On our 62nd Independence Day on Thursday, all the omens were grim. The Taliban in Swat warned that no one should celebrate 14th of August or he would be attacked and killed. To prove this in Lahore, a suicide bomber hit policemen in Allama Iqbal Town, killing nine and maiming over 35. The interior ministry has warned that there may be more attacks because the terrorists had moved into the big cities and were ready for action. One report actually says that one incident may be caused by using a car snatched from a female officer of an intelligence agency (sic!). The earlier week was full of reports of uncovered caches of weapons, explosives and suicide-jackets.
The NWFP government has condemned America for violating Pakistan’s “territorial integrity” by attacking inside the Tribal Areas. Another attack by a drone near Wana also killed terrorists from outside the tribal agency, some Arabs and some Punjabis from the sectarian and jihadi organisations. Just a day before August 14, the sectarian war going on in the Kurram Agency claimed 28 more people, bringing the count for the week to nearly 200. The three-year-old war has killed thousands there while the government is unable to help the besieged inhabitants of Parachinar, the agency’s headquarters.
As the NWFP assembly condemned the NATO forces in Afghanistan, it did nothing to resolve the crisis faced by the Kurram Agency. The governor — whose office is becoming politically controversial — has been unable to come to the help of the Parachinar population that is now even without medicines. The wounded are piling up in the local hospital and operations are being performed without medical supplies. The medical stores of Kurram sent crores of rupees for medicines to Peshawar. The medicines were bought and are lying packed in Peshawar but have not been despatched for the past three months. Under pressure, people in Parachinar say they are not being rescued because they are Shia.
The warlord of Bajaur, Maulvi Faqir, is getting more ferocious as his men come under attack from the army. He has vowed revenge after he lost 18 of his warriors to aerial bombing and has told the local population that they would be targeted by his men if they don’t resist the Pakistan army. The NWFP assembly ignored the fact that the Taliban in Swat had attacked the house of the well known ANP leader, Afzal Khan. It failed to recognise that the Taliban going in from our Tribal Areas had virtually conquered half of Afghanistan, as reported by the BBC TV on Independence Day. While the rest of the country is gradually responding to reconstruction, the eastern and south-eastern regions of Afghanistan have virtually fallen to the Taliban.
Down in Sindh, the PPP is celebrating the resolution passed by the Sindh Assembly in a no-confidence vote against the president. But it is in denial of the claim made by the Tehreek-e Taliban leader, Maulvi Umar of South Waziristan, that his warriors would soon take over the province. Its general approach, together with the PMLN, is that of making “peace deals” with the Taliban, but it is too busy unseating the president and letting the army do whatever it can to save the country from being conquered internally. Against this background, it is chastening to see the National Assembly once again putting on the war-paint over Kashmir.
The National Assembly, while condemning India over the latest incidents in Kashmir, neglected to take note of the bombings that hit Quetta in the week preceding Independence Day. The spate of grenade-throwing and time-bombing in the past week has been unprecedented in recent history. Baloch nationalist militants have given out a warning, after killing two people in Hub with a bomb blast, that they would cause bombs to go off across Balochistan on Independence Day. As if in response, one ANP minister resigned from the cabinet in Islamabad and the PMLN “returnee” ministers quietly decided not to attend the cabinet meeting on Wednesday.
In view of the way the country’s leaders are behaving — and that includes politicians and the media — people expected to do business in Pakistan are quietly dollarising their rupees and making ready to leave and live in Dubai where they have bought apartments. Ironically, housing schemes coming up in Dubai have advertised “fair bargains” in Pakistani papers inside Independence Day supplements. As the rupee plummeted to 76 to a dollar on the kerb, the message was frightening: come for R&R as your country goes down fighting the wrong wars.
Everybody seeking revenge and demanding aggressive action in foreign policy claims he has 160 million people behind him. But on the eve of Independence Day, when GEO TV interviewed the first 15 people on the street, it was told the priorities chosen by politicians and TV anchors were all wrong. The political glands in Pakistan are secreting juices that may satisfy the heart but fail to appeal to the mind. The economy, which is the priority of the 160 million, exclusively demands an exercise of the intellect.
AUG 14 2008 Unpleasant reminders on Independence Day
Spread of terrorism in Asia!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Editorial:
Daily Times
The adviser to the prime minister on Interior Affairs, Mr Rehman Malik, on Monday held a detailed meeting with his Chinese counterpart and State Counsellor, Meng Jianzhu, in Beijing and expressed condolences for those who lost their lives in recent explosions in the province of Xinjiang, China. He assured him that Pakistan would not relent in its resolve to fight terrorism as a frontline state and explained to him the strategy Pakistan was employing to remove the centre of international terrorism located in its Tribal Areas.
This was in order. Not many months ago, President Pervez Musharraf had himself informed the nation that among the foreign “Islamist” terrorists undergoing training in the Tribal Areas were also a number of Uighur rebels from Xinjiang. Subsequently it is believed that China had reason to be satisfied because Pakistan undertook to apprehend the said terrorists and eliminate them. Adviser Malik’s expression of assurance was also timely because Xinjiang was once again made a target of violence by the terrorists twice in one week before the beginning of the Beijing Olympics on August 8.
The spread of “Islamist” terrorism in China’s neighbourhood in part inspired the setting up of the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) five years ago. The countries that joined it included China, Russia, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan, all victims of terrorist violence. The SCO consults on extremism and irredentism in the region and evolves strategies of resistance against it. But the pattern in the region of these states differs from the one prevalent elsewhere. The group contains states that are either non-Muslim or are ruled by Muslim dictators. Apparently, both categories are better able to confront the phenomenon of “Islamist” terrorism than Muslim-democratic states.
Uzbekistan and Tajikistan have been targeted by “Islamist” groups turned violent with outside help coming mostly from Afghanistan and Pakistan, but the draconian methods employed by President Karimov in Uzbekistan and President Rakhmonov in Tajikistan have prevented the terrorist groups from achieving any success. This observation, however, has to be qualified by the significant fact that movements for democracy in these states tend to be on the same side of the barricades as the Al Qaeda-supported groups.
In Russia, the “Islamist” terrorists have not succeeded because of the revulsion that the non-Muslim population feels for these acts of violence. In fact the population of Russia has voted overwhelmingly for the political order created by President Putin to defeat the terrorism which spread as far as Moscow with the help of the Chechens in the south of the Russian Federation. China, too, comes in this category, but it is located too close to ground zero of terrorism where Al Qaeda is located these days and therefore needs to be more vigilant. To some extent, India belongs in the same category.
America and Europe were the prime targets of “Islamist” terrorism, not the Muslim states. In both the regions the populations supported the legislation of tough laws and institutional vigilance to pre-empt attacks after they peaked in 2005. Now the aftermath of these tough measures is being borne by expatriate Muslims there. At the cost of changing their quality of life, however, the non-Muslims populations have supported their states in confronting the individuals who infiltrate and attempt acts of violence. But the pattern is unfortunately different in the Muslim states with majority Muslim populations.
In Pakistan and Bangladesh, a growing trend in favour of “Islamism” reflects sympathy for the terrorists groups. In both cases, the military has been dominating the political system and the terrorists lean to the convenient strategy of becoming a part of the struggle for democratisation. Thus two trends conjoin to form a prodigious political force in favour of the consolidation of the terrorist groups. It is an irony that in Pakistan the man who fought the terrorists, President Pervez Musharraf, is being impeached while an ascendant Al Qaeda, which should have been on the run, puts forward its own charge sheet to supplement the one being brought up in parliament against him.
It is not only Iraq in the Middle East but all of Asia which is in the grip of “Islamist” terrorism. In Indonesia, the pattern is the same as in Pakistan and Bangladesh. There are religious parties and groups which insist that Al Qaeda is no threat and that a delay in the enforcement of sharia might lead to more rather than less violence in the country. Only in the Philippines is the Abu Sayyaf group — named after a warlord of Afghanistan who is now in the American camp — growing because of the jungle conditions in which it survives and because of outside help.
Finally, “Islamist” terrorism is a phenomenon that attacks and destabilises the Muslim states which are struggling for democracy. Because of the quest for sharia in Muslim societies, the terrorists find a higher level of popular acceptance of their cause among the Muslims who ironically are also killed in their suicide-bombings. Significantly, however, when they kill people in non-Muslim states, they invariably meet resistance they can’t cope with. *
Musharraf 'unfit for office'
Pervez Musharraf, the Pakistani president, is unfit for office and should step down, the provincial assembly in Pakistan's Punjab region has declared.
The vote by Pakistan's most powerful province on Monday came after Musharraf's spokesman said the embattled president would not step down.
The ruling by the Punjab's assembly carries no constitutional weight, but supports plans by the country's ruling coalition to finalise charges against Musharraf.
Pakistan's parliament was expected to discuss impeachment proceedings on Monday but these failed to get under way and the body deliberating on drafting the charge sheet postponed its meeting until Tuesday.
