Pakistan

Pakistan's Ambassador to Speak at New America Foundation

Patrick Doherty — Tue, 19 Aug 2008 15:43:00 -0400

Today, the day after Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf resigned, Pakistani Ambassador Hussein Haqqani will join New America President Steve Coll and American Strategy Program Director Steve Clemons live at 12:15 today, Tuesday August 19, 2008.

ASP In the News | August 11-18

Ian McAllister — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 18:38:00 -0400

Foreign Policy (08/18) quotes Steve Clemons on speculation over Obama's coming VP pick.
UN Dispatch (08/18) ponders Steve Clemons' questioning on just what is happening in Pakistan.
Washington Post (08/17) features Peter Bergen analyzing the present state of Al Qaeda.
Middle East Online (08/15) quotes Daniel Levy's analysis on a possible civil war in Gaza.
CBS News (08/14) cites Steve Clemons' analysis on false clams of a Colin Powel Obama endorsement.
Washington Independent (08/14) cites Peter Bergen on terrorist havens in Northeast Pakistan.

Pakistan: Democracy in Action

Faith Smith — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 14:56:00 -0400

The civil society in Pakistan has taken down President Musharraf, not with military might or mass revolts, but with political pressure. Whether Musharraf is loved or hated, we have to applaud Pakistan's political maturity. They, as Bolivia did just a week ago, exercised their rights through law and politics to determine the course their country would take. The peaceful release of presidential power by Musharraf stands in stark contrast to Pakistan's long history of military coups and assassinations.

This is what democracy looks like. It is a complex system that must go beyond the right to vote, far beyond. Elections can only skim the surface of democracy. The pulls and levers, checks and balance, the right to stick with, as in Bolivia, or replace, as in Pakistan, the elected leader: this is true democracy.

What does Musharraf's resignation mean for the United States? Musharraf was a much needed ally to the U.S. in the wake of 9/11; more so than his citizens would have liked. The future of U.S.-Pakistani relations is now up in the air. For the past seven years, the current administration has invested heavily in Pakistan's unpopular leader and equally unpopular military activity in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas. This strategy could backfire as Musharraf is ousted. Investing in the leader rather than the country was bad policy.

Senators Biden and Lugar are working to remedy this and build a country to country relationship with Pakistan to replace the Bush-Musharraf military alliance. The Biden-Lugar bill, introduced last month, will triple non-military aid to Pakistan. The bill focuses on strengthening civil society rather than the military by investing in education and economic development. Pakistan's civil society has proven to be active, democratic and forward-thinking; and that's something worth investing in.

ASP In the News | July 2-7

Ian McAllister — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 17:20:00 -0400

Daily News (07/06) features Michael Cohen discussing Obama's parallels with FDR.
The National (07/05) posts Peter Bergen's analysis of continuing instability in Pakistan.
The Australian (07/05) quotes Flynt Leverett on the United State's loss of influence in the global economy.
The National Interest (07/03) cites Flynt Leverett on the increasing irrelevance of the G8.
Time (07/02) features Peter Bergen debating if Osama Bin Laden still matters in today's political climate.

Pakistan's Two-Edged Strike

Patrick Doherty — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 16:15:00 -0400

Is Pakistan getting back on track? In recent days, we learned of American reluctance to mount special operations raids in Pakistan's tribal regions while at the same time the newly-elected government in Pakistan finally responded in force to increasing Taliban activity in the region.

American Strategy Program's Nick Schmidle, an expert on this region of Pakistan, examines this operation and concludes while it is good to see the new government taking a firmer stand against the Taliban, the longer-term effect may be to unite the disparate Islamist factions into a more cohesive group.

Pakistan: Another Failed U.S. Policy

Patrick Doherty — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 21:29:00 -0400

A few hours ago I hosted the release of the Terror Free Tomorrow/New America Foundation public attitude survey of Pakistan. The whole event can be viewed here. The report is here.

