year, 240 people - almost all of them children - have been kidnapped in Pakistan. Only 74 have been recovered alive. There - not in the suicide attacks and the venality of politicians- lies the worst statistic in Pakistan.

10 words that rocked parliament house - I

The Frontier Post
M Sarwar Awan
“You brought disgrace to the entire house of National Assembly.” This was the 10-word sentence Justice Khilji Arif expressed while addressing Jamshed Dasti, an elected MNA and also holding the post of Chairman National Assembly’s Standing Committee on Sports, during hearing of a case of fake degree that should have shaken the building of the Parliament as this disgrace was brought by none other than the members of the always held ‘supreme’ National Assembly themselves. It was a time of shame for the whole lot of the entire House when the court after failure of the ‘honourable’ MNA to answer a few common questions usually taught to the beginners at the school or madrassah and that too relating to his Master Degree subject asked him to resign or be ready to go to jail. But here we forget one thing that the word ‘shame’ is no more found in the dictionary of the present so-called leaders sans some of the highly educated and disciplined parliamentarians. It was a thing of the past lost in the wilderness of greed years ago. If this young man have an iota of shame he would not have indulged in this cheat and fraud. It would be better if all the members of parliament who presented fake degrees and some how managed to win elections and play with the destiny of this poor and unfortunate nation should resign giving any respectable reason. The irony of the fate is that Dasti managed to get fake degree equivalent to MA and that too in Islamiyat from a religious madrassah. Further another MNA Nazeer Jatt and an MPA from Punjab, judging the fate of their cases, thought it better to resign instead of appearing in the apex court and facing the volley of questions by the highly respectable and senior members of the Supreme Court. The universities in foreign countries are already not accepting the degrees awarded by our universities. This event has very badly tarnished the image of the degrees possessed by our youth. Now first of all let us see the reason why a decay and an ad hoc situation is prevailing in our society. Every department is facing deterioration. The common people vote to elect their representatives to the National and provincial assemblies entrusting them the responsibility to make laws for the betterment of the country’s citizens and also using their vision and farsightedness to frame policies keeping in mind the present day modern developments and technology to enable them to compete with the people of the developed world. But unfortunately our elected assembly members always lacked vision and forsightedess which is amply reflected by the speeches delivered by them during debates in the assembly whether it be a debate on national budget, war on terror or any external or internal problem faced by the country. Except a few members, all the elected representatives have never forwarded a new proposal or given new suggestion to improve the status of the oppressed people of this country. The parliamentarians taking part in assembly debates spend their energies blaming the past governments saying that they ignored all the departments and nation was facing problems for the misdeeds and follies committed by the past rulers but they all forget that former rulers were not aliens but their kith and kin, their fathers and grandfathers. Another famous and effective excuse forwarded by the assembly members is that bureaucracy was creating hurdles in their way to work for the masses’ welfare but the fact is that elected members due to lack of knowledge and abilities fail to counter the bureaucracy. So in order to safe face these people make bureaucrats a scapegoat to hide their failures. In short they have thousands of excuses to prove their innocence and put the blame on the shoulders of others. The members of this unfortunate and hapless nation have been witnessing this blame game for the last 40 years. The elected members complete their tenure playing this blame game and trying to push the opposition to the corner. During the period, especially the democratic governments, such policies had been adopted which played havoc with industries and now we are witnessing not thousands but lakhs of unemployed people, we daily read news of suicides by the jobless people. Country men have been witnessing the development plans devised by the democratic governments starting from Junejo era up to the present democrats. No government has planned any long-term development plans but only such programmes have been devised which benefited a small number of people for a short time just draining the national exchequre. For example, the Junejo government introduced three and five marla schemes in the name of poor and homeless people. Further a so-called plan to promote education and especially to make older people literate Taleem-i-Balghaan was announced and so millions of rupees were wasted. Now come to the present government. The present democrats from the day one are distributing taxpayers’ money in the name of Benazir Bhutto. These useless plans are short-lived. Some people term this exercise as election bribery. These programmes portray the short-sightedness of the leaders. One can safely say that more than five centuries ago Sher Shah Suri who ruled India for a few years was more intelligent and had vision who used the national exchequre with great care. Historians say that people were finding it hard to get jobs. Some of his advisors told him to distribute the money lying in government kity but he refused to do so. Sher Shah ordered construction of Grand Trunk Road starting from Peshawar to Calcutta. In this way a grand road was constructed, joblessness ended to an extent, and untill now hundreds of cities have been set up along side the Road. Crores of people even now are benefiting from this one project of Sher Shah. One can say that money was well spent. Year after year has elapsed but we are still reading ministers’ statements prepared by PROs. These statements have no difference, one issued 30 or 40 years ago or issued now, are the same. These all facts indicate and prove inability, inefficiency and ignorance of the MPs about the present day developments taking place in the world and it is certainly due to illiterate lot of our parliamentarians as compared to the developed world. Now it is the time for the experts and technocats to frame policies, face the present day challenges and bring the country at par with the other countries in all fields and mere a degree whether it is of MA or BA would not be working. Now let’s come back to the MNAs and MPA who resigned from the assembly seats. Actually these assembly members have played fraud and cheated the nation of millions of rupees. The honourable judges of the Supreme Court have ordered new elections on the seats vacated by these MPs. These elections will certainly cost a lot of money collected through the taxes from the common people. The court only ordered these cheaters to resign and imposed no penalty on them. It would have been a nice step on part of the Supreme Court if these culprits had been made to pay back all the money they received as salary, allowances, all fringe benefits, TA/DA and tours abroad on the expanse of State exchequre. Further the money to be spent on the re-elections should also be received from these people because re-elections are being held due to their fraud and cheating. Here a question arises as to what is the criteria which the party committees or the party heads follow while awarding party ticket to a candidate to contest elections. Usually party heads allot election ticket to a member of the party known to him for years then how is it possible that he is not aware of the expected candidate’s educational qualifications. It will be better for the nation and country’s future that party heads awarding election tickets should be held responsible if they award tickets to candidates having fake degrees. It means that party head would be assisting a cheater to commit a fraud so he would be equally responsible for this fraud.

Pakhtuns calling: Is anybody listening?

