Of Errant Politicians And The Kashmir Cause
Globalist
http://www.theglobalist.com/nor/readlips/2002/04-30-02.shtml
Posted by
mohajir
Jun 19, 2002 12:29 pm
http://www.theglobalist.com/nor/richter/2002/06-13-02.shtml Globalist
http://www.theglobalist.com/nor/readlips/2002/04-30-02.shtml
Kashmir Fatigue
Hindu minority refuses to bow out of Kashmir
By Sonia Jabbar
NEW DELHI - Adding to the complexity of the ``Kashmir Problem`` which has dogged India and Pakistan for more than 50 years has been the fate of the minority Hindu population of Kashmir, otherwise known as the Pandits.
If little is known about the 300,000 Pandits who fled the Kashmir Valley between 1989 and 1991, at a time of popular support for militancy, to become refugees in India, less is known about the tiny number of 17,860 Pandits who chose not to leave.
Unlike the Kashmiri Sikhs who rallied around in huge numbers after the massacre of the 36 Sikhs of Chittisinghpora earlier in March last year, the Pandits were unable to organize themselves effectively in the face of selective killings of their community, choosing the safety of tented refugee camps in Jammu and Delhi instead.
The mass exodus of the Pandits is still shrouded in mystery. Why they left is a question still levelled at them by the Muslims of the valley.
``Tens of thousands of Kashmiri Muslims have died either at the hands of security forces or militants, but we are still here,`` says Shafi, an artist in Anantnag whose group of friends was almost entirely Pandit before the exodus. That there was a real, palpable fear among the Pandits of being exterminated is a fact dismissed by Shafi. He feels, like most Muslims, betrayed by them. They left without saying goodbye.
In Delhi, an old man`s sense of betrayal is of equal intensity. He was a government servant in Kashmir who trusted his Muslim neighbors. He feels they gave him no choice once the killings of the Pandits started in 1989, that they did nothing to allay his fears, that they drove him out of his homeland. ``I asked my Muslim friend why did you throw us out, why? Did we murder you? Did we rob you? Did we rape your women?`` he shouted, ``we taught you to read and write, we taught you . . . `` His friend, he said, had no answer.
The Pandits of Kashmir are all Brahmins, and pride themselves on being the only caste to have resisted conversion when Islam was introduced peacefully to the Kashmir Valley in the 14th century by the Sufis of Central Asia. They held considerable power, as they were the only people who had a tradition of being highly educated. But this also meant that they bore the brunt of the tyranny unleashed by certain ruthless invaders, particularly during the Afghan occupation of Kashmir in the mid-eighteenth century.
Even though the Kashmiri Pandits have had greater sympathies and links with the Indian Union than their Muslim counterparts, they bore severe economic losses after the Maharaja of Kashmir acceded to India when, in 1949, Kashmir`s leader Sheikh Abdullah introduced land reform measures, redistributing land largely held by the Pandits to the Muslim tiller.
``We have suffered at the hands of tyrants through history,`` says Yuvraj Raina, a Panun Kashmir activist in New Delhi. ``There have been four migrations of Pandits. This is the fifth, and the last.`` Panun Kashmir is an organization of Kashmiri Pandits formed in 1991 which believes that the only solution to the problems faced by Kashmiri Pandits is a separate homeland carved non-violently out of the Kashmir Valley.
This portion of the Valley, called Panun Kashmir, would be a secular state autonomous of Srinagar, and would abide by the Indian Constitution. They feel this is the only way to safeguard the interests, values and culture of the Kashmiri Pandit.
``Look, we told those who remained behind, it`s just a matter of time before they get you,`` says Raina. ``The Muslim fundamentalists want to ensure a pan-Islamic State from the Middle East and Central Asia to Kashmir and the world keeps quiet.`` He recounts the recent killings of the Pandits in the Valley - five last month, one more a couple of weeks later. ``We told them it is either homeland or perish.``
But this is not a sentiment shared by the Pandits who choose to remain in the Valley. In Mattan, south Kashmir, a young school teacher, Jyoti, continues to live with her family and extended family amongst her Muslim neighbors. ``This is the only home I`ve known. These are the only friends and neighbors I have ever had and they`ve been very good to us - so why should we leave?`` she asks.
``Yes, we do feel scared sometimes,`` she concedes. ``You see, no one knows anymore who the killers are. It`s not like the old days where everyone knew who belonged to which militant outfit. Now they are nameless, faceless.``
About the Pandit exodus she says, ``We never knew they were leaving. No one told us anything. In the evening they`d be chatting with us quite normally, perhaps a little afraid, and then the next morning we`d find a big lock on their front doors.``
The exodus of the Pandits has also meant that it becomes increasingly difficult for someone like Jyoti to find a suitable husband. In Srinagar there is a sizeable concentration of Pandits, but in rural areas there are barely a few families among the larger Muslim population. ``I really don`t know what I will do. My parents don`t want me to marry into a family who lives in some isolated hamlet. They`d worry for my safety. I suppose they`ll marry me off to someone in Jammu and I`d be forced to leave the Valley,`` she says quietly.
In Srinagar, the Hindu Welfare Forum, founded in 1991 to protect the interests of the Pandits who chose to remain behind, are an angry lot. They are visibly upset by the recent killings of the Pandits and fear another migration. ``Neither the state government nor the government of India has done anything to protect us.Nobody even knows we even exist. Neither the Indian media nor the international media has bothered to see how we live, highlighted our problems. Even our own community in India and abroad calls us traitors because we refused to leave,`` said a Forum member.
Apart from the myriad problems faced by this tiny community, they are a determined lot. Says Wanchoo, a businessman and a member of the Forum: ``We will never leave Kashmir, and we don`t believe in a separate homeland.
``This is our homeland and we wish to live in peace here. As for the killings, well it`s a problem faced by all Kashmiris, not just the Hindus. Everyday you read that 8-10 people have been killed and they`re usually Muslims. But the militants must realize that they only get discredited when they kill the minorities.``
His wife, who has lived through these terrible 12 years, witnessing much of the violence, experiencing much of the pain, relates a recent experience which makes her smile with delight and hope. ``At a wedding recently a whole lot of us had gathered after a long, long time - Muslim women as well as Sikh and Pandit women - and we really had fun, singing and dancing late into the night just as we used to before the militancy started.
``As I was turning in to sleep I heard the Muslim women whispering among themselves in the kitchen. `After so long,` they said, `after so many years all of us have come together`.
``It`s true, isn`t it, that a garden is most beautiful when there is a profusion of many kinds of flowers.``
Posted by
mohajir
Jun 17, 2002 06:43 pm
Asia Times Hindu minority refuses to bow out of Kashmir
By Sonia Jabbar
NEW DELHI - Adding to the complexity of the ``Kashmir Problem`` which has dogged India and Pakistan for more than 50 years has been the fate of the minority Hindu population of Kashmir, otherwise known as the Pandits.
If little is known about the 300,000 Pandits who fled the Kashmir Valley between 1989 and 1991, at a time of popular support for militancy, to become refugees in India, less is known about the tiny number of 17,860 Pandits who chose not to leave.
Unlike the Kashmiri Sikhs who rallied around in huge numbers after the massacre of the 36 Sikhs of Chittisinghpora earlier in March last year, the Pandits were unable to organize themselves effectively in the face of selective killings of their community, choosing the safety of tented refugee camps in Jammu and Delhi instead.
The mass exodus of the Pandits is still shrouded in mystery. Why they left is a question still levelled at them by the Muslims of the valley.
``Tens of thousands of Kashmiri Muslims have died either at the hands of security forces or militants, but we are still here,`` says Shafi, an artist in Anantnag whose group of friends was almost entirely Pandit before the exodus. That there was a real, palpable fear among the Pandits of being exterminated is a fact dismissed by Shafi. He feels, like most Muslims, betrayed by them. They left without saying goodbye.
In Delhi, an old man`s sense of betrayal is of equal intensity. He was a government servant in Kashmir who trusted his Muslim neighbors. He feels they gave him no choice once the killings of the Pandits started in 1989, that they did nothing to allay his fears, that they drove him out of his homeland. ``I asked my Muslim friend why did you throw us out, why? Did we murder you? Did we rob you? Did we rape your women?`` he shouted, ``we taught you to read and write, we taught you . . . `` His friend, he said, had no answer.
The Pandits of Kashmir are all Brahmins, and pride themselves on being the only caste to have resisted conversion when Islam was introduced peacefully to the Kashmir Valley in the 14th century by the Sufis of Central Asia. They held considerable power, as they were the only people who had a tradition of being highly educated. But this also meant that they bore the brunt of the tyranny unleashed by certain ruthless invaders, particularly during the Afghan occupation of Kashmir in the mid-eighteenth century.
Even though the Kashmiri Pandits have had greater sympathies and links with the Indian Union than their Muslim counterparts, they bore severe economic losses after the Maharaja of Kashmir acceded to India when, in 1949, Kashmir`s leader Sheikh Abdullah introduced land reform measures, redistributing land largely held by the Pandits to the Muslim tiller.
``We have suffered at the hands of tyrants through history,`` says Yuvraj Raina, a Panun Kashmir activist in New Delhi. ``There have been four migrations of Pandits. This is the fifth, and the last.`` Panun Kashmir is an organization of Kashmiri Pandits formed in 1991 which believes that the only solution to the problems faced by Kashmiri Pandits is a separate homeland carved non-violently out of the Kashmir Valley.
This portion of the Valley, called Panun Kashmir, would be a secular state autonomous of Srinagar, and would abide by the Indian Constitution. They feel this is the only way to safeguard the interests, values and culture of the Kashmiri Pandit.
``Look, we told those who remained behind, it`s just a matter of time before they get you,`` says Raina. ``The Muslim fundamentalists want to ensure a pan-Islamic State from the Middle East and Central Asia to Kashmir and the world keeps quiet.`` He recounts the recent killings of the Pandits in the Valley - five last month, one more a couple of weeks later. ``We told them it is either homeland or perish.``
But this is not a sentiment shared by the Pandits who choose to remain in the Valley. In Mattan, south Kashmir, a young school teacher, Jyoti, continues to live with her family and extended family amongst her Muslim neighbors. ``This is the only home I`ve known. These are the only friends and neighbors I have ever had and they`ve been very good to us - so why should we leave?`` she asks.
``Yes, we do feel scared sometimes,`` she concedes. ``You see, no one knows anymore who the killers are. It`s not like the old days where everyone knew who belonged to which militant outfit. Now they are nameless, faceless.``
About the Pandit exodus she says, ``We never knew they were leaving. No one told us anything. In the evening they`d be chatting with us quite normally, perhaps a little afraid, and then the next morning we`d find a big lock on their front doors.``
The exodus of the Pandits has also meant that it becomes increasingly difficult for someone like Jyoti to find a suitable husband. In Srinagar there is a sizeable concentration of Pandits, but in rural areas there are barely a few families among the larger Muslim population. ``I really don`t know what I will do. My parents don`t want me to marry into a family who lives in some isolated hamlet. They`d worry for my safety. I suppose they`ll marry me off to someone in Jammu and I`d be forced to leave the Valley,`` she says quietly.
In Srinagar, the Hindu Welfare Forum, founded in 1991 to protect the interests of the Pandits who chose to remain behind, are an angry lot. They are visibly upset by the recent killings of the Pandits and fear another migration. ``Neither the state government nor the government of India has done anything to protect us.Nobody even knows we even exist. Neither the Indian media nor the international media has bothered to see how we live, highlighted our problems. Even our own community in India and abroad calls us traitors because we refused to leave,`` said a Forum member.
Apart from the myriad problems faced by this tiny community, they are a determined lot. Says Wanchoo, a businessman and a member of the Forum: ``We will never leave Kashmir, and we don`t believe in a separate homeland.
``This is our homeland and we wish to live in peace here. As for the killings, well it`s a problem faced by all Kashmiris, not just the Hindus. Everyday you read that 8-10 people have been killed and they`re usually Muslims. But the militants must realize that they only get discredited when they kill the minorities.``
His wife, who has lived through these terrible 12 years, witnessing much of the violence, experiencing much of the pain, relates a recent experience which makes her smile with delight and hope. ``At a wedding recently a whole lot of us had gathered after a long, long time - Muslim women as well as Sikh and Pandit women - and we really had fun, singing and dancing late into the night just as we used to before the militancy started.
``As I was turning in to sleep I heard the Muslim women whispering among themselves in the kitchen. `After so long,` they said, `after so many years all of us have come together`.
``It`s true, isn`t it, that a garden is most beautiful when there is a profusion of many kinds of flowers.``
The Aga Khani
Thu Apr 25,11:16 AM ET
MADA, Nigeria (AP) - Muslim prosecutors sought the death penalty for two men accused of converting from Islam to Christianity, a crime for which an Islamic court judge gave the accused men three days to reconvert.
Lawali Yakubu and Ali Jafaru, villagers in their 30s, were accused in the Islamic, or Shariah, court in the northern town of Mada of recently abandoning the Islamic faith and joining the Great Commission Movement, an international Evangelical church with a strong following in Nigeria.
Auwal Jabaka, the court judge, said Wednesday that although the Muslim holy book, or Quran, calls for the execution of Muslims who accept another religion, it was unclear whether the state`s two-year-old Shariah penal code also permitted such a punishment.
Jabaka adjourned the court for three days to allow the accused to ``change their minds`` and convert back to Islam.
In the meantime, he called on the Zamfara government to clarify its position on the matter.
``If the law empowers me to (execute the two for converting from Islam to Christianity), I will have no hesitation in doing that,`` the judge said.
Yakubu and Jafaru were not represented by lawyers but were instead accompanied by fellow church members.
The two argued they had never been Muslims, but were instead members of the Magazawa, a Hausa subgroup that has long practiced Christianity. The overwhelming majority of Hausas — one of Nigeria`s largest tribes — are Muslim.
The case was believed to be the first of its kind since a dozen predominantly Muslim northern states began implementing Shariah law in early 2000, despite virulent opposition from mainly Christian and animist southerners.
In the past two years, thousands of Muslims and Christians have been killed in periodic bursts of inter-religious bloodletting.
Posted by
mohajir
Apr 28, 2002 01:32 pm
Death Penalty Sought in Nigeria Thu Apr 25,11:16 AM ET
MADA, Nigeria (AP) - Muslim prosecutors sought the death penalty for two men accused of converting from Islam to Christianity, a crime for which an Islamic court judge gave the accused men three days to reconvert.
Lawali Yakubu and Ali Jafaru, villagers in their 30s, were accused in the Islamic, or Shariah, court in the northern town of Mada of recently abandoning the Islamic faith and joining the Great Commission Movement, an international Evangelical church with a strong following in Nigeria.
Auwal Jabaka, the court judge, said Wednesday that although the Muslim holy book, or Quran, calls for the execution of Muslims who accept another religion, it was unclear whether the state`s two-year-old Shariah penal code also permitted such a punishment.
Jabaka adjourned the court for three days to allow the accused to ``change their minds`` and convert back to Islam.
In the meantime, he called on the Zamfara government to clarify its position on the matter.
``If the law empowers me to (execute the two for converting from Islam to Christianity), I will have no hesitation in doing that,`` the judge said.
Yakubu and Jafaru were not represented by lawyers but were instead accompanied by fellow church members.
The two argued they had never been Muslims, but were instead members of the Magazawa, a Hausa subgroup that has long practiced Christianity. The overwhelming majority of Hausas — one of Nigeria`s largest tribes — are Muslim.
The case was believed to be the first of its kind since a dozen predominantly Muslim northern states began implementing Shariah law in early 2000, despite virulent opposition from mainly Christian and animist southerners.
In the past two years, thousands of Muslims and Christians have been killed in periodic bursts of inter-religious bloodletting.
The Significant Unit of War
http://www.tehrantimes.com/Detailview.asp?Keyword=india&Da=1/8/02&Cat=2&Num=29
Iran Ready to Help Settle Indo-Pak Dispute: Official
TEHRAN Deputy Foreign Minister in charge of education and research affairs, Sadeq Kharrazi, here on Sunday announced Tehran`s political readiness to help settle the existing Indo-Pakistan dispute.
Addressing the second roundtable discussions on Iran-Pakistan cooperation, he stressed that any kind of ``arms competition`` in the region will harm the regional peace and stability.
Rejecting the presence of the Zionist regime in the region, he said the Islamic Republic of Iran is concerned about the Israeli activities in the indian subcontinent. He called on the Islamic countries to be sensitive toward the issue.
Referring to the key role being played by both Iran and Pakistan in establishment of peace and stability in the region as well as in reconstruction and renovation of the war-torn Afghanistan, he said there are great potentials in both countries which pave the way for active participation of the two states in reconstruction of the neighboring Afghanistan.
Both Iran and Pakistan, as the two major regional states, have had fruitful consultations on different international and regional developments within the framework of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), Kharrazi added.
Although there have been several ups and downs in the two countries` bilateral relations, both Tehran and Islamabad should seize opportunities to further promote bilateral cooperation.
He further expressed hope that the ongoing discussions will lead to closer diplomatic ties between the two neighboring states.
Several Iranian and Pakistani scholars are attending the one-day roundtable discussions which will be concluded this evening.
http://www.tehrantimes.com/Detailview.asp?Keyword=india&Da=1/10/02&Cat=2&Num=6
Date: Thursday, January 10, 2002
U.S. Aims to Benefit From Islamabad-New Delhi Tension
TEHRAN - The assistant editor-in-chief of the Egyptian daily * * * *Ash-Shaab * * * *, Ahmed Al-Soyufi, said on Wednesday that the motive behind the United States` presence in Central Asia is to benefit from the current tension between india and Pakistan. He suggested that the Bush administration intends to increase its influence over the two countries, both of which have nuclear weapon capabilities, as well as in Iraq and the Persian Gulf.
