Ahmed Rashid

Ahmed Rashid on the rise of the Punjabi Taliban in the NY R of Books.

The massacre of over 80 worshippers at two mosques in my hometown of Lahore by Pakistani Taliban militants has exposed, in the most extreme and brutal way, the half-heartedness of Pakistan’s military and civilian leadership in confronting homegrown terrorism and the failure of the country’s intelligentsia to recognize the seriousness of the crisis.


At least nine gunmen and suicide bombers shot their way into the two mosques during the weekly Friday prayers on May 28, opening fire on those inside and exploding bombs at random. The worshippers belonged to the Ahmadi sect, just one of several religious groups that the state discriminates against or declines to adequately protect. Other groups include Hindus, Christians and even Shia Muslims. At least 74 people were killed and 108 injured during the attack, but many succumbed to their wounds over the weekend, bringing the death toll to 90, according to Ahmadi officials.

Two of the suicide bombers were captured by worshippers in one of the mosques. One of the two, who was unconscious, was transferred to the prestigious Jinnah Hospital in the center of the city, where he was put under heavy police guard. Then, on the night of May 31, another four terrorists carried out an audacious assault on the hospital in an attempt to free him. They did not succeed but killed four policemen and a female patient before making their escape in a police vehicle.

The Ahmaddiya movement is a sect that follows the teachings of a nineteenth-century religious reformer and promotes the peaceful propagation of a variant of Islam. But in the 1970s, the Pakistani government—under pressure from conservative Muslim clerics—declared the Ahmadis a non-Muslim minority and many Pakistanis today view them as heretics to Islam—something considered far worse than being non-Muslim. Although some two million Ahmadis still live in Pakistan, millions more have fled abroad. Many of the victims at the two mosques—including a retired army Lieutenant General and several retired senior judges and civil servants—were over 70 years old, showing the extent to which the younger generation of Ahmadis have largely left Pakistan.

Ahmadis are by far the most persecuted minority in Pakistan by Islamist parties and right wing media, and they are widely portrayed as subversive and cultish in school text books. Prominent journalists and politicians think nothing of publicly reviling the Ahmadis or Christians, describing them as agents of foreign powers or anti-Pakistan, while the state has again and again demonstrated its unwillingness or inability to protect them and other religious minorities.


Moreover, while Christians have prominent bishops and community leaders who are outspoken about their tribulations, and the Shia priestly hierarchy is influential and is supported outside Pakistan by Iran, nobody is willing to speak up for the Ahmadis. On Friday some of the local TV channels even refused to name their sect, calling them instead “a religious minority.” Senior government officials declined to meet with Ahmadi representatives or visit hospitals where the wounded were being treated.

Pakistan has taken an awfully long time to understand that it faces an unprecedented terrorist threat that is not a result of conspiracies hatched in Washington, New Delhi or Tel-Aviv, as many in the public believe, but that is the result of the Pakistani state’s nurturing of extremist groups since the 1970s.

Part of the problem is the refusal of the army and the government to accept the fact that Pakistan faces a serious terrorist threat in its populated heartland of Punjab. Just a few days before this latest episode, federal ministers, army spokesmen and Punjab province’s Chief Minister Shabaz Sharif heatedly denied the existence of a Punjabi branch of the Taliban, maintaining therefore that no punitive action against Punjabi militants was required. Yet in recent years, Punjabi Taliban been has been responsible for attacking army headquarters, police stations and offices of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

The Punjabi Taliban are distinct from the Pashtun Taliban that have been fighting the Pakistan army in the Northwestern tribal areas and attacking US forces in Afghanistan. Although many of the Punjabi groups have developed close links to the Pashtun Taliban and al-Qaeda in the Northwest, they were originally trained in the 1980s by the military to fight Indian forces in Kashmir.

Since that covert war and the Kashmir insurgency wound down in 2004, these groups have been at a loss as to what do with themselves. There has been no disarmament and demobilization program of the Punjabi Taliban because every Pakistani government has denied that they exist.

One major Punjab-based group—the former Lashkar-e-Tayaba—perpetrated the massacre in Mumbai in India in 2008 and nearly bought the two countries to war. The army is now committed to fighting the Pashtun Taliban, but it still does not publicly accept the threat to our Punjab heartland, where many terrorists now operating in the Northwest originate from, and where most of the army’s soldiers are also recruited from.

In fact, every arm of the state seems to have an interest in denying that anything is happening in Punjab. The army would like to keep these extremist groups on ice in case tensions with India rachet up again. Some unscrupulous Punjabi politicians, including the backers of former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, want to use vote banks controlled by the extremists to get elected to parliament; others get kick backs from the criminal fundraising done by the extremists.

The police and the state bureaucracy don’t want to get involved in a major crack down operation in Punjab, partly because they are scared of these groups, and the senior judiciary has been freeing numerous arrested extremists because the police refuse to provide sufficient evidence to convict them.

Members of the right wing intelligentsia, who hate the US and the West and hold the most powerful positions in the press and in universities, help promote myopic views of religious groups and non-Muslims. The government very rarely takes them to task, while the voices of liberal Pakistanis have far less influence.

A state of denial and a failure to provide security or governance seems to suit everyone. The country has to wake up to the cancer of extremism and intolerance that is eating away at the lives of millions of Pakistanis. Combating this threat requires something far more than a military campaign: a comprehensive social and political plan and a political leadership that is determined and clear headed and admits that extremism is today threatening the country’s largest province. All that is still missing.
From 3QD
June 3, 2010 12:25 p.m.

South Waziristan

Ahmed Rashid writes about the situation in South Waziristan and how the Military is playing a double game and threatening the stability of the civilian government.



The Pakistani military has been sleeping with the enemy while keeping the civilian government down
Ahmed Rashid
YaleGlobal , 19 October 2009

Enemy within: Pakistani army has launched an offensive against Islamist Taliban in the country's South Waziristan region.
MADRID: After nine suicide attacks in just eleven days that killed 160 people, including many from the security forces, the Pakistan army has finally started its long awaited offensive in South Waziristan where the Pakistani Taliban are based. The success of the offensive, against the backdrop of a serious civil-military division in Pakistan and unresolved debate in Washington, could be critical for the fate of Pakistan which is financially broke and politically paralyzed.

The army and the civilian government are once more at odds over policy towards the US and India, the insurgency in Baluchistan, and how to deal with militant Punjabi groups who are linked to the Taliban. Moreover, still unresolved and now an issue of growing international concern, is the sanctuary being given to Afghan Taliban in Pakistan.


Dozens of soldiers and police officers have been killed in suicide attacks from October 5 to 15 that included an embarrassing 22 hour siege of the army headquarters in Rawalpindi and the deaths of eight soldiers and three simultaneous attacks on police training camps and intelligence offices in Lahore. The spate of attacks could have been designed to prevent or delay the expected army offensive on its stronghold, but they also aimed to topple the government, impose an Islamic state, and, if possible, get hold of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.

The recent attacks have proved more deadly than those in the past because they took place in three of the country’s four provinces, involving not just Taliban tribesmen from the Pashtun ethnic group, but extremist Punjabi and Kashmiri factions who were until recently trained by the Interservices Intelligence (ISI) to fight Indian forces in Indian Kashmir.

Moreover, several within the militant leadership had direct connections to the army or the ISI. The so called Dr Usman, the leader of the nine man group that attacked the army’s general headquarters on October 10, was himself a member of the army’s medical corps. Police officials say that the Rawalpindi and Lahore attacks had help from inside because the terrorists were able to bypass the stringent security measures in place and had knowledge of the layout of the complexes.


While the armed forces are unwilling to admit what many Pakistanis now believe – that there is some degree of penetration by extremist sympathizers within its ranks – the civilian government refuses to admit that the largest province of Punjab and especially its poverty hit southern part has become the major new recruiting ground for militants.

The Punjab provincial government is run by Shabaz Sharif, the brother of Nawaz Sharif and leader of the opposition in the country. The Sharif brothers who ruled the country twice in the 1990s are known to have close ties with the leaders of several militant groups, including Hafez Saeed, the leader of the Lashkar-e-Taiba whose militants carried out the massacre in Mumbai India last year.

Saeed, wanted by India and Interpol has been freed twice from jail in Punjab, on account of lack of evidence to hold him. The Sharifs have refused repeated requests by the Americans, British, Indians and the federal government to crack down on militancy in south Punjab where it is strong and providing recruits for the Taliban.


Meanwhile the federal government has suffered increasingly fraught relations with the army. Last week at the height of the suicide attacks, the army chief General Ashfaq Pervaiz Kayani chose that moment to blast the civilian government for agreeing to a US $ 7.5 billion five year aid package from the US for civilian and developmental purposes.