The Frontier Post
Jan Assakzai
Discrimination against nearly 40 million Pakhtuns in Pakistan has reached new levels finding parallels with Bengalis of erstwhile East Pakistan. Yes it is in Pakistan which has a constitution that purports to respect the rights of other provinces, ethnic and religious minorities. In practice, Pakhtuns are practising worse kind of discrimination can be seen below: 1: The war on terror has turned Pakhtun areas of Pakhtunkhwa and of Southern Pakhtunkhwa (Read Balochistan's Pakhtun areas) into a battleground for extremist and terrorist activities culminating in closure of thousands of schools and killing of innocent political, tribal and social leaders, besides women and children 2: The policies of war on terror and of "strategic depth" pursued by Pakistan military establishment are victimising Pakhtuns while having no say whatsoever in shaping them - leaving the community brutalised and traumatised over the last nearly three decades. 2: B. The Talibanisation policy of the state has depicted Pakhtuns as Taliban world over. Any Pakhtun in Lahore, Karachi or in other parts of Pakistan is being suspected as terrorist or Talib. Even Karachi dominated electronic media - on the day of Lahore's multiple blasts couple of weeks back - aired a police officer as saying "we arrested a 'Pathan' in connection with Lahore blasts" instead of saying a suspect has been detained. Even a Pakhtun officer of Pakistan army told this scribe that he wanted to book an army guest house in Sindh when a fellow officer asked him if he did not belong to FATA implying that officer may be subjected to further scrutiny. One can see the level of suspicion directed at Pakhtuns. 3: Such is intolerance to the identity of Pakhtuns that predominantly Punjab based PML-N has tooth and nail opposed changing the name of NWFP to Pakhtunkhwa. Isn't it racist if you do not call me what I prefer you to call me by. 3:B Nearly 40 million Pakhtuns have been living in their lands on a contiguous territory but divided in different political and administrative units under the name of NWFP, FATA and Balochistan turning them into Pakistan's "Kurds" on their own land. Why words like NWFP, FATA and Balochistan not used for others? Is the state of Pakistan the new form of British Raj when it comes to Pakhtuns? 4: Pakhtu language is orphan in the state of Pakistan. It is mainly due to brave Pakhtun mothers that Pakhtu language is alive and still thriving. But without state support Pakhtu language will become endangered specie very soon. Do Pakhtuns need another state to stop discrimination against their identity, language, culture and values? 5: The plight of FATA is the culmination of colonial policies that Pakistan inherited from British Empire and pursued till today. FCR's black law is still an infringement of the rights - not to mention the economic deprivation of the area. Do Pakhtuns need another state to cater for their constitutional rights there? 6: There is no single road, train or any other means of communication linking Pakhtun areas in Pakistan. For example, in FATA in order to go to another agency you have to drive through Peshawar. From Southern Pakhtunkhwa-in Balochistan one has to go through Sindh and Punjab in order to go to Peshawar while using train as a mode of transportation. The train journey takes nearly two days. On the other hand if there had been a train service linking Quetta, Zhob and Dera Ismail Khan, timing could have been cut by two-thirds. Is not the job of the state to ensure modern means of transportation for their travel. As far the economic deprivation, the less said the better. Despite being energy producing power, Pakhtuns have negligible access to its proceeds. Power cuts in rural areas reach to 12-20 hours a day hurting their agriculture badly. Agriculture produce ie, tobacco from Pakhtunkhwa, for example, and apples from southern Pakhtunkhwa can hardly be seen in the Middle Eastern markets, Europe and North America while mangoes and oranges - agriculture produce from non-Pakhtun areas - end up on the streets of Dubai, London and New York, courtesy of state patronage. Same is the case with other products. Are Pakhtuns not Pakistanis or they not entitled to state support for their agriculture produce to market in Middle East, Europe and North America? 8: The so-called economic package for Balochistan has left out almost half of the Balochistan population. Is it because Pakhtuns in Balochistan are not gun totting as their Baloch counterparts are? Such is the level of frustration among Pakhtuns there that this scribe was shocked to observe many Pakhtun youth arguing for adopting Balaach Marri solution - resorting to violence - in reaction to widespread economic deprivation and unemployment. Is the state of Pakistan listening? 9: Millions of Pakhtuns in Karachi are facing the threat of losing livelihood due to the fact the state of Pakistan is one sidedly supporting ethnic Muhajir community in their politically, economically and socially discriminatory policies towards Pakhtuns. Are Pakhtuns of Karachi half Pakistanis? In conclusion the status quo viz a viz Pakhtuns cannot perpetuate for long as such a large community cannot be held back from its due share in the country's political, economic and social life. If Pakistan has to come out of its present mess, it needs a new social contract with Pakhtuns in particular. Only a democratic Pakistan at ease with its minorities and at peace with its neighbours is the ultimate solution. Will somebody at the helms listen before it is too late?

Want to Buy Some Opium?

Surgar Weekly
The focus of the U.S. Military in Afghanistan has apparently shifted towards Kandahar. General McChrystal recently declared that the operation has already begun. But what about Marjah? Only recently it was the primary theater for U.S. forces, and, as written here, the real struggle began after kinetic operations ended. So now, at the most important juncture, why are resources and attention being pulled elsewhere? There are numerous outstanding issues in Marjah, and neglecting them now will undermine any progress made in the past.
One of the most vexing issues in Marjah is the opium crop, which is due to be harvested soon. In a drastic change of policy, U.S. and ISAF forces will not be eradicating the crop. The reason is simple -- Afghans who planted the crop are relying on the profits from the harvest to make ends meet and feed their families. Destroying the crop would only serve to impoverish the farmers and further erode the legitimacy of the Karzai government. General McChrystal is right to eschew eradication, but that alone doesn't solve the opium problem.
It's important to understand that farmers do not become wealthy by growing opium. They do it because it is a hardy crop and in times of insecurity is a reliable producer of enough cash to survive. The illicit wealth goes to a myriad of middlemen, from local drug runners and Taliban enforcers to international smugglers and distributors. These middlemen often coerce farmers into growing poppy. In areas where the Afghan government's writ is circumscribed, local Taliban sometimes require local farmers to plant opium, and threaten punishment if they do not deliver a satisfactory output after the harvest.
When viewed through this prism of desperation and coercion, it becomes clear that benign neglect from coalition forces is not sufficient to address the problem.
The Taliban and drug smugglers will still make their profits, and farmers will still be forced to grow more opium next year. A more active and comprehensive solution is needed to ensure that opium is not planted next year, and this solution does exist -- the U.S. should buy the current opium crop from farmers. Additionally, the coalition should distribute seeds for other crops and make clear that all subsequent opium yields will be destroyed without compensation. In other words, help the farmers survive by paying for their crop now, but warn them that this will never happen again and help them shift to other products.
Obviously this is a solution with warts, but it has not been fully examined. Ron Nordland wrote it off with a nod to an unattributed source, who "feared that it would only encourage more opium cultivation -- and might be illegal under United States law, turning American troops into de facto drug financiers." Dion Nissenbaum for McClatchy similarly dismissed the option as "politically unpalatable" without any further discussion.Purchasing the crop need not be considered illegal. Treating it as a military expenditure to create stability in Afghanistan is justifiable, particularly considering it would save American lives and cost less than another force escalation. Nor would buying the crop turn American troops into "de fact drug financiers." The poppy would be promptly destroyed, not trafficked, and the majority of the funds would go to struggling Afghan farmers, not the Taliban middlemen. Another workaround is for American troops to pay Afghan farmers to destroy their own crops, circumventing the legal issue and ensuring that the farmers are justly compensated.There are, however, two outstanding issues that make purchasing the crop a risky gambit: security and governance. Doing so is predicated on the notion that Marjah will remain under coalition/Afghan government control in the foreseeable future. Drug smugglers and Taliban forces accustomed to easy profits will be angered if they are cut out of the proceeds this year, and will most likely seek reprisals against Afghan farmers.
Security must be guaranteed in order to protect the farmers. Furthermore, illicit traffickers will presumably pressure farmers to plant more opium next year, and threaten to destroy any other crop or bring violence if they do not receive the allotted quota of poppy. To prevent farmers from falling victim to capricious traffickers and Taliban, security is once again of the utmost priority. Furthermore, many in the Afghan government, including the President's own brother, have been implicated in the drug trade. For this solution to work, security must be maintained and accompanied by honest governance. This means the Afghan government must protect farmers from Taliban violence, stop participating in the drug trade, and encourage the growth of a diversity of legal crops.
It's a tall order for a struggling government, and I have made no secret of my pessimistic attitude towards the Karzai regime. But something must be done to break the cycle of dependence between the farmers and the Taliban, and turning a blind eye is simply not enough.

