Fear and Loathing in AfPak

In this lead story from the online edition of the New York Times on the 26th of September, reporter Carlotta Gall humanizes one of the 16 American and Afghani officials allegedly ambushed and killed in cold blood at the Pakistani outpost of Teri Mangal in 2007, at the end of what they had thought would be a peaceful meeting to resolve a border dispute:

"…a Pakistani soldier opened fire with an automatic rifle, pumping multiple rounds from just 5 or 10 yards away into an American officer, Maj. Larry J. Bauguess Jr., killing him almost instantly. An operations officer with the 82nd Airborne Division from North Carolina, Major Bauguess, 36, was married and the father of two girls, ages 4 and 6."

US Major Larry J. Baugess (source: NYT)

Ms Gall’s story, the publication of which coincided with an increase in the verbal volleys being fired in Pakistan’s direction, blended seamlessly into the narrative currently being fed to the American public by its mainstream media. The narrative can be summarized by this editorial, The Latest Ugly Truth About Pakistan, in the same publication two days before:

"Those who came under fire that day remain bitter about the duplicity of the Pakistanis. Colonel Kuchai remembers the way the senior Pakistani officers left the yard minutes before the shooting without saying goodbye, behavior that he now interprets as a sign that they knew what was coming."

The increased rhetorical aggression is, in its own words, just the latest play in this game:

“The Pentagon hopes public exposure will shame the Pakistanis — who receive billions of dollars in aid — into changing their behavior.”

But realpolitik aside Ms. Gall – who is an award winning, experienced reporter covering Afghanistan and Pakistan - and the New York Times, are right to seek to ‘tell the truth’ and expose this story of ambush, murder and injustice in the AfPak borderlands in 2007. That, along with making a profit, is what serious journalists and serious publications are supposed to do. Here is another example of a similar story about the unjust ambush and murder of 16 men in the AfPak borderlands in 2006.

 The Spin Boldak massacre of 2006 (Photos from Afghan CID via The Atlantic)

This one is the culmination of a two-year investigation by roving reporter Matthieu Aikins. It is the story of smuggler Shin Noorzai and the 15 companions (farmers, traders, and a 16-year-old boy) who were traveling with him in Afghanistan in 2006 when he accepted an invitation from Mohammed Nadeem Lalai, an officer in the Border Police, to stop in Kabul on their way to the northern city of Mazar-e-Sharif to celebrate Nauroz. Lalai led them to a house where, during the festivities, the 16 were drugged, bound, gagged, loaded into vehicles with official plates and driven 500 kilometers south to Spin Boldak, by a smuggler/Border Police colonel named Abdul Raziq:

"Raziq and his men loaded their captives into a convoy of Land Cruisers and headed out to a parched, desolate stretch of the Afghan-Pakistani border. About 10 kilometers outside of town, they came to a halt. Shin and the others were hauled out of the trucks and into a dry river gully. There, at close range, Raziq’s forces let loose with automatic weapons, their bullets tearing through the helpless men, smashing their faces apart and soaking their robes with blood. After finishing the job, they unbound the corpses and left them there."

Brig General Abdul Raziq (source: The Atlantic)

If the name Abdul Raziq sounds familiar to anyone who follows developments in Afghanistan, it is because he is now Brigadier General Abdul Raziq of the Border Police, and also acting Police Chief of Kandahar, where he continues to exercise his penchant for torture and killing. The drug trafficker's rapid rise through the ranks is all the more remarkable, Mr Aikins establishes, when you consider how well documented his extracurricular activities have been:

"Though Raziq has risen in large part through his own skills and ambition, he is also, to a considerable degree, a creation of the American military intervention in Afghanistan. (Prior to 2001, he had worked in a shop in Pakistan.) As part of a countrywide initiative, his men have been trained by two controversial private military firms, DynCorp and Xe, formerly known as Blackwater, at a U.S. -funded center in Spin Boldak, where they are also provided with weapons, vehicles, and communications equipment. Their salaries are subsequently paid through the Law and Order Trust Fund for Afghanistan, a UN-administered international fund, to which the U.S. is the largest contributor. Raziq himself has enjoyed visits in Spin Boldak from such senior U.S. officials as Ambassador Karl Eikenberry and Generals Stanley McChrystal and David Petraeus."

In her story, Ms Gall hints at how official inquiries into the 2007 incident seemed opaque and half-hearted:

"General McNeill, who is retired, remembers the episode as the worst moment of his second tour as commander in Afghanistan, not only because he knew Major Bauguess and his family, but also because he never received satisfactory explanations in meetings with his counterpart, the Pakistani vice chief of army staff, Gen. Ahsan Saleem Hyat."

In his, Mr Aikins notes a similar pattern of investigative shortcomings on the other side of the line:

"In public, American officials had until recently been careful to downplay Raziq’s alleged abuses. When I met with the State Department’s Moeling at his Kandahar City office in January, he told me, “I think there is certainly a mythology about Abdul Raziq, where there’s a degree of assumption on some of those things. But I have never seen evidence of private prisons or of extrajudicial killings directly attributable to him."

"Yet, as a 2006 State Department report shows, U.S. officials have for years been aware of credible allegations that Raziq and his men participated in a cold-blooded massacre of civilians, the details of which have, until now, been successfully buried."

Both include the obligatory search for meaning in the tragedy reference. Ms Gall with:

"As for the Afghans, they still want answers. “Why did the Pakistanis do it?” General Same of the Afghan Army said. “They have to answer this question."

Mr Aikins with:

"It was a tribal conflict,” Waheed said, shaking his head, his long fingers trembling as they tapped against his cheek. “Raziq had a problem with Shin, but why did he have to kill all the others?"

To the jaded eye weary of reading endless accounts of the death and destruction wrought by mankind’s continued obsession with playing toy soldiers, the most interesting thing about Ms Gall’s piece was its timing, and this account of one of her previous interactions with Pakistani intelligence. Mr Aikins', on the other hand, kept my attention, partly because of nuggets like the following:

"Toward the end of 2009, senior ISAF officials reportedly thought about pushing for Raziq to be replaced. According to leaked cables, a high-level meeting was convened in Kabul, chaired by Deputy Ambassador Earl Wayne and Major General Michael Flynn, to discuss the problematic behavior of Raziq, among others. “Nobody, including his US military counterparts,” one cable noted, “is under any illusions about his corrupt activities.” Ultimately, however, General McChrystal, who was then the commander of ISAF and U.S. forces, decided that Raziq was too useful to cut loose, according to an article in The Washington Post. (McChrystal, through a spokesperson, declined to comment.) Cables also reveal that an American information-operations team even proposed a plan, “if credible,” for “the longer-term encouragement of stories in the international media on the ‘reform’ of Razziq."

