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.

Manan Ahmed on Pakistan

Amy Goodman and Juan Cole talk to Manan Ahmed about the current situation in Pakistan.

JUAN GONZALEZ: Our top story today is Pakistan, where tens of thousands of people continue to flee the Swat Valley area of the North-West Frontier Province along the Afghan border following a major offensive by the Pakistani military. Pakistani helicopter gunships and warplanes have been bombing sites in the area as clashes intensify. The military claims to have killed eighty militants, alongside reports of rising civilian casualties and the Red Cross warning of a growing humanitarian crisis. As the Pakistani government prepares to set up temporary shelters for up to half-a-million people it expects will be displaced in the fighting, the peace deal with pro-Taliban groups in the valley appears to be over.


Meanwhile, the Pakistani and Afghan presidents are in Washington for a second day of talks with President Obama. Following Wednesday’s talks, all three leaders emphasized their linked futures and their shared commitment to fighting Taliban and al-Qaeda forces. President Obama thanked his counterparts for attending the summit, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised the recent steps against militancy in Pakistan.


On the eve of the meetings, Richard Holbrooke, the special envoy to the region, testified before the House Foreign Relations Committee to assure lawmakers of continued US support for Pakistan.


RICHARD HOLBROOKE: We do not think Pakistan is a failed state. We think it’s a state under extreme test from the enemies, who are also our enemies. And we have, Mr. Chairman, the same common enemy.



JUAN GONZALEZ: The Obama administration, however, was not so sanguine about Pakistan last month. Tensions have been growing since the Pakistani government signed a ceasefire deal with the Pakistani Taliban three months ago that allowed the Taliban to impose Islamic law in the Swat Valley.


Amidst reports that the Pakistani Taliban were gaining new ground and nearing the capital city of Islamabad, Secretary of State Clinton warned of a, quote, “existential threat” to Pakistan. She told the House Foreign Relations Committee that Pakistan was, quote, “basically abdicating to the Taliban and the extremists.”


HILLARY CLINTON: I think that we cannot underscore the seriousness of the existential threat posed to the state of Pakistan by the continuing advances, now within hours of Islamabad, that are being made by a loosely confederated group of terrorists and others who are seeking the overthrow of the Pakistani state, which is, as we all know, a nuclear-armed state. And I don’t hear that kind of outrage or concern coming from enough people that would reverberate back within the highest echelons of the civilian and military leadership of Pakistan.



AMY GOODMAN: Last week, Pakistani President Zardari sought to calm Western fears of his country’s nuclear weapons falling into the hands of the Taliban.


PRESIDENT ASIF ALI ZARDARI: I want to assure the world that the nuclear capability of Pakistan is under safe hands. It’s not a Kalashnikov. Nuclear technology is a huge subject. So it’s not that one little Taliban can come down and press a button. There is no button.



AMY GOODMAN: Well, expert commentators and journalists continue to raise alarm bells about the dangers of the Taliban in Pakistan and the alleged threat they pose to the country’s nuclear facilities. This is a sampling of their voices in recent weeks: Walter Russell Mead of the Council on Foreign Relations, Newsweek’s Fareed Zakaria, former CIA Officer Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, and David Sanger of the New York Times.


DAVID SANGER: What the President was asked was whether or not he believed that Pakistan can and will protect the arsenal itself. And he expressed confidence and then went on to say that his confidence was in the army, the Pakistani army, which is one of the few institutions in the country that actually works. But that confidence is based mostly on the assurances they have been given that this is the army’s number one priority.


ROLF MOWATT-LARSSEN: The most important concern is any possibility that instability might lead to a security breakdown, where they might lose either material or parts of a weapon or, in the worst case, an entire weapon.


WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: The Pakistani army really has been developed for fighting a conventional war against India. It is not a very good counterinsurgency army. This is a campaign they’re not likely to have a lot of overwhelming success with. So they don’t have the capacity to do this well, even if they had the will.


FAREED ZAKARIA: And the problem in Pakistan is, we don’t have anybody there. We don’t have any US troops there. We don’t have a UN mandate there. They don’t want us there. The anti-Americanism there is incredibly high.