"Pakistan's ruling coalition had warned that it would impeach the president, however when the session of parliament did begin it went into a regular question and answer session," Kamal Hyder, Al Jazeera's correspondent in Islamabad, said.
"That sent a wave of disappointment across the country as people were expecting there would be a showdown."
Corruption allegations
Charges against Musharraf have not been finalised, but the chief of the ruling party has reportedly accused the president of misappropriating hundreds of millions of dollars in US aid intended for the Pakistani military for supporting the so-called "war on terror".
"They claim it's been going in budget support, but that's not the answer. We're talking about $700m a year missing. The rest has been taken by 'Mush' for some scheme or other and we've got to find it," Asif Ali Zardari, who heads the ruling coalition, was quoted as telling Britain's Sunday Times newspaper.
Zardari claimed the American aid may have gone to fund rogue members of Pakistani intelligence - recently accused by US officials of supporting pro-Taliban militants fighting in Afghanistan.
Musharraf supporters have dismissed the reported comments from Zardari, who was labeled "Mr 10 per cent" for his alleged links to corruption during the two governments of Benazir Bhutto, Zardari's late wife.
Tariq Azeem, the spokesman for the main pro-Musharraf party, said the charges against Musharraf were "baseless" and would only redouble the president's resolve to reject the charges.
"Absolutely president Musharraf will prove all this wrong. There is no way he will quit now quietly while being blamed for corruption," he said.
Azeem also rejected claims from Sherry Rehman, the chief government spokeswoman, that several federal lawmakers from the pro-Musharraf party were ready to support his impeachment.
Bajaur fighting
Away from the capital, Pakistani helicopter gunships attacked positions said to belong to pro-Taliban fighters in the country's tribal region, killing 50 fighters, officials said.
The deaths increased the toll to more than 150 people killed in Bajaur, a known sanctuary for al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters, in recent days.
Thousands of people were fleeing from the area after aircraft bombed four villages, the Reuters news agency reported.
Separately, residents found the beheaded bodies of two men in an area 16km west of Khar, Bajaur's main town, with a note that they had been killed for spying for US and Pakistani forces.
"The note said the men were helping forces ... identify militant positions," Mohmammad Khan, a local resident, said.
Source: Al Jazeera and agencies
China defends rights record, accuses Bush of meddling
China said it is committed to its citizens' "basic rights and freedoms" Thursday and criticized President Bush for meddling in what Beijing says are its internal affairs.
President Bush meets with Thai Prime Minister Samak Sundaravej on Wednesday in Bangkok.
"We firmly oppose any statements or deeds which use human rights, religion and other issues to interfere with the internal affairs of other countries," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang, responding to Bush, who has cited "deep concerns" with China's record on human rights.
The spokesman added that China embraces the concept of putting people's interests first and is devoted to "maintaining and promoting basic rights and freedom of its citizens."
"Chinese citizens enjoy freedom of religion in accordance with the law. These facts are well known. Regarding the Sino-U.S. differences on issues including human rights and religion, we have always insisted on dialogue and communication based on mutual equality and mutual respect, in order to enhance understanding, reduce differences and to expand consensus," he said. Watch pro-Tibet protests »
In a speech on Asian policy delivered in Bangkok, Thailand, on the eve of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, Bush chided China over its record of religious freedom and human rights.
"America stands in firm opposition to China's detention of political dissidents, human rights advocates and religious activists," Bush said.
"We speak out for a free press, freedom of assembly, and labor rights -- not to antagonize China's leaders, but because trusting its people with greater freedom is the only way for China to develop its full potential," he said. "And we press for openness and justice not to impose our beliefs, but to allow the Chinese people to express theirs."
Despite the critique, Bush praised what has become a "constructive relationship" between the United States and China in trade and diplomacy. He also said that the association "has placed America in a better position to be honest and direct on other issues."
Bush spoke at the Queen Sirikit National Convention Center in Bangkok.
The trip to Asia is Bush's last as president, and he took the opportunity to shine a light on the well-publicized crackdowns on political dissenters in communist China, a country that has emerged as a symbol of soaring capitalistic growth.
"I have spoken clearly, candidly and consistently with China's leaders about our deep concerns over religious freedom and human rights," he said. "And I have met repeatedly with Chinese dissidents and religious believers. The United States believes the people of China deserve the fundamental liberty that is the natural right of all human beings."
China cracked down on protests this year in Tibet. Some demonstrators advocated autonomy and greater religious freedom, while others sought outright independence from China.
On Wednesday, four Tibet activists unfurled Tibetan flags and pro-independence banners near National Stadium in Beijing, a main Olympic venue.
Two men in the group scaled electric poles to display the banners, police said, according to the state-run Xinhua news agency. Police took away "four foreigners" -- three men and a woman, the agency said.
Students for a Free Tibet, a Tibet activist group, issued a statement saying those involved in the demonstration were from the United States and Britain.
According to the group, one of the signs read, "One World, One Dream: Free Tibet" in English, while the second read, "Tibet Will Be Free" in English and "Free Tibet" in Chinese.
The group said the signs were on display for about an hour, but police said it was about 12 minutes. The demonstrators entered China on tourist visas, police said, according to Xinhua.
Meanwhile, the government's reaction to people protesting in northwest China's Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region, home to a Sunni Muslim ethnic minority, also has generated concerns. The Uighurs are supposed to enjoy autonomy, as it is guaranteed by the Chinese Constitution, but some seek independence.
Millions of Han Chinese, the country's dominant ethnic group, have migrated into Xinjiang over the past 60 years, prompting complaints that they dominate local politics, culture and commerce at the Uighurs' expense.
In the Xinjiang city of Kashgar, Chinese paramilitary police beat two Japanese journalists Monday, hours after a deadly attack that killed 16 police officers, journalist groups said.
China also has been criticized for its policies toward Sudan. Critics have said China is backing the African regime, which is accused of gross human rights abuses in a crackdown in the Darfur region. The United States has condemned the campaign of killing in Darfur as genocide.
Team Darfur, a group of international athletes committed to raising awareness about Darfur, complained that former speedskating gold medalist Joey Cheek had his visa revoked by the Chinese Embassy.
White House spokeswoman Dana Perino, speaking to reporters en route to Thailand, said, "We were disturbed to learn that the Chinese had refused his visa. We are taking the matter very seriously." Watch a report on the revoking of the activist's visa »
She said U.S. diplomats are asking the Chinese to reconsider their actions and emphasized that the administration hopes China changes its mind.
In Thursday's speech, Bush also focused on other issues, including the economic strides in China -- which endured "rampant" poverty three decades ago.
Beijing is "sprinting into the modern era," Bush said, and the "growth sparked by China's free market reforms is good for the Chinese people."
"China's new purchasing power is also good for the world because it provides an enormous market for exports from across the globe," he said.
Bush urged China to adhere to the "rules of the international economic system" and "act responsibly on issues such as energy, the environment and African development."
He said the United States and China are embarking on "a new strategic economic dialogue," saying the two countries will "discuss ways to ensure long-term growth and widely shared prosperity in both our economies, as well as issues like currency exchange rates and intellectual property rights."
Bush cited two areas of diplomatic cooperation -- the six-party talks on North Korea's nuclear program and the easing of tensions along the Taiwan Strait.
Pakistan Coalition cranks up pressure on Musharraf
Pakistan Coalition cranks up pressure on Musharraf
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Pakistan's ruling coalition will ask President Pervez Musharraf to seek a confidence vote in Parliament or face impeachment, senior party officials told The Associated Press on Thursday.
Two ruling party officials said that course of action was decided upon during marathon talks between party leaders Asif Ali Zardari and ex-Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif that ended early Thursday.
Both officials spoke on condition of anonymity as they divulged the outcome of two days of talks before the formal announcement at an Islamabad news conference, due later in the day.
Musharraf, who ousted Sharif's government in a bloodless coup in 1999 and then dominated Pakistan for eight years, was sidelined when Zardari and Sharif formed a coalition government after trouncing the former general's allies in February parliamentary elections.
The coalition has a comfortable majority in the National Assembly, so Musharraf would struggle to win a confidence vote. That would crank up political pressure on the U.S.-backed former army chief to resign.
Soon after news broke of the coalition's decision, the Foreign Office announced that Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani would represent Pakistan at the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics — rather than Musharraf as originally planned.
That immediately fueled speculation the president had canceled his trip because of the imminent moves to oust him.
Political analyst Rasul Bakhsh Rais said if Musharraf seeks a vote of confidence and loses, it sends a political signal of his weakness, but constitutionally it would not lead to his removal from office. If he refuses to take such a vote, lawmakers could include that when drawing up impeachment charges against him, Rais said.
"There is a strong likelihood, but not certainty, that the ruling coalition can impeach him," he said.
Impeaching a president requires a two-thirds majority support of lawmakers in both houses of Parliament. Musharraf loyalists maintain the coalition would struggle to muster it.