We wait with bated breath for a time when there will be a US policy push for the longer-term encouragement of stories in the international media on the ‘reform’ of Pakistan.


Footnote:

Hunter S. Thompson

These two strikingly similar and yet markedly different stories had me reaching for a passage from the beginning of Hunter S. Thompson’s The Rum Diary, describing the hard-drinking clientele of Al’s Backyard:

"Vagrant journalists are notorious welshers, and to those who travel in that rootless world, a large unpaid bar tab can be a fashionable burden.

There was no shortage of people to drink with in those days. They never lasted very long, but they kept coming. I call them vagrant journalists because no other term would be quite as valid. No two were alike. They were professionally deviant, but they had a few things in common. They depended, mostly from habit, on newspapers and magazines for the bulk of their income; their lives were geared to long chances and sudden movements; and they claimed no allegiance to any flag and valued no currency but luck and good contacts.

Some of them were more journalists than vagrants, and others were more vagrants than journalists – but with a few exceptions they were part-time, freelance, would-be-foreign correspondents who, for one reason or another, lived at several removes from the journalistic establishment. Not the slick strivers and jingo parrots who staffed the mossback papers and news magazines of the Luce empire. Those were a different breed.

…In a sense I was one of them – more competent than some and more stable than others- and in the years that I carried that ragged banner I was seldom unemployed…It was a greedy life and I was good at it. I made some interesting friends, had enough money to get around and learned a lot about the world that I could never have learned in any other way.

Like most of the others, I was a seeker, a mover, a malcontent, and at times a stupid hell raiser. I was never idle long enough to do much thinking, but I felt somehow that my instincts were right. I shared a vagrant optimism that some of us were making real progress, that we had taken an honest road, and that the best of us would inevitably make it over the top.

At the same time, I shared a dark suspicion that the life we were leading was a lost cause, that we were all actors, kidding ourselves along a senseless odyssey. It was the tension between these two poles- a restless idealism on one hand and a sense of impending doom on the other – that kept me going."

Hunter S. Thompson killed himself in 2005.

Trust Us, Even If We Do Not Trust Ourselves

So, most of our readers have probably already heard about the advertisement that the Government of Pakistan took out in the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) on the 10th anniversary of 9/11. According to Dawn, the ad was first offered to the New York Times, which "refused to publish it, forcing Pakistani officials to go to a business newspaper with a specialised but influential readership."

Here is the ad (via the LongWarJournal):

Pakistan's 9/11 ad in the WSJ

Irrespective of the merits of the advertisement - and there are many who have questioned its design and message - one of the intriguing questions that arise is why the New York Times refused to publish it. A half-page ad is, after all, darn good revenue especially in these recessionary times.

According to the WSJ's own blog, which shrugged off the ad's chances of changing the anti-Pakistan narrative in the American media:

"The [New York] Times asked for “more clarity in the ad about who was placing it,” according to a spokeswoman for the newspaper. The Times did not hear back from the government and so has not yet run the ad, she said."

Well, our sources inform us that the problem about the source of the ad arose because neither the Pakistan Embassy in Washington nor the Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MoFA) nor the Ministry of Information & Broadcasting (MoI&B) were the sources of the ad. In fact, our sources confirm that none of these three Pakistani government entities was even consulted about the ad. In fact, the ad, designed by the Pakistani advertising agency Midas, was placed directly from the Prime Minister's Secretariat.

Why, you might ask, would the Prime Minister's Secretariat bypass its own subordinate media departments and its representatives who are specifically tasked with international relations work? Could it be, as our sources indicate, that the advertisement was the first instance of the country's premier intelligence agency directly placing an advertisement in a foreign publication?

The question that the WSJ probably needs to answer is how, if the three obvious points of contact (Embassy, MoFA, MoI&B) for advertisements from the Government of Pakistan did not sign off on the ad, was it able to confirm that the ad was, in fact, placed by the Government of Pakistan. According to the WSJ blog, which also raises this question:

"The ad as printed in the Journal carries a line at the bottom in small font saying “Government of Pakistan” next to a web address for the government. A spokeswoman for the Journal declined to comment."

Is there something essentially wrong about the ad? Aside from quibbles about the precision of some of the figures, some of the cringe-worthy wording ("Promising Peace To The World"?) and the obsequious offering up of Pakistan to the Americans, no. Is it wrong to try and sway public opinion in the US to a better understanding of the suffering Pakistanis have gone through in the fight against Al Qaeda-type terrorism? Once again, no. Those convinced that Pakistan is playing an evil double game will obviously poke fun at some of the assertions of the ad but there is no doubt that the often unnuanced and simplistic American narrative, that ignores how Pakistanis view the maelstorm they are caught in and their own interests, is in dire need of a corrective.

But what does it say about the Pakistani State if its organs feel they need to bypass each other to get a point across that, ostensibly, all of them should be agreed upon? What does it say about how policies are made and implemented?

Then again, we might also point out that the US$150,000 apparently spent on running the ad in the WSJ could have been better utiltized for things with a currently slightly higher priority than a PR exercise.

The Pakistanian Defence And Its Alternatives

Pakistan Today's cover May 3, 2011

It can be argued that the world’s most powerful countries are those that understand the difference between perception and reality, and attach equal importance to controlling both. Pakistan’s reality is a harsh, challenging one, but unless we move proactively and immediately to counter the further degradation of our already distorted image, it is about to get a lot worse.


Consider this, from Al Jazeera English:

“The Arab Spring has eroded many of the conventional assumptions about the relationship between dictators, Islamists and the West. In Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria, we heard dictators playing the Islamist card for three decades – "support us unless you want the terrorists to win".

The reality has been quite different...Today, the US continues to lavishly fund the Pakistani military, while using drones and secret soldiers such as Raymond Davis to attack the extremist forces that the same regime supports. It is up to the US to stop feeding the beast.”