What Punjab CM should learn from Taliban?

Dawn.Com
How does it feel caught in the eye of the storm? For nearly seven years, the people of the NWFP and the adjacent tribal regions and the security forces braved bombings and terrorist attacks, laying down their lives and offering unprecedented sacrifices. That was, when terrorists had turned the NWFP and the tribal regions into killing fields, while those living further a field to the east in the Punjab and Sindh were lived a relatively unscathed life.

The lull in terrorist attacks during the February, 2008 elections and the months afterwards because of the government’s peace-overtures towards the militants, were followed by a dramatic uptick in deadly bombings that exacerbated human toll with every passing day.

Those have been one of the most difficult times in the history of the NWFP, when every new day brought in more blood and gore. Still, nobody seemed moved in Islamabad and Rawalpindi. Such was the frustration that people began to seriously ask if the NWFP had been abandoned to its fate.

The irony was that while Pakistani militants spilled the blood and slit the throats of their own countrymen, our drawing room intellectuals, right wingers and armchair anchors split their hair if the war being fought in the tribal regions was Pakistan’s own.

That was rubbing salt into the wounds of those in the NWFP suffering the pain of a thousand cuts not just at hand of the militants’ brigades but also the apathy and indifference of their brethren in the rest of Pakistan.

That changed in 2009, when the military establishment finally woke up from its deep slumber to the existential challenge to the state by the aggressive and more ambitious militants menacingly setting their eye on areas across the Indus.

Swat was the turnaround followed by South Waziristan. Newton’s third law of motion says that every action generates an opposite and equal reaction. Holed up in North Waziristan and relatively smaller pockets in Orakzai, Tirah and Mohmand, the militants are now fighting their own survival war. So, it would have been naïve, if not downright stupid, on our part not to expect retaliation; and they will hit where it hurts the more: Punjab.

This, because in the militants’ own calculation; and unfortunately, it was a perception many in the NWFP had come to hold too, due to the seeming indifference to their plight in Punjab and elsewhere, that to change the course of military action, take the battle to the heartland of the military power — the Punjab.

Nor that the militants would think twice before striking anywhere in the NWFP, if an opportunity presents itself. Attacks continue across the length and breadth of the NWFP, though the scale and recurrence of these attacks have, mercifully, shown a remarkable downward trend.

So, should the chief minister of Punjab, Shahbaz Sharif, be surprised over the outrage caused by his appeal to the Taliban to spare his province because both opposed foreign dictation? Does he still wonder, no matter what spin his advisers try to weave around his rather timid statement, why the Taliban are now choosing to hit the citadel of his power; Lahore? And was he taken aback when the military chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani summoned him to Rawalpindi to give him a piece of his mind?

It took the military nearly two years, of course with the much needed crucial and critical support of the political leadership, to turn the tide against the militants by shaping up public opinion, to own this war as Pakistan’s own.

So, was Mr Sharif implying that the war that was being fought in the volatile tribal regions of South Waziristan, Bajaur, Khyber, Orakzai and other places is not Pakistan’s own and was being carried out on foreign dictations?

Did he realise what toll would his statement take of the morale of the forces fighting in some of the world’s toughest regions? Did he know how much effort it took to motivate the forces to take on an enemy that claimed to be fighting a holy war in the name of Islam?

Did he know the possible implications his statement could have, for reaching out to the militants to seek reprieve for a province that is a major contributor of manpower to the armed forces?

These are pretty serious questions and that is precisely why the controversy his statement generated refuses to die down. Statesmanship is not just about rendering Faiz Ahmad Faiz, it requires foresight as well. It was therefore, all the more ironical that this could have come from a man, which the establishment once wanted to hoist on Pakistan.

Wonder why, those who have had no love lost for the present dispensation, have now come to like them more than they liked the Sharifs for being the new saviors of the country.

But what is probably more worrying in this whole sordid affair is the ethnic dimension that terrorist incidents have assumed.

That Punjab has been in perpetual self denial about the existence of Punjabi Taliban and what is cooking in its own backyard in southern Punjab will have its own implications for Pakistan’s most populous province and by extension on the whole of the country.

But what has begun to happen does not bode well for national unity — the witch-hunt bordering on ethnic profiling after terrorist attacks in the Punjab and Sindh, when Pashtuns invariably become a suspect and is picked-up for questioning. Sadly, the electronic media cannot exonerate itself from playing up this ethnic dimension.

It is unfortunate that the militants are probably more united than our own political leadership across the broad political spectrum. Instead of seeking a common cause with the militants, the chief minister of Punjab should at least have learnt one thing from the Taliban — their unity. The Taliban may be known by their origin but when it comes to fighting an enemy, they are one, be that in Afghanistan or in Pakistan.

Reforming Pakistan's Civil Service

International Crisis Group Report.


Decades of mismanagement, political manipulation and corruption have rendered Pakistan’s civil service incapable of providing effective governance and basic public services. In public perceptions, the country’s 2.4 million civil servants are widely seen as unresponsive and corrupt, and bureaucratic procedures cumbersome and exploitative. Bureaucratic dysfunction and low capacity undermine governance, providing opportunities to the military to subvert the democratic transition and to extremists to destabilise the state. The civilian government should prioritise reforms that transform this key institution into a leaner, more effective and accountable body.