In October, Musharraf won his current five-year term in a controversial vote of lawmakers in the outgoing parliament which was dominated by his supporters. The current ruling parties — who were then in opposition — boycotted or abstained from voting.
Musharraf "will be asked by us to seek the vote of confidence from Parliament, as promised by him while contesting the presidential elections," said one of the officials from Zardari's party, which is the largest in the coalition.
The official said the coalition leaders would move a no-confidence motion against him if Musharraf failed to show that he enjoyed the support of the majority of lawmakers.
The official said the coalition had also agreed to restore judges sacked by Musharraf when he declared a state of emergency and rounded up thousands of opponents last November — just as the Supreme Court was to rule on the legality of the October presidential vote.
The officials said the method for reinstating the judges would be announced by Sharif and Zardari.
The coalition was expected to issue a joint statement. The other ruling party official said it would ask Musharraf "to show confidence, failing which we start impeachment proceedings. After that judges will be restored."
Sharif's party refused to divulge the contents of the statement before the news conference.
The former prime minister has been more aggressive than Zardari in seeking Musharraf's ouster and has repeatedly demanded the restoration of the judges.
Sharif spokesman Ahsan Iqbal said early Thursday that the coalition leaders were committed to reinstating the judges and promised "good news" in the upcoming announcement.
Rifts over the judges and how to handle Musharraf have weakened the four-month-old government and hampered its efforts to formulate policies to counter Islamic militancy and a slew of economic problems.
The president, a stalwart U.S. ally, has in recent weeks made more public appearances and comments — seen by some in Pakistan as an attempt to show he remains a political force. He has appeared intent to serve out his five-year term.
While he has little say in the day-to-day running of government and has ceded his control of the powerful army, Musharraf retains the constitutional power to dissolve Parliament. Analysts say he probably retains some influence with the military.
Pakistan president 1,000 per cent sure?
When the president says that he is 1000 per cent sure that foreign hands and agencies are working to destabilise Pakistan generally and Balochistan specifically (he was visiting Quetta when he made the comment) you may be sure that he probably knows something that we don't. There are more foreign intelligence agencies poking around inside Pakistan than there have ever been and we may be certain that the Indians, the Americans, the British, the Afghans, the Bangladeshis, the Saudis, Tajiks, Uzbeks, Iranians and Iraqis to name but a few all have active intelligence gathering operations going on inside our borders. (By the same token we may expect our own agencies to be doing the same in all those places, and if they are not then they are not doing their job!) They will all have slightly different agendas depending on their national interests and may well be competing for the same information. Intelligence agencies do not only gather information, some of them seek to influence events and there can be little doubt that the Americans, Afghans and the Indians are doing just that, every hour of every day.
Of particular concern to our own agencies is the apparent double game being played by the Americans who on the one hand point out a trust deficit when it comes to sharing information - 'We give you information and ten minutes later the bad guys are out the door' – and on the other not acting when Pakistan provided the US with precise coordinates for the location of Baitullah Mehsud. It would have been a relatively simple matter to vector a Predator loaded with a Hellfire missile to target and eliminate a man who has done as much for the instability of Pakistan as anybody else in recent times. Yet that did not happen. It is further alleged that Mr Mehsud is in possession of encrypting communications equipment that enables him to get real-time information on the movement of Pakistani troops. Now who supplied him with that, we wonder? Could it have been rogue elements in out own services…or the Indians…or the Americans? Who knows…we don't. We may not know but we may have reasonable suspicion, and wonder if a level of managed instability within Pakistan might be in the interests of several of our neighbours. Neither India nor Afghanistan has much investment in a strong and stable Pakistan, and America will eternally play both ends against the middle. It should be no surprise to us then if it seems that the US may be supporting – or at least not actively hindering – the work of one or more 'hidden hands' . As Oscar Wilde remarked… 'Your friends stab you in the front'.
Nawaz Sharif's corruption A Shocking Report
Rehmat Shah Afridi criticises Nawaz
Daily Times Monitor
LAHORE: Frontier Post Chief Editor Rehmat Shah Afridi criticised Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) chief Nawaz Sharif in a TV interview on Tuesday and showed documents that he said were proofs of the former prime minister’s corruption.
The veteran journalist claimed that the PML-N chief had once earned Rs 330 million in a day by allotting 24 sugar plants to various people. He also alleged that Nawaz wanted to give the contract for developing the Gwadar Port to a defaulted American company in 1999. Afridi said Nawaz had received a huge sum of money from Osama Bin Laden in Madina in the name of jihad. He told Osama he would assist Gulbadin Hekmatyar and Haji Zaman, but the warlords did not receive a penny.
Nawaz brought to Pakistan Rs 1.49 billion of the sum and used Rs 270 or Rs 290 million of it against Benazir Bhutto in the 1990 no-confidence move.
Jamaat-e-Islami chief Qazi Hussain Ahmad also knew about this money, Afridi said.
He said Nawaz had betrayed and robbed all his friends and would “throw [Pakistan People’s Party Co-chairman] Asif Ali Zardari across River Ravi” when he found the opportunity.
Afridi said Nawaz came to his house in 1999 and called him his brother. Nawaz also called Muttahida Qaumi Movement chief Altaf Hussain his brother, but set up military courts in Karachi on the pretext of a rape case, he said.
He said he had said in a report he published that there were more rapes in Punjab during Shabaz Sharif’s government than in Sindh and therefore it was Punjab that needed military courts.
He also criticised the National Reconciliation Ordinance and said Zardari had also been involved in corruption. Afridi said he had refused to give false statements against Zardari and Benazir Bhutto in court.
Ragtag Taliban Show Tenacity in Afghanistan
KABUL, Afghanistan — Six years after being driven from power, the Taliban are demonstrating a resilience and a ferocity that are raising alarm here, in Washington and in other NATO capitals, and engendering a fresh round of soul-searching over how a relatively ragtag insurgency has managed to keep the world’s most powerful armies at bay.
The mounting toll inflicted by the insurgents, including nine American soldiers killed in a single attack last month, has turned Afghanistan into a deadlier battlefield than Iraq and refocused the attention of America’s military commanders and its presidential contenders on the Afghan war.
But the objectives of the war have become increasingly uncertain in a conflict where Taliban leaders say they do not feel the need to control territory, at least for now, or to outfight American and NATO forces to defeat them — only to outlast them in a region that is in any case their home.
The Taliban’s tenacity, military officials and analysts say, reflects their success in maintaining a cohesive leadership since being driven from power in Afghanistan, their ability to attract a continuous stream of recruits and their advantage in having a haven across the border in Pakistan.
While the Taliban enjoy such a sanctuary, they will be very hard to beat, military officials say, and American officials have stepped up pressure on Pakistan in recent weeks to take more action against the Taliban and other militants there. That included a visit last month by a top official of the Central Intelligence Agency who, American officials say, confronted senior Pakistani leaders about ties between the country’s powerful spy service and militants operating in Pakistan’s tribal areas.
Pakistani officials say those ties, which stretch back decades, have been broken. But there is no doubt that the Taliban continue to use Pakistan to train, recruit, regroup and resupply their insurgency.
The advantage of that haven in Pakistan, even beyond the lawless tribal realms, has allowed the Taliban leadership to exercise uninterrupted control of its insurgency through the same clique of mullahs and military commanders who ran Afghanistan as a theocracy and harbored Osama bin Laden until they were driven from power in December 2001.
The Taliban’s reclusive leader, Mullah Mohammad Omar, a one-eyed cleric and war veteran, is widely believed by Afghan and Western officials to be based in Quetta, the capital of Baluchistan Province in Pakistan, near the border with Afghanistan.
He runs a shadow government, complete with military, religious and cultural councils, and has appointed officials and commanders to virtually every Afghan province and district, just as he did when he ruled Afghanistan, the Taliban claim.
He oversees his movement through a grand council of 10 people, the Taliban spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahed, said in a telephone interview.
Mullah Bradar, one of the Taliban’s most senior and ruthless commanders, who has been cited by human rights groups for committing massacres, serves as his first deputy. He passes down Mullah Omar’s commands and makes all military decisions, including how foreign fighters are deployed, according to Waheed Muzhta, a former Taliban Foreign Ministry official who lives in Kabul and follows the progress of the Taliban through his own research.
The Taliban even produce their own magazine, Al Somood, published online in Arabic, where details of their leadership structure can be found, he said.
But while the Taliban may be united politically, the insurgency remains poorly coordinated at operational and strategic levels, said Gen. David D. McKiernan, commander of the NATO force in Afghanistan.
Taliban forces cannot hold territory, and they cannot defeat NATO forces in a direct fight, other NATO officials say. They also note that scores of senior and midlevel Taliban commanders have been killed over the past year, weakening the insurgents, especially in the south.
Three senior members of the grand council were killed in 2007, and others have been detained, Mr. Muzhta said. The military council has lost 6 of its 29 members in recent years, he said. Despite their losses, however, the Taliban repeatedly express confidence that the United States and its allies will grow weary of a thankless war in a foreign land, withdraw and leave Afghanistan open for a return of the Taliban to power.