Or this, from The New York Times:

“... Bin Laden’s death near Islamabad has rekindled suspicions in Afghanistan…“Pakistan is the problem, and the West has to pay attention,” said Amrullah Saleh, the former intelligence director of Afghanistan, who resigned last summer. Though jubilant at the death of Bin Laden, he said it was time for the United States to “wake up to the fact that Pakistan is a hostile state exporting terror.”

Or this, from Salman Rushdie for The Daily Beast:

“ There is not very much evidence that the Pakistani power elite is likely to come to its senses any time soon. Osama bin Laden’s compound provides further proof of Pakistan’s dangerous folly.

As the world braces for the terrorists’ response to the death of their leader, it should also demand that Pakistan give satisfactory answers to the very tough questions it must now be asked. If it does not provide those answers, perhaps the time has come to declare it a terrorist state and expel it from the comity of nations .”

Despite American and British efforts to diffuse the situation, this hard-line ‘enough is enough’ stance is being echoed across the globe. It is neither surprising nor unexpected, and in the long run questions of whether it is justified will remain, as they are now, relevant only to Pakistan’s internal dialogue, but more on that later. The world, like the mob, is ultimately uninterested in the nuances of things. Can it, like the beast, be lulled into stillness with the right tune?


I cannot comment with any authority on the PR plan our politicians, military, past/future leaders and broadcast journalists are currently following. I know that most of the politicos are sticking with the ostrich routine, most of our leaders are rechecking their visa-to-safer-climes status, most of our broadcast journalists are continuing to miss the forest for the trees, and that the ISPR is shooting a feature film, written possibly by the official behind the 'We're good, but we're not God' line featured in this BBC report. The two sole Pakistani voices who have spoken for us internationally today, then, are the rather Laurel and Hardyesque pairing of novelist Mohsin Hamid and President Asif Ali Zardari; Hamid in an opinion piece for The Guardian and Zardari in a comment for The Washington Post.


Both have chosen to follow what I would like to dub ‘The Pakistanian Defense’ (a nod to George Bush, which is also interestingly often a feature of the PD, as is the kind of ironic self referencing you see here). The Pakistanian Defense has a few standard features, some of which are listed below, which can be tweaked to accommodate word length, timing and audience.


1) More of my countrymen have died than all of yours combined.


Zardari, or his resident ghost writer, does it with: 

“Let us be frank. Pakistan has paid an enormous price for its stand against terrorism. More of our soldiers have died than all of NATO’s casualties combined. Two thousand police officers, as many as 30,000 innocent civilians and a generation of social progress for our people have been lost.”

Hamid does it with: 

“Less well known is the statistic that since the subsequent US invasion of Afghanistan, terrorists have killed nearly five times that number of people in Pakistan. The annual number of Pakistani fatalities from terrorism has surged from fewer than than 200 in 2003 to almost 1,000 in 2006, to more than 3,000 in 2009. In all, since 2001 more than 30,000 have died here in terror and counterterror violence; slain by bombs, bullets, cannons and drones. America's 9/11 has given way to Pakistan's 24-7-365.”

Zardari’s piece is simple in structure and word choice, much like a lot of the hostility currently emanating from the pens of opinion makers in other countries. It, like Clinton’s ‘you cannot wait us out, you cannot defeat us’, outlines the outer limits of the diplomatic dance. Hamid, on the other hand, co-opts the linguistic weapons of choice of the other side (surged, counterterror, America’s 9/11 has given way to Pakistan’s 24-7- 365) and in doing so creates a space where nuance may one day live.


2) Pakistanis want peace, not war.


Zardari raises the facts that: 

“Radical religious parties have never received more than 11 percent of the vote. Recent polls showed that 85 percent of our people are strongly opposed to al-Qaeda. In 2009, when the Taliban briefly took over the Swat Valley, it demonstrated to the people of Pakistan what our future would look like under its rule — repressive politics, religious fanaticism, bigotry and discrimination against girls and women, closing of schools and burning of books. Those few months did more to unite the people of Pakistan around our moderate vision of the future than anything else possibly could.”

Hamid reinforces that with: 

“If Osama Bin Laden's death means that the war in south and central Asia can now begin to end, that America can begin to withdraw its forces from the region, and that Pakistan and Afghanistan can somehow rediscover peace, then one day there may be celebrations here as well.”

3) They will be gunning for us even more viciously now.


Zardari points this out with: 

“Only hours after bin Laden’s death, the Taliban reacted by blaming the government of Pakistan and calling for retribution against its leaders, and specifically against me as the nation’s president.”

Hamid says it with: 

“As news of terrorist leader Osama bin Laden's death reverberates in Pakistan, embassies here are shutting down, hotels are ramping up security, restaurants are reporting cancelled reservations and public gatherings like plays, concerts and lectures, are being postponed. The feeling in Lahore is familiar: it is like the dread that lingers over the city in the days after it has suffered a massive terrorist attack. This time, though, the attack has not yet happened, and the dread spans the entire country. Pakistanis know they may pay a blood price for Bin Laden's killing. A purported mirror has been broken. Bad luck is to be expected.”

Zardari makes the mistake of sticking with the royal ‘we’, demanding an acknowledgement of worth nobody currently wants to give us. Hamid comes in from the other end and makes us ordinary, human, sketching life for Pakistanis in details The Other can understand, even if they are details actual ordinary, human Pakistanis would scratch their heads at (hotels, restaurants, plays, concerts, lectures…er…what?). A universal symbol of bad luck, the broken mirror, is weaved in too, to reinforce the pathos and significance of ‘dread’ and ‘blood price’. Zardari invites you to stick a sock on your hand and pillory his pomposity. Hamid invites you to sit down, listen and sympathize.


4) Why on earth would we want to make the most trigger-happy nation in the world angry with us?


Zardari feels the best way to make this point is:

“The war on terrorism is as much Pakistan’s war as it is America’s…My government endorses the words of President Obama and appreciates the credit he gave us Sunday night for the successful operation in Khyber Pakhtunkhawa. We also applaud and endorse the words of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that we must “press forward, bolstering our partnerships, strengthening our networks, investing in a positive vision of peace and progress, and relentlessly pursuing the murderers who target innocent people.”