The army was furious that the government had agreed to US imposed conditions, which only insisted that there be civilian control of the army, democracy be maintained and the fight against extremism continued. The army with its deep tentacles in the Pakistani media and among opposition politicians, whipped up a storm of public opinion against the deal, with some commentators accusing the government of President Asif Ali Zardari of treason.

Neither the army nor the politicians seemed to notice that the country is nearly bankrupt, barely subsisting on life support loans from the International Monetary Fund worth a total of US$11.3 billion. Pakistan has been holding out a begging bowl for the past year, while factories, farms and schools are shutting down because of a chronic shortage of electric power, which is off in major cities for up to 10 hours a day.

The civilian government has also tried repeatedly to end the long running separatist insurgency in Baluchistan province by declaring ceasefires and the promise to hold talks with insurgent leaders. However Baluch leaders accuse the army of sabotaging any such political reconciliation by continuing to assassinate or carry out forced disappearances of Baluch activists.

Meanwhile as the policy review over Afghanistan and Pakistan continues in the White House, both the army and government are being directly accused by US officials of continuing to harbor the Afghan Taliban leadership and allowing them to pump in recruits, logistics and other supplies into Afghanistan.


As long as only British and Canadian troops in Helmand and Kandahar faced the effects of the Taliban’s safe sanctuaries in Pakistan’s Baluchistan province, the former Bush administration was quiet. But now that there are over 10,000 US marines in Helmand and Kandahar who are taking casualties, the Obama administration has made the sanctuary issue a major plank in its future relations with Pakistan.

But the dithering in Washington over the future of US policy towards Afghanistan is leading to greater justification by Pakistan and other neighbors of Afghanistan to hedge their bets for the future in case the Americans withdraw or reduce their commitment, by backing once again their favorite Afghan proxies just as they did during the 1990s civil war.

Pakistan has been saving the Afghan Taliban leadership for just such an eventuality. But now Iran, Russia, India and the Central Asian states are all looking at their future in the country in the light of a US lack of resolve to stay the course in Afghanistan. US relations with Pakistan’s military remain troubled – everyone knows that it is still the army and not the civilian government that calls the shots when it comes to policy towards India and Afghanistan.

However it is the worsening relations between the civilians and the military over domestic issues that are causing growing consternation at home. It is unlikely that General Kayani would like to overthrow the civilian government, but the army is resisting any attempt by the civilians to change the broad ambit of foreign or domestic policy.

Zardari is known to want peace and trade with India, an end to interference in Afghanistan, improved ties with Iran and better relations and more aid from the West to strengthen the economy and democracy.

However, Zardari’s attempts to build up public support for these logical civil demands have been stymied because of public disillusionment with the civilian government, which is considered to be corrupt, ineffective, incompetent and unwilling to rebuild moribund institutions of governance.

The key to future stability is to bring the army, civilian government and the opposition onto one page with a common agenda to fight extremism, while amicably resolving other internal disputes, but so far that looks extremely unlikely.



Ahmed Rashid is a Pakistani journalist and author, most recently of "Descent into Chaos: The US and the Disaster in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Central Asia." Click here for the excerpt.

Ahmed Rashid

Ahmed Rashid has a great article in the NY Review of books on the current situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

To Live or to Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan
by Nicholas Schmidle
Henry Holt, 254 pp., $25.00

Seeds of Terror: How Heroin Is Bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda
by Gretchen Peters
Thomas Dunne/St. Martin's, 300 pp., $25.95

On August 5, Baitullah Mehsud, the all-powerful and utterly ruthless commander of the Pakistani Taliban, was killed in a US missile strike in South Waziristan. At the time of the strike, he was undergoing intravenous treatment for a kidney ailment, and was lying on the roof of his father-in-law's house with his young second wife. At about one o'clock that morning, a missile fired by an unmanned CIA drone tore through the house, splitting his body in two and killing his wife, her parents, and seven bodyguards.

His death marked the first major breakthrough in the war against extremist leaders in Pakistan since 2003, when several top al-Qaeda members based in the country were arrested or killed. Over the last few years, Mehsud's estimated 20,000 fighters gained almost total control over the seven tribal agencies that make up the Federal Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) bordering Afghanistan.

Mehsud's death plunged the Pakistani Taliban, composed of some two dozen Pashtun tribal groups, into an intense struggle over leadership, creating an opportunity for the CIA and Pakistan's Interservices Intelligence (ISI) to take action against the extremists. After ousting in April and May the militants who had seized the Swat valley—which is not in the tribal areas but north of the capital city of Islamabad—the Pakistani army is now pursuing the Pakistani Taliban with more determination: in mid-August, two of Mehsud's senior aides were arrested, one in FATA and the other in Islamabad while seeking medical treatment. The US is anxious for Pakistan to continue its pressure by launching an offensive in Waziristan, the region in the southern part of FATA—first in South Waziristan to eliminate the Pakistani Taliban there and then in North Waziristan, where al-Qaeda and Afghan Taliban leaders are based.


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In North Waziristan two key Afghan Taliban networks—one led by the Pash- tun warlord Jalaluddin Haqqani and his son Sirajuddin Haqqani, and the other by the Muslim extremist Gulbuddin Hekmatyar—have been on the payroll of Pakistan's ISI since the 1970s and the ISI still allows them to operate freely. Al-Qaeda militants also live in North Waziristan, as do militant groups of Pakistani Punjabis, who launch terrorist attacks in India and Afghanistan.

The key question is whether the Pakistani army and the ISI, which have intermittently supported the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban since 2001, can now make a strategic shift—turning decisively to eliminate not only the Pakistani Taliban but also the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda. Until now the Pakistani army has considered the Afghan Taliban a strategic asset in its battle against India and other regional rivals for influence in Afghanistan.

Success in eliminating these terrorist networks is vital for the US and the world—even more so now that the rigged presidential elections in Afghanistan in late August have created a deep political and security crisis for Afghans and Western forces there. Every day the evidence of electoral fraud has mounted, with videos posted on the Internet showing, for example, a local election chief stuffing ballot boxes.

Fighting Over the Spoils in the Tribal Areas
Baitullah Mehsud became Pakistan's most-wanted leader after Taliban forces allied with him took control of the Swat valley in April. They were pushed out of the valley by the army in June after fierce fighting that left 312 soldiers, 2,000 militants, and an unknown number of civilians dead. Mehsud also became a target for CIA-launched drones, after the US decided last year to target Pakistani Taliban leaders along with those from the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda.

Mehsud was close to and trusted by Osama bin Laden; by Mullah Omar, the leader of the Afghan Taliban; and by Jalaluddin Haqqani. He gave them support, troops, and facilities for their various operations. By fighting off the Pakistani army and expanding his power across Pakistan's tribal areas, he gave al-Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban a hugely expanded sanctuary from which to operate and gather recruits for their war in Afghanistan.

Among Mehsud's innovations were the extremely efficient new systems he set up to train suicide bombers, some as young as eleven, and to produce vast quantities of land mines and improvised explosive devices (IEDs), which are being used in both Afghanistan and Pakistan. He also oversaw a criminal network of kidnapping for ransom, which netted him a war chest estimated in the tens of millions of dollars. Seventy prominent Pakistanis have been kidnapped this year throughout Pakistan, with ransoms—as high as one million dollars—handed over in FATA.

With the control of money, men, and territory at stake, there was a fierce struggle among various Pashtun tribal contenders to succeed Mehsud as leader of the Pakistani Taliban. The succession was also heavily influenced by al-Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban. Mullah Omar and Sirajuddin Haqqani sent several delegations to South Waziristan to influence Pakistani Taliban leaders.

Finally on August 26 a new power-sharing agreement was worked out between the two main contenders: Hakimullah Mehsud, twenty-eight, a ruthless Mehsud protégé who took responsibility for a series of suicide bombings in Pakistan earlier this year, became the new chief of the Pakistani Taliban; while his main rival, Waliur Rehman, who had acted as Mehsud's deputy, will head the Taliban in South Waziristan, where most of the fighters are based. Both men promised a new bombing campaign in Pakistan and increased support to the Afghan Taliban. One day later, on August 27, they fulfilled their promise when a suicide bomber at Torkham—a town that straddles a major crossing on the Afghanistan–Pakistan border—attacked a police checkpoint on the road used by NATO convoys to enter Afghanistan, killing twenty-two people. Three days after that, on August 30, a suicide bomber killed fifteen policemen in Swat.

The Reconquest of Swat
Regrouped under its new leadership, the Pakistani Taliban will continue to pose a major threat to the civilian government of President Asif Ali Zardari and to the country's military leaders, who are the real decision-makers in Pakistan. The army's recent counterinsurgency campaign in the Swat valley was its first success since 2001, allowing the more than two million people who had fled the region to return home. Mingora, the main town in Swat, is once again open for business and the hundreds of schools destroyed by the Taliban have restarted under tents.

