Tuesday, January 31, 2006

On Afghan Security: Insights of a leading scholar



Sowing Afghan security
Robert I. Rotberg
The Boston Globe JANUARY 13, 2006

There is a striking antidote to worsening security in Afghanistan, where suicide bombing and convoy ambushes now occur every day. Increasingly, these Taliban- and Al Qaeda-sponsored attacks are linked to opium and heroin trafficking. Afghanistan supplies 80 percent of Europe's heroin and is the largest grower of poppies in the world. Instead of legalizing poppy growing or attempting to eradicate the stubborn plants and destroy the livelihoods of impoverished farmers, why not pay the farmers to grow something else?

Afghans already grow wheat as their staple grain. Simply exhorting farmers to turn away from poppies to wheat, saffron and pomegranates will not work. But providing serious, guaranteed, long-term incentives that will encourage farmers to grow wheat in preference to poppies could well produce addictions to wheat instead of heroin. Senior Afghans, meeting in December at Harvard University with American and British researchers, believe that wheat is the answer.

Americans spend about $3 billion a year attempting and failing to expunge the Afghan poppy crop. The conclusions of a project on Afghanistan mounted by Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government estimate that providing annual guarantees for purchases of wheat at triple the world price would cost less than eradication.

To be credible for farmers, the guarantees would have to be established for five- and 10-year periods, not just annually. A marketing board could do the buying, and the problems of supply that would have to be watched carefully would concern smuggling wheat into the country rather than smuggling opium out.

The results could also be eaten by hungry Afghans, or exported to neighboring Pakistan or Tajikistan. And Europe would benefit immensely from reduced supplies of heroin.

By thus ending the major battles to eradicate what is now the main peasant commodity, and the source of great profits for warlords and middlemen, subsidizing wheat would also contribute to peace. It might also help to undercut some of the appeal of the Taliban. Terrorism now connected with narco-trafficking would also cease, thus improving overall national security.

If the scourge of poppy growing can be reduced and then eliminated, Afghanistan might stand a chance to prosper and develop well. Otherwise, its future will be precarious, and the new government will continue to be a collection of its sections, with little unity.

Making headway on poppies and drugs would provide the central government of Afghanistan with a sense of common purpose that could draw the proto-nation together. Today the central government has only limited visibility and legitimacy beyond Kabul, the capital. A handle on the poppy problem would also give Kabul an edge over regional power brokers. The United States and the European Union should use their collective financial muscle to assist President Hamid Karzai's government and the new national Parliament in this way, and not by attacking farmers trying to be productive by any means that they know how.

To accomplish these and other worthy objectives, Afghanistan needs to be well governed. The key governance deliverable is security. Second is a much enhanced rule of law. A climate of impunity for powerful people now prevails, and must be altered. The state must not continue to be complicit in the abuse of ordinary civilians.

America and the EU must do more to help the Karzai government to develop its legal apparatuses and codes. Even when the police make arrests, their investigations are weak, and the legal system plays favorites. There are few assurances of predictability or integrity, with many local warlords imposing their own dictates on civil and criminal disputes.

Afghanistan also requires an ability to recognize and protect individual rights. Battling harder against corruption is also critical, although this is a task largely for the Karzai government and not for outsiders.

These obstacles impede Afghanistan's emergence from conflict and chaos. With skillful internal leadership and outside assistance, however, these barriers can be overcome. But the time horizon is five years, not months or single years. The role of foreign donors will remain critical for that period, and beyond. More coordination among those donors will be essential, but Afghanistan must provide the priorities more than it now does.

If drug-related and judicial reforms happen, and if Afghan and NATO forces can reduce insecurity, then - and only then - Afghanistan will emerge as a strong ally and an effective developing nation.

(Robert I. Rotberg is director of the Program on Intrastate Conflict at Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government and president of the World Peace Foundation)

Monday, January 30, 2006

Pipeline Politics Continues....



Daily Times, January 31, 2006
Aiyar’s departure blow to IPI pipeline project
By Iftikhar Gilani

NEW DELHI: The Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline has become suspect with the change of guard in the Indian Petroleum Ministry.

While the previous minister Mani Shankar Aiyar was said to have an anti-west tilt and was considered a strong advocate of this pipeline, his successor Murli Deora is known to be pro-US and often throws parties for visiting US legislators.

Aiyar’s removal from the oil ministry is widely seen as a result of intense pressure from domestic private lobbies and the Americans, who were not happy with his left-oriented view of the global economy.

Deora may not be able to pursue the high-pressure oil diplomacy that Aiyar carried out in the past 20 months which lined up over a dozen countries for partnership with India in the energy field. The journalists who routinely cover the Petroleum Ministry also point out how Aiyar worked to promote public sector oil companies and would not allow oil giants like Reliance Industry of the Ambanis to succeed in their designs of privatising oil companies using their political clout.

Everyone expected Aiyar to be relieved of the Panchayati Raj portfolio in order to continue on the energy front, using his past experience as an Indian Foreign Service (IFS) cadre officer. He has been given the Sports and Youth Affairs Ministry.

His close terms with the Gandhi family since Rajiv Gandhi’s days couldn’t help him retain the petroleum portfolio, leading observers to conclude that there might have been some kind of pressure on the prime minister.

If performance were the criterion, Aiyar would not have been touched. It was Aiyar who made headlines in the financial dailies around the world by laying the foundation for a partnership with China on the oil front and proposing an Asia-wide hydrocarbon grid that generated interest in countries like Turkey, Kazakistan, Iran, China and Korea. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh has so far echoed Aiyar’s theory that India’s oil and gas deals with Iran are separate from the civilian nuclear deal with the US.

The responsibility now falls on Deora to prove that he would not allow the Americans to dictate to India on the Iran pipeline issue or yield to the written US demand to India earlier this month warning against investment in Syrian oilfields.

Known for his liaison capabilities, Deora is expected to improve communication between the government and business leaders but analysts say the real test will be how he deals with the Americans.

Pakistani official was paid $12m for Australian wheat

Daily Times, January 31, 2006
Pakistani official was paid $12m for Australian wheat

SYDNEY: Australia’s monopoly wheat exporter paid a Pakistani government official 12 million US dollars to ensure sales within the country, a Sydney inquiry into Iraq’s UN oil-for-food scandal heard Monday.

The commission of inquiry into the AWB’s (formerly the Australian Wheat Board) business in Iraq is investigating the company’s practices in Pakistan as part of its probe into whether there was a culture of kickbacks in its foreign dealings.

The inquiry has already unearthed allegations of corrupt practices in Pakistan.

Earlier this month it heard that two former AWB employees dealing with the country had demanded legal indemnity in case some payments amounted to bribes and that an Islamabad-based Pakistani agent was paid four million US dollars for securing a one million tonne wheat shipment.

The commission’s senior counsel, John Agius, Monday revealed that AWB agreed to pay the same Islamabad agent, who was a Pakistan government official, a total of 12 million US dollars over three years until 2000. AWB trade and commodities chief Peter Geary said he was aware of some details about an Islamabad agent. But asked whether he knew the agent was a Pakistani government official, Geary replied: “I’m not aware of that, sir.”

Geary said he knew there was an arrangement with an agent in Karachi, who AWB shared with US wheat export company Cargill, but was “aware there was another agent and that the commission was much higher.”

The Australian government called the commission of inquiry into AWB’s dealings with Iraq after a United Nations report into corruption in the oil-for-food programme named AWB as paying 220 million US dollars in kickbacks to the Iraqi government. AWB has said it was unaware that the Iraq payments, which were paid to a Jordanian trucking company, were being funnelled to Saddam Hussein’s regime.

Meanwhile Australian Prime Minister John Howard denied knowledge of the bribes paid by the country’s wheat exporter AWB to Saddam Hussein’s Iraq under the UN’s corruption-tainted oil-for-food programme.

“We were in no way involved with the payment of bribes,” Howard told national radio Monday. “We didn’t condone them, we didn’t have knowledge of them, but we did work closely with AWB.

“I make no bones about that. I had no reason to believe that AWB Ltd wasn’t just going all out to preserve Australia’s wheat sales to Iraq,” he said. An official inquiry Monday heard that Howard wrote to AWB’s chief executive in July 2002 after Baghdad threatened to cut wheat imports because of Australia’s support for the United States ahead of the war on Iraq.

“In view of the importance of the matter, I suggest the government and AWB Ltd remain in close contact in order that we can jointly attempt to achieve a satisfactory outcome in the longer term,” Howard wrote to CEO Andrew Lindberg.

A United Nations report last year charged that AWB had paid some 220 million dollars in kickbacks to secure 2.3 billion dollars in wheat contracts with Iraq under the 1996-2003 oil-for-food programme.

The programme allowed Iraq to export oil to buy food, medicine and other humanitarian supplies under UN supervision to lessen the impact of international sanctions on the Iraqi people.

Howard said he had met with the AWB after Lindberg’s return from Baghdad and was “pleased” that the problem had been resolved.

Asked whether he knew how the AWB achieved the favourable outcome, Howard said: “No, they didn’t go into any detail. We had no suspicion, no suggestion there had been any bribes paid.”

Howard established the commission of inquiry into the formerly government-run Australian Wheat Board in November, but restricted it to examining allegations of wrongdoing by private companies.

The opposition Labour Party is pressing for the terms of reference to be widened to allow the commission to investigate the government’s role in the scandal.

“Anything less is a cover-up of what has been, to my mind, the worst piece of corruption I have seen in my 25 years as a federal politician,” said Labour leader Kim Beazley.

He took aim at Howard as well as Deputy Prime Minister Mark Vaile and Foreign Minister Alexander Downer.

“They’re like the three wise monkeys. They see no evil, they speak no evil, they hear no evil,” he told reporters. afp

Sunday, January 29, 2006

US-Pakistan Relations under severe stress



The New York Times, January 28, 2006
Editorial: Straight Talk Needed on Pakistan

Pakistan's prime minister came to the White House this week and pretended that the people of Pakistan highly value their country's current close military relationship with the United States. President Bush reciprocated by pretending in his public comments that the American airstrikes that killed 18 Pakistani civilians earlier this month were not Topic A in that relationship. Even diplomacy requires more direct talk than this.

Those strikes were legitimately aimed at top fugitive leaders of Al Qaeda, but hit innocent women and children. Pakistan's people deserve a good explanation, and since they haven't heard one from their leaders, Mr. Bush should have provided it.

Washington needs a strong and healthy partnership with Pakistan if it is to have any chance of eliminating Qaeda's leaders, defeating a resurgent Taliban and turning back nuclear weapons proliferation. But strong and healthy partnerships are not built around political charades. And that is the only way to describe the events in Washington last week.

Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz is a decent, intelligent man. But real prime ministers, including the ones Pakistan had in the 1990's, come out of democratically elected parliaments. Mr. Aziz was appointed by a military dictator, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, who has yet to permit the democratic elections he has repeatedly promised since his coup more than six years ago.

