Whose side is Pakistan's ISI really on?

It has been accused of supporting al-Qaida and double-dealing with the CIA. At the same time the ISI, Pakistan's powerful intelligence service, is being targeted by Islamist extremists. In the wake of Osama bin Laden's death, what role will it play?
If there was one telling moment in Pakistan in the 10 days since Osama bin Laden's death, when a Hollywood-style American assault on a suburban house left the country reeling, torn between anger, shame and denial, it occurred late one evening on a prime-time television show hosted by Kamran Khan.

Chatshow hosts are the secular mullahs of modern Pakistan: fist-banging populists who preach to the nation over supper, often through a rightwing lens. Khan, a tubby 50-year-old journalist with neat glasses and a small chin, is the biggest of them. Every night on Geo, the largest channel, he rails against "corrupt" civilian politicians and America, and lionises the armed forces; some colleagues nickname him "the brigadier". But as the country seethed over Bin Laden last week, Khan tore off his metaphorical stripes and stamped them into the ground.

The army had failed its people, he railed. To Pakistan's shame US soldiers had invaded the country; their finding Bin Laden in Abbottabad, two hours north of Islamabad, was a disgrace. The country's "two-faced" approach to extremism had disastrously backfired, he said, reeling off a list of atrocities – New York, Bali, London, Madrid – linked to Pakistan. "We have become the world's biggest haven of terrorism," he declared. "We need to change." Viewers watched in astonishment. The unprecedented attack targeted not only the army chief, General Ashfaq Kayani, but also the most sensitive policies of the military's premier spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate (ISI). Feared, reviled and admired in equal measure, the ISI is considered the embodiment of army power in Pakistan, the object of hushed deference. But now, as one US official told me, "the world has changed". And the ISI finds itself in the line of fire.

The Bin Laden debacle has triggered a blizzard of uncomfortable questions, the sharpest come from Washington. How, President Barack Obama wondered aloud last Sunday, could Bin Laden shelter for years in a garrison town that is home to three regimental headquarters, the local version of Sandhurst, and thousands of soldiers? One retired US officer who has served in the region told me he had been mulling the same question. "All those times we drove up to Abbottabad, and we could have taken out our pistols and done the job ourselves," he said. The CIA chief Leon Panetta, meanwhile, says he didn't warn the ISI about the special forces raid because he feared word might leak to the al-Qaida leader. Behind the pointed statements lies an urgent question: was the ISI hiding Bin Laden?

The answer may lie inside the ISI's headquarters in Abpara, on the edge of Islamabad. The entrance, beside a private hospital, is suitably discreet: no sign, just a plainclothes officer packing a pistol who direct visitors through a chicane of barriers, soldiers and sniffer dogs. But inside, past the smooth electric gates, lies a neatly tended cluster of adobe buildings separated by smooth lawns and tinkling fountains that resembles a well-funded private university. Cars purr up to the entrance of the central building, a modern structure with a round, echoing lobby. On the top floor sits the chief spy: the director general Ahmed Shuja Pasha, a grey-haired 59-year-old three-star general. One American counterpart describes him as "brilliant and extremely intelligent . . . Thoughtful, pensive and extremely well read; if he was in the US military he would be a very successful officer."

Pasha and the ISI are the heart of Pakistan's "establishment" – a nebulous web of generals, bureaucrats and hand-picked politicians (not always elected ones) who form the DNA of Pakistan's defence and security policies. It has at least 10,000 employees (some say twice as many), mixing serving army officers, many on three-year rotations from other services, with thousands of civilian employees, from suited analysts to beefy street spies. In theory they answer to the prime minister; in reality they are a tool of the army chief, Kayani. To supporters, the ISI safeguards national security – monitoring phones, guarding the country's nuclear weapons. But to its many critics, the ISI is the army's dirty tricks department, accused of abduction and assassination, vote-rigging and torture, and running Islamist terrorist outfits. "The ISI," said Minoo Bhandara, an outspoken Parsi businessman who ran a brewery across the road from army headquarters before he died in 2008, "is an institution full of intelligence but devoid of wisdom."

Oddly, it was founded by an Australian. As Pakistan recovered from its disastrous first war with India in 1948, Major General R Cawthorne, on secondment from the British army, decided the fledgling military needed a proper intelligence outfit. The first decades were inauspicious. The ISI mishandled the 1965 war with India and failed to predict the East Pakistan conflict in 1971, which sundered Pakistan in two and created Bangladesh. All changed, however, eight years later when Soviet tanks rolled into Afghanistan on Christmas Day 1979. The decade-long war of resistance – bankrolled by the United States, fought by Afghans and Arabs, but largely run by the ISI from Pakistan's tribal areas – revolutionised the agency's fortunes. It ran a network of secret training camps along the Afghan border that trained more than 80,000 fighters. It controlled a weapons pipeline, funded by the CIA and Saudi intelligence, that smuggled Kalashnikovs and Stinger anti-aircraft missiles from Karachi to the Khyber Pass. And it grew powerful and rich.

A legendary figure from that period was a man named Colonel Imam, whom I first met five years ago. He was tall and burly, with a thick beard and a crooked smile that suggested several missing teeth. He wore a white turban and an olive-green, British issue second world war-issue paratroop jacket, which he told me he had been wearing since he joined the army in 1971. During the 80s, Imam ran many of the ISI training camps, becoming popular among ethnic Pashtun fighters for his love of Islam and his fondness for killing Soviets. "Those were wonderful times," he told me. Although his real name was Sultan Amir, to the Afghans he became "Colonel Imam". "I loved the fight. And the mujahideen were very fond of me," he said with a smile.

The US liked him too. On the wall of his Rawalpindi home hung war trophies from the 80s – daggers, faded photos, a Russian general's gun – but on the table sat a chunk of the Berlin wall, cased in glass. "To one who helped deliver the first blow," it read. "The Americans gave me that," he said.

With the Russian withdrawal from Afghanistan in 1989, the CIA largely abandoned Pakistan. But the spirit of "jihad" – fighters imbued with Islamist vim – lived on in the ISI. Pakistani officers, having imbibed too much of their own ideology, transformed the spy agency. It started to support Islamist groups across Asia – Bangladesh, Uzbekistan, Burma, India – and the US placed Pakistan on a terrorist watchlist. In 1993, Javed Ashraf Qazi, a secular-minded general officer, was sent in to clean up the mess. "I was shocked at what I found," he tells me. Senior ISI officers had jettisoned their uniforms for shalwar kameez; their subordinates would disappear off to the mosque for hours on end. The ISI had bought a hotel in Bangkok, probably to facilitate gun-running. The outgoing spy chief, Javed Nasir, was a playboy turned zealot who had grown a scraggly beard and refused to shake women's hands. On his first day in the office Qazi found him running out of the door to a Muslim missionary conference. "When people say the ISI is a rogue agency, it was true in those days," he says.

Qazi fired the ideologues, sold the hotel and ordered his subordinates to wear their uniforms (some struggled to fit in them). "We cleaned it up," says Qazi, who later became a minister under Pervez Musharraf.

But the ISI was not done with jihad; it had merely narrowed its focus. The proof is on the wall of Qazi's home. I notice an unusual rifle hanging on the wall. It is an Indian service rifle, Qazi admits half bashfully – a present from one of the "mujahideen" fighters the ISI started to send into Indian-occupied Kashmir from the mid 90s, when he was in charge. "We turned a blind eye to some groups," he says. They included Lashkar-e-Toiba, he admits – the terrorist outfit that in 2008 would attack hotels and train stations in the Indian city of Mumbai, killing 170 people.

In the early 90s, the ISI also started to support an obscure Islamist movement in Afghanistan called the Taliban. Colonel Imam was sent back into Afghanistan to advise the one-eyed Taliban leader Mullah Omar. They had history: Imam, it turned out, had trained Omar back in the mujahideen camps in the 80s. With ISI backing, the Taliban swept to power in Kabul; at the UN in New York, a beleaguered Afghan official complained that Imam was the "de facto governor" of the newly conquered territories. "Ah, they are naughty people," Imam told me of the Taliban with his shy smile. "Rough people, good fighters, but respected. And they were all my friends."

Over the past decade, however, the ISI has professed to have abandoned jihad. As American troops swarmed across Afghanistan, in search of Bin Laden in late 2001, President General Pervez Musharraf disavowed the Taliban, sacked his most Islamist generals (including the then ISI director, Mahmud Ahmed) and brought Colonel Imam home. The following January he made a signature speech banning a slew of jihadi groups. "We need to rid society of extremism," he declared.

On the ground, though, things have looked different. US diplomatic cables released through WikiLeaks last year claimed the ISI was still covertly supporting the Afghan Taliban, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and the Haqqani network, as part of its decades-old grudge match with India. And despite billions of dollars in American assistance, wrote ambassador Anne Patterson, "no amount of money" was likely to make the army – or the ISI – change direction.

Simultaneously, though, the ISI has become a victim of jihadi violence. The Pakistani Taliban – related to the Afghan movement, but separate, and heavily influenced by al-Qaida – is seeking to oust the Pakistani state. The ISI, deemed to have betrayed them, has become the enemy. Hundreds of ISI officials have died in recent years, killed in bombings of buses and offices, and ISI spies have been beheaded in the tribal belt. In the latest atrocity on 8 March a massive car bomb outside an ISI office in Faisalabad destroyed an airline office and killed 32 people.