The poll goes into depth in many areas, with some striking results: more than 50% of Pakistanis support negotiations with the Taliban and al-Qaeda. The United States is more feared as a threat to individual security than India. China is loved with an 82% favorable rating. Nawaz Sharif has an 86% approval rating. Musharraf is down to 23%.

Ken Ballen, president of Terror Free Tomorrow, summed up the findings well. View his comments here. Ken said the poll really strikes at the heart of three myths: that anti-American feelings do not matter; that we cannot change attitudes toward the U.S. anyway; and that they hate us for our freedoms. According to this polling, anti-americanism is driving political preferences, there are clear things the U.S. can do to improve our standing, and its the policies we pursue, not our passport, that piss people off.

When I add it up, I take it in a different direction. I believe you get a resounding repudiation of U.S. strategy towards Pakistan. That strategy has been to treat Pakistan as a central front on the war on terror. It's not hard to see why this has failed: the top issues for Pakistanis are restoring and independent judiciary, a free press, fair elections, and improving the Pakistani economy. But the U.S. has done little, if anything to support the lawyers rebellion calling for the reinstatement of the ousted judges, has poured billions of aid into not the economy but the military, and has stuck by Musharraf until the elections, while still not changing our policy. Worse, from Pakistani eyes, the U.S. is launching hellfire missile strikes and killing Pakistani civilians and military. Violence is at its highest leves in decades.

This, of course, gets to the core dysfunction of the Global War on Terror. You cannot win the war on terror on the cheap and violence only embeds the cycle of extremism. The fertilizer for extremism is economic and political exclusion and in Pakistan you have both at sustained high levels. Supporting the Pakistani Army with one hand while attacking the Taliban with armed Predators with the other just makes us complicit in the political exclusion and piles bloody grievances on top. For a president who made democracy the centerpiece of his second inaugural, it's hard to think of a place that would have benefitted more from real adherence to that speech.

The next president will have his work cut out for him. The honeymoon of the next president, in Pakistan, will be brief if it even exists. I continue to think that Afghanistan and Pakistan are part of a larger regional game that is more about Pakistan and India than a global vision of jihad. If, as was mentioned in today's event, Pakistan is keeping the Taliban around just in case the U.S. gets pushed out of Afghanistan and Pakistan needs to secure its western border from an India-friendly regime, the next president will find that the road to bin Laden may go through New Delhi and require a resolution to the real conflict, that over Kashmir.

First, however, Pakistan will need a stable, representative government. While the U.S. needs to be able to act against credible threats, what will be equally important is in supporting the kind of political reforms and economic growth that are high on the list of Pakistanis. Then, a strong Pakistan government can sit down to talk with India, cut a deal, and then start cleaning up the mess in its own backyard.

Whither Pakistan?

Patrick Doherty — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 14:46:00 -0400

U.S.-Iran cooperation? Neo-Taliban? For those of you wanting to go deeper on Afghanistan/Pakistan issues than the campaign soundbytes, here's New America's Nick Schmidle debating Amin Tarzi of the Center for Advanced Defense Studies on Bloggingheads.tv.

From Our Overseas Bureaus: Ukraine to Vote on NATO?

Joe Mathews — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 14:13:00 -0400

YUSHCHENKO PLEDGES VOTE: Ukraine's president says the country will hold a popular referendum on joining NATO within two years.

CAYMANS VOTE: The Cayman Islands are moving towards its first ever popular referendum, a vote the prime minister wants on his proposals for a "modernized" constitution. This story from the Caymanian Compass, a national newspaper there, says the referendum may include more than one question.

SCOTS ON THEIR OWN: Scots want to vote on independence, a new poll says.

ISRAELI VOTE? The Israeli Knesset debates the wisdom of holding a public referendum on territorial concessions.

SOLVING PAKISTAN'S CRISIS: How to restore those Pakistani judges deposed by Musharraf? Former parliamentarian Haji Saifullah Khan suggests a popular referendum might solve the problem -- and give the judiciary new public legitimacy.