That makes it awkward for Mr. Aziz to deliver messages about how highly the Pakistani people value their ties with Washington, particularly when just about every poll and street demonstration suggest just how unpopular those ties have become. One crucial reason General Musharraf gets so little pressure from the Bush administration about restoring democracy is the almost universal assumption in Washington that only a dictator can deliver Pakistani military cooperation.

That had better not be true because Washington will need support from Pakistan for a long time, and General Musharraf, who has already survived several assassination attempts and again faces serious challenges, cannot stay in power indefinitely. He has also proved to be unable, or unwilling, to close down the sanctuaries that three different groups of terrorists — Qaeda, Taliban and Kashmiri — have established along three Pakistani borders.

The most important of these to the United States are the safe zones that fugitive Qaeda leaders established after fleeing the Tora Bora caves in Afghanistan four years ago. It is inexcusable that a Pentagon already looking ahead to Iraq did not pour in enough American troops to block the escape of Osama bin Laden and his top deputies, the masterminds of the 9/11 attacks. Attacking them in wartime Afghanistan would have been far simpler, militarily and politically, than trying to catch up with them in tribal areas that even the Pakistani Army can't control. But that is where they are now, and where America's war against them must be fought.

It is not enough for Mr. Bush to exchange periodic pleasantries with General Musharraf and Mr. Aziz. He needs to address the concerns of the Pakistani people as well. A franker public discussion of the airstrikes would have been a good place to start.

Saturday, January 28, 2006

Ten reasons to doubt nuclear deterrence



Daily Times, January 29, 2006
VIEW: Ten reasons to doubt nuclear deterrence —Ahmad Faruqui

It is often said that poor countries have a right to nuclear weapons since the rich countries have them; not letting the former have them is reprehensible and reeks of double standards, a kind of nuclear apartheid. Such an argument is putting forward the specious proposition that rich countries should not be allowed to have a monopoly on making monstrously big mistakes

Pakistanis may disagree on many things but on one issue there is unanimity of opinion — that the country’s nuclear weapons are necessary to keep India at bay. This notion needs to be re-examined.

The genesis of the nuclear programme goes back to the 1971 war. Pakistan drew the wrong conclusions from its defeat. The war would have been unthinkable had General Yahya Khan not connived with certain politicians in West Pakistan to postpone the National Assembly session in March. This decision brought about the death of Jinnah’s Pakistan. Once East Pakistan plunged into a civil war and India intervened, the defeat of the beleaguered Pakistani army garrison was a foregone conclusion. However, a similar defeat in the west was not inevitable.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, who had famously committed Pakistanis to developing nuclear weapons even if they had to “eat grass”, decided to initiate a nuclear programme in 1972. Some felt his policies were vindicated when India unveiled a “smiling Buddha” at Pokhran in 1974. However, that may have been India’s response to Bhutto’s decision to go nuclear. But it is likely that India was responding to China’s nuclear weapons programme while simultaneously fulfilling a long-held desire of its scientific elite to demonstrate that they were second to none.

Today, there are at least 10 reasons to rethink Pakistan’s nuclear programme. First, the Kargil crisis provides evidence that the presence of nuclear weapons emboldens one or both parties to visualise and sometimes execute limited conventional war. There is no way to determine precisely the “red lines” of the other party and such ambiguity can in fact precipitate a nuclear war.

Second, it is not clear that Pakistan’s nuclear weaponry prevented India from a pre-emptive war in Kashmir in 2002. Perhaps India was implementing coercive diplomacy and never intended to go to war. Furthermore, the importance of American influence on the antagonists cannot be underestimated.

Third, Pakistan’s nuclear assets have become a liability in the post-9/11 world. General Pervez Musharraf cited several reasons why he made a U-turn on Pakistan’s Afghan policy, one of which was to protect the country’s nuclear assets. While one may question the merits of supporting the Taliban, having to change the policy under duress to protect the nuclear assets was a reversal of logic since nuclear assets were supposed to allow the country to have an independent foreign policy.

Fourth, by going nuclear, Pakistan should have been able to reduce its expenditure on conventional forces and prevent the future of the country from being mortgaged. There has been no nuclear dividend; $4 billion are being spent annually on maintaining a military force of 600,000 and equipping them with advanced weaponry.

Fifth, the perception that a minimum nuclear deterrent requires a constant and unchanging amount of funding is false, since the level of Pakistan’s minimum deterrent is tied to whatever India regards as its minimum deterrence. That, in turn, is tied to India’s regional ambitions, which are tied to China’s regional ambitions.

Thus, Pakistani nuclear expenditures will keep on accelerating as more advanced ballistic missiles and warheads continue to be deployed regionally. The military will require tactical and strategic missiles that can be fired from land, sea and air. Over time, it will seek more sophisticated means of storing, transporting and launching the weapons, all of them worth billions. Ultimately, the military that has a first strike capability will find it necessary to develop a second strike capability and so on.

Sixth, were a “do or die” situation to develop for the state of Pakistan, what would be the military value of using nuclear assets to keep territory that would become uninhabitable the moment they were used. And what about the morality of killing millions of innocent civilians merely to make a statement about the sanctity of man-made borders that came into being just half a century earlier? Seen from this vantage point, nuclear war emerges as a psychopathic nationalised projection of suicide bombing.

Seventh, with nuclear weapons there is always the risk of accidental launch. Safeguards and protocols can never eliminate the risk of failure. Eighth, there would always be a risk of terrorists acquiring the weapons, especially in Pakistan’s regional environment.

Ninth, some defence analysts have argued that nuclear weapons are simply an anodyne, a relatively painless means to prevent war, and that they will never be used. Not only is this at odds with historical practice at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it is also contradicted by the recent statement of France’s Jacques Chirac in which he signalled a willingness to use them under “special” circumstances and earlier statements by leading members of the Bush administration who see military value in deploying “tactical mini-nukes”.

And last, it is often said that poor countries have a right to nuclear weapons since the rich countries have them; not letting the former have them is reprehensible and reeks of double standards, a kind of nuclear apartheid. Such an argument is putting forward the specious proposition that rich countries should not be allowed to have a monopoly on making monstrously big mistakes.

Nowhere was the military disutility of nuclear weapons more visible than during the Cold War during which time, to quote Henry Kissinger, the US and the USSR behaved “like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other whom he assumes to have perfect vision.”

Each country produced warheads in excess of 10,000. The US nuclear programme represented 29 percent of its military budget and had even half of that money been spent on social programmes, it would have permanently eliminated poverty and deprivation from American society. As for the USSR, none of its nuclear weapons and intercontinental ballistic missiles could save it from collapse.

Sadly, the territorial dimension of national security continues to be paramount in Pakistan’s policy making, even under a prime minister who is a former banker. From this ill-conceived premise flows the false deduction that nuclear weapons are the best method of protecting Pakistan’s independence.

Thus, a poor nation that should be spending two or three times the amount on development that it spends on defence spends roughly equal amounts on the two. Pakistan’s priorities should be eliminating poverty and illiteracy — which drive ethnic, sectarian and urban lawlessness and threaten its future survival.

Dr Ahmad Faruqui is director of research at the American Institute of International Studies and can be reached at Faruqui@pacbell.net

Former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif's views about Pakistan's Nuclear Policy



Daily Times, January 28, 2006
I can still strike a deal with Musharraf: Nawaz Sharif

“I regretfully say that only one out of three services chiefs supported my decision on the nuclear blasts. This shocked and stunned me. Pakistan’s status as a nuclear power not only enhanced the country’s prestige in the world but also gave pride to the entire Muslim Ummah. The blasts stopped India from translating its dream of establishing its hegemony in South Asia to reality. It also helped the India-Pakistan peace process move forward,” Qadri quoted Nawaz as saying.

Nawaz regretted that Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan’s atomic bomb, was declared a criminal and a first information report was lodged against him by the military rulers. He (Nawaz) said that global powers were interfering in Pakistan’s internal affairs and its security was “under threat”.

Wednesday, January 25, 2006

To be or not to be?





Washington Post
The War in Pakistan
Wednesday, January 25, 2006

SHORTLY AFTER Sept. 11, 2001, President Bush famously declared that other countries must choose between supporting the United States and supporting terrorism, and that those that harbored al Qaeda would be treated as the enemy. In the years since, he has refrained from applying that tough principle in practice -- which is lucky for Pakistan's president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf. Ever since the war on terrorism began, this meretricious military ruler has tried to be counted as a U.S. ally while avoiding an all-out campaign against the Islamic extremists in his country, who almost surely include Osama bin Laden and his top deputies. Despite mounting costs in American lives and resources, he has gotten away with it.

Gen. Musharraf and his aides, such as Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, boast that Pakistan has arrested hundreds of al Qaeda militants and deployed tens of thousands of troops in the border region near Afghanistan. Yet Gen. Musharraf has never directed his forces against the Pashtun Taliban militants who use Pakistan as a base to wage war against American and Afghan forces across the border. He has never dismantled the Islamic extremist groups that carry out terrorist attacks against India. He has never cleaned up the Islamic madrassas that serve as a breeding ground for suicide bombers. He has pardoned and protected the greatest criminal proliferator of nuclear weapons technology in history, A.Q. Khan, who aided Libya, North Korea and Iran. And he has broken promises to give up his military office or return Pakistan to democracy.

The consequences of this record are that al Qaeda has continued to operate from Pakistan, while U.S. and allied troops have been unable to pacify southern Afghanistan. More than 125 American soldiers have been killed there in the past year, many of them by militants crossing the border. Osama bin Laden is apparently secure enough to have released an audiotape last week threatening more attacks inside the United States.

The Bush administration is still providing Gen. Musharraf $600 million in annual military and economic aid and treating him as a major ally. But in the absence of effective Pakistani action, it has also stepped up its own clandestine operations in the border areas where al Qaeda and its allies are based. At least three times in the past year, drone aircraft armed with missiles have attacked terrorist targets; most recently, a strike on a Pakistani village this month killed at least 13 people, several important al Qaeda operatives possibly among them.

In keeping with his double game, Gen. Musharraf's government publicly criticized the latest attack even though his intelligence service reportedly cooperated with it. Now he and Mr. Aziz, who met with Mr. Bush yesterday, are saying U.S. forces should carry out no more such attacks without Pakistani agreement. We'll assume that's more of their bluster. Even if it is not, Mr. Bush should ignore it. Gen. Musharraf perhaps cannot be forced to side decisively with the United States against the terrorists, as the administration once hoped -- though much more could be done to raise the price of his feckless cooperation. But Mr. Bush must take every available measure to eliminate the al Qaeda and Taliban operations in Pakistan. If targets can be located, they should be attacked -- with or without Gen. Musharraf's cooperation.