JON STEWART: But we gave them $10 billion. Didn’t they build some kind of non-permeable structure at the border there?


FAREED ZAKARIA: Oh, no, no, no.


JON STEWART: What did they do with our $10 billion?


FAREED ZAKARIA: Used it to prepare to fight a war against India.


JON STEWART: But now the Taliban is—aren’t they sixty miles outside of Islamabad?


FAREED ZAKARIA: They now claim to have won a great military victory, and they’re now a hundred miles away.


JON STEWART: Oh, that’s forty miles right there. That’s at least a week.


FAREED ZAKARIA: Exactly. I think maybe now they’ve finally gotten a wake-up call, and they realize, you know what? This problem isn’t going away. And it’s your struggle. This is not America’s struggle. This is not about—somehow, we became part of the problem. In a nice way, the Pakistanis are now taking some responsibility. I have some, you know, friends in Pakistan who used to always denounce the American drone attacks, you know, these Predator strikes—


JON STEWART: Right.


FAREED ZAKARIA: —on the al-Qaeda. And the last month, what I notice is, they’re all in favor of them.


JON STEWART: Really?


FAREED ZAKARIA: Yeah. They’re saying, “You know what?”


JON STEWART: So now they’re afraid.


FAREED ZAKARIA: Yeah, yeah. They’re saying, “You know what? If that’s the only thing that will work, kill those guys.”



AMY GOODMAN: Fareed Zakaria on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, among the many voices in the media echoing and amplifying the administration’s concerns about Pakistan’s ability to contain the Taliban.


Well, our guest today is University of Chicago historian Manan Ahmed, who blogs at chapatimystery.com, a historian of South Asian Islam and Pakistan and has been closely following recent events in Pakistan, as well as how they get talked about here in the United States.


Manan Ahmed, joining us from Chicago, welcome to Democracy Now! Your assessment of the situation right now?


MANAN AHMED: Thank you, Amy, for having me.


I think there are two parallel things that we ought to talk about. On the one hand, there is this hysteria, or at least a hyperventilating that’s going on in US media outlets, specifically Washington Post, New York Times, the sort of the mainstream top-of-the-line newspapers, and also coming from, as you played the clip from Secretary of State Clinton. So, there is a hysteria or hyperventilating that the army or the Pakistani state are not aware of or not acting appropriately towards the sort of threat of Taliban, who are forty, sixty, eighty, a hundred miles from Islamabad.


And what we have to sort of bracket that with is, you know, the Pakistani institutions, Pakistani army, which, by last count, was 500,000- to 700,000-strong, have sort of—it’s very hard to project a future in which Pakistan fails. Pakistan has megacities, like Karachi, Islamabad, populations of 12, 13 million, 18 million in the case of Karachi. It’s very hard to see how Taliban, who are estimated to be 14,000 to 18,000, are simply going to walk into Islamabad and take over the nuclear—you know, nuclear bombs and nuclear facilities. So there is a certain sort of level of hyperbole or hyperventilating that’s going on in the media.


But let’s leave that to where it is, and let’s turn our attention to Pakistan itself. There are approximately three major crises that Pakistan faces, internal crises. One is the civilian legitimacy of Zardari’s regime, Zardari’s government. This, as you might remember, is a result of a very, very populist movement to bring Pervez Musharraf’s military dictatorship out of power about a year ago. And since then, the Pakistan People’s Party, which is Zardari’s party, and the Nawaz Sharif party, the PML, the other opposition leader, have been really struggling to get a hold of what they think are the nation’s top priorities. The chief justice Chaudhry Iftikhar’s reinstatement was a big part of the PML-N, the Nawaz Sharif platform. And so, you saw another long march of lawyers and citizenry against Zardari’s regime this time to reinstate the chief justice, and that happened not too long ago. So there is a way in which the civilian government itself has legitimacy issues with the people of Pakistan.


