Tuesday, October 29, 2013

Sharif in the Wonderland

From New York Times

Obama and Sharif Meeting Signals Action Must Follow Words
Alex Ortolani,
Asia Society, October 24, 2013

In a meeting at the White House yesterday, U.S. President Barack Obama and Pakistan's relatively new Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif reportedly discussed a wide range of topics, including the U.S. troop withdrawal from Afghanistan, India-Pakistan relations, and U.S. drone strikes.

While a positive step forward in a recently strained relationship, the meeting highlighted a continued sticking point over military cooperation on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, says Asia Society Senior Advisor Hassan Abbas, author of the forthcoming book The Taliban Revival: Violence and Extremism on the Pakistan-Afghanistan Frontier.

"The U.S. drone strike policy is increasingly becoming a divisive issue between the two states, and this is likely to continue till Pakistan takes effective counterterrorism steps on its Pushtun frontier," Abbas told Asia Blog.

Abbas also noted that the U.S. will take a wait-and-see approach to Sharif to ensure he can bring stability to a country that voted in his civilian government this May.

"The U.S. wants to give sufficient time to Sharif to settle down and show he believes in the principle that continuation of democracy in Pakistan is the best way to strengthen and stabilize the country," Abbas said.

A day before the meeting between Obama and Sharif, the U.S. released $1.6 billion in military and economic assistance to Pakistan it had suspended after disagreements about the U.S. raid that killed Osama bin Laden. Abbas told the BBC ahead of the meeting that the release of the aid was a "positive development" that showed relations between the two countries are improving.

Listen to Abbas's October 23 Newshour interview about the meeting here (interview begins at 42:30).

Related:

Monday, October 21, 2013

Destroying History....

How our entire history was dumped in a horse stable
Majid Nawaz,
Dawn, October 6, 2013

Away it went in ignominy, on hundreds of wheelbarrows to be dumped in a dirty, humid and putrid discarded horse stable. I am talking about one of the world’s finest, and surely the second largest collection of rare books, manuscripts and document dealing with the history of Punjab, from Kabul to Delhi and from Kashmir to Sindh over the last 500 years.

In the old horse stable of the Lahore Civil Secretariat, in dark, moldy, dingy conditions, lies this amazing collection, all official record let me clarify, of over 70,000 rare books and under one million rare manuscripts and documents, piles upon piles, on the floor, on old broken desks, in cupboards without glass panes. The stink and humidity overwhelms the senses. Only in the British Museum Library of London is there a better collection, all kept in mint condition. They respect our rich history. In terms of our own history, we are the wretched of the earth.

I do not know the daft former chief secretary who ordered this evil move. All I have learnt from officials inside the Secretariat, and I have no reason to doubt their opinion, that after retiring he sits on judgment on the fate of other bureaucrats. His antics, they claim, still reads like a mad hatter’s tea party. But then that is what our present rulers probably want. I leave his bizarre ways for younger journalists unearth.

My attention today is focused on the old official horse stable in Lahore’s Civil Secretariat and the damage done to our heritage. In any other sane society he would be arrested and tried. In his reign he got vacated the old world-famous library and record-room in General Allard’s old home, where once Lawrence, Kipling and Garrett studied and researched and produced books that will live forever. Small men need a lot of space; such is their ‘imagined greatness’. A spacious second conference hall and a new rest room emerged. The brown ‘sahib’ acted his part with a vengeance.

In wheel-barrows by the thousands went the world’s finest record, rare manuscripts, rare documents and books, even the first litho prints the world had ever seen from the year 1600 onwards. In heaps he got them stacked in the horse stable, throwing them on the floor to decay. Mind you I am talking about over 70,000 rare books and under a million documents and manuscripts, the world’s second largest collection after the British Museum Library. If you are shocked, I am not surprised, for you have no idea what the Punjab bureaucracy has morphed into. The brilliance of Hallard is a distant dream.

For complete article, click here

Understanding Pakistani Taliban

The U-Curve
Babar Sattar,
Dawn, October 21, 2013

MALCOLM Gladwell in his latest book David and Goliath writes about the relevance of the inverted U-curve to violence. Using the example of North Ireland and other data from criminologists he argues that, “there comes a point where the best-intentioned application of power and authority begins to backfire”.

In other words the application of force up to a certain point bears positive results after which it plateaus and then comes the downward spiral where use of force actually makes things worse.

