China is Pakistan’s True Ally – It’s Obvious!

By Matthew Yglesias

Very nice scoop from Mark Mazzetti in the New York Times who reveals that American officials have concluded that after it crashed during the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound “Chinese engineers – at the invitation of Pakistani intelligence operatives – took detailed photographs of the severed tail of the Black Hawk helicopter equipped with classified technology designed to elude radar.” It’s a very telling story. That said, I’m not really sure that the story it tells is “further evidence of the depths of Pakistan’s anger over the Bin Laden raid.”

Without trying to play fake Pakistan expert, here’s the story I see. Pakistan is an independent country with its own interests. High on that list of interests is pursuing a rivalry with India, a country with which it has a longstanding territorial dispute and also a pretty profound ideological clash. India has a much larger population than Pakistan and a larger economy. And while Pakistan was generally richer than India on a per capita basis until about ten years ago, that’s no longer the case. So Pakistan needs partners in a standoff with its larger neighbor. For a long time, both the United States and China have been part of that equation of partner-seeking, and the preference of the Pakistani government is to be on good terms with both. But sometimes you kind of have to choose. And what we’re seeing here is that the Pakistani calculus was that a partnership with China is going to be more valuable in the medium term than a partnership with the United States.

Are they wrong? It’s not obvious to me that they are. In ten or fifteen years are we going to be wanting to take Pakistan’s side in disputes with India?

After Davis release, CIA touts ‘healthy’ ties with ISI

WASHINGTON: The CIA said Wednesday it enjoyed a “healthy partnership” with Pakistan’s intelligence service after an American spy accused of murder was freed by Islamabad authorities.

CIA says relations between the spy services remained strong.

A Pakistan court on Wednesday released the CIA contractor, Raymond Davis, who was accused of double murder, after $2 million in blood money was paid to the families of the dead.

The case had prompted protests in Pakistan and aggravated strained relations between Washington and Islamabad, which had faced calls to stand up to its superpower ally and try Davis for murder.

The Central Intelligence Agency, however, said relations between the spy services remained strong, amid speculation that the case was a result of hostile machinations between the CIA and Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency.

“The agency and our Pakistani counterparts have had a strong relationship for years. When issues arise, it’s our standing practice to work through them,” CIA spokesman George Little said in an email.

“That’s the sign of a healthy partnership – one that’s vital to both countries, especially as we face a common set of terrorist enemies.”

US authorities said Davis was protected by full diplomatic immunity, a claim refuted by the Pakistani government, and a decision on his status was on Monday deferred by the Lahore high court for criminal judges to decide.

A third Pakistani was struck down and killed by a US diplomatic vehicle that raced to Davis’ assistance in the incident.

US officials have said Pakistan’s intelligence agency retains ties to some militiant groups, including the Haqqani network which is blamed for attacks on NATO-led troops in Afghanistan.

The chair of the US Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein, has reportedly described CIA ties with Pakistan intelligence as “something less than wholehearted partnership” and that the ISI is “walking both sides of the street.”

Parallel security sector in Pakistan

By Huma Yusuf

In August, Afghan President Hamid Karzai caught the US off guard by announcing a ban on private security firms. Many surmised the ban was an attempt to siphon off revenue generated by Afghanistan’s 52 security firms.

The sheer size and growth of the private security infrastructure signal the extent to which the Pakistani state has absconded on its duties to protect its citizens.

But Karzai insisted that he was facilitating the process of entrusting Afghanistan’s security to Afghans. Whatever Karzai’s motivations, his decision holds a lesson for the Pakistani government. The Afghan state’s primary complaint against private security firms is that they constitute a parallel security structure that challenges the authority of the army and police. By emphasising this, Karzai is referring to an old premise of political theory: for a state to be functional and effective, it must retain a monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. Of course, by Max Weber’s definition, private security firms retain this monopoly since the state licenses them to engage in violence. But these are academic arguments that play out quite differently on the ground in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Afghanistan’s security firms – often internationally managed outfits that recruit Afghans – have been undermining the state’s ability to safeguard its citizens. A US Senate Armed Services Committee report found that Taliban insurgents and fighters affiliated with warlords sign up as security guards. These elements exploit the fact that millions of dollars, arms, equipment and training are available to private security firms contracted by the US. By serving as security guards, they bolster the capacity and reach of the Taliban.

Afghan security guards have been known to smuggle weapons, work against coalition forces and terrorise local populations by shooting indiscriminately while escorting supply convoys. Not surprisingly, Karzai wants to see these outfits disbanded, and has asked his government to monitor the transition of security guards into the Afghan National Army and police force, where their activities can be overseen.