I last saw Colonel Imam in January 2010 at his home in Rawalpindi. He joked about media articles describing him as the "father of the Taliban". Weeks later he set off for Waziristan with another former ISI man, Khawaja, and a British journalist, Asad Qureshi, who had been commissioned by Channel 4, to interview the Taliban leader Hakimullah Mehsud. But the Taliban took them hostage. After a few weeks Khawaja was executed, after confessing on video to being a "CIA spy". Qureshi was released in September after his family paid a hefty ransom. Then last January, a video of Imam surfaced showing him kneeling before a group of masked, armed men. Mehsud appeared, and said a few words. Then a Talib opened fire, pumped Imam with bullets.

"When you're Frankenstein, and you create a lot of baby monsters who are running round your ankles looking sort of cute, they eventually grow up to be recalcitrant adults," a US official tells me in Islamabad. "And you hope you can get them back into the fold so they become useful. But the Pakistanis can't control everything they create."

Could the ISI's complex policy towards jihadi militants have caused it to harbour Bin Laden? Its many critics have little doubt, particularly in Afghanistan; last week the former Kabul spy chief Amrullah Saleh said he warned Musharraf about Bin Laden four years ago, only to be rowdily shouted down. Now Musharraf himself admits it's a possibility, albeit one limited to "rogue" officers. Yesterday he told ABC News there was a "possibility" of a "lower-level operative . . . following a policy of his own and violating the policy from above". But could it be done with the knowledge of the top generals? Opinion is split between agnostics and sceptics. "Did Pasha know? It's entirely implausible that he didn't," says a former western military official who has worked in Pakistan. A senior diplomat sees it differently. Perhaps the ISI is neither complicit or incompetent, he says. Maybe they just didn't look. "Looking for Osama may not have been a big priority when not finding him earns you billions of dollars a year, and if you did the Americans would leave the region," he says.

The ISI itself points to its consistent record in fighting al-Qaida. Over the past decade it has rounded up hundreds of Islamist suspects, many dispatched to Guantánamo Bay. They include the most notorious al-Qaida henchmen: Khalid Sheikh Muhammad, architect of the 9/11 attacks, snatched from a Rawalpindi safehouse in 2003; Ramzi bin al-Shibh, captured after a gun battle a year earlier; Abu Faraj al-Libi, then the al-Qaida number three, arrested in Mardan in 2005 by ISI commandos wearing burka disguises. Not finding Bin Laden was "a failure on our side," admits an ISI official. "Unfortunate, but a fact. We are good but we are not God."

Yet the questions remain. How did Bin Laden avoid ISI surveillance in a military area, just a few hundred metres from a major military base, in a zone where military intelligence traditionally keeps a close eye? And what about the army major who recently built his house just behind Osama's? Did he not wonder about his neighbour with the barbed-wire fence and the security cameras perched on the wall? "I find it entirely implausible that the military and intelligence agencies knew nothing," says Dr Farzana Sheikh, author of Making Sense of Pakistan. "There must have been knowledge at the highest levels." But, along with so many other critics, she concedes "there is no proof". In a country where so many pressing mysteries remain unresolved – from the plane crash that killed General Zia ul-Haq in 1988, to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto in 2007 – few are holding their breath.

There could, at least, be accountability, although hopes are fading fast. As television anchors raged and criticism of the army swelled last week, some hoped Pakistan's civilian leadership would seize the moment to claw back part of the power it has ceded over the past 30 years. Yet those hopes were dashed on Monday when prime minister Gilani stood up in parliament for a stout defence of the generals. "The ISI is a national asset," he said. The battle, if it had ever been contemplated, was lost.

In America the scrutiny will not vanish so easily. Angry congressional leaders have called for Pakistan's $3bn annual aid package to be slashed; hostile media coverage portraying the ISI as an enemy unit is growing. Government officials, however, are more circumspect. With Nato's main military supply line running through Pakistan, other al-Qaida figures still at large including Bin Laden's deputy, Ayman al-Zawahiri, and a peace settlement to be negotiated in Afghanistan, many quietly speak of the need to eventually patch up the Pakistan relationship – although few doubt that it has been utterly changed over the past 10 days. "We can't break it, it's too important," says one US official. "We're going to have to sit down across the table and try and tell some truths to each other."

Still, he adds: "There are degrees in truth. We would like to have a degree of the truth."

American popular opinion may be less nuanced. The forthcoming trial of David Headley, an American jihadi accused of helping Lashkar-e-Taiba carry out the Mumbai attacks, is likely to bring fresh accusations of ISI "double-game". And movie culture is likely to have a strong influence. Even before Bin Laden died an action thriller called tentatively "Kill Bin Laden", by Oscar-winning director Kathryn Bigelow, was in the works. Now many more will surely follow. In the coming months, casting directors will start seeking actors to play macho navy Seals, a tense American president and an elusive Saudi fugitive. And, almost certainly, they will be looking for a clutch of double-dealing Pakistani spies. In the ISI, Hollywood may have found a new bad guy.

Mother of all embarrassments

Ayaz Amir

For a country with more than its share of misfortunes and sheer bad luck, we could have done without this warrior of the faith, Osama bin Laden, spreading his beneficence amongst us. He was a headache for us while he lived, but nothing short of a catastrophe in his death. For his killing, and the manner of it, have exposed Pakistan and its security establishment like nothing else.

To say that our security czars and assorted knights have been caught with their pants down would be the understatement of the century. This is the mother of all embarrassments, showing us either to be incompetent – it can’t get any worse than this, Osama living in a sprawling compound a short walk from that nursery school of the army, the Pakistan Military Academy and, if we are to believe this, our ever-vigilant eyes and ears knowing nothing about it – or, heaven forbid, complicit.

I would settle for incompetence anytime because the implications of complicity are too dreadful to contemplate.

And the Americans came, swooping over the mountains, right into the heart of the compound, and after carrying out their operation flew away into the moonless night without our formidable guardians of national security knowing anything about it. This is to pour salt over our wounds. The obvious question which even a child would raise is that if a cantonment crawling with the army such as Abbottabad is not safe from stealthy assault what does it say about the safety of our famous nuke capability, the mainstay of national pride and defence?

Barely 24 hours before the Osama assault General Kayani, at a ceremony in General Headquarters in remembrance of our soldiers killed in our Taliban wars, was describing the army as the defender of the country’s ideological and geographical frontiers. For the time being, I think, we should concentrate on ideology and leave geography well alone, the Abbottabad assault having made a mockery of our geographical frontiers.

Every other country in the world is happy if its armed forces can defend geography. We are the only country in the world which waxes lyrical about ideological frontiers. To us alone belongs the distinction of calling ourselves a fortress of Islam.

In the wake of the Raymond Davis affair a certain sternness had crept into our tone with the Americans, as we told them that they would have to curtail their footprint in Pakistan. I wonder what we tell them now. It is not difficult to imagine the smile on American lips when we now speak of the absolute necessity of minimising CIA activities.

With whom the gods would jest, they first make ridiculous. The hardest thing to bear in this saga is not wounded pride or breached sovereignty but our exposure to ridicule. Osama made us suffer in life and has made us look ridiculous after his death. Around the tallest mountains there is the echo of too much laughter at our expense.

Consider also the Foreign Office statement of May 3, “As far as the target compound is concerned, ISI had been sharing information with CIA...since 2009....It is important to highlight that taking advantage of much superior technological assets, CIA exploited intelligence leads given by us to identify and reach Osama bin Laden.” This is hilarious. If we were aware of the compound and had suspicions about its occupants what ‘superior technological assets’ were required to go in and find out?

But what takes the cake is the stern warning attached: “This event of unauthorised unilateral action cannot be taken as a rule. The government of Pakistan further affirms that such an event shall not serve as a future precedent for any state, including the US.” We can imagine the CIA trembling in its shoes. My son burst out laughing when he read this. If the Americans get a clue to the whereabouts of Ayman al-Zawahiri or Mullah Omar will they ask our permission before sending their SEAL teams in?

The CIA chief, Leon Panetta, has rubbed the point in: “It was decided that any effort to work with the Pakistanis could jeopardise the mission. They might alert the targets.” That’s about the level of trust we seem to inspire.

Anyway, trust Prime Minister Gilani to put it best, that the failure to find Osama for so long was not just Pakistan’s failure but that of intelligence agencies around the world. This is really cool, absolving ourselves of all responsibility even when Osama is discovered within walking distance of PMA Kakul.

We have some funny notions of sovereignty and national honour. The CIA spreading itself wide in Pakistan is a breach of national sovereignty, and rightly so. And American boots on the ground, as in Abbottabad, are totally unacceptable. But when it comes to Al Qaeda using Pakistan as a base, Sirajuddin Haqqani and the rest of the Taliban holed up in North Waziristan and Taliban elements in Quetta, we somehow can’t work up the same outrage.

We already had a tough job on our hands convincing the world of our bona fides. After the Osama operation it gets that much tougher.