He said that the disputes between india and Pakistan are of concern to the Islamic world and must be taken seriously. He added that the two countries should try to solve their problems as soon as possible, with help from Islamic and Arab states, since the only country that would benefit from a conflict is the U.S., and its interference should be opposed.
http://www.tehrantimes.com/Detailview.asp?Keyword=india&Da=1/10/02&Cat=2&Num=9
Date: Thursday, January 10, 2002
Shahroudi Urges Indo-Iran Strategic Contacts
TEHRAN -- Judiciary Chief Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi here Tuesday urged Iran and india to forge strategic ties against U.S. which he said is eying rich resources of the region.
Washington, he said at a meeting with indian Ambassador to Tehran Pripuran Singh Haer, is seeking to expand its domination on the region under the pretext of an anti-terror campaign in Afghanistan.
``America`s fight against Osama bin Laden and Taleban, under the pretext of fighting terrorism, is aimed at consolidating U.S. presence in the region in order to protect the country`s interests,`` he said.
``While we consider the issue of combating terrorism among our strategic objectives, I do not see American (anti-terror) intentions sincere,`` the Iranian official further said.
Haer hailed the positive pace of developments which the Indo-Iranian ties are going through and called for enhanced judicial cooperation of the two countries.
The indian ambassador also expressed optimism over Pakistan`s measures to check terrorist activities in its territory.
He also invited Shahroudi to pay an official visit to New Delhi to get acquainted with the indian judicial system.
Posted by
mohajir
Jan 9, 2002 08:01 pm
Check out the map of India shown on Iranian TV, Iranian newspapers and Iranian newsagency IRNA. Entire Jammu Kashmir is shown as part of India. While US shows the LOC as the dividing line between India and Pakistan , Iranian media has consistently shown Jammu Kashmir to be part of India.http://www.tehrantimes.com/Detailview.asp?Keyword=india&Da=1/8/02&Cat=2&Num=29
Iran Ready to Help Settle Indo-Pak Dispute: Official
TEHRAN Deputy Foreign Minister in charge of education and research affairs, Sadeq Kharrazi, here on Sunday announced Tehran`s political readiness to help settle the existing Indo-Pakistan dispute.
Addressing the second roundtable discussions on Iran-Pakistan cooperation, he stressed that any kind of ``arms competition`` in the region will harm the regional peace and stability.
Rejecting the presence of the Zionist regime in the region, he said the Islamic Republic of Iran is concerned about the Israeli activities in the indian subcontinent. He called on the Islamic countries to be sensitive toward the issue.
Referring to the key role being played by both Iran and Pakistan in establishment of peace and stability in the region as well as in reconstruction and renovation of the war-torn Afghanistan, he said there are great potentials in both countries which pave the way for active participation of the two states in reconstruction of the neighboring Afghanistan.
Both Iran and Pakistan, as the two major regional states, have had fruitful consultations on different international and regional developments within the framework of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), Kharrazi added.
Although there have been several ups and downs in the two countries` bilateral relations, both Tehran and Islamabad should seize opportunities to further promote bilateral cooperation.
He further expressed hope that the ongoing discussions will lead to closer diplomatic ties between the two neighboring states.
Several Iranian and Pakistani scholars are attending the one-day roundtable discussions which will be concluded this evening.
http://www.tehrantimes.com/Detailview.asp?Keyword=india&Da=1/10/02&Cat=2&Num=6
Date: Thursday, January 10, 2002
U.S. Aims to Benefit From Islamabad-New Delhi Tension
TEHRAN - The assistant editor-in-chief of the Egyptian daily * * * *Ash-Shaab * * * *, Ahmed Al-Soyufi, said on Wednesday that the motive behind the United States` presence in Central Asia is to benefit from the current tension between india and Pakistan. He suggested that the Bush administration intends to increase its influence over the two countries, both of which have nuclear weapon capabilities, as well as in Iraq and the Persian Gulf.
He said that the disputes between india and Pakistan are of concern to the Islamic world and must be taken seriously. He added that the two countries should try to solve their problems as soon as possible, with help from Islamic and Arab states, since the only country that would benefit from a conflict is the U.S., and its interference should be opposed.
http://www.tehrantimes.com/Detailview.asp?Keyword=india&Da=1/10/02&Cat=2&Num=9
Date: Thursday, January 10, 2002
Shahroudi Urges Indo-Iran Strategic Contacts
TEHRAN -- Judiciary Chief Mahmoud Hashemi Shahroudi here Tuesday urged Iran and india to forge strategic ties against U.S. which he said is eying rich resources of the region.
Washington, he said at a meeting with indian Ambassador to Tehran Pripuran Singh Haer, is seeking to expand its domination on the region under the pretext of an anti-terror campaign in Afghanistan.
``America`s fight against Osama bin Laden and Taleban, under the pretext of fighting terrorism, is aimed at consolidating U.S. presence in the region in order to protect the country`s interests,`` he said.
``While we consider the issue of combating terrorism among our strategic objectives, I do not see American (anti-terror) intentions sincere,`` the Iranian official further said.
Haer hailed the positive pace of developments which the Indo-Iranian ties are going through and called for enhanced judicial cooperation of the two countries.
The indian ambassador also expressed optimism over Pakistan`s measures to check terrorist activities in its territory.
He also invited Shahroudi to pay an official visit to New Delhi to get acquainted with the indian judicial system.
The Significant Unit of War
http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/cta/progs/02/hardtalk/puri07jan.ram
Posted by
mohajir
Jan 8, 2002 07:39 pm
BBC Hard Talk:http://news.bbc.co.uk/olmedia/cta/progs/02/hardtalk/puri07jan.ram
Running Naked
http://reuters.activebuddy.com/s?id=DSU1WLGXPAS
Fri 10:50 AM
MOSCOW (Reuters) - G8 foreign ministers called on Pakistan Friday to crack down on ``terrorists`` operating from its territory and expressed concern about rising India-Pakistan tension after a deadly attack on the New Delhi parliament.
In a statement released in Moscow ministers from the Group of Eight, comprising the world`s seven leading industrial states and Russia, said they ``firmly condemn terrorism in all its guises, including the attack on the Indian Parliament building.``
Noting Islamabad`s condemnation of the attack, the ministers said they ``urge Pakistan to take further measures against terrorist groups acting on its territory which target India in particular.``
They also urged Islamabad to arrest and bring to trial militants and cut off their finances.
New Delhi blames the December 13 attack, in which 14 people died, on Pakistan-based Kashmiri militants, a charge Islamabad denies.
India and Pakistan, which are nuclear powers, have massed troops on their tense border and have exchanged fire across the cease-fire line dividing the disputed Kashmir region.
In their communiqu, the G8 ministers expressed ``serious concern about rising tension between India and Pakistan`` in the wake of the parliament attack.
They also praised Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee`s statement that New Delhi wanted a diplomatic solution to its differences with Islamabad, and urged both sides not to escalate the situation.
The Group of Eight comprises Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United States and Russia.
The release of the statement in Moscow, even though Italy currently chairs the body, further underscores Russia`s desire to play a key role in the global anti-terrorism coalition forged in the wake of the September 11 attacks on U.S. cities.
Russia has been a key supporter of the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan against the chief suspects in those attacks.
Moscow says it has been fighting the same international terrorism, as that behind the strikes on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, in its rebellious Chechnya province
Posted by
mohajir
Dec 29, 2001 02:37 pm
G8 Urges Pakistan to Crack Down on Militantshttp://reuters.activebuddy.com/s?id=DSU1WLGXPAS
Fri 10:50 AM
MOSCOW (Reuters) - G8 foreign ministers called on Pakistan Friday to crack down on ``terrorists`` operating from its territory and expressed concern about rising India-Pakistan tension after a deadly attack on the New Delhi parliament.
In a statement released in Moscow ministers from the Group of Eight, comprising the world`s seven leading industrial states and Russia, said they ``firmly condemn terrorism in all its guises, including the attack on the Indian Parliament building.``
Noting Islamabad`s condemnation of the attack, the ministers said they ``urge Pakistan to take further measures against terrorist groups acting on its territory which target India in particular.``
They also urged Islamabad to arrest and bring to trial militants and cut off their finances.
New Delhi blames the December 13 attack, in which 14 people died, on Pakistan-based Kashmiri militants, a charge Islamabad denies.
India and Pakistan, which are nuclear powers, have massed troops on their tense border and have exchanged fire across the cease-fire line dividing the disputed Kashmir region.
In their communiqu, the G8 ministers expressed ``serious concern about rising tension between India and Pakistan`` in the wake of the parliament attack.
They also praised Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee`s statement that New Delhi wanted a diplomatic solution to its differences with Islamabad, and urged both sides not to escalate the situation.
The Group of Eight comprises Britain, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the United States and Russia.
The release of the statement in Moscow, even though Italy currently chairs the body, further underscores Russia`s desire to play a key role in the global anti-terrorism coalition forged in the wake of the September 11 attacks on U.S. cities.
Russia has been a key supporter of the U.S. military campaign in Afghanistan against the chief suspects in those attacks.
Moscow says it has been fighting the same international terrorism, as that behind the strikes on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, in its rebellious Chechnya province
Is Jehad Passe’?
2230 GMT, 011227
Summary
http://www.stratfor.com/home/0112272230.htm
With al Qaeda and Taliban elements fleeing Afghanistan, the United States will continue to grapple with strategic problems concerning its traditional ally, Pakistan. There are significant differences between what President Pervez Musharraf has said he will do to fight terrorism, what he intends to do and what he actually can accomplish. The threat of an imminent Indo-Pakistani war may be just the lever Washington needs to move Islamabad.
Analysis
The United States has been engaged in intense debate regarding the next steps it must take to eradicate al Qaeda. Two main strategies have emerged of late. One argues that there can be no solution to the problem of Islamic attacks on the United States until the regime of Saddam Hussein is eliminated. The other strategy argues that Iraq`s role is secondary, and that the United States` primary mission is to prevent al Qaeda from establishing a command center in some other isolated country, like Yemen or Somalia.
Obviously, the strategies are not incompatible. Equally obviously, at least from STRATFOR`S point of view, the debate misses the point entirely: the next country on the agenda is Pakistan.
When planning for the Afghan campaign began immediately after Sept. 11, it was clear -- at least from a naive standpoint -- that Pakistan, which has an extensive border with Afghanistan and a long-standing strategic relationship with the United States, would be the strategic key to the campaign. The planners` first impulse was to deploy U.S. forces in Pakistan and prosecute the campaign from there. This proved impossible. Instead, U.S. ground forces had to deploy in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, while air attacks were carried out from carriers in the Arabian Sea and from strategic bombers on Diego Garcia and elsewhere. Clearly, some forces were deployed in Pakistan, but only under tight secrecy.
The need for secrecy is the key to everything. Simply put, the Pakistani government was not in a position to permit a war against the Taliban regime to be waged from its soil. This was not simply because of substantial sympathy for the Taliban in Pakistan, although that existed. Nor is it simply because Pushtuns, the foundation of Taliban power, live on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border, although they do.
Rather, it was because the Taliban was ultimately as much a Pakistani phenomenon as it was Afghan. In a sense, the Taliban was a Pakistani construct, designed to conclude -- on terms acceptable to Pakistan -- the civil war that raged in Afghanistan following the Soviet withdrawal. Pakistan feared the ascendance of the Northern Alliance as well as other groups in Afghanistan, and saw in the Taliban a government that was congenial to Pakistan both strategically and ideologically. The ISI, Pakistan`s intelligence service, was in many ways the godfather of the Taliban government.
As the Taliban government provided al Qaeda with a secure operational base, the United States continued to parse the issue of Pakistan and Afghanistan. It is inconceivable that the Taliban would have been able to develop its relationship with al Qaeda without the knowledge of Pakistan`s intelligence services and government, and it is difficult to imagine that they would not have given at least implicit approval. However, the United States was not prepared to frame the issue as an Afghan-Pakistani issue -- only as an Afghan problem fundamentally distinct from Pakistan.
This policy continued after Sept. 11 and throughout the campaign, despite the clear limits Pakistan placed on cooperation with the United States. Washington clearly and rationally wanted to contain the Afghan campaign. It placed sufficient pressure on President Pervez Musharraf to force him to remove senior officials who were too closely aligned with the Taliban, to permit at least some basing of U.S. forces in Pakistan and to publicly commit himself to use Pakistani forces along the frontier to prevent Taliban forces from crossing into Pakistan.
The United States recognized that much of this was cosmetic. Support for the Taliban ran deep in the government and deeper in the country. The U.S. forces based in Pakistan were hardly strategic. Finally, whatever he promised, there were significant differences between what Musharraf said, what he actually intended to do and what he ultimately was able to do.
The United States carefully refrained from pressing the issue, afraid that excessive pressure would topple Musharraf and throw Pakistan either into chaos or into a fundamentalist dictatorship. Or if excessive pressure threatened Musharraf`s survival, he might simply reverse course and turn against the United States. In any case, the United States adopted a minimax policy -- it demanded the most it could get within the limits of what Islamabad could deliver, and it lived with the three differences: what was said, what was actually intended, what could really be delivered.
The manner in which the Afghan war concluded has suddenly rendered this policy untenable. While the Taliban has abandoned the cities, it continues to exist, both in alliances with particular warlords and in its own right. Where it exists most intensely, in fact, is in Pakistan, among Taliban sympathizers as well as among hundreds or thousands of Taliban fighters that have crossed into Pakistan during the past month. A very few have been very publicly apprehended, but most have gone to ground -- some protected by Pakistani forces.
Far more important than the fate of the Taliban is the fate of al Qaeda`s senior commanders, including Osama bin Laden, and of its fighters. It is becoming increasingly obvious that neither the Taliban`s high command nor al Qaeda`s has been captured. The release of a new videotape that appears to have been made in the past few weeks, and perhaps as recently as last week, dealt a blow to speculation that bin Laden and the others were killed at Tora Bora. It was always problematic that bin Laden would have chosen to travel from Kandahar to Tora Bora in the chaos that followed his last known taping. This would be not only dangerous but pointless. It was far more likely that he went directly to Pakistan, where supporters hid him and may still be doing so.
Whether bin Laden is in Pakistan or has traveled elsewhere, it is clear that many of his forces as well as Taliban leaders went to Pakistan and that the vast majority of those remain. In other words, apart from native support for the Taliban and al Qaeda, elements from Afghanistan are now in Pakistan and operating under the protection of, if not the government, certainly elements of the government and powerful political forces.
If we are correct in this, then the problem the United States faces in destroying al Qaeda does not concern Somalia, Yemen or Iraq, but Pakistan. Ideally, the United States would like Musharraf to use his security and military forces to destroy al Qaeda`s forces and hand senior leaders over to the United States. Certainly, this is something that Musharraf has assured the United States he would do. However, it is not clear that he is in a position to deliver on his promise -- it is not clear his orders are being obeyed. Nor, frankly, is it clear that he wishes to see these orders carried out. Certainly, he wants to placate the United States, but there is a huge gap between saying he will act, acting, and acting effectively.
A case in point is the Dec. 13 attack on India`s parliament by gunmen, which the U.S. government says were Islamic militants based in Pakistan. There are two explanations for the attack. The first is that Musharaff knew about plans for the attack and sanctioned it. The second is that he neither knew of nor sanctioned the attack. In a real sense, it doesn`t matter which it was. Either explanation raises serious questions about the course of Afghanistan.
All this creates a strategic crisis for the United States. Its fundamental goal is to defend its own territory against al Qaeda attacks and the global destruction of al Qaeda. In our view, al Qaeda has taken refuge in Pakistan -- historically an ally of the United States, and a country that poses a military challenge on an order of magnitude beyond that posed by Afghanistan. Launching a military campaign in Pakistan is possible but requires much greater resources than in Afghanistan, as well as the destruction of Pakistan`s nuclear capability. Rather than use direct military action, the United States would prefer a more subtle lever.
The attack on India`s parliament provides precisely that lever. Obviously, the shootout was as intolerable for India as a similar attack on Congress would be for the United States. India must react. But even apart from that, India sees itself as having an unprecedented opportunity to deal not only with the Kashmir issue but with the entire issue of the nature and future of Pakistan.
Pakistan`s alliance with the United States has placed severe limits on how far India could go. However, a profound schism is developing between Washington and Islamabad as post-Sept. 11 events evolve. Clearly, both sides are doing everything to avert an open breach -- but equally clearly, if it becomes undeniable that Pakistan is harboring al Qaeda elements, a break becomes inevitable. At that moment, India would have the opening it has awaited for 50 years. The United States would be not be able to refrain from acting against Pakistan, nor could it act efficiently without Indian support and involvement. India was eager to help from the beginning; now the United States would have no choice but to accept that help.
The United States does not want an Indo-Pakistani war, but the threat of such a war is precisely what Washington needs to move Islamabad. For Pakistan, the threat of a war with India in which the United States either stood to one side or actively participated is the worst possible nightmare. By allowing the specter to rise, Washington has given Musharraf an opportunity to become more forthcoming. If he is in control but insincere, he is being shown the abyss and can change course. If he is sincere but not in control, he can show the abyss to Islamic fundamentalists in his government and bring them under control.
The problem is that many of the fundamentalists would actually welcome a war and even defeat by India. Their goal is to radicalize the Islamic world by demonstrating that Christians, Hindus and Jews have formed a vast alliance designed to crush Islam. A combined U.S.-Indian attack would be exactly what would be needed to demonstrate this to the world. The destruction of Pakistan`s nuclear capability -- whether by nuclear or conventional weapons -- would further illustrate the point. It is therefore no accident that Islamic fundamentalists struck India at what would normally be considered the worst possible moment. From their point of view, it was the best possible moment to act.
This indicated that Musharraf may not be able to gain control of the situation, even if he wanted to. Thus, he visited Beijing in late December. China has historically been an enemy of India and an ally of Pakistan. Beijing has been extremely cautious since Sept. 11, but it remembers both the EP-3 spy plane incident and U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld`s redefinition of strategy toward the Pacific and against China prior to Sept. 11. Beijing is happy to see the United States diverted. It would not be happy to see India emerge without a threat on its western flank. Hence, Musharaff had a very cordial visit to Beijing.