© 2006 The Washington Post Company

Daily Times, January 26, 2006
EDITORIAL: Bajaur accusations recoil on Pakistan

The Pakistan government said last week that the bombing of a village in Bajaur on January 13 was carried out by Afghanistan-based American drones without informing Pakistan. It also claimed that 18 innocent people died in the attack. Three days later someone carried out a suicide-bombing in Afghanistan. The Afghans believe this was done by elements with sanctuaries in Pakistan. Did Kabul see this as some kind of revenge-killing? Certainly, a normally friendly President Hamid Karzai seems to think so. This is evident from the way he has welcomed Tuesday’s wave of public demonstrations in Afghanistan that followed the massive explosion that killed at least 22 men in the town of Spin Boldak on the border with Pakistan. There’s more confusion.

Initially, Pakistan seemed to be firm in its stance that the Bajaur attack was wrong. Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz went to the US saying he was sure there were no Al Qaeda leaders in the village where the Americans struck. But there were “leaks” in the Washington press that contradicted the Pakistani position. Then the US undersecretary of state, Nicholas Burns, toured Pakistan but did not apologise for the Bajaur action. Ominously, he also remained tight-lipped about who was right and who was wrong. Meanwhile, the national press in Pakistan has continued to condemn the Bajaur incident and lambast the Americans.

The Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) government in the NWFP has passed a resolution in the provincial assembly demanding the immediate deportation of the American ambassador in Islamabad. Thousands have protested against America in the streets of Peshawar and other cities. The combined opposition leaders put on ceremonial turbans and tried to visit Bajaur in an act of collective protest, but were stopped by the government. Fiery speeches were made all over the country and for once the government seemed to be with the anti-American opposition. What happened then?

President Pervez Musharraf, who was in Norway lecturing the Nordics ironically on the subject of “Pakistan’s Role for Peace and Development in the Region and Beyond”, said that Al Qaeda fighters were probably killed in the air strike that killed 13 civilians in Damadola village in Bajaur Agency earlier this month. “Now that we’ve started investigating the reality on the ground, yes, we have found that there are foreigners there. That is for sure,” he said. Back in Pakistan there were signs of the coming cock-up in the “gap” that had appeared in the versions of the Bajaur incident put out by the political agent of Bajaur and the prime minister of Pakistan. Finally, it was Pakistan which was proved to have taken a wrong position on what had actually transpired.

Those in Pakistan who have been taking the establishment’s side on the ongoing Pak-Afghan differences over cross-border infiltration must now eat humble pie. They have to read the past with a different gloss. The journalists who got their ears tweaked in the past for reporting too close to the bone on the presence of the Taliban in Pakistan were right. Now the Americans are having doubts about President Musharraf too. Whose side is he on? The America military commanders in Afghanistan have never believed Pakistan’s side of the story. Now they have nudged Mr Karzai to send a blunt message to Islamabad. Protest marches against Pakistan as far away as Herat mean that the anti-Pakistan reaction is orchestrated.

The “leaks” in Washington are coming thick and fast. One official has revealed from his record of intercepted phone messages: “You can draw the Afghan-Pakistan border on a map by looking at the pattern of signal intercepts. The bad guys chatter away in Pakistan, feeling they are safe. That area lights up like a Christmas tree. Then they go silent when they cross into Afghanistan, where they fear getting hit.” In contrast, President Bush talked to Mr Aziz for two hours and described relations with Pakistan as “vital and strategic”. It appears that the red line has been drawn on how far President Musharraf can be trusted in Washington. The fallout in Pakistan, where a strong political consensus is developing against him and the US, will require a lot of damage control.

There is a need to remove the cobwebs from President Musharraf’s policy vis a vis Afghanistan. His operations in South Waziristan have not lent any clarity to his policy of fighting Al Qaeda. In Balochistan, official accusations that India is helping the rebellious sardars dovetail dangerously with rumours that America is behind the mischief. This is not what may be called a good conduct of declared policy, especially as things on the eastern front with India are not going well either. If President Musharraf is double-minded on the policy in the West, it is more dangerous for Pakistan than Afghanistan.

India-US Nuke Deal: Dependent on Vote on Iran at IAEA?



Times of India, January 25, 2006
India should vote against Iran or Nuke deal will 'die': US

NEW DELHI: Just a week ahead of the IAEA meeting on Iran issue, the US on Wednesday made it clear if India did not vote against Tehran's nuclear programme, the fallout on the Indo-US nuclear deal in the Congress would be "devastating" and the initiative will "die".

Washington also feels that the ideas put forth by India on separation of its civilian and military nuclear establishments had not met the "test of credibility" and the negotiations process need to be completed before President George W Bush's visit here in March failing which the "historic opportunity" would be "much less practical".

"We have made it known to them (India) that we would very much like India's support because India has arrived on the world stage and is a very very important player in the world," US Ambassador to India David C Mulford said in a wide-ranging interview.

"If it (India) opposes Iran having nuclear weapons, we think they should record it in the vote," he said.

Mulford's observations come amid intensified efforts by the US and the EU-3 (Britain, France and Germany) to seek world support for the resolution to be placed at the February two of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) meeting for referring Iran's nuclear issue to the UN Security Council for action.

Tuesday, January 24, 2006

CIA penetrates ISI?



The News, January 25, 2006
Reports about CIA infiltrating into ISI denied
By Mariana Baabar

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan on Tuesday categorically denied reports that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United States has succeeded in penetrating the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s premier intelligence network.

"Absolutely rubbish, I categorically deny these allegations as nothing of the sort is happening in the ISI. We have very secure systems for all our communications, especially for sensitive communication for which there are secret codes. Of course, we are aware that the Americans have highly sensitive technical gadgetry and we are aware of the manner that they pick up information on unguarded lines but this does not mean that we let our guard down for a minute," a senior intelligence official told The News.

The official was responding to queries about a report in The Times, reproduced by a local English language daily, which spoke of two issues. One that the United States and Pakistan have an agreement which allows the Americans to strike inside Pakistan if it has the required intelligence, and if Pakistan forces are themselves unable to cope with the situation.

The second comment in The Times report talked of American intelligence saying that they were capable of monitoring the ISI, in case there were still people employed there who were sympathetic to the Taliban and other militants.

"Nothing could be further from the truth. The Army rotates officers in a routine manner and there is no one at this institution working in any area on a permanent basis. If at some stage, because of certain policies, there were such people, then all of them have been removed from such sensitive posts," the official said.

Asked if it was possible for the Americans to come in physically and bug sensitive installations, the official said it was a routine the world over to sweep for such bugs and this was a technique that Pakistan used very frequently as they were aware of the techniques and methods that different capitals applied, and Pakistan too had methods to counter them.

Meanwhile, when the Foreign Office spokesperson was asked about the Pakistan-US agreement as mentioned by The Times, she said: "The Foreign Office is not aware of any such agreement. This question should be directed to the ISPR."

At present, ISPR Director-General Maj-Gen Shaukat Sultan is accompanying President Pervez Musharraf to Oslo. However, the Foreign Office spokesperson said there was certainly no agreement allowing the US to operate inside Pakistan’s territory. "The prime minister in his remarks in New York was very clear and categorical on this issue," she added.

New Report on Baluchistan Crisis




For a new research report on Baluchistan crisis, see Carnegie Endowment's website:
Pakistan: The Resurence of Baluch Nationalism
http://www.carnegieendowment.org/files/CP65.Grare.FINAL.pdf

Monday, January 23, 2006

A cover up or a hidden truth?

Daily Times, January 24, 2006
‘US has deal with Pakistan on strikes in FATA’
Daily Times Monitor

Washington has an understanding with Islamabad that allows the US to strike within Pakistan’s border regions, providing the US has actionable intelligence and Pakistan cannot take firm action, according to a report in US weekly magazine Time.

The source of the report is a Peshawar-based Pakistani intelligence official. “Pakistan’s caveat (to the agreement) is that it would formally protest such strikes to deflect domestic criticism. Some ranking Pakistani officials deny such an agreement exists,” says the report headlined ‘Can Bin Laden be caught?’

According to the Time report, Pakistani and US intelligence agencies have stepped up their search for top Al Qaeda leaders in recent weeks, “with the skies above the mountains buzzing with spy planes and unmanned Predator drones, and a network of local spies and informants has been scouring the landscape for information”. A Pakistani security officer told Time that the CIA has installed sophisticated surveillance equipment in several offices of Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), to monitor any radio and Internet communications between Al Qaeda and its sympathisers.

A Peshawar-based official told Time that in the past month, Pakistani intelligence field agents had been tracking two groups of men who had crossed from Afghanistan into Bajaur Agency, which borders Afghanistan’s Kunar province. In the days before the US air strike of January 13, the search zoomed in on the group headed for Damadola village; counter-terrorist officials believed that some top Al Qaeda figures, including possibly Al Qaeda number 2 Ayman al-Zawahri, might have been in that group. “We knew there were going to be some VIPs, and any of those were worthy” targets, says a US official.

The infiltrators sheltered in a small compound of three houses just outside Damadola. Shortly after 3 am on January 13, locals say, several missiles fired from Predators crashed into the compound, practically obliterating the houses. At least 13 civilians were killed in the attack. Pakistani intelligence officials have been reported as saying four senior Al Qaeda members were killed, but this has not been confirmed. Some counter-terrorism experts are optimistic that the turmoil in Al Qaeda’s high command they hope was caused by the strike in Damadola may force its leaders to expose themselves.

Top level corruption: with facts and figures



Daily Times, January 22, 2006
Take the money and run: Why this prevarication?
Ardeshir Cowasjee

In 1996, Air Marshal Asghar Khan filed a human rights petition in the Supreme Court against General Mirza Aslam Beg, former chief of army staff, Lt General Asad Durrani, former chief of the Inter-Services Intelligence, and Younus Habib of Habib and then Mehran Bank, concerning the criminal distribution of the people’s money for political purposes (HRC 19/96).