General Pervez Musharraf’s eight-year military rule left behind a demoralised and inefficient bureaucracy that was used to ensure regime survival. There was a dramatic rise in military encroachments as retired generals were appointed to key civil posts, such as the chairmanship of the Federal Public Service Commission, the premier agency for recruitment and promotions. The military regime’s poorly conceived devolution of power led to further administrative confusion and the breakdown of service delivery at the district level, the key administrative unit of governance. The decision to vest revenue and law and order functions in nazims (mayors), elected indirectly and on a non-party basis, led to greater collusion between unscrupulous district officials and corrupt police.

The civil bureaucracy’s ills, however, predate military rule. Archaic rules and procedures and a rigid hierarchical authority structure have undermined its oversight of a public sector that has expanded considerably since the 1970s. Low salaries, insecure tenure, and obsolete accountability mechanisms have spawned widespread corruption and impunity. Recruitments, postings and promotions are increasingly made on the basis of personal contacts and political affiliation, instead of on merit.

The civil service’s falling standards impact mostly Pakistan’s poor, widening social and economic divisions between the privileged and underprivileged. With citizens increasingly affected by conflict and militancy, including millions displaced by fighting in the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP) and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), the government’s ability to ensure law and order and provide services such as education and health care will be vital to winning the hearts and minds of the public, and restoring links between the citizen and the state.

Bureaucratic procedures and practices, formal or informal, play a key role in public perceptions of the government’s functioning. Both the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP), which heads the coalition government at the centre, and its main opposition, the Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz) (PML-N), have a stake in investing the patience, resources and political capital needed to enhance the bureaucracy’s ability to execute government policies and respond to public grievances and needs. Both parties should resist the temptation to again use the bureaucracy for short-term political ends, which undermined its functioning. The government’s inability to deliver basic services and good governance could provide an ambitious military leadership the opportunity to intervene.

In the 1990s, the PPP and the PML-N each formed two elected governments but were prevented each time from completing a full term by the military – either through its civilian proxy, the president, or a direct coup in October 1999. The two parties share the blame for that flawed transition, by failing to deliver good governance and as well as a willingness to align with the military against each other. Unsurprisingly, each dismissal, including the October coup, was justified on the grounds of bad governance and corruption. In this, another period of fragile democratic transition, the two parties must realise that repeating past mistakes will again make them vulnerable to military intervention.

If the flaws of an unreformed bureaucracy are not urgently addressed, the government risks losing public support. The recommendations of the National Commission on Government Reforms (NCGR), which was set up by the military regime in 2006 and presented a report to Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani in May 2008, if properly implemented could help reform the civil service.

The international community too can help improve governance by supporting civil service reform, expanding training programs, and providing technological support and expertise to modernise methods of administration. However, the U.S., EU and other donors should refrain, absent political reform, from supporting bureaucracies such as the FATA secretariat, where unchecked powers and the absence of financial oversight make corruption more likely. They must also condition aid on measures to institute greater accountability and transparency. Indeed, with hundreds of millions more dollars committed for Pakistan’s development, for example through the U.S. Enduring Assistance and Cooperation Act 2009, comes increased risk of corruption and waste, particularly if the money is directly channelled to inefficient and unaccountable institutions. If international development funds yield few tangible results, undermining local expectations, the hearts and minds of the Pakistani public will likely be lost rather than won.

RECOMMENDATIONS

To the Government of Pakistan:

1. Enhance civil service performance and revive a spirit of public service by:

a) increasing salaries and pensions, particularly for those at the bottom of the hierarchy, providing better housing, transport and health insurance for all government employees, and subsidised schooling for their children;

b) conducting regular training, including refresher courses, at all levels of the bureaucracy;

c) improving standards of instruction at training institutions to inculcate professional skills as well as norms and practices that reward integrity and professional commitment;

d) providing competitive compensation and benefits to attract qualified and motivated instructors;

e) linking an officer’s performance during training programs with promotions, thus no longer using successful completion as the only yardstick;

f) establishing and strictly abiding by new criteria for secretariat appointments to include professional expertise, diversity of experience, demonstrable leadership in public institutions, and ability to tackle challenging assignments;

g) modifying Annual Confidential Reports (ACRs) to include tangible, performance-oriented criteria instead of subjective evaluations of officers’ characters;

h) instituting a transparent and competitive selection process to encourage representation of all occupational groups, and reserving positions in each basic pay scale for officers from each of those groups; and

i) ensuring that specialists have the same access to training facilities as generalist officers in occupational groups.

2. Eliminate military interference by:

a) ending the practice of hiring serving or retired military officers in the civil service and abolishing the annual 10 per cent quota reserved for military officers;

b) refraining from renewing contracts of retired military officers presently occupying civil service positions;

c) enacting laws barring serving or retired military personnel from heading any institution dealing with civil service training, recruitment or promotions; and

d) immediately ending the practice of having senior appointments subject to evaluation and clearance by the military’s intelligence agencies.

3. Enhance the functioning of federal and provincial secretariats by:

a) reducing excessive centralisation of functions and devolving administrative and financial authority to lower tiers, with effective oversight;

b) revising and simplifying existing rules and procedures to ensure that civil servants are informed of their rights and responsibilities;

c) ending the systemic bias in favour of generalists by allowing the same opportunities for postings, promotions and career advancement to specialists; and

d) reversing the quota for District Management Group (federal) appointees to provincial posts at the level of Basic Pay Scale (BPS) 21 so that 75 per cent of these posts are reserved for provincial civil servants, and the remainder for federal appointees.

4. Institute effective accountability over the civil bureaucracy by:

a) implementing the recommendations of the Charter of Democracy, signed between the PPP and PML-N, to set up an independent accountability commission, answerable to the National Assembly’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC); this committee would investigate – in tandem with the Federal Investigation Agency (FIA) – alleged malpractice and financial and other corruption by government officials and take disciplinary actions against those found guilty;

b) empowering federal and provincial ombudsmen to redress public grievances against bureaucratic malpractice; and

c) holding federal and provincial secretaries accountable to parliament and provincial assemblies by mandating national and provincial parliamentary committees to hold regular hearings requiring these civil servants to account for efficient use of resources as well as the organisation, management and staffing of their respective departments.