Hamid goes with: 

“But there are other, truly frightening theories, such as that even in a town with as dense a military presence as Abbottabad, Bin Laden managed to elude Pakistani security forces, suggesting a remarkable degree of incompetence. More terrifying still would be if there were official complicity in harbouring him, putting Pakistan on a collision course with the US. Pakistanis must hope that neither of these is true.”

The royal megaphone of royalty sticks with the moving speechwriting software writs and having writ moves on. Hamid establishes the difference between the sheep and the shepherds with one fluid reference to the ‘incompetence’ of the state within a state that consistently fails to protect its charges. 


To be fair to President Zardari, this is where the difference between a novelist and a head of state is, governed by realpolitik as much as it is by style. The privilege of implying, publicly, that their nation's army is either incompetent or duplicitous rests only with one. This is evident also in the contrast between Sir Salman Rushdie's Down With Pakistan and David Cameron's more measured public stance.


5) Forget the past, it is not in our power to change it. Lets talk about what happens next.


According to our president: 

“We can become everything that al-Qaeda and the Taliban most fear — a vision of a modern Islamic future. Our people, our government, our military, our intelligence agencies are very much united. Some abroad insist that this is not the case, but they are wrong. Pakistanis are united.”

According to one of our brightest literary lights: 

“In the meantime American, Pakistani, Afghan, and terrorist commanders will go on conducting their operations, the slaughter will continue, and human beings – all equal, all equal – will keep dying, their deaths mostly invisible to the outside world but at a rate evoking a line of aircraft stretching off into the distance, bearing down upon tower after tower after tower. Bin Laden is dead. But many Pakistanis sense the impending arrival of yet another murderous plane, headed their way.”

Zardari takes the opportunity to tell people Pakistanis are united against ‘terrorism’. Hamid points out that Pakistanis are united only in being the direct target of everybody else’s cross hairs.


The defining characteristic of The Pakistanian Defense, finally, is that…


6) People are no longer buying it.


And that, really, is the point of the deconstruction. It doesn’t matter how well or how badly written our responses to this situation are, what notes we hit or don’t hit in our explanations, the rest of the world no longer gives a shit.

Consider this, from an Economics Times report on our President’s article:

“Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari defended his country on Monday against accusations it did not do enough to track down Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, but made no direct comment on alleged intelligence failures…Zardari provided no detailed explanation on how bin Laden managed to live for years undetected in Abbottabad, a hillside retreat popular with retired Pakistani generals just a few hours drive from Islamabad. “

Or consider this, from one of the responses posted to Hamid’s article in The Guardian:

“I once referred to Pakistan as the classic informant, who tells the thief about the whereabout of the owner of the property and then informed the owner of the property the thief is coming…Pakistan as I have also posted before is a country the world should fence off and throw away the key. It is a country that its only contribution to the world is misery and danger to lives and limbs. In fact it is terrorist country. The most dangerous terrorist country on the planet.

Every western gov't including ours should not only cease aid to Pakistan, immigration from Pakistan should also be stopped. The world should let Pakistan sleep in the bed it made.”

Back now, to the question of whether the bile and revulsion this ‘rogue state’ and ‘terrorist sanctuary’ is currently provoking is justified. You can choose to find your answer amongst the six points of The Classic Pakistanian Defense outlined above. You can find it while channel surfing, watching someone like Ansar Abbasi holding forth on how Osama Bin Laden was a Muslim Hero. You can find it in the pages of an Urdu paper as a columnist obsesses over the burial ritual of one murderer and not the mass graves of the multitudes of innocents he, and those he was a figurehead for, killed. You can find it in the online edition of an English one detailing how the banned Laskhkar-e-Taiba held funeral prayers for Bin Laden in Karachi today.


People of that ilk make Pakistan’s image crisis worse by openly exposing their – and by extension our - tolerance for intolerable positions. If what the foreign commentators I have quoted above said offends you, and you think they are refusing to distinguish between Pakistanis and those elements within Pakistan that gave Bin Laden shelter, acknowledge the role those elements play in shaping the outside world’s refusal to make that distinction. This, from outside the bubble, is a country where a sentence is blasphemy but a murder is not, rape victims are vilified for attempting to challenge patriarchy, terrorists are sheltered after slaughtering innocent civilians, and the challenge to sovereignty by a western force is always more important than the steady, decades long erosion of sovereignty by some imported, medieval hogwash.


Once, there might have been room in the world for an ideology that thinks it is special, God gifted, exempt from the rules and norms of the comity of nations of which one commentator speaks, but that place has already been taken. Certain Pakistanis need to accept that we are not Israel. By this I mean we cannot defend an indefensible position by virtue of association with unshakeable allies because really, at the end of the day, we have none. Even Saudi Arabia had the sense to let its most notorious son slip quietly into the sea, we on the other hand built him a home in a hill resort.


Today, we have a twofold crisis. One, the incompetence, exposed, of a bloated institution that has never lost an opportunity to enrich itself and steadfastly refused to fix itself. Two, a perception that Pakistan is populated by illiterate Muslims who will come out on the street to protest Danish cartoon strips but not to protest an almost comical, internationally inflammatory misstep. How do we fix the first? The rogue state within a state needs to be broken, examined forensically, and rebuilt in the shelter of a democratically elected civilian government, never to take a step without a popular mandate again, and then only to protect our citizens not endanger them further. 


How do you fix the second? For a start, apologize. Apologize Mr. President, Mr. Prime Minister, to the world for not keeping your side of the bargain, to your country for letting us be shamed on your watch. Apologize even if it kills you. Because your subsequent loss of face might embolden you enough to hold others accountable. And because somebody or the other is always trying to kill you anyway and you might as well die on the right side of the line.

Screen Grab of the Day

Hmmmm. Does the Guardian know something we don't?

A screen-grab off the Guardian's Wikileaks database... Thanks to Missing Romance for sending it on to us:

Ayatollah Ali Zardari?!?

First it was the New York Times and BBC Urdu Service leading the world (and the gullible Pakistani media) to believe Saudi King Abdullah said Asif Zardari was "the biggest obstacle to Pakistan's progress", when he actually only said that Zardari was "the primary obstacle to the government's ability to move unequivocally to end terrorist safe havens" in Pakistan (okay, so the actual phrasing is far more baffling than the misquote). Now we have the Guardian trying to imply stronger links with Iran than anyone knew. Just doesn't pay to be Zardari does it? Oh wait, that came out all wrong...