The Taliban say they need little in the way of arms or matériel. “The Taliban are now mounting a hit-and-run war against their enemies,” Mr. Mujahed, the spokesman, said. “It doesn’t need much money or weapons compared to what the foreign troops are spending.”
Even so, Western officials say the Taliban have a steady stream of financing from Afghanistan’s opium trade, as well as from traders, mosques, jihad organizations and sympathizers in the region, and Arab countries.
At the same time, Taliban leaders can still exploit their position as moral authorities — Taliban means religious students — which gives them overarching power over the various commanders, bandits, smugglers and insurgents fighting around Afghanistan.
That aura is increasingly terrifying. Known for their harsh rule when in power, the Taliban have turned even more ruthless out of power, and for the first time they have shown great cruelty even toward their fellow Pashtun tribesmen.
The Taliban have used terrorist tactics — which include beheadings, abductions, death threats and summary executions of people accused of being spies — as well as a skillful propaganda campaign, to make the insurgency seem more powerful and omnipresent than it really is.
“The increasing use of very public attacks has had a striking effect on morale far beyond the immediate victims,” the International Crisis Group, a nonprofit group that seeks to prevent and resolve deadly conflicts, said in a recent report.
Some of that brutality may be attributed to the growing influence of Al Qaeda, but much of it has by now taken root within the insurgents’ ranks.
After the American-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001, Al Qaeda and the Taliban both sought refuge in Pakistan’s tribal areas, which have since become a breeding ground where they and other foreign fighters have found common cause against the American forces in Afghanistan and have shared terrorist tactics and insurgent strategies.
Pakistan’s tribal areas along the border are now the main pool to recruit fighters for Afghanistan, General McKiernan said. Pakistani insurgent groups in the region — Pakistani Taliban — have also become a potent threat to the security and stability of Pakistan itself.
Jihad does not recognize borders, the Taliban like to say, and indeed much unites the Taliban on both sides of the border. They share a common Pashtun heritage, a longstanding disregard for the Afghan-Pakistani border drawn by the British and the goal of establishing a theocracy that would impose Islamic law, or Shariah.
In fact, the dispatches of the Pakistani Taliban leader, Baitullah Mehsud, carry the symbol of the Islamic Emirate, the name the Afghan Taliban used for their government.
Mr. Mehsud and his cohort have sworn allegiance to the Afghan Taliban leader, Mullah Omar, as well as to Jalaluddin Haqqani, a former minister in the Taliban government who now commands Taliban forces in much of eastern Afghanistan.
Western military officials often describe Mr. Haqqani as running a distinct network with close links to Arab members of Al Qaeda, but he and his followers have also proclaimed allegiance to Mullah Omar.
Even Mr. bin Laden has paid tribute to Mullah Omar as Amir ul-Momineen, or Leader of the Faithful, the paramount religious leader.
To avoid jeopardizing their sanctuary or their hosts, however, the Taliban have always maintained the pretence that their leadership is based inside Afghanistan and that the insurgency is made up entirely of Afghans.
The two Afghan Taliban spokesmen, Mr. Mujahed and Qari Yousuf Ahmadi, who speak regularly by telephone to local journalists, never reveal their whereabouts. They profess sympathy for their Muslim brothers, the Pakistani Taliban, but deny that there is any joint leadership or unified strategy.
They also claim that the Afghan Taliban broke with Al Qaeda after the Sept. 11 attacks, which led to the fall of the Taliban government in Afghanistan.
The Afghan government dismisses those claims, however, and insists that the Taliban on both sides of the border are directed by Pakistani intelligence officials with the aim of destabilizing Afghanistan and maintaining some sway over their neighbor.
While the Pakistani government was one of the only supporters of the Taliban government when it was in power from 1996 to 2001, today the Pakistani authorities profess not to know the whereabouts of Mullah Omar or his colleagues.
But Afghan and NATO officials say the Taliban today operate much as the mujahedeen did in the 1980s, when they used Pakistan as their rear base, to drive out the Soviet Army, which had invaded Afghanistan.
Many members of President Hamid Karzai’s government, who were themselves mujahedeen, say the Taliban are even using some of the same contacts from 20 years ago, including a well-known trader in Quetta who handles logistics, housing and other supplies.
He was widely known to be the front man for the largest Pakistani intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence, according to one former mujahedeen commander who is now a senior official in the Afghan government.
Meanwhile, Taliban spokesmen dismiss the idea of negotiations or power-sharing deals with the Afghan government, even though Afghan officials say that more Taliban members have made overtures to talk in recent months.
“We carried out the fight to oppose the invaders,” one of the Taliban spokesmen, Mr. Ahmadi, said. “Now they are on the brink of humiliation. That’s the aim of our fight.”
As the Fighting Swells in Afghanistan, So Does a Refugee Camp in Its Capital
KABUL, Afghanistan — On a piece of barren land on the western edge of this capital, a refugee camp is steadily swelling as families displaced by the heavy bombardment in southern Afghanistan arrive in batches.
The growing numbers reaching Kabul are a sign of the deepening of the conflict between NATO and American forces and the Taliban in the south and of the feeling among the population that there will be no end soon. Families who fled the fighting around their homes in Helmand Province one or two years ago and sought temporary shelter around two southern provincial capitals, Lashkar Gah and Kandahar, said they had moved to Kabul because of growing insecurity across the south.
“If there was security in the south, why would we come here?” said Abdullah Khan, 50, who lost his father, uncle and a female relative in the bombing of their home last year. “We will stay here, even for 10 years, until the bombardment ends.”
Sixty-one families from just one southern district — Kajaki, in northern Helmand Province — arrived in Kabul in late July. A representative for those families, Khair Muhammad, 27, said that a major jailbreak last month that freed hundreds of Taliban prisoners was the latest sign of the deteriorating security. “Do you know, the Taliban entered Kandahar city and broke into the prison?” he said. “Do you think that is security?”
The United Nations refugee agency has registered 450 families from Helmand Province at the camp — approximately 3,000 people. But that is only a part of the overall refugee picture. An estimated 10,000 to 15,000 people have been displaced by the insurgency in the south, but the numbers fluctuate as some have been able to return home when the fighting moves elsewhere.
The International Committee of the Red Cross has warned that the displaced who have reached the cities represent only the tip of the iceberg, and many others are trapped by violence in remote areas without assistance.
Many of the families who have arrived in Kabul have suffered traumatic losses and injuries, and they say that they are pessimistic about the future.
“The Taliban are getting stronger,” said Muhammad Younus, a farm worker who abandoned his village after his father, brother and uncle were killed in an airstrike two years ago. “There were armored vehicles on the hill and they were firing. There was a heavy bombardment, and planes bombed, too,” he said. “They did not differentiate between the guilty and not guilty.”
He, like many of the displaced people, complained that villagers found themselves trapped between Taliban fighters, who used the villages for cover to attack foreign forces, and NATO and American forces, which would often call in airstrikes on village compounds where civilians were living.
“We left our houses because we had no power to resist the Taliban or the government,” said Mr. Muhammad, the representative who brought families to Kabul from villages in Kajaki.
“Anytime the Taliban fired a shot from our houses, then the coalition, the government and the police came to the area and hit us.”
“The government comes and arrests us, and then the Taliban come and arrest us as well,” he said. “We are under the feet of two powers.”
As a civilian plane circled above the city, Mr. Muhammad and the crowd of men around him all looked nervously upward. “We are in trouble with these things,” he said, pointing at the plane. “There was fighting in the village a hundred times, roadside bombs, bombardment, firing and shooting.”
His strongest complaints were against the Taliban who, he said, had accused a relative of being a spy for the coalition forces and executed him. “I absolutely know he was not,” he said vehemently.
“The Taliban are coming during the night, with heavy weapons, riding on vehicles, and we cannot even dare ask them to leave, because if they see someone at night outside they will slaughter them and accuse them of being spies,” he said.
But the heavy reprisals by NATO and American forces was what drove them from their homes in the end, he and others said.
Khan Muhammad, 35, came with 40 people from his extended family three months ago after their village, Tajoi, near Kajaki, was bombed and his 4-year-old son, Umar Khan, was killed. “His mother was cooking, and he was lying beside her,” he said. “The whole village was destroyed, and after that we left.”
He said the villagers did not even see the Taliban but heard them fire as foreign troops were driving along the road outside the village.
“We don’t know from which side they fired, but we heard that,” he said. “Half an hour or an hour later they bombed.”
His father, Sher Ali Aqa, 75, was trapped under the rubble and his leg was shattered. Still unable to walk, he sat on a mat beside a makeshift tent.
“I blame the foreigners,” Mr. Muhammad said. “If the Taliban fire from over there, do you come and bomb this village?”
He added, “We only want a stable country, whether with the Taliban or the foreigners.” But he said that the level of violence made him realize that the foreign forces could not bring security.