5. Promote fairness and eliminate opportunities for political manipulation at all levels of the civil administration by:

a) expanding the role of the Federal Public Service Commission (FPSC) from a recruiting agency to one that professionally oversees all aspects of the bureaucracy’s functioning;

b) mandating parliamentary committees to vet and approve senior civil service appointments, proposed by the FPSC, to ensure that they are made on merit rather than personal or political affiliation, followed by a vote in parliament;

c) withdrawing the discretionary power of the prime minister to promote officers to the highest grade in the bureaucracy and transferring it to the FPSC;

d) guaranteeing security of tenure and providing civil servants legal protection against postings, transfers and promotions that do not conform to due process;

e) empowering the Federal Services Tribunal to monitor postings and transfers, and review civil servants’ complaints about arbitrary transfers; and

f) replicating these measures in the provinces.

6. Settle the status of the report by the National Commission on Government Reforms (NCGR) by:

a) constituting a bipartisan parliamentary committee on civil service reform, with half the members nominated by the government and half by the opposition, co-chaired by the prime minister and the leader of the opposition, to assess the report, placing recommendations before the national and provincial assemblies for detailed debate and review;

b) once approved, present a final bill on the floor of the National Assembly for a vote; and

c) encourage the provincial assemblies to follow suit on reform of the provincial services.

7. Improve land administration and local governance by:

a) computerising land records;

b) making certificates of possession and other land ownership-related documents available at information kiosks in tehsils (towns) for a small fixed fee;

c) establishing call centres in districts to report requests for bribes, illegal commissions and other abuses, including by the patwari (village revenue officer); and

d) devolving authority to tehsil officials to issue certificates of domicile and related documents, rather than through district headquarters.

8. Modernise civil service systems and processes and enhance inter-agency coordination through e-gov­ern­ance technology by:

a) making compliance with standards set by the E-Government Directorate (EGD) mandatory for major federal government projects;

b) instituting compulsory training in basic information technology processes for all government employees in BPS-5 and above; and

c) giving the EGD greater financial and organisational autonomy by converting it from a cell to an attached department of the ministry of information technology.

9. Improve police functioning by having the parliament review the Police Order (2002); setting up a parliamentary subcommittee to deal exclusively with policing; and empowering accountability and managerial bodies such as the public safety commissions and the National Police Management Board.

10. Mainstream FATA’s bureaucracy by abolishing the FATA secretariat and the office of the political agent, and transferring their authority to the NWFP secretariat, relevant provincial line ministries and district departments.

To the U.S. and the International Community:

11. Condition FATA aid under the U.S. Enduring Assistance and Cooperation Act 2009 on reform of the region’s corrupt and dysfunctional bureaucracy, including the abolition of the FATA secretariat and the office of the political agent, with their powers transferred to the NWFP secretariat, relevant provincial line ministries and district departments.

12. Include technocrats, as well as cadre civil servants, in all public sector capacity building projects, in addition to training schemes at leading international universities and institutes.

13. Build the capacity of civil service training institutions by providing instructors and teaching materials on best international practices of public policy, fiscal policy, financial management, infrastructure development, human resource management, energy and agriculture.

14. Provide technical support for the expansion of E-government technologies, particularly in areas such as land revenue administration, taxation and policing, and leverage aid to press line ministries, departments and agencies to incorporate E-governance processes within their domains.

Obama's escalation challenges U.S. military

(Reuters)
WASHINGTON - U.S. President Barack Obama's escalation of the war in Afghanistan challenges his generals to do more with slightly less than they wanted -- and much, much faster. The odds are against them.
The deployment of 30,000 more troops is a victory for proponents of the buildup within the U.S. military, who say it will breathe new life into a flagging eight-year-old war that would have ended in defeat otherwise.
But Obama did not give General Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. and NATO commander on the ground, all of the 40,000 troops he sought -- let alone a more ambitious plan to deploy up to 80,000 extra troops. NATO will not entirely bridge the gap.
Obama, in his speech on Tuesday, also demanded success more quickly, calling for U.S. forces to start pulling out in mid-2011 -- a year and a half sooner than McChrystal thought was advisable.
"He is being asked to do more with less, at least less than he had asked for," said military analyst Kimberly Kagan, who was part of the team that helped McChrystal assess the Afghan conflict during the summer.
"Is it enough? I don't know ... 30,000 forces is a lot of combat power and it has a chance, and I think a reasonable chance, of dramatically changing the situation on the ground."
Commanders are expected to funnel the forces into Taliban strongholds in southern Afghanistan, including Kandahar and opium-producing areas of Helmand province, protecting key population centers.
The reinforcements, all of which are expected to be in place by the end of August, will aim to isolate the Taliban and create the space needed to train the Afghan security forces and build local governance.
TROOPS CAN'T WIN WAR
McChrystal, a straight-talking former special operations commander said to sleep just four or five hours a night, led Americans into an autumn of soul-searching about the Afghan war after his bleak assessment of the conflict was leaked to the media in September.
He warned the war effort would fail without additional troops, and, worse still, that an escalation alone could not ensure victory.
But his calls to address a crisis of confidence in the Afghan government have raised uncomfortable questions about nation-building -- a grim prospect in an underdeveloped country ravaged by three decades of war, rampant corruption and a booming opium trade.
Obama, in his speech, said Afghanistan's government had to crack down on corruption and deliver services to the people, warning "the days of providing a blank check are over."
Defense Secretary Robert Gates has announced plans to tighten control of multimillion-dollar U.S. contracts as a first step to fighting corruption.
After three months of White House strategy reviews, McChrystal commended Obama for giving him a "clear military mission and the resources to accomplish our task" -- even though he did not get all of the troops he wanted.
McChrystal cited the goal of ramping up training of Afghan security forces -- a crucial step for any handover. There are now about 190,000 Afghan soldiers and police, a number McChrystal has recommended raising to 400,000.
But officials have also spoken bluntly about the obstacles of developing capable Afghan security forces given high attrition rates among recruits and widespread illiteracy.
Less than a third of the Afghan population are literate and officer training includes teaching officers to read, a fact McChrystal warns could take the training well beyond 2013.
IT'S NOT IRAQ
For McChrystal and his boss, General David Petraeus, the Afghanistan mission will be a crucial test of counter-insurgency strategy and the lessons of Iraq.
There, a quick "surge" of 20,000 U.S. troops sent to Iraq between January and July 2007 is one of the factors credited with helping to pull that country back from brink.
But both McChrystal and Petraeus have been wary of drawing comparisons to Iraq given the major differences with Afghanistan, which lacks a strong central government or tribal structure after three decades of war.
For his part, Obama rejected comparisons to Vietnam in his speech on Tuesday, as U.S. generals have done for years.
And then there is the Soviet Union. U.S. military strategists are working hard to make sure that Western forces are not seen as occupiers, as they escalate past the peak size of Soviet forces before their withdrawal in defeat in 1989.
Gates has said showing Afghans that U.S. troops improve their lives will help prevent comparisons to the Soviets. He wants U.S. forces to build wells, schools and roads after clearing towns of the Taliban.
But avoiding such comparisons could be difficult. Even the strategy itself drew allusions to the Soviet Union on Tuesday.
"The McChrystal plan calls for what the Soviets did -- holding the cities," said Christine Fair, a professor at Georgetown University's Center for Peace and Security Studies.
"That did not work for the Soviets and I don't know how it will work with us, given the troop footprint we have."