At this point, the strategic imperative of defeating al Qaeda begins to intersect with Eurasian geopolitics. It is one thing to take Afghanistan apart, quite another to do the same with Pakistan. Afghanistan`s fate is of little significance to great powers. The fate of Pakistan matters to China, among others. At the same time, if al Qaeda is using Pakistan as a base of operations or even as a transit point and the Pakistani government can`t or won`t do anything decisive and effective about it, this strikes at a fundamental U.S. interest and cannot be tolerated.
The United States is, therefore, in the midst of a veiled crisis over Pakistan. It is an odd crisis in that Washington, fearing the consequences of a public confrontation, is trying very hard to maintain the fiction that Pakistan has been fully cooperating in the battle against al Qaeda, that it is acting effectively against the Taliban and al Qaeda and that its forces would certainly arrest senior al Qaeda leaders if they could catch them. At the same time, the United States is quietly showing Pakistan the abyss in the hopes that the plausible fiction of U.S.-Pakistani relations might thereby become reality.
The problem is that in Pakistan, there are those who prefer an open breach with the United States to accommodation. Even if we assume that Musharraf is not one of these elements, it is not clear that he can control them. If he can`t control them, the United States is faced with an extraordinary dilemma -- to go into Pakistan and get al Qaeda itself. It cannot do this without India, and India will not move unless Pakistan`s nuclear weapons are destroyed. It is not clear that U.S. precision-guided munitions are sufficient for a task that will tolerate no failure.
The rest follows logically.
Posted by
mohajir
Dec 29, 2001 02:37 pm
Pakistan, India and the United States2230 GMT, 011227
Summary
http://www.stratfor.com/home/0112272230.htm
With al Qaeda and Taliban elements fleeing Afghanistan, the United States will continue to grapple with strategic problems concerning its traditional ally, Pakistan. There are significant differences between what President Pervez Musharraf has said he will do to fight terrorism, what he intends to do and what he actually can accomplish. The threat of an imminent Indo-Pakistani war may be just the lever Washington needs to move Islamabad.
Analysis
The United States has been engaged in intense debate regarding the next steps it must take to eradicate al Qaeda. Two main strategies have emerged of late. One argues that there can be no solution to the problem of Islamic attacks on the United States until the regime of Saddam Hussein is eliminated. The other strategy argues that Iraq`s role is secondary, and that the United States` primary mission is to prevent al Qaeda from establishing a command center in some other isolated country, like Yemen or Somalia.
Obviously, the strategies are not incompatible. Equally obviously, at least from STRATFOR`S point of view, the debate misses the point entirely: the next country on the agenda is Pakistan.
When planning for the Afghan campaign began immediately after Sept. 11, it was clear -- at least from a naive standpoint -- that Pakistan, which has an extensive border with Afghanistan and a long-standing strategic relationship with the United States, would be the strategic key to the campaign. The planners` first impulse was to deploy U.S. forces in Pakistan and prosecute the campaign from there. This proved impossible. Instead, U.S. ground forces had to deploy in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, while air attacks were carried out from carriers in the Arabian Sea and from strategic bombers on Diego Garcia and elsewhere. Clearly, some forces were deployed in Pakistan, but only under tight secrecy.
The need for secrecy is the key to everything. Simply put, the Pakistani government was not in a position to permit a war against the Taliban regime to be waged from its soil. This was not simply because of substantial sympathy for the Taliban in Pakistan, although that existed. Nor is it simply because Pushtuns, the foundation of Taliban power, live on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border, although they do.
Rather, it was because the Taliban was ultimately as much a Pakistani phenomenon as it was Afghan. In a sense, the Taliban was a Pakistani construct, designed to conclude -- on terms acceptable to Pakistan -- the civil war that raged in Afghanistan following the Soviet withdrawal. Pakistan feared the ascendance of the Northern Alliance as well as other groups in Afghanistan, and saw in the Taliban a government that was congenial to Pakistan both strategically and ideologically. The ISI, Pakistan`s intelligence service, was in many ways the godfather of the Taliban government.
As the Taliban government provided al Qaeda with a secure operational base, the United States continued to parse the issue of Pakistan and Afghanistan. It is inconceivable that the Taliban would have been able to develop its relationship with al Qaeda without the knowledge of Pakistan`s intelligence services and government, and it is difficult to imagine that they would not have given at least implicit approval. However, the United States was not prepared to frame the issue as an Afghan-Pakistani issue -- only as an Afghan problem fundamentally distinct from Pakistan.
This policy continued after Sept. 11 and throughout the campaign, despite the clear limits Pakistan placed on cooperation with the United States. Washington clearly and rationally wanted to contain the Afghan campaign. It placed sufficient pressure on President Pervez Musharraf to force him to remove senior officials who were too closely aligned with the Taliban, to permit at least some basing of U.S. forces in Pakistan and to publicly commit himself to use Pakistani forces along the frontier to prevent Taliban forces from crossing into Pakistan.
The United States recognized that much of this was cosmetic. Support for the Taliban ran deep in the government and deeper in the country. The U.S. forces based in Pakistan were hardly strategic. Finally, whatever he promised, there were significant differences between what Musharraf said, what he actually intended to do and what he ultimately was able to do.
The United States carefully refrained from pressing the issue, afraid that excessive pressure would topple Musharraf and throw Pakistan either into chaos or into a fundamentalist dictatorship. Or if excessive pressure threatened Musharraf`s survival, he might simply reverse course and turn against the United States. In any case, the United States adopted a minimax policy -- it demanded the most it could get within the limits of what Islamabad could deliver, and it lived with the three differences: what was said, what was actually intended, what could really be delivered.
The manner in which the Afghan war concluded has suddenly rendered this policy untenable. While the Taliban has abandoned the cities, it continues to exist, both in alliances with particular warlords and in its own right. Where it exists most intensely, in fact, is in Pakistan, among Taliban sympathizers as well as among hundreds or thousands of Taliban fighters that have crossed into Pakistan during the past month. A very few have been very publicly apprehended, but most have gone to ground -- some protected by Pakistani forces.
Far more important than the fate of the Taliban is the fate of al Qaeda`s senior commanders, including Osama bin Laden, and of its fighters. It is becoming increasingly obvious that neither the Taliban`s high command nor al Qaeda`s has been captured. The release of a new videotape that appears to have been made in the past few weeks, and perhaps as recently as last week, dealt a blow to speculation that bin Laden and the others were killed at Tora Bora. It was always problematic that bin Laden would have chosen to travel from Kandahar to Tora Bora in the chaos that followed his last known taping. This would be not only dangerous but pointless. It was far more likely that he went directly to Pakistan, where supporters hid him and may still be doing so.
Whether bin Laden is in Pakistan or has traveled elsewhere, it is clear that many of his forces as well as Taliban leaders went to Pakistan and that the vast majority of those remain. In other words, apart from native support for the Taliban and al Qaeda, elements from Afghanistan are now in Pakistan and operating under the protection of, if not the government, certainly elements of the government and powerful political forces.
If we are correct in this, then the problem the United States faces in destroying al Qaeda does not concern Somalia, Yemen or Iraq, but Pakistan. Ideally, the United States would like Musharraf to use his security and military forces to destroy al Qaeda`s forces and hand senior leaders over to the United States. Certainly, this is something that Musharraf has assured the United States he would do. However, it is not clear that he is in a position to deliver on his promise -- it is not clear his orders are being obeyed. Nor, frankly, is it clear that he wishes to see these orders carried out. Certainly, he wants to placate the United States, but there is a huge gap between saying he will act, acting, and acting effectively.
A case in point is the Dec. 13 attack on India`s parliament by gunmen, which the U.S. government says were Islamic militants based in Pakistan. There are two explanations for the attack. The first is that Musharaff knew about plans for the attack and sanctioned it. The second is that he neither knew of nor sanctioned the attack. In a real sense, it doesn`t matter which it was. Either explanation raises serious questions about the course of Afghanistan.
All this creates a strategic crisis for the United States. Its fundamental goal is to defend its own territory against al Qaeda attacks and the global destruction of al Qaeda. In our view, al Qaeda has taken refuge in Pakistan -- historically an ally of the United States, and a country that poses a military challenge on an order of magnitude beyond that posed by Afghanistan. Launching a military campaign in Pakistan is possible but requires much greater resources than in Afghanistan, as well as the destruction of Pakistan`s nuclear capability. Rather than use direct military action, the United States would prefer a more subtle lever.
The attack on India`s parliament provides precisely that lever. Obviously, the shootout was as intolerable for India as a similar attack on Congress would be for the United States. India must react. But even apart from that, India sees itself as having an unprecedented opportunity to deal not only with the Kashmir issue but with the entire issue of the nature and future of Pakistan.
Pakistan`s alliance with the United States has placed severe limits on how far India could go. However, a profound schism is developing between Washington and Islamabad as post-Sept. 11 events evolve. Clearly, both sides are doing everything to avert an open breach -- but equally clearly, if it becomes undeniable that Pakistan is harboring al Qaeda elements, a break becomes inevitable. At that moment, India would have the opening it has awaited for 50 years. The United States would be not be able to refrain from acting against Pakistan, nor could it act efficiently without Indian support and involvement. India was eager to help from the beginning; now the United States would have no choice but to accept that help.
The United States does not want an Indo-Pakistani war, but the threat of such a war is precisely what Washington needs to move Islamabad. For Pakistan, the threat of a war with India in which the United States either stood to one side or actively participated is the worst possible nightmare. By allowing the specter to rise, Washington has given Musharraf an opportunity to become more forthcoming. If he is in control but insincere, he is being shown the abyss and can change course. If he is sincere but not in control, he can show the abyss to Islamic fundamentalists in his government and bring them under control.
The problem is that many of the fundamentalists would actually welcome a war and even defeat by India. Their goal is to radicalize the Islamic world by demonstrating that Christians, Hindus and Jews have formed a vast alliance designed to crush Islam. A combined U.S.-Indian attack would be exactly what would be needed to demonstrate this to the world. The destruction of Pakistan`s nuclear capability -- whether by nuclear or conventional weapons -- would further illustrate the point. It is therefore no accident that Islamic fundamentalists struck India at what would normally be considered the worst possible moment. From their point of view, it was the best possible moment to act.
This indicated that Musharraf may not be able to gain control of the situation, even if he wanted to. Thus, he visited Beijing in late December. China has historically been an enemy of India and an ally of Pakistan. Beijing has been extremely cautious since Sept. 11, but it remembers both the EP-3 spy plane incident and U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld`s redefinition of strategy toward the Pacific and against China prior to Sept. 11. Beijing is happy to see the United States diverted. It would not be happy to see India emerge without a threat on its western flank. Hence, Musharaff had a very cordial visit to Beijing.
At this point, the strategic imperative of defeating al Qaeda begins to intersect with Eurasian geopolitics. It is one thing to take Afghanistan apart, quite another to do the same with Pakistan. Afghanistan`s fate is of little significance to great powers. The fate of Pakistan matters to China, among others. At the same time, if al Qaeda is using Pakistan as a base of operations or even as a transit point and the Pakistani government can`t or won`t do anything decisive and effective about it, this strikes at a fundamental U.S. interest and cannot be tolerated.
The United States is, therefore, in the midst of a veiled crisis over Pakistan. It is an odd crisis in that Washington, fearing the consequences of a public confrontation, is trying very hard to maintain the fiction that Pakistan has been fully cooperating in the battle against al Qaeda, that it is acting effectively against the Taliban and al Qaeda and that its forces would certainly arrest senior al Qaeda leaders if they could catch them. At the same time, the United States is quietly showing Pakistan the abyss in the hopes that the plausible fiction of U.S.-Pakistani relations might thereby become reality.
The problem is that in Pakistan, there are those who prefer an open breach with the United States to accommodation. Even if we assume that Musharraf is not one of these elements, it is not clear that he can control them. If he can`t control them, the United States is faced with an extraordinary dilemma -- to go into Pakistan and get al Qaeda itself. It cannot do this without India, and India will not move unless Pakistan`s nuclear weapons are destroyed. It is not clear that U.S. precision-guided munitions are sufficient for a task that will tolerate no failure.
The rest follows logically.
The Girl Next Door
2230 GMT, 011227
Dec 27,2001
Summary
http://www.stratfor.com/home/0112272230.htm
With al Qaeda and Taliban elements fleeing Afghanistan, the United States will continue to grapple with strategic problems concerning its traditional ally, Pakistan. There are significant differences between what President Pervez Musharraf has said he will do to fight terrorism, what he intends to do and what he actually can accomplish. The threat of an imminent Indo-Pakistani war may be just the lever Washington needs to move Islamabad.
Analysis
The United States has been engaged in intense debate regarding the next steps it must take to eradicate al Qaeda. Two main strategies have emerged of late. One argues that there can be no solution to the problem of Islamic attacks on the United States until the regime of Saddam Hussein is eliminated. The other strategy argues that Iraq`s role is secondary, and that the United States` primary mission is to prevent al Qaeda from establishing a command center in some other isolated country, like Yemen or Somalia.
Obviously, the strategies are not incompatible. Equally obviously, at least from STRATFOR`S point of view, the debate misses the point entirely: the next country on the agenda is Pakistan.
When planning for the Afghan campaign began immediately after Sept. 11, it was clear -- at least from a naive standpoint -- that Pakistan, which has an extensive border with Afghanistan and a long-standing strategic relationship with the United States, would be the strategic key to the campaign. The planners` first impulse was to deploy U.S. forces in Pakistan and prosecute the campaign from there. This proved impossible. Instead, U.S. ground forces had to deploy in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, while air attacks were carried out from carriers in the Arabian Sea and from strategic bombers on Diego Garcia and elsewhere. Clearly, some forces were deployed in Pakistan, but only under tight secrecy.
The need for secrecy is the key to everything. Simply put, the Pakistani government was not in a position to permit a war against the Taliban regime to be waged from its soil. This was not simply because of substantial sympathy for the Taliban in Pakistan, although that existed. Nor is it simply because Pushtuns, the foundation of Taliban power, live on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border, although they do.
Rather, it was because the Taliban was ultimately as much a Pakistani phenomenon as it was Afghan. In a sense, the Taliban was a Pakistani construct, designed to conclude -- on terms acceptable to Pakistan -- the civil war that raged in Afghanistan following the Soviet withdrawal. Pakistan feared the ascendance of the Northern Alliance as well as other groups in Afghanistan, and saw in the Taliban a government that was congenial to Pakistan both strategically and ideologically. The ISI, Pakistan`s intelligence service, was in many ways the godfather of the Taliban government.
As the Taliban government provided al Qaeda with a secure operational base, the United States continued to parse the issue of Pakistan and Afghanistan. It is inconceivable that the Taliban would have been able to develop its relationship with al Qaeda without the knowledge of Pakistan`s intelligence services and government, and it is difficult to imagine that they would not have given at least implicit approval. However, the United States was not prepared to frame the issue as an Afghan-Pakistani issue -- only as an Afghan problem fundamentally distinct from Pakistan.
This policy continued after Sept. 11 and throughout the campaign, despite the clear limits Pakistan placed on cooperation with the United States. Washington clearly and rationally wanted to contain the Afghan campaign. It placed sufficient pressure on President Pervez Musharraf to force him to remove senior officials who were too closely aligned with the Taliban, to permit at least some basing of U.S. forces in Pakistan and to publicly commit himself to use Pakistani forces along the frontier to prevent Taliban forces from crossing into Pakistan.
The United States recognized that much of this was cosmetic. Support for the Taliban ran deep in the government and deeper in the country. The U.S. forces based in Pakistan were hardly strategic. Finally, whatever he promised, there were significant differences between what Musharraf said, what he actually intended to do and what he ultimately was able to do.
The United States carefully refrained from pressing the issue, afraid that excessive pressure would topple Musharraf and throw Pakistan either into chaos or into a fundamentalist dictatorship. Or if excessive pressure threatened Musharraf`s survival, he might simply reverse course and turn against the United States. In any case, the United States adopted a minimax policy -- it demanded the most it could get within the limits of what Islamabad could deliver, and it lived with the three differences: what was said, what was actually intended, what could really be delivered.
The manner in which the Afghan war concluded has suddenly rendered this policy untenable. While the Taliban has abandoned the cities, it continues to exist, both in alliances with particular warlords and in its own right. Where it exists most intensely, in fact, is in Pakistan, among Taliban sympathizers as well as among hundreds or thousands of Taliban fighters that have crossed into Pakistan during the past month. A very few have been very publicly apprehended, but most have gone to ground -- some protected by Pakistani forces.
Far more important than the fate of the Taliban is the fate of al Qaeda`s senior commanders, including Osama bin Laden, and of its fighters. It is becoming increasingly obvious that neither the Taliban`s high command nor al Qaeda`s has been captured. The release of a new videotape that appears to have been made in the past few weeks, and perhaps as recently as last week, dealt a blow to speculation that bin Laden and the others were killed at Tora Bora. It was always problematic that bin Laden would have chosen to travel from Kandahar to Tora Bora in the chaos that followed his last known taping. This would be not only dangerous but pointless. It was far more likely that he went directly to Pakistan, where supporters hid him and may still be doing so.
Whether bin Laden is in Pakistan or has traveled elsewhere, it is clear that many of his forces as well as Taliban leaders went to Pakistan and that the vast majority of those remain. In other words, apart from native support for the Taliban and al Qaeda, elements from Afghanistan are now in Pakistan and operating under the protection of, if not the government, certainly elements of the government and powerful political forces.