The inverted U-curve argument seems logical. In the context of violence and terror, it rests on the concepts of rational actors and deterrence on the one hand and limits of power and state legitimacy on the other. The upward spiral in the inverted ‘U’ is explained by the fact that humans are rational beings and their cost-gain analysis influences their behaviour. Thus if a criminal feels that there is high probability of getting caught and reasonable certainty of punishment, crime would be deterred.

The downward spiral of the inverted U-curve is explained by the inherent limits of what power and authority can accomplish and how their excessive use can undermine the legitimacy of the state. If the state itself is perceived as illegitimate by a sizable part of the populace, use of force by it can become counterproductive and provoke more violence by creating more recruits who see those challenging the state as fighting a just war against an unjust state.

If we analyse our Tehreek-i-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) conundrum as realists (not as moral pacifists or denialists) and agree that excessive use of force is counterproductive, we need to consider the following: one, when can we deem the use of force to have become excessive; two, what are the demands or grievances of terrorists that inform their concept of state legitimacy; and three, how does adhering to the demands of terrorists affect the rest of the law-abiding citizens of Pakistan.

Consider the examples of East Pakistan or Northern Ireland that Imran Khan uses to support his pro-talks stance (Gladwell also uses Northern Ireland to explain the limits of power). These were movements driven by a sense that the state was unjust in its distribution of rights, resources and power in relation to a community that had a shared identity. Such lack of justice undermined the legitimacy of the state in the eyes of the community and excessive use of force by the unjust state entrenched the resentment and provoked more violence and hate.

Notwithstanding horrible acts of terrorism against state officials or innocent citizens, within the realist paradigm the state can talk to an aggrieved community and its terrorists whose demands are rights-based. If a community feels that the state is stealing its rights and resources, there can be a conversation about redistribution. Balochistan falls within this category. And that is where the inverse U-curve is relevant. The aggrieved Baloch are focused on their rights and the resources made available to them by the state.

For complete article, click here

Friday, October 11, 2013

Malala - A Pakistani Trailblazer for Global Education and Women Rights

The Bravest Girl in the World
Christiane Amanpour's interview with Malala Yousafzai, The Bravest Girl in the World, will air Sunday, October 13 at 7pm ET, and reair during Amanpour's normal Monday timeslot.

By Mick Krever, CNN, October 11, 2013

When Malala Yousafzai woke from the coma the Taliban put her in, she was aware of only a few things.

“Yes, Malala, you were shot,” she told herself.

She thought back to her dreams – of lying on a stretcher, being in some distant place far from home and school – and realized that they weren’t dreams, but recollections.

“The nurses and doctors, everyone was speaking in English,” she recalls. “I realized that now I am not in Pakistan.”

All Malala Yousafzai wanted was to go to school.

But she lived in an area of Pakistan, the Swat Valley, where the Taliban had effectively taken over governance, and imposed its harsh ideology – of no music, no visible women, and certainly no girls in school.

For defying their will, and refusing to stay silent, the Taliban tried to murder Malala, then a 15-year-old girl.

Miraculously, she survived, and has continued speaking truth to power about education, extremism, and equality.

Almost a year to the day after the attempt on her life, Malala, and her father Ziauddin, spoke with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour in front of a live town hall audience at the 92nd Street Y in New York.

The Taliban, she told Amanpour, “say that we are going to fight for Islam. … So I think we also must think about them.”

“And that's why I want to tell Taliban [to] be peaceful,” she said, “and the real jihad is to fight through pens and to fight through your words. Do that jihad. And that's the jihad that I am doing. I am fighting for my rights, for the rights of every girl.”

When she woke up from her week-long coma she asked for her mother and father by writing on a piece of paper; she had a breathing tube in her throat that prevented her from speaking.

“The first thing I did was that I thanked Allah – I thanked God, because I was surviving, I was living,” she told Amanpour.

“They told me that your father is safe and he will come soon, as soon as possible,” she recounted.

“And the second question that was really important for me and about which I was thinking - who will pay for me? Because I don't have money and I also knew that my father is running a school, but the buildings of the schools are on rent, the home is on rent … then I was thinking he might be asking people for loans.”

A 15-year-old girl, a week after being shot in the head by the Taliban, was worried about how her medical bills would be paid.

Extraordinary circumstances

Malala was ten when the Taliban came to the Swat Valley, she writes in her memoir out this week, “I Am Malala.”

“Moniba and I had been reading the Twilight books and longed to be vampires,” she wrote. “It seemed to us that the Taliban arrived in the night just like vampires.”