In an ideal world this should be a wakeup call for Pakistan, an opportunity for some honest introspection and a hard look at some of the bizarre notions underpinning our theories of national security. Must we spend so much on defence? Is the world engaged in a conspiracy to undermine our foundations? Aren’t our nuclear weapons enough to give us a sense of security? Hasn’t the time come to curb some of our zest for nurturing and sustaining jihadi militias? And isn’t it time we stopped fretting so much about Afghanistan and made internal order and prosperity the principal focus of our endeavours?

But we do not live in an ideal world and our capacity for self-deception should not be under-estimated. Shaken as we may be by the Osama operation, we can safely assume that we won’t take this as a wakeup call. As the Foreign Office statement vividly shows, we’ll hunt for lame excuses and hide behind false explanations, convinced of our ability to fool the world when the only thing fooled will be ourselves.

So we will keep talking about strategic assets and good and bad Taliban, and about protecting our interests in Afghanistan, and we’ll keep subscribing to theories of Indian hostility and encirclement, because these are the foundations on which stands the peculiar national security state we have constructed, forever threatened and insecure.

If the separation of East Pakistan was not a wakeup call, if Musharraf’s adventure in Kargil wasn’t that either, it is too much to expect that Pakistan’s comprehensive exposure in this saga, the Islamic Republic without its clothes, will lead to any radical departures in national outlook.

Our ruling establishment is too set in its ways and, sadly, the roots of national stupidity run too deep.

And perish the thought of anyone taking responsibility and throwing in his papers. That’s just not the Pakistani way.

But there should be no escaping the fact that from now on we will have to be more careful. All the signs suggest that this may prove to be a milestone of sorts, a dangerous turning point, in that our friends, let alone our enemies, become more sceptical of our pronouncements and increasingly less willing to put up with our hidden and double games.

We will be asked some tough questions and the time for bluster or a show of righteous indignation may have passed.

Challenges and Opportunities for Afghanistan

Afghanistan is situated in a particularly tough geo-political and geo-economic environment. This environment is characterized by various state and non-state actors, both regional and trans-regional, that result in the geo-political and security equilibrium in the region to be fragile and prone to disturbance at the slightest of provocations. Perhaps, Afghanistan is one of the few countries in the world with such a difficult geopolitical environment. From the standpoints of security, military, economy, business and trade, politics and diplomacy, the state to state relations in this part of the world, where Afghanistan is located, continues to be under-developed and vulnerable to strains and pressures. Iran, the central Asian region republics, Pakistan, China, Russia and by extension Saudi Arabia and recently Turkey are all in one way or another involved in the immediate vicinity of Afghanistan. Unfortunately enough for Afghanistan, on account of many reasons, dialogue, consultation, cooperation and finding common grounds for collaboration and multi-lateral understanding remain to be alien to these countries. However, the region where Afghanistan is located provides it with many opportunities as well.

In many other parts of the world, countries of a region work towards ever bringing themselves closer to each other by promoting inter-regional trade and business, and signing pacts of cooperation in many areas from economy and politics to joint scientific and medical research. In our region, however, many reasons including lingering historical mistrusts, prevalence of dictatorial and authoritarian rulers, oil-based economies and an entrenched political myopia prevent these countries from setting aside differences and moving closer towards each other. As a result of these countries’ unwillingness to set aside differences and explore common grounds, many valuable opportunities are being wasted. These wasted opportunities are in the areas of combating terrorism and insecurity, increased inter-regional trade and business, economic development and growth and many others. Imagine the kind of advanced scientific expertise and knowledge in the fields of medicine and base sciences that Iran has managed to achieve in recent years. If a climate of multi-lateral trust and greater cooperation prevailed in the region, our country Afghanistan along with the republics of the central Asia could have immensely benefited from joint cooperation with Iran in these fields. You can also think of the great economic and energy hub that the republics in the central Asian region can become in near future as a result of which Afghanistan can benefit handsomely by acting as a major transit route of pipelines and overland transport. Afghanistan can very well become the new “pipelineistan” of the region. You can also imagine the immense joint potential that the two governments in Kabul and Islamabad have in terms of combating and defeating terrorism and sources of instability and insecurity. All these are not mere wishful thinking but possible scenarios that can very well be accomplished over the long run if the right kind of political will is put in place by these countries and if they can set aside differences and distrusts. Examples are abound in other parts of the world such as South East Asia and Latin America where governments and countries have been able to gradually overcome problems and start deepening relations.

The SAARC or the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation, now comprised of Afghanistan, India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and Maldives came into being in 1985 with the aim of exactly doing what has been discussed: to explore the common grounds of cooperation among these countries and enabling them to benefit from the strengths of one another and work collectively to overcome problems. Afghanistan joined SAARC in 2005 and thus found a valuable opportunity to benefit from cooperating with other countries that were already members of this regional association. Unfortunately, after more than 25 years of coming into existence, SAARC and its objectives have remained good only on paper. It has been only able to achieve a small fraction of its original objectives due to many problems that have undermined real cooperation among the member countries. SAARC has been overshadowed by other regional problems, hostilities and conflicts and more importantly, heterogeneous and different political, economic and historical structures and realities of each member country. The differentials have so far worked to ground the SAARC and prevent it from becoming a substantive regional platform for dialogue and greater regional cooperation.

If the very idea of SAARC is not practical and doomed to failure in such a geo-political and geo-economic environment, then the way out can be staring bilateral cooperation among those countries which are not hindered by those differences. For instance, Afghanistan and Pakistan can work towards setting aside differences and actually collaborate with one another on many burning issues that have plagued themselves and their bilateral relations. Terrorism and combating the multitude of militant and extremist networks, which operate on both soils, is one of the most important fertile grounds for greater cooperation. It might seem that in the short run, overcoming the many problems that lie in the way is impossible given the differing political and security objectives that each country pursues in relation to the other. But we also should not lose sight of the fact that in the long run, normalizing relations and joint cooperation on the burning issues of the region is the only sustainable alternative. If the countries and governments in the region including Afghanistan and Pakistan cannot amicably find solutions to their problems, problems will only be prolonged and will get more complicated in the process. Therefore, regional relations need to undergo a major overhaul keeping in view the new developments and the urgency of the problems and crises that confront these countries including our country Afghanistan.

On the other hand and on a realistic note, these geo-political realities as discussed also necessitate preparing the country against the threats of external aggressions. Aggressions need not necessarily be of a military nature but can also be economic, environmental and many other. In other words, our region confronts Afghanistan with a mix of both opportunities and challenges. The opportunities are what already discussed but the challenges also are critical and need to be addressed. Strengthening the economy, preparing strong and ready national security forces capable of protecting the territorial integrity of the country and above all crafting an effective diplomatic apparatus for the country are all imperatives without which Afghanistan would continue to titter on the brinks of becoming yet again a failed state.

Pakistan: A revolution against whom?

In Pakistan, there may be a public disconnected from the power of the State, but there is no 'regime' to revolt against.
Asad Hashim
Al Jazeera
Pakistan is a country often described as being on the brink – of what, precisely, is up for speculation. There are fears economic, social and political crises, separately and simultaneously, will cause the country to implode into an ungovernable, anarchical mess: a failing, if not failed, state.

Indeed, there are those who argue that this has already happened.

On the one hand, it is difficult to argue with the point that the country is facing simultaneous challenges on several fronts.

With inflation on basic household items at 18.88 per cent (according to government figures) and unemployment at an estimated 15 per cent (according to the CIA’s World Factbook), households in Pakistan are feeling the economic pinch.

Simultaneously, the country appears to lurch from one political crisis to another. The latest issue in the political sphere could have come straight out of a spy novel: the case of Raymond Davis, a CIA contractor who shot and killed two Pakistanis on a Lahore street who he said were attempting to rob him, and was then released after the payment of $2.3 million in compensation to the victims’ families.

The opposition, led by Nawaz Sharif's PML-N party, has slammed the government for dithering over the issue of whether or not Davis had diplomatic immunity, and for allowing the deal to be struck, terming it a question of sovereignty.

Meanwhile, the opposition also continues to criticise the government for its performance on service delivery, revenue generation, economic policy and foreign policy (specifically its stance to tacitly stand by the US and its use of drone strikes on Pakistani territory, while simultaneously being unable to curb extremist attacks in the country).

Things do not appear much better on the social front, with public discourse lurching towards an ever-narrower view of what is acceptable, as evidenced by the recent killings of Shahbaz Bhatti, the federal minister for minorities, and Salman Taseer, the governor of Punjab, for their stance against the country's blasphemy laws as they currently stand. Analysts argue that the murders are indicative of a country where the social sphere is going through an upheaval that leaves less and less space for liberal discourse.

It is the Davis case, though, that Imran Khan, the leader of the Pakistani Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) party, believes will be the spark that lights public discontent into a mass uprising. Speaking to Time magazine, he says the country is "completely ready" for a revolution, "even more … than Egypt was".

Khan called for mass rallies to be held on the Friday after Davis was released, but only a few hundred people showed up at the PTI's gatherings. Several religious parties, too, called for demonstrations, but were unable to create significant momentum. This after weeks of rallies in several cities where thousands would call for Davis to be tried and hanged.