Like the Wild West, Plus al-Qaeda

Patrick Doherty — Mon, 31 Mar 2008 16:17:00 -0400

Is it possible that Iraq is still sucking up all the best intelligence and counter-insurgency assets of the U.S. Government and leaving only the scraps to deal with the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan? New America Fellow Nick Schmidle, whose New York Times Magazine cover story got him and his wife expelled from Pakistan by the Musharraf government, looks at the state of play in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas in this piece in Sunday's Washington Post. With unmanned Predator strikes killing civilians and senior military advisors trying to replicate Iraq's Anbar Awakening, the answer seems clear.

Like the Wild, Wild West. Plus al-Qaeda.

By Nicholas Schmidle
March 30, 2008 | The Washington Post

Darra Adam Khel, a small burg in Pakistan's tribal areas, is the quintessential frontier town. Picture Wyatt Earp sashaying down the streets of Tombstone in a turban, and you begin to get the idea. Because Pakistani laws don't apply here, smugglers, gunsmiths and, most recently, the Taliban find Darra, as it's locally known, an optimal place to do business.

Most stores along the main road sell firearms or drugs. In one, freshly pressed slabs of hashish are cured in goat skins, stacked up like a new line of sweaters at the Gap. Next door, customers can walk in, pull a Kalashnikov from the rack and step outside to test-fire it into the sky. On my first visit to Darra, I opened the car door just as a prospective AK-47 buyer rattled off a few rounds. Thinking that I'd stumbled into a duel, I dove into a ditch for cover.

It's hard to believe that the limits of American power -- and the future of how it's projected -- could reside in the streets of a Wild West-era holdover like this. But, handicapped by the lack of a good plan, reliable allies or decent intelligence, the United States has watched as this strip of mountainous territory wedged between Afghanistan and Pakistan has become the most ungoverned, combustible region in the world. The U.S. intelligence community has described it as a refuge for Osama bin Laden and the rest of al-Qaeda's reconstituted leadership. And recently, Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, predicted that the next terrorist attack on the United States would originate from the tribal areas, probably from a town much like Darra.

Seven years after Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf ditched the Afghan Taliban to join the United States in the "war on terror," a new generation of Pakistani Taliban has brazenly turned the tribal areas into its bailiwick. In Darra, Taliban-inspired gangs have run out hash dealers, bombed DVD and CD shops, and closed girls' schools. In January, jihadists car-jacked five military supply trucks loaded with weapons and ammunition and kidnapped more than 50 Pakistani paramilitary troops on a stretch of highway near the town.

When the Pakistani army deployed to the region in 2003 for the first time since 1948, a cleric in Islamabad issued a fatwa proclaiming that any Pakistani soldier killed fighting the Taliban in South Waziristan should be denied a Muslim burial. Last August, militants under the command of Baitullah Mehsud, the Taliban leader accused of masterminding former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto's assassination, kidnapped more than 200 soldiers in South Waziristan.

The Pakistani Taliban hasn't toppled the political order and gained power, but it has overthrown centuries of traditional authority. With al-Qaeda, it has slaughtered hundreds of maliks, or tribal chiefs, branding them as traitors for dealing with Musharraf's government or as spies working for the Americans and NATO. Their corpses (often headless) are routinely dumped in town bazaars as a warning to any who might be plotting against the Taliban. Earlier this month, tribal elders gathered in Darra to draft a strategy for purging their area of militants. As the meeting ended, a suicide bomber ran into the crowd and blew himself up, killing more than 40 people, including many elders.

The Federally Administered Tribal Areas, or FATA, are a conglomeration of seven "agencies" and six "frontier regions" comprising an area slightly smaller than Maryland. Elected representatives from the FATA sit in Pakistan's parliament, but the laws it drafts mostly don't apply in the tribal areas. The national government's degree of involvement in local affairs varies -- Darra, for instance, which belongs to Frontier Region Kohat, is slightly more integrated into Pakistan's legal, political and administrative framework than South Waziristan, the largest agency. But all the tribal areas are "governed" by the Frontier Crimes Regulations, which give the tribes autonomy as long as they take collective responsibility for the actions of individual tribesmen.