Contributing to that are the drone attacks, which have been going on really ferociously since August of 2008. And by, you know, sort of Pentagon or related outlets themselves, the success rate is really abysmally low. Some estimates that I heard put the success rate at two percent. That is, two percent of al-Qaeda or Taliban or targeted people were actually killed, and 98 percent being civilian or collateral damage casualties. And what happens is that, since November of 2008, when the Pakistani Prime Minister Gilani promised on national television the Pakistani people that the new administration will stop these drone attacks and will work with the Pakistani government to have a sort of systematic strategy against—for fighting al-Qaeda or foreign elements—they call them “foreign elements”—that obviously didn’t happen. Since the Obama administration has taken hold, the drone attacks have not only continued, but they have sort of increased in frequency.


So, on both fronts, both domestic politics front and foreign national front, the Pakistani regime, the Zardari regime, is facing big legitimacy crises. So—


JUAN GONZALEZ: Manan Ahmed, I’d like to ask you—you wrote recently that there’s a rich vein of Pakistan-on-the-brink theorization that has dominated US foreign policy since the 1950s. And you mention that decades ago it was a fear of communist takeover; now it’s fear of Islamic fundamentalists taking over. Could you—


MANAN AHMED: That’s absolutely right, yeah, sure. I mean, there is a—if you think back to 1947, when Pakistan was founded, it sort of melded within the academic and administrative circles in Washington and with, you know, the real rise of modernization theory. This was when nations were going to become templates, where a Western idea of modernity was going to be implemented—infrastructure, big dams. We saw this across the world in many, many, many different sites.


Pakistan had its brief moment of sunshine earlier in that transition period, in ’57, ’58, when the Harvard Advisory Group was at the forefront of sort of developing Pakistan. But very soon thereafter, in the early ’60s, Pakistan failed to meet the developmental matrix, you know, how they were to chart the progress. And since then, the notion that Pakistan is a failed state or a failing state or a collapsing state or on the brink, at a crossroads, has been a very, very sustained and deeply held sort of myth within both academic and governmental states.


At that point, in the ’60s and ’70s, it transitioned from the developmental vein to communist sort of domino theory, wherein Pakistan’s socialist/communist Prime Minister Bhutto was going to lead Pakistan into the arms of USSR. And part of that vein really crystallizes once sort of the Afghanistan invasion of—Afghanistan invasion happens by Russia.


And so, it isn’t just the fact that Pakistan is found to be failing or about to fail currently, but if you look through the literature and you look through the pronouncements of US sort of state and government entities throughout the fifty-plus-year history of US-Pakistan relationships, you’ll see a very, very sustained sort of presence of “Pakistan is to fail,” “Pakistan should be protected from failing,” and “Pakistan is failing.”


AMY GOODMAN: Manan Ahmed, you’ve got the presidents of Afghanistan and Pakistan in Washington now. What do you think the US approach to both countries should be?


MANAN AHMED: I think for—I mean, one of the things that I thought the Obama administration had a huge misstep was to link Pakistan and Afghanistan together, or their AfPak strategy, which I think they’re trying to de-link again. I mean, fact of the matter is that, you know, Afghanistan, 35 million-plus population, ravaged by thirty-plus years of war, without any infrastructure to speak of, one sort of very little urban presences, versus Pakistan, 175 million people, megacities, you know, at least some tradition of governance, a very fierce critical media. These are not countries that—whose fates are sort of—can be lumped in one basket.


So I think that the first step needs to be to recognizing Pakistan’s own realities. You know, how do you operate within that country itself? And within that, I think the primary task has to be to support the civilian government of Asif Ali Zardari, not because—I mean, I personally am not a huge fan, but the fact is that that is the elected government by the people after a, you know, twelve-year gap in elections. And I think they need—they explicitly need support, because if we are to give them the political will to act in Swat, to act in Waziristan, to act in Baluchistan, if we are to give them the political standing to go to the people of Pakistan and say, “This is a hard war. This is a tough campaign. There are refugees in these major cities. We need to support those refugees, and we have to support the civilian populations. And then we need to fight—in real military terms, fight—those elements who are not negotiating and not talking to us.” And that takes a tremendous amount of political will on behalf of a government that like, as I said before, has problems with legitimacy.