However, the Swat campaign has left gnawing doubts. None of the twenty militant commanders operating there has been killed or captured. The local Taliban chief Maulana Fazlullah is also at large, although suspected of being badly wounded. Taliban attacks against schools and police stations resumed in late August, proving that many Taliban are still hiding out in the mountains.

Still, the army has clearly adopted a new and much tougher strategy for eliminating the Pakistani Taliban and establishing greater cooperation between the CIA and the ISI in the tribal areas. This progress has been much appreciated by US officials. On a visit to Islamabad in mid-August Richard Holbrooke, the US special envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan, told me that Pakistan's cooperation in fighting the Pakistani Taliban was very welcome, but that the army now has to go into South Waziristan and clear out the militants just as it did in Swat. In the meantime the US military is providing limited fresh equipment and funds to the army for just such an operation.

During August, other Western officials came to Islamabad to deliver the same message. In addition to Holbrooke, they included British Foreign Secretary David Miliband and two senior US commanders, General David Petraeus, head of US Central Command, and General Stanley McChrystal, the new head of US and NATO forces in Afghanistan. They all urged the government and army to use this moment to turn decisively against the terrorist holdouts in the tribal areas and in Waziristan.

However, Pakistan's generals made it abundantly clear that they will not invade South Waziristan for the moment. "It's going to take months" to launch a ground offensive, the senior commander in the area, Lieutenant General Nadeem Ahmad, told reporters after meeting with Holbrooke on August 18. General Ahmad said that all the army can do now is choke off supplies to South Waziristan by shutting down the roads, while planes and artillery bombard terrorist hideouts—but from outside South Waziristan.

The army would prefer to wait and see what happens in Waziristan and also in Afghanistan. It is hesitant to move into the tribal areas, where since 2004 it has been defeated by the guerrilla tactics of the Taliban and their advantage in the area's harsh mountainous terrain. Pakistan continues to pursue a policy of containing the Taliban fighters on the Afghan border rather than eliminating them. That clearly will not satisfy Western governments and military leaders since it leaves NATO forces in Afghanistan vulnerable to the inflow of men, supplies, and suicide bombers from the tribal areas of Pakistan.

Senior Pakistani officials say they will only be able to adopt a new strategy against the Taliban when India changes its current policy toward Pakistan and Kashmir. In Swat the army succeeded because it made use of Pakistani troops transferred from the Indian border, where 80 percent of the army is based. The key to launching a Pakistani offensive in the tribal areas is for the Americans to help improve Pakistan's relations with New Delhi, so that the army can move more of its troops to the Afghan border.

India is not helping. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said on August 17 that Pakistan-based terrorist groups were plotting more attacks against India. Last November the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba (Army of the Pure) carried out attacks in Mumbai that killed 166 people. Lashkar is a group that is distinct from the Taliban and has been particularly active against targets in India and Kashmir. Indian officials now say that Hafiz Saeed, the Lashkar leader who lives undisturbed in Lahore, was "the brain" behind the Mumbai attack. They demand that he be put on trial.

Pakistan is refusing to clamp down on Lashkar or put Saeed behind bars. Lashkar is the best disciplined, organized, and loyal of the jihadi groups that the ISI has trained and sponsored since the 1980s, and it has always targeted India rather than the Pakistani army. The army will do everything to preserve Lashkar, as long as it believes there is a threat from India. Similarly, Pakistan's continued support for the Afghan Taliban is based on countering India's influence in Afghanistan and on having an alternative force that Pakistan can count on, in case the Americans leave Afghanistan.

In short, the strategy of the Pakistani military to selectively use Islamic extremists both as a tool in its foreign policy arsenal against India and to gain influence in Afghanistan is not going to change in a hurry. The Obama administration's main strategy for the moment is hand-holding—it wants to keep engaging with the Pakistani leaders to try to get them to change course. At least one senior US official arrives in Islamabad every other week to argue the American case.

The Afghan Elections
Pakistan's safe havens for the Afghan Taliban have been to a large extent responsible for their revival and growing dominance across Afghanistan and for the rising death toll among NATO forces. But the Taliban were not the major cause of the political crisis that enveloped Afghanistan after the August 20 presidential elections.

US officials told me in April 2008 that President Bush had been warned by his military commanders that Afghanistan was going from bad to worse. More troops and money were needed; reconstruction was at a standstill; pressure had to be put on Pakistan; the elections in April 2009 should be indefinitely postponed. Bush ignored all the advice except for asking the Afghans to postpone the elections until August.

He left everything else to his successor to sort out. When Obama took over in January, the crisis was much worse and Pakistan and Afghanistan immediately became his highest foreign policy priorities. Obama added 21,000 more troops, committed billions of dollars to rebuild Afghan security forces and speed up economic development, and sent hundreds of American civilian experts to help rebuild the country. He has attempted to make the anti-narcotics policy more effective and to involve neighboring countries in a regional settlement. It's an assertive and possibly productive new strategy, but the Obama administration has had neither the time nor the resources to implement it.

The depth of the opium problem, for example, has recently been exposed by Gretchen Peters, who in her book Seeds of Terror describes how opium sales have ballooned since 2001, because of either a lack of a coherent strategy by the US or the constant bickering over a strategy between the US and its NATO partners, particularly Britain. Bush refused to use the US military—the only capable force on the ground—to interdict drug convoys in Afghanistan and arrest or kill drug lords, many of whom were easily identifiable. Only last year did the Department of Defense agree to use the military for these purposes. During the last six months there have been a series of raids by US Special Forces and Afghan commandos that have netted large amounts of opium, chemicals that turn it into heroin, and many of the drug traffickers. Afghanistan today provides 93 percent of the world's heroin. As Peters shows, from the poppy growers, to the Taliban and other local powers, to the drug lords and their allies in government, the influence of opium money pervades Afghan life.

In fact, most of this year has been taken up with preparing for the Afghan elections and trying to ensure sufficient security for them. Everything else has had to be put on hold. In private moments Holbrooke has regretted how the elections have distracted attention from putting into effect Obama's new strategy. At home Obama has not had the time to show that his policy is the right one to follow, and now the elections themselves are being exposed as riddled with fraud.

Another complicating issue for Obama has been the troubled US relationship with President Hamid Karzai, who in the spring was convinced that Obama and Holbrooke wanted to replace him and hold the elections under a caretaker president. That was never the case, but Karzai's paranoia, which is fostered by some of his aides and brothers, who drum up astounding conspiracy theories about US or British intentions, got the better of him.

That the elections were subject to extensive rigging by Karzai's supporters was partly the result of his belief that the Americans were backing one of the two strongest opposition figures, either Abdullah Abdullah or Ashraf Ghani Ahmadzai, which was again not the case. In fact, with so much now invested in Afghanistan, Obama and Holbrooke had every incentive to ensure that the election results were credible. What is now clear, however, is that the flagrantly dishonest elections have undermined the government and its Western backers, jeopardized future Afghan trust in democracy, and given the Taliban more reason to claim they are winning.

For much of this year the Taliban have been on the offensive in Afghanistan. Their control of just thirty out of 364 districts in 2003 expanded to 164 districts at the end of 2008, according to the military expert Anthony Cordesman, who is advising General McChrystal. Taliban attacks increased by 60 percent between October 2008 and April 2009. Forty-seven American soldiers died in August, making it the deadliest month in the war for the US Army. Forty-four were killed in July.

In August, moreover—as part of their well-planned anti-election campaign—the Taliban opened new fronts in the north and west of the country where they had little presence before. On election day in Kunduz in the far northeast of the country, considered to be one of the safest cities in Afghanistan, the Taliban fired fifty-seven rockets. The US military has acknowledged the gravity of the situation. "It is serious and it is deteriorating.... The Taliban insurgency has gotten better, more sophisticated" in their tactics, Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told CNN on August 23.

Both before and after the elections there were highly visible Taliban attacks in cities including Kabul and Kandahar, along with well-laid ambushes, attacks against security forces, and extensive use of IEDs. A month before the elections thousands of US, British, and Afghan forces launched an offensive in Helmand province in southern Afghanistan in order to regain territory, block supply routes from Pakistan, and release villagers from the clutches of the Taliban so that they could vote.

Instead, voter turnout was estimated by Western officials who had done their own investigation at between 1 and 5 percent in most parts of Helmand and Kandahar—before high-intensity ballot stuffing for Karzai began in the late hours of August 20. According to Western diplomats, Karzai loyalists also created hundreds of fake polling sites, from which many thousands of votes were recorded in favor of the incumbent. In one southern district, the polling sites were shut down and the entire vote of 23,900 ballots was forged for Karzai. In Babaji, a town in Helmand that was reclaimed by British forces with the loss of four soldiers this month, only 150 people voted, out of 80,000 who were eligible. The British suffered thirty-seven dead and 150 wounded in the six-week Helmand campaign— ostensibly to provide security for the vote. It will be difficult to maintain the morale of Western troops for long under such circumstances.