That sentiment was echoed by many of the villagers, who said that the civilian deaths were particularly galling given the sophisticated technology of the coalition’s warplanes.
“If they kill, if they wound innocent people, we don’t want them,” said Tauz Khan, a man from the Sangin district who said he lost five members of his family in bombings last year. “If they build and bring peace we will accept them.”
His father, brother and a daughter were among those killed. “You cannot take revenge against a plane,” he said. “But I will not forgive the foreigners for this crime.”
HISTORY: South Korea Says U.S. Killed Hundreds of Civilians
August 3, 2008 NEW YORK TIMES
South Korea Says U.S. Killed Hundreds of Civilians
By CHOE SANG-HUN
WOLMI ISLAND, South Korea — When American troops stormed this island more than half a century ago, it was a hive of Communist trenches and pillboxes. Now it is a park where children play and retirees stroll along a tree-shaded esplanade.
From a hilltop across a narrow channel, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, memorialized in bronze, appears to gaze down at the beaches of Inchon where his troops splashed ashore in September 1950, changing the course of the Korean War and making him a hero here.
In the port below, rows of cars, gleaming in the sun, wait to be shipped around the world — testimony to South Korea’s industrial might and a reminder of which side has triumphed economically since the conflict ended 55 years ago.
But inside a ragged tent at the entrance of the park, some aging South Koreans gather daily to draw attention to their side of the conflict, a story of carnage not mentioned in South Korea’s official histories or textbooks.
“When the napalm hit our village, many people were still sleeping in their homes,” said Lee Beom-ki, 76. “Those who survived the flames ran to the tidal flats. We were trying to show the American pilots that we were civilians. But they strafed us, women and children.”
Village residents say dozens of civilians were killed.
The attack, though not the civilian casualties, has been corroborated by declassified United States military documents recently reviewed by South Korean investigators. On Sept. 10, 1950, five days before the Inchon landing, according to the documents, 43 American warplanes swarmed over Wolmi, dropping 93 napalm canisters to “burn out” its eastern slope in an attempt to clear the way for American troops.
The documents and survivors’ stories persuaded a South Korean commission investigating long-suppressed allegations of wartime atrocities by Koreans and Americans to rule recently that the attack violated international conventions on war and to ask the country’s leaders to seek compensation from the United States.
The ruling was one of several by the government’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission in recent months that accused the United States military of using indiscriminate force on three separate occasions in 1950 and 1951 as troops struggled against Communists from the North and from China. The commission says at least 228 civilians, and perhaps hundreds more, were killed in the three attacks.
In one case, the commission said, at least 167 villagers, more than half of them women, were burned to death or asphyxiated in Tanyang, 87 miles southeast of Seoul, when American planes dropped napalm at the entrance of a cave filled with refugees.
“We should not ignore or conceal the deaths of unarmed civilians that resulted not from the mistakes of a few soldiers but from systematic aerial bombing and strafing,” said Kim Dong-choon, a senior commission official. “History teaches us that we need an alliance, but that alliance should be based on humanitarian principles.”
The South Korean government has not disclosed how it plans to follow up on the findings. And Maj. Stewart Upton, a Defense Department spokesman in Washington, said the Pentagon could not comment on the reports pending formal action by the South Korean government.
Under South Korea’s earlier authoritarian and staunchly anti-Communist governments, criticism of American actions in the war was taboo.
But after investigations showed that American soldiers killed South Korean civilians in air and ground attacks on the hamlet of No Gun Ri in 1950 — and after the United States acknowledged the deaths but refused to investigate other claims — a liberal government set up the fact-finding commission in 2005. More than 500 petitions, some describing the same actions, were filed to demand the investigation of allegations of mass killings by American troops, mostly in airstrikes.
The recent findings were the commission’s first against the United States, and it is unlikely that the commission has the time or resources to investigate many more before it is disbanded, as early as 2010.
Separately, the commission has also ruled that the South Korean government summarily executed thousands of political prisoners and killed many unarmed villagers during the war.
The Wolmi victims’ demands for recognition tap into complicated emotions underlying South Korea’s alliance with the United States.
“We thank the American troops for saving our country from Communism, for the peace and prosperity we have today,” said Han In-deuk, chairwoman of a Wolmi advocacy group. “Does that mean we have to shut up about what happened to our families?”
The airstrikes came during desperate times for the American forces and for the South Koreans they came to defend.
The war broke out in June 1950 with a Communist invasion from the north. In September, when the American military planned the landing at Inchon to relieve United Nations forces cornered in the southeastern tip of the peninsula, it decided it first had to neutralize Wolmi, which overlooks the channel that approaches the harbor.
“The mission was to saturate the area so thoroughly with napalm that all installations on that area would be burned,” Marine pilots said in one of their mission reports on Wolmi that were retrieved by the commission from the National Archives and Records Administration of the United States.
They also reported that no troops were seen, “but the flashes observed on the ground indicated the intensity of the fire to be accurate enough to destroy any about.”
The reports describe strafing on the beach but make no mention of civilian casualties.
The Inchon landing helped United Nations troops recapture Seoul and drive the North Koreans back. But the tide turned again when China entered the war.
The other two attacks the commission ruled on, in Tanyang and Sansong, south of Seoul, occurred as Communist forces barreled down the peninsula. As the allies fell back, they were attacked by guerrillas they could not easily distinguish from refugees.
Fearing enemy infiltration, American troops stopped refugees streaming down the roads and told them to return home or stay in the hills, or risk getting shot by allied troops. On Jan. 14, 1951, the Army’s X Corps under Maj. Gen. Edward M. Almond ordered the “methodical destruction of dwellings and other buildings forward of front lines which are, or susceptible of being, utilized by the enemy for shelter.” It recommended airstrikes.
“Excellent results” was how American pilots summarized their strikes at Sansong on Jan. 19, 1951.
The same day, however, one of General Almond’s subordinates, Brig. Gen. David G. Barr of the Seventh Infantry Division, wrote to General Almond that “methodical burning out poor farmers when no enemy is present is against the grain of U.S. soldiers.” At least 51 villagers, including 16 children, were killed in Sansong, according to the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
The attack on Tanyang followed the next day, when, survivors say, American planes dropped napalm near the entrance of the cave where refugees had sought shelter.
“When the napalm hit the entrance, the blast and smoke knocked out kerosene and castor-oil lamps we had in the cave,” Eom Han-won, then 15, said in an interview. “It was a pitch-black chaos — people shouting for each other, stampeding, choking. Some said we should crawl in deeper, covering our faces with wet cloth. Some said we should rush out through the blaze. Those who were not burned to death suffocated.”
Like Mr. Eom’s family, most of the people there were refugees who had been turned back at an American roadblock south of Tanyang, survivors said. In the days before the attack, the cave was packed with families. When the American warplanes flew in from the southwest, children were playing outside amid cattle and baggage.
That day, the Seventh Division’s operations logs noted that 13 planes attacked “enemy troops” and “pack animals and cave.” It reported “many casualties and got all animals.”
Mr. Eom, who rushed out of the cave into a hail of machine-gun fire from the planes but survived, said, “The Americans pushed us back toward the enemy area and then bombed us.” He said he lost 10 family members.
Shortly afterward, South Korea’s Second Division reported 34 civilians killed and 72 wounded at Sansong, but “no enemy casualties,” prompting the American military to open an investigation. The American investigators did not dispute the South Korean report but concluded that the airstrike was “amply justified.” They said that Sansong was considered an enemy haven and that its residents had been warned to evacuate.
The case appeared closed until several years ago, when, in the course of a Korean television reporter’s investigation, villagers acquired a copy of the American military’s wartime report and read that they had been told to evacuate. They insist, and the commission agreed, that this was not true. They say the village where North Korean troops were sighted was elsewhere and was never bombed.
Regarding the Wolmi attack, the commission said that while it recognized the need for the landing at Inchon, it could find “no evidence of efforts to limit civilian casualties.”
Wolmi survivors said the North Korean officers’ housing was about 1,000 feet away from their village. They say the American pilots, whose mission reports noted “visibility unlimited” and firing altitudes as low as 100 feet, should not have mistaken villagers, including many women and children, for the enemy.
They said the American troops later bulldozed their charred village to build a base.
“If you say these killings were not deliberate and were mistakes, how can you explain the fact that there were so many of these incidents?” asked Park Myung-lim, a historian at Yonsei University in Seoul.
The victims’ grievances found an outlet in 2005, when left-leaning civic groups tried to topple the MacArthur statue. But Wolmi survivors said they did not join the protest for fear they might be branded anti-American.
“We consider MacArthur a hero to our country, but no one can know the suffering our family endured,” said Chung Ji-eun, an Inchon cabdriver whose father died at Wolmi. “Both governments emphasize the alliance, but they never care about people like us who were sacrificed in the name of alliance.”
Rogue Pakistan spies aid Taliban in Afghanistan
Bush warns of ‘serious action’ after evidence of agents masterminding deadly embassy bombing
Officers from Pakistan’s main intelligence agency have had links with the Taliban.