Separatists, Islamists and Islamabad Struggle for Control of Pakistani Balochistan

www.jamestown.org
By: Chris Zambelis

To say that the U.S.-led invasion and occupation of Afghanistan in October 2001 shook Pakistan to its core would be an understatement. Since then, the war in Afghanistan has spilled over into Pakistan on multiple levels. The escalating cycle of violence between Pakistani security forces and a patchwork of tribal militants, particularly the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and foreign fighters aligned with the Taliban and al-Qaeda in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) is a case in point. Many observers of Pakistani affairs have used the deteriorating situation in the tribal agencies along the Afghanistan-Pakistan frontier as a bellwether of future trends in Pakistan. In this context, it is no surprise that events in Pakistan’s tribal areas seem to draw the most attention. Yet Pakistan’s Balochistan province is also beginning to draw interest as a center of Taliban and al-Qaeda activity.

Reports that the U.S. is seeking Pakistan’s approval for expanding its controversial drone campaign against targets in Balochistan - a clear red line for Pakistan - have raised serious concerns in Islamabad about Washington’s ultimate intentions (The News, [Islamabad], September 29). As the Obama administration escalates its military campaign in Afghanistan, Pakistani leaders have expressed deep concerns about the potential destabilization of Balochistan resulting from the intensified fighting expected in Afghanistan in the coming months (The Nation [Lahore], November 27). As if these concerns were not enough, Balochistan remains a hotbed of ethno-nationalist militancy, drug smuggling, and organized crime. Balochistan is also in the throes of a refugee crisis that has been largely ignored. The confluence of these trends - which indirectly or directly reinforce each other - is making an already dangerous situation worse with severe implications for Pakistan and the wider region.

Geography and Demographics

Balochistan occupies approximately 42 percent of Pakistan’s total landmass, making it the country’s largest province. Yet in spite of its large geographic area, Balochistan is only home to an estimated population ranging between 7 and 12 million, a consequence of its harsh, mountainous terrain and paucity of water sources, making it Pakistan’s least densely populated region and smallest province in terms of total population. The provincial capital of Quetta is home to an estimated 750,000 to 1 million people. Ethnic Baloch represent a slight majority in the province, with ethnic Pashtuns, many of whom are refugees or descendants of refugees from Afghanistan, representing the next largest community, especially in the north. Ethnic Pashtun influence is significant in Balochistan; the provincial capital Quetta, for instance, is a majority Pashtun city, as are other areas of the province. Balochistan is also home to smaller ethnic and religious minorities.

Pakistani Balochistan is situated in a strategic location in southwestern Pakistan due south of the South Waziristan region of the FATA and adjacent to the borders of the neighboring Iranian province of Sistan-Balochistan and Afghanistan’s Nimruz, Helmand, Kandahar, Zabol, and Paktika provinces. Balochistan lies on the Gulf of Oman, a busy sea passage that connects to the Arabian Sea and the Persian Gulf, and by extension, the wider Indian Ocean. Balochistan is also home to the strategically important Gwadar deepwater seaport. The Soviet invasion of Afghanistan was motivated largely by Moscow’s pursuit of access to a long coveted warm water seaport giving access to the Indian Ocean.

Balochistan is among Pakistan’s poorest and least developed regions. Paradoxically, it is also rich in natural resources. Balochistan is home to significant natural gas deposits (accounting for at least one-third of total Pakistani consumption) and oil reserves. It is also rich in minerals and metals, including copper, uranium, and gold (Asia Times [Hong Kong], May 9). Balochistan lies along the route of the proposed Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) pipeline - popularly dubbed the “peace pipeline” - designed to transfer natural gas from Iran to India via Pakistan. Balochistan also lies along the alternative regional pipeline network favored by the United States (precisely because it excludes Iran) known as the Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India (TAPI) pipeline. [1]

Ethno-Nationalist Militancy

Balochistan has been a center of ethno-nationalist militancy and violent revolts against the state since the province was forcibly annexed by Pakistan after the partition of India gave rise to an independent Pakistan. Prior to being annexed by Pakistan, Balochistan enjoyed autonomy under British colonial rule. Pakistan’s ethnic Baloch community is underserved and deeply resents what it sees as a calculated effort by Islamabad to suppress Baloch identity and culture. Baloch nationalists argue that Islamabad is actively working to keep the Baloch people impoverished, weak, and disorganized, thus making it easier for the ethnic-Punjabi dominated central government to reap the benefits of Balochistan’s vast natural resources. The latest outbreak of the Baloch insurgency was sparked by the deaths of three prominent Baloch rebel leaders following a period of relative calm. Baloch militant groups such as the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) and the Balochistan Liberation United Front (BLUF) accused Islamabad of instigating the latest round of violence.

Baloch militants typically target symbols of the Pakistani state, political leaders, members of the security services and targets associated with the region’s natural resources, such as gas pipelines. Pakistan has always viewed the Baloch with great suspicion, owing in part to their strong sense of national identity and their numbers in Afghanistan and the neighboring Iranian province of Sistan-Balochistan, where ethnic Baloch insurgents led by the obscure Jundallah (Soldiers of God) movement are mounting their own violent campaign against Tehran (see Terrorism Monitor, February 9). While Pakistan and Iran have a history of cooperating closely to suppress Baloch nationalism, as the Baloch separatist aspirations threaten the territorial integrity of both countries, Pakistan is wary of attempts by regional rivals such as India to support Baloch militancy (PakTribune [Rawalpindi], November 19).