The Taliban had threatened to derail the elections and, to a considerable degree, they did, because much of the terrified population did not vote. The turnout is expected to be between 30 to 40 percent, much less than the 70 percent who voted in 2004. There were four hundred Taliban attacks on election day and many polling stations never opened.

How Could the Rigging Have Happened?
Forty candidates ran against Karzai. His main opponent, Dr. Abdullah Abdullah, and other candidates produced overwhelming evidence of cheating. By the end of August the Electoral Complaints Commission had received over 2,500 complaints, of which more than 570 could directly affect the results. It will take weeks to go through all these claims.

Still, within hours of the polls closing, the US, NATO, the European Union, and the UN congratulated everyone on a successful election. Their words were aimed at the Taliban, who had failed to stop it; but they sounded hollow and deceitful to Afghans who were more interested in the credibility of the election.

The rigging defied expectations. There were hundreds of foreign observers from the US and other embassies. Both UN officials and a European Union delegation were assigned months ago to make sure this would be a credible election. Afghans and other experts were warning the embassies about possible rigging. Abdullah Abdullah painted a bleak future for the country if the West did not recognize the fraud. "The fact is that the foundations of this country have been damaged by this fraud, throwing it open to all kinds of consequences, including instability. It is true that the Taliban are the first threat but an illegitimate government would be the second," said Abdullah to reporters in Kabul on August 29. Yet the entire Western community in Afghanistan was caught napping by the widespread fraud. In fact, as I recently wrote elsewhere, the fraud was assured months ago when Karzai began to align himself with regional warlords, drug traffickers, and top officials in the provinces who were terrified of losing their lucrative sinecures.

The biggest mistake may have been made by the UN in not running the elections as it did in 2004 but instead handing them over to the Afghan-run "Independent Election Commission," which was beholden to Karzai, who appointed the members. On September 8, a UN-backed commission announced that it had found "clear and convincing evidence of fraud" and ordered a partial recount of returns that claimed Karzai had received 54 percent of the vote. If Karzai does not receive over 50 percent of the vote in the final count then there will be a runoff election in October. If Karzai wins over 50 percent his legitimacy will be doubted by many Afghans while the credibility of the US and the other nations involved in the elections will be even more damaged.

An October runoff between Karzai and Abdullah may win back the credibility of the democratic process if that election is more tightly run, but it will leave the country paralyzed for most of the next two months. During that time there could be severe ethnic tensions. Karzai is a Pashtun while Abdullah's mother is a Tajik. We can expect local conflicts, assassinations, and a breakdown in law and order—while the Taliban will further justify their condemnation of democracy as an infidel conspiracy. The best option would be for the US to pressure Karzai to accept a national government that would include Abdullah and other opposition candidates.

In Washington President Obama is under fire from the left of the Democratic Party for becoming another war president and from right-wing Republicans for being overly ambitious in his plans for Afghanistan. Increasingly Americans are getting fed up with a war that has gone on longer than the US involvement in the two world wars combined. For the first time, polling shows that a majority of Americans do not approve of Obama's handling of Afghanistan. Yet if it is to have any chance of success, the Obama plan for Afghanistan needs a serious long-term commitment—at least for the next three years. Democratic politicians are demanding results before next year's congressional elections, which is neither realistic nor possible. Moreover, the Taliban are quite aware of the Democrats' timetable. With Obama's plan the US will be taking Afghanistan seriously for the first time since 2001; if it is to be successful it will need not only time but international and US support—both open to question.

After Obama's injection of 21,000 troops and trainers, total Western forces in Afghanistan now number 100,000, including 68,000 US troops. It is likely that General McChrystal will soon ask for more. Obama's overall plan has been to achieve security by doubling the Afghan army's strength to 240,000 men and the police to 160,000; but these are tasks that would take at least until 2014 to complete, if indeed they can be carried out. Meanwhile the military operation in Afghanistan is now costing cash-strapped US taxpayers $4 billion a month.

Across the region many people fear that the US and NATO may start to pull out of Afghanistan during the next twelve months despite their uncompleted mission. That would almost certainly result in the Taliban walking into Kabul. Al-Qaeda would be in a stronger position to launch global terrorist attacks. The Pakistani Taliban would be able to "liberate" large parts of Pakistan. The Taliban's game plan of waiting out the Americans now looks more plausible than ever.

For all these reasons it is important to recognize that if Western forces are to regain the initiative in Afghanistan, they must deal with the situation in Pakistan, which needs to eliminate sanctuaries of both the Pakistani and Afghan Taliban forces within the country. The Pakistani military will bide its time until the Americans are really desperate, and then the army will demand its price from the US—a price to be measured in financial and military support.

Balochistan
Much has been made of Pakistan as a potential failed state on the verge of breakup, yet if there is even a remote chance of that happening it will not be because of the Taliban, but because of an underlying crisis that has been studiously ignored by the West—the separatist movement in Balochistan. The issue is well described in the best chapter of a new book on Pakistan by Nicholas Schmidle, To Live or to Perish Forever: Two Tumultuous Years in Pakistan.

Balochistan is Pakistan's largest province, comprising 48 percent of its territory and sharing a long border with southern Afghanistan; but it is a land of rugged mountains and deserts, with a population of only 12 million people. Ever since Pakistan's creation in 1947, the Baloch tribes have been in revolt against what they see as the chauvinism and denial of their rights by the Pakistani army in favor of Punjab, the country's most populous province, with 86 million people.

In five major insurgencies against the army, the Baloch have demanded greater autonomy, royalties for the province's gas, development funds, and genuine political representation. The fifth insurgency began in 2005 and has intensified because of the brutal repression and hundreds of "disappearances" of Baloch nationalists, for which the army under former President Pervez Musharraf was responsible.

Many young Baloch are now demanding their own state. In August, with the start of the new school year, Baloch students refused to hoist the Pakistani flag or sing the national anthem. Ten non-Baloch college principals were assassinated by guerrillas the same month, creating panic among the Punjabi settler population. The Khan of Kalat, Mir Suleman Dawood, the titular chief of chiefs of all the Baloch tribes—whose ancestors once ruled Balochistan—announced on August 11 the formation of a council for "an independent Balochistan"; he rejected any reconciliation with the government unless there was international mediation from the UN. According to human rights activists, hundreds of Baloch nationalists have disappeared—they are believed to have been secretly arrested and tortured by the military but their whereabouts remain unknown.

Schmidle meets the Khan and other Baloch chiefs and, with no small courage, follows them as they are trailed by the ISI. "By the end of 2006, nearly every nationalist leader in Balochistan had been killed, arrested, or placed under house arrest," he writes. The Khan of Kalat describes Balochistan's mineral wealth to Schmidle: "We are sitting on gold and anytime we speak up and ask for due compensation, we get a bloody spanking."

The civilian government under President Zardari arranged a cease-fire with the guerrillas last year but failed to follow it up with serious talks, and guerrilla attacks have resumed. Pakistan's past military rulers have ignored the fact that their country is a multiethnic, multireligious state and the policies of an overtly centralized military do not work. The army's refusal to acknowledge this led to the loss of East Pakistan—now Bangladesh—in 1971. Tomorrow it could be Balochistan.

Schmidle has written a picaresque book about what Pakistan looks like today. Like a good film director he presents extraordinary pictures of political mayhem and violence interspersed with dialogue, solid character actors, and tightly focused close-ups of bad guys such as Maulana Fazlullah, the leader of the Swati Taliban—"a short man with large gaps between his teeth,...wavy hair,...a bulky, black turban and a goofy smile."

However, like many movies, Schmidle's book lacks a coherent plot. Each chapter serves up a separate scene or subject, but no common thread or larger themes and ideas link the chapters together. In fact there is little that sets the book apart from the best recent Western newspaper reporting on Pakistan. Schmidle's prose can be brilliant but fails to describe the undercurrents of life in Balochistan or provide the analysis that is needed.

As early as page 8 he heralds his arrival in Pakistan with an analysis that could have been culled from any US magazine over the past three years—Pakistan as the most dangerous place on earth:

From what I gathered, there were a few essential things to know about Pakistan: the army was perpetually in charge, the intelligence agencies were a brooding and ubiquituous force, the Islamists threatened to take over, ethnic problems portended more Balkanization, corruption plagued human interaction and a modest arsenal of nuclear weapons all combined to make Pakistan the most dysfunctional—and most dangerous—country in the world.
After reading such a statement of the obvious we expect some further insights. Instead, at the end of the book, Schmidle is still asking the same questions, having found no answers:

The political, social, economic, and religious dynamics embedded in Pakistan seemed to become more and more complicated—and volatile—with time, and less and less solvable.
Foreign correspondents should not make too much of their own intrepid adventures, but this is not the case with Schmidle. He opens the book with a graphic account of his deportation from Pakistan, warning us that the book is going to be as much about him as about Pakistan. We are often told about his looks and his physique—he is six feet two with blond hair—and about the personal dilemmas that obsess him: What clothes should he wear? What color should he dye his hair? Would it be better to pretend to be Canadian rather than American? Such worries only trivialize his story.