US and Nato forces have questioned the wisdom of the ban: they point out that the army and police are not ready to shoulder the burden of maintaining security. And few are convinced that the Afghan government can ensure minimal infiltration by the Taliban. Already, the Afghans have had to refine their position: private security guards will continue at places where foreigners work. Karzai is also being pressured to allow security firms to continue protecting the aid community.

Karzai’s stance against private security firms, though drastic and under attack, has set an interesting precedent for the region. After all, Pakistan too faces a unique set of problems resulting from the proliferation of private security firms. While most Pakistanis are obsessed with the presence of Xe Services (Blackwater) and DynCorp in the country, the greatest challenges to state authority are posed by domestic policy and practice. The sheer size and growth of the private security infrastructure signal the extent to which the Pakistani state has absconded on its duties to protect its citizens.

The statistics are staggering: there are about 600 licensed firms employing over 300,000 guards nationally (that figure is the equivalent of the total number of active duty personnel in Pakistan’s paramilitary forces, including the Rangers, National Guard, Maritime Security and Frontier Corps). Private security is a Rs5.5bn per annum industry, and it grows by 15 per cent per month. In Karachi, private security guards outnumber police officers by a three-to-one ratio. Undoubtedly, private security is co-opting the role of law-enforcing agencies in Pakistan.

More problematically, state institutions such as the army and police are allowed by law to establish private security companies. This measure ostensibly helps security forces ensure the welfare of their retired personnel. But such set-ups (including the private wing of the National Police Force, Fauji Security Services, Frontier Corps Security Services and the Sindh police department’s upcoming Sindh Police Welfare Security Guards) are commercial ventures that draw on state assets such as training facilities and human resources. As such, these firms make citizens pay for a service that the government should be providing free of cost.Given the number of groups that challenge the Pakistani state’s monopoly on violence – the private armies of feudal lords, urban gangs, smuggling rackets, and, of course, violent extremist and sectarian groups – the official trend towards institutionalising and promoting private security firms at the expense of strengthening the state’s security apparatus is baffling. It also poses a conflict of interest: although Pakistan spends billions on national security, it allows firms under the ambit of the state to profit from the poor security situation. The privatisation of security also creates troubling hierarchies regarding who and what is secured, to what extent, and how – only those who can afford to be are safe in today’s Pakistan.

Like Afghanistan, Pakistan has also seen how these private forces undermine the effectiveness of the state security infrastructure that they are supposedly complementing. The recruiting standards of security firms are lax, and in some cases guards receive only three days of training before deployment. Guards have been known to participate in armed burglaries, and were implicated in several major bank robberies last year that helped finance terrorism in the tribal areas. In January this year, the head of a private security company was arrested in Islamabad for trafficking unlicensed weapons.

State-sanctioned security privatisation also stymies the ongoing effort by political parties and NGOs to deweaponise society. Though legally mandated to do so, private security firms essentially hand out weapons to men with unknown (and often dubious) ideologies and fluctuating criminal proclivities, and that too at an alarming rate.

While the average Pakistani citizen’s desire to feel secure at all costs is understandable, the Pakistan government should rethink its policies regarding the licensing and growth of the private security sector. After all, a state that no longer exercises direct control over the most basic mandate of security provision and law-enforcement is one that can no longer be seen to have legitimate authority.

Fighting the Pakhtuns

Ahmed Quraishi

There is a very simple question that every Pakistani government official needs to ask the Americans: If you fail to pacify the Pakhtuns in Afghanistan, is it Pakistan’s responsibility to sever historical ties and wage war against them?

This is the mother of all questions because it deals with the issue of some, not all, of the Afghan Taliban using Pakistani territory to attack occupation armies in their country. Apparently this is the excuse the United States is using to expand its failed Afghan war into Pakistan. US officials say Pakistanis are unable to exercise sovereignty over their own territory. Then some here inside Pakistan – in politics and the media – use this argument to ask another question: isn’t Al-Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban violating Pakistani sovereignty by using our border-pockets as hideouts away from action inside Afghanistan? This argument is used to justify US violations of the Pak-Afghan international border. If the Afghan Taliban can do it, why not the US military? So the justification goes.

Pakistan still has time to come out strongly with two arguments at policy level. One, there is no way of completely stopping Pakistani Pakhtuns, who are an integral part of the Pakistani nation, from sympathising with the Pakhtuns in Afghanistan. And two, the US must solve the ‘Pakhtun problem’ inside Afghanistan. The solution is not by starting a war between the Pakistani military – manned in substantial part by the Pakhtuns – and Pakistani Pakhtun tribes or some of the Afghan Taliban, like the so-called Haqqani network. This will not fix the toy the Americans broke in Afghanistan.

