US Congressional Hearing: Options for reconciliation in Afghanistan

Options for reconciliation in Afghanistan

By Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), The Hill's Congress Blog, July 27, 2010
This morning, Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman John Kerry (D-Mass.) chaired a hearing on Afghanistan. This is the Committee’s twelfth oversight hearing on U.S. policy toward Afghanistan in the past year and a half. Below are his opening remarks as delivered:

I would like to make a few opening comments and then we’ll proceed with each of the other witnesses. Let me begin by thanking you for coming today to talk to the Committee. I think you can see from the membership today that this is obviously an important issue to the country and to the Congress. There are a lot of questions, which is entirely appropriate. Today’s hearing is really to try and focus on the issue of reconciliation and see what role that might play in achieving a political solution in the end. And I think we have a very thoughtful panel to consider those issues.

I might just comment that this is the twelfth hearing of the Committee on Afghanistan in the past eighteen months. And it reflects our recognition of the critical role this issue plays, the unbelievable expense of human treasure of our sons and daughters, and the monetary cost, which is also enormous.

I want to say a couple of words about the leaked documents on Afghanistan and Pakistan yesterday. I think it is important to not overhype or get excessively excited about the meaning of those documents. Certainly to those of us that lived through the Pentagon papers and a different period, there is no relationship whatsoever to that event or to those documents. In fact, these documents in many cases reflect a very different pattern of involvement by the U.S. government from that period of time.

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Pakistan: An Ally of Necessity

An Ally of Necessity
Over the past nine years, more Pakistani than NATO troops have lost their lives fighting the Taliban.
By HUSAIN HAQQANI, Wall Street Journal JULY 27, 2010

The much publicized leaking of several thousand classified documents relating to the war in Afghanistan may have provided the war's American critics an opportunity to press their objections. It does not, however, make the case against military and political cooperation between the governments of the United States and Pakistan, made necessary by the challenge of global terrorism.

Under elected leaders, Pakistan is working with the U.S. to build trust between our militaries and intelligence agencies. In recent months, Pakistan has undertaken a massive military operation in the region bordering Afghanistan, denying space to Taliban extremists who had hoped to create a ministate with the backing of al Qaeda. Pakistan-Afghanistan relations have been enhanced to an unprecedented degree. And exchanges of intelligence between Pakistan and the U.S. have foiled several terrorist plots around the globe. The WikiLeaks controversy and the ensuing speculation about Pakistan's role in the global effort against the terrorists should not disrupt the ongoing efforts of the U.S. and Pakistan to contain and destroy the forces of extremism and fanaticism that threaten the entire world.

Pakistan is crucial for helping Afghanistan attain stability while pursuing the defeat of al Qaeda led terrorist ideologues. For that reason the White House, the Pentagon and the State Department have denounced the leaking of unattributed and unprocessed information implicating Pakistan in supporting or tolerating the Taliban. House Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton, a Democrat, warned Monday against judging Pakistan's role in the Afghan war by "outdated reports," adding that Pakistan had "significantly stepped up its fight against the Taliban." Most Americans and many Pakistanis agree on the need for improvements in Pakistan's efforts, but that is not the same as suspecting lack of cooperation.

The tragedy that has unfolded in South Asia is the product of a long series of policy miscalculations spanning fully 30 years. The U.S., in its zeal to defeat the Soviet Union—a noble goal indeed—selected Afghanistan as a venue. Pakistan became caught up in an ideological battle between communism and a politicized version of our Islamic faith. The most violent and most radical elements of the Mujahedeen resistance were empowered to fight the surrogate war against the Russians. Concerns—such as former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto's warning in 1989 while visiting the U.S. that the world had created a Frankenstein monster in Afghanistan that would come back to haunt us—were generally ignored.

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Related:
Pakistan dismisses Afghan war leak as skewed - Xinhua
US lawmaker says leaks paint 'outdated' Pakistan picture - Dawn
Afghan Document Leak: Why America's Allies Are Hedging Their Bets - TIME

Inside the WikiLeaks

WikiLeaks: More US documents coming on Afghan war
By Raphael Satter and Kimberly Dozier, Associated Press Writers – Mon Jul 26, 2010

LONDON – The release of some 91,000 secret U.S. military documents on the Afghanistan war is just the beginning, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange promised Monday, adding that he still has thousands more Afghan files to post online.