So what's the difference, then, between Pakistan and Egypt, or Tunisia, where popular uprisings based on several of the same push-factors (high inflation, rampant unemployment and a public that feels completely disconnected from the power of the State) have occurred?

"You quickly run out of the similarities [with Egypt and Tunisia]," says Cyril Almeida, an Islamabad-based columnist. "Far more interesting, and numerous, are the differences."

Almeida points out that the uprisings currently being seen across the Middle East are aimed at "long-running dynasties or autocratic rulers".

Protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, Manama’s Pearl roundabout and Sanaa’s University Square were united by one slogan: "The people want the fall of the regime".

"In Pakistan … we get rid of our dictators every ten years or so… There is no 'regime' to overthrow … the first question is: an uprising against whom?" asks Almeida.

And it is that question that strikes to the heart of the difference between Pakistan and Arab states that are currently facing political upheaval. The political landscape in the country is fundamentally different from that of the Arab states where uprisings are currently occurring, because while protesters in Tripoli, Sanaa, Manama, Cairo, Tunis and other cities were calling for dictators to be overthrown and free and fair elections to be held, Pakistan has no 'regime', and already holds elections.

"Why would you need an uprising against Asif Zardari [Pakistan's president] when you know 24 months from now that he's going to get chucked out? Who do you revolt against?" asks Almeida.

"You can argue that there can be a popular uprising against the political system itself, i.e. against electoral democracy predicated on routine elections and transfer of power, but then you're in a very different kind of uprising," he says.

Dr Hasan Askari Rizvi, a professor of political science and a political analyst, agrees.

"It is different [from the Arab world] in two or three respects," he told Al Jazeera. "First, the political system is not so oppressive in Pakistan, and you have a lot of freedom to express your views to organise against the government, set up political parties. And the media, unlike the media in the Arab world, is very free."

Moreover, Pakistan arguably already saw its own popular uprising in 2007, when lawyers led a successful political protest movement against former president, General (retd) Pervez Musharraf.

Second, Rizvi points to an existing framework of elections allowing for governments to be changed.

His third point, however, is as telling as the question of who to revolt against:

"Unlike Egypt, or even Tunisia, there is a lot of fragmentation, both political and religious. Split after split – the situation is very polarised in Pakistan. And the religious parties are too ideological and more literalist in their approach than the Islamic parties in [those countries]. The possibility of a nationwide uprising that involves all sections of the population – all political, ideological and ethnic groups – that kind of possibility is very limited."

Rizvi says that while there are "common factor[s]" in the population of Pakistan being very young, an "acute dissatisfaction with the performance of the government at all levels, whether federal or provincial", and "widespread alienation from the rulers and the democratic experiment", the greater danger in Pakistan is of a government that is unable to govern.

"Pakistan is threatened with a state of anarchy," he says, "rather than a nationwide agitation that would topple the government… the situation may be different in Pakistan, but that doesn’t necessarily mean things are stable."

An economy in crisis

Economically, too, Pakistanis are caught between a (increasingly expensive) rock and a hard place. With prices of household goods spiraling (though below the inflation levels of more than 20 per cent seen in 2008), and limited opportunities for work for both skilled and unskilled labour, they are feeling the pinch.

Kaiser Bengali, a well-respected economist who has worked with the Pakistan People’s Party-led government in the past, argues that the situation in the rural areas is not as bad as in urban centres, where "manufacturing is in a state of recession".

For Bengali, the main issue remains one of revenue generation. Without adequate revenue, the government continues to run a deficit of around six per cent, two percentage points above what was agreed under the terms of an International Monetary Fund emergency loan taken a little over two years ago.

Tax collection rates remain low, and "any new tax would meet opposition", Bengali says, because taxes that target industries would hurt the PML-N’s primary electorate in Punjab.

"Currently the government is trying to meet the deficit [targets of four per cent set by the IMF] by cutting development expenditure," he told Al Jazeera. That means less money for everything from road and infrastructure construction to income support programmes for the country's poor.

Bengali argues that between fighting an insurgency, providing flood relief and a "stagnation" of revenues, the government is forced to "squeeze" on development projects that not only provide infrastructure, but also jobs.

In recent months, the government has seen a large amount of political wrangling over the issue of a Reformed General Sales Tax (RGST) and a proposed agricultural tax that would target large landholdings.

Bengali argues that the RGST, an indirect tax, in actuality targets large industries as much as it does consumers, and that the agricultural tax is a "good political slogan", but difficult to enforce.

In a sign of how dire Pakistan's income emergency is, the government on March 15 unveiled a "mini-budget" that, between expenditure cuts and new taxes, would free up Rs120 billion. The move implements development expenditure cuts and introduces Rs53 billion in new taxes on income, imports, agriculture and other sectors. The taxes were introduced through presidential ordinances, exempting them from parliamentary approval, with the express intention of meeting the IMF targets.

Almeida sums up the economic stresses, independent of the government’s budgetary concerns:

"The economy is doing wretchedly, there is rampant unemployment and lack of growth combining to leave the urban poor particularly vulnerable, if not already plunged into a state of deep economic misery."

Of right wing parties and 'confused idealists'

Activists in Pakistan say that while the economic and political stresses exist in Pakistan, the difference in landscape makes an uprising unlikely.

Al Jazeera spoke to Fahad Desmukh, a Pakistani activist and journalist who has lived in Bahrain, where the February 14 uprising is currently calling for major political reforms, for much of his life.

"Bahrain is relatively free socially, but not politically … opposition activists have been jailed for demanding changes, so the avenues available for expressing social and political frustration are limited," he says. "On the other hand, Pakistan has a much longer history of political activity, with long-established political parties, student groups and labour unions. The parliament and the executive are elected, and the media is much more free. It means there are more avenues to express frustration and 'let off steam', as it were."

Desmukh argues that given the lack of a 'regime' to revolt against, the only kind of uprising that would "make sense" in Pakistan would be class-based, aimed at ending the country's feudal system. He concedes, however, that "this seems unlikely in the near future".

The only other option would appear to be protests against the country's military, which holds great influence over the political sphere, but Desmukh, Rizvi and Almeida all agree that such action is also unlikely.

Beena Sarwar, a political and human rights activist, argues that those calling for a popular uprising in Pakistan are actors "who know they will not come into power through the electoral process – the right wing so-called religious parties… and confused idealists like Imran Khan who seem to have no grip on political realities".

Sarwar says that included in this group are politically disillusioned educated young people who are "alienated from the political process" and are "fired by emotion, youthful zeal and vague ideas of Islamic supremacy and anti-Americanism".

She argues that wide-ranging political change "will come if the political process is allowed to continue", through the political parties and parliament, without interference from Pakistan's military, which, historically, has interrupted democratic transitions with coups.

Democracy’s 'birth pangs'

Rizvi, the professor of political science, and Almeida, the columnist, both disagree, however, at least in so far as the chances of there being any actual positive change.

Almeida says that while he expects elections to take place as scheduled in 2013, "electoral disappointments are likely".

"People forget that the only other option for power [the PML-N] is already in power in Punjab. It mirrors the PPP’s performance … between the PML-N in Punjab and the PPP in Islamabad, there is very little to tell them apart, in terms of incompetence."

"The latest phase of electoral politics is less than three years old, so I don't think there's any fatigue with the system, even if there's genuine tiredness with the current government… Ultimately the great worry for Pakistan is that it may not have enough time to go through the birth pangs of democracy because of the security situation."

Rizvi agrees that the outlook for political change is bleak.

"[The political parties] are good at engaging in polemics, they are good at criticising, but none has been able to present a formula or a framework for addressing socioeconomic problems," he says, pointing to the example of the issue of terrorism, on which political parties "make ambiguous statements and avoid taking a categorical position against particular groups".

"I don't expect [new political players to gain popular support] in the near future, because all the political parties lack ideals and a sense of direction, except in rhetoric.

"The thing I would repeat is my fear that increasingly the Pakistani state system is on a very fast downward slide. If it is not collapsing, it is losing its capacity to function effectively."

With another military coup unlikely, given that the memory of a Pakistan under Gen (retd) Pervez Musharraf that was not doing much better is still fresh in most Pakistanis’ minds, and the likelihood of substantive political change from within the existing system being limited, at least in the short term, what appears most likely is that Pakistan will, as it has for so many years now, blunder on.

It is a country riven with ethnic, religious and political divisions, battling multiple insurgencies (in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and Balochistan), and facing both economic and identity crises.

"And yet," as Anatol Lieven, a scholar and journalist argues in a soon to be released book, "it moves."