So I think that’s where the media hype in the United States press becomes a huge drawback. And I think that’s where the Obama administration needs to step up and sort of convince both itself and the Pakistani people that they are really partners in this together and that they will support the civilian leadership and not, you know, start talking nostalgically about the return of another—yet another military dictator.


JUAN GONZALEZ: Well, you raise the issue of yet another military dictator. Isn’t it—could the argument be made that Pakistani society is perhaps stronger now than it has been in many years, because of the success of the people in getting rid of Musharraf and ending the authoritarian rule and that it seems that the administration sees it as a failed state, when it’s not—when the government is not strictly controlling its population?


MANAN AHMED: Absolutely. I think that one of the sort of untold and unheard story of Pakistan’s entire existence in the United States media was the lawyers’ movement that peacefully, I might add, and in large terms secularly, drove out of power a entrenched military dictator, both out of military power, but also out of civilian power.


And I think that that really speaks towards two inherent presences in Pakistani society. One is they have a robust, critical media that is not multi-—sort of multi-voiced. There’s Urdu presses, Urdu newspaper channels, English newspaper channels and other regional channels and newspapers, so very, very diverse media that has had a critical engagement with the state on many different levels. And secondly, the need of Pakistani people, in general, to—you know, as in any other citizenry of the world, to ask for security, to ask for safety, to ask for engagement with their government.


And I think that the rise of this sort of civil movement, the lawyers’ movement and its sort of student wing, really speaks to the articulation by the Pakistani people that they want to operate within a democratic framework and not within a sort of a military dictatorship that they had been under for the past ten years.


AMY GOODMAN: Manan Ahmed, we want to thank you very much for being with us, historian of modern Pakistan and South Asian Islam at the University of Chicago. His blog is at chapatimystery.com.


MANAN AHMED: Thank you.

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.

Asma Jahangir

The New Yorker has a wonderful piece by William Dalrymple on human rights lawyer, Asma Jahangir. He traces her activism, from setting up her own law firm, with her sister Hina Jilani, to fighting against the repressive Hudood legislation passed by dictator Zia ul-Haq, to surviving an attack in her office.

Jahangir helped organize protest marches against the Hudood Ordinances, and she was arrested and sent to prison for a month in 1983. There she met many women who had been arrested under the new laws, and, on her release, she took up their cases. She helped overturn a sentence of imprisonment and flogging issued against a blind woman who was raped and then charged with zina. In 1986, she helped establish the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. The H.R.C. defended women accused of adultery. It also took on a growing number of blasphemy cases filed against Ahmadis, a heterodox Muslim sect, and Christians: a single accusation could result in execution.

Jahangir’s position as a human-rights lawyer made her especially vulnerable to the violent religiosity that had become more evident in the country. In 1994, Jahangir won the freedom of a fourteen-year-old Christian boy who had been sentenced to death for blasphemy. Soon afterward, her family compound was attacked by a group of jihadis who were determined to kill her as a defender of infidels and an enemy of Islam. They broke into one of the houses in the compound and took the family of one of Jahangir’s sisters hostage. Jahangir managed to get the police; the siege ended when the jihadis escaped.

In 1999, two people were killed at Jahangir’s office. A woman named Samia Sarwar, from Peshawar, who wanted a divorce from her abusive husband, was hiding from her family in the H.R.C.’s shelter. Under Jahangir’s guidance, Sarwar agreed to discuss the situation with her mother. But the mother showed up at Jahangir’s office with a hired assassin posing as her driver. As the two entered the office, the assassin shot Sarwar in the head. The assassin was killed by a policeman as he attempted to flee the building. Yet Sarwar’s mother was never charged with being an accomplice to murder. Following the strictures of Sharia, the heirs of the victim—in this case the abandoned husband and the two children—exercised their right to forgive the murderer. It was a graphic illustration of the way that Sharia can be twisted to legalize the murder of women deemed to have “shamed” their families.

“Honor killings are not a specifically Islamic tradition,” Jahangir said firmly. “They are just a bad tradition that must be stopped.”