The tribal belt is dominated by Pashtuns, an ethnic group of about 20 million who live on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border. Pashtuns are renowned for their hospitality and their martial ways, a people reputed to treat guests like kings but eye strangers with suspicion. U.S., Saudi and Pakistani intelligence agencies banked on this when they armed Pashtuns to drive the Soviet army out of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Today, Pashtuns compare the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan to the Soviet one, and residents of North and South Waziristan regard the Pakistani troops there, most of them Punjabis, as foreign invaders.

Washington's response to the Talibanization of western Pakistan has been clumsy and shortsighted. The White House's unwavering support for Musharraf backfired long ago, and Pakistanis, as I learned while living in the country for two years, by and large sympathize with the embattled tribesmen more than with their president. Periodic missile strikes at suspected al-Qaeda safe houses in the tribal areas by U.S. Predator drones have killed many civilians, creating more enemies than they eliminated. In October 2006, dozens of madrassa students died when a missile targeting al-Qaeda's No. 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, landed in Bajaur, the northernmost agency, a few hours after Zawahiri apparently left. The attack handed al-Qaeda a symbolic victory; pictures of dead kids can fire up jihadists for generations to come.

The State Department, meanwhile, has earmarked $750 million for development in the tribal areas to win hearts and minds by paving roads and building schools and hospitals. But who will regulate and oversee this development when foreigners are officially prohibited from the tribal areas and the Taliban and its affiliates authorize dealings in most parts of the FATA? When the Pakistani government launched a polio vaccination drive there last year, Taliban leaders used pirated radio stations to convince locals that the vaccine was an impotency serum sent from the United States to eradicate Muslims. Few children got the shots.

Meanwhile, the U.S. presidential candidates have remained mostly mute. When Sen. Barack Obama once suggested that, if elected, he might authorize bombing the tribal areas if intelligence showed that al-Qaeda was planning attacks against U.S. interests and Pakistan refused to act, critics from all sides chastised him. Yet since Feb. 5, a barrage of Predator-fired missiles has rained down on North and South Waziristan, killing more than 50 people.

As if the challenges of devising a counterinsurgency strategy in the FATA weren't enough, political obstacles in Islamabad also abound. The winners of last month's parliamentary elections have pledged to withdraw the army from the tribal areas, negotiate with the militants and curb Predator flights over Pakistani airspace. Responding to this softened tone, the Taliban has reciprocated with goodwill gestures of its own, saying that Pakistan could save some of its defense budget by withdrawing troops from the tribal areas and allowing the militants to enforce border security.

But as politicians seek some rapprochement with the Taliban, could the public be getting fed up? Just a week after the elections, another wave of bombings linked to the Taliban hit the North-West Frontier Province and Punjab, including an attack in Lahore that killed more than 40. The victims weren't policemen or soldiers in South Waziristan, just ordinary people in the wrong place at the wrong time.

"The crescendo of local violence has been a bad tactic on the part of the extremists," says Bob Grenier, the former CIA station chief in Islamabad and former head of the agency's counterterrorism center. "The counterinsurgency is now being aided by the cruelty of the enemy; they are their own worst enemy." According to a recent poll by the anti-terrorism organization Terror Free Tomorrow, Pakistani support for the Taliban and al-Qaeda has fallen to all-time lows of 18 and 19 percent, respectively -- half what it was in a similar survey taken last summer.

The United States may already be exploiting these sentiments. Recent missile strikes in the FATA killed a number of high-ranking foreign militants and caused little collateral damage. Such a marked improvement in accuracy is the result of better intelligence, gathered by capitalizing on inter-tribal dissent to lure informers.