The son of a Marine general, Schmidle, in his mid-twenties and married, arrives in Pakistan in February 2006 under a two-year grant from a Washington think tank. To his credit, he learns Urdu and travels extensively. His time in Islamabad coincides with the most tumultuous events in the country's history during the dictatorship of General Musharraf. The heart of his story is his meetings with Islamic extremists. He befriends the bespectacled, soft-spoken yet lethal religious leader Abdul Rashid Ghazi, who ran the radical Red Mosque in the center of Islamabad. Ghazi opens doors for Schmidle that lead him straight into the heart of the Islamic militancy that was beginning to grip the country in 2006. Ghazi himself is a complex character:

While Ghazi relished his al-Qaeda connections and the confidence such friends might have lent, I still found him to be surprisingly sensible and pragmatic. His eyes didn't burn with fervor. Nor did his rhetoric emanate hatred. He calmly explained the rise of anti-Americanism around the world as a product of the United States' "missed opportunity" to act as a benevolent, global leader.
Ghazi's story ends with his martyrdom once the army, after procrastinating for six months, storms the Red Mosque. One hundred militants die but hundreds of Ghazi's young followers escape the siege to become the suicide bombers that have since torn through the heart of Pakistan's cities.

Ultimately the book's strength lies in its cinematic descriptions, for example its account of the quarter in Karachi run by the political leader Altaf Hussain and his party, the Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM), which advocates preserving the ethnic identity of the Urdu-speaking minority that emigrated from India:

Whitewashed apartment blocks lined the surrounding streets. Billboards modeled Altaf's face more than they advertised products, and the MQM's white, green, and red-striped flag fluttered from lampposts, traffic lights and car antennas. Sputtering Suzuki hatchbacks circled around a dried-up fountain, the color of rain clouds. A sculpture of a clenched fist rose from the top of the fountain.
Unfortunately, strong description is not enough. Whether Pakistan's army and political leaders can deal with the threat from the Taliban and other violent forces they have themselves sustained over the years is a question that needs to be addressed more urgently than ever as the situation in Pakistan and Afghanistan deteriorates further.

—September 10, 2009

Ahmed Rashid on Pakistan in NYRB

Ahmad Rashid on Pakistan and President Zardari.

To get to President Asif Ali Zardari's presidential palace in the heart of Islamabad for dinner is like running an obstacle course. Pakistan's once sleepy capital, full of restaurant-going bureaucrats and diplomats, is now littered with concrete barriers, blast walls, checkpoints, armed police, and soldiers; as a result of recent suicide bombings the city now resembles Baghdad or Kabul. At the first checkpoint, two miles from the palace, they have my name and my car's license number. There are seven more checkpoints to negotiate along the way.

Apart from traveling to the airport by helicopter to take trips abroad, the President stays inside the palace; he fears threats to his life by the Pakistani Taliban and al-Qaeda, who in December 2007 killed his wife, the charismatic Benazir Bhutto, then perhaps the country's only genuine national leader. Zardari's isolation has only added to his growing unpopularity, his indecisiveness, and the public feeling that he is out of touch. Even as most Pakistanis have concluded that the Taliban now pose the greatest threat to the Pakistani state since its cre- ation, the president, the prime minister, and the army chief have, until recently, been in a state of denial of reality.

"We are not a failed state yet but we may become one in ten years if we don't receive international support to combat the Taliban threat," Zardari indignantly says, pointing out that in contrast to the more than $11 billion former president Pervez Musharraf received from the US in the years after the September 11 attacks, his own administration has received only between "$10 and $15 million," despite all the new American promises of aid. He objects to the charge that his government has no plan to counter the Taliban-led insurgency that since the middle of April has spread to within sixty miles of the capital. "We have many plans including dealing with the 18,000 madrasas"—i.e., the Muslim religious schools—"that are brainwashing our youth, but we have no money to arm the police or fund development, give jobs or revive the economy. What are we supposed to do?" Zardari's complaints are true, but he does acknowledge that additional foreign money would have to be linked to a plan of action, which does not exist.


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The sense of unrealism is widespread. As the Taliban stormed south from their mountain bases near the Afghan border in northern Pakistan in late April, Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani told the parliament that they posed no threat and there was nothing to worry about. Interior Minister Rehman Malik talked about how the Afghan government of Hamid Karzai was supporting the Taliban and how India and Russia were sowing more unrest in Pakistan. Meanwhile, the inscrutable, chain-smoking army chief, General Ashfaq Pervez Kiyani, remained silent. By the time Kiyani made his first statement on the advance of the Taliban, on April 24, the army was being widely and loudly criticized for failing to deploy troops in time.

Pakistan is close to the brink, perhaps not to a meltdown of the government, but to a permanent state of anarchy, as the Islamist revolutionaries led by the Taliban and their many allies take more territory, and state power shrinks. There will be no mass revolutionary uprising like in Iran in 1979 or storming of the citadels of power as in Vietnam and Cambodia; rather we can expect a slow, insidious, long-burning fuse of fear, terror, and paralysis that the Taliban have lit and that the state is unable, and partly unwilling, to douse.

In northern Pakistan, where the Taliban and their allies are largely in control, the situation is critical. State institutions are paralyzed, and over one million people have fled their homes. The provincial government of North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) has gone into hiding, and law and order have collapsed, with 180 kidnappings for ransom in the NWFP capital of Peshawar in the first months of this year alone. The overall economy is crashing, with drastic power cuts across the country as industry shuts down. Joblessness and lack of access to schools among the young are widespread, creating a new source of recruits to the Taliban. Zar-dari and Gilani have spent the past year battling their political rivals instead of facing up to the Taliban threat and the economic crisis.

According to the Islamabad columnist Farrukh Saleem, 11 percent of Pakistan's territory is either directly controlled or contested by the Taliban. Ten percent of Balochistan province, in the southwest of the country, is a no-go area because of another raging insurgency led by Baloch separatists. Karachi, the port city of 17 million people, is an ethnic and sectarian tinderbox waiting to explode. In the last days of April thirty-six people were killed there in ethnic violence. The Taliban are now penetrating into Punjab, Pakistan's political and economic heartland where the major cities of Islamabad and Lahore are located and where 60 percent of the country's 170 million people live. Fear is gripping the population there.

The Taliban have taken advantage of the vacuum of governance by carrying out spectacular suicide bombings in major cities across the country. They are generating fear, rumor, and also support from countless unemployed youth, some of whom are willing to kill themselves to advance the Taliban cause. The mean age for a suicide bomber is now just sixteen.

American officials are in a concealed state of panic, as I observed during a recent visit to Washington at the time when 17,000 additional troops were being dispatched to Afghanistan. The Obama administration unveiled its new Afghan strategy on March 27, only to discover that Pakistan is the much larger security challenge, while US options there are far more limited. The real US fear was bluntly addressed by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in Baghdad on April 25:

One of our concerns...is that if the worst, the unthinkable were to happen, and this advancing Taliban...were to essentially topple the government for failure to beat them back, then they would have the keys to the nuclear arsenal of Pakistan.... We can't even contemplate that.
Pakistan has between sixty and one hundred nuclear weapons, and they are mostly housed in western Punjab where the Taliban have made some inroads; but they are under the control of the army, which remains united and disciplined if ineffective against terrorism. In his press conference on April 29, President Obama made statements intended to be reassuring after the specter of Pakistani weakness evoked by Clinton, saying, "I feel confident that that nuclear arsenal will remain out of militant hands."

A week earlier Clinton had accused the Pakistani government of "basically abdicating to the Taliban and to the extremists." Leading US military figures such as General David Petraeus and Admiral Michael G. Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, have chimed in with even more dire predictions. Clinton's statements have provoked increasing anti-Americanism in the Pakistani army and public, and thus will complicate the effectiveness of any future aid the US may give. On April 24 General Kiyani said that the army was fully capable of defending the country and went on to strongly condemn "the pronouncements" by outside powers that criticized the army and raised doubts about the future of Pakistan.

The Obama administration has promised Pakistan $1.5 billion a year for the next five years, but the bill is stuck in Congress with a long list of conditions that the Pakistanis are unwilling to accept. In early April other countries pledged a miserly $5.3 billion in aid, even as Richard Holbrooke, the US special envoy to the region, told me that Pakistan needs $50 billion. None of this money is likely to come immediately.