During the initial hearing of the petition, General Naseerullah Babar filed in court a copy of a bank account sheet headed “G/L Account. Activity Report. Account 12110101 G. Baig (sic.)” The column heads read “Transaction, Date, Particulars, Debit, Credit.” The numbered transactions took place between October 23 1991 and December 12 1993. The first transaction listed was “Cash-P.O. Karachi Bar Association A/C Gen. Baig (sic.), debit, 5,05,680” (advocate Mirza Adil Beg, Aslam Beg’s nephew, the then president of the KBA, confirms that the KBA received the money). In January 1992 USD 20,000 was sold @ 26.50 and 5,30,000 was credited to the account. Thereafter all debits : “Arshi c/o Gen. Baig (sic.) 2,90,000 ; Cash paid to Gen. Shab 2,40,000 ; Cash Friends 1,00,000 [Aslam Beg’s organisation, FRIENDS, Foundation for Research on National Development and Security] ; Cash TT to Yamin to pay Gen. Shab 3,00,000 ; Cash TT to Yamin Habib 12,00,000 ; Cash Friends 1,00,000 ; Cash Friends 1,00,000 ; Cash paid through YH 10,00,000 ; Cash Friends TT to Salim Khan 2,00,000 ; Cash 1,00,000 ; Cash Towards Friends 5,00,000 ; Cash Asif Shah for Benglow 35,000 ; Cash Friends 1,00,000 ; Cash Friends 1,00,000 ; Cash TT through Yamin for Friends 1,00.000 ; Cash paid to Fakhruddin G Ebrahim 2,00,000 [he confirms having received the money from General Beg as fees and expenses for defending him in the contempt of court charge brought against him – PLD 1993 SC310] ; Cash paid through TT to Yamin for Friends ; Cash paid to Fakhruddin G Ebrahim 1,28,640 [he confirms receipt for fees/expenses for contempt case] ; Cash Guards at 11-A 10,500 ; Cash TT for USD 240,000 Fav. Riaz Malik to City Bank (sic.) New York 68,76,000 ; Cash Friends 1,00,000; Cash Guards at 11-A 10,500 ; Cash Mjr. Kiyani 10,000; Cash mobile phone for Col. Mashadi 28,911 ; Cash TT fav. Qazi Iqbal and M Guddul 3,00,000 ; Cash Mjr. Kiyani 10,000 ; Cash TT to Peshawar 3,00,000 ; Cash deposited at Karachi A/C EC [Election Commission] 3,00,000 ; Cash Guards 24,000 ; Cash TT to Quetta 7,00,000 ; Cash mobile bill of Col. Mashadi 3,237 ; Cash TT to Peshawar Br. 4,00,000 ; Cash deposited at Karachi Br. 4,00,000 ; Cash Guards 11,520 ; Cash TT to Peshawar for EC 2,00,000 ; Cash TT to Quetta for EC 2,00,000 ; Cash Guards 5,760 ; Cash Mjr. Kiyani 5,000 ; Cash A/C Guards 8,640 ; Cash th. YH 2,00,000 ; Cash A/C Guards 5,760 ; Cash TT to Salim Khan 1,00,000.”

An elite host of other political figures who received funds from an ISI account were revealed in the Supreme Court whilst the petition was being heard. Inter alia, Nawaz Sharif received (in rupees) 3.5 million, Lt General Rafaqat [of President Ghulam Ishaq Khan’s election cell] 5.6 million, Mir Afzal 10 million, Ghulam Mustafa Jatoi 5 million, Jam Sadiq Ali 5 million, Mohammed Khan Junejo 2.5 million, Pir Pagaro 2 million, Abdul Hafeez Pirzada Rs.3 million, Yusuf Haroon 5 million [he confirms having received this for Altaf Hussain of the MQM], Muzaffar Hussain Shah 0.3 million, Abida Hussain 1 million, Humayun Marri 5.4 million. Aslam Beg, under oath, revealed the existence of a political cell within the ISI, whilst strangely clarifying that though he was aware of the distribution of funds he was never personally involved.

Further names of anti-PPP politicians who received payments from the ISI during the run-up to the 1990 elections rigged in favour of the IJI and Nawaz Sharif were later revealed : Jamaat-i-Islami Rs.5 million; Altaf Hussain Qureshi and Mustafa Sadiq Rs.0.5 million ; Arbab Ghulam Aftab Rs.0.3 million ; Pir Noor Mohammad Shah Rs.0.3 million ; Arbab Faiz Mohammad Rs.0.3 million ; Arbab Ghulam Habib Rs.0.2 million ; Ismail Rahu Rs.0.2 million ; Liaquat Baloch Rs.1.5 million ; Jam Yusuf Rs.0.75 million; Nadir Magsi Rs. 1 million ; Ghulam Ali Nizamani Rs.0.3 million ; Ali Akbar Nizamani Rs. 0.3 million.

Yet more payments were uncovered: During the Mehrangate investigations of 1993 which led up to the Supreme Court case, Younas Habib of HBL/MBL, as per his statement filed in court, (recorded at Karachi under section 161 Cr.P.C) disclosed that the following political and other pay-offs were made between 1991 and 1994 : “General Mirza Aslam Beg Rs.140 million ; Jam Sadiq Ali (the then chief minister of Sindh), Rs.70 million ; Altaf Hussain (MQM) Rs.20 million, Advocate Yousaf Memon ( for disbursement to Javed Hashmi MNA and others) Rs.50 million ; 1992 - Jam Sadiq Ali, Rs.150 million ; 1993 - Liaquat Jatoi Rs .01 million ; 1993 - Chief minister of Sindh, through Imtiaz Sheikh Rs.12 million; Afaq of the MQM Rs.0.5 million ; 1993 Chief chief minister of Sindh, through Imtiaz Sheikh, Rs. 01. million ; 1993 - Ajmal Khan, a former federal minister, Rs.1.4 million ; 1993 - Nawaz Sharif, former prime minister, Rs.3.5 million ; 27/9/93 Nawaz Sharif, former prime minister, Rs.2.5 million ; 26/9/93 Jam Mashooq Rs.0.5 million ; 26/9/93 Dost Mohammad Faizi Rs. 1 million ; Jam Haider Rs. 2 million ; Jam Mashooq Rs. 3 million ; Adnan, son of Sartaz Aziz, Rs. 1 million ; Nawaz Sharif and Ittefaq Group of Companies Rs.200 million (photocopies of cheques and deposit slips etc already attached with affidavit at page nos. 42 to 73) ; Sardar Farooq Leghari 12/12/93 (payment set/off) Rs.30 million - 6/1/94 Rs.2.0856 million - 19/3/94 Rs.1.92 million.”

Three further payments were recorded : YH TT Peshawar A/c Sherpao for Election 5,00,000 ; Anwar Saifullah for MBL deposit 15,00,000 ; Farooq Leghari PO issued 1,50,00,000, another 1,50,00,000 paid through Bank.

The last hearing of the case was on October 11 1999, one day before the army, under General Pervez Musharraf, had little option but to overthrew the ‘heavily mandated’ Nawaz Sharif government, when the sitting chief justice, Saiduzzaman Siddiqui, announced that he had reserved judgment on the ISI case.

Before he could write his judgment, General Babar saw him in chambers and prevailed upon him to send notice to and examine Farooq Ahmad Khan Leghari and others mentioned on the lists before announcing his judgment. In the interest of justice, the CJ ordered that the desired notices be issued.

Thereafter, the case was apparently ‘morgued’. Asghar on several occasions reminded Saiduzzaman’s successor, the new chief justice, Irshad Hasan Khan (who after retirement was appointed chief election commissioner to ‘supervise’ the 2002 elections), and requested him to take up the case but he received no response. Justice Khan was far too busy attending to more vital affairs.

On August 10 2002, Asghar addressed a letter to the succeeding Chief Justice of Pakistan Sheikh Riaz Ahmad, its subject “HRC No.19/96, Air Marshal (R) Mohammad Asghar Khan versus General (R) Mirza Aslam Beg.” It reads : “I should like to draw you attention to my letter MAK/12/5 addressed to your predecessor on 8 April 2000 requesting that the above case may please be reopened. I have received no reply to this letter and elections are due on 10 October 2002. Many of the people who are guilty of misconduct will, if the case is not heard, be taking part in the elections and the purpose of those elections will thus be defeated. I would request an early hearing and decision in this case.” There was no response. Justice slept.

Many of the people guilty of gross misconduct and of, in fact, corruption, did take part in the elections and are now sitting in our assemblies and the most honourable Senate. President General Pervez Musharraf himself admitted after the 2002 elections that he was helpless before the ‘system’, the parliamentary form of governance, and presumably a dishonest and corrupted election commission. He told the people that he had no option but to have in his government rogues, robbers and other criminal elements who should rightly be behind bars.

The point of now repeating all this – which has been written on several occasions prior to the last elections, is that we have scheduled elections, supposedly of the free and fair kind, coming up in 2007. Our new Chief Justice of Pakistan, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, has so far proved himself to be a conscientious and pro-active chief justice who carries the cause of justice in all departments firmly in his mind. When I met that indefatigable warrior, Asghar Khan, recently, I suggested to him, and he agreed, that he should approach Chief Justice Chaudhry and ask that his petition be revived and heard – truly in the larger national interest – so that come the next round of elections the ISI (or any other sinister organization which may in the meantime be rigged up) may be restrained from any activity relating to the elections, those people who have been deemed to be corrupt may be barred from standing for election, and the election commission may be thoroughly cleaned up and then be given full charge of holding the elections free from any interference.

Pakistani opposition's complaints to the US



Daily Times, January 22, 2006
Politicians complain about army, Punjab to Nicholas Burns
By Shahzad Raza

ISLAMABAD: Pakistani politicians on Saturday criticised the armed forces, the Punjab province and intelligence agencies in a meeting with Nicholas Burns, the US deputy secretary of state for political affairs. Burns said he supported democracy in Pakistan but refused to comment on the country’s internal matters.

The visiting US official held a meeting with the leaders of opposition and ruling parties. The politicians raised internal matters like unequal distribution of resources and lack of consensus on Kalabagh Dam. “Meeting Pakistani politicians is a learning experience for me. We (the US government) want to play a role in the promotion of democracy in Asia. And Pakistan is fundamentally important to us,” sources privy to meeting quoted Burns as saying.

Burns described his meeting with President Pervez Musharraf as comprehensive. He said his government was looking at political stability in Pakistan, which could not be achieved without strong democracy. He called Pervez Musharraf a friend of the United States.

MNA Fauzia Wahab of the Pakistan People’s Party Parliamentarians questioned how the US could promote democracy in Pakistan when it supported a military dictator. She said political parties had been marginalised by the military regime. She told the US official that former prime minister Benazir Bhutto was being threatened with court cases if she returned to Pakistan.

Abdul Hayee Baloch, a Baloch nationalist, briefed Burns about the Balochistan situation. He claimed the Balochistan had suffered a lot from “military dictators”.

Nasreen Jaleel, a leader of the Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM), complained that Sindh was not given its due share by the federal government. Sources said the MQM leader criticised President Musharraf for announcing Kalabagh Dam and launching an operation in Balochistan.

Sources said Burns refused to comment on Pakistan’s internal issues. He said provincial autonomy and the distribution of resources were purely internal issues.

Human rights activist Asma Jehangir said that Musharraf’s policies were “damaging the federation of Pakistan”. “Elections are held in ISI offices rather than in towns,” sources quoted her as telling the US official.

MNA Sheikh Waqas Ahmed, who belonged to the ruling PML, claimed intelligence agencies and military officials were patronising banned religious outfits.

Friday, January 20, 2006

Indian Media's Stereotyping of Pakistanis

Against the Grain: Pakistan, Islam and Indian Media Stereotypes by Yoginder Sikand
January 20, 2006

Contrary to Indian media representations, the average Pakistani is just about as religious or otherwise as the average Indian. The average Pakistani is certainly not the wild-eyed fanatic baying for non-Muslim blood or waging violent jihad to establish global Islamic hegemony that our media would have us believe. Like the average Indian, he is emotionally attached to and culturally rooted in his religion, but he does not wear it on his sleeve and nor does it dictate every thought or act of his. In fact, the thing that first strikes the Indian visitor to Pakistan is how almost identical the average Pakistani is, looks and behaves to the average north Indian.