And the Pentagon hopes to re-create an "Anbar Awakening" in the FATA. Anbar is the Sunni-dominated province in western Iraq where tribal leaders ditched al-Qaeda in Iraq and allied with the U.S. military in 2006. The day after the bombing of the tribal meeting in Darra, I e-mailed a senior U.S. Army officer who's intimately familiar with the Anbar Awakening. I suggested that the tribal chiefs, under attack from all sides, would be hard-pressed to unite against the militants anytime soon. Based on his time in Iraq, he replied, "I would argue that attacks like yesterday's will only make the desire to organize against [al-Qaeda] and the Taliban more intense. Believe me, the murder of tribal leaders in Anbar was the impetus to the Awakening."

But for now, few elders dare to speak publicly against the militants, and even fewer would risk relying on the Pakistani army to guarantee their security if they did "turn." (Last fall, when a pro-Taliban cleric used his weekly sermons to merely criticize suicide attacks, he was shot and killed.)

And Pashtuns themselves admit that they can make for fickle strategic partners. The hashish dealers in Darra who were earlier driven out of business by the Taliban could just as easily be bankrolling them as fighting them tomorrow.

Last year, a man in Peshawar explained to me why the United States' efforts to subdue Afghanistan were faltering. "You thought Pashtuns were for sale, but you misjudged," he said, smiling. "We are only for rent."

Nicholas Schmidle, a fellow at the New America Foundation, is writing a book about Pakistan, where he lived from 2006 to January 2008.

Will the U.S. Lose Pakistan?

Patrick Doherty — Wed, 27 Feb 2008 16:20:00 -0500

Missing in the presidential debate over Pakistan are two critical points, first, it was the U.S. strategy in the war on terror, resulting in the disappearances of more than 500 Pakistani citizens, that triggered the erosion of General Musharraf's support. Second, that neither the Taleban nor the United States are well liked in Pashtun areas. Unless the next U.S. administration takes these two facts to heart, says American Strategy Program Senior Research Fellow Anatol Lieven writing in The National Interest, Pakistan will soon be lost to extremism.

Inside Track: Politics as Usual?
by Anatol Lieven, The National Interest

As the presidency of General Pervez Musharraf enters what seem to be its last days, we need to keep one thing firmly in mind. It is that despite the Bush administration’s support for Musharraf, it was also the Bush administration that did the most to destroy him, by forcing him into a subordinate role in a war on terror that most Pakistanis detest. It was not Musharraf’s (very mild) “dictatorship,” but the tag of “Busharraf” which originally crippled his domestic prestige. And if U.S. administrations are not careful, they will help destroy the next Pakistani administration and the one after that, until the country does indeed eventually become ungovernable.

This is something which has been largely—and one is tempted to say, deliberately—lost in much of the U.S. media’s reporting of the “restoration of democracy” in Pakistan. For example, how many journalists have bothered to note that the original sparking point for the dispute between Musharraf and Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhury, which in turn began the process of Musharraf’s fall, was Chaudhury’s insistence that the government account for the fate of more than five hundred Islamist activists who have “disappeared” at the hands of the security forces?

On whose orders did they disappear? And where have some at least of them gone? These are issues on which the U.S. mainstream media is silent. If the next Pakistani government refuses to go along with the transfer of arrested international Islamists to U.S. custody without reference to the courts, will the U.S. media praise that too as a triumph of Pakistani democracy and the rule of law?

As Pakistani opinion polls since 9/11 demonstrate, it was Musharraf’s enforced subservience to the United States more than anything else that shattered the prestige of Musharraf’s administration—an administration that came to power in 1999 with massive public support, and which by (admittedly execrable) local standards, had delivered the best government Pakistan had experienced for more than a generation.

The fact that most Pakistanis loathe subservience to the United States and hate U.S. strategy in the “War on Terror” does not mean that they support the Islamists. The most encouraging aspect of the election results was the crushing defeat of the MMA Islamist coalition, which has ruled the Pashtun North West Frontier Province since 2002, at the hands of the Pashtun secular nationalist Awami National Party (ANP) and Bhutto’s Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). Let us hope that this result will lead to a diminution of the hysteria about the threat of an Islamist revolution in Pakistan seizing control of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons—something that was never on the cards, unless the United States itself is crazy enough to attack Pakistan.