The Current Crisis
The present scare was set off in mid-February when the North-West Frontier provincial government signed a deal with a neo-Taliban movement in the scenic Swat valley, a major tourist resort area about a hundred miles from Islamabad, allowing the Taliban to impose strict sharia law in Swat's courts. (The creation of a new Islamic appeals court was announced by the Pakistani government on May 2.) In return for the Pakistani army withdrawing, the Taliban agreed to disarm, then promptly refused to do so. The accord followed the defeat in Swat last year of 12,000 government troops at the hands of some three thousand Taliban after bloody fighting, the blowing up of over one hundred girls' schools, heavy civilian casualties, and the mass exodus of one third of Swat's 1.5 million people. The Taliban swiftly imposed their brutal interpretation of sharia, which allowed for executions, floggings, and destruction of people's homes and girls' schools, as well as preventing women from leaving their homes and wiping out the families that had earlier resisted them.

Despite dire warnings by experts and Pakistan's increasingly vocal commentators in the press and elsewhere that the accord was a major capitulation to the militants and a terrible precedent that contradicted the rule of law as stipulated by the constitution, Zardari and the national parliament approved the deal on April 14 without even a debate. Within days the Taliban in Swat moved further, taking control of the local administration, police, and schools. On April 19 Sufi Mohammed, a radical leader who the government had released from prison in November 2008 and termed "a moderate" and whose son-in-law, Maulana Fazlullah, is now the leader of the Swat Taliban, said that democracy, the legal system of the country, and civil society should be disbanded since they were all "systems of infidels." Having won Swat, the Taliban made clear their intentions to overthrow the national government.

The Taliban in Swat quickly grew to more than eight thousand fighters, including hundreds of foreign and al-Qaeda militants, seasoned Pashtun fighters from the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), and extremist groups from Punjab and Karachi. They invited Osama bin Laden to come live in Swat. In fact al-Qaeda and the Taliban had targeted Swat three years earlier in their search for a safe, secure sanctuary that would be at a good distance from the Afghan border, with better facilities for an insurgency than FATA, as well as far away from the US drone missiles that have been falling on the tribal areas, killing Taliban leaders. Several top Taliban commanders from FATA have already moved to Swat. The valley also has income from lucrative emerald mines and timber businesses that the Taliban seized from their owners.

It was also obvious that having taken possession of Swat, the Taliban would expand beyond it; yet the army failed to deploy any troops in neighboring areas to deter them. On April 21 the Taliban moved into the adjoining districts of Buner, Shangla, and Dir, from which they threatened several key sites—Mardan, the second-largest city in the North-West Frontier Province; Nowshera, the army's major training center; several large dams; and the Islamabad–Peshawar highway. In Buner they were now just sixty miles from Islamabad.

Finally, on April 24, after much criticism from the Pakistani public, politicians, and Washington, the army began to attack Taliban positions in the three districts. Another 100,000 people fled the army advance. The original deal with the Taliban is now virtually dead since Swat has become the Taliban's main base and will also soon be attacked by the army.

What has shocked the world is not just the spread of the Taliban forces southward, but the lack of the government's will and commitment to oppose them and the army's lack of a counterinsurgency strategy. This disarray makes them all the more vulnerable in view of the apparent cohesiveness of the Taliban's tactics and strategy. Although the group has no single acknowledged leader, it has formed alliances with around forty different extremist groups, some of them with no previous direct connection to the Taliban. Moreover, the Afghan Taliban have become a model for the entire region. The Afghan Taliban of the 1990s have morphed into the Pakistani Taliban and the Central Asian Taliban and it may be only a question of time before we see the Indian Taliban.


Who are the Pakistani Taliban?
The US failure to destroy the al-Qaeda and Afghan Taliban leadership in the 2001 war that liberated Afghanistan allowed both groups to take up safe residence in the tribal badlands of the Federal Administered Tribal Areas that form a buffer zone between Afghanistan and Pakistan, where some 4.5 million Pashtun tribesmen live. Other Afghan Taliban leaders sought sanctuary in Quetta, the capital of Balochistan province. Their escape from Afghanistan and their move into FATA were aided by local Pakistani Pashtun tribesmen who had fought for the Afghan Taliban in the 1990s but had now become richer, more radicalized, and more heavily armed in the process of playing host to their guests.

The Pakistani military under former President Pervez Musharraf tried to hunt down al-Qaeda, but never touched the Afghan Taliban, whose regime the Pakistanis had supported in the 1990s and whose presence was now considered a good insurance policy for Pakistan in case the Americans were to leave Afghanistan. Both the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban and their Punjabi extremist allies were seen as potentially useful counters against India —both in any future struggle for the contested region of Kashmir and also to tame the growing Indian influence in Kabul. George W. Bush seems, at least, to have gone along with this Pakistani strategy, urging action against al-Qaeda but never pushing Pakistan to deal with the Taliban threat.

In Pakistan, the radicalized Pakistani Pashtun tribal leaders in FATA began to organize their own militias in 2003 and to draw up their own political agenda to "liberate" Pakistan. Meanwhile, the Afghan Taliban had reconstituted their insurgency in Afghanistan, aided by their Pakistani Pashtun allies and the Pakistani military's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), which looked the other way as arms and men flowed into Afghanistan from FATA and Balochistan. Only after Taliban attacks on US forces in Afghanistan increased in the summer of 2004 did Washington force Musharraf to send troops into FATA and clear them out.

The Pakistani army, however, was promptly defeated and a vicious cycle ensued. After every setback, the army signed peace agreements with the Pakistani Taliban that allowed them to consolidate their grip on FATA. In 2007 the separate tribal militias, led by a variety of commanders, coalesced into the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or Movement of the Pakistani Taliban, led by the charismatic thirty-four-year-old Baitullah Mehsud from the tribal area of South Waziristan. A close ally of both al-Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban, he was later linked to the assassination of Benazir Bhutto and to hundreds of suicide attacks in Pakistan.

At the same time, other separate but coordinated jihadi movements—some supported in part by radical madrasas funded by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries—sprang up. In the spring of 2007 radical mullahs took over the Red Mosque in Islamabad and announced their intention to impose sharia in the capital. The Musharraf government declined to intervene when the movement numbered hardly a dozen activists. Six months later, thousands of heavily armed militants including Pashtun Taliban, Kashmiris, and al-Qaeda fighters fought a three-day battle with the army in which a hundred people were killed. The extremist survivors vowed revenge and became the core of a new group sponsoring suicide bombings as they fled to FATA to join up with Baitullah Mehsud.

Three years earlier, in 2004, Maulana Fazlullah, the son-in-law of Sufi Muhamed, who was at the time an unknown former ski-lift operator and itinerant mullah, had set up an FM radio station in the Swat valley with a handful of supporters and begun broadcasting inflammatory threats both to local people and to the state of Pakistan. The Musharraf government never shut his station down. Fazlullah soon attracted the attention of al-Qaeda and the Taliban, who poured in men and weapons to support him. By the time the Pakistani army finally went into Swat in November 2007, Fazlullah himself had an army and several radio stations.

In Punjab, extremist Punjabi groups who had been mobilized to fight in Indian Kashmir in the 1990s by the ISI found themselves at loose ends when Musharraf initiated talks with New Delhi and agreed to stop militant infiltration into Indian Kashmir. With no resettlement or rehabilitation programs in place, these Punjabi jihadi groups, who until then had only focused on Kashmir and India, split apart. Some went home, others rejoined madrasas, but thousands of them linked up with the Pakistani Taliban and were able to mount suicide attacks in Pakistani cities where the Taliban themselves had little access.

None of these groups could have survived if the military had carried out a serious counterterror strategy; but the Pakistani army never shut down any of them. Even though they were all openly opposing the Pakistani state, the army still considered them part of the front line against India and continued to stay in touch with them.


The Army and Politics
The army has always defined Pakistan's national security goals. Currently it has two strategic interests: first, it seeks to ensure that a balance of terror and power is maintained with respect to India, and the jihadis are seen as part of this strategy. Second, the army supports the Afghan Taliban as a hedge against US withdrawal from Afghanistan and also against Indian influence in Kabul, which has grown considerably. Containing the domestic jihadi threat has been a tactical rather than a strategic matter for the army, so there have been bouts of fighting with the militants and also peace deals with them; and these have been interspersed with policies of jailing them and freeing them—all part of a complex and duplicitous game.

The Bush administration pandered to the illusion that the Pakistani army had a strategic interest in defeating home-grown extremism, including both the Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda. Under Bush, the US poured $11.9 billion into Pakistan, 80 percent of which went to the army. Instead of revamping Pakistan's capacity for counterinsurgency, the army bought $8 billion worth of weapons for use against India—funds that are still unaccounted for, either by the US Congress or the Pakistani government. Not a single major public development project was initiated in Pakistan by Washington during the Bush era.