Almost all the many people I met in the course of a recent month-long visit to Pakistan that took me to several places in Punjab and Sindh do not even remotely fit the description of the average Pakistani peddled by our media. Islamist radical groups undeniably do have an important presence in parts of Pakistan, but they certainly do not command widespread popular support all over the country. This explains the continual dismal performance of religious parties in every successive Pakistani election. Despite concerted efforts by Islamist and mullah-based parties to establish a theocracy in the country, Pakistani politics are not dominated by religion as much as by economic, ethnic and regional concerns. It is, therefore, crucial not to exaggerate the influence of radical religious outfits in Pakistan, as the Indian media generally does.

Indian media descriptions about Pakistan tend to portray Islam in the country as a seamless monolith. The variety of local expressions of Islam are consistently overlooked so as to to reinforce the image of a single version of Islam that is defined by the most radical of Islamist groups. The fact, however, is, that most Punjabis and Sindhis, that is to say a majority of Pakistanis, ascribe to or are associated with the traditions of the Sufi saints, which are anathema for such Islamists. Popular Sufism is deeply-rooted in Pakistani soil and provides a strong counter to radical Islamist groups and their exclusivist agenda. Many Sufis were folk heroes, radicals in their own right, bitterly critiquing tyrannical rulers as well as Muslim and Hindu priests. This is why they exercised a powerful influence on the masses, irrespective of religion. This explains, in part, why Islamist radicals are so fiercely opposed to the traditions that have developed over the centuries around such figures.

The popular Sufi tradition in large parts of Pakistan thus limits the appeal of radical Islamists, making the chances of an Islamist take-over of the country a remote possibility. In recent years, it is true, these groups have gained particular salience and strength, but this is said to be less a reflection of a growing popular commitment to the Islamist cause than to other factors. One of these is the role of the state. Although the ideological founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, envisaged Pakistan as a secular Muslim state, successive Pakistani regimes governments have used Islam to bolster their own frail support base, exactly in the same manner as the Congress and the BJP have done with Hinduism in the Indian case. Islam has also been used to wield together a number of the country's ethnic groups that have little in common other than their profession of Islam, in the same way in which advocates of both 'soft' Hindutva, such as the Congress, and 'hard' Hindutva, such as the BJP, have sought to invoke Brahminical Hinduism to define the Indian nation-state. Hindutva ideologues propagate a form of Hindu 'nationalism' that has no space for Indians of other faiths, and is, in fact, based on an unrelenting hatred of non-Hindu 'others'. Creating a Hindu identity in this fashion is predicated on excising all elements of culture and tradition that Hindus are seen to share with others. The same has happened with the case of official as well radical versions of Islam in Pakistan. Yet, it is important to remember that this is not the only, and certainly not the dominant, form of Islam in Pakistan, as my interaction with numerous Pakistanis from different walks of life revealed to me.

'Radical Islamist groups are not a true reflection or representative of Pakistani Islam', a social activist friend of mine from Sindh explains. 'State manipulation of religion', he argues, 'has had a major role to play in promoting radical Islamism in Pakistan', which, he says, 'is largely an expression of elite politics and Western imperialist manipulation'. 'To add to state patronage of such groups', he points out, 'is the fact of mounting economic and social inequalities, sustained military rule, the continued stranglehold of feudal lords and the absence of mechanisms for expressing democratic dissent, all of which have enabled radical Islamist groups to assert the claim of representing normative Islam against other competing versions and visions of the faith'. In some parts of Pakistan, such as Baluchistan and the North-West Frontier Province, he says, electoral support for Islamists 'reflects anti-American sentiments rather than popular demands for theocratic rule'. Such groups, he says, have gained added strength from the ongoing conflict in Kashmir by 'tapping into Pakistani nationalist sentiments on this issue in the same way as Hindutva groups used the Kashmir conflict in India, both seeking to present the issue in religious terms'. 'In short', he claims, 'the limited support that radical Islamist groups enjoy in Pakistan reflects less a fierce commitment to their ultimate agenda of strict Islamist rule than a protest against the system which, ironically, has abetted such groups for its own purposes'.

'The task before Indians and Pakistanis seriously concerned about the future of our common subcontinent', says another friend of mine, a journalist from Lahore, 'is to rescue our religious traditions from the monopolistic claims of the radicals. Islamism in Pakistan and Hindutva in India feed on each other while claiming to be vociferous foes. We need to revive popular forms of religion, such as Sufism and Bhakti, that are accepting of other faiths and that at the same time are socially engaged and critique the system of domination that produces radicalism as a reaction while at the same time using it as a means of stifling challenges to it'.

Inside the mind of a Pakistani General!



Daily Times, January 20, 2006
‘No changes to Iqbal’s tomb, VIPs can stay out’By Anjum Herald Gill

LAHORE: Punjab Archaeology Department has rejected Pakistan Rangers’ demand for more room in Allama Iqbal’s mausoleum, saying the provincial law did not allow changing the monument, sources told Daily Times on Thursday. The issue began when allegedly the Rangers director general (DG) had to wait outside the mausoleum during a visit by the Chinese premier and his wife, because there was no space left in the room. The grave’s onyx cenotaph presented by the Shah of Afghanistan has been built in a way that it could not be changed, leaving space for only three people to lay floral wreaths and pray. When President Musharraf visited the tomb in April 2001, he was told that the Rangers DG had to wait for the Chinese prime minister outside, and that the tomb needed an extension. The Archaeology Department made a committee thereafter, which suggested that the terrace, which is part of the main cenotaph, should be cut to make more room. The proposal was rejected. The committee then proposed making a covered area outside the mausoleum where a platform could be made to lay wreaths. Rangers authorities contacted the Archaeology Department to ask how much red sandstone they had to extend the building. They were told that the extension could not be made because it was against the law. “Mausoleums of Maulana Roomi, Hafiz Sherazi and Sheikh Saadi also have little room, and people pray outside it, ” sources said from the department said. “It is against the law to tamper with the monument.” When Iqbal died in 1938, the British government gave special permission for his burial outside the mosque. The mausoleum was designed by a three-member committee of prominent Muslims. Nizam of Hyderabad’s architect Zain Yar Jang was also invited for the purpose. The red sandstone burial chamber was completed in 1950.

Tuesday, January 17, 2006

The coming water crisis

Daily Times, January 18, 2006
World Bank report on Pakistan water resources: Water economy: running dry

Pakistan is one of the world’s most arid countries, with an average rainfall of under 240 mm a year. The population and the economy are heavily dependent on an annual influx into the Indus river system (including the Indus, Jhelum, Chenab, Ravi, Beas and Sutlej rivers) of about 180 billion cubic meters of water, that emanates from the neighbouring countries and is mostly derived from snow-melt in the Himalayas. Throughout history, people have adapted to the low and poorly distributed rainfall by either living along riverbanks or by careful husbanding and management of local water resources. One of the greatest of human civilisations – the Indus Valley civilisation (Harrapa and Mohenjo Daro) – flourished along the banks of the Indus.

This precarious, low-level balance between man and water was decisively shifted with the advent of large-scale irrigation technology in the 19th century. The Indus irrigation system became the largest contiguous irrigation system in the world. The desert literally bloomed, with irrigated agriculture providing the platform for the development of the modern economy of Pakistan.

This hydraulic economy has faced and surmounted three massive challenges in the last half century. The first challenge arose because the lines of Partition of the Indo-Pak sub-continent severed the irrigated heartland of Punjab from the life-giving waters of the Ravi, Beas and Sutlej rivers. In an unprecedented triumph of water diplomacy, Pakistani engineers, together with their Indian counterparts and the World Bank, negotiated the Indus Waters Treaty, giving Pakistan rights in perpetuity to the waters of the Indus, Jhelum and Chenab rivers, which comprise 75 percent of the flow of the whole Indus system.

The second challenge was that there was now a mismatch between the location of Pakistan’s water (in the western rivers) and the major irrigated area in the east. Again Pakistan’s water engineers were up to the task, building the world’s largest earth-fill dam, the Tarbela on the Indus, and link canals, which ran for hundreds of miles and carried flows ten times the flow of the Thames River. To a considerable degree (but not completely) the “heroic stage” of water engineering in Pakistan was now over – as in other countries the major challenges were now those of management. This is the case in all countries. But in the case of Pakistan, however, the “heroic” era had involved particularly blunt affronts to the living organism that the river represents. The natural flow regime was dramatically altered: rivers which had previously meandered over wide plains were now confined within narrow channels, sediments which had previously nourished the delta were trapped, vast quantities of water were disgorged onto deserts, substantial parts of which were of oceanic origin and highly saline. It was this last reality which gave rise to the third major challenge facing Pakistan shortly after Independence. Hundreds of billions of cubic meters of water were now stored in the naturally-deep aquifers of Punjab alone. In many areas water tables had reached the level of the land, giving rise to the twin curse of waterlogging and salinity.

In the early 1960s, it appeared that Pakistan was doomed, ironically, to a watery, salty grave. With equal doses of good thinking, good planning and good luck, this problem is now not beaten (nor will it ever be) but controlled and managed, to a degree that no one foresaw fifty years ago. The good thinking was the application of water science and economics by many of Pakistan’s best and brightest in conjunction with many of the best water minds in the world. The “solution” was not the obvious one of lining canals and putting less water on the land but of increasing the use of groundwater, thus both increasing evapotranspiration, drawing down the groundwater table and leaching much of the salts down and out of the root zone. The good thinking and good planning were classic “public goods”. The “good luck” driver of this revolution was the modest but transforming tubewell and diesel engine, bought and managed by millions of farmers for the simple reason that this decentralised “on-demand” source of water enabled them to greatly increase their crop yields and incomes.

So the modern history of water development and management in Pakistan is one in which the glass can be seen as more than half full. But, as this report will show, the glass can also be viewed as much more than half empty too. Once again, the survival of a modern and growing Pakistan is threatened by water.

The facts are stark.
For complete report, see:
http://www.dailytimes.com.pk/default.asp?page=2006\01\18\story_18-1-2006_pg7_27

Monday, January 16, 2006

The Mind of the Mullah: Understanding the Fall of Dhaka

Daily Times, January 17, 2006
SECOND OPINION: Wrangling witnesses of Fall of Dhaka —Khaled Ahmed’s TV Review

General Umar was more upset than he should have been. His reference to his own piety was not appropriate. The first thing is to decide about coming to the programme. Once you decide to face it then be prepared to face the questions without getting hot under the collar

For a long time, Pakistan was dominated by the opinion that East Pakistan separated from Pakistan because the Indians engineered it and finally invaded it to assist its agents there. Then in the period of freedom of expression under Prime Minister Junejo, people began to write the real story. Two opinions began to appear, as if in a clash. Even that period passed and now those who say that India broke Pakistan up are increasingly on the defensive. Even the generals have started disagreeing.