The Clueless Mr Harrison

The only question that can possibly arise from any sensible follower of international relations after reading Center for International Policy director and former Washington Post South Asia bureau chief Selig Harrison's August 26 op-ed in the New York Times is this: Is Selig Harrison a paid lobbyist for India or simply senile?

Selig S. Harrison: using a table to seem reflective

So full of bollocks is his piece - written breathlessly like a breaking news story - that it is hard to imagine who could possibly ever take it or Mr Harrison seriously. The basic thrust of the op-ed is that Pakistan has covertly handed over the Gilgit-Baltistan region to the Chinese, a "fact" that it seems only Mr Harrison is privy to and thus he becomes the Chosen One to reveal it to the world. In fact, just hearing about this was enough for me to dismiss the story and move on. I mean, you have to ask yourself, despite our longstanding security ties with China, given Pakistan's national psyche, is such a thing even possible? Could such a development actually happen without anyone knowing about it? Or a hue and cry arising about it in at least Pakistan's anarchic media? (And please don't bring in that sliver of land called Aksai Chin into this, as far as I know nobody lives in that remote desert.)

But now that the Pakistan Foreign Office was forced to issue a rebuttal, I thought I would go back and actually read the piece. And woe is me. Mr Harrison begins with the kind of ominous foreboding that would suit a Tom Clancy thriller, and had it been a film rather than a printed article, would have surely included a menacing dhen dhen dhen soundtrack...

"While the world focuses on the flood-ravaged Indus River valley, a quiet geopolitical crisis is unfolding in the Himalayan borderlands of northern Pakistan, where Islamabad is handing over de facto control of the strategic Gilgit-Baltistan region in the northwest corner of disputed Kashmir to China."

Unfortunately, having set up his thriller, he almost immediately puts his foot into his rather large mouth by making factually ridiculous claims:

"The entire Pakistan-occupied western portion of Kashmir stretching from Gilgit in the north to Azad (Free) Kashmir in the south is closed to the world, in contrast to the media access that India permits in the eastern part, where it is combating a Pakistan-backed insurgency."

Does Selig even know anything of what he writes about? Gilgit-Baltistan is closed to the world??? Has he ever heard of European trekking and mountaineering expeditions? Or Japanese and Korean tourists visiting Buddhist relics? Or the Aga Khan Rural Support Programme that has international consultants coming in and out of the region with more regularity than he probably goes to the loo with? Or has he never read international dispatches from Muzaffarabad during the earthquake or from the site of the recent Attabad landslide lake in Hunza? Yes, foreigners do need a special visa to go into these areas, partly because Pakistan officially considers them disputed areas and partly because of security concerns. But not only does Pakistani media reach these areas but most newspapers have permanent correspondents based there and report regularly from there. But of course, this fool gives his hand away by comparing it to the "media access that India permits" in Indian-administered Kashmir (which foreign correspondents also need special permission for.) You have to be either totally blinkered or totally corrupt to make the case that media access in the Valley of Kashmir is greater than in Gilgit-Baltistan or Pakistan-administered Kashmir.




Mr Harrison then adds:

"... reports from a variety of foreign intelligence sources, Pakistani journalists and Pakistani human rights workers reveal two important new developments in Gilgit-Baltistan: a simmering rebellion against Pakistani rule and the influx of an estimated 7,000 to 11,000 soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army."

Aah, the "simmering rebellion" hypothesis, so favoured by Selig. You might go: what? where? How come I didn't see it in Skardu? But then you probably have not followed Mr Harrison's career. Here are two takedowns of his earlier claims, the first from an excellent blog on all things Central Asian called Registan, the other from the Pakistan Policy blog. Registan's post, evocatively and correctly titled "The Inexplicable Longevity of Selig S. Harrison" begins thus:

"Selig S. Harrison has a curious relationship with reality—that is to say, not much of one."

And that in essence is all you need to know about this former hack.


Incidentally, the People's Liberation Army soldiers? Apparently Chinese civilians who have come with flood relief goods and those helping the rebuilding of the Karakorum Highway, which if you recall, was built with Chinese assistance in the first place and has been severely damaged by the recent floods. Harrison in fact admits that most of the Chinese are "working on dams, expressways and other projects." But he also questions some "mysterious tunnels" that he believes could be used for laying oil pipelines and to hide missiles, and plans for railroad and road links that China could use to "transport cargo from Eastern China to... Gwadar." Oh wow. Damn those nefarious-minded Asian types, trying to do things for their own benefit.


By the way, doesn't everyone know about Pakistan's longtime collaboration with China on security matters? And why shouldn't Pakistan collaborate with China to build its infrastructure or even as a military counter-weight to India? And why would the Chinese do it unless they see something in it for themslves? Isn't 'strategic national interest' the very foundation of international state relations? But Mr Harrison sees something sinister in this. Why? Basically because:

"Coupled with its support for the Taliban, Islamabad’s collusion in facilitating China’s access to the Gulf makes clear that Pakistan is not a U.S. “ally.” Equally important, the nascent revolt in the Gilgit-Baltistan region is a reminder that Kashmiri demands for autonomy on both sides of the cease-fire line would have to be addressed in a settlement."

By the way, I have no clue what he means by the second part, regardless of his imaginary "nascent revolt" repetition. So, reminders that the Kashmir issue remains outstanding is a problem for you Selig?


But of course Mr Harrison can't leave it at that. He must earn his lobbying funds (ok, I have no proof of this, but I would be dumbfounded if the following bit of Indian establishment fantasy were being repeated without any quid pro quo):

"Media attention has exposed the repression of the insurgency in the Indian-ruled Kashmir Valley. But if reporters could get into the Gilgit-Baltistan region and Azad Kashmir, they would find widespread, brutally-suppressed local movements for democratic rights and regional autonomy."

I have news for you Selig. People all over Pakistan desire democratic rights and regional autonomy (as, dare I say, they do in vast swathes of Moaist insurgency-wracked India) but nowhere in Gilgit-Baltistan and Azad Kashmir will you find the kind of brutal military-backed suppression of local movements that you will find in the Valley. To draw equivalences there is the height of ignorance, of cynicism or devious attempts to deflect focus.