The MMA’s defeat was largely a result of their failure to provide good government and deal with corruption; but it was also a clear sign that the majority of Pashtuns do not sympathise even with the mainstream Islamist parties, let alone with the pro-Taleban militants and terrorists, and that they are deeply opposed to the violence and unrest that the militants have unleashed in the Pashtun areas in recent months. That gives real hope for a stronger drive against the militants in the Pashtun areas, backed by real support from the local population.

For this to happen, however, various conditions are necessary. This must be seen as a Pakistani effort, carried out for Pakistani reasons, and not on the orders of the United States. The army and the politicians must work together. That will require that the army not work to undermine the coalition government and play its members off against each other, but it will also mean the parties accepting the reality that the Pakistani army will never “return to barracks,” but will always play a key role in government. This is not simply because the army is the only really effective institution of the Pakistani state, but also because it will be quite impossible to get the military to fight against the extremists unless it is closely involved in the entire decision-making process.

Finally, the parties will have to work with each other. Neither at the provincial level in Peshawar nor at the national level in Islamabad has one party gained an absolute majority. In the North West Frontier Province, the ANP and PPP will have to form a coalition, just as the PPP and the Nawaz Sharif bloc will have to form a coalition at the national level. This coalition-building is well under way. But these parties will also have to work successfully together in government over a long period—and the whole of Pakistani history suggests that this will be extremely difficult.

Given the direct physical threat that Islamist terrorism now poses to Pakistan’s political class, such cooperation would seem natural. And perhaps the Islamist threat has in fact changed the equations which continually divided Pakistan’s mainstream parties in the past. While of course tragic, the death of Benazir Bhutto may also make it easier for the PPP to cooperate with other parties on a footing of equality, rather than asserting a sort of natural right to dominate them. Meanwhile, Nawaz Sharif’s room to maneuver will be limited by the eclipse of the Islamist parties who were his natural partners in government.

Perhaps this will be the case. But during my stay in Peshawar last May, a leading local PPP politician was assassinated; and the immediate response of PPP supporters was to blame not Islamist terrorists, but an ANP politician with whom he had had a family feud. And the PPP activists’ form of protest was to burn vehicles, loot and destroy shops belonging to ANP supporters, and attack the police. Similar feuds are replicated across Pakistan.

They are fuelled not just by personal and clan enmity, but by the continuous rivalry for limited amounts of patronage that is the fundamental driving force of Pakistani political life. Forming stable and long-lasting coalitions between the parties will mean not just overcoming bitter historical and personal enmities and agreeing on common policies, but the much more difficult task of sharing out jobs and government favors.

And the risk is that even if the parties can agree on this, it will only be by vastly increasing the number of ministries, political appointments, sinecures and contracts available to be shared out—thereby increasing government spending, undermining the budget and destroying many of the improvements in government achieved in recent years. And that is leaving aside the possibility of outright kleptocracy, as practiced by so many Pakistani politicians in the past when in government.

I hope very much that this will not be the case; that the Pakistani parties and their leaders have learned from their dreadful mistakes of the past, and that the army has learned that it too must seek a stable relationship with civilian governments, rather than seeking to divide them and undermine them. Given the number of Pakistani soldiers killed by Islamist terrorism, it is high time that the military too wakes up to the threat facing the Pakistani state in general; for if the Islamists have suffered a severe political defeat, and stand no chance of overthrowing the state, their capacity to cause violent mayhem is still immense.

If the military and the civilian politicians work together, and are capable of curbing their own greed and ambition, then there is some chance that this will indeed be the new birth for Pakistan of which the Pakistani and Western media speak. If not, then a few years down the line everyone will yet again be lamenting the failure of “democratic” government in Pakistan, and lamenting the relatively efficient and clean administration of Musharraf.

Anatol Lieven is a senior editor at The National Interest, a professor at King’s College London and a senior fellow of the New America Foundation in Washington, DC. His latest book, Ethical Realism: A Vision for America’s Role in the World, co-authored with John Hulsman, is published by Pantheon.