GEO (December 2005) in his Jawadeh programme Iftikhar Ahmad grilled Major-General (retd) Ghulam Umar on the Fall of Dhaka. Gen Umar insisted that East Pakistan fell because of the secret plans of India, Mujib’s traitorous link-up with India, the Soviet Union and the United States, which did not send its naval fleet to save Pakistan.

In his book The White House and Pakistan (OUP), FS Aijazuddin informs us from official documents that President Nixon delivered an ultimatum to India that if it attacked West Pakistan the US will move against it. He made the threatening move on the sea to back it up. And the threat worked. There was no American commitment to save East Pakistan. There was also no similar Chinese commitment.

In his book, Gen ‘Tiger’ Niazi accused Gen Ghulam Umar of being in the inner circle of Yahya Khan and even of embezzling money, misappropriating Rs 600,000 and returning only Rs 300,000 when caught. Gen Umar denied the charge and said he could not answer the allegations when they cropped up because he was placed under house arrest by Bhutto for five and a half years.

The political factor has cropped up. Bhutto’s act of confining him and Zia’s favour to him marks him. But he is no longer closed to the ‘non-ideological’ causes. He wants the state to re-investigate causes other than India’s role. The fact is that the military officers have finally started telling their story and this causes clashes among them.

The charge against Gen Umar was that he had interfered to scuttle an agreement already arrived at between Yahya and Mujib before Umar arrived in Dhaka from Islamabad. He met with General Yahya, General Tikka Khan and General Khudadad in Dhaka where he convinced them not to agree on anything with Mujib and to start Operation Blitz.

General Umar vehemently denied the allegation. He said he knew nothing about Operation Blitz. Another accusation, according to Bangladeshi sources, was that Gen Umar together with Generals Gul Hasan and Tikka Khan had decided that Bengali intellectuals and journalists would be put to death.

Gen Umar denied it. He kept insisting that he was clean because of his religious background. He was from the family of Islamic scholars and ascetics (ulema and fuqara).

Gen Umar was more upset than he should have been. His reference to his own piety was not appropriate. The first thing is to decide about coming to the programme. Once you decide to face it then be prepared to face the questions without getting hot under the collar. Gen Umar gave a bad interview.

Gen Umar thought Gen Sher Ali, as information minister of Gen Yahya, was a great man because he campaigned to make Pakistan Islamic. He said he had proof that India had plotted the fall of East Pakistan together with Mujib and the Soviet Union with the presumed acquiescence of the United States.

He said Bhutto knew that he would not have absolute power over Pakistan as long as there was East Pakistan, so he got rid of East Pakistan. Bhutto also wanted to disgrace the Pakistan army.

Another weak part of Gen Umar’s defence. Sher Ali was a bit of a comic figure, impersonating Napoleon at night and doing Islam during the day. Sher Ali was a forerunner of General Zia, only he was more grotesquely unreal — a ‘nawab’ general gone Islamic. Another ‘nawab’ general Yaqub Khan was more gifted intellectually. He ducked out of East Pakistan.

To the question that a recent book by Hussain Haqqani had also indicted him, Gen Umar said that he had no assets; he just could not be dishonest. To the accusation that the Hamudur Rehman Commission on the Fall of East Pakistan had also stated negative things about him, asking the state to indict him, he said he was ready to be tried in the court of law. He said he took no part in the intrigues in which other generals were involved. As for East Pakistan it was now Bangladesh and it did not rejoin India and was an Islamic state.

Gen Umar was reductionist about Islam in Bangladesh today. He presumed that Pakistanis no longer knew much about the state of Islamic terror in Bangladesh. He may have been right. Our minds are closed on Islam in that country. Today, an acceptance of the constitutional nomenclature of Islamic state for Bangladesh would be a shameful acceptance of Islam as terrorism.

GEO (December 13, 2005) Host Hamid Mir spoke of inter-faith dialogue with Prof Khalid Alvi and Dr Khalid Masud and a Christian leader, Mr William. Mir said how could we talk to the West when one leader (Bush) was talking of Crusades? To this Mr William replied that the West did not believe that what was happening in Iraq was a Crusade. He said he was opposed to the American invasion of Iraq.

Khalid Masud said that abusing religion politically was an issue before the Muslims. He said global capital and liberalism were destroying Islam. Khalid Alvi said that 7/7 in London was the wrong thing to do. He said Britain was a good state but the new laws it was bringing in were wrong. He said he saluted the British parliament for saying no to Blair’s anti-Muslim bill, that is, arrest without charge for 90 days.

Dr Masud, like his predecessor chief of the CCI, has locked horns with global capitalism. Dr SM Zaman, too, had attacked globalisation in a conference which was not on the subject. Why should a specialist on religion dabble in economics? Our thinkers (Sir Syed and Allama Iqbal and before them Abduh and Rashid Rida of Egypt) allowed themselves to comment on banking only to accept riba as its prohibition was keeping the Muslims out of trading.

Islamic orthodoxy has its own economic doctrine, which doesn’t jibe with any system that the world knows today. In the above chat show Mr William came out the winner because of his moderation and self-criticism.

A Q Khan Network: How much the US knew all along?


Daily Times, January 17, 2006
‘US knew all along about AQ Khan network’
By Khalid Hasan

WASHINGTON: Washington was keeping a close watch on Dr AQ Khan all through the years but finds it “politically inconvenient” do admit that now, according to a lengthy report in a reputable American magazine on Pakistan’s nuclear establishment and the Khan affair.

The first part of the investigative report, written by William Langewiesche, appeared in Atlantic Monthly in November 2005, while the second part has been published in the magazine’s first issue of the new year.

Langewiesche quotes a US source as saying somewhere in the 1980s, “We have a very strong interest in Dr Khan and the Khan Research Laboratories. We pay very close attention to his work. In fact, our interest in this man is so intense that you can assume if he takes a toilet break and goes to the john, we know about it. We know where he is.”

Langewiesche, who visited Pakistan for interviews and information-gathering more than once, writes, “Though it would be politically inconvenient to admit this now, the United States was aware not only of Khan’s peddling of nuclear wares to Iran but also of the likely involvement of the army and the government of Pakistan. (Mark) Hibbs (an American reporter for Nucleonics Week magazine) has reported that the US ambassador to Islamabad from 1988 to 1991, Robert B Oakley, went around the embassy fuming, ‘They sold that stuff to those bastards!’ (a reference to Iran) and believes that Oakley expressed the same emotion more politely at the National Security Council. Oakley, who now works at the National Defence University, in Washington, DC, does not recall knowing of the sales to Iran when he was ambassador, and says he was not asked to raise the matter with the Pakistani government. For political reasons more than for reasons of national security, these are some of the most closely held secrets in the United States. For the same reasons, the apparent lack of good information is pointed to as yet another US intelligence failure … when in reality the CIA knew fairly well what was happening, and an awareness of Pakistani actions should count as a US intelligence success.”

Langewiesche, who interviewed Dr Mubashar Hasan, finance minister under Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, quotes him as saying that the late Munir Ahmed Khan, “AQ Khan’s despised rival” and head of the Pakistan Atomic Energy Commission, repeatedly complained to him in the late 1980s that “AQ Khan was corrupt and, more important, that he was involved in selling Pakistan’s nuclear-weapons technology abroad”.

According to Hasan, Munir Ahmed Khan had taken the same complaints to reporter Mark Hibbs that the Pakistani procurement network during the making of the bomb remained large and robust, providing not only for AQ Khan’s uranium-enrichment plant but also for a parallel programme to acquire plutonium - the alternative material for a fission bomb - which was led by Munir Ahmed Khan, at the head of the PAEC. AQ Khan exploited the connections he had developed in acquiring nuclear weapons and, by neatly diverting the inbound procurement flows, eventually set up a virtual nuclear-weapons market in which countries could buy the entire package, from the necessary machine shops and centrifuges to the blueprints for a bomb, he states. One of the Pakistani procurement people, he recalls, was Mazhar Malik who lived in south London and ran a small trading company by the name of Development & Technology Enterprises, Ltd.

Langewiesche says of the offer allegedly made on behalf of Dr Khan to Iraq that it was not taken up because “the Iraqis suspected that the offer might be a scam or a trap; they asked for a sample of the goods - possibly a component or blueprints. They never received the sample, because the Gulf War then erupted.”

Meanwhile, the reporter Hibbs, who lives in Germany, writes Langewiesche, “was beginning to piece together the signs that Pakistan’s nuclear-procurement network had expanded into the business of spreading these weapons around … Pakistan’s sale of nuclear-weapons technology abroad did not require a deliberative process, a chain of command, or a formal commitment to proceed. More likely it took the shape of opportunities that occasionally arose and were acted on by a small circle of friends - the country’s military rulers, its co-opted politicians, and, of course, AQ Khan and his men. They knew that such activities would provoke the United States, Europe, and other great powers - but they did not think of themselves as bad people, or believe that they were breaking international law. Whatever profits they hoped to gain from these deals would have been as much for the treasury as for their personal accounts - albeit in a country where such distinctions have little meaning. As to questions about the morality of promoting such lethal technology, they had some questions of their own - about the fairness of discriminatory non-proliferation treaties and a world order in which the established nuclear powers seemed determined to ‘disarm the disarmed’. This was the emotional spillover from Pakistan’s experience of building a bomb, and it fed a genuine sense of solidarity with all other nuclear aspirants, including even a potential antagonist like Iran.”

Langewiesche refers to the then army chief of staff, Gen Mirza Aslam Beg, who in 1991 returned from a trip to Tehran openly advocating the export of nuclear-weapons technology to Iran and pointing to the several billion dollars’ worth of state revenue that might be in the offing. “Beg,” he writes, “is an anti-American with sympathies for Iran, and he says that he is the target of a Jewish conspiracy of lies. Be that as it may, he was told to keep quiet in the early 1990s, presumably because the transfer of blueprints and centrifuges was already under way.”

The CIA, he states, had in the meanwhile concluded that the Pakistan-Iran connection had cooled, in part because the centrifuges that Pakistan had sold were castoffs, prone to vibration and inefficient compared with more modern designs. “As a result US interest in Khan diminished, and to some extent the trail was allowed to go cold. Hindsight shows that this was a mistake: Khan remained as ambitious as ever, and like a good vendor, he offered improvements to his client. His relations with Iran were solid and all the better because they were out of sight. Throughout that decade, however, as Hibbs occasionally reported, US suspicions remained strong that Iran was continuing to pursue a nuclear-weapons programme, with the perhaps unwitting aid of Russia and China, both of which were eager to sell civil nuclear technology to Iran - as they are today.”

Hibbs, writes Langewiesche, asked a confidential US source in Washington in late 2002 as to where Iran had got its centrifuges and the answer was Pakistan. Earlier, the United States had leaked word that North Korea had received centrifuge designs and possibly prototypes from Pakistan in return for missile technology, in a state-to-state swap. The leak was directed not against Pakistan but against North Korea, which soon restarted its plutonium-reprocessing facilities and expelled IAEA inspectors. The IAEA knew about the Pakistan-Iran link but was not willing to say so publicly, as it was “all being discreetly negotiated between the IAEA, the United States, and other countries”. Hibbs, who was chasing the story, said the problem for the United States was that Pakistan was again now a trusted ally, this time in the effort to destroy Al Qaeda.