And of course no two-bit "expert" on South Asia (or any third world area) can go without attempting to stoke sectarian / ethnic fires through sweeping generalizations:

"When the British partitioned South Asia in 1947, the maharajah who ruled Kashmir, including Gilgit and Baltistan, acceded to India. This set off intermittent conflict that ended with Indian control of the Kashmir Valley, the establishment of Pakistan-sponsored Free Kashmir in western Kashmir, and Pakistan’s occupation of Gilgit and Baltistan, where Sunni jihadi groups allied with the Pakistan Army have systematically terrorized the local Shiite Muslims."

Yes, of course, he has to bring in the Shia-Sunni angle as well, as if his main aim is to protect the Shia of Gilgit-Baltistan (shades of neo-con "experts" wanting to protect the Shia in Iraq, the women in Afghanistan etc). Yes, there are sectarian tensions in parts of the area (Gilgit city for example) which have existed for decades and periodically erupt into violence. But he is obviously confusing areas like Kurram Agency in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) - where Al Qaeda backed militants have terrorized Shia populations - as part of the Northern Areas. I have yet to hear of any overt jihadi outfits operating in the Northern Areas. But when your agenda is something else, geography is the least of your concerns.




Selig Harrison goes on:

"Gilgit and Baltistan are in effect under military rule. Democratic activists there want a legislature and other institutions without restrictions like the ones imposed on Free Kashmir, where the elected legislature controls only 4 out of 56 subjects covered in the state constitution. The rest are under the jurisdiction of a “Kashmir Council” appointed by the president of Pakistan. India gives more power to the state government in Srinagar; elections there are widely regarded as fair, and open discussion of demands for autonomy is permitted."

That "democratic activists there want a legislature" must certainly come as news to Northern Areas elected chief minister Mehdi Shah and his elected cabinet. I guess Selig was sleeping when the Northern Areas elections were held. He is right that there is resentment about how much real power the legislatures of Azad Kashmir (which have their own president and prime minister) and Gilgit-Baltistan actually enjoy but do keep in mind that unlike India, Pakistan does not claim to have incorporated the region into the country and, at least accepts their position as regions whose status is yet to be resolved. The bit about elections in Indian-administered Kashmir being "widely regarded as fair" would be laughable (at least as far as the Valley is concerned) if only there were no daily military-enforced curfews and large-scale protests every day there by ordinary Kashmiris demanding independence (no, Selig, they are not demanding "greater autonomy" within India, but nice of you to at least concede that all is not hunky dory there).


Notice also that he never once points out that the people of Gilgit-Baltistan do not consider themselves historically part of Kashmir and their strongest demand has always been a de-linking of their status from that of Kashmir. Why? Probably because it goes against the Indian establishment narrative.


Nevertheless, Mr Harrison provides his prescription for what the US should do with (to?) Pakistan:

"In Pakistan, Washington should focus on getting Islamabad to stop aiding the insurgency in the Kashmir Valley and to give New Delhi a formal commitment that it will not annex Gilgit and Baltistan. Precisely because the Gilgit-Baltistan region is so important to China, the United States, India and Pakistan should work together to make sure that it is not overwhelmed, like Tibet, by the Chinese behemoth."

So, India should be "pressed" to resume talks with separatists on autonomy (kind of like the US presses Israel to resume Middle East talks?) even as its claims to Kashmir as a part of its union are accepted, while Islamabad gives New Delhi "a formal commitment" about keeping Gilgit and Baltistan in limbo? Oh, I understand Selig, it's because what is important to the US (and you) has nothing to do with the people of GB per se or what they want but with the United States' own strategic interests vis a vis keeping China at bay. And yes, we should all work together to make sure GB is not overwhelmed by China (a patently manufactured scare in the first place), since the only sort of overwhelming that is kosher is by the US. What Selig is basically saying is, if you want to be overwhelmed, Main Hoon Na. Thanks for clearing that up.




Tailpiece: You might have wondered what the Center for International Policy is all about, because any organization that has someone as clueless or mealy-mouthed as Selig Harrison as a director, well what can you really say about its credibility? Well here's what Wikipedia has to say about it's history:

"The Center for International Policy (CIP), located in Washington DC, was founded in 1975 by diplomats and peace activists in the wake of the Vietnam War. On its website, the Center describes its mission as "Promoting a U.S. foreign policy based on international cooperation, demilitarization and respect for human rights.""

How the mighty have fallen! At least they are keeping up the "promoting a U.S. foreign policy" bit.

The Not So Reluctant Editorialists

I know I may be going out on a limb here but what IS up with Pakistani English fiction writers becoming the prescriptive messiahs of Pakistan?

I mean, I know that novelists are storytellers and there's nothing as powerful as a good storyteller to bring out the humanity of such a massive disaster as the current floods - often drowned in dry and incomprehensible statistics - for a wider reading public, especially outside Pakistan. And some, such as Daniyal Mueenuddin, have done an admirable job of painting pictures with their words, (Incidentally, here's a well-written critique of the American press' obsession with the Taliban taking advantage of the floods, that many readers have taken to be a critique of Mueenuddin's piece, which to be fair only pandered to this obsession right at the end). But since when did Pakistani English language novelists, most of them with only a book or two to their names, become the "experts" on Pakistan's politics, economy, sociology, and everything else? So much so that you would be hard-pressed to find a piece on Pakistan by a Pakistani in the New York Times or other Western English newspapers not written by a Pakistani fiction writer.

The Usual Suspects: (clockwise from top left) Hanif, Mueenuddin, Sethi, Shamsie

Don't get me wrong: I enjoy a well-written piece as much as anyone else (though some of the pieces recently appearing don't even fall into that category - Ali Sethi, I'm thinking of you) and I can understand the Western press' natural reliance on people who can string together a sentence in English. What I find inexplicable is the total reliance on a handful of mostly urban elite, mostly thirty-something writers to explain everything about Pakistan, to the exclusion of almost anyone else (aside from the official line periodically trotted out by the Husain Haqqanis and the Wajid Shamsul Hasans). You want a piece on feudalism? Let's go to Mueenuddin (he's a farmer after all). You want a piece on corruption, let's ask Sethi. The music scene? Mohsin Hamid. Attack on the Sri Lankan cricket team? Kamila Shamsie. Afghan refugees? Mohammed Hanif. The Ahmadis? How about Bapsi Sidhwa? At least Mohammed Hanif can claim to be a reporter who has covered Pakistani politics for years. And I am sure these writers reflect upon their country and have quite intelligent things to say about a variety of topics. But are they the only people who do / can? What about activists, political economists, musicians, sociologists, anthropologists, historians, sports journalists... you know, the people who actually work in these fields and do the research? Or for that matter, why not poets or writers in 'native' languages who have far greater experience of "the Pakistani condition"? (If Marquez for example wanted to submit an op-ed in Spanish about Colombia, don't you think the NYT would get it translated?)