In other words: what is it the US is doing wrong in Afghanistan to spur Pashtun and Taliban resistance, including pushing some of them inside Pakistan? And should Pakistan respond by killing these Pakhtuns because the US says so?

There are two more strong arguments that can strengthen a Pakistani policy review, which is overdue nine years into a failed war.

One is the fact that the Pakhtun and Taliban resistance against occupation in Afghanistan is not a function of the Pakistani tribal areas. The US military dare not claim that Pakistan’s devastated tribal belt is alone responsible for the rout facing US, NATO and ISAF forces across Afghanistan. But this is what the Americans imply when they shift the world focus to Pakistan without anyone from the Pakistani side disputing this twisted American logic.

And the second argument has to do with Al-Qaeda. Pakistan needs to dispute American claims about the quality and strength of Al-Qaeda presence in the Pakistani tribal belt. London’s International Institute of Strategic Studies is not exactly a den of antiwar activism. In a report last month, the think-tank questioned the US-policy line that Al-Qaeda can muster attacks anywhere outside Afghanistan or Pakistan.

If anything, we are seeing a US-occupied Afghanistan becoming a magnet for unknown terrorists from multiple backgrounds and questionable loyalties using Afghan soil to enter our tribal belt, as in the case of the Germans involved in the alleged Mumbai-style Europe-terror plot. Washington is conveniently using these conspiracy theories to expand its war onto Pakistani territory without any credible evidence.

Pakistan does not have a quarrel with the Afghan Pakhtuns or the Afghan Taliban. The latest US reports and assertions that Pakistan’s spy agencies maintain contacts with either are ridiculous. Islamabad must maintain those contacts. In fact, we must expand contacts with the Afghan Taliban in view of the double game the United States played with us in Afghanistan over the last eight years, where it turned Kabul into an Anti-Pakistan Central and deliberately expanded and continues to encourage Indian presence on our western borders.

The American duplicity extends to peace talks. Washington wants us to enter into a war with Afghanistan’s Pakhtuns while it secretly establishes contacts and tries to win them over behind Pakistan’s back. The same argument extends to the Lashkar-e-Taiba and Kashmiri groups. Islamabad can’t shower bombs upon Kashmiris who decide to become part of LeT or support their kin resisting Indian atrocities in Kashmir. The solution there too is for India to resolve its own problems. Its festering occupation in Kashmir, like the festering American occupation in Afghanistan, is breeding a two-way violence that first and foremost de-stabilises Pakistan. Our answer can’t be to send troops to crack down on Pakhtuns and Kashmiris. others need to answer for their actions that are destabilising Pakistan and the region.

Unforgivable

Asif Ezdi

The current wave of pro-Azadi demonstrations which began in Occupied Kashmir on June 11 with the death of a teenage boy at the hands of the Indian forces entered its 100th day on Saturday. Nearly a hundred young Kashmiris have been killed by the occupation forces during this period for daring to raise their voice against Indian rule. More than a thousand have been injured, some maimed and disabled for life. Yet, in spite of the use of brute force to suppress it, the “Quit Jammu and Kashmir” movement has been growing and has gripped not only the major urban centres but also remote towns and villages of the Kashmir Valley. It has also spread to some of the Muslim-majority areas of Jammu. Eidul Fitr, and especially the following day, saw an explosion of popular anger against Indian occupation on a scale not seen since the nineties.

What began as a largely spontaneous and sporadic outburst of popular anger at the highhandedness of the occupation forces has now assumed the proportion of a mass rebellion. It has knocked the bottom out of the Indian case that the freedom movement is fed and instigated by Pakistan and that, by participating in the State Assembly election of December 2008-in which India claims that a phenomenal 65 per cent of the electorate took part-the Kashmiri people rejected the “hardliners” who demand Azadi. As APHC chairman Mirwaiz Umar Farooq has said, the protests are a form of referendum showing that the Kashmiris want freedom from India.

Another reason for Indian concern is that the “Quit Jammu and Kashmir” movement is a resounding rejection by the Kashmiri people of the “settlement” that Musharraf was negotiating with Manmohan Singh through the backchannel, which would have sanctified the division of the state along the Line of Control and given India permanent control over the occupied part. According to former foreign minister Khurshid Mehmood Kasuri, most of the APHC leadership had been on board and the only significant opposition had come from Tehreek-e-Hurriyat leader Syed Ali Shah Geelani. His lieutenants are now spearheading the current movement and setting the pace of the protests, with the “moderate” faction of the APHC mostly playing catch-up.