The White House, Britain and Pakistan have all condemned the online whistle-blowing group's release Sunday of the classified documents, one of the largest unauthorized disclosures in military history. The Afghan government in Kabul said it was "shocked" at the release but insisted most of the information was not new.
The documents cover some known aspects of the troubled nine-year conflict: U.S. special operations forces have targeted militants without trial, Afghans have been killed by accident, and U.S. officials have been infuriated by alleged Pakistani intelligence cooperation with the very insurgent groups bent on killing Americans.

Still, they also included unreported incidents of Afghan civilian killings and covert operations against Taliban figures.
Assange told reporters in London that what's been reported so far on the leaked documents has "only scratched the surface" and said some 15,000 files on Afghanistan are still being vetted by his organization.

For complete article, click here
Related:
Q&A: What do WikiLeak documents tell us? - CNN
Pakistan Aids Insurgency in Afghanistan, Reports Assert - New York Times
Leaks Add to Pressure on White House Over Strategy - NYT
Hamid Gul Responds to WikiLeaks Allegations - WSJ

Know thy neighbour: good, bad, and ugly

Know thy neighbour: good, bad, and ugly

Times of India, 24 July, 2010

The July 15 Islamabad Summit was a failure only for the supremely ambitious South Asian, says Mosharraf Zaidi

The anger that produced Shah Mehmood Qureshi’s press conference lambasting the Indian delegation led by SM Krishna, as Krishna was boarding a plane for New Delhi, comes from a very specific place. It is a place that doesn’t exist in the real world anymore, but is still vividly embedded in the minds of some within the Pakistani establishment. In that old place, Pakistan was the nimble and clever fox, and India was the large, clumsy elephant. That place is 1991.


In 1991, India’s GDP growth was a sorry 1.06 per cent, while Pakistan was chugging along at an impressive 5.06 per cent. This was not an anomaly, but the usual. Before 1991, Pakistan frequently outpaced India’s growth — even though India’s was more even, while Pakistan’s seemed to be on crack, vacillating wildly. Then in 1991, a bunch of retired and on-vacation IMF and World Bank bureaucrats unofficially took over the Pakistani economy to try to tame the beast, and a sage named Manmohan Singh began to run the Indian economy. Since then, India has enjoyed a sustained era of slow, but meaningful and across-the-board reform, while Pakistan has, outside of its telecom, banking and media sectors, achieved zero reform.

Pakistanis that I spoke to who had access to the goingson during the July 15 summit between Qureshi and Krishna complain of India’s monochromatic national narrative —press, government, private sector — all united. They complain that India didn’t come to slow dance, but rather to tease and prod. They complain that India’s attitude was dismissive, while Pakistan’s was earnest. I have no difficulty believing any of these things. But the very act of complaining about these things, rather than having cogent and defensible comebacks, should be a tell-all indicator of how differently positioned India and Pakistan are for the 21st century. Qureshi’s press conference is what weaker parties do when confronted with a conundrum. They wail.

One way to try to understand the growing gulf between India and Pakistan is to examine the now infamous interview of the Indian home secretary G K Pillai — which is rightly identified by many Pakistanis as having possibly contaminating the spirit of the July 15 summit. The truth is however, that the interview hardly scratches the surface of what would constitute titillating revelations. Nobody loves intelligence agencies, certainly not one from an “enemy country”.

What really catches the eye in that interview rather is the boldness of Pillai’s manner, a civil servant working for India’s central government, as he skewers the political and administrative failures of Indian states. A gag order reportedly placed on Pillai may assuage some of the politicians’ egos in Delhi and the various state capitals that he rankles, but the home secretary’s confidence is unlikely to diminish. Maybe civil servants have no place discussing public policy with the press. Maybe not. But Pillai’s self-confidence speaks to a greater issue.