The threat of Baloch separatism will remain a challenge for Pakistan in its own right. The deteriorating security situation across Pakistan and Afghanistan, however, could severely complicate matters for Islamabad in Balochistan. Baloch rebels, for instance, may see a window of opportunity to escalate their campaign against Islamabad as Pakistan concentrates its efforts on fighting militants in the tribal areas. A potential expansion of the U.S. drone campaign to Balochistan may also provide Baloch militants with another opening to strike at Islamabad. There is evidence to suggest that Baloch rebels are already exploiting the current turmoil in Pakistan and Afghanistan. A series of bomb blasts and abductions in recent years targeting Chinese laborers prompted China to halt construction of the Gwadar oil refinery in Balochistan due to security concerns (Financial Times, August 14). Baloch rebels have also begun abducting international NGO personnel in the province. A senior UNHCR official was kidnapped and his driver killed by members of the BLUF in Quetta in February. BLUF staged the operation in part to highlight the plight of Baloch political prisoners in Pakistani prisons. While the UN official was eventually released, the BLUF’s decision to target UN relief workers represents a major escalation of Baloch militancy (Dawn [Karachi], February 4). Islamabad fears that Baloch rebels may position themselves as a potential bulwark against the spread of Taliban and al-Qaeda-style extremism that is increasingly gripping the province’s ethnic Pashtuns in an effort to gain allies in Washington, thus circumventing Islamabad’s authority and potentially ushering in a new and more dangerous stage of the Baloch separatist movement.

The Taliban and al-Qaeda

U.S. officials identify Balochistan as a critical center of Taliban and al-Qaeda activity. Many observers believe that high-profile al-Qaeda figures and ranking Taliban members, including Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar, have fled Afghanistan or Pakistan’s tribal areas for sanctuary in Balochistan. The provincial capital of Quetta is believed to serve as a critical hub for financing and organizing Taliban and al-Qaeda operations (Dawn, September 30). Islamabad’s intelligence service is often accused of protecting Afghan Taliban members in Balochistan, namely the powerful Taliban faction led by Mullah Omar known as the Quetta Shura. Pakistan disputes the very existence of the Quetta Shura, choosing instead to lay the blame for the resurgence of the Taliban and the deteriorating security situation in South Asia on what it describes as the failure of the U.S.-led mission to stabilize Afghanistan (Dawn, September 27). Because of its geographic proximity to the tribal areas, Balochistan is open to a spillover of violence and radicalism. The emergence of Baloch-based militants aligned with the Taliban, namely the obscure Tehrik-e-Taliban Balochistan (TTB), is indicative of the larger concerns regarding the spread of radicalism in the region (The News, March 4).

Because Balochistan borders Afghanistan, including Helmand province—a center for Taliban operations against NATO forces—Islamabad worries that an escalation of the U.S.-led campaign in Helmand and other parts of Afghanistan will compel Afghan militants to use Balochistan as a temporary sanctuary to evade direct engagements with U.S. forces. Afghan militants may also use Balochistan as a staging ground for attacks against NATO forces in Helmand and beyond. In other words, Pakistan fears that Balochistan may go the way of FATA and the NWFP following the U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, a dangerous scenario, to say the least. Afghan militants may also wreak havoc in Balochistan by launching attacks inside the province, particularly against religious minorities such as the small Shi’a community, a frequent object of radical Sunni Islamist ire. In fact, Balochistan has seen a spike in sectarian attacks over the last few years (AFP, March 4). Pakistan’s Prime Minister Yousef Raza Gilani has expressed concern over a possible influx of militants in Balochistan after U.S. reinforcements arrive in Afghanistan (The Nation, November 27). This is a nightmare scenario for Pakistan since it also has the potential to invite a more aggressive U.S. policy of launching drone attacks in Balochistan.

Tribal militants fleeing the Pakistani military’s offensive in the tribal areas may also use nearby Balochistan as a temporary base. The problems affecting Balochistan are severe, considering that the region serves as one of the crucial logistical hubs sustaining the U.S.-led military campaign in Afghanistan. Convoys ferrying fuel, vehicles, arms, food, and other crucial items to U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan travel through Balochistan. The first confirmed attack against a NATO convoy in Balochistan occurred in June in Chaman City, near the Afghan border (Times of India [New Delhi], June 3). Militants struck again in September in an attack against a NATO fuel convoy passing near Quetta, setting eight oil tankers ablaze (UPI, September 9). Vital supply routes used by NATO in Balochistan are likely to come under increasing attack as the escalation in Afghanistan unfolds, consequently raising a new set of challenges.

Opium and Organized Crime

Pakistani Balochistan plays a critical role as one the world’s busiest and most dangerous opium smuggling hubs, where the borders of Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran converge. Known as the Golden Crescent, the region is home to scores of powerful organized crime networks, especially criminal organizations engaged in drug smuggling and opium production. Not surprisingly, the rapid expansion of opium cultivation in Afghanistan in recent years has provided a boon to regional drug smugglers.

Ethnic Baloch-led criminal gangs based in Pakistani Balochistan (some of which associate with ethnic Baloch insurgent groups as well as Taliban factions based on mutual business interests as opposed to ideology or politics) figure prominently in the smuggling of opium out of Afghanistan (Asia Times, October 22).

Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs)

According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Pakistan is home to one of the largest refugee populations in the world with almost 1.8 million refugees on its soil. [2] Pakistani Balochistan is home to generations of refugees, mostly ethnic Pashtuns who fled Afghanistan following the Soviet invasion in 1979, as well as refugees who fled the country more recently. Balochistan is also home to IDP camps housing upwards of 200,000 ethnic Baloch forced to flee various parts of the province as a result of Islamabad’s military operations against Baloch separatists in the region. [3]

UNHCR estimates that upwards of 2 million people - nearly all ethnic Pashtuns - were forced to flee their homes during the fighting between Pakistani security forces and tribal militants in the FATA and NWFP [4] The massive scale of the displacement of Pashtuns from the tribal areas to other parts of Pakistan, including Balochistan, has caught Pakistani, U.S., and international authorities by surprise. The migration of IDPs into Balochistan and other parts of Pakistan will have a serious social and political impact on Pakistan’s society and economy that may ultimately threaten political stability. Baloch activists, for instance, often accuse Islamabad and the international community of favoring Pashtun refugees and IDPs in Balochistan at the expense of ethnic Baloch IDPs for political reasons. Some Baloch observers believe that Islamabad is exploiting the refugee and IDP crisis in Balochistan to further diminish Baloch influence through demographic changes. [5] The recent decision by the United Nations to withdraw much of its staff from parts of Pakistan - including Balochistan - due to security concerns will also exacerbate matters in the months ahead, adding another set of challenges to Pakistan’s embattled domestic institutions