The United States has accused Pakistan’s main spy agency of deliberately undermining Nato efforts in Afghanistan by helping the Taliban and Al-Qaeda militants they are supposed to be fighting.
President George W Bush confronted Yusuf Raza Gillani, Pakistan’s prime minister, in Washington last week with evidence of involvement by the ISI, its military intelligence, in a deadly attack on the Afghan capital and warned of retaliation if it continues.
The move comes amid growing fears that Pakistan’s tribal areas are turning into a global launch pad for terrorists.
Gillani, on his first official US visit since being elected in February, was left in no doubt that the Bush administration had lost patience with the ISI’s alleged double game.
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Bush warned that if one more attack in Afghanistan or elsewhere were traced back to Pakistan, he would have to take “serious action”.
Gillani also met Michael Hayden, director of the CIA, who confronted him with a dossier on ISI support for the Taliban. The key evidence concerned last month’s bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul, which killed 54 people, including the military attaché.
An intercepted telephone conversation apparently revealed that ISI agents masterminded the operation. The United States also claimed to have arrested an ISI officer inside Afghanistan.
Yesterday ministers said they had left Washington reeling from what they described as a “grilling” and shocked at “the trust deficit” between Pakistan and its most important backer.
“They were very hot on the ISI,” said a member of the Pakistan delegation. “Very hot. When we asked them for more information, Bush laughed and said, ‘When we share information with your guys, the bad guys always run away’.”
“The question is why it’s taken the Americans so long to see what the ISI is doing,” said Afra-siab Khattak, provincial president for the Awami National party which runs the government in the Frontier province bordering Afghanistan. “We’ve been telling them for years but they wouldn’t buy it.”
The American accusations were categorically denied by Rehman Malik, Pakistan’s de facto interior minister. “There is no involvement by the ISI of any form in Afghanistan,” he told The Sunday Times. “We requested evidence which has not yet been given.”
Malik admitted that in meetings in London, senior British government and intelligence officials had also told him they were convinced of ISI involvement in the embassy bombing.
It is the first time the White House has openly confronted Pakistan since just after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on Washington and New York when General Pervez Musharraf’s regime was told to drop its support for the Taliban or be bombed back to the Stone Age.
Musharraf agreed and went on to change the director of the ISI and build a close relationship with Bush who described him as his “best friend”. But many middle-ranking officers continued to hold close links with militants built up over 20 years since the mujaheddin was fighting the Russians in Afghanistan.
There were persistent reports of Pakistani territory being used for terrorist training camps and recruitment. Foreign journalists were banned from Quetta “for our own security” – those of us who have ventured there to investigate have generally ended up arrested.
President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan has repeatedly accused Pakistan of harbouring Taliban leaders, providing lists of addresses and at one time claiming that its leader, Mullah Omar, was living in a military cantonment.
For the West, confronting Islamabad is a risky strategy as Pakistan’s support is critical to the war on terrorism. Afghanistan is landlocked and much of the logistical support and food for the 53,000 Nato troops, including water for the British forces in Helmand, has to be shipped into Karachi and driven through Pakistan.
“It’s a calculated risk,” said a western diplomat in Islamabad, pointing out that Pakistan could not afford to do without US aid, which averages £1 billion a year. The military has also benefited: only last week four more F-16 fighter jets were handed over to the air force.
An open challenge to the ISI was welcomed by Nato troops operating in Afghanistan, particularly the American forces fighting in the east.
For years their commanders have expressed frustration at militants coming across the border to take pot shots at them, before moving back to the sanctuary of the triba areas. These areas are seen as the new battleground in the war on terror. Originally created by the British as a buffer between the Indian empire and Afghanistan, they stretch along Pakistan’s 1,500-mile border with Afghanistan.
As the poorest and most backward part of Pakistan with a literacy rate of just 3%, but fiercely martial, they are the breeding ground for militant groups. Political parties are not allowed. As militant groups have grown in influence, local people have nowhere else to turn.
Most of the attacks on US soldiers in eastern Afghanistan are ordered by Maulvi Jalalud-din Haqqani, who operates from Miramshah in North Waziristan, and whom the United States believes to have close ties with Al-Qaeda.
Neighbouring South Waziristan is dominated by Baitullah Mehsud, a former gym teacher, whose Pakistan Taliban is believed by the CIA to be responsible for the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister, last December.
“The security of Pakistan, Afghanistan, the entire region and maybe that of the whole world will be determined by developments in the tribal areas over the next few months,” said Khattak.
The United States has carried out a number of bombings and missile strikes inside the areas, although each time the key targets seem to have escaped. So concerned is the Bush administration that the ISI is tipping militants off that in January it sent two senior intelligence officials to Pakistan. Mike Mc-Connell, the director of national intelligence, and Hayden asked Musharraf to allow the CIA greater freedom to operate in the tribal areas.
Of particular US concern was the ISI’s alleged involvement with Haqqani, one of its former allies, and its links to Lashkar-i-Toiba, a Punjab-based militant group, which is thought to have been behind the attack on an American outpost in Kunar last month in which nine US soldiers were killed.
Many US intelligence officials have long suspected that ISI officers accept their money and then help their foes, but it has been difficult to find proof. In June the Afghan government publicly accused the ISI of being behind an assassination attempt on Karzai in April and threatened to send their own troops into the border. But they were unable to produce any concrete evidence.
“The Indian embassy bombing seems to have finally provided it. This is the smoking gun we’ve all been looking for,” a British official said last week.
On the eve of the Washington visit, the Pakistan government tried to tame the ISI by announcing that it would henceforth come under interior ministry control. It was forced to revoke the decision within three hours after angry phone calls from the army chief.
Malik, on behalf of the government, claimed the decision had been misinterpreted. “What we were trying to do was bring national security and the war on terror under the interior ministry but it was wrongly announced,” he said.
US officials say the number of attacks on their soldiers in Afghanistan have increased by 60% since the civilian government took power this year.
There is widespread disillusion with Gillani’s government after elections in the wake of Bhutto’s assassination brought her Pakistan People’s party (PPP) to power as head of a coalition government. Nearly six months on, Musharraf is still president.
In a reflection of who really calls the shots, while the government party was in Washington Lieutenant-General Martin Dempsey, acting commander of Centcom, the US military command, was in Islamabad handing over F-16 fighter planes and holding meetings with the top brass. A British officer who was present at the meeting said Pakistani generals had spoken of their frustration with the civilian government: “They said they were still waiting for a signal to act in the tribal areas. To be honest, none of us could think of a thing they had done in six months.”
The sensitivity of the intelligence issue became clear on Friday night when Sherry Rehman, the information minister, acknowledged to journalists that the ISI might still contain pro-Taliban operatives. “We need to identify these people and weed them out,” she said, only to change her statement later to maintain that the problems were in the past and there would be no purge.
For its part, Islamabad says America is interested only in countering attacks in Afghanistan and gives it no help to confront militants causing problems in its own territory nor vital equipment, such as drone spy planes.
Pakistan ministers were particularly incensed when the United States launched a missile strike inside one of the country’s tribal areas on Monday, while the government party was still en route to Washington. “It was the first thing I read on my BlackBerry when I got off the plane,” said a member of the delegation. “What a nice gift.”
Offer of Inquiry into Kabul attack
Pakistan yesterday offered to investigate the bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul on July 7, in which 54 people died and 140 were injured. It was the bloodiest attack in the Afghan capital since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. Nobody has claimed responsibility.
A suicide bomber drove a lorry laden with explosives into the embassy gate during the morning rush hour, wounding and killing many of those queuing for visas. The embassy is in the centre of Kabul.
The main target seemed to be a diplomatic convoy that had just entered the gate. Among those killed were two senior diplomats including the military attaché, Brigadier Ravi Mehta.
Where writs don't run.....PAKISTAN'S WILD WEST
Borderland Pakistan is the old west reincarnated, and ignorant outsiders won't force change.
Peter Preston The Guardian
America has seen enough John Ford movies to get the point. Britain, too, had its fill of John Wayne. So why are we all so infernally slow to realise that borderland Pakistan is the old west reincarnated - except that we're not talking Apaches or Sioux now, just Bugti, Swati, Jadoon and Tareen in the realms of the Pashtuns and Baluchis?
Such parallels bound out only a few miles from Peshawar. If this were Nevada, you'd find casinos down some desert road, run as a matter of restitution by the tribes. That big, lushly watered house on the hill would be where the chief lives, counting his cash. And here the feeling is just the same: no slots or blackjack, maybe, but gun supermarkets, smugglers' paradises, walled mansions and the rest - ritually patrolled by the tribes' own internal police. Ten yards off the Khyber Pass, Pakistan's national forces' law and order give up the ghost. Their writ doesn't run. Reservation self-preservation.