The Indian Administrative Service’s ability to breed such confidence is not a random accident. Good civil servants — like Shiv Shankar Menon and TN Seshan — are cultivated, not discovered. The contemporary history of the IAS in India and its colonial cousin in Pakistan, the District Management Group, is a study in contrasts. India’s system of recruiting, retaining, rotating, and sustaining civil servants to serve the state has produced top-shelf talent consistently, despite being ravaged by challenges like corruption and a rigid system of home state allocation.

Despite enjoying a less complicated federal structure, Pakistan’s civil servants, on the other hand, while individually brilliant, have experienced a consistent and brutal stripping away of their powers and their ability to contribute to national stability and prosperity. The decay began in 1974, when Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto sought to democratise the bureaucracy by making civil servants increasingly accountable to politicians. Those reforms effectively ended up bringing to a close the Raj legacy of administrative efficiency on this side of the Wagah border.

A 2007 study of political cycles in IAS postings by Lakshmi Iyer (Harvard) and Anandi Mani (Warwick) found that the “average probability of a transfer in a given year was 49 per cent… bureaucrats spent an average of 16 months in any given position”. While 16 months falls well short of the global three-year standard (which is also the recommended period in both India and Pakistan), it likely exceeds the average for civil servants in Pakistan. One example of how crazy transfers and postings have become is from the spring of 2009 when the government of Punjab (in Pakistan) saw a number of individual departmental heads experience as many as four postings within a shambolic five-month period (when Chief Minister Shahbaz Sharif’s government was summarily dismissed, and later, reconstituted).

The differences are vast. India’s Pay Commission reports, in epic detail, are available free of cost to anyone (including Pakistanis). Pakistan’s Pay and Pensions Committee reports are state-secrets, not available even to parliamentarians and senior bureaucrats.
The Indian delegation of officials and journalists got to know a small morsel of these kinds of details about Pakistan during the July 15 summit. That, and not Qureshi’s political tamasha, is what should lie at the heart of this conversation between India and Pakistan: a continuum of humanising the other.

I’d be delighted to watch the next Pakistani delegation visit India and receive a frigid welcome by the Indian ministry for external affairs. Delighted that the next summit is used by both sides to reiterate the centrality of Kashmir versus the centrality of terrorism. Delighted if India and Pakistan continue to agree to disagree. As long as the two countries keep talking, we should all be delighted. The long road to a peaceful South Asia begins by getting to know one another, little by little. The July 15 summit achieved that, and then some.

Kayani, a man for many seasons ?

Kayani, a man for many seasons

Shuja Nawaz, Foreign Policy, July 24, 2010

In a timely though perhaps overly dramatic move, Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani of Pakistan announced last night on national television the extension of army chief General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani for another three years beyond November this year, when his first term was to end. Timely, since any further delay in announcing it would have led to further speculation and confusion about what was to happen. Dramatic, since the normal manner would have been a press release from the Inter Services Relations Directorate.

But then this is Pakistan and anything to do with the army chief makes headlines. And this announcement further strengthens the view that the army continues to be a key player even as democracy struggles to establish itself in a country that has been ruled for more than half its life by the military.

This is the first time a civilian government has extended an army chief for a full term. In the past, extensions have been either short, given by military rulers to themselves or, in the case of the first military ruler, Ayub Khan, to an ineffectual army chief with no independent power base. Benazir Bhutto sought to break with tradition when she offered an extension to General Abdul Waheed in 1996 but he refused it. Kayani took pains to convey the impression that he would not seek an extension nor negotiate for one. It appears that the government made him an offer he could not refuse.

Kayani is widely regarded as a quiet, professional soldier, who has helped transform the army in his tenure from a largely conventional force to one that is effectively fighting an irregular war inside its own borders. His new tenure gives him a rare opportunity to continue the transformation of the Pakistan into army into a professional body ready to fight insurgencies and conventional enemies equally well. He maintains a low public profile and is seen as a thinking general. Compared with his predecessor, General Pervez Musharraf, who was tempestuous and rarely had time to read, Kayani is deliberate. From the outset, he stated a policy of keeping the army out of politics, a policy that he tried to maintain even while selectively intervening in political squabbles as a referee. In recent months he has played a key role in moving the United States-Pakistan strategic dialogue onto a higher plane in terms of content and action.