An ignorant friend

By —Farhat Taj
Daily Times

The tribal people fear the Pakistan Army’s aerial bombardment in FATA. The IDPs from all over FATA accuse the Pakistan Army of deliberately bombing innocent civilians while avoiding Taliban centres

Some time back, a piece in Foreign Policy suggested a referendum in FATA and the nearby areas of Afghanistan to ask the people if they were for or against a strict Islamist government. In case of a yes vote, any people in the larger region subscribing to a strict version of Islam could emigrate to the area. Dr Mohammad Taqi has elaborated how hollow this whole idea is via his article ‘A passport to dystopia’ (Daily Times, March 3, 2011). Dr Taqi’s article and Pakhtun comments in Foreign Policy on the piece should have encouraged the writer to reflect on his ideas about the Pakhtuns. A researcher with a sense of professional commitment would have done so. This does not appear to be the case with the writer Saleem Ali. Recently, he wrote an article in a Pakistani English daily and reproduced the following misleading ideas about the Pakhtuns on which I would like to comment:

“FATA is ungovernable territory and its population is decidedly more conservative than the rest of Pakistan. Islamists have political clout in FATA. There is an urban-rural divide among the Pakhtun whereby the urban Pakhtun blame the ISI for the terrorism in FATA while the rural Pakhtun in FATA embrace Islamism. The Bacha Khan Movement has no traction in FATA. The New America Foundation Survey last September is the most comprehensive survey in FATA. Tribalism in FATA is conflating with Islamism. There is an aversion to aerial bombing (US drone attacks) in the area.”

From a security point of view, FATA has never been an ungovernable territory since Pakistan came into being. It has always been under the control of the intelligence agencies of Pakistan. This is especially so since the ISI-CIA sponsored jihad in Afghanistan. Did the ISI and CIA operate their entire jihad against the Russians in Afghanistan from an ungovernable space? Were the Soviets so foolish that they could not destroy jihadi bases in an ungovernable space?

FATA is governable but the military establishment of Pakistan is deliberately projecting it as an ‘ungovernable wild west’ to the world because it needs the area for strategic games vis-à-vis India in Afghanistan. Does the writer have any idea about the pro-Islamism activities from the offices of political agents in FATA under the direction of the ISI? May I ask Saleem Ali why the Political Parties Act of Pakistan has not been extended to the area? President Zardari announced the promulgation of the act in FATA in 2009. Who is resisting a formal notification in this regard? Is it the people of FATA or is it the GHQ in Rawalpindi that is so averse to any idea of Pakhtun nationalist political parties operating in the area due to its eternal fear of Pakhtun nationalism?

There is no scientific evidence to suggest that FATA is more conservative than any other community in Pakistan. The fact that FATA is a gender discriminatory society does not explain anything significant in terms of the conservatism supposed by the writer.

It is ridiculous to hear that there is an urban-rural divide among the Pakhtun at a time when Pakhtun social activists are expressing their concerns over the growing ‘ruralisation’ of Peshawar and other cities in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa due to a lack of human development caused by government policies. Can one indicate any significant rural-urban divide between Waziristan, FATA, Bannu and Tank in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, between Bajaur, FATA and Dir and so on? Actually, all areas in FATA are much more integrated in terms of culture, tribal links, familial ties, business connections and so on with the adjacent ‘urban centres’ in Pakhtunkhwa than among themselves.

Above all, there is no ‘rural-urban’ divide among the Pakhtun over the security situation in FATA. It is actually the illiterate ‘rural’ people in FATA who have suffered at the hands of the Islamists and straightaway hold the ISI responsible for their destruction. The fact that they cannot openly speak due to fear of the ISI does not give any justification to writers sitting far away to assume that FATA’s population subscribes to Islamism.

It is factually wrong that the Bacha Khan Movement has no traction in FATA. His movement has mainly been concentrated in villages, including villages in FATA. There are countless people all over FATA who are sympathetic to the movement. People linked to it were among the first eliminated by the ISI when it unleashed targeted killings in the area in 2003 to silence those who had the potential to question the presence of ‘state guests’ — al Qaeda jihadis in FATA.

How could the New America Foundation survey in FATA be comprehensive when it was conducted at a time when most of FATA’s people were IDPs outside FATA? The survey also suffers from other serious methodological and ethical errors that render it meaningless for a scholarly debate over FATA. My detailed critique of the survey will be published in the coming months.

There is no conflation between tribalism and Islamism in FATA. The tribes have made lashkars against the Islamists. The popular jirga-backed lashkars are much more representative of the tribes in terms of tribal identity than the ISI-backed multi-ethnic Taliban. Did the writer ever try to reach out to the lashkar leaders? Does he have any idea who the ‘rural’ lashkar leaders hold responsible for the atrocities committed against their tribes?

The tribal people fear the Pakistan Army’s aerial bombardment in FATA. The IDPs from all over FATA accuse the Pakistan Army of deliberately bombing innocent civilians while avoiding Taliban centres. There is, however, no aversion to the US drone attacks. They are welcomed because the drone never targets civilians. There have been large-scale human displacements in all tribal areas where military operations were conducted. There is no large-scale human displacement from North Waziristan, the area most hit by drones. I predict there will a huge human displacement from North Waziristan if and when the Pakistan Army launches a military operation in the area under US pressure.

“Are we achieving any success thus far with drones?” asks the writer. No, we have not achieved much with drones in the larger picture. But this is because the US is not doing enough to deal with the ISI. As long as the military establishment is using FATA as strategic space, terrorism will go on by state design. The drone attacks, meanwhile, frustrate the establishment’s design by killing its ‘beloved’ jihadis. For the tribesmen, the drone strikes are a significant achievement. They are precisely killing the multi-ethnic jihadis who have overpowered them.

“I am writing this as a friend of Pakhtuns,” says Saleem Ali. I accept his words at face value but his writings show that he is ignorant about Pakhtun history, society, culture and the current situation. In the words of Martin Luther King, “Nothing can be more dangerous than sincere ignorance.” Saleem Ali should educate himself about the Pakhtun or choose some other topic to write on. The Pakhtun are passing through a hard time and cannot afford ignorant friends.

The writer is a PhD Research Fellow with the University of Oslo and currently writing a book, Taliban and Anti-Taliban

Empowering Fata

GENUINE representation in the federation fosters a sense of ownership that strengthens specific

regions as well as the country as a whole. Unfortunately, parts of Pakistan continue to be marginalised, left out of the political mainstream at a time when national unity is of the essence. The most extreme case in this regard is that of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, a region that falls within Pakistan’s territorial boundaries but is not bound by its laws. Nor do the ordinary residents of Fata enjoy the same rights and privileges that, in theory at least, can be claimed by even the most deprived sections of society in other parts of the country. It is argued by some that tribal people have their own unique cultures and codes of conduct, which is true in the main. What is sometimes overlooked here, however, is that increased participation in the socio-political affairs of the country does not automatically lead to an erosion of intrinsic cultural values. If anything it empowers people and allows them greater freedom to live a life of their own choosing. Middle classes grow when the grip of a few is loosened to whatever extent, and with options and relative prosperity comes the prospect of peace. Alienation and poverty, needless to say, serve as an ideal breeding ground for militancy.

As speakers at a conference in Islamabad pointed out on Tuesday, we can start addressing at least some of the myriad problems facing the tribal belt by bringing the region into the national mainstream. Perhaps the first step in this direction should be to extend the Political Parties Act to the tribal areas so that people there get more options when it comes to choosing who represents them in Islamabad. The Frontier Crimes Regulation system that was imposed by the British a century ago and is still shaped by draconian concepts such as collective responsibility for the actions of individuals or families ought to be phased out and replaced by the Pakistan Penal Code. It will take time to right the wrongs of the past but a beginning must be made.

Whose blood? Whose money?

By Talat Farooq
http://www.thenews.com.pk

It is like a slap in the face, a personal affront, legality and religious endorsement of the act notwithstanding. Raymond Davis has finally been delivered into safety and freedom by the federal government, the provincial government, the security agencies and the judiciary. How united we stand when it comes to serving our masters overseas!

Who wanted Davis back? America. And who was the guarantor and the mediator? Saudi Arabia. How did Saudi Arabia achieve this American objective in Pakistan? By using the Islamic-leverage; a strategy that Saudi Arabia has effectively applied since the Afghan-Soviet War in the 1980s. They have used the religious bent of the people of Pakistan and their sentimental attachment to the Prophet to help the US attain its foreign policy goals in Pakistan.

Raymond Davis is not only the murderer of two individuals, he is involved in espionage against the state of Pakistan. What right then did the Saudis have to arrange Davis’ return? Who were they to pay the blood money on America’s behalf? The sad truth is that we as beggars cannot be choosers.

The political hypocrisy of both the US and Saudi Arabia has never been more apparent than it is today. It is reflected in their responses to the peoples’ uprisings in North Africa and the Middle East. It is manifested in their prompt intervention in Bahrain and their delaying tactics in stopping the hand of Qaddafi. The Saudi role whether in Pakistan or Bahrain, has demonstrated how its monarchy works hand in glove with the US.

The question is how then do our mullahs find the Saudis to be the great upholders of the ultimate truth? Why are the Jamaat-e-Islami and the rest of the bearded lot only condemning America? Is the Saudi obsequiousness any different from Tony Blair’s catering to the fancies of George Bush?

The Taliban that have become the bane of our lives were manufactured by the military and mullahs with Saudi riyals. Why then do we consider them our benefactors? How is Saudi intervention in our internal matters any different from America’s violation of our sovereignty? The Saudis are as much responsible for what has become of Pakistan today as America and Pakistan’s security agencies. Saudi riyals have bought Pakistani vested interests with as much ease as US dollars.