Yet still, Washington doesn't see the similarities. It wanted elections, even after Benazir Bhutto's assassination, but now it can't abide the result. Yousuf Raza Gilani's fragile PPP-led government seems more feeble than Musharraf at bringing the tribes to heel. Even more cross-border flits for the Taliban; even less hope of catching Bin Laden. A bomb in Kabul kills 58, and renegade extremists in Pakistan army intelligence must be "weeded out". This country has just got to do what it's told - otherwise (shades of Barack Obama) the White House will send its cavalry in. After you, General Custer ... And nobody sees the challenge whole.
That shanty city along the main route out of Peshawar is Afghanistan by another name: more than a million who fled the Russians and haven't gone home. In Baluchistan far to the south, the tribes have been fighting each other for centuries - and, much more recently, the troops Musharraf sent in to try to bring some semblance of order (they want independence, not devolution). The North-West Frontier Province has a population the size of Iraq, and the religious far right in control. It's a dusty, rugged, rock-strewn terrain, perfect for using the Stingers you bought on your last trip to the supermarket.
Telling Gilani, far away in Islamabad, to order his army to crack down on this chaos is empty foolishness. The army - mostly born and nurtured in Punjab - has scant stomach for rumbling civil war. It has lost too many of its own on these killing slopes already. Meanwhile, slipping and slithering back and forth, the enemies we call the Taliban - or al-Qaida, in our more facile moments - are part of the landscape, simply unstoppable except by the kind of massive, sustained surge nobody has the will or resources to mount. Musharraf couldn't do it when he was really in charge. Random, passing politicians are even further off the pace.
And the danger, time after time, is seeing Pakistan's far west in the way that ignorant generals from the east were expected to act (until James Stewart showed them what a fine chap Geronimo was). This is a deep and often deluding mix of race, many tongues, acute poverty, tradition and religion. It isn't some simple terrain where the word of the PM goes. Nor is it a territory invaded and held by alien terrorist forces. What you've got, instead, is something fiercely autonomous but also anarchic - a world where the state called Pakistan barely exists.
There's suspicion and duplicity lurking in these ravines, to be sure. Army intelligence, like some corrupt trading-post keeper, is used to playing both ends against the middle: and was hailed in heroic terms when the Red Army was one of the ends it ran ragged. But the greater game far outweighs small, if bloody, plots. Gilani, and the heirs of Bhutto, barely in power and already buffeted by food shortages and energy costs, are the best democratic hope Pakistan has on offer. It's politicians or the generals again, and the braided ones haven't really gone back to base yet after their last failed spell. The frail balance of turn and turnabout between democrats and soldiers is perilously out of phase.
Pakistan as a whole voted against extremism a few months ago: but Pakistan is not a whole. Indeed, in many places, the central government is disregarded. Gilani - widely advised - has tried to take off the pressure, to reassure the Baluchis and Pashtuns, to bring gifts and pipes of peace. That's not good enough for the long knives from DC, perhaps. They want crackdowns and action: they've got a war against terrorism to win. But we know, from too many seats in the stalls, who truly wins in the end. And it's not the ignorant, impatient outsiders raining death on a people their "civilisation", in its careless way, cannot comprehend.
Feudalism: a myth or mother of all ills?
It should be commonly understood that feudalism as a mode of production does not exist. However, it is the feudal ways and norms that remain the bane of underdeveloped societies. Consequently, the term "feudalism" is used to describe pejoratively "anything reactionary, old-fashioned, or resonant of aristocratic values" (Oxford Dictionary).
Under the original feudal system, a vassal or a feudal tenant would hold land and would in return perform military duties for an overlord. The overlord would, in turn, provide protection and land tenure to the tenant. The overlord would pledge allegiance to a king. Land tenures of the lesser lords were thus guaranteed. The communities remained subservient to the vassals and the overlords. If some communities still have no better option other than servile existence under big landlords, it can be safely concluded that the world has yet to get rid of "feudalism" or feudal ways and practices. Surely, in Pakistan, it remains a daunting challenge.
Feudal system existed in Europe as much as it did in Japan. In England, it met with stiff resistance from its institutions as they developed. Industry rose on the ashes of feudalism. France is known for entrenched feudalism until their revolution. Modernization in France could not be conceived to coexist with feudalism. The French Revolution commenced by putting an end to feudalism by decree. It changed the structure of the society so as to make it growth- and development-oriented.
As the Philadelphia Convention met to draw up the American Constitution in 1787, France was ripe for a revolution. King Louis XVI of France had financed the American War of Independence against the British. France almost reached the verge of bankruptcy as, "those with the capacity to pay taxes failed to bear their share of the burden." The French King summoned the Assembly of Notables (aristocrats) requesting them to abandon some of their fiscal privileges. The Notables resisted and called for summoning of the Estates General (assembly) to deal with the fiscal crisis. The Estates General comprised three estates, namely, the clergy, the aristocracy, and the rest. When the Estates General met, the Third Estate, comprising the rest, withdrew and declared itself the National Assembly competent to give a new constitution to France. The fiscal crisis was thus viewed against the larger backdrop of the structure of the French society wherein the privileged few enjoyed tax privileges as the country was driven to bankruptcy. The fiscal crisis could not be addressed in 18th century France unless the structure of the society was changed. For, if the privileged were not willing to part with their privileges, then the privileged had to go. So it was ruled in 18th century France.
In 21st century Pakistan, the privileged argue that there privileges and the socio-economic hardships of the underprivileged are both a myth. The people of this country are neither dense nor dumb. Many similarities emerge as we look back at the economic development path of the developed West. All those aware of Pakistan's fiscal crisis and its distorted structures of politico-economic power would further know where the similarities end. The similarity ends when we display a lack of courage and will-power to effect change for the better.
Bastille was demolished on July 14, 1789 and feudalism was abolished on August 4, 1789 through a series of "Decrees Abolishing the Feudal System." The opening words were, "The National Assembly abolishes the feudal regime entirely ....." The decrees did away with many kinds of manorial obligations to begin with. The decrees also abolished special tax privileges and opened all offices to all citizens "without distinction of birth." Cornerstone to build a modern France had been laid.
The second important decree was the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen passed late August 1789. The second decree came on the heels of the first decree about abolishing feudalism and privileges. The decrees were thus logically sequenced. Without the first one, the second would have been meaningless.
The French Revolution did not end in the year it started. Rather, the Revolution kept consolidating itself even in the 19th century until the Napoleonic era. Even though Napoleon turned despotic, the ideals of the Revolution were pushed forward forcefully on nearly every front in his era. These ideas were also exported to Italy, Spain, and Prussia. Germany would then provide further intellectual thrust to the ideals of the enlightenment. Unfortunately, these ideas have yet to be assimilated and internalized by us.
We remain backward as we try to build a modern society on the traditional repugnant value system most prevalent in the countryside from where it also gets exported to the urban so-called modern sector. Thanks to this age of rapid and effective communication, one is saved the agony of personally witnessing the oppression in the villages. There is enough evidence available about life in rural areas on the basis of which serious students of economics can draw the sad conclusions from which the big farm lords wish to look the other way. It is true that behaviour and attitudes in other sectors of the economy are also repugnant in many ways. However, one needs to determine not just the "sources" of ills in the society but rather the "causes" of them. If a cause-effect tree is constructed, it will converge to the major problem identified way back in 1789 by none other than the French which is "feudalism." Later in the 20th century, it was identified by the Japanese, the Koreans, the Taiwanese, and the Chinese as soon as they embarked on development and modernization. However, China is ignored by many in this country due to its totalitarian political disposition. We may then travel Westward and find a case in point in the liberated France which exported the idea to other parts of Europe.
Until such time that the root cause is addressed in Pakistan, it would be very difficult to reform the rest of the society. Rather, it is impossible to reform if the major sector of agriculture or big agriculturists continue to occupy the privileged status that they do. They continue to wield the same amount of power as they did when their sector contributed over 40 per cent to the GDP in the 1950s and the 1960s. They might well know that their sector's contribution to the GDP stands declined to about 25 per cent in the decade of the 1990s. It is, therefore, not a "predominant factor" as still imagined by some of them. They should not, therefore, be allowed to continue to dominate the value system which some of them think is their birth right by virtue of the sector's significance in the economy.
Nonetheless, the rural economy remains significant as it is still home to 67 per cent of the country's population. With a declining GDP share, the misery of the multitude can only be expected to increase unless drastic land and agrarian reforms are undertaken. It is common knowledge that even though "begaar" is abolished, the tiller barely subsists. The condition of socio- economic or human rights remains pathetic on which enough data have been collected by many development centres at least one of which works under the auspices of the UN. There is enough empirical evidence already in support of the fact that the number of displaced and landless peasants is rising. This is creating pressure on urban areas due to influx of rural migrants. To argue the above facts, data, and actual trends is to be unreasonable and irrational.