For complete article, click here

Related:

A Second Term for General Kayani - Dawn Editorial

In New York: Songs of the Saints, With Love, From Pakistan

Songs of the Saints, With Love, From Pakistan
By JON PARELES, New York Times, July 22, 2010

Hands waved overhead. Voices shouted lyrics and whooped with delight. Children were hoisted onto parents’ shoulders. In the tightly packed crowd a few dancers made room to jump. T-shirts were tossed to fans from the stage.

Yet in the songs that Abida Parveen was singing, saints were praised. They were Islamic saints, the poets and philosophers revered by Sufism, the mystical branch of Islam.

It was the first New York Sufi Music Festival, a free three-hour concert on Tuesday in Union Square, and it had music from the four provinces of Pakistan, including traditional faqirs who perform outside temples, Sufi rock and a kind of rapping from Baluchistan.
The concert was presented by a new organization called Pakistani Peace Builders, which was formed after the attempted bombing in Times Square by a Pakistani-American. The group seeks to counteract negative images of Pakistan by presenting a longtime Pakistani Islamic tradition that preaches love, peace and tolerance.
Sufism itself has been a target of Islamic fundamentalists; on July 1 suicide bombers attacked Pakistan’s most important Sufi shrine. Pakistan’s ambassador to the United Nations, Abdullah Hussain Haroon, spoke between sets on Tuesday. “What we’re here to do today,” he said, is “to be at peace with all of America.”

The music’s message was one of joyful devotion and improvisatory freedom. Ms. Parveen, one of Pakistan’s most celebrated musicians, was singing in a Sufi style called kafi. Like the qawwali music popularized worldwide by Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, kafi sets classical poems — about the love and intoxication of the divine, about seeking the spirit within — to visceral, handclapping rhythms and vocal lines that swoop and twist with passionate volatility.

Ms. Parveen carried songs from serene, hovering introductions to virtuosic euphoria. Long, sustained notes suddenly broke into phrases that zigzagged up and down an octave or more; repeated refrains took on an insistent rasp and became springboards for elaborate leaps and arabesques; quick syllables turned into percussive exchanges with the band. Each song was a continual revelation, making the old poems fully alive.

While the crowd was there for Ms. Parveen’s first New York City performance in a decade, the rest of the program was strong. The Soung Fakirs, from Sachal Sarmast Shrine in Sindh, danced in bright orange robes to devotional songs with vigorous, incantatory choruses. Akhtar Chanal Zehri, though he was introduced as a rapper, was backed by traditional instruments and seemed more of a folk singer, heartily intoning his rhythmic lyrics on a repeating note or two and, eventually, twirling like a Sufi dervish.
Rafaqat Ali Khan, the heir to his family’s school of classical singing (khayal), was backed only by percussion, pushing his long-breathed phrasing into ever more flamboyant swirls and quavers. The tabla player Tari Khan, who also accompanied Rafaqat Ali Khan, played a kinetic solo set that carried a 4/4 rhythm through variants from the Middle East, Europe, New York City and (joined by two more drummers) Africa. There was also instrumental music from the bansuri (wooden flute) player Ghaus Box Brohi.

On the modernizing side, Zeb and Haniya, two Pakistani women who started their duo as college students at Mount Holyoke and Smith, performed gentler songs in the Dari tradition, a Pakistani style with Central Asian roots, with Haniya adding syncopated electric guitar behind Zeb’s smoky voice. Under wooden flute and classical-style vocals the Mekaal Hasan Band plugged in with reggae, folk-rock and a tricky jazz-rock riff. But the lyrics quoted devotional poetry that was 900 years old, distant from the turmoil of the present.

Protesting the mosque: A post Founding Fathers America

Protesting the mosque: A post Founding Fathers America
Jonathan Hayden, Salon blog, July 21, 2010

Last week protestors poured into the streets of Murfreesboro, TN to voice their displeasure at a proposed new mosque just outside of the city in central Tennessee. Some of the protestors were very clear on why they were opposed to a mosque in their neighborhood. “We’re at war with these people,” said one woman. Local political figures likewise did not mince words. Lou Ann Zelenik, a congressional candidate said Muslims aimed to “fracture the moral and political foundation of Middle Tennessee."
In a television news report, local Channel 5 reported on a small Muslim community in a rural part of the state. The reporter seemed shocked to find the there were no signs of “anti-American activity” or “flag desecration”. Nor, he told us, were there “reports from neighbors complaining of unexplained gunshots or explosions.”