If we are correct in this, then the problem the United States faces in destroying al Qaeda does not concern Somalia, Yemen or Iraq, but Pakistan. Ideally, the United States would like Musharraf to use his security and military forces to destroy al Qaeda`s forces and hand senior leaders over to the United States. Certainly, this is something that Musharraf has assured the United States he would do. However, it is not clear that he is in a position to deliver on his promise -- it is not clear his orders are being obeyed. Nor, frankly, is it clear that he wishes to see these orders carried out. Certainly, he wants to placate the United States, but there is a huge gap between saying he will act, acting, and acting effectively.
A case in point is the Dec. 13 attack on India`s parliament by gunmen, which the U.S. government says were Islamic militants based in Pakistan. There are two explanations for the attack. The first is that Musharaff knew about plans for the attack and sanctioned it. The second is that he neither knew of nor sanctioned the attack. In a real sense, it doesn`t matter which it was. Either explanation raises serious questions about the course of Afghanistan.
All this creates a strategic crisis for the United States. Its fundamental goal is to defend its own territory against al Qaeda attacks and the global destruction of al Qaeda. In our view, al Qaeda has taken refuge in Pakistan -- historically an ally of the United States, and a country that poses a military challenge on an order of magnitude beyond that posed by Afghanistan. Launching a military campaign in Pakistan is possible but requires much greater resources than in Afghanistan, as well as the destruction of Pakistan`s nuclear capability. Rather than use direct military action, the United States would prefer a more subtle lever.
The attack on India`s parliament provides precisely that lever. Obviously, the shootout was as intolerable for India as a similar attack on Congress would be for the United States. India must react. But even apart from that, India sees itself as having an unprecedented opportunity to deal not only with the Kashmir issue but with the entire issue of the nature and future of Pakistan.
Pakistan`s alliance with the United States has placed severe limits on how far India could go. However, a profound schism is developing between Washington and Islamabad as post-Sept. 11 events evolve. Clearly, both sides are doing everything to avert an open breach -- but equally clearly, if it becomes undeniable that Pakistan is harboring al Qaeda elements, a break becomes inevitable. At that moment, India would have the opening it has awaited for 50 years. The United States would be not be able to refrain from acting against Pakistan, nor could it act efficiently without Indian support and involvement. India was eager to help from the beginning; now the United States would have no choice but to accept that help.
The United States does not want an Indo-Pakistani war, but the threat of such a war is precisely what Washington needs to move Islamabad. For Pakistan, the threat of a war with India in which the United States either stood to one side or actively participated is the worst possible nightmare. By allowing the specter to rise, Washington has given Musharraf an opportunity to become more forthcoming. If he is in control but insincere, he is being shown the abyss and can change course. If he is sincere but not in control, he can show the abyss to Islamic fundamentalists in his government and bring them under control.
The problem is that many of the fundamentalists would actually welcome a war and even defeat by India. Their goal is to radicalize the Islamic world by demonstrating that Christians, Hindus and Jews have formed a vast alliance designed to crush Islam. A combined U.S.-Indian attack would be exactly what would be needed to demonstrate this to the world. The destruction of Pakistan`s nuclear capability -- whether by nuclear or conventional weapons -- would further illustrate the point. It is therefore no accident that Islamic fundamentalists struck India at what would normally be considered the worst possible moment. From their point of view, it was the best possible moment to act.
This indicated that Musharraf may not be able to gain control of the situation, even if he wanted to. Thus, he visited Beijing in late December. China has historically been an enemy of India and an ally of Pakistan. Beijing has been extremely cautious since Sept. 11, but it remembers both the EP-3 spy plane incident and U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld`s redefinition of strategy toward the Pacific and against China prior to Sept. 11. Beijing is happy to see the United States diverted. It would not be happy to see India emerge without a threat on its western flank. Hence, Musharaff had a very cordial visit to Beijing.
At this point, the strategic imperative of defeating al Qaeda begins to intersect with Eurasian geopolitics. It is one thing to take Afghanistan apart, quite another to do the same with Pakistan. Afghanistan`s fate is of little significance to great powers. The fate of Pakistan matters to China, among others. At the same time, if al Qaeda is using Pakistan as a base of operations or even as a transit point and the Pakistani government can`t or won`t do anything decisive and effective about it, this strikes at a fundamental U.S. interest and cannot be tolerated.
The United States is, therefore, in the midst of a veiled crisis over Pakistan. It is an odd crisis in that Washington, fearing the consequences of a public confrontation, is trying very hard to maintain the fiction that Pakistan has been fully cooperating in the battle against al Qaeda, that it is acting effectively against the Taliban and al Qaeda and that its forces would certainly arrest senior al Qaeda leaders if they could catch them. At the same time, the United States is quietly showing Pakistan the abyss in the hopes that the plausible fiction of U.S.-Pakistani relations might thereby become reality.
The problem is that in Pakistan, there are those who prefer an open breach with the United States to accommodation. Even if we assume that Musharraf is not one of these elements, it is not clear that he can control them. If he can`t control them, the United States is faced with an extraordinary dilemma -- to go into Pakistan and get al Qaeda itself. It cannot do this without India, and India will not move unless Pakistan`s nuclear weapons are destroyed. It is not clear that U.S. precision-guided munitions are sufficient for a task that will tolerate no failure.
The rest follows logically.
Posted by
mohajir
Dec 29, 2001 02:37 pm
Pakistan, India and the United States2230 GMT, 011227
Dec 27,2001
Summary
http://www.stratfor.com/home/0112272230.htm
With al Qaeda and Taliban elements fleeing Afghanistan, the United States will continue to grapple with strategic problems concerning its traditional ally, Pakistan. There are significant differences between what President Pervez Musharraf has said he will do to fight terrorism, what he intends to do and what he actually can accomplish. The threat of an imminent Indo-Pakistani war may be just the lever Washington needs to move Islamabad.
Analysis
The United States has been engaged in intense debate regarding the next steps it must take to eradicate al Qaeda. Two main strategies have emerged of late. One argues that there can be no solution to the problem of Islamic attacks on the United States until the regime of Saddam Hussein is eliminated. The other strategy argues that Iraq`s role is secondary, and that the United States` primary mission is to prevent al Qaeda from establishing a command center in some other isolated country, like Yemen or Somalia.
Obviously, the strategies are not incompatible. Equally obviously, at least from STRATFOR`S point of view, the debate misses the point entirely: the next country on the agenda is Pakistan.
When planning for the Afghan campaign began immediately after Sept. 11, it was clear -- at least from a naive standpoint -- that Pakistan, which has an extensive border with Afghanistan and a long-standing strategic relationship with the United States, would be the strategic key to the campaign. The planners` first impulse was to deploy U.S. forces in Pakistan and prosecute the campaign from there. This proved impossible. Instead, U.S. ground forces had to deploy in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, while air attacks were carried out from carriers in the Arabian Sea and from strategic bombers on Diego Garcia and elsewhere. Clearly, some forces were deployed in Pakistan, but only under tight secrecy.
The need for secrecy is the key to everything. Simply put, the Pakistani government was not in a position to permit a war against the Taliban regime to be waged from its soil. This was not simply because of substantial sympathy for the Taliban in Pakistan, although that existed. Nor is it simply because Pushtuns, the foundation of Taliban power, live on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border, although they do.
Rather, it was because the Taliban was ultimately as much a Pakistani phenomenon as it was Afghan. In a sense, the Taliban was a Pakistani construct, designed to conclude -- on terms acceptable to Pakistan -- the civil war that raged in Afghanistan following the Soviet withdrawal. Pakistan feared the ascendance of the Northern Alliance as well as other groups in Afghanistan, and saw in the Taliban a government that was congenial to Pakistan both strategically and ideologically. The ISI, Pakistan`s intelligence service, was in many ways the godfather of the Taliban government.
As the Taliban government provided al Qaeda with a secure operational base, the United States continued to parse the issue of Pakistan and Afghanistan. It is inconceivable that the Taliban would have been able to develop its relationship with al Qaeda without the knowledge of Pakistan`s intelligence services and government, and it is difficult to imagine that they would not have given at least implicit approval. However, the United States was not prepared to frame the issue as an Afghan-Pakistani issue -- only as an Afghan problem fundamentally distinct from Pakistan.
This policy continued after Sept. 11 and throughout the campaign, despite the clear limits Pakistan placed on cooperation with the United States. Washington clearly and rationally wanted to contain the Afghan campaign. It placed sufficient pressure on President Pervez Musharraf to force him to remove senior officials who were too closely aligned with the Taliban, to permit at least some basing of U.S. forces in Pakistan and to publicly commit himself to use Pakistani forces along the frontier to prevent Taliban forces from crossing into Pakistan.
The United States recognized that much of this was cosmetic. Support for the Taliban ran deep in the government and deeper in the country. The U.S. forces based in Pakistan were hardly strategic. Finally, whatever he promised, there were significant differences between what Musharraf said, what he actually intended to do and what he ultimately was able to do.
The United States carefully refrained from pressing the issue, afraid that excessive pressure would topple Musharraf and throw Pakistan either into chaos or into a fundamentalist dictatorship. Or if excessive pressure threatened Musharraf`s survival, he might simply reverse course and turn against the United States. In any case, the United States adopted a minimax policy -- it demanded the most it could get within the limits of what Islamabad could deliver, and it lived with the three differences: what was said, what was actually intended, what could really be delivered.
The manner in which the Afghan war concluded has suddenly rendered this policy untenable. While the Taliban has abandoned the cities, it continues to exist, both in alliances with particular warlords and in its own right. Where it exists most intensely, in fact, is in Pakistan, among Taliban sympathizers as well as among hundreds or thousands of Taliban fighters that have crossed into Pakistan during the past month. A very few have been very publicly apprehended, but most have gone to ground -- some protected by Pakistani forces.
Far more important than the fate of the Taliban is the fate of al Qaeda`s senior commanders, including Osama bin Laden, and of its fighters. It is becoming increasingly obvious that neither the Taliban`s high command nor al Qaeda`s has been captured. The release of a new videotape that appears to have been made in the past few weeks, and perhaps as recently as last week, dealt a blow to speculation that bin Laden and the others were killed at Tora Bora. It was always problematic that bin Laden would have chosen to travel from Kandahar to Tora Bora in the chaos that followed his last known taping. This would be not only dangerous but pointless. It was far more likely that he went directly to Pakistan, where supporters hid him and may still be doing so.
Whether bin Laden is in Pakistan or has traveled elsewhere, it is clear that many of his forces as well as Taliban leaders went to Pakistan and that the vast majority of those remain. In other words, apart from native support for the Taliban and al Qaeda, elements from Afghanistan are now in Pakistan and operating under the protection of, if not the government, certainly elements of the government and powerful political forces.
If we are correct in this, then the problem the United States faces in destroying al Qaeda does not concern Somalia, Yemen or Iraq, but Pakistan. Ideally, the United States would like Musharraf to use his security and military forces to destroy al Qaeda`s forces and hand senior leaders over to the United States. Certainly, this is something that Musharraf has assured the United States he would do. However, it is not clear that he is in a position to deliver on his promise -- it is not clear his orders are being obeyed. Nor, frankly, is it clear that he wishes to see these orders carried out. Certainly, he wants to placate the United States, but there is a huge gap between saying he will act, acting, and acting effectively.
A case in point is the Dec. 13 attack on India`s parliament by gunmen, which the U.S. government says were Islamic militants based in Pakistan. There are two explanations for the attack. The first is that Musharaff knew about plans for the attack and sanctioned it. The second is that he neither knew of nor sanctioned the attack. In a real sense, it doesn`t matter which it was. Either explanation raises serious questions about the course of Afghanistan.
All this creates a strategic crisis for the United States. Its fundamental goal is to defend its own territory against al Qaeda attacks and the global destruction of al Qaeda. In our view, al Qaeda has taken refuge in Pakistan -- historically an ally of the United States, and a country that poses a military challenge on an order of magnitude beyond that posed by Afghanistan. Launching a military campaign in Pakistan is possible but requires much greater resources than in Afghanistan, as well as the destruction of Pakistan`s nuclear capability. Rather than use direct military action, the United States would prefer a more subtle lever.
The attack on India`s parliament provides precisely that lever. Obviously, the shootout was as intolerable for India as a similar attack on Congress would be for the United States. India must react. But even apart from that, India sees itself as having an unprecedented opportunity to deal not only with the Kashmir issue but with the entire issue of the nature and future of Pakistan.
Pakistan`s alliance with the United States has placed severe limits on how far India could go. However, a profound schism is developing between Washington and Islamabad as post-Sept. 11 events evolve. Clearly, both sides are doing everything to avert an open breach -- but equally clearly, if it becomes undeniable that Pakistan is harboring al Qaeda elements, a break becomes inevitable. At that moment, India would have the opening it has awaited for 50 years. The United States would be not be able to refrain from acting against Pakistan, nor could it act efficiently without Indian support and involvement. India was eager to help from the beginning; now the United States would have no choice but to accept that help.
The United States does not want an Indo-Pakistani war, but the threat of such a war is precisely what Washington needs to move Islamabad. For Pakistan, the threat of a war with India in which the United States either stood to one side or actively participated is the worst possible nightmare. By allowing the specter to rise, Washington has given Musharraf an opportunity to become more forthcoming. If he is in control but insincere, he is being shown the abyss and can change course. If he is sincere but not in control, he can show the abyss to Islamic fundamentalists in his government and bring them under control.
The problem is that many of the fundamentalists would actually welcome a war and even defeat by India. Their goal is to radicalize the Islamic world by demonstrating that Christians, Hindus and Jews have formed a vast alliance designed to crush Islam. A combined U.S.-Indian attack would be exactly what would be needed to demonstrate this to the world. The destruction of Pakistan`s nuclear capability -- whether by nuclear or conventional weapons -- would further illustrate the point. It is therefore no accident that Islamic fundamentalists struck India at what would normally be considered the worst possible moment. From their point of view, it was the best possible moment to act.
This indicated that Musharraf may not be able to gain control of the situation, even if he wanted to. Thus, he visited Beijing in late December. China has historically been an enemy of India and an ally of Pakistan. Beijing has been extremely cautious since Sept. 11, but it remembers both the EP-3 spy plane incident and U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld`s redefinition of strategy toward the Pacific and against China prior to Sept. 11. Beijing is happy to see the United States diverted. It would not be happy to see India emerge without a threat on its western flank. Hence, Musharaff had a very cordial visit to Beijing.
At this point, the strategic imperative of defeating al Qaeda begins to intersect with Eurasian geopolitics. It is one thing to take Afghanistan apart, quite another to do the same with Pakistan. Afghanistan`s fate is of little significance to great powers. The fate of Pakistan matters to China, among others. At the same time, if al Qaeda is using Pakistan as a base of operations or even as a transit point and the Pakistani government can`t or won`t do anything decisive and effective about it, this strikes at a fundamental U.S. interest and cannot be tolerated.
The United States is, therefore, in the midst of a veiled crisis over Pakistan. It is an odd crisis in that Washington, fearing the consequences of a public confrontation, is trying very hard to maintain the fiction that Pakistan has been fully cooperating in the battle against al Qaeda, that it is acting effectively against the Taliban and al Qaeda and that its forces would certainly arrest senior al Qaeda leaders if they could catch them. At the same time, the United States is quietly showing Pakistan the abyss in the hopes that the plausible fiction of U.S.-Pakistani relations might thereby become reality.
The problem is that in Pakistan, there are those who prefer an open breach with the United States to accommodation. Even if we assume that Musharraf is not one of these elements, it is not clear that he can control them. If he can`t control them, the United States is faced with an extraordinary dilemma -- to go into Pakistan and get al Qaeda itself. It cannot do this without India, and India will not move unless Pakistan`s nuclear weapons are destroyed. It is not clear that U.S. precision-guided munitions are sufficient for a task that will tolerate no failure.
The rest follows logically.
Muslims and The West After 11th September
2230 GMT, 011227
Dec 27,2001
Summary
http://www.stratfor.com/home/0112272230.htm
With al Qaeda and Taliban elements fleeing Afghanistan, the United States will continue to grapple with strategic problems concerning its traditional ally, Pakistan. There are significant differences between what President Pervez Musharraf has said he will do to fight terrorism, what he intends to do and what he actually can accomplish. The threat of an imminent Indo-Pakistani war may be just the lever Washington needs to move Islamabad.
Analysis
The United States has been engaged in intense debate regarding the next steps it must take to eradicate al Qaeda. Two main strategies have emerged of late. One argues that there can be no solution to the problem of Islamic attacks on the United States until the regime of Saddam Hussein is eliminated. The other strategy argues that Iraq`s role is secondary, and that the United States` primary mission is to prevent al Qaeda from establishing a command center in some other isolated country, like Yemen or Somalia.
Obviously, the strategies are not incompatible. Equally obviously, at least from STRATFOR`S point of view, the debate misses the point entirely: the next country on the agenda is Pakistan.
When planning for the Afghan campaign began immediately after Sept. 11, it was clear -- at least from a naive standpoint -- that Pakistan, which has an extensive border with Afghanistan and a long-standing strategic relationship with the United States, would be the strategic key to the campaign. The planners` first impulse was to deploy U.S. forces in Pakistan and prosecute the campaign from there. This proved impossible. Instead, U.S. ground forces had to deploy in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, while air attacks were carried out from carriers in the Arabian Sea and from strategic bombers on Diego Garcia and elsewhere. Clearly, some forces were deployed in Pakistan, but only under tight secrecy.
The need for secrecy is the key to everything. Simply put, the Pakistani government was not in a position to permit a war against the Taliban regime to be waged from its soil. This was not simply because of substantial sympathy for the Taliban in Pakistan, although that existed. Nor is it simply because Pushtuns, the foundation of Taliban power, live on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border, although they do.
Rather, it was because the Taliban was ultimately as much a Pakistani phenomenon as it was Afghan. In a sense, the Taliban was a Pakistani construct, designed to conclude -- on terms acceptable to Pakistan -- the civil war that raged in Afghanistan following the Soviet withdrawal. Pakistan feared the ascendance of the Northern Alliance as well as other groups in Afghanistan, and saw in the Taliban a government that was congenial to Pakistan both strategically and ideologically. The ISI, Pakistan`s intelligence service, was in many ways the godfather of the Taliban government.