The US and Saudi Arabia are not the only ones who stand exposed. More importantly, it is Pakistan. The politicians, the judiciary and the military establishment are all party to this drama. Raymond Davis, the murderer of innocent Pakistanis has left the country; America, the mass murderer of innocent people all over the world, has struck Waziristan with a vengeance.

Prime Minister Gilani tells us that the drone attacks were ‘irresponsible’ and the government has protested to the US. And the bases from where the drones flew, where were they, Gilani Saheb? In India? Afghanistan? America?

If there were any doubts about the nature of power politics in Pakistan, the Raymond Davis drama has dispelled them. The politicians whether from the ruling party or the opposition will always be remembered as cowards of the highest order. The representatives of the judiciary will be remembered as unjust, the military as inadequate, and the mullahs as hypocritical.

They are all working according to their respective agendas. The politicians want to loot and plunder while the iron is hot. The judiciary wants to rock the boat but not to the point of drowning itself. The military wants to protect its self-created monsters in North Waziristan and Punjab; the mullahs want to use religion to attain power and blame America but not Saudi Arabia. They all have their own axes to grind.

No-one gives a toss about the people of Pakistan. They do not matter; their integrity is a joke, their dignity for sale. They are treated like commodities, used and discarded. They are a mild irritant in the way of the high and mighty and their desires. They are insects that the elite don’t even notice when they crush them under their shoes. They once dared to dream of an independent country where they would live with dignity. They once believed that Jinnah’s Pakistan will be better than Nehru’s India. Today they are crushed, abused, broken and humiliated. Their blood is being spilled every day in the streets of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan.

But no one will ever ask for their forgiveness; no one will ever offer to pay their blood money in order to win freedom. They are nobodies, redundant, superfluous, and dispensable. They will remain uncounted, faceless and nameless for their life is not a matter of national interest for America or Saudi Arabia or Pakistan.

So let us then bow our heads and weep for the dreams that could not materialise. Let us bow our heads and weep for the self-respect lost along the way and for being betrayed by those we trusted with our lives and dreams; the ones we trusted with the future of our children. Let us weep for lost hopes and broken dreams. Above all, let us weep for never having the courage to stand up to the usurpers, the exploiters and the oppressors. Let us weep because our dreams were important to us but not that important.



The writer is a PhD student at Leicester, UK. Email: talatfarooq11@gmail.com

Spy game: The CIA, Pakistan and 'blood money'

aljazeera.net
Chris Arsenault

The case of Raymond Davis has all the trappings of a 21st century spy novel.

It is a story of murder, prison and clandestine payments, starring a burly former US Special Forces soldier tangled in a murky web of intelligence agencies, competing diplomats and – differentiating his case from Cold War spy sagas – shady private military contractors.

Pakistani authorities released the CIA contractor from prison on Wednesday, after families of two motorcyclists he killed in January were paid a reported $2.3mn in "blood money".

Details surrounding the case are sketchy at best: a series of claims and counter-claims from various diplomats, agencies and organisations which are almost impossible to independently verify. And the stakes are high.

Privatising conflict

"The case highlights the fact that the US is engaged in a covert war in Pakistan - a country it has not declared war against," says Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: the Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.

Davis, 36, once hustled for Blackwater, the controversial military contractor responsible for killing civilians in Iraq, which has since been rebranded as Xe Services LLC.

"He worked for Blackwater when the company was working on the drone bombing campaign with the JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command], and the CIA against high-value individuals in Pakistan," Scahill told Al Jazeera.

Davis owns Hyperion Protective Consultants, according to ABC News. The firm sells surveillance equipment and provides clients with "loss and risk management professionals".

In the new world of intelligence, individuals can wear several different hats, often at the same time.
"In theory, it would be cheaper to have government agents do the work contractors are doing: they don't get paid as much and there is no dedicated profit margin," says Eamon Javers, author of Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy: The Secret World of Corporate Espionage.

"There is a huge open question about the legal jurisdiction these contractors are operating under in war zones. They are not accountable to US military justice, as special ops would be," Javers told Al Jazeera.

Christine Fair, a Pakistan expert at Georgetown University says, "There is nothing abnormal about military contractors gathering intelligence, conducting warfare or helping with diplomacy", concerns about high costs, impunity and jurisdiction notwithstanding.

"The way we [Americans] do business, fight wars, provide assistance, and the way we run our embassies is being done through contractors," Fair told Al Jazeera.

Who is immune?

When Pakistani authorities arrested Davis in Lahore, he carried classic tools of the spy trade: a Glock semiautomatic pistol, a long-range wireless set, camera, flashlight and small telescope.

The initial public conflict between Pakistan and the US revolved around Davis's diplomatic status. The US said the contractor had diplomatic immunity from prosecution, while Pakistani authorities disputed the claim.

According to Fair, the issue of diplomatic immunity is simple and was "misconstrued" throughout the Davis saga. Whether Davis was a contractor or a formal embassy employee is not important for the question of immunity, she says.

"The diplomatic status of staff members is set by the sending countries," she says, referring in this case to the US. "The Pakistani government has one choice to make: to accept the terms or not to. Pakistan accepted the terms and issued a visa and then re-issued it."

There is no debate about the process for getting diplomatic immunity, as Pakistan and the US have signed the Vienna Convention which sets out the rules.

But Jeremy Scahill is not sure Davis's diplomatic status is quite so clear. "There have been some reports that the US tried to claim he was a diplomat after the events took place," Scahill says.

Conflicting crime stories

The events in question transpired on January 27. Davis was driving his car through a poor section of Lahore. He stopped at a crowded intersection. Two Pakistani men jumped off motorcycles and came towards him, with weapons drawn, according to American accounts of the incident. Davis opened fire with his Glock, killing them.

He said he fired in self-defence, assuming they were trying to rob him. Pakistani authorities disputed this claim, saying the men were shot in the back and Davis got out of his car to take photographs of the bodies.

Pakistani security forces chased Davis to a traffic circle a short distance away from the crime scene and arrested him. Before being taken down, Davis called the US Consulate to extract him from the dicey situation. The US sent an unmarked SUV tearing through the streets of Lahore.

It drove the wrong way down a one way street, killing a random motorcyclist, in a development that further infuriated Pakistanis. The three killings lead to widespread outrage, fuelling anti-American demonstrations.

"Those who oppose the partnership between Pakistan and the US have been making noise," says Rasul Baksh Raees, a political science professor at Lahore University of Management Sciences.

Wary of anger on the streets, Pakistan's government may have initially denied giving the contractor immunity to save face, says Muqtedar Khan, a professor of international relations at the University of Delaware.

Intrigue

Many Pakistanis, including the political opposition, are furious about US drone strikes and other killings in the country. But this is nothing new.

The intrigue concerns the identities of the men Davis killed - and the nature of his mission.

"Some suggest Davis was trying to document links between Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) and Lashkar-e-Taiba [the Army of the Pure], which would expose the ISI's links to the Mumbai attacks [of 2008]," says Khan. The US and UN Security Council have designated Lashkar as an international terrorist organisation.

In February, Leon Panetta, the CIA director, said the ISI-CIA relationship is one of the "most complicated" he has encountered during his time in intelligence.

"If Ray Davis was targeting Laskhkar or trying to establish links between it and Pakistani intelligence, that would be probably one of the most sensitive places to hit the ISI," says Jeremy Scahill, the author and investigative journalist.

In a US federal court in New York, a lawsuit was filed in 2010 against the ISI for backing the Mumbai attacks. Davis's conclusions could have damaged more than the ISI's public image. US tax dollars paid to Pakistani security forces under the auspices of fighting terrorism, not to mention a major financial settlement, could be at stake.

Christine Fair, the Georgetown professor, says two high-level Pakistani officials told her that the men Davis killed were ISI agents tasked with following him.

Davis worked out of a safe house in an obscure part of Lahore as part of a CIA cell investigating Lashkar, Fair says.

"The CIA cooperates with the ISI on certain issues," Fair says. "But these organisations also operate against each other. This is spy versus spy."

The origins of Lashkar can be traced to US support for forces fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan during the 1980s, Khan says. Today, the group operates openly in Pakistan from a sprawling compound in the suburbs of Lahore, where it runs schools, hospitals and a blood bank. Hafiz Saeed, the group's leader, is a frequent commentator in the Pakistani press.

The group frequently espouses anti-Western ideology, targeting India, Israel and the US in their literature, says professor Fair, adding that "they never really operated to achieve those larger objectives – perhaps until 2004, when they started attacking the US in Afghanistan".

The ISI and some other branches of Pakistan's government see Lashkar as an important tool against India in Kashmir, a province claimed by both India and Pakistan, says Muqtedar Khan.

"In recent years, the balance of power has shifted significantly in India's favour, in terms of traditional warfare," Khan says. "The economic disparity is such that Pakistan cannot launch a conventional war against India for Kashmir," he says. Pakistan sees unconventional forces like Lashkar as crucial defences against its traditional rival.

Pakistan also worries about Indian dominance in Afghanistan after the US pulls out, and wants Lashkar ready to fill the vacuum of American power, Khan says.