The Taliban started broadcasting nightly sermons on FM Radio. Everyone started calling it “Mullah FM.”

In the beginning, their messages were guidance on living that appealed to a devout audience, including Malala’s mother.

Slowly, they became more radical, urging people to give up their TVs and music.

Then, Malala told Amanpour, the Radio Mullah – as they called him – made an announcement that the young schoolgirl could not possibly abide.

“‘No girl is allowed to go to school,’” she recalls him saying. “‘And if she goes, then, you know what we can do.’”

They congratulated the girls that heeded the call.

“‘Miss So-and-so has stopped going to school and will go to heaven,’ he’d say,” she wrote.

And you had only to walk around her hometown of Mingora, in the Swat Valley, to see what would happen if you crossed them – women flogged in the street, decapitated men lying in the gutter.

But Malala defied the call. She went to school as normal, and listened to the Western music – Justin Bieber and Selena Gomez – of which she was fond.

She replaced her school uniform with plain clothes, to avoid attention; she wore a Harry Potter backpack, as shown in a documentary by Adam Ellick of the New York Times.

At one point, a Pashto television station interviewed some school children, including Malala, about life in Swat. Soon thereafter, she spoke to a national broadcaster, Geo TV.

“I did not want to be silent, because I had to live in that situation forever,” she said, nearly screaming the final word. “And it was a better idea, because otherwise they were going to kill us – so it was a better idea to speak and then be killed.”

A producer from the BBC approached her father about having one of his teachers blog about the experience of living under Taliban rule; instead, Malala volunteered herself.

“On my way from school to home I heard a man saying 'I will kill you,’” she wrote on January 3, 2009. “I hastened my pace and after a while I looked back if the man was still coming behind me. But to my utter relief he was talking on his mobile and must have been threatening someone else over the phone.”

Daddy’s girl

You cannot really tell the story of Malala Yousafzai without talking about her father, Ziauddin.

In most Pakistani families, Ziauddin told Amanpour, when a girl is born, “a kind of sympathy is expressed with [the] mother,” an acknowledgement of the fact that boys are vastly more valued than are girls.

Not so for Ziauddin.

“I usually tell people, don’t ask me what I have done,” he said. “Just ask me what I did not do. That is important. The only thing which I did not do, and I went against the taboos, and I went against the tradition – that I did not clip the wings of my daughter to fly.”

It is impossible to stand with Ziauddin and his daughter and not feel, as if by osmosis, the soul-wrenching love he feels for his daughter.

“She's the most precious person for me in my life,” he told Amanpour. “And we are not only father and daughter, we are friends.”

But to ask Malala, it is Ziauddin’s personal courage, not his devotion to her, that has fueled her determination most.

“I also remember the time of terrorism, when no one was speaking, and my father dared to speak, and he raised up his voice,” she said. “He was not afraid of death at that time. And he still not is.”

Ziauddin, an English-teacher by vocation, ran the girls’ school, Khushal School, that Malala attended.

“You blast my school and you will say, ‘Don't condemn it.’ It's very difficult,” Ziauddin said of the Taliban. “You kill my people and say don't say anything.”

“I think better to die than to live in such a situation,” he told Amanpour. “I think that it's better to live for one day to speak for your right than to live for a hundred years in such a slavery.”

Even when she had an international media profile, Malala worried that the Taliban would come for her father, not her.

“I was worried about my father, because I was not expecting Taliban to come for me,” she said. “I thought that they might have a little bit manners, and their behavior would be – somehow they would be like humans.”

It was Ziauddin who encouraged Malala to speak up, and allowed her to give TV interviews, blog for the BBC, and raise her international profile.

Did he, Amanpour asked, feel at all responsible for the violent attack that almost ended his daughter’s life?

“No,” he said emphatically. “Never.”

Pakistan’s government, he said, “could not protect four hundred schools in Swat. They should be repenting that they could not protect the girls to be flogged. They could not protect the infrastructure of Swat to be sold and they could not protect the men to be slaughtered in the square. Why should I repent?”

The politician

When Malala was young, she wanted to be a doctor. She got good grades, she told Amanpour – and not just because her father was the school principal, she chuckled – and in her community the studious girls could become one of two things: a doctor or a teacher.

Ziauddin, no doubt with some mix of affection and recognition that she was a prodigy, encouraged her to speak up and think about going into politics.

Soon, she started to like the idea.

For complete article, click here

Relevant:
Malala Yousafzai leaves Jon Stewart speechless on Daily Show - Telegraph

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