But the problem is not just that the pool of op-ed writers being drawn from by Western publications is small and stereotyped. The more insidious problem is that some of these writers end up believing their own hype and think they actually have it all figured out, going beyond humanizing stories with anecdotes and observation to presenting solutions. So we have Shamsie blaming these floods on the timber mafia (yes, deforestation is a factor but certainly does not explain the entire gamut of devastation caused by the floods, most of it in areas where timber theft is not really a factor), Hanif trying to make a point against the Taliban scare by claiming that there is no indigenous word for terrorism in Sindhi or Seraiki (really? and Pushto does?) and Mueenuddin raising the spectre of the radicalization of and revolution by the displaced and hungry to explain why those people should be helped out.

But a special place in all this must be reserved for Mohsin Hamid, whose every article on Pakistan seems now to be predicated on the belief that everything would be rosy in Pakistan if only everyone paid more taxes. What is perhaps even more strange is that it's a local publication, Dawn, that gives him pride of place on its op-ed pages to hold forth his economic prescriptions that under a little bit of scrutiny turn out to be mostly nice-sounding fluff. Here, for example is his solution to Pakistan's woes, from his latest piece in Dawn:

"Helping [the flood affectees] means taxes. We pay only a tenth of our collective income to our state, far less than most countries. India and Sri Lanka pay half again as much as we do. We need to pay more. We need a comprehensive flood tax programme. We need to cease our foolish bickering about whether taxes should be paid to the provinces or to the centre, by merchants or by landlords, on luxury goods or on shareholdings. The answer to these either-or questions is both. Let’s tax both locally and nationally, both trading and agriculture, both consumption and wealth."

Author Mohsin Hamid: obsessed with taxes

Yes, Mohsin, we know you were a banker and we know that Pakistan's tax collections are abysmally low. But could you go and check with any economist how much of what we do collect is actually utilized? And I'm not even talking about corruption here, the other favourite bugbear of armchair theorists. I'm talking about the state's lack of capacity in even making the most of what it has. It is a favourite pastime of the intelligentsia to moan about how Pakistan allocates only 1.5% of its GDP to education and health and how we need to raise this number manifold. All well and good, but what about the fact that more than 50% of even this meagre allocation goes un-utilized because the state does not have the ability to use it? Yes, of course there should be more schools for children and health units in the rural areas, but what about the fact that even the ones that exist are often without teachers and medical staff and supplies? Mohsin alludes to this major issue with the throwaway line, "if we can... then spend for our impoverished majority..." Ah, yes, great idea, it's a pity nobody ever thought of it before.

Could we move beyond the safe generalizations to understand the complexity of the issues? Or am I just being a Wish Maker?

Going For A Leak

I have such mixed emotions about the WikiLeaks expose of the Afghan War Diaries and so many strands of thought that I want to pursue that this is going to be a difficult post. But I'm going to try and present at least some of them in as coherent a manner as I can. I hope you will bear with me. For my own sake (and probably for readers' sake as well) I will break up the different strands with sub-heads.

Is The WikiLeaks Expose A Good Thing?

Generally, yes. Any puncturing of the facade of unaccountable power is a great thing in my book. But particularly when it involves exposing the reality of a conflict that very few outside the conflict zone have even a basic understanding of, it is invaluable. We are fed so many lies by governments and the hand-in-glove media that narratives that challenge those fabrications and lead to questioning among the public are the only way to challenge that hegemony.

However. There are a couple of things which also bother me about the recent leak of apparently over 92,000 previously secret files. The first is based on taking the leaks at face value. As most of us know by now, the secret documents are mostly raw field intelligence reports, that is they are the reports filed by Western soldiers on the frontline reporting incidents, interactions and intelligence culled from various sources. These were meant to be internal documents for their superior officers. Not only do they reflect the competence and biases of the soldiers writing them up as well as contain cover-ups (after all, soldiers don't want anything bad to reflect on themselves in front of superiors), they have not been verified, double-checked or passed up through a filtration process that assesses their credibility via other sources. So, yes, there is a vicarious thrill to seeing what things are like for soldiers on the frontline or how a military operates in such a situation, and there may be very useful information to be gleaned from them, but in and of themselves, they are not terribly helpful for the average reader to understand what is actually going on. Readers who take these reports at face value - as most readers are tending to do - are likely to mire themselves further in the "fog of war" rather than cut through it, to paraphrase Mahir Ali in Dawn today.

As a parallel, imagine for a moment having access to an investigative reporter's notebook that details every observation, every possible lead, every interview, every hunch, every rumour or remark heard. Many of these leads, hunches and rumours could be simply false and not all observations, interviews and overheard remarks are helpful in clarifying the story. Now imagine having access to the notebooks of thousands of reporters working on the same story and believing everything as true. That is the danger of treating these documents as gospel, just because they were classified as secret and have now been leaked.

Julian Assange: mystery man

The second thing that makes me uneasy is WikiLeaks itself. I know this will probably sound terribly conspiratorial, but I cannot say with 100 percent surety that it is not all part of some grand psy-ops strategy: you know, build up an institution with calculated cred boosters (e.g. the leaked Iraq helicopter footage) and then use it to release info you want to release. It's not like it has never been done before, although of course never on a global level. Okay, I know I'm probably sounding like a nutter now but bear with me. Yes, I've read the wonderful profile of maverick Julian Assange (the driving force behind WikiLeaks) in The New Yorker, but I never quite understood the over-dramatized cloak and dagger stuff. Are we really being asked to believe that a man as publicly recognizable as Assange, who jets from continent to continent, can escape being tracked by international security agencies? Or that WikiLeaks, which claims to run entirely on donations (including credit card donations), does not have a single bank account or money transfer that is trace-able? Really?