Money talks

Raymond Davis's case has caused head-aches for the US and Pakistan. They both hoped it would go-away, but neither could lose face.

The payment of "blood money" to relatives of the men Davis killed - an accepted custom in Pakistan - was the easiest solution.

The sum of $2.3mn is exponentially higher than what the US normally pays family members when its forces kill innocents in Iraq or Afghanistan, Jeremy Scahill says.

Money talks, and such a large sum illustrates the importance of the case. According to Scahill, the blood money suggested by the US state department for victims of Blackwater killings in Iraq was about $5,000.

"What is even more important than the money, is what the Pakistanis and the ISI extracted from the US in exchange for [Davis's] release," Scahill says.

After "blood money" was paid, American consular officials whisked Raymond Davis out of the country. His exact mission, or the conclusions from the intelligence he gathered, may never come to light.

Hillary Clinton, the US secretary of state, denied that the US paid family members. However, she wouldn't comment on who forked over the cash.

"It is rather a charade to suggest [the US] didn't pay family members," says Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst, who alleged that the payment came from Pakistan's ISI, which receives money from the US through bilateral military cooperation deals.

But Davis's political footprint will last, as anti-American protests spread across Pakistan, with people demanding more accountability from foreign forces operating on Pakistani territory. "Raymond Davis was basically the tip of the iceberg," says Professor Khan.

"He was not the cause, but a part of, the diverging interests between Pakistan and the US in the war on terror."

Punjab's Faith factory

BY NADEEM F. PARACHA
Last year, while on a visit to Lahore I had to meet an industrialist at one of his factories.

The discussion between us soon drifted towards politics. Just two days before our meeting, there had been a deadly suicide bomb attack in Lahore.

It was the (thirty-something and well-dressed) gentleman who began the proceedings, but he soon said something that left me scratching my head. He asked (in Punjabi), ‘So Paracha sahib, has the situation in Karachi gotten any better?’

After realising that his question was not tongue-in-cheek, I wondered what on earth he was talking about.

Here was a man surrounded by frequent sights and sounds of devastation inflicted by rabid groups of extremists on politicians, military men, police and innocent civilians, and all he was concerned about was ‘violence in Karachi’?

‘Sir, shouldn’t you be more concerned about Lahore?’ I asked, smiling.

He failed to get my drift: ‘Paracha sahib, why don’t you people do something about the MQM?’

By now my smile had turned into a polite laughter: ‘Sir, was it the MQM or the PPP that blew up the Sufi shrine in Lahore the other day?’

‘I know you’re not so naïve, Paracha sahib,’ he said, ‘you know who is behind all these terrorist attacks…’

‘Of course, I do,’ I replied. ‘These terrorists are the same monsters whom we have been nurturing in the name of jihad all these years and …’

He let out a loud burst of laughter: ‘What sort of a media man are you, Paracha sahib. These so-called terrorists are all enemy agents!’

I knew that was coming, right on cue.

‘Well said!’ I applauded. ‘Whenever there is violence in Lahore it is blamed on anti-Islam agents, but violence in Karachi is blamed on the MQM, the PPP and the ANP? Very convenient.’

Switching back to Punjabi, the gentleman gave me a sideways grin: ‘Paracha sahib, you are a Punjabi, so I wonder why the sympathy with the MQM? Is it fear?’

I then reverted back to speaking in Punjabi: ‘Sir jee, it is not fear. It is curiosity about the mindset of the people of Punjab. We are highly intrigued about how in the face of overwhelming evidence that it is our own people who in the name of Islam, are going about blowing up mosques, shrines and markets in the Punjab, but you continue living in a make-believe world of conspiracies. But what do we, Karachiites know. We are, after all gangsters, right?’ I smiled.

A strain of slight anger suddenly cut across the gentleman’s face: ‘We are more concerned about the corruption and the scoundrels in this government.’

‘Very noble of you, sir,’ I replied.

‘Give Nawaz Sharif 5 years and he will change the fate of this country!’ he announced.

‘But sir, Mian Sahib so far only gets votes from the Punjab. And anyway, isn’t a cousin of yours a member of the PML-Q?’ I asked.

He ignored the PML-Q remark: ‘Mian sahib will sweep the next elections …’

‘…in the Punjab,’ I interrupted. ‘Is Pakistan only about the Punjab then?’

He laughed and shook his head: ‘That’s the problem with you. Punjab is blamed for everything! What sort of a Punjabi are you?’

‘Wah, Sir jee,’ I said with a smile, ‘it is fine if you go on and on about the Mohajirs, Sindhis, the Pashtuns and the Baloch, but throw up your arms in shock when someone even mentions the Punjab?’

‘We have done so much for Pakistan!’ He announced proudly.

‘Were you the only ones?’ I asked.

‘Why do you think Pakistan’s enemies are targeting the Punjab? They know its’ importance.’ He said.

‘Oh, so do we,’ I replied. ‘But we, Pakistanis, are our own enemies. Those killing their own countrymen in the name of faith, politics, greed or ideology anywhere in Pakistan, are the enemy.’

‘Faith has nothing to do with this!’ He announced, now with a sterner expression.

‘Precisely!’ I said, ‘and yet we keep calling it faith!’

By now he had lost me: ‘What do you mean?’

‘Sir, Karachiites or as you would like to call us – gangsters – believe that the Punjab does not condemn extremists enough. It is as if by doing this they feel they would be condemning faith itself, is that true?’ I asked.

‘We don’t think these extremists are even Muslim!’ He shot back.

‘Well, they say they are the best Muslims out there,’ I replied. ‘And anyway, if you think they are not Muslim, then why not condemn them the way they should be?’

‘How come you guys don’t condemn the MQM or the PPP?’ he snapped back.

‘Oh, we do,’ I retorted. ‘Just the way political parties should be criticised. But then they have yet to blow up mosques, shrines and markets, if you know what I mean.’ I replied.

‘And the PML-N does?’ He asked, raising his voice a notch.

‘Absolutely not!’ I said. ‘It just doesn’t condemn extremists the way it should, that’s all. Is it fear?’

The argument ended when his cell phone rang and he excused himself.

I said goodbye and on my way out was met by his manager who gave some going-away gifts: beautiful unstitched fabric, a nice shirt and a cardboard box.

Curious about what was in it, I opened the box in the car and found 9 slim booklets – all of them were on how to become a better Muslim. Viola!

It seems that the industrialists are getting spiritually industrious as well.



Nadeem F. Paracha is a cultural critic and senior columnist for Dawn Newspaper and Dawn.com.

Federally-Administered Tribal Areas....Orphan or what?

Are the Federally-Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) an orphan or a colony, and their residents second-class citizens or children of a lesser god that nobody in Islamabad ever talks of making them a province? The prime minister has just now vowed making the Seraiki province demand his party manifesto’s part. But not even he, not also the president, the FATA’s actual sole super-boss, has given just a fleeting thought to giving a province’s status to the region, which it qualifies for in every manner. Others are making demands for a separate province primarily on linguistic basis, though with strong political underpinnings. But FATA’s case is compelling on every merit - area-wise, population-wise, resources-wise, administratively, legally and even morally. When Pundit Jawaharlal Nehru, accompanied by Bacha Khan, drove into the Khyber Agency on a journey in pre-partition days to seduce the tribal people into accession to India, they stoned his car and made him flee back with a bleeding head. And when Quaid-e-Azam visited the tribal people, they welcomed him with warmth and garlands. They indeed had overwhelmingly plumped for Pakistan voluntarily and lovingly. And the Quaid may have vowed to them not to interfere with their tribal code, customs and traditions. But certainly he had not contemplated keeping them from modernity or emancipation. Nor had they opted for any kind of medievalism or primitiveness. They had aspired for a better deal than dealt them by the British colonialists who had made of them a sort of buffer zone in the region with their rivaling power, Czarist Russia. But the Quaid’s successors proved colossally unworthy. They kept the British governance dispensation intact in all its colonial trappings in the region. The only change was the complexion of face, from gora to kala. The Frontier Crimes Regulation (FCR) of the British colonialists stayed in place in its entire cruelty to administer the region, with snooty, pipe-smoking bureaucrats sitting in the federal government’s offices looking at it disdainfully as some kind of an ungovernable Wild West and its inhabitants as some sort of wild people not amenable to uplift, progress and development. It is this innate bureaucratic contempt that accounts largely for the tribal people being kept denied of what is their legitimate and inviolable due. Had the region been given the due recognition as an integral part of the country that it merits by every canon long ago and its inhabitants given the rights that their compatriots have in the country’s other parts, it would have been a far better place than what it is today. But regrettably that was not to be. Leave alone giving the FATA a fully-fledged province’s status, it has been dealt all through a raw deal even in development and progress. Palpably, it is a resources-rich land, offering enormous opportunities in horticulture, forestry and minerals, just to mention a few. An attempt was made to introduce the region to development by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s government and help its people to exploit the tremendous natural resources their land is endowed with. But sadly that endeavour lost steam and withered away after his ouster. Had indeed the region made a big headway in development, its residents’ economic progress would have in time blossomed into their social emancipation as well inevitably, sucking them into the national mainstream to a salutary effect all around. The region would have ceased to be an abode of conservatism. The tribal affinities too would have undergone a markedly positive change. And it would have turned into a forbidding place, too, for extremist proclivities and alien poaching. Still, all is not lost, even though the region is presently being buffeted by militancy, mostly alien-fuelled. Let it become a province, with its own elected legislature, its own elected government and its own separate governor. With a vested interest in the system, the tribal people would not only enact laws and policies suiting their needs and aspirations and conforming to their deeply-held tribal mores, codes, customs and traditions. They would also team up and adopt ways and means to obviate the menaces and threats to their peace, security and stability. In fact, it is the denial of this basic right that has eaten into the tribal people’s spirit to stand up to the dark forces of extremism, fundamentalism and militancy. They suffer from a gnawing sense of deprivation and step-motherly treatment, a sense lately aggravated enormously by the official neglect of their internally displaced due to military operations and by CIA’s freely increasing drone incursions that claim more of their innocents’, including women’s and children’s, lives than militants’. If indeed despite international implications, an autonomous Gilgit-Baltistan could be made of Northern Areas, why FATA, in spite of being internationally-recognised Pakistani territory, cannot be made a province?