Pakistani Ruling classes plunder public money

www.thefrontierpost.com
Parliamentary Affairs Minister Dr Babar Awan has disclosed that three political families and some retired army officers got millions of rupees bank loans waived from 30 banks across the country between 1985 and 2003. Without giving details, he said the National Bank of Pakistan had been the main sufferer. A report on this corruption by influential people has been tabled in the National Assembly. Separately, the NA's Public Accounts Committee also sought details of the writing-off of 1,000 Industrial Development Bank of Pakistan loans amounting to Rs 14 billion. Federal minister Syed Naveed Qamar also divulged in the NA the other day that a total of about Rs 60 billion of bank loans have been written off during 1999-2007. Most written off loans were obtained by cement, textile and sugar industries. The Punjab Bank waived Rs 608.74 million and the National Bank of Pakistan Rs 6109 million. The First Women Bank wrote off Rs 12.3 million, SME Bank Rs 1.239 billion, the IDBP Rs 10.763 billion and the Bank of Khyber Rs 1.124 billion. A total of Rs 127.485 billion of loans have been written off between 1999 and 2007 alone. If calculated banks have been writing off loans worth trillions of rupees between 1985 and 2007 and political people, army institutions and industries in addition to influential individuals have been the beneficiaries. This is not all because as, upon the directions, the State Bank has been submitting to superior courts lists of the people obtaining huge loans from almost all Pakistani banks and then getting them written off. What is even more deplorable is that all such scams have gone unnoticed and no corrupt people have ever been proceeded against under any law of the land. No government has ever seemed pushed about this colossal bank robbery particularly since 1985. This is because all political parties, military establishment, business barons and industrial tycoons belong to one ruling class that have virtually developed mafias that are sucking the blood of the common people already subject to severe economic miseries. Banks around the world work for the betterment of society and the welfare of the people but in Pakistan they serve only the already rich and influential. Stopping this corrupt practice is almost impossible at least for the political administration because top bosses are hand in glove with bank loan mafias. In fact, all those belonging to the ruling class are working like mafias. As such, the people cannot expect justice from any government. The only way left may be a judicial commission to probe into this alarmingly high corruption. As a last hope the Chief Justice of Pakistan should appoint a commission to inquire into the issue in depth at least since 1958, fix responsibilities, get the plundered public money back and inflict exemplary punishment on those who have and continue to harm the national and public financial interests. We may request the apex court of the country to also slap disqualification on corrupt political people from pursuing their political ambitions because no corrupt deserves a place in a legislature and government.

The Afghanistan Speech

EDITORIAL
New York Times

Americans have reason to be pessimistic, if not despairing, about the war in Afghanistan. After eight years of fighting, more than 800 American lives lost and more than 200 billion taxpayer dollars spent, the Afghan government is barely legitimate and barely hanging on in the face of an increasingly powerful Taliban insurgency.

In his speech Tuesday night, President Obama showed considerable political courage by addressing that pessimism and despair head-on. He explained why the United States cannot walk away from the war and outlined an ambitious and high-risk strategy for driving back the Taliban and bolstering the Afghan government so American troops can eventually go home.

For far too long — mostly, but not only, under President George W. Bush — Afghanistan policy has had little direction and no accountability. Mr. Obama started to address those problems at West Point, although the country needs to hear more about how he intends to pay for the war and how he will decide when Afghanistan will be able to stand on its own.

The president’s prolonged and leak-ridden policy review had fanned doubts here and abroad about Mr. Obama’s commitment. He showed no reluctance on Tuesday night. He said he decided to send more troops because he is “convinced that our security is at stake in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” which he called “the epicenter of the violent extremism practiced by Al Qaeda.”

“This is no idle danger,” Mr. Obama said, “no hypothetical threat.” He warned that new attacks were being plotted in the region, and raised the terrifying prospect of an unchecked Al Qaeda taking over a nuclear-armed Pakistan.

Mr. Obama’s decision to send an additional 30,000 troops — and ask NATO allies for several thousand more — is unlikely to end the political debate. Republicans are certain to point out that it is still short of the 40,000 requested by the top field commander, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, and object to the president’s pledge of a quick drawdown. Many Democrats and the president’s own vice president had opposed any escalation.

At this late date, we don’t know if even 100,000 American troops plus 40,000 from NATO will be enough to turn the war around. But we are sure that continuing President Bush’s strategy of fighting on the cheap (in January 2008, the start of Mr. Bush’s last year in office and more than six years after the war began, there were only 27,000 American troops in Afghanistan) is a guarantee of defeat.

Mr. Obama said he planned to move those 30,0000 troops in quickly — within six months — to break the Taliban’s momentum, secure key population centers, speed up training of Afghan security forces and then hand over control to Afghan authorities. He said he expected to be able to start drawing down American forces in July 2011. But he made no promise about when all American combat troops would be gone, saying only that the decision would be based on conditions on the ground.

Over all, we found the president’s military arguments persuasive.

The Afghan people have no love for the Taliban’s medieval ideas and brutality, but the Karzai government’s failure to provide basic services or security has led many to conclude that they have no choice but to submit. Driving the Taliban back swiftly and decisively from key cities and regions should help change that calculation. Coupled with an offer of negotiations, it may also peel away less committed fighters.

There is no point in doing that unless there is a minimally credible Afghan government to “hold” those areas. There is no chance of that unless Mr. Karzai ends the corruption and appoints competent officials. One of Mr. Obama’s biggest challenges is figuring out how to goad him into doing that, without further damaging the Afghan leader’s legitimacy, or driving him even deeper into his circle of unsavory cronies and warlords.

In his speech Mr. Obama sought to put Mr. Karzai on notice, but more gently than we would have. “The days of providing a blank check are over,” he said, vowing that his government “will be clear about what we expect from those who receive our assistance.”

We hope that the president and his aides — who failed to stop Mr. Karzai from trying to steal his re-election — are a lot more specific and a lot more forceful with the Afghan leader in private.

Mr. Obama faced a similar balancing act with Pakistan. He forcefully argued that Pakistan’s survival also depends on defeating Al Qaeda and the Taliban but gave the Pakistani government more credit than we would have for seeing that.

Pakistani officials insist they understand the threat but question Washington’s staying power. Mr. Obama said the United States will support Pakistan’s “security and prosperity long after the guns have fallen silent.” But it will take a lot more cajoling and pressure to finally persuade Islamabad to stop hedging its bets and fully take on the extremists.

For years President Bush sought to disguise the true cost of the Afghan and Iraq wars. So it was a relief to hear the president put a credible price tag on his escalation — he said it is likely to cost an additional $30 billion next year — and promise to work with Congress to pay for it. He and Congress need to address that issue quickly and credibly.

We are eager to see American troops come home. We don’t know whether Mr. Obama will be able to meet his July 2011 deadline to start drawing down forces.

For that to happen, there will have to be a lot more success at training Afghan forces and improving the government’s effectiveness.

Still, setting a deadline — so long as it is not set in stone — is a sound idea. Mr. Karzai and his aides need to know that America’s commitment is not open-ended. Mr. Obama’s generals and diplomats also need to know that their work will be closely monitored and reviewed.

Otherwise, Mr. Obama will be hard pressed to keep his promise that this war, already the longest in American history, will not go on forever.