He was also asked to “pipe down”. But he did not. Hibbs recalled to Langewiesche, “Anyway, we kept working on Pakistan, and more and more bits of the story got confirmed. I kept fingering Pakistan, fingering Pakistan, and pissing off the IAEA and the US government, because at that time they were saying, ‘We want to make a deal with these people. We want to make sure it doesn’t get out of control.’” The US did not want to control the activity but the “story” of the activity.

According to Langewiesche, “Behind closed doors in 2000 US officials confronted the Musharraf regime with what they thought was irrefutable evidence (much of it photographic) of the centrifuge trade. The Pakistanis categorically denied that any such activity had taken place. They looked the Americans in the eye and lied, and they did not care that the Americans knew it. The transfers continued. The Americans persisted, some believing that bombs in the hands of Pyongyang would be more dangerous even than bombs in the hands of Baghdad or Tehran. Eventually Musharraf came up with a convenient answer: while admitting to no wrongdoing by Pakistan or himself, or to any consummated transfers of nuclear technology, he quietly pointed at Khan, essentially for being out of control.”
------------------
For the Atlantic Monthly article, see:
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200601/aq-khan

Was Zawahiri there?:

The News, January 17, 2006
Lucky and not-so-lucky Damadola villagers
By Rahimullah Yusufzai

PESHAWAR: Teenager Samiullah talks incoherently while recalling the US aerial strike that demolished his home in Damadola village in Bajaur tribal agency last Friday and killed 11 of his family members. He still believes some of his near and dear ones are alive and would be back after undergoing treatment at the hospital.

The 16-year-old boy was lucky to have survived the attack in the dead of the night. In fact, he wasn’t home. He had gone to his uncle’s home located nearby to spend the night with his cousins as part of the Eidul Azha celebrations.

Everybody else in the family home was killed or injured. His 65-year old father, Bakhtpur Khan, and mother Noor Pari, 50, perished in the missile strike on their cemented home. Two of his brothers, 25-year-old Nazeer Mohammad and 18-year-old Amir Mohammad, were also killed. He also lost two sisters named Madia and Sadiqa aged 9 and 10 years, respectively.

No wonder then that Samiullah has become disoriented. Any other person would have behaved similarly or even worse after experiencing so much suffering. Samiullah’s uncle Bashir survived the attack but his life was turned upside down after losing his wife and sons Tayyab, aged 15, and Zahidullah, 13. His younger brother Said Rahman’s wife and a nephew Hussain were also killed. Bashir was injured and is now under treatment at a hospital in Khaar, headquarters of Bajaur Agency.

Mohammad Sadiq and Shah Zaman, two other uncles of Samiullah, escaped unhurt in the attack but their home located nearby was half destroyed. Sadiq, young and more articulate than the other survivors of the US attack, has become the family spokesman after having granted scores of interviews to print, radio and television journalists.

Strong-nerved and calm, he has by now grasped all the questions that reporters are likely to ask. "We were lucky to survive but our material losses were huge. The collapsed rooms and furnishings and the cattleheads that were killed must be worth Rs 3.2 million," he estimated.

The third home that suffered two missile hits belonged to five bothers. Couple of adjacent homes where two of their remaining brothers lived didn’t sustain any damage. A mosque and a madrassa for girls sited nearby also escaped damage. One of the brothers, Mohammad Noor, lost two young sons in the attack. One of them, Saeedullah, was a Hafiz-i-Quran and 25 years old. His brother Mohammad Usman was 15. Two of their young female cousins, Aasia and Panra, were injured and hospitalised. Their father Badshah Khan survived the attack. Mohammad Saeed, Mohammad Khan and Mohammad Ismail, the remaining brothers, also survived. The last-named is Pesh Imam (prayer leader) of the mosque and runs the Madrassa for girls.

The owners of the three homes that were hit by US missiles are related to each other. In fact, they are all jewellers by profession and most of them own small jewellery shops in Inayat Qala town, located at a distance of three kilometres from Damadola. They had earned enough money to build sturdy, cemented homes. But the missile strike was so devastating that most of the dwellings were flattened and roofs were blown away.

At least four children went missing after the attack. They somehow managed to run out of Bakhtpur Khan’s home to take refuge in nearby houses. Saima, Shahana, Zahra and Hassan Nawaz were initially listed as dead. That is how the death toll was reported at 18 or even more. Subsequently, the four children were found and the death toll was corrected. It is now 13 and that appears to be final.

There are 13 fresh graves, all covered with white and blue plastic sheets to keep away the rains, in an agricultural field just opposite the destroyed homes. In fact, villagers explained that they dug one large grave and then put stones in it to make compartments for each dead person. Initially, 18 to 20 compartments were made because it was estimated that the death toll could be that much. But later the empty graves were filled up with earth again and levelled.

The fact that more graves were dug up earlier is probably the reason for the unsubstantiated and apparently misleading reports that five or even more bodies of al-Qaeda figures such as Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri were taken away for secret burial somewhere else. Hundreds of villagers had reached the site of the US missile attack by 4 am Friday and volunteers struggled until 8 am to remove the debris and retrieve the bodies. Sahibzada Haroon-ur-Rasheed was among them and he and others who remained on site vehemently denied reports that some of the bodies were taken away. There is no evidence to support this claim and it appears this story was concocted to justify the inexcusable US missile attack that killed innocent men, women and children.

Sunday, January 15, 2006

What is Happening in Baluchistan: From former KGB Sources




Note: Its an interesting story and analysis about how Baluch insurgency started and what are the geo-political factors involved in this conflict. The news source claims to get it from the two former KGB operators who created Baluchistan Liberation Army. Its very insightful, though it is difficult to assess how much truth it contains.
Blog owner

Pakistan: Unveiling the Mystery of Balochistan Insurgency - Part One
NEWS CENTRAL ASIA
Tariq Saeedi in Ashgabat, With Sergi Pyatakov in Moscow, Ali Nasimzadeh in Zahidan, Qasim Jan in Kandahar and S M Kasi in Quetta, Additional reporting by Rupa Kival in New Delhi and Mark Davidson in Washington

Deception and treachery. Live and let die. The ultimate zero sum game. Repetition of bloody history: Call it what you may, something is happening in the Pakistani province of Balochistan that defies comprehension on any conventional scale.

Four correspondents and dozens of associates who collectively logged more than 5000 kilometers during the past seven weeks in pursuit of a single question – What is happening in Balochistan? – have only been able to uncover small parts of the entire picture.

However, if the parts have any proportional resemblance to the whole, it is a frightening and mind-boggling picture.

Every story must start somewhere. This story should conveniently have started on the night of 7 January 2005 when gas installations at Sui were rocketed and much of Pakistan came to almost grinding halt for about a week. Or, we should have taken the night of 2 January 2005 as the starting point when an unfortunate female doctor was reportedly gang-raped in Sui. However, the appropriate point to peg this story is January 2002 and we shall return to it in a minute.

Actually, the elements for the start of insurgency in Balochistan had been put in place already and the planners were waiting for a convenient catalyst to set things in motion. The gang-rape of 2 Jan, around which this sticky situation has been built, was just the missing ingredient the planners needed.

Two former KGB officers explained that the whole phenomenon has been assembled on skilful manipulation of circumstances. We shall keep returning to their comments throughout this report.

As Pakistan and India continue to mend fences, as Iran, Pakistan and India try to pool efforts to put a shared gas pipeline, as Pakistan, Afghanistan and Turkmenistan join hands to lay a natural gas pipeline of great economic and strategic importance, as the United States continues to laud the role of Pakistan as a frontline nation in war against terrorism, as Chinese contractors forge ahead with construction work in Gawadar port and on trans-Balochistan highway, as the Pakistan government makes efforts to bring Balochistan under the rule of law and eliminate safe havens for terrorists and drug barons, as the whole region tries to develop new long-term models to curb terrorism and bring prosperity to far flung areas, there is a deadly game going on in the barren and hostile hills of Balochistan. Liens are muddy; there are no clear-cut sectors to distinguish friends from foes.

Right in the beginning we would like to clarify that when we say Indians, we mean some Indians and not the Indian government because we don’t have any way of ascertaining whether the activities of some Indian nationals in Pakistan represent the official policy of their government or is it merely the adventurism of some individuals or organizations. When we say Iranians or Afghans, we mean just that: Some Iranians or Afghans. We don’t even know whether the Iranian and Afghan players in Balochistan are trying to serve the interests of their countries or whether their loyalties lie elsewhere.

But – and it is a BUT with capital letters – when we say Americans or Russians, we have reasons to suspect that the American and Russian involvement in Balochistan is sanctioned, at least in part, by Pentagon (if not White House) and Kremlin.

We would also like to acknowledge that the picture we have gathered is far from complete and except for the explanatory comments of two former KGB officials, we have no way of connecting the dots in any meaningful sequence. For the sake of honesty, this story should better remain abrupt and incomplete.

The story we are going to tell may sound a lot like cheap whodunit but that is what we found out there.

Before zooming in to January 2002, let’s set the background.

We consulted Sasha and Misha, two former KGB officers who are Afghanists – the veterans of Russo-Afghan war – and they seem to know Balochistan better than most Pakistanis. Obviously, Sasha and Misha are not their real names. They live on the same street in one of the quieter suburbs of Moscow. Two bonds tie them together in their retirement: While on active duty in KGB, they were both frequent travelers to Balochistan during the Russo-Afghan war where they were tasked to foment trouble in Pakistan; and they are both wary of Vodka, the mandatory nectar of Russian cloak and dagger community. They visit each other almost every day and that is why it was easy to catch them together for long chats over quantities of green tea and occasional bowls of Borsch.

We made more than a dozen visits to the single-bedroom flat of Misha, where Sasha was also found more often than not, and we picked their brains on Balochistan situation. As and when we unearthed new information on Balochistan, we returned to Sasha and Misha for comments.

As they told us, during the Russo-Afghan war, the Soviet Union was surprised by the ability and resourcefulness of Pakistan to generate a quick and effective resistance movement in Afghanistan. To punish Pakistan and to answer back in the same currency, Kremlin decided to create some organizations that would specialize in sabotage activities in Pakistan. One such organization was BLA (Balochistan Liberation Army), the brainchild of KGB that was built around the core of BSO (Baloch Students Organization). BSO was a group of assorted left-wing students in Quetta and some other cities of Balochistan.

Misha and Sasha can be considered among the architects of the original BLA.

The BLA they created remained active during the Russo-Afghan war and then it disappeared from the surface, mostly because its main source of funding – the Soviet Union – disappeared from the scene.