As the Taliban government provided al Qaeda with a secure operational base, the United States continued to parse the issue of Pakistan and Afghanistan. It is inconceivable that the Taliban would have been able to develop its relationship with al Qaeda without the knowledge of Pakistan`s intelligence services and government, and it is difficult to imagine that they would not have given at least implicit approval. However, the United States was not prepared to frame the issue as an Afghan-Pakistani issue -- only as an Afghan problem fundamentally distinct from Pakistan.
This policy continued after Sept. 11 and throughout the campaign, despite the clear limits Pakistan placed on cooperation with the United States. Washington clearly and rationally wanted to contain the Afghan campaign. It placed sufficient pressure on President Pervez Musharraf to force him to remove senior officials who were too closely aligned with the Taliban, to permit at least some basing of U.S. forces in Pakistan and to publicly commit himself to use Pakistani forces along the frontier to prevent Taliban forces from crossing into Pakistan.
The United States recognized that much of this was cosmetic. Support for the Taliban ran deep in the government and deeper in the country. The U.S. forces based in Pakistan were hardly strategic. Finally, whatever he promised, there were significant differences between what Musharraf said, what he actually intended to do and what he ultimately was able to do.
The United States carefully refrained from pressing the issue, afraid that excessive pressure would topple Musharraf and throw Pakistan either into chaos or into a fundamentalist dictatorship. Or if excessive pressure threatened Musharraf`s survival, he might simply reverse course and turn against the United States. In any case, the United States adopted a minimax policy -- it demanded the most it could get within the limits of what Islamabad could deliver, and it lived with the three differences: what was said, what was actually intended, what could really be delivered.
The manner in which the Afghan war concluded has suddenly rendered this policy untenable. While the Taliban has abandoned the cities, it continues to exist, both in alliances with particular warlords and in its own right. Where it exists most intensely, in fact, is in Pakistan, among Taliban sympathizers as well as among hundreds or thousands of Taliban fighters that have crossed into Pakistan during the past month. A very few have been very publicly apprehended, but most have gone to ground -- some protected by Pakistani forces.
Far more important than the fate of the Taliban is the fate of al Qaeda`s senior commanders, including Osama bin Laden, and of its fighters. It is becoming increasingly obvious that neither the Taliban`s high command nor al Qaeda`s has been captured. The release of a new videotape that appears to have been made in the past few weeks, and perhaps as recently as last week, dealt a blow to speculation that bin Laden and the others were killed at Tora Bora. It was always problematic that bin Laden would have chosen to travel from Kandahar to Tora Bora in the chaos that followed his last known taping. This would be not only dangerous but pointless. It was far more likely that he went directly to Pakistan, where supporters hid him and may still be doing so.
Whether bin Laden is in Pakistan or has traveled elsewhere, it is clear that many of his forces as well as Taliban leaders went to Pakistan and that the vast majority of those remain. In other words, apart from native support for the Taliban and al Qaeda, elements from Afghanistan are now in Pakistan and operating under the protection of, if not the government, certainly elements of the government and powerful political forces.
If we are correct in this, then the problem the United States faces in destroying al Qaeda does not concern Somalia, Yemen or Iraq, but Pakistan. Ideally, the United States would like Musharraf to use his security and military forces to destroy al Qaeda`s forces and hand senior leaders over to the United States. Certainly, this is something that Musharraf has assured the United States he would do. However, it is not clear that he is in a position to deliver on his promise -- it is not clear his orders are being obeyed. Nor, frankly, is it clear that he wishes to see these orders carried out. Certainly, he wants to placate the United States, but there is a huge gap between saying he will act, acting, and acting effectively.
A case in point is the Dec. 13 attack on India`s parliament by gunmen, which the U.S. government says were Islamic militants based in Pakistan. There are two explanations for the attack. The first is that Musharaff knew about plans for the attack and sanctioned it. The second is that he neither knew of nor sanctioned the attack. In a real sense, it doesn`t matter which it was. Either explanation raises serious questions about the course of Afghanistan.
All this creates a strategic crisis for the United States. Its fundamental goal is to defend its own territory against al Qaeda attacks and the global destruction of al Qaeda. In our view, al Qaeda has taken refuge in Pakistan -- historically an ally of the United States, and a country that poses a military challenge on an order of magnitude beyond that posed by Afghanistan. Launching a military campaign in Pakistan is possible but requires much greater resources than in Afghanistan, as well as the destruction of Pakistan`s nuclear capability. Rather than use direct military action, the United States would prefer a more subtle lever.
The attack on India`s parliament provides precisely that lever. Obviously, the shootout was as intolerable for India as a similar attack on Congress would be for the United States. India must react. But even apart from that, India sees itself as having an unprecedented opportunity to deal not only with the Kashmir issue but with the entire issue of the nature and future of Pakistan.
Pakistan`s alliance with the United States has placed severe limits on how far India could go. However, a profound schism is developing between Washington and Islamabad as post-Sept. 11 events evolve. Clearly, both sides are doing everything to avert an open breach -- but equally clearly, if it becomes undeniable that Pakistan is harboring al Qaeda elements, a break becomes inevitable. At that moment, India would have the opening it has awaited for 50 years. The United States would be not be able to refrain from acting against Pakistan, nor could it act efficiently without Indian support and involvement. India was eager to help from the beginning; now the United States would have no choice but to accept that help.
The United States does not want an Indo-Pakistani war, but the threat of such a war is precisely what Washington needs to move Islamabad. For Pakistan, the threat of a war with India in which the United States either stood to one side or actively participated is the worst possible nightmare. By allowing the specter to rise, Washington has given Musharraf an opportunity to become more forthcoming. If he is in control but insincere, he is being shown the abyss and can change course. If he is sincere but not in control, he can show the abyss to Islamic fundamentalists in his government and bring them under control.
The problem is that many of the fundamentalists would actually welcome a war and even defeat by India. Their goal is to radicalize the Islamic world by demonstrating that Christians, Hindus and Jews have formed a vast alliance designed to crush Islam. A combined U.S.-Indian attack would be exactly what would be needed to demonstrate this to the world. The destruction of Pakistan`s nuclear capability -- whether by nuclear or conventional weapons -- would further illustrate the point. It is therefore no accident that Islamic fundamentalists struck India at what would normally be considered the worst possible moment. From their point of view, it was the best possible moment to act.
This indicated that Musharraf may not be able to gain control of the situation, even if he wanted to. Thus, he visited Beijing in late December. China has historically been an enemy of India and an ally of Pakistan. Beijing has been extremely cautious since Sept. 11, but it remembers both the EP-3 spy plane incident and U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld`s redefinition of strategy toward the Pacific and against China prior to Sept. 11. Beijing is happy to see the United States diverted. It would not be happy to see India emerge without a threat on its western flank. Hence, Musharaff had a very cordial visit to Beijing.
At this point, the strategic imperative of defeating al Qaeda begins to intersect with Eurasian geopolitics. It is one thing to take Afghanistan apart, quite another to do the same with Pakistan. Afghanistan`s fate is of little significance to great powers. The fate of Pakistan matters to China, among others. At the same time, if al Qaeda is using Pakistan as a base of operations or even as a transit point and the Pakistani government can`t or won`t do anything decisive and effective about it, this strikes at a fundamental U.S. interest and cannot be tolerated.
The United States is, therefore, in the midst of a veiled crisis over Pakistan. It is an odd crisis in that Washington, fearing the consequences of a public confrontation, is trying very hard to maintain the fiction that Pakistan has been fully cooperating in the battle against al Qaeda, that it is acting effectively against the Taliban and al Qaeda and that its forces would certainly arrest senior al Qaeda leaders if they could catch them. At the same time, the United States is quietly showing Pakistan the abyss in the hopes that the plausible fiction of U.S.-Pakistani relations might thereby become reality.
The problem is that in Pakistan, there are those who prefer an open breach with the United States to accommodation. Even if we assume that Musharraf is not one of these elements, it is not clear that he can control them. If he can`t control them, the United States is faced with an extraordinary dilemma -- to go into Pakistan and get al Qaeda itself. It cannot do this without India, and India will not move unless Pakistan`s nuclear weapons are destroyed. It is not clear that U.S. precision-guided munitions are sufficient for a task that will tolerate no failure.
The rest follows logically.
Posted by
mohajir
Dec 29, 2001 02:37 pm
Pakistan, India and the United States2230 GMT, 011227
Dec 27,2001
Summary
http://www.stratfor.com/home/0112272230.htm
With al Qaeda and Taliban elements fleeing Afghanistan, the United States will continue to grapple with strategic problems concerning its traditional ally, Pakistan. There are significant differences between what President Pervez Musharraf has said he will do to fight terrorism, what he intends to do and what he actually can accomplish. The threat of an imminent Indo-Pakistani war may be just the lever Washington needs to move Islamabad.
Analysis
The United States has been engaged in intense debate regarding the next steps it must take to eradicate al Qaeda. Two main strategies have emerged of late. One argues that there can be no solution to the problem of Islamic attacks on the United States until the regime of Saddam Hussein is eliminated. The other strategy argues that Iraq`s role is secondary, and that the United States` primary mission is to prevent al Qaeda from establishing a command center in some other isolated country, like Yemen or Somalia.
Obviously, the strategies are not incompatible. Equally obviously, at least from STRATFOR`S point of view, the debate misses the point entirely: the next country on the agenda is Pakistan.
When planning for the Afghan campaign began immediately after Sept. 11, it was clear -- at least from a naive standpoint -- that Pakistan, which has an extensive border with Afghanistan and a long-standing strategic relationship with the United States, would be the strategic key to the campaign. The planners` first impulse was to deploy U.S. forces in Pakistan and prosecute the campaign from there. This proved impossible. Instead, U.S. ground forces had to deploy in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, while air attacks were carried out from carriers in the Arabian Sea and from strategic bombers on Diego Garcia and elsewhere. Clearly, some forces were deployed in Pakistan, but only under tight secrecy.
The need for secrecy is the key to everything. Simply put, the Pakistani government was not in a position to permit a war against the Taliban regime to be waged from its soil. This was not simply because of substantial sympathy for the Taliban in Pakistan, although that existed. Nor is it simply because Pushtuns, the foundation of Taliban power, live on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border, although they do.
Rather, it was because the Taliban was ultimately as much a Pakistani phenomenon as it was Afghan. In a sense, the Taliban was a Pakistani construct, designed to conclude -- on terms acceptable to Pakistan -- the civil war that raged in Afghanistan following the Soviet withdrawal. Pakistan feared the ascendance of the Northern Alliance as well as other groups in Afghanistan, and saw in the Taliban a government that was congenial to Pakistan both strategically and ideologically. The ISI, Pakistan`s intelligence service, was in many ways the godfather of the Taliban government.
As the Taliban government provided al Qaeda with a secure operational base, the United States continued to parse the issue of Pakistan and Afghanistan. It is inconceivable that the Taliban would have been able to develop its relationship with al Qaeda without the knowledge of Pakistan`s intelligence services and government, and it is difficult to imagine that they would not have given at least implicit approval. However, the United States was not prepared to frame the issue as an Afghan-Pakistani issue -- only as an Afghan problem fundamentally distinct from Pakistan.
This policy continued after Sept. 11 and throughout the campaign, despite the clear limits Pakistan placed on cooperation with the United States. Washington clearly and rationally wanted to contain the Afghan campaign. It placed sufficient pressure on President Pervez Musharraf to force him to remove senior officials who were too closely aligned with the Taliban, to permit at least some basing of U.S. forces in Pakistan and to publicly commit himself to use Pakistani forces along the frontier to prevent Taliban forces from crossing into Pakistan.
The United States recognized that much of this was cosmetic. Support for the Taliban ran deep in the government and deeper in the country. The U.S. forces based in Pakistan were hardly strategic. Finally, whatever he promised, there were significant differences between what Musharraf said, what he actually intended to do and what he ultimately was able to do.
The United States carefully refrained from pressing the issue, afraid that excessive pressure would topple Musharraf and throw Pakistan either into chaos or into a fundamentalist dictatorship. Or if excessive pressure threatened Musharraf`s survival, he might simply reverse course and turn against the United States. In any case, the United States adopted a minimax policy -- it demanded the most it could get within the limits of what Islamabad could deliver, and it lived with the three differences: what was said, what was actually intended, what could really be delivered.
The manner in which the Afghan war concluded has suddenly rendered this policy untenable. While the Taliban has abandoned the cities, it continues to exist, both in alliances with particular warlords and in its own right. Where it exists most intensely, in fact, is in Pakistan, among Taliban sympathizers as well as among hundreds or thousands of Taliban fighters that have crossed into Pakistan during the past month. A very few have been very publicly apprehended, but most have gone to ground -- some protected by Pakistani forces.
Far more important than the fate of the Taliban is the fate of al Qaeda`s senior commanders, including Osama bin Laden, and of its fighters. It is becoming increasingly obvious that neither the Taliban`s high command nor al Qaeda`s has been captured. The release of a new videotape that appears to have been made in the past few weeks, and perhaps as recently as last week, dealt a blow to speculation that bin Laden and the others were killed at Tora Bora. It was always problematic that bin Laden would have chosen to travel from Kandahar to Tora Bora in the chaos that followed his last known taping. This would be not only dangerous but pointless. It was far more likely that he went directly to Pakistan, where supporters hid him and may still be doing so.
Whether bin Laden is in Pakistan or has traveled elsewhere, it is clear that many of his forces as well as Taliban leaders went to Pakistan and that the vast majority of those remain. In other words, apart from native support for the Taliban and al Qaeda, elements from Afghanistan are now in Pakistan and operating under the protection of, if not the government, certainly elements of the government and powerful political forces.
If we are correct in this, then the problem the United States faces in destroying al Qaeda does not concern Somalia, Yemen or Iraq, but Pakistan. Ideally, the United States would like Musharraf to use his security and military forces to destroy al Qaeda`s forces and hand senior leaders over to the United States. Certainly, this is something that Musharraf has assured the United States he would do. However, it is not clear that he is in a position to deliver on his promise -- it is not clear his orders are being obeyed. Nor, frankly, is it clear that he wishes to see these orders carried out. Certainly, he wants to placate the United States, but there is a huge gap between saying he will act, acting, and acting effectively.
A case in point is the Dec. 13 attack on India`s parliament by gunmen, which the U.S. government says were Islamic militants based in Pakistan. There are two explanations for the attack. The first is that Musharaff knew about plans for the attack and sanctioned it. The second is that he neither knew of nor sanctioned the attack. In a real sense, it doesn`t matter which it was. Either explanation raises serious questions about the course of Afghanistan.
All this creates a strategic crisis for the United States. Its fundamental goal is to defend its own territory against al Qaeda attacks and the global destruction of al Qaeda. In our view, al Qaeda has taken refuge in Pakistan -- historically an ally of the United States, and a country that poses a military challenge on an order of magnitude beyond that posed by Afghanistan. Launching a military campaign in Pakistan is possible but requires much greater resources than in Afghanistan, as well as the destruction of Pakistan`s nuclear capability. Rather than use direct military action, the United States would prefer a more subtle lever.
The attack on India`s parliament provides precisely that lever. Obviously, the shootout was as intolerable for India as a similar attack on Congress would be for the United States. India must react. But even apart from that, India sees itself as having an unprecedented opportunity to deal not only with the Kashmir issue but with the entire issue of the nature and future of Pakistan.
Pakistan`s alliance with the United States has placed severe limits on how far India could go. However, a profound schism is developing between Washington and Islamabad as post-Sept. 11 events evolve. Clearly, both sides are doing everything to avert an open breach -- but equally clearly, if it becomes undeniable that Pakistan is harboring al Qaeda elements, a break becomes inevitable. At that moment, India would have the opening it has awaited for 50 years. The United States would be not be able to refrain from acting against Pakistan, nor could it act efficiently without Indian support and involvement. India was eager to help from the beginning; now the United States would have no choice but to accept that help.
The United States does not want an Indo-Pakistani war, but the threat of such a war is precisely what Washington needs to move Islamabad. For Pakistan, the threat of a war with India in which the United States either stood to one side or actively participated is the worst possible nightmare. By allowing the specter to rise, Washington has given Musharraf an opportunity to become more forthcoming. If he is in control but insincere, he is being shown the abyss and can change course. If he is sincere but not in control, he can show the abyss to Islamic fundamentalists in his government and bring them under control.
The problem is that many of the fundamentalists would actually welcome a war and even defeat by India. Their goal is to radicalize the Islamic world by demonstrating that Christians, Hindus and Jews have formed a vast alliance designed to crush Islam. A combined U.S.-Indian attack would be exactly what would be needed to demonstrate this to the world. The destruction of Pakistan`s nuclear capability -- whether by nuclear or conventional weapons -- would further illustrate the point. It is therefore no accident that Islamic fundamentalists struck India at what would normally be considered the worst possible moment. From their point of view, it was the best possible moment to act.
This indicated that Musharraf may not be able to gain control of the situation, even if he wanted to. Thus, he visited Beijing in late December. China has historically been an enemy of India and an ally of Pakistan. Beijing has been extremely cautious since Sept. 11, but it remembers both the EP-3 spy plane incident and U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld`s redefinition of strategy toward the Pacific and against China prior to Sept. 11. Beijing is happy to see the United States diverted. It would not be happy to see India emerge without a threat on its western flank. Hence, Musharaff had a very cordial visit to Beijing.
At this point, the strategic imperative of defeating al Qaeda begins to intersect with Eurasian geopolitics. It is one thing to take Afghanistan apart, quite another to do the same with Pakistan. Afghanistan`s fate is of little significance to great powers. The fate of Pakistan matters to China, among others. At the same time, if al Qaeda is using Pakistan as a base of operations or even as a transit point and the Pakistani government can`t or won`t do anything decisive and effective about it, this strikes at a fundamental U.S. interest and cannot be tolerated.