The reactivation of the backchannel negotiations has been a key element of Delhi’s Kashmir policy and it has been working quietly with Washington’s discreet support for this purpose. But the Zardari government has been dithering, not so much by design as by default. Kashmir is not on its radar screen because its main preoccupation is to hold on to power and save Zardari from corruption charges. With the upsurge in the Azadi movement, a return to the backchannel will become even more difficult to sell to the Pakistani public. Even Kasuri, the most persistent and ardent advocate of the backchannel in Pakistan, has fallen silent on this issue.

The popular rebellion in Kashmir has upset also the “domestic” part of Delhi’s Kashmir agenda which is focused on engaging the “moderate” APHC faction led by the Mirwaiz in talks on some form of autonomy within the scope of the Indian constitution. On Aug 25, Indian home minister P Chidambaram expressed the hope that in the next few days Delhi would be able to “restart the process of dialogue that will lead to a solution.” In response, Geelani laid down five conditions, which have been endorsed by the Mirwaiz. These include terms that are totally unacceptable to Delhi, like acceptance of Kashmir as an international dispute and the commencement of complete demilitarisation of the state. This has pushed back the prospects of the internal dialogue with Kashmiri parties sought by Delhi, especially after the massacre of a score of peaceful demonstrators in one day last week.

In short, the Kashmiri intifada has wrecked, or at least severely compromised, three main elements of Manmohan Singh’s Kashmir policy: the showcasing of the election to the State Assembly as an endorsement of Indian rule; the resuscitation of the backchannel deal; and the activation of the “internal” track of dialogue with the “moderates.” Besides, this summer’s popular uprising shows once again that even six decades of repressive Indian rule have not succeeded in suppressing the freedom movement. The baton has now been taken up by a new generation of Kashmiris. Instead of the armed struggle of the nineties, they have turned to mass street protests, often organised by educated young men through Facebook and mobile phones. It is no wonder that the Indian establishment and political parties of all hues have been unnerved.

There is every indication that in its desperation, Delhi will resort to even more violence to quell the popular agitation. This was signalled also by the deliberations of the all-parties meeting called by Manmohan Singh last week. All that the meeting decided was to send a delegation of politicians to Kashmir to meet all sections of the people and assess the ground situation. The meeting could not agree even on a token relaxation of India’s iron grip, such as a proposal by Omar Abdullah, the state’s beleaguered chief minister, for a dilution in the Armed Forces Special Powers Act (AFPSA). Nobody imagines that a change in the law would ease Indian repression in Kashmir, but even such a purely cosmetic measure was vetoed by the Indian armed forces.

An even harsher crackdown against the civilian population is now imminent. The Indian authorities have begun deploying the army to support the state police in enforcing the curfew and to prevent popular protests against the Indian occupation. Large numbers of “miscreants” are being rounded up and a manhunt has been launched to arrest Masarrat Alam Bhat, deputy leader of Tehreek-e-Hurriyat, who has played a key part in organising anti-India protests.

The international community has been a silent spectator to the reign of terror unleashed by India. One reason is to be found in the geopolitical plans or strategic interests of the US and other countries of the West. The last time Obama uttered the K-word was nearly two years ago. The Indian reaction was immediate. Since then the US president has carefully steered clear of Kashmir.

Another reason, one even more deplorable, for the indifference of the international community to India’s brutal repression of the Kashmiris, is the failure of the Pakistani government to raise the issue at the international level. In his recently published memoirs, former British prime minister Tony Blair recalls his surprise when during his visit to Pakistan after the 9/11 attacks Musharraf asked him to resolve Palestine rather than the Kashmir issue. The present government has also given the same low priority to Kashmir. In fact it is doubtful if it has a Kashmir policy. Its only response to the recent earth-shaking developments has been to issue two blandly worded statements. One of them calls for “restraint” by the Indian government, suggesting that if less force were used Pakistan would have no objection. The other statement refers to the occupation forces as “security forces” as if they were engaged in a legitimate activity to provide security.

Issuing statements from Islamabad will not be enough. The government must also devise a proactive policy to mobilise international support for the peaceful Azadi movement in the occupied state. Its failure to do so is unforgivable. As an immediate step, the government must forcefully take up the issue at international fora and bilaterally with Washington and other key countries. The prime minister (but please not Zardari) should address the UN General Assembly during the general debate beginning this Thursday and urge the international community to take steps to safeguard the human rights of the Kashmiris. The prime minister should also write letters to key heads of government. In addition, the foreign minister should address the Human Rights Council meeting currently in Geneva. Like the government, our parliament and political parties should also wake up to their responsibility to the people of Kashmir as they face the onslaught of the 700,000-strong Indian occupation force in the state.