The matter, however, needs to be addressed whenever status quo is supported. Otherwise, it would only reinforce the already existing barriers to reform. As soon as the sentiment for meaningful land reforms caught on in the country recently, big landlords tried to project "feudalism" as a myth. It would be a fantasy to assume that the country is not plagued with a feudal mindset. Some of the ills found in other sectors of the economy are actually a manifestation of this same mindset exported from the countryside to the rest of the economy. Absentee landlords, living off the wealth generated on the soil tilled by subsisting tenants, served as "role models." The societal goals got transformed to maximizing personal material gain and personal power only. These goals were sought increasingly in other sectors, be it industry or bureaucracy. The undesirable norms and attitudes caught on. These trends are now being used to justify oppression in that same agricultural sector from which they were exported in the first place. The vicious circle ought to be broken rather than justified. The importance of parallel attempts notwithstanding, first attempts should then be made in the sector from which these anti-developmental attitudes originated.
These attitudes have also been the biggest roadblock to the development of institutions in the country. As this sector remains virtually exempt from fiscal and other socio-economic obligations, other sectors find their legal fiscal and administrative requirements discriminating. Consequently, they are fulfilled only partially, if at all. Profitability in agricultural sector remains a question mark as the sector has made itself impervious. The luxurious lifestyles of big agriculturists belie their claims about economic hardships. Other sectors then consider it not-so-illegitimate to underreport incomes. The taxation structure remains horizontally iniquitous. Agriculturists complain of multiplicity of taxes and try to remain exempt from income taxation. Other sectors and salaried individuals too have to pay a number of taxes but their incomes remain heavily taxed. Despite heavy taxation, fiscal and economic problems have compounded because, inter alia, the economic managers can no longer justify the privileged status of agriculture. It is now even allowed market prices for output. The issue of implicit taxation exists no longer. But the privileges do!
Can a modern economy be constructed with attitudes and norms that discourage enterprise, seek rents rather than healthy normal profits, and which encourage distribution in favour of a few powerful rather than all the input providers? Economic history answers in the negative!
Why choose now to complain about Pakistan’s ISI?
Why now? Until this week, the ISI was an acronym for Pakistan’s powerful spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence, that was little known outside of South Asia. Now it’s all over the American media as the organisation accused of secretly helping Islamist militants in Afghanistan and Pakistan, while the country it works for is a crucial ally in the U.S. battle against al Qaeda and the Taliban.
The New York Times led the charge by reporting that the CIA had confronted Pakistan over what it called deepening ties between members of the ISI and militant groups responsible for a surge in violence in Afghanistan. It followed it up with a story quoting U.S. government officials blaming the ISI for an attack last month on the Indian embassy in Kabul. The Washington Post and TIME, amongst others, ran similar stories.
Whenever you see a deluge of stories in the media quoting government or intelligence officials, it’s always worth asking why those unnamed officials have chosen this particular moment to speak out. The accusations against the ISI — denied by Pakistan — are not new.
India has complained for years about the role of the ISI in supporting the insurgency in Kashmir. It threatened to go to war in 2001/2002 over a December 2001 attack on the Indian parliament that it blamed on militants backed by the ISI, a charge denied by Pakistan. The debate within India at the time was very similar to the one you can find today in the U.S. media — how much do the ruling authorities in Pakistan control the ISI, and to what extent is it a monolithic disciplined organisation, and to what extent does it have renegade members who might follow their own agenda?
More importantly, perhaps, in the current context, is how the Americans viewed the ISI. The U.S. diplomats I knew in India had no illusions about the ISI, although publicly they refused to take sides as they tried – successfully as it turned out — to persuade Islamabad and Delhi to stand down from a conflict that threatened to undermine America’s post 9/11 efforts to tame Afghanistan.
During the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan from 1979 to 1989, the CIA worked closely with the ISI to arm, train and fund the mujahideen. Between them they drove the Russians out of Afghanistan and helped bring down the Soviet Union. There can be no closer relationship between two countries’ spy agencies than that. The CIA knows, and has long known, the ISI — perhaps better than any other country’s intelligence services.
So I come back to my original question. Why turn on them now?
There are, of course, obvious answers. Pakistan’s new government, elected in February, just made a botched attempt to bring the ISI under civilian control. Its subsequent retraction served only to highlight the power of the ISI. The Americans and their allies are suffering heavy losses in Afghanistan, while going into a presidential election where the war in Iraq, and the U.S. failure to hunt down al Qaeda and the Taliban, have become a major issue.
But I can’t help but wonder whether those unnamed officials now so keen to talk to the media are spinning a line. There have long been arguments within the CIA about how to handle the ISI, with agents based in Kabul generally arguing in favour of confrontation and those in Islamabad backing cooperation.
So is what we are seeing in the U.S. media a reflection of a battle within the CIA over rival views on how to handle Pakistan and the ISI? Maybe.
Or is it a reflection of actual events, including the increase in violence in Afghanistan, the renewed focus on Iraq/al Qaeda created by the U.S. presidential election, the speculation about whether the United States will send its troops into Pakistan to hunt down leaders of al Qaeda and the Taliban, and heightened tensions between India and Pakistan over the attack on the Indian embassy in Kabul? Maybe.
I am not asking these questions in the kind of rhetorical way that suggests that I already know the answer. I’m asking because I don’t know.
But I am just a little bit suspicious when I see the media all heading in the same direction. It feels uncannily similar to the way the media quoted unnamed officials about WMD to justify the invasion of Iraq. Many countries had been suspicious of Saddam Hussein since the invasion of Kuwait in 1990. But having ignored that for years, there was suddenly a groundswell of opinion to remove him. Are we now seeing a similar groundswell against Pakistan?
Once again, I don’t know the answer, but suggest only that there is a need to ask why people have chosen this moment to talk. Otherwise we prove the old cliche true, that “we learn from history that we don’t learn from history.”
Situation in global war on terror remains stern
Two explosions tore through a crowded pedestrian area of Turkey's largest city of Istanbul when local residents sat around to enjoy the cool of the evening or strolled along bustling streets on late Sunday, July 27. The blasts killed at least 15 people and injured more than 150 others, and 15 of them seriously.
A day earlier, a string of 18 explosions rocked and destroyed markets, bus stations, residential quarters, hospitals and other crowded areas in the city of Ahmedabad in Gujarat state, west India last Saturday or July 26. The serial explosions killed at least 45 people and wounded 161. Also in India, 60 people died and more than 150 were injured in seven successive bomb blasts that occurred on May 13.
Terrorist attacks have taken place not only in Iraq and Afghanistan, but in other countries and regions since early this year. In some thrilling bomb blasts, the cruel, ruthless nature of terrorists has been fully exposed or unmasked. They not only target at innocent civilians at some overcrowded sites, but also resort to other means as fixing snag nails and other stuffings into deadly explosive devices to cause maximal casualties. They even did not let off hospitals, where many rescuers got killed.
Appalling horrible scenes drenched with much bloodshed have given people all over the world a clear and strong signal: Terrorism still poses a very immediate threat to the contemporary world, and the situation with global war on terrorism remains stern and stark.
Then, some people would naturally ask this question: The war on terrorism launched by the United States has been still going on with a steady increase in the cost of manpower and material and financial resources, and why terrorist activities have turned so ferocious and rampant? Here, we'd better hear what Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali has said. "The war against terror cannot be won by police force alone," President Ben Ali acknowledged, and some new preventative measures should be taken, and the root cause for generating terrorism has to be eradicated by means of improving democracy, popularizing education and culture, raising the status of women and eradicating poverty. If the infallibility is claimed from one's might and persistence bent on via military means to combat terrorism, the effect is likely to discount greatly.
With the war on terror having been fought for year after year, some others may also ask: Why terrorists have not sunk into oblivion but contrarily make people feel the world insecure and more violent as they have gone on fighting against the terrorism more resolutely and relentlessly? This is, however, owed to an outcome inflicted by some of the moves taken to combat terrorism, apart from varied political, economic and social factors.
Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan expressed his grave concern over the humanitarian crisis. He vehemently denounced such anti-terrorist moves as an "ethnic cleansing" operation, the massive bombing of cities, the mistreatment and torture of prisoners in violation of human rights and international humanitarian law and the ensuing deaths of innocent people. More important, he deemed such moves could possibly be taken as the excuse for terrorists to attract or regroup new recruits and create a round after another of violence. Facts have again told people that erroneous actions will incur even more serious consequences.
How to further reinforce global cooperation constitutes an important realm worthy of attention for the global war on terrorism. Without an effective international cooperation, it is out of the question to attain the objective for anti-terrorism efficaciously. Some Western nations could hardly push ahead the worldwide cooperation in the war on terror as they often resort to double standards in the sphere of fighting against terrorism and give heed only to their own concern to the neglect of terrorist threats posed for others.
To date, all above-mentioned questions have shed light on causes for an inconspicuous effect and stark reality in the ongoing global war on terrorism. So, the global community should reappraise and re-think carefully of such issues as those regarding the outcome of the war on terror, on how terrorism has been bred and multiplied, how to beef up cooperation in the anti-terrorism field and how to seek a temporary solution and uproot the cause of terrorism.
By People's Daily