The United States is, therefore, in the midst of a veiled crisis over Pakistan. It is an odd crisis in that Washington, fearing the consequences of a public confrontation, is trying very hard to maintain the fiction that Pakistan has been fully cooperating in the battle against al Qaeda, that it is acting effectively against the Taliban and al Qaeda and that its forces would certainly arrest senior al Qaeda leaders if they could catch them. At the same time, the United States is quietly showing Pakistan the abyss in the hopes that the plausible fiction of U.S.-Pakistani relations might thereby become reality.
The problem is that in Pakistan, there are those who prefer an open breach with the United States to accommodation. Even if we assume that Musharraf is not one of these elements, it is not clear that he can control them. If he can`t control them, the United States is faced with an extraordinary dilemma -- to go into Pakistan and get al Qaeda itself. It cannot do this without India, and India will not move unless Pakistan`s nuclear weapons are destroyed. It is not clear that U.S. precision-guided munitions are sufficient for a task that will tolerate no failure.
The rest follows logically.
An International Failure
2230 GMT, 011227
Dec 27,2001
Summary
http://www.stratfor.com/home/0112272230.htm
With al Qaeda and Taliban elements fleeing Afghanistan, the United States will continue to grapple with strategic problems concerning its traditional ally, Pakistan. There are significant differences between what President Pervez Musharraf has said he will do to fight terrorism, what he intends to do and what he actually can accomplish. The threat of an imminent Indo-Pakistani war may be just the lever Washington needs to move Islamabad.
Analysis
The United States has been engaged in intense debate regarding the next steps it must take to eradicate al Qaeda. Two main strategies have emerged of late. One argues that there can be no solution to the problem of Islamic attacks on the United States until the regime of Saddam Hussein is eliminated. The other strategy argues that Iraq`s role is secondary, and that the United States` primary mission is to prevent al Qaeda from establishing a command center in some other isolated country, like Yemen or Somalia.
Obviously, the strategies are not incompatible. Equally obviously, at least from STRATFOR`S point of view, the debate misses the point entirely: the next country on the agenda is Pakistan.
When planning for the Afghan campaign began immediately after Sept. 11, it was clear -- at least from a naive standpoint -- that Pakistan, which has an extensive border with Afghanistan and a long-standing strategic relationship with the United States, would be the strategic key to the campaign. The planners` first impulse was to deploy U.S. forces in Pakistan and prosecute the campaign from there. This proved impossible. Instead, U.S. ground forces had to deploy in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, while air attacks were carried out from carriers in the Arabian Sea and from strategic bombers on Diego Garcia and elsewhere. Clearly, some forces were deployed in Pakistan, but only under tight secrecy.
The need for secrecy is the key to everything. Simply put, the Pakistani government was not in a position to permit a war against the Taliban regime to be waged from its soil. This was not simply because of substantial sympathy for the Taliban in Pakistan, although that existed. Nor is it simply because Pushtuns, the foundation of Taliban power, live on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border, although they do.
Rather, it was because the Taliban was ultimately as much a Pakistani phenomenon as it was Afghan. In a sense, the Taliban was a Pakistani construct, designed to conclude -- on terms acceptable to Pakistan -- the civil war that raged in Afghanistan following the Soviet withdrawal. Pakistan feared the ascendance of the Northern Alliance as well as other groups in Afghanistan, and saw in the Taliban a government that was congenial to Pakistan both strategically and ideologically. The ISI, Pakistan`s intelligence service, was in many ways the godfather of the Taliban government.
As the Taliban government provided al Qaeda with a secure operational base, the United States continued to parse the issue of Pakistan and Afghanistan. It is inconceivable that the Taliban would have been able to develop its relationship with al Qaeda without the knowledge of Pakistan`s intelligence services and government, and it is difficult to imagine that they would not have given at least implicit approval. However, the United States was not prepared to frame the issue as an Afghan-Pakistani issue -- only as an Afghan problem fundamentally distinct from Pakistan.
This policy continued after Sept. 11 and throughout the campaign, despite the clear limits Pakistan placed on cooperation with the United States. Washington clearly and rationally wanted to contain the Afghan campaign. It placed sufficient pressure on President Pervez Musharraf to force him to remove senior officials who were too closely aligned with the Taliban, to permit at least some basing of U.S. forces in Pakistan and to publicly commit himself to use Pakistani forces along the frontier to prevent Taliban forces from crossing into Pakistan.
The United States recognized that much of this was cosmetic. Support for the Taliban ran deep in the government and deeper in the country. The U.S. forces based in Pakistan were hardly strategic. Finally, whatever he promised, there were significant differences between what Musharraf said, what he actually intended to do and what he ultimately was able to do.
The United States carefully refrained from pressing the issue, afraid that excessive pressure would topple Musharraf and throw Pakistan either into chaos or into a fundamentalist dictatorship. Or if excessive pressure threatened Musharraf`s survival, he might simply reverse course and turn against the United States. In any case, the United States adopted a minimax policy -- it demanded the most it could get within the limits of what Islamabad could deliver, and it lived with the three differences: what was said, what was actually intended, what could really be delivered.
The manner in which the Afghan war concluded has suddenly rendered this policy untenable. While the Taliban has abandoned the cities, it continues to exist, both in alliances with particular warlords and in its own right. Where it exists most intensely, in fact, is in Pakistan, among Taliban sympathizers as well as among hundreds or thousands of Taliban fighters that have crossed into Pakistan during the past month. A very few have been very publicly apprehended, but most have gone to ground -- some protected by Pakistani forces.
Far more important than the fate of the Taliban is the fate of al Qaeda`s senior commanders, including Osama bin Laden, and of its fighters. It is becoming increasingly obvious that neither the Taliban`s high command nor al Qaeda`s has been captured. The release of a new videotape that appears to have been made in the past few weeks, and perhaps as recently as last week, dealt a blow to speculation that bin Laden and the others were killed at Tora Bora. It was always problematic that bin Laden would have chosen to travel from Kandahar to Tora Bora in the chaos that followed his last known taping. This would be not only dangerous but pointless. It was far more likely that he went directly to Pakistan, where supporters hid him and may still be doing so.
Whether bin Laden is in Pakistan or has traveled elsewhere, it is clear that many of his forces as well as Taliban leaders went to Pakistan and that the vast majority of those remain. In other words, apart from native support for the Taliban and al Qaeda, elements from Afghanistan are now in Pakistan and operating under the protection of, if not the government, certainly elements of the government and powerful political forces.
If we are correct in this, then the problem the United States faces in destroying al Qaeda does not concern Somalia, Yemen or Iraq, but Pakistan. Ideally, the United States would like Musharraf to use his security and military forces to destroy al Qaeda`s forces and hand senior leaders over to the United States. Certainly, this is something that Musharraf has assured the United States he would do. However, it is not clear that he is in a position to deliver on his promise -- it is not clear his orders are being obeyed. Nor, frankly, is it clear that he wishes to see these orders carried out. Certainly, he wants to placate the United States, but there is a huge gap between saying he will act, acting, and acting effectively.
A case in point is the Dec. 13 attack on India`s parliament by gunmen, which the U.S. government says were Islamic militants based in Pakistan. There are two explanations for the attack. The first is that Musharaff knew about plans for the attack and sanctioned it. The second is that he neither knew of nor sanctioned the attack. In a real sense, it doesn`t matter which it was. Either explanation raises serious questions about the course of Afghanistan.
All this creates a strategic crisis for the United States. Its fundamental goal is to defend its own territory against al Qaeda attacks and the global destruction of al Qaeda. In our view, al Qaeda has taken refuge in Pakistan -- historically an ally of the United States, and a country that poses a military challenge on an order of magnitude beyond that posed by Afghanistan. Launching a military campaign in Pakistan is possible but requires much greater resources than in Afghanistan, as well as the destruction of Pakistan`s nuclear capability. Rather than use direct military action, the United States would prefer a more subtle lever.
The attack on India`s parliament provides precisely that lever. Obviously, the shootout was as intolerable for India as a similar attack on Congress would be for the United States. India must react. But even apart from that, India sees itself as having an unprecedented opportunity to deal not only with the Kashmir issue but with the entire issue of the nature and future of Pakistan.
Pakistan`s alliance with the United States has placed severe limits on how far India could go. However, a profound schism is developing between Washington and Islamabad as post-Sept. 11 events evolve. Clearly, both sides are doing everything to avert an open breach -- but equally clearly, if it becomes undeniable that Pakistan is harboring al Qaeda elements, a break becomes inevitable. At that moment, India would have the opening it has awaited for 50 years. The United States would be not be able to refrain from acting against Pakistan, nor could it act efficiently without Indian support and involvement. India was eager to help from the beginning; now the United States would have no choice but to accept that help.
The United States does not want an Indo-Pakistani war, but the threat of such a war is precisely what Washington needs to move Islamabad. For Pakistan, the threat of a war with India in which the United States either stood to one side or actively participated is the worst possible nightmare. By allowing the specter to rise, Washington has given Musharraf an opportunity to become more forthcoming. If he is in control but insincere, he is being shown the abyss and can change course. If he is sincere but not in control, he can show the abyss to Islamic fundamentalists in his government and bring them under control.
The problem is that many of the fundamentalists would actually welcome a war and even defeat by India. Their goal is to radicalize the Islamic world by demonstrating that Christians, Hindus and Jews have formed a vast alliance designed to crush Islam. A combined U.S.-Indian attack would be exactly what would be needed to demonstrate this to the world. The destruction of Pakistan`s nuclear capability -- whether by nuclear or conventional weapons -- would further illustrate the point. It is therefore no accident that Islamic fundamentalists struck India at what would normally be considered the worst possible moment. From their point of view, it was the best possible moment to act.
This indicated that Musharraf may not be able to gain control of the situation, even if he wanted to. Thus, he visited Beijing in late December. China has historically been an enemy of India and an ally of Pakistan. Beijing has been extremely cautious since Sept. 11, but it remembers both the EP-3 spy plane incident and U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld`s redefinition of strategy toward the Pacific and against China prior to Sept. 11. Beijing is happy to see the United States diverted. It would not be happy to see India emerge without a threat on its western flank. Hence, Musharaff had a very cordial visit to Beijing.
At this point, the strategic imperative of defeating al Qaeda begins to intersect with Eurasian geopolitics. It is one thing to take Afghanistan apart, quite another to do the same with Pakistan. Afghanistan`s fate is of little significance to great powers. The fate of Pakistan matters to China, among others. At the same time, if al Qaeda is using Pakistan as a base of operations or even as a transit point and the Pakistani government can`t or won`t do anything decisive and effective about it, this strikes at a fundamental U.S. interest and cannot be tolerated.
The United States is, therefore, in the midst of a veiled crisis over Pakistan. It is an odd crisis in that Washington, fearing the consequences of a public confrontation, is trying very hard to maintain the fiction that Pakistan has been fully cooperating in the battle against al Qaeda, that it is acting effectively against the Taliban and al Qaeda and that its forces would certainly arrest senior al Qaeda leaders if they could catch them. At the same time, the United States is quietly showing Pakistan the abyss in the hopes that the plausible fiction of U.S.-Pakistani relations might thereby become reality.
The problem is that in Pakistan, there are those who prefer an open breach with the United States to accommodation. Even if we assume that Musharraf is not one of these elements, it is not clear that he can control them. If he can`t control them, the United States is faced with an extraordinary dilemma -- to go into Pakistan and get al Qaeda itself. It cannot do this without India, and India will not move unless Pakistan`s nuclear weapons are destroyed. It is not clear that U.S. precision-guided munitions are sufficient for a task that will tolerate no failure.
The rest follows logically.
Posted by
mohajir
Dec 29, 2001 02:37 pm
Pakistan, India and the United States2230 GMT, 011227
Dec 27,2001
Summary
http://www.stratfor.com/home/0112272230.htm
With al Qaeda and Taliban elements fleeing Afghanistan, the United States will continue to grapple with strategic problems concerning its traditional ally, Pakistan. There are significant differences between what President Pervez Musharraf has said he will do to fight terrorism, what he intends to do and what he actually can accomplish. The threat of an imminent Indo-Pakistani war may be just the lever Washington needs to move Islamabad.
Analysis
The United States has been engaged in intense debate regarding the next steps it must take to eradicate al Qaeda. Two main strategies have emerged of late. One argues that there can be no solution to the problem of Islamic attacks on the United States until the regime of Saddam Hussein is eliminated. The other strategy argues that Iraq`s role is secondary, and that the United States` primary mission is to prevent al Qaeda from establishing a command center in some other isolated country, like Yemen or Somalia.
Obviously, the strategies are not incompatible. Equally obviously, at least from STRATFOR`S point of view, the debate misses the point entirely: the next country on the agenda is Pakistan.
When planning for the Afghan campaign began immediately after Sept. 11, it was clear -- at least from a naive standpoint -- that Pakistan, which has an extensive border with Afghanistan and a long-standing strategic relationship with the United States, would be the strategic key to the campaign. The planners` first impulse was to deploy U.S. forces in Pakistan and prosecute the campaign from there. This proved impossible. Instead, U.S. ground forces had to deploy in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, while air attacks were carried out from carriers in the Arabian Sea and from strategic bombers on Diego Garcia and elsewhere. Clearly, some forces were deployed in Pakistan, but only under tight secrecy.
The need for secrecy is the key to everything. Simply put, the Pakistani government was not in a position to permit a war against the Taliban regime to be waged from its soil. This was not simply because of substantial sympathy for the Taliban in Pakistan, although that existed. Nor is it simply because Pushtuns, the foundation of Taliban power, live on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border, although they do.
Rather, it was because the Taliban was ultimately as much a Pakistani phenomenon as it was Afghan. In a sense, the Taliban was a Pakistani construct, designed to conclude -- on terms acceptable to Pakistan -- the civil war that raged in Afghanistan following the Soviet withdrawal. Pakistan feared the ascendance of the Northern Alliance as well as other groups in Afghanistan, and saw in the Taliban a government that was congenial to Pakistan both strategically and ideologically. The ISI, Pakistan`s intelligence service, was in many ways the godfather of the Taliban government.
As the Taliban government provided al Qaeda with a secure operational base, the United States continued to parse the issue of Pakistan and Afghanistan. It is inconceivable that the Taliban would have been able to develop its relationship with al Qaeda without the knowledge of Pakistan`s intelligence services and government, and it is difficult to imagine that they would not have given at least implicit approval. However, the United States was not prepared to frame the issue as an Afghan-Pakistani issue -- only as an Afghan problem fundamentally distinct from Pakistan.
This policy continued after Sept. 11 and throughout the campaign, despite the clear limits Pakistan placed on cooperation with the United States. Washington clearly and rationally wanted to contain the Afghan campaign. It placed sufficient pressure on President Pervez Musharraf to force him to remove senior officials who were too closely aligned with the Taliban, to permit at least some basing of U.S. forces in Pakistan and to publicly commit himself to use Pakistani forces along the frontier to prevent Taliban forces from crossing into Pakistan.
The United States recognized that much of this was cosmetic. Support for the Taliban ran deep in the government and deeper in the country. The U.S. forces based in Pakistan were hardly strategic. Finally, whatever he promised, there were significant differences between what Musharraf said, what he actually intended to do and what he ultimately was able to do.
The United States carefully refrained from pressing the issue, afraid that excessive pressure would topple Musharraf and throw Pakistan either into chaos or into a fundamentalist dictatorship. Or if excessive pressure threatened Musharraf`s survival, he might simply reverse course and turn against the United States. In any case, the United States adopted a minimax policy -- it demanded the most it could get within the limits of what Islamabad could deliver, and it lived with the three differences: what was said, what was actually intended, what could really be delivered.
The manner in which the Afghan war concluded has suddenly rendered this policy untenable. While the Taliban has abandoned the cities, it continues to exist, both in alliances with particular warlords and in its own right. Where it exists most intensely, in fact, is in Pakistan, among Taliban sympathizers as well as among hundreds or thousands of Taliban fighters that have crossed into Pakistan during the past month. A very few have been very publicly apprehended, but most have gone to ground -- some protected by Pakistani forces.
Far more important than the fate of the Taliban is the fate of al Qaeda`s senior commanders, including Osama bin Laden, and of its fighters. It is becoming increasingly obvious that neither the Taliban`s high command nor al Qaeda`s has been captured. The release of a new videotape that appears to have been made in the past few weeks, and perhaps as recently as last week, dealt a blow to speculation that bin Laden and the others were killed at Tora Bora. It was always problematic that bin Laden would have chosen to travel from Kandahar to Tora Bora in the chaos that followed his last known taping. This would be not only dangerous but pointless. It was far more likely that he went directly to Pakistan, where supporters hid him and may still be doing so.
Whether bin Laden is in Pakistan or has traveled elsewhere, it is clear that many of his forces as well as Taliban leaders went to Pakistan and that the vast majority of those remain. In other words, apart from native support for the Taliban and al Qaeda, elements from Afghanistan are now in Pakistan and operating under the protection of, if not the government, certainly elements of the government and powerful political forces.
If we are correct in this, then the problem the United States faces in destroying al Qaeda does not concern Somalia, Yemen or Iraq, but Pakistan. Ideally, the United States would like Musharraf to use his security and military forces to destroy al Qaeda`s forces and hand senior leaders over to the United States. Certainly, this is something that Musharraf has assured the United States he would do. However, it is not clear that he is in a position to deliver on his promise -- it is not clear his orders are being obeyed. Nor, frankly, is it clear that he wishes to see these orders carried out. Certainly, he wants to placate the United States, but there is a huge gap between saying he will act, acting, and acting effectively.
A case in point is the Dec. 13 attack on India`s parliament by gunmen, which the U.S. government says were Islamic militants based in Pakistan. There are two explanations for the attack. The first is that Musharaff knew about plans for the attack and sanctioned it. The second is that he neither knew of nor sanctioned the attack. In a real sense, it doesn`t matter which it was. Either explanation raises serious questions about the course of Afghanistan.