This animosity towards and suspicion of Islam is by no means restricted to Tennessee. Mosques across America are being attacked at a startling rate. In the past few months, mosques in Iowa, Florida, Georgia, New York, have been targeted with physical attack.

Over the last few years, I have visited to over 100 mosques throughout the country for field work research which resulted in the book Journey into America: The Challenge of Islam and a film by the same name by world renowned scholar Akbar Ahmed. We found that these occurrences were far too common. I would estimate that over half of the mosques we visited have been targeted in one way or the other—sometimes with aggressive actions like windows being broken or arson. Sometimes more passive actions are taken like complaints over parking issues, or threatening letters. Some mosques protect themselves by hanging no sign or image indicating that the building is even in use.

For complete article, click here

Meet Rahmatullah Nabeel - Afghanistan's new intel boss

Meet Afghanistan's new intel boss
By Kate Clark, AfPak Channel, Foreign Policy, July 19, 2010
 
The appointment of a new head of Afghanistan's National Directorate of Security (NDS, the country's intelligence agency) has come with a lot less fanfare than the departure of the old one, Amrullah Saleh, who resigned after deep disagreements with the president over policy towards the Taliban. The acting director, Engineer Ibrahim Spinzada, has returned to the shadows and his day job as deputy head of the National Security Council (NSC), leaving one of his protégés, Engineer Rahmatullah Nabeel, in charge of Afghanistan's intelligence apparatus.

Engineer Nabeel is from Wardak and, according to Pajhwok News Agency, was born in 1968. He went to primary school in Kabul, then, after the Soviet invasion, to secondary school in exile in Peshawar. He also studied for a degree in engineering in Peshawar from a private university and then worked as an engineer with NGOs (reportedly in Peshawar and Jalalabad). By the late 1990s, he was working in Kabul for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), while Engineer Ibrahim was with UNHCR in Kandahar.

In late 2002, Nabeel went from being an engineer working on projects around Kabul to security officer at the Presidential Palace. He was one of a number of UNHCR staff who followed Engineer Ibrahim to the Palace (Ibrahim and Karzai know each other from Quetta -- there are family connections). The new recruitment was part of an attempt to create a professional, Afghan security apparatus at the Palace which would be unwaveringly loyal to Karzai.

For complete article, click here
Related:
Intelligence Chief, a brilliant appointment by Karzai! - Pashtunforums

Pakistan's Counter-terrorism coordinator steps down: A Setback

Counter-terrorism coordinator steps down
The Express Tribune, July 21, 2010

ISLAMABAD: The coordinator of the National Counter Terrorism Authority (Nacta), Tariq Pervez, has resigned over differences with his bosses on the status of the authority. Pervez wanted the prime minister to be the authority’s chairman and the four provincial chief ministers to be its members, a senior official told The Express Tribune on the condition of anonymity.

The resignation reads: “I tender my resignation due to personal and pressing circumstances,” the official said, adding that the authority was working under the interior ministry.

The official said that Pervez had submitted his proposals to his bosses in black and white – a move which they did “not appreciate”.

“The rejection of the proposals led Pervez to resign,” the official said, claiming that Pervez wanted to enhance his powers.

The authority, established in December last year, was supposed to come up with a feasible strategy to deal with the deteriorating law and order situation. Another source said that during the recent strategic dialogue round with the US, it was agreed that the Nacta and the US-based National Centre for Terrorism Control (NCTC) would work together to wage an effective anti-terrorism battle.

He said that the prime minister would appoint the next coordinator on a priority basis, so that it could work in collaboration with the NCTC.

The European Union had pledged 15 million euros for Nacta, which would serve as a research organisation, for which a legal cover was being framed.