Afghanistan: the threat of civil war

Daily Times
Musa Khan Jalalzai

Strong military leadership is impossible in an environment where political and ethnic affiliations rather than merit are the basis of promotions

The issue of mutual distrust between the US and NATO and the Afghan National Army (ANA) and the killing of innocent civilians by the US-led coalition forces, has been a matter of great concern for Afghan politicians. The rising power of the Taliban insurgency, desertions of Afghan army soldiers, ethnic and sectarian rivalries and massive corruption in the government departments have threatened the US and NATO stabilising strategy for Afghanistan. These are a few reasons behind the rift that caused distrust between the Karzai regime and its NATO allies.

Having expressed deep regret over the recent US killings of innocent children in Kunar province, a source in the Afghan defence ministry told me that the entire military command is highly disturbed and the majority of officers are not willing to further cooperate with the coalition partners. President Karzai urged NATO to stop civilian killings by mistake. “We are very tolerant people but now our tolerance has run out,” he said. The president cried as he held a girl who he said had her leg amputated following an attack. Now the issue of foreign occupation is openly discussed in military units.

Private debates in government offices, political circles and in military headquarters have recently focussed on the point that this unsuccessful war on terror has put in danger the territorial integrity of the country. According to the Afghan Human Rights Commission report, more than 520 children have been killed between 2009 and 2010 and some 200,000 children are living with disabilities as a result of wrongly directed US air strikes and crossfire among warring factions. In 2010, at least 2,800 civilians were killed and over 4,000 injured. The recent US resolve for permanent military bases in Afghanistan is seen by the ANA as a new formula of permanent colonisation of their country.

Nationalists in the defence and interior ministries have showed some reservations and disillusionment. They openly blame the Americans that they are pushing the country to the brink of civil war. A long-term US presence, according to sources in the defence ministry of Afghanistan, will bring further instability and undermine the hope of reconciliation with the Taliban and other militant groups. The Global Security Organisation in its situation report on Afghanistan has stated that the US war in Afghanistan has created many problems, neither addressing ethnicity nor factionalism. The Afghans loathe Americans and Americans are treating the Afghans like slaves. This mutual distrust has increased the importance of mercenaries like Blackwater to play their controversial role in the country.

Notwithstanding the US and NATO’s billions of dollars investment in the Afghan National Army and the police, this army has now turned against the American presence. Traders and truckers complain they are paying monthly $ 1,000-10,000 bribes to the provincial governors, police chiefs, and local military units whose territory they pass through. According to a recent report, warlords pay millions of dollars to the officers of the ANA every month. Business relations between private contractors and the army are thriving. According to the US exit strategy, it wants to equip, train and arm the ANA and the police before the expected military withdrawal in 2014, but the widespread drug addiction within the police and the army ranks is a big hurdle in the way of building a well organised army in Afghanistan.

Some Afghan military officers and soldiers were recently removed from service for their involvement in drugs offences. Some officers are running their own businesses to support their families. Every month, one-fifth soldiers of the Afghan army become absent without informing their commanders. They are not able to pay the rent of their houses, their children are not schoolgoing, and they are not willing to fight for Americans and corrupt Afghan warlords. Soldiers and officers of the army are from three backgrounds and follow three different ideologies. The first group has a communist background, the second group were trained in Pakistan as mujahideen fighters, and the third has an American, NATO and European background. This ideological, sectarian and ethnic division within the Afghan National Army (ANA) and the police department can cause an unending civil war in the near future.

Recruitment on ethnic and sectarian basis has created many problems. In 2002, as defence minister, General Fahim made some appointments on ethnic basis. In these appointments, of 38 generals, 37 were Tajiks and one was Uzbek. In fact, all these generals were associated with the Northern Alliance. If we look at the list of the 100 generals appointed in 2002, 90 belonged to the Northern Alliance. The story has not ended there. These and other appointments in the defence and interior ministries were followed by the removal of Interior Minister Hanif Atmar and intelligence Chief Amrullah Saleh for their non-professional performance. Both these officials had challenged President Karzai on his plans to reconcile with the Taliban insurgents. Mr Amrullah Saleh was found involved in many torture cases of Pakistani and Afghan detainees.

The command selection of the ANA is based on ethnicity and personal connections at the corps, ANA general staff, or ministry of defence level. Strong military leadership is impossible in an environment where political and ethnic affiliations rather than merit are the basis of promotions. Enforcement of discipline is another problem faced by the ANA. According to a recent US military report, units of ANA sell vehicles, weapons, fuel and other military equipment and are involved in outright theft of food provided by the US. The transmogrified ethnic face of the ANA was unveiled in the 2010 ethnic war between the nomadic tribes and Hazara population in Behsood district of Wardak province. Military command in the defence ministry was ethnically divided on the issue.

Generals from both Sunni and Shia groups were trying to arm the nomads and Hazaras respectively. This massive shift in the ethnicnisation and sectarianisation of the Afghan army officers will lead to another civil war between the Pashtuns and Tajik warlords. General David Petraeus’ plan of local defence is widely opposed in the military circles. He wants to copy the idea of the Pakistan Army qaumi lashkars (national militias) fighting Taliban terrorists in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. This plan, military observers say, will not work in Afghanistan.

According to Petraeus’ strategy, 10,000 unemployed Afghans will be put on the CIA payroll and prepared to fight against their countrymen. He wants to give them dollars and arms so that they can form a Pakistani style qaumi lashkar. This plan will not succeed, as the Afghans have now turned against the US presence in their country. Illegal detentions, searches and torture have ultimately changed their mind. Since 2001, hundreds of men, women and even teenagers have been arrested, tortured, and killed by the US forces. At present, NATO is fighting the Taliban, but doing nothing to address the ethnic divide, corruption and bridging the trust. In summation, the long-term US presence in Afghanistan will cause more problems, more casualties, destruction and violence.

The writer is the author of Britain’s National Security Challenges and Punjabi Taliban. He can be reached at zai.musakhan222@gmail.com

Why Pakistan has not caught the Middle East's revolution fever

By Reza Sayah
Few countries today are facing as many crippling crises as Pakistan. Some are identical to the problems that sparked revolutions and uprisings in Egypt, Tunisia, Libya and other countries in the Middle East and North Africa: government corruption, unemployment, poverty and a floundering economy. But Pakistan has not caught the Middle East’s revolution fever.
Here are four reasons why:
1. Pakistan had its own version of a revolution in 2007. That’s when a largely middle-class movement, fed up with former President Pervez Musharraf’s military rule and failure to crack down on extremists, led an uprising against the regime. A civilian government came into power after the 2008 parliamentary elections that were widely viewed as free and fair. A few months later, Musharraf resigned as president and left the country.
2. Pakistanis have ample opportunities to let off steam and voice dissent through a remarkably free and vibrant press and political system. In Pakistan, trashing politicians is national sport that plays out daily on nearly two dozen 24-hour news channels. The only institution that is clearly immune to public criticism is the military and Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agencies. The relative freedom of expression in Pakistan is rare for an Islamic state, and it allows the public and opposition factions to vent their fury through public dissent instead of resorting to anti-government uprisings.
3. Pakistani culture is made up of at least six different ethnicities: Punjabi, Pashtun, Sindhi, Baluch, Muhajir and Kashmiri. Each has its own distinct culture and language. This diverse mix of ethnicities makes it difficult for Pakistanis to unite behind a single cause.
4. Pakistanis have many perceived enemies, so it’s often hard to decide whom to rise up against. Yes, the government in Islamabad is perceived as weak and corrupt, but many Pakistanis also view the U.S., Islamist extremists and India as its enemies, too. On any given week in Pakistan, you can find public protests against any one of these perceived enemies. Having too many foes reduces the intensity and focus of dissent, which are often prerequisites for an uprising.
There’s no sign of revolution coming to Pakistan, but this is still a country in a crucial region that desperately needs help and reform to address the most basic needs of its people. Change could come with the democratic mechanisms that are already in place there, but that will take a commitment from all institutions – including the powerful military – along with support from the international community and lots of patience.