All this creates a strategic crisis for the United States. Its fundamental goal is to defend its own territory against al Qaeda attacks and the global destruction of al Qaeda. In our view, al Qaeda has taken refuge in Pakistan -- historically an ally of the United States, and a country that poses a military challenge on an order of magnitude beyond that posed by Afghanistan. Launching a military campaign in Pakistan is possible but requires much greater resources than in Afghanistan, as well as the destruction of Pakistan`s nuclear capability. Rather than use direct military action, the United States would prefer a more subtle lever.
The attack on India`s parliament provides precisely that lever. Obviously, the shootout was as intolerable for India as a similar attack on Congress would be for the United States. India must react. But even apart from that, India sees itself as having an unprecedented opportunity to deal not only with the Kashmir issue but with the entire issue of the nature and future of Pakistan.
Pakistan`s alliance with the United States has placed severe limits on how far India could go. However, a profound schism is developing between Washington and Islamabad as post-Sept. 11 events evolve. Clearly, both sides are doing everything to avert an open breach -- but equally clearly, if it becomes undeniable that Pakistan is harboring al Qaeda elements, a break becomes inevitable. At that moment, India would have the opening it has awaited for 50 years. The United States would be not be able to refrain from acting against Pakistan, nor could it act efficiently without Indian support and involvement. India was eager to help from the beginning; now the United States would have no choice but to accept that help.
The United States does not want an Indo-Pakistani war, but the threat of such a war is precisely what Washington needs to move Islamabad. For Pakistan, the threat of a war with India in which the United States either stood to one side or actively participated is the worst possible nightmare. By allowing the specter to rise, Washington has given Musharraf an opportunity to become more forthcoming. If he is in control but insincere, he is being shown the abyss and can change course. If he is sincere but not in control, he can show the abyss to Islamic fundamentalists in his government and bring them under control.
The problem is that many of the fundamentalists would actually welcome a war and even defeat by India. Their goal is to radicalize the Islamic world by demonstrating that Christians, Hindus and Jews have formed a vast alliance designed to crush Islam. A combined U.S.-Indian attack would be exactly what would be needed to demonstrate this to the world. The destruction of Pakistan`s nuclear capability -- whether by nuclear or conventional weapons -- would further illustrate the point. It is therefore no accident that Islamic fundamentalists struck India at what would normally be considered the worst possible moment. From their point of view, it was the best possible moment to act.
This indicated that Musharraf may not be able to gain control of the situation, even if he wanted to. Thus, he visited Beijing in late December. China has historically been an enemy of India and an ally of Pakistan. Beijing has been extremely cautious since Sept. 11, but it remembers both the EP-3 spy plane incident and U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld`s redefinition of strategy toward the Pacific and against China prior to Sept. 11. Beijing is happy to see the United States diverted. It would not be happy to see India emerge without a threat on its western flank. Hence, Musharaff had a very cordial visit to Beijing.
At this point, the strategic imperative of defeating al Qaeda begins to intersect with Eurasian geopolitics. It is one thing to take Afghanistan apart, quite another to do the same with Pakistan. Afghanistan`s fate is of little significance to great powers. The fate of Pakistan matters to China, among others. At the same time, if al Qaeda is using Pakistan as a base of operations or even as a transit point and the Pakistani government can`t or won`t do anything decisive and effective about it, this strikes at a fundamental U.S. interest and cannot be tolerated.
The United States is, therefore, in the midst of a veiled crisis over Pakistan. It is an odd crisis in that Washington, fearing the consequences of a public confrontation, is trying very hard to maintain the fiction that Pakistan has been fully cooperating in the battle against al Qaeda, that it is acting effectively against the Taliban and al Qaeda and that its forces would certainly arrest senior al Qaeda leaders if they could catch them. At the same time, the United States is quietly showing Pakistan the abyss in the hopes that the plausible fiction of U.S.-Pakistani relations might thereby become reality.
The problem is that in Pakistan, there are those who prefer an open breach with the United States to accommodation. Even if we assume that Musharraf is not one of these elements, it is not clear that he can control them. If he can`t control them, the United States is faced with an extraordinary dilemma -- to go into Pakistan and get al Qaeda itself. It cannot do this without India, and India will not move unless Pakistan`s nuclear weapons are destroyed. It is not clear that U.S. precision-guided munitions are sufficient for a task that will tolerate no failure.
The rest follows logically.
The Price
2230 GMT, 011227
Dec 27,2001
Summary
http://www.stratfor.com/home/0112272230.htm
With al Qaeda and Taliban elements fleeing Afghanistan, the United States will continue to grapple with strategic problems concerning its traditional ally, Pakistan. There are significant differences between what President Pervez Musharraf has said he will do to fight terrorism, what he intends to do and what he actually can accomplish. The threat of an imminent Indo-Pakistani war may be just the lever Washington needs to move Islamabad.
Analysis
The United States has been engaged in intense debate regarding the next steps it must take to eradicate al Qaeda. Two main strategies have emerged of late. One argues that there can be no solution to the problem of Islamic attacks on the United States until the regime of Saddam Hussein is eliminated. The other strategy argues that Iraq`s role is secondary, and that the United States` primary mission is to prevent al Qaeda from establishing a command center in some other isolated country, like Yemen or Somalia.
Obviously, the strategies are not incompatible. Equally obviously, at least from STRATFOR`S point of view, the debate misses the point entirely: the next country on the agenda is Pakistan.
When planning for the Afghan campaign began immediately after Sept. 11, it was clear -- at least from a naive standpoint -- that Pakistan, which has an extensive border with Afghanistan and a long-standing strategic relationship with the United States, would be the strategic key to the campaign. The planners` first impulse was to deploy U.S. forces in Pakistan and prosecute the campaign from there. This proved impossible. Instead, U.S. ground forces had to deploy in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, while air attacks were carried out from carriers in the Arabian Sea and from strategic bombers on Diego Garcia and elsewhere. Clearly, some forces were deployed in Pakistan, but only under tight secrecy.
The need for secrecy is the key to everything. Simply put, the Pakistani government was not in a position to permit a war against the Taliban regime to be waged from its soil. This was not simply because of substantial sympathy for the Taliban in Pakistan, although that existed. Nor is it simply because Pushtuns, the foundation of Taliban power, live on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border, although they do.
Rather, it was because the Taliban was ultimately as much a Pakistani phenomenon as it was Afghan. In a sense, the Taliban was a Pakistani construct, designed to conclude -- on terms acceptable to Pakistan -- the civil war that raged in Afghanistan following the Soviet withdrawal. Pakistan feared the ascendance of the Northern Alliance as well as other groups in Afghanistan, and saw in the Taliban a government that was congenial to Pakistan both strategically and ideologically. The ISI, Pakistan`s intelligence service, was in many ways the godfather of the Taliban government.
As the Taliban government provided al Qaeda with a secure operational base, the United States continued to parse the issue of Pakistan and Afghanistan. It is inconceivable that the Taliban would have been able to develop its relationship with al Qaeda without the knowledge of Pakistan`s intelligence services and government, and it is difficult to imagine that they would not have given at least implicit approval. However, the United States was not prepared to frame the issue as an Afghan-Pakistani issue -- only as an Afghan problem fundamentally distinct from Pakistan.
This policy continued after Sept. 11 and throughout the campaign, despite the clear limits Pakistan placed on cooperation with the United States. Washington clearly and rationally wanted to contain the Afghan campaign. It placed sufficient pressure on President Pervez Musharraf to force him to remove senior officials who were too closely aligned with the Taliban, to permit at least some basing of U.S. forces in Pakistan and to publicly commit himself to use Pakistani forces along the frontier to prevent Taliban forces from crossing into Pakistan.
The United States recognized that much of this was cosmetic. Support for the Taliban ran deep in the government and deeper in the country. The U.S. forces based in Pakistan were hardly strategic. Finally, whatever he promised, there were significant differences between what Musharraf said, what he actually intended to do and what he ultimately was able to do.
The United States carefully refrained from pressing the issue, afraid that excessive pressure would topple Musharraf and throw Pakistan either into chaos or into a fundamentalist dictatorship. Or if excessive pressure threatened Musharraf`s survival, he might simply reverse course and turn against the United States. In any case, the United States adopted a minimax policy -- it demanded the most it could get within the limits of what Islamabad could deliver, and it lived with the three differences: what was said, what was actually intended, what could really be delivered.
The manner in which the Afghan war concluded has suddenly rendered this policy untenable. While the Taliban has abandoned the cities, it continues to exist, both in alliances with particular warlords and in its own right. Where it exists most intensely, in fact, is in Pakistan, among Taliban sympathizers as well as among hundreds or thousands of Taliban fighters that have crossed into Pakistan during the past month. A very few have been very publicly apprehended, but most have gone to ground -- some protected by Pakistani forces.
Far more important than the fate of the Taliban is the fate of al Qaeda`s senior commanders, including Osama bin Laden, and of its fighters. It is becoming increasingly obvious that neither the Taliban`s high command nor al Qaeda`s has been captured. The release of a new videotape that appears to have been made in the past few weeks, and perhaps as recently as last week, dealt a blow to speculation that bin Laden and the others were killed at Tora Bora. It was always problematic that bin Laden would have chosen to travel from Kandahar to Tora Bora in the chaos that followed his last known taping. This would be not only dangerous but pointless. It was far more likely that he went directly to Pakistan, where supporters hid him and may still be doing so.
Whether bin Laden is in Pakistan or has traveled elsewhere, it is clear that many of his forces as well as Taliban leaders went to Pakistan and that the vast majority of those remain. In other words, apart from native support for the Taliban and al Qaeda, elements from Afghanistan are now in Pakistan and operating under the protection of, if not the government, certainly elements of the government and powerful political forces.
If we are correct in this, then the problem the United States faces in destroying al Qaeda does not concern Somalia, Yemen or Iraq, but Pakistan. Ideally, the United States would like Musharraf to use his security and military forces to destroy al Qaeda`s forces and hand senior leaders over to the United States. Certainly, this is something that Musharraf has assured the United States he would do. However, it is not clear that he is in a position to deliver on his promise -- it is not clear his orders are being obeyed. Nor, frankly, is it clear that he wishes to see these orders carried out. Certainly, he wants to placate the United States, but there is a huge gap between saying he will act, acting, and acting effectively.
A case in point is the Dec. 13 attack on India`s parliament by gunmen, which the U.S. government says were Islamic militants based in Pakistan. There are two explanations for the attack. The first is that Musharaff knew about plans for the attack and sanctioned it. The second is that he neither knew of nor sanctioned the attack. In a real sense, it doesn`t matter which it was. Either explanation raises serious questions about the course of Afghanistan.
All this creates a strategic crisis for the United States. Its fundamental goal is to defend its own territory against al Qaeda attacks and the global destruction of al Qaeda. In our view, al Qaeda has taken refuge in Pakistan -- historically an ally of the United States, and a country that poses a military challenge on an order of magnitude beyond that posed by Afghanistan. Launching a military campaign in Pakistan is possible but requires much greater resources than in Afghanistan, as well as the destruction of Pakistan`s nuclear capability. Rather than use direct military action, the United States would prefer a more subtle lever.
The attack on India`s parliament provides precisely that lever. Obviously, the shootout was as intolerable for India as a similar attack on Congress would be for the United States. India must react. But even apart from that, India sees itself as having an unprecedented opportunity to deal not only with the Kashmir issue but with the entire issue of the nature and future of Pakistan.
Pakistan`s alliance with the United States has placed severe limits on how far India could go. However, a profound schism is developing between Washington and Islamabad as post-Sept. 11 events evolve. Clearly, both sides are doing everything to avert an open breach -- but equally clearly, if it becomes undeniable that Pakistan is harboring al Qaeda elements, a break becomes inevitable. At that moment, India would have the opening it has awaited for 50 years. The United States would be not be able to refrain from acting against Pakistan, nor could it act efficiently without Indian support and involvement. India was eager to help from the beginning; now the United States would have no choice but to accept that help.
The United States does not want an Indo-Pakistani war, but the threat of such a war is precisely what Washington needs to move Islamabad. For Pakistan, the threat of a war with India in which the United States either stood to one side or actively participated is the worst possible nightmare. By allowing the specter to rise, Washington has given Musharraf an opportunity to become more forthcoming. If he is in control but insincere, he is being shown the abyss and can change course. If he is sincere but not in control, he can show the abyss to Islamic fundamentalists in his government and bring them under control.
The problem is that many of the fundamentalists would actually welcome a war and even defeat by India. Their goal is to radicalize the Islamic world by demonstrating that Christians, Hindus and Jews have formed a vast alliance designed to crush Islam. A combined U.S.-Indian attack would be exactly what would be needed to demonstrate this to the world. The destruction of Pakistan`s nuclear capability -- whether by nuclear or conventional weapons -- would further illustrate the point. It is therefore no accident that Islamic fundamentalists struck India at what would normally be considered the worst possible moment. From their point of view, it was the best possible moment to act.
This indicated that Musharraf may not be able to gain control of the situation, even if he wanted to. Thus, he visited Beijing in late December. China has historically been an enemy of India and an ally of Pakistan. Beijing has been extremely cautious since Sept. 11, but it remembers both the EP-3 spy plane incident and U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld`s redefinition of strategy toward the Pacific and against China prior to Sept. 11. Beijing is happy to see the United States diverted. It would not be happy to see India emerge without a threat on its western flank. Hence, Musharaff had a very cordial visit to Beijing.
At this point, the strategic imperative of defeating al Qaeda begins to intersect with Eurasian geopolitics. It is one thing to take Afghanistan apart, quite another to do the same with Pakistan. Afghanistan`s fate is of little significance to great powers. The fate of Pakistan matters to China, among others. At the same time, if al Qaeda is using Pakistan as a base of operations or even as a transit point and the Pakistani government can`t or won`t do anything decisive and effective about it, this strikes at a fundamental U.S. interest and cannot be tolerated.
The United States is, therefore, in the midst of a veiled crisis over Pakistan. It is an odd crisis in that Washington, fearing the consequences of a public confrontation, is trying very hard to maintain the fiction that Pakistan has been fully cooperating in the battle against al Qaeda, that it is acting effectively against the Taliban and al Qaeda and that its forces would certainly arrest senior al Qaeda leaders if they could catch them. At the same time, the United States is quietly showing Pakistan the abyss in the hopes that the plausible fiction of U.S.-Pakistani relations might thereby become reality.
The problem is that in Pakistan, there are those who prefer an open breach with the United States to accommodation. Even if we assume that Musharraf is not one of these elements, it is not clear that he can control them. If he can`t control them, the United States is faced with an extraordinary dilemma -- to go into Pakistan and get al Qaeda itself. It cannot do this without India, and India will not move unless Pakistan`s nuclear weapons are destroyed. It is not clear that U.S. precision-guided munitions are sufficient for a task that will tolerate no failure.
The rest follows logically.
Posted by
mohajir
Dec 29, 2001 02:37 pm
Pakistan, India and the United States2230 GMT, 011227
Dec 27,2001
Summary
http://www.stratfor.com/home/0112272230.htm
With al Qaeda and Taliban elements fleeing Afghanistan, the United States will continue to grapple with strategic problems concerning its traditional ally, Pakistan. There are significant differences between what President Pervez Musharraf has said he will do to fight terrorism, what he intends to do and what he actually can accomplish. The threat of an imminent Indo-Pakistani war may be just the lever Washington needs to move Islamabad.
Analysis
The United States has been engaged in intense debate regarding the next steps it must take to eradicate al Qaeda. Two main strategies have emerged of late. One argues that there can be no solution to the problem of Islamic attacks on the United States until the regime of Saddam Hussein is eliminated. The other strategy argues that Iraq`s role is secondary, and that the United States` primary mission is to prevent al Qaeda from establishing a command center in some other isolated country, like Yemen or Somalia.
Obviously, the strategies are not incompatible. Equally obviously, at least from STRATFOR`S point of view, the debate misses the point entirely: the next country on the agenda is Pakistan.
When planning for the Afghan campaign began immediately after Sept. 11, it was clear -- at least from a naive standpoint -- that Pakistan, which has an extensive border with Afghanistan and a long-standing strategic relationship with the United States, would be the strategic key to the campaign. The planners` first impulse was to deploy U.S. forces in Pakistan and prosecute the campaign from there. This proved impossible. Instead, U.S. ground forces had to deploy in Uzbekistan and Tajikistan, while air attacks were carried out from carriers in the Arabian Sea and from strategic bombers on Diego Garcia and elsewhere. Clearly, some forces were deployed in Pakistan, but only under tight secrecy.
The need for secrecy is the key to everything. Simply put, the Pakistani government was not in a position to permit a war against the Taliban regime to be waged from its soil. This was not simply because of substantial sympathy for the Taliban in Pakistan, although that existed. Nor is it simply because Pushtuns, the foundation of Taliban power, live on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistani border, although they do.
Rather, it was because the Taliban was ultimately as much a Pakistani phenomenon as it was Afghan. In a sense, the Taliban was a Pakistani construct, designed to conclude -- on terms acceptable to Pakistan -- the civil war that raged in Afghanistan following the Soviet withdrawal. Pakistan feared the ascendance of the Northern Alliance as well as other groups in Afghanistan, and saw in the Taliban a government that was congenial to Pakistan both strategically and ideologically. The ISI, Pakistan`s intelligence service, was in many ways the godfather of the Taliban government.
As the Taliban government provided al Qaeda with a secure operational base, the United States continued to parse the issue of Pakistan and Afghanistan. It is inconceivable that the Taliban would have been able to develop its relationship with al Qaeda without the knowledge of Pakistan`s intelligence services and government, and it is difficult to imagine that they would not have given at least implicit approval. However, the United States was not prepared to frame the issue as an Afghan-Pakistani issue -- only as an Afghan problem fundamentally distinct from Pakistan.