In the wake of 9-11, when the United States came rushing to Afghanistan with little preparation and less insight, the need was felt immediately to create sources of information and action that should be independent of the government of Pakistan.

As Bush peered into the soul of Putin and found him a good guy, Rumefeld also did his own peering into the soul of his Russian counterpart and found him a good game. The result was extensive and generous consultation by Russian veterans who knew more about Afghanistan and Balochistan than the Americans could hope to find.

It was presumably agreed that as long as their interests did not clash with each other directly, the United States (or at least Pentagon) and Kremlin would cooperate with each other in Balochistan.

That brings us to January 2002.

“Actually, most of the elements were in place, though dormant, and it was not difficult for anyone with sufficient resources to reactivate the whole thing,” said Misha about the present-day BLA that is blamed for most of the sabotage activities in Balochistan.

In January 2002, the first batch of ‘instructors’ crossed over from Afghanistan into Pakistan to set-up the first training camp. That was the seed from which the present insurgency has sprouted.

It seemed like a modest effort back then.

Only two Indians, two Americans, and their Afghan driver-guide were in a faded brown Toyota Hilux double cabin SUV that crossed the border near Rashid Qila in Afghanistan and came to Muslim Bagh in Pakistani province of Balochistan on 17 January 2002. For this part of the journey, they used irregular trails. From Muslim Bagh to Kohlu they followed the regular but less-frequented roads.

In Kohlu they met with some Baloch youth and one American stayed in Kohlu while two Indians and one American went to Dera Bugti and returned after a few days. They spent the next couple of weeks in intense consultations with some Baloch activists and their mentors and then the work started for setting up a camp.

“Balch was one of our good boys and even though I don’t know who the present operators are, it can be said safely that Kohlu must have been picked as the first base because of Balach,” said Misha.

Balach Marri is the son of Nawab Khair Bakhsh Marri and he qualified as electronic engineer from Moscow. As was customary during those times, any Baloch students in Russia were cultivated actively and lavishly by the KGB. Balach was one of their success stories.

Because of intimate connections with India and Russia, it was no surprise that Balach Marri was picked as the new head of the revived BLA. The mountains between Kohlu and Kahan belong to the Marris.

The first camp had some 30 youth and initial classes comprised mainly of indoctrination lectures. The main subjects were: 1. Baloch’s right of independence, 2. The Concept of Greater Balochistan, 3. Sabotage as a tool for political struggle, 4. Tyranny of Punjab and plight of oppressed nations, and 5. Media-friendly methods of mass protest.

“Manuals, guidelines and even lecture plans were available in the Kometit [KGB] archives. Except for media interaction, they virtually followed the old plans,” told Sasha.

As was logical, the small arms and sabotage training soon entered the syllabus. First shipment of arms and ammunition was received from Afghanistan but as the number of camps grew, new supply routes were opened from India.

Kishangarh is a small Indian town, barely five kilometers from Pakistan border where the provinces of Punjab and Sindh meet. There is a supply depot and a training centre there that maintains contacts with militant training camps in Pakistan, including Balochistan.

There is also a logistics support depot near Shahgarh, about 90 kilometers from Kishangarh, that serves as launching pad for the Indian supplies and experts.

These were unimportant stations in the past but they have gained increasing importance since January 2002 when Balochistan became the hub of a new wave of foreign activity.

The method of transfer from India to Balochistan is simple.

Arms and equipment such as Klashnikov, heavy machine guns, small AA guns, RPGs, mortars, landmines, ammunition and communication equipment are transferred from Kishangarh and Shahgarh to Pakistani side on camel back and then they are shifted to goods trucks, with some legitimate cargo on top and the whole load is covered by tarpauline sheets. Arms and equipment are, as a rule, boxed in CKD or SKD form.

The trucks have to travel only 140 or 180 kilometers to reach Sui and a little more to reach Kohlu, a distance that can be covered in a few hours only. This is most convenient route because transferring anything from Afghanistan to these areas demands much sturdy vehicles that must cover longer distance over difficult terrain.

The small arms and light equipment are mostly of Russian origin because they are easily available, cheap, and difficult to trace back to any single source.

This route is also handy for sabotaging the Pakistani gas pipelines because the two main arteries of Sui pipe – Sui-Kashmore-Uch-Multan and Sui-Sukkur – are passing, at some points, less than 45 kilometers from the Indian border.

Whoever planned these camps and the subsequent insurgency, had to obtain initial help in recruitment and infrastructure from Indian RAW.

“When we first started the BLA thing, it was logical to ask for RAW assistance because they have several thousands of ground contacts in Pakistan, many of them in Balochistan,” said Sasha.

“Anyone wanting to set shop in Pakistan needs to lean on RAW,” added Misha.

The number of camps increased with time and now there is a big triangle of instability in Balochistan that has some 45 to 55 training camps, with each camp accommodating from 300 to 550 militants.

A massive amount of cash is flowing into these camps. American defence contractors – a generic term applicable to Pentagon operatives in civvies, CIA foot soldiers, instigators in double-disguise, fortune hunters, rehired ex-soldiers and free lancers – are reportedly playing a big part in shifting loads of money from Afghanistan to Balochistan. The Americans are invariably accompanied by their Afghan guides and interpreters.

Pay structure of militants is fairly defined by now. The ordinary recruits and basic insurgents get around US $ 200 per month, a small fortune for anyone who never has a hope of landing any decent government job in their home towns. The section leaders get upward of US $ 300 and there are special bonuses for executing a task successfully.

Although no exact amount of reward could be ascertained for specific tasks, one can assume that it must be substantial because some BLA activists have lately built new houses in Dalbandin, Naushki, Kohlu, Sibi, Khuzdar and Dera Bugti. Also, quite a few young Baloch activists have recently acquired new, flashy SUVs.

Oddly enough, there is also an unusual indicator for measuring the newfound wealth of some Baloch activists. In the marriage ceremonies the dancing troupes of eunuchs and cross-dressers are raking in much heavier shower of currency notes than before.

Based on the geographic spread of training camps, one can say that there is a triangle of extreme instability in Balochistan. This triangle can be drawn on the map by taking Barkhan, Bibi Nani (Sibi) and Kashmore as three cardinal points.

There is another, larger, triangle that affords a kind of cushion for the first triangle. It is formed by Naushki, Wana (in NWFP) and Kashmore.

Actually, landscape of Balochistan is such that it offers scores of safe havens, inaccessible to outsiders.

Starting from the coastline, there are Makran Coastal Range, Siahan Range, Ras Koh, Sultan Koh and Chagai Hills that are cutting the land in east-west direction. In the north-south direction, we find Suleiman Range, Kirthar Range, Pala Range and Central Brahvi Range to complete the task of forming deep and inaccessible pockets. Few direct routes are possible between the coastline and upper Balochistan. Only two roads connect Balochistan with the rest of the country.

Apart from the triangles of instability that we have mentioned there is an arc – a wide, slowly curving corridor – of extensive activity. It is difficult to make out as to who is doing what in that corridor.

Here is how to draw this arc-corridor on the map: Mark the little Afghan towns of Shah Ismail and Ziarat Sultan Vais Qarni on the map. Then mark the towns of Jalq and Kuhak in Iran. Now, draw a slowly arching curve to connect Shah Ismail with Kuhak and another curve to connect Ziarat Sultan Vais Qarni with Jalq. The corridor formed by these two curves is the scene of a lot of diverse activities and we have been able to gather only some superficial knowledge about it.

The towns of Dalbandin and Naushki where foreign presence has become a matter of routine are located within this corridor.

Different entities are making different uses of this corridor. Despite employing some local help, we could find very little about the kind of activity that is bubbling in this corridor.

We found that the Indian consulate in Zahidan, Iran, has hired a house off Khayaban Danishgah, near Hotel Amin in Zahidan. This house is used for accommodating some people who cross over from Afghanistan to Pakistan and from Pakistan to Iran through the arched corridor we have described. But who are those people and what are they doing, we could not find.

We also found that although Pasdaran (Revolutionary Guards), the trusted force directly under the control of Khamnei, are monitoring Zahidan-Taftan road, there is no regular check post of Pasdaran on the road between Khash and Jalq, making it easy for all kinds of elements to cross here and there easily.

We also found that the border between Afghanistan and Iran is mostly under the control of Pasdaran who come down hard on any illegal border movement and that is why the arched corridor passing through Pakistan is the favourite route for any individuals and groups including American ‘defence contractors’ and their Afghan collaborators who may have the need to go across or near the border of Iran.

Not surprisingly, part of this corridor is used by Iranians themselves when they feel the need to stir some excitement in Pakistan. Iranians also use the regular road of Zahidan-Quetta when they can find someone with legal documents as was the case with an Iranian who has business interests both in Pakistan and Iran and who came to Quetta just before the start of 7 Jan trouble. He has not been heard of since then.

There is a coastal connection that also provides free access for elements in Dubai and Oman to connect with militants in Balochistan. This is a loosely defined route but there are three main landing points in Balochistan: Eastern lip of Gwater Bay that lies in the Iranian territory but affords easy crossover to Pakistan through unguarded land border; 2. Open space between Bomra and Khor Kalmat; and 3. Easternmost shoulder of Gawadar East Bay.

Some Indians, a curious mix of businessmen and crime mafia, came in fishing boats from either Dubai or Oman and landed on the Gwater Bay in the Iranian territory before the start of 7 Jan eruptions. From there they traveled to Khuzdar and then Quetta where they met with some Baloch militants. It is rumoured in those areas that the Indians came with heavy amounts of cash but there was no way of verifying it. They were escorted both ways by some Sarawani Balochs who run their own fishing vessels.

Simultaneously, there were reports from our Washington correspondent that some ‘sources’ in Pentagon had been trying to ‘leak’ the story to the media that Americans and Israelis were carrying joint reccee operations inside Iran and for that purpose they were using Pakistani soil as launching point. The lead was finally picked and disseminated by Semour Hersh of The New Yorker.

However, from our own observations in the area we could not confirm this report although there is a possibility that the curving corridor that we have identified may have been used by the Americans and Israelis to travel from Afghanistan into Pakistan and then into Iran and back for this purpose although this is mere speculation, based on the movement of foreigners in this area, and we can neither confirm nor deny the substance of this report.

Also, there was some buzz, as reported by our correspondent in New Delhi, that some high circles were questioning the wisdom of two-faced policy of engaging Islamabad in peace dialogue while at the same time supporting insurgent activity in Balochistan.

It was also not clear as to why Iran would be interested in stirring trouble in Balochistan when it was faced by an imminent war from the American side and it needed all the allies it could muster on its side and one of those allies could possibly be Pakistan. It was also difficult to reconcile Iranian involvement in Balochistan with the fact that Iran-Pakistan-India gas pipeline, that is a crucial project for Iran, was in the final stages of negotiation and there seemed no logical point in sending mixed signals by creating difficulties in Balochistan.

For Part Two, see
http://www.newscentralasia.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1189
(Interviews of KGB operators who formed Baluchistan Liberation Army)