Despite US military aid, anti- Americanism has flourished in the army, public opinion, and the press and television, fueled by the idea that Pakistan was being made to fight America's war, while the Americans were unwilling to help Pakistan regain influence in Afghanistan. The US is accused both of helping India gain a strong foothold in Kabul and of declining to put pressure on New Delhi to resolve the Kashmir dispute. Bush's signing of the nuclear deal with India last year was the last straw for the Pakistani army. In military and public thinking, Pakistan was seen as sacrificing some two thousand soldiers in the war on terror on behalf of the Americans, while in return the Americans were recognizing the legitimacy of India's nuclear weapons program. Pakistan's nuclear weapons got no such acceptance.

Many in Pakistan had enormous hopes that the general elections in February 2008 would bring in a civilian government that would be a counterweight to the army and redefine Pakistan's national security as requiring support for the economy and education and improvement in relations with Pakistan's neighbors. Pakistanis, fed up with Musharraf's eight years of military rule and stung by Bhutto's assassination, voted for two moderate, pro-democracy, semi-secular parties—Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party (PPP), now led by her husband Zardari, on the national level, and the Awami National Party (ANP) as the provincial government in the North-West Frontier Province. It was a resounding defeat for the Islamic parties that Musharraf had placed in office in the NWFP and Balochistan in the heavily rigged 2002 elections.

Here was the last opportunity for the politicians to concentrate on two vital needs: reviving the moribund economy and working with the army on a decisive strategy to combat Talibanization. The world looked for leadership from the PPP, and foreign donors promised financial aid if it could deliver. According to many polls, the Pakistani public wanted the politicians to unite and work together. Instead Zardari and the main opposition leader, Nawaz Sharif, who heads the Pakistan Muslim League that holds sway in Punjab province, have spent the last year battling each other, as the economy sank further, Talibanization spread more widely, and the army and Western donors became more and more fed up with the politicians. General Kiyani has said that he is willing to take orders from the civilian government but clear orders were never forthcoming.

In the NWFP, the Awami National Party failed to stand up to the Taliban after they began an assassination campaign against ANP ministers and members of parliament, forcing the ANP leaders to disappear into bunkers while capitulating to the Taliban. The Swat deal was initiated by the ANP, which naively believed that the Taliban could be contained within Swat. The party is now divided, weakened and unpopular among the Pashtuns who voted for it in overwhelming numbers just a year ago. Its failure has wider consequences, for the ANP is the only Pashtun party that could counter the Taliban claim that the Pashtuns are pro-jihad and extremist. The ANP version of Pashtunwali—the tribal code of behavior—is nation-alistic but moderate and in favor of democracy. Right now the extremist Taliban ideology is winning out as Pashtun cultural leaders, aid workers, teachers, doctors, and lawyers are cowed by the Taliban adherents.

Now that the army has moved into the districts around Swat and is battling the Taliban, it is seen by the public as a two-edged sword. Although people want the army to drive back the Taliban, the army lacks both a counterinsurgency strategy and the kind of weapons that would be needed to carry it out. In early May, extensive fighting was reported in Swat after the Taliban reiterated their refusal to surrender their weapons, fortified their positions, and ambushed a military convoy, killing one soldier. In response, the army imposed a curfew in the valley's main city of Mingora and ordered the civilian population to move out. On the night of May 7, following an announcement by Pakistani Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani that the government was going to "eliminate" the Taliban militants, the army launched a major air and ground offensive in Swat, dropping bombs and firing artillery around Mingora, where an estimated four thousand Taliban fighters had dug in and planted landmines.

In FATA and Swat, villages have been flattened by the army's artillery and aerial bombing; many civilians have been killed, and local tribal leaders who have tried to resist the Taliban have not been supported by the army. Meanwhile, on May 12, the United Nations Refugee Agency reported that it had registered more than 500,000 displaced people from the conflict in Buner, Dir, and Swat since May 2 alone, joining another 500,000 that have been uprooted in the NWFP since last summer, and others who have not yet registered with the agency. According to a spokesman for the Pakistani military, the total number of refugees has risen to 1.3 million. But by mid-May, the Pakistani government had no adequate plans to look after this influx—only a fraction of which had been given temporary shelter in camps—or to provide aid.

Since 2004, practically everything that could go wrong in this war has gone wrong. Most important of all, the army and the government never protected the Pashtun tribal chiefs and leaders who were pro-government—some three hundred have had their throats slit by the Taliban in FATA, and the rest have fled. Even though there was significant local resistance to the Taliban in Swat and Buner, tribal councils begged the army to cease its operations because they have been so destructive for civilians.

The insurgency in Pakistan is perhaps even more deadly than the one in Afghanistan. In Afghanistan there is only one ethnic group strongly opposing the government—the Pashtuns who make up the Taliban—and so fighting is largely limited to the south and east of the country, while the other major ethnic groups in the west and the north are vehemently anti-Taliban. Moreover, more than a few Pashtuns and their tribal leaders support the Karzai government. In Pakistan, the Pashtun Taliban are now being aided and abetted by extremists from all the major ethnic groups in Pakistan. They may not be popular but they generate fear and terror from Karachi on the south coast to Peshawar on the Afghan border.

In Afghanistan the state is weak and unpopular but it is heavily backed by the US and NATO military presence. In addition, the Afghans have several things going for them. They are tired of nearly thirty years of war; they have already suffered under a Taliban regime and don't want a return of Taliban rule; they crave development and education; and they are fiercely patriotic, which has kept the country together despite the bloodshed. The Afghans have always refused to see their country divided.

In Pakistan there is no such broad national identity or unity. Many young Balochs today are fiercely determined to create an independent Balochistan. The ethnic identities of people in the other provinces have become a driving force for disunity. The gap between the rich and poor has never been greater, and members of the Pakistani elite have rarely acted responsibly toward the less fortunate masses. The Taliban have gained some adherents by imposing rough forms of land redistribution in some of the areas it controls, expropriating the property of rich landlords. Education and job creation have been the least-funded policies of Pakistan's governments, whether military or civilian, and literacy levels are abysmal; there are now some 20 million youth under age seventeen who are not in school. The justice system has virtually collapsed in many areas, which is why the Taliban demand for speedy justice has some popular appeal. Moreover, the Pakistani public has to deal with the differing versions of Pakistani policy put out by the army, the political parties, the Islamic fundamentalists, and the press and other components of civil society. There is confusion about what actually constitutes a threat to the state and what is needed for nation-building.

The last two years have bought some hope in the growth of the middle class, an articulate and increasingly influential civil society made up partly of urban professionals and publicly involved women. Most Pakistanis are not Islamic extremists and believe in moderate and spiritual forms of Islam, including Sufism. However, Pakistan is now reaching a tipping point. There is a chronic failure of leadership, whether by civilian politicians or the army. President Zardari's decision to invade Swat in early May came only after pressure was applied by the Obama administration and the army and the government had been left with no other palatable options. But with the Taliban opening new fronts, it will soon become impossible for the army to respond to the multiple threats it faces on so many geographically distant battlefields. The Taliban's campaigns to assassinate politicians and administrators have demoralized the government.

The Obama administration can provide money and weapons but it cannot recreate the state's will to resist the Taliban and pursue more effective policies. Pakistan desperately needs international aid, but its leaders must first define a strategy that demonstrates to its own people and other nations that it is willing to stand up to the Taliban and show the country a way forward.

Ahmed Rashid on Pakistan

Yale Global reviews the situation in Pakistan post Benazir.

After Bhutto, Pakistan on Edge

With the country exploding in anger, Pakistan’s fate hangs on how Musharraf and political leaders decide to restore stability

Ahmed Rashid
YaleGlobal, 1 January 2008

LAHORE: In the aftermath of the assassination of Benazir Bhutto, Pakistan faces the gravest threat to its unity since the country was born amid bloodshed 60 years earlier.

Although the security of the whole world is at stake from the way power is transferred in this nuclear weapon state, world leaders can do little but look on helplessly as Pakistan’s cowed political establishment and dispirited military face the threat of a determined Al Qaeda–backed Islamic extremists. While enormous public anger and mistrust swells in the nuclear-armed nation, both President Pervez Musharraf and his leading backer, the US, have lost all credibility over managing free and democratic elections, combating extremism or delivering stability to the troubled region.

Musharraf, in clinging to power, cracked down on Pakistanis who demanded reform and democracy, and appeased extremists. The US, shrill in its “war on terror,” spent billions propping ally Musharraf and then, in the face of growing isolation of the general, hurriedly pressured Bhutto to go along with a power-sharing deal with him.

Evidence is emerging that Musharraf fooled both the Americans and Bhutto about the power-sharing deal. Until the last moment Washington wanted to believe that Musharraf was amenable to sharing power with Bhutto if she became prime minister after winning the January elections – even though it was clear by November that Musharraf had no intentions of doing so.