He said the agency was supposed to have three wings – one to counter extremism, to be headed by an educationist or a journalist, another to counter terrorism, headed by a police officer and the third for research and analysis, headed by an eminent academician.

Pakistan’s Elite Pay Few Taxes, Widening Gap: Excellent NYT story

Pakistan’s Elite Pay Few Taxes, Widening Gap
By Sabrina Tavernise, July 18, 2010

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Much of Pakistan’s capital city looks like a rich Los Angeles suburb. Shiny sport utility vehicles purr down gated driveways. Elegant multistory homes are tended by servants. Laundry is never hung out to dry.

But behind the opulence lurks a troubling fact. Very few of these households pay income tax. That is mostly because the politicians who make the rules are also the country’s richest citizens, and are skilled at finding ways to exempt themselves.

That would be a problem in any country. But in Pakistan, the lack of a workable tax system feeds something more menacing: a festering inequality in Pakistani society, where the wealth of its most powerful members is never redistributed or put to use for public good. That is creating conditions that have helped spread an insurgency that is tormenting the country and complicating American policy in the region.
It is also a sorry performance for a country that is among the largest recipients of American aid, payments of billions of dollars that prop up the country’s finances and are meant to help its leaders fight the insurgency.
Though the authorities have tried to expand the net in recent years, taxing profits from the stock market and real estate, entire swaths of the economy, like agriculture, a major moneymaker for the elite, remain untaxed.

“This is a system of the elite, by the elite and for the elite,” said Riyaz Hussain Naqvi, a retired government official who worked in tax collection for 38 years. “It is a skewed system in which the poor man subsidizes the rich man.”

The problem starts at the top. The average worth of Pakistani members of Parliament is $900,000, with its richest member topping $37 million, according to a December study by the Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development and Transparency in Islamabad.
While Pakistan’s income from taxes last year was the lowest in the country’s history, according to Zafar ul-Majeed, a senior official in the Federal Board of Revenue, the assets of current members of Parliament nearly doubled from those of members of the previous Parliament, the institute study found.

For complete article, click here

Harvard University award for Mir Ibrahim Rahman

Harvard University award for Mir Ibrahim Rahman of Jang/Geo Group
The News, July 18, 2010

Mir Ibrahim is first Muslim and second South Asian to get this highest award; he was conferred the Lucius N Littauer award earlier; also worked for the Harvard Appointments Committee; honoured to deliver speech at the graduation ceremony representing all students; teachers, students and their parents paid great tributes to Mir Ibrahim Rahman

WASHINGTON: Mir Ibrahim Rahman has joined the distinguished ranks of alumni awarded the Robert F Kennedy Public Service Award from Harvard University, one of the top centres of learning in the world.

Mir is the first Muslim and only the second individual from South Asia to have received this Award. The Award is considered the most prestigious honour for students of the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and is presented to those who have not only made a mark in the past for their distinguished public service work but also excelled in this field during their educational career at the university. The committee that selects individuals to be honoured comprises senior professors of the institution.

Mir Ibrahim Rahman had earlier received the Lucius N Littauer award that is given to students who have made an outstanding contribution to the Kennedy School Community. Mir Ibrahim Rahman had represented his class at the Kennedy Student of Government, and during his tenure had organized a number of important seminars. He was a member of the Harvard South Asia Advisory Board Committee and was also one of the few students to get the opportunity to work for the Harvard Appointments Committee, which normally comprises only senior professors.

For complete article, click here
Related:
The great American tradition of questions - Text of Mir Ibrahim's speech

‘Data Darbar had to be destroyed because...'

‘Data Darbar had to be destroyed because of Ibn Taymiyya'
Sunni-Sunni war was much earlier and it reached a peak in 2006 at Nishtar Park, the year the ISI allowed Sipah-e-Sahaba to stage its show of power in Islamabad

Mazhar Jadoon, Viewpoint, July 16, 2010

The Sunni-Sunni war reached a peak in 2006 at Nishtar Park, the year the ISI allowed Sipah-e-Sahaba to stage its show of power in Islamabad, senior journalist and Editor Khaled Ahmed responds to some questions by Viewpoint on the post-Data Darbar attack scenario in Lahore and the menace of sectarian strife in Pakistan.