Ok, forget my questions about WikiLeaks. Is it really beyond the realm of possibility for WikiLeaks and Assange, no matter how pure of heart they are, to be used by psy-op warriors wanting to put certain things out in the public realm? Are we really being asked to believe that 92,000 plus secret documents can be easily smuggled out of the Pentagon (on a Lady GaGa CD, no less, if some reports are to be believed) without anyone having any inkling? Anything is possible I guess but the probability on the other hand is a different matter.

Forgive me for being a doubting Thomas and slightly cynical. But these are the reasons I would not take the leaks at face value even as I accept the mining of the data for useful information. I hope my doubts about WikiLeaks are misplaced though.



Do We Learn Anything New in the Leaks?

I guess the answer to this depends on how much you know of Afghanistan and how much you have followed the story of the conflict there. For most old hands, there is nothing sensationally new in the documents (at least from what has come to light so far). But you do get a lot of details and a very good idea of the way much of them are covered up. For example, the number of attacks on Coalition Forces (CF) and the far larger number of civilian casualties than have been reported previously. Or the almost comic attempts of American soldiers to win hearts and minds among the local populace. And most of all you understand in the minutae why this conflict will end unsuccessfully for the US.



Is This The Smoking Gun Against Pakistan?

In one word, no. The allegations against Pakistan's military establishment for playing a double game in Afghanistan may well be true (I will come back to this later) but these documents do not prove it. At best they remain allegations. Most of the documents detailing the ISI's backing for the Taliban are, as already pointed out, based on questionable intelligence sources, either Afghan intelligence operatives (who have well known hostility to the ISI) or paid informers (who have a vested interest in selling sensational stories). Some of them are plainly laughable, such as the alleged ISI plan to poison Western forces' beer supplies. According to the intel, the alcohol was going to be purchased from Miranshah in Waziristan - yeah, right! - and Peshawar, mixed with poison and then airdropped and trucked into Afghanistan for Coalition Forces to consume (it would seem from this that the CF are quite keen on the FATAbrau brand and short of their Budweisers).

One of the most respected Afghanistan experts and a former European Union deputy head of mission in Afghanistan, Michael Semple, had this assessment to make about the reports in The Guardian (by far the most level-headed assessment I have read so far in the Western press and certainly worth reading in its entirety):

"Although most of Afghanistan's trade comes through Pakistan and Pakistan was the main place of refuge for Afghan refugees during the 1980s, the most popular way of establishing credentials as an Afghan nationalist has long been to denounce Pakistan as the enemy.

 

Among the 180 reports of ISI interference, most are drawn from informants or briefings from the Afghan intelligence service, who describe in lurid detail direct involvement of ISI officers in trying to wreak havoc inside Afghanistan. The bulk of them can now be dismissed as unreliable either with the benefit of hindsight (they warn of impending disasters which never happened) or on the basis of implausibility (conveying details the source could not have known) and because they fit in with a pattern of disinformation (stories constructed from recurrent themes and familiar characters).

 

One set of informants most likely passed on these reports because they found there was a market for them. More politically motivated informants, such as those Afghan officials who supplied briefings which US personnel later wrote up as intelligence, probably wanted to strengthen US backing by turning the US against Pakistan."

It is important to reiterate that most of these intel reports have not been been verified or confirmed as correct. The one exception to this (as far as I can tell so far) may be a Polish intelligence report about an allegedly ISI-backed impending attack on the Indian consulate in Kabul a week before it happened. That intel was apparently corroborated by US intercepts of communication, which were presented to the Pakistan government by the CIA Deputy Head Stephen Kappes.

Which brings me back to the issue of whether the ISI (or at least elements within it) really is involved in backing the Taliban in Afghanistan. There has been enough chatter around the issue for one to believe that there may be some kernel of truth to the matter. I have no proof and none has been conclusively presented but there is plenty of circumstantial evidence to support the thesis - after all, could the insurgency succeed without backing from any quarters in Pakistan? But putting your realpolitik hat on, try and think about it slightly differently. There are two questions:

Q1. Is the ISI's double-game directed against the US or against India, whose influence it is trying to counter in Afghanistan? I am no fan of the ISI and its shenanigans but given the mindset of the Pakistan army and the agency's mandate, would it not be completely understandable for it to work to undermine Indian influence on Pakistan's western flank? And who would be a more logical partner than the opposition to the government that it believes is completely in India's pocket? And it's not as if Indian intelligence agencies do not have their own goals in Afghanistan and have not actively pursued the objective of marginalizing Pakistan's interests in the country. Now, you may argue that the problem is that by using the Taliban to undermine Indian influence, the ISI would necessarily be pitting itself against US interests as well. And you may be right. But I am willing to bet (if this hypothesis is true) that the ISI believes it can limit the fallout - it would probably be as wrong as it has been in the past with such things but it would still believe it.

Q2. In strategic terms, is Pakistan hedging its bets vis a vis the Taliban, so entirely shocking? Given past history of US involvement in the region, given how badly the US war in Afghanistan has gone, given the history of broken promises regarding safeguarding Pakistani interests in the region (vis a vis India) and given the increasing domestic pressure in the US to pull out, is it entirely surprising if Pakistan should? Especially if it feels the US will eventually leave behind a mess like the last time it pulled out? Especially if it fears that once the US forces move out, it will have to confront hostile neighbours on both sides?

Now, I should clarify that I would be the last person you would think of as a Taliban supporter. I am merely attempting to argue within the security state paradigm, the way the military probably is thinking about this. It's not something I like (because of what the Taliban represent and what the other repercussions would be on Pakistan) but given the geostrategic imperatives of the region, it is something I can almost understand.

The biggest irony about the WikiLeaks saga is that while the documents may not have provided any smoking gun of Pakistani backing for the Taliban, the dismay in Western (particularly US) audiences over the failing war effort will almost surely lead to increasing pressure on their governments to pull out forces sooner rather than later...which would help entrench Pakistani military opinion that backing the Taliban is the sensible thing to do, as an insurance policy for the coming mess.

We are screwed either way.



So, Why The Inordinate Focus On Pakistan?

I wanted to end this post with my assessment of the possible game plan around the leaks. Particularly a comparison of how a marginal media player such as The Guardian has presented the findings as opposed to the major media player, The New York Times, since the two vastly different takes tell us a lot about the stakes involved. Plus how the issue has been dealt with by other media players in interested areas such as India. But this post is already too long and I am completely exhausted. So I will defer this portion for another separate post (or perhaps an update on this one) when I am slightly refreshed. Till then.