Instead Musharraf, the army and the intelligence services planned to rig the elections to reelect the same alliance of pro-army politicians who sustained him in power since the last rigged elections in 2002. After imposing emergency rule on November 3, Musharraf packed the Supreme Court and the Election Commission with his own nominees, stifled the press and put 10,000 civil-society activists in jail. No state institution was willing to hear complaints from any political party about rigging.

US diplomats refused to accept that the deal was dead or that Musharraf may have double-crossed them. US Deputy Secretary of State John Negroponte traveled to Islamabad in late November, urging Bhutto to continue collaboration with Musharraf, insisting that the general was sincere about the deal. In a private conversation I had with Bhutto three weeks before her death, she made it clear that she trusted neither the military regime nor Musharraf, that evidence of rigging was everywhere. But the US applied immense pressure, with Negroponte ringing her frequently.

During our conversation, Bhutto observed that the US put little pressure on Musharraf, that the Americans were taking him at his word, but there was enormous US pressure on her.

In Pakistan, scathing criticism targets the Bush administration for its naivety. The US role as interlocutor between the army and the political parties has been shaken by the series of miscalculations by the US State Department, and the Pakistani government has lost all credibility with its own people. Opposition political parties now refuse to have anything to do with Musharraf and call on him to resign.

Musharraf, long supported by the US, is considered the biggest obstacle to moving the country towards greater stability.

Mourning for Bhutto is marked by seething anger and bitterness. The entire country was bought to a standstill for three days as trains, planes, cars stopped operating and all business and bazaars shut down. Tens of thousands of people buried Bhutto in her ancestoral village in Sind province, and millions of people said prayers for her for several days running at mosques and open grounds around the country.

Most Pakistanis are convinced that the government was either directly responsible for Bhutto's death or at the very least failed to provide her with adequate protection. Bhutto's own appeals for increased security as she campaigned for the 8 January elections were ignored, even ridiculed by government agencies.

So when just 24 hours after her death the government claimed to have cracked the case, the media and Bhutto's Pakistan Peoples Party greeted the announcement with ridicule. Interior Ministry Spokesman Brig Javed Iqbal Cheema told a press conference on the evening of December 28 that Bhutto had fatally cracked her head on the lever of a sun roof, after bullets were fired and a bomb exploded near her vehicle. He then released a telephone intercept of Baitullah Mehsud, the emir of the Pakistani Taliban in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, congratulating the leader of a suicide squad for carrying out the bombing.

Despite a heavy crackdown against the media by the regime, Brig Cheema's comments were met with derision and even abuse by the press. His comments sounded particularly hollow in the light of demands by politicians across the country for an independent and international investigation into Bhutto's death – something that US presidential contender Hillary Clinton has endorsed and the Bush administration is weighing. Cheema subsequently retracted some of his remarks, saying he had been misquoted.

During the past six months, suicide bombers have killed some 700 Pakistanis, but the Musharraf regime has failed to track down a single culprit behind the blasts. Now it claims to have resolved the Bhutto murder in 24 hours.

Anger and grief at Bhutto's death is exacerbated by a crisis in which no political party is willing to accept an election under Musharraf's auspices. Nobody is willing to accept the government's explanations for Bhutto’s death. And no general or politician has Bhutto’s courage, to stand up to the growing militancy that has gripped Pakistan.

The insurgency launched by the Pakistani Taliban has now spread from the mountainous tribal areas into the valleys and plains of the North West Frontier Province, where more than 30 million people live. Hundreds of soldiers have surrendered, deserted their positions or fled rather than fight the militants. Al Qaeda uses the Pakistani Taliban to expand their area of influence and make territorial conquests so that a liberated area for the new Caliphate, comprising the border regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan, can be won.

Restoration of political stability is no longer possible under Musharraf. But he will not resign unless the army pushes him out, the US withholds support or Pakistanis organize sustained street protests. New army chief General Ashfaq Kiyani is still a novice, feeling his way around and surrounded by generals promoted by Musharraf and loyal to him. The former head of the ISI led the intelligence services during the past three years as the threat of fundamentalism expanded across Pakistan, both in tribal areas adjacent to Afghanistan and urban areas. It is the first time in the history of the Pakistan army that an ISI chief has become army chief, but Musharraf has always heavily depended on ISI chiefs for principle advisers. Kiyanai is American-trained.

The military regime has become a master at playing divide and rule among the political parties, fragmenting them. It is essential that all the major parties form a common front, seeking to create a national government and pledge not to become victim to ISI machinations.

The parliamentary elections will likely be postponed and we must wait to see if political parties accept any new date. Few Pakistanis want another round of military rule. What they would prefer is that sustained public pressure forces Musharraf to step down and that the caretaker prime minister, with support from the military, set up a new national government of all the political parties, which could then organize fresh elections under acceptable ground rules. A change at the top is essential if even minimum stability is to return.

Ahmed Rashid is the author of "Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil, and Fundamentalism in Central Asia" and "Jihad: The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia" and a correspondent for the Daily Telegraph.

Pakistan

Ahmed Rashid writes in the Washington Post about Musharraf's state of Emergency.

President Pervez Musharraf was on the verge of imposing a state of emergency in Pakistan last week before being stopped by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and civilian advisers. It is clear to all in this extremely tense country that power is rapidly flowing away from Musharraf, even as he desperately tries to find a way out of an impossible political impasse.

Declaring a state of emergency would have suspended fundamental rights, placed restrictions on the Supreme Court and delayed this year's elections. It is unlikely that an already angry and mobilized public would have accepted new restrictions, even those imposed by the army, which Musharraf heads. Massive street protests and further mayhem might have ensued.

After eight years as president, Musharraf is battling for survival, refusing to yield power to civilians yet unable to exert the authority he needs to keep the peace at home and still be a useful ally to the West in rooting out Islamic extremists along the border with Afghanistan.

In recent weeks, Musharraf has considered imposing martial law, has tried to cut a power-sharing deal with exiled former prime minister Benazir Bhutto and has enlisted support from President Bush to dampen the crisis that the country has been in since spring, but nothing has worked.

Bhutto is backing away from any deal, and her aides describe Musharraf as a drowning man.

Since 2001 the Bush administration has refused to understand that political stability in Pakistan requires a modicum of democracy, a political consensus among the country's various liberal forces and a working relationship among the four provinces before any battle against extremism can succeed.

Washington presumed that because Musharraf wielded the army's power there was no need to push for democracy or bother with civilian politicians. As a result, the Bush administration has lost the hearts and minds of the Pakistani people. (They have become further alienated while watching Pakistan become a whipping boy in debates between U.S. presidential candidates.)

The Bush administration looked away when the army rigged presidential and parliamentary elections in 2002 and ignored the exiling or sidelining of mainstream politicians and political parties by Musharraf.

For the past few months tens of thousands of the country's liberal and secular elite -- lawyers, female activists and political workers -- have protested Musharraf's wrongful suspension of the Supreme Court's chief justice, Iftikhar Mohammed Chaudhry, in March.

Yet even as our civil society filled the streets, the U.S. State Department and the White House maintained a studied silence -- betraying not only the Pakistani people and democracy but also America's abiding interest in having a stable government in Islamabad that would be a meaningful partner in the war against extremism.

Chaudhry was recently reinstated through a stunning legal decision, a major blow to Musharraf. The Supreme Court is now a wild card, capable of issuing any number of decisions that would make it untenable for Musharraf to continue as president and army chief.

In the days leading up to Aug. 14, when Pakistanis will celebrate the 60th anniversary of the country's founding, Americans should recall that Pakistan's creation was the result of a long democratic struggle against British colonial rule.

In 1945 thousands of Muslim lawyers and members of civil society marched through the streets of British India, demanding a new country. Pakistan was not created by a tin-pot general or by mullahs. And Pakistan should never be compared to Muslim Middle Eastern dictatorships; its people have a long history of battling for democracy, despite a U.S.-backed military that has all too frequently seized power over the years.

Today, Pakistan faces immense problems. There is a full-blown tribal insurgency backed by al-Qaeda in the North-West Frontier Province bordering Afghanistan in which more than 200 soldiers have been killed since mid-July, while suicide bombers have twice penetrated Islamabad.

The army, facing civil revolt and plagued by differences of opinion, cannot effectively go after extremists, while Pakistanis have yet to be convinced that this is their war against extremism and not one dictated by Washington.

The United States needs to help bring about a peaceful and fair political transition in Islamabad before it again insists that the army battle al-Qaeda. Musharraf needs to shed his uniform, hold elections and declare that he is not a candidate for the presidency. Washington then needs to help ensure that the new elected leadership works with the army to mobilize public support for the struggle against extremism.

Neither the army nor Bhutto can battle the extremists alone and save Pakistan from meltdown. Bhutto understands this, but the army still does not. Bush has to accept that his ally's political days are over -- that it is time to stop equating Musharraf with Pakistan.