Viewpoint: Attack on Data Darbar was bloody, but shrines like Bari Imam and many more in Pakhtunkhwa have been attacked in last few years. We have seen attack on Sunni Tehrik in Karachi besides Deobandi-Barelvi riots in Khyber agency. It seems Shia-Sunni strife is now becoming Sunni vs Sunni clash. What do you say?

Khaled Ahmed: Barri Imam was attacked by backers of Lal Masjid through an anti-Shia personality of Kohat known as al-Qaeda Lawyer who was brought as arbiter by our agencies together with others like Fazlur Rehman Khaleel of Harkatul Mujahideen fighting Pakistan's proxy wars during the Lal Masjid faceoff in July 2009. The Sunni-Sunni war was much earlier and it reached a peak in 2006 at Nishtar Park, the year the ISI allowed Sipah-e-Sahaba to stage its show of power in Islamabad. Why should we start dubbing the old war as new war? And why should we leave the state out of it? It is not ‘now becoming', it is ‘continuing' because the state has not decided that it must stop its protégés from killing Pakistanis. Questions should be correctly posed. The Sunni-Sunni strife is old. Ask Mufti Munib and he will put you right and clear your mind of indoctrination. Data Darbar had to be destroyed because of Ibn Taymiyya (1263-1328) who figures now in the al-Qaeda pantheon.

Viewpoint: Zia regime is blamed for sectarian trouble in Pakistan. But we have seen that even PPP and PML-N governments are trying to appease these forces. PPP built election coalition with TNFJ while accommodating an SSP minister in its Punjab cabinet back in 1990s. PML-N's appeasement policy has also been highlighted recently. Your comment.

Khaled Ahmed: The state of Pakistan has deployed its non-state actor terrorists in Punjab. Because of the unclear charter of power of the state agencies linked to the army, parts of Punjab are succumbing to the power of the terrorists. South Punjab is vulnerable to three terrorist organisations. The Punjab government is now paying crores of rupees supporting ‘charities' of one of them that it has ‘nationalised'. A new perspective of the Seraiki Movement is gradually coming to the fore, reflecting the political dominance of Sipah-e-Sahaba and its offshoot, the Jaish. No one from among the backers of the Movement – known traditionally to be secular – is willing to even speak of the presence of the jihadi-terrorist organisations. One reason is that most of them want to lean on them to win the elections; the other may be the simple fact of intimidation and the subliminal acknowledgement of state patronage to the terrorists. A Seraiki Province in the coming days will be exclusively the domain of Sipah-e-Sahaba and its friends. It will be for the first time that terrorists posing as Islamic warriors against India and against the Shias of Pakistan will possess an entire province and its resources under the new constitutional dispensation of real autonomy.

Viewpoint: What about the role of Iran and Saudi Arabia?

Khaled Ahmed: Official Saudi Arabia hates al-Qaeda but Saudi civil society plus the civil society of UAE and Kuwait are spending big money in the region so that Shias and Sunnis should be killed in Pakistan because of the ‘jahiliya' act on the part of Pakistan to be an ally of America. Iran is out of the competition after getting a bloody nose in the shape of mass Ashura slaughters in Pakistan.

Viewpoint: What do you say about the curriculum of hate taught at madrassas stoking sectarian fire?

Khaled Ahmed: Textbooks at the madrassas are OK. The courses are culpable only so far as they take the acolyte away from the world outside the madrassa. The isolation of the acolyte and his total enslavement to the handlers is what should bother us. Everyone who does terrorism has been to the madrassas, starting from Sipah leader Azam Tariq, to Harkatul Mujahideen Fazlur Rehman Khalil, Qari Saifullah Akhtar and Mullah Umar. Banuria has the distinction of getting most of its leaders like Yusuf Ludihanvi and Shamzai killed after they sanctioned violence on targeted communities. The Madrassa network is not only sectarian; it also disagrees with the state of Pakistan as it is. But this is not a strict law. Suicide-bombers are also picked up from mosques. All strictly religious people are vulnerable, as shown by Faisal Shahzad and his helpers.

For complete article, click here