This policy continued after Sept. 11 and throughout the campaign, despite the clear limits Pakistan placed on cooperation with the United States. Washington clearly and rationally wanted to contain the Afghan campaign. It placed sufficient pressure on President Pervez Musharraf to force him to remove senior officials who were too closely aligned with the Taliban, to permit at least some basing of U.S. forces in Pakistan and to publicly commit himself to use Pakistani forces along the frontier to prevent Taliban forces from crossing into Pakistan.
The United States recognized that much of this was cosmetic. Support for the Taliban ran deep in the government and deeper in the country. The U.S. forces based in Pakistan were hardly strategic. Finally, whatever he promised, there were significant differences between what Musharraf said, what he actually intended to do and what he ultimately was able to do.
The United States carefully refrained from pressing the issue, afraid that excessive pressure would topple Musharraf and throw Pakistan either into chaos or into a fundamentalist dictatorship. Or if excessive pressure threatened Musharraf`s survival, he might simply reverse course and turn against the United States. In any case, the United States adopted a minimax policy -- it demanded the most it could get within the limits of what Islamabad could deliver, and it lived with the three differences: what was said, what was actually intended, what could really be delivered.
The manner in which the Afghan war concluded has suddenly rendered this policy untenable. While the Taliban has abandoned the cities, it continues to exist, both in alliances with particular warlords and in its own right. Where it exists most intensely, in fact, is in Pakistan, among Taliban sympathizers as well as among hundreds or thousands of Taliban fighters that have crossed into Pakistan during the past month. A very few have been very publicly apprehended, but most have gone to ground -- some protected by Pakistani forces.
Far more important than the fate of the Taliban is the fate of al Qaeda`s senior commanders, including Osama bin Laden, and of its fighters. It is becoming increasingly obvious that neither the Taliban`s high command nor al Qaeda`s has been captured. The release of a new videotape that appears to have been made in the past few weeks, and perhaps as recently as last week, dealt a blow to speculation that bin Laden and the others were killed at Tora Bora. It was always problematic that bin Laden would have chosen to travel from Kandahar to Tora Bora in the chaos that followed his last known taping. This would be not only dangerous but pointless. It was far more likely that he went directly to Pakistan, where supporters hid him and may still be doing so.
Whether bin Laden is in Pakistan or has traveled elsewhere, it is clear that many of his forces as well as Taliban leaders went to Pakistan and that the vast majority of those remain. In other words, apart from native support for the Taliban and al Qaeda, elements from Afghanistan are now in Pakistan and operating under the protection of, if not the government, certainly elements of the government and powerful political forces.
If we are correct in this, then the problem the United States faces in destroying al Qaeda does not concern Somalia, Yemen or Iraq, but Pakistan. Ideally, the United States would like Musharraf to use his security and military forces to destroy al Qaeda`s forces and hand senior leaders over to the United States. Certainly, this is something that Musharraf has assured the United States he would do. However, it is not clear that he is in a position to deliver on his promise -- it is not clear his orders are being obeyed. Nor, frankly, is it clear that he wishes to see these orders carried out. Certainly, he wants to placate the United States, but there is a huge gap between saying he will act, acting, and acting effectively.
A case in point is the Dec. 13 attack on India`s parliament by gunmen, which the U.S. government says were Islamic militants based in Pakistan. There are two explanations for the attack. The first is that Musharaff knew about plans for the attack and sanctioned it. The second is that he neither knew of nor sanctioned the attack. In a real sense, it doesn`t matter which it was. Either explanation raises serious questions about the course of Afghanistan.
All this creates a strategic crisis for the United States. Its fundamental goal is to defend its own territory against al Qaeda attacks and the global destruction of al Qaeda. In our view, al Qaeda has taken refuge in Pakistan -- historically an ally of the United States, and a country that poses a military challenge on an order of magnitude beyond that posed by Afghanistan. Launching a military campaign in Pakistan is possible but requires much greater resources than in Afghanistan, as well as the destruction of Pakistan`s nuclear capability. Rather than use direct military action, the United States would prefer a more subtle lever.
The attack on India`s parliament provides precisely that lever. Obviously, the shootout was as intolerable for India as a similar attack on Congress would be for the United States. India must react. But even apart from that, India sees itself as having an unprecedented opportunity to deal not only with the Kashmir issue but with the entire issue of the nature and future of Pakistan.
Pakistan`s alliance with the United States has placed severe limits on how far India could go. However, a profound schism is developing between Washington and Islamabad as post-Sept. 11 events evolve. Clearly, both sides are doing everything to avert an open breach -- but equally clearly, if it becomes undeniable that Pakistan is harboring al Qaeda elements, a break becomes inevitable. At that moment, India would have the opening it has awaited for 50 years. The United States would be not be able to refrain from acting against Pakistan, nor could it act efficiently without Indian support and involvement. India was eager to help from the beginning; now the United States would have no choice but to accept that help.
The United States does not want an Indo-Pakistani war, but the threat of such a war is precisely what Washington needs to move Islamabad. For Pakistan, the threat of a war with India in which the United States either stood to one side or actively participated is the worst possible nightmare. By allowing the specter to rise, Washington has given Musharraf an opportunity to become more forthcoming. If he is in control but insincere, he is being shown the abyss and can change course. If he is sincere but not in control, he can show the abyss to Islamic fundamentalists in his government and bring them under control.
The problem is that many of the fundamentalists would actually welcome a war and even defeat by India. Their goal is to radicalize the Islamic world by demonstrating that Christians, Hindus and Jews have formed a vast alliance designed to crush Islam. A combined U.S.-Indian attack would be exactly what would be needed to demonstrate this to the world. The destruction of Pakistan`s nuclear capability -- whether by nuclear or conventional weapons -- would further illustrate the point. It is therefore no accident that Islamic fundamentalists struck India at what would normally be considered the worst possible moment. From their point of view, it was the best possible moment to act.
This indicated that Musharraf may not be able to gain control of the situation, even if he wanted to. Thus, he visited Beijing in late December. China has historically been an enemy of India and an ally of Pakistan. Beijing has been extremely cautious since Sept. 11, but it remembers both the EP-3 spy plane incident and U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld`s redefinition of strategy toward the Pacific and against China prior to Sept. 11. Beijing is happy to see the United States diverted. It would not be happy to see India emerge without a threat on its western flank. Hence, Musharaff had a very cordial visit to Beijing.
At this point, the strategic imperative of defeating al Qaeda begins to intersect with Eurasian geopolitics. It is one thing to take Afghanistan apart, quite another to do the same with Pakistan. Afghanistan`s fate is of little significance to great powers. The fate of Pakistan matters to China, among others. At the same time, if al Qaeda is using Pakistan as a base of operations or even as a transit point and the Pakistani government can`t or won`t do anything decisive and effective about it, this strikes at a fundamental U.S. interest and cannot be tolerated.
The United States is, therefore, in the midst of a veiled crisis over Pakistan. It is an odd crisis in that Washington, fearing the consequences of a public confrontation, is trying very hard to maintain the fiction that Pakistan has been fully cooperating in the battle against al Qaeda, that it is acting effectively against the Taliban and al Qaeda and that its forces would certainly arrest senior al Qaeda leaders if they could catch them. At the same time, the United States is quietly showing Pakistan the abyss in the hopes that the plausible fiction of U.S.-Pakistani relations might thereby become reality.
The problem is that in Pakistan, there are those who prefer an open breach with the United States to accommodation. Even if we assume that Musharraf is not one of these elements, it is not clear that he can control them. If he can`t control them, the United States is faced with an extraordinary dilemma -- to go into Pakistan and get al Qaeda itself. It cannot do this without India, and India will not move unless Pakistan`s nuclear weapons are destroyed. It is not clear that U.S. precision-guided munitions are sufficient for a task that will tolerate no failure.
The rest follows logically.
Let us Not be Foolish
Arnaud de Borchgrave
Dec. 27, 2001
Washington Times
In an attempt to avoid embarrassing Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, and to pre-empt any Indian campaign to extend the war against terrorism to cover terrorist training camps in Pakistan, the White House announced Dec. 20 it was blocking the assets of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LET) which it described as ``a Kashmiri terrorist organization that has conducted a number of operations against Indian troops and civilian targets in Kashmir since 1993.``
That was once over very lightly. If truth be known, the facts behind LET are identical to Osama bin Laden`s al Qaeda`s organization. The terrorists are interchangeable between both organizations. They were all trained in al Qaeda`s camps and some of bin Laden`s Afghan Arabs have already found refuge among LET`s ranks in Kashmir. The White House`s new formulation calls LET ``a stateless sponsor of terrorism.`` But LET is also Pakistan-based and Pakistan-sanctioned.
LET`s ranks consist of Pakistanis, Afghans, and Arabs led by Pakistani cadres. Pakistan`s Inter-Services Intelligence agency oversees LET`s terrorist operations. Headquartered at Muridke outside Lahore, LET holds annual conclaves that are attended by serving and retired officers of ISI and the regular army, political leaders, and retired scientists of Pakistan`s nuclear establishment. LET`s terrorists are ``freedom fighters`` dedicated to ``the liberation of Indian-occupied Kashmir.`` Its political cover is called Marka-ud-Dawa-wal-Irshad (MDI), a fiercely anti-U.S. pseudo-religious, extremist organization.
LET`s last big meeting was held in Muridke April 13-15 and was attended by retired Gen. Hameed Gul, a former head of ISI and currently ``strategic adviser`` to Pakistan`s extremist religious parties; Retired Gen. Javed Nasir, another former ISI director general; Abdul Qadir Khan, the father of Pakistan`s nuclear bomb; Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, formerly with the Atomic Energy Commission and recently detained at the request of the U.S. for questioning about his meetings with Osama Bin Laden. The conference passed a resolution calling on its ``freedom fighters`` to capture Hindu temples, destroy the idols and hoist the flag of Islam on them.
ISI was tasked with ensuring that no journalists gained access to the meeting. But some did. The News reported on April 22 that LET ``operates six private military training camps in Pakistan and Kashmir where several thousand are given both military and religious education.`` The newspaper also reported that LET runs 2,200 recruiting offices across Pakistan and some two dozen ``launching camps along the Line of Control [LOC] in Kashmir,`` which makes it ``the biggest jihadi [holy warrior] network in Pakistan.``
No militant training center in Pakistan can operate without the consent of the army, now in power, and ISI, a state within a state whose chief reports only to Mr. Musharraf. Yet the government continues to be in a state of deep denial. Presidential spokesman Gen. Rashid Quereshi says, ``No group operating in Kashmir has any base in Pakistan.``
Mr. Musharraf is riding a terrorist tiger and is having trouble dismounting. Last May 18, Najam Sethi, the editor of ``Friday Times,`` an authoritative weekly journal, summed up the president`s dilemma: ``The Musharraf model seeks to covertly ally with the jihadi groups while overtly keeping the mainstream religious parties out of the power loop. This is to enhance and sustain its covert external agenda, while internally maintaining an overtly moderate anti-fundamentalist stance for the comfort of the international community whose economic support is critical to Pakistan`s financial viability.``
The terrorist attack against the Indian Parliament Dec. 13 was almost certainly the work of Jaish-e-Mohammed (Soldiers of the Prophet), another Pakistan-based terrorist organization. This writer found its slogans painted in towns and villages throughout the Pakistani tribal belt last week, to wit: ``Jaish-e-Mohammed and al Qaeda are Bubbling Blood Brothers`` and ``For Commando Training, Contact Jaish-e-Mohammed.`` The motive for the attack was most probably an attempt to disrupt the budding U.S.-Pakistani alliance and isolate Mr. Musharraf.
After ditching Taliban, it becomes increasingly harder for Mr. Musharraf to crack down on those who would Talibanize Pakistan. In fact, he released from detention the No. 1 religious extremist firebrand, Fazrul Rehman.
Mr. Musharraf is now caught between a rock and four hard places — Afghanistan where the anti-Pakistani, pro-Indian Northern Alliance holds the key government positions in the new coalition under Hamid Karzai; a hostile India on the edge of retaliatory action; a disloyal ISI; and a belligerent extremist clergy.
Despite the appointment of a Musharraf loyalist as the new head of ISI when U.S. bombing started last October, the powerful agency has not been responding to the president`s pro-American policies. One regional ISI general even went so far as to rattle tribal chiefs by telling them Pakistan would be next in America`s crosshairs after the defeat of Taliban. The secret organization continues to undermine him at every turn. The country`s principal political leaders are fearful of ISI. They draw the initials with their fingers in the air when the subject comes out lest they be heard by ubiquitous bugs. And they say nothing short of a top-to-bottom reform of ISI, followed by accountability to a yet-to-be-created national security council of civilian and military leaders, will bring the agency back to its proper place in the body politic.
The Taliban infrastructure in Pakistan emerged unscathed from Taliban`s defeat in Afghanistan. While ISI is officially cooperating with the U.S. in hunting down Taliban`s deposed leaders, senior Taliban officials are now resting comfortably in their second homes in Quetta and Peshawar, the two frontier towns where they had parked their families when the bombing started. One has even given an interview to a British newspaper. Another has given a ``religious lecture`` at the madrassa — the ``University for the Education of Truth`` — where he graduated in the town of Khattak. ISI is doubtless aware of these activities. But is Mr. Musharraf?
Belatedly, over the Christmas weekend, Mr. Musharraf decided to freeze the accounts of LET and Umma Tamee-e-Nau (UTN), the group the U.S. believes passed nuclear weapons data to Osama bin Laden. The LET chief then resigned. It is to be hoped that a thorough housecleaning of ISI is next on Mr. Musharraf`s must-do list as he returns from a weeklong state visit to China.
Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor at large of The Washington Times and of United Press International
http://www.washingtontimes.com/commentary/20011227-79790204.htm
Posted by
mohajir
Dec 27, 2001 01:57 pm
Connecting terrorism`s dotsArnaud de Borchgrave
Dec. 27, 2001
Washington Times
In an attempt to avoid embarrassing Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, and to pre-empt any Indian campaign to extend the war against terrorism to cover terrorist training camps in Pakistan, the White House announced Dec. 20 it was blocking the assets of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LET) which it described as ``a Kashmiri terrorist organization that has conducted a number of operations against Indian troops and civilian targets in Kashmir since 1993.``
That was once over very lightly. If truth be known, the facts behind LET are identical to Osama bin Laden`s al Qaeda`s organization. The terrorists are interchangeable between both organizations. They were all trained in al Qaeda`s camps and some of bin Laden`s Afghan Arabs have already found refuge among LET`s ranks in Kashmir. The White House`s new formulation calls LET ``a stateless sponsor of terrorism.`` But LET is also Pakistan-based and Pakistan-sanctioned.
LET`s ranks consist of Pakistanis, Afghans, and Arabs led by Pakistani cadres. Pakistan`s Inter-Services Intelligence agency oversees LET`s terrorist operations. Headquartered at Muridke outside Lahore, LET holds annual conclaves that are attended by serving and retired officers of ISI and the regular army, political leaders, and retired scientists of Pakistan`s nuclear establishment. LET`s terrorists are ``freedom fighters`` dedicated to ``the liberation of Indian-occupied Kashmir.`` Its political cover is called Marka-ud-Dawa-wal-Irshad (MDI), a fiercely anti-U.S. pseudo-religious, extremist organization.
LET`s last big meeting was held in Muridke April 13-15 and was attended by retired Gen. Hameed Gul, a former head of ISI and currently ``strategic adviser`` to Pakistan`s extremist religious parties; Retired Gen. Javed Nasir, another former ISI director general; Abdul Qadir Khan, the father of Pakistan`s nuclear bomb; Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, formerly with the Atomic Energy Commission and recently detained at the request of the U.S. for questioning about his meetings with Osama Bin Laden. The conference passed a resolution calling on its ``freedom fighters`` to capture Hindu temples, destroy the idols and hoist the flag of Islam on them.
ISI was tasked with ensuring that no journalists gained access to the meeting. But some did. The News reported on April 22 that LET ``operates six private military training camps in Pakistan and Kashmir where several thousand are given both military and religious education.`` The newspaper also reported that LET runs 2,200 recruiting offices across Pakistan and some two dozen ``launching camps along the Line of Control [LOC] in Kashmir,`` which makes it ``the biggest jihadi [holy warrior] network in Pakistan.``
No militant training center in Pakistan can operate without the consent of the army, now in power, and ISI, a state within a state whose chief reports only to Mr. Musharraf. Yet the government continues to be in a state of deep denial. Presidential spokesman Gen. Rashid Quereshi says, ``No group operating in Kashmir has any base in Pakistan.``
Mr. Musharraf is riding a terrorist tiger and is having trouble dismounting. Last May 18, Najam Sethi, the editor of ``Friday Times,`` an authoritative weekly journal, summed up the president`s dilemma: ``The Musharraf model seeks to covertly ally with the jihadi groups while overtly keeping the mainstream religious parties out of the power loop. This is to enhance and sustain its covert external agenda, while internally maintaining an overtly moderate anti-fundamentalist stance for the comfort of the international community whose economic support is critical to Pakistan`s financial viability.``
The terrorist attack against the Indian Parliament Dec. 13 was almost certainly the work of Jaish-e-Mohammed (Soldiers of the Prophet), another Pakistan-based terrorist organization. This writer found its slogans painted in towns and villages throughout the Pakistani tribal belt last week, to wit: ``Jaish-e-Mohammed and al Qaeda are Bubbling Blood Brothers`` and ``For Commando Training, Contact Jaish-e-Mohammed.`` The motive for the attack was most probably an attempt to disrupt the budding U.S.-Pakistani alliance and isolate Mr. Musharraf.
After ditching Taliban, it becomes increasingly harder for Mr. Musharraf to crack down on those who would Talibanize Pakistan. In fact, he released from detention the No. 1 religious extremist firebrand, Fazrul Rehman.
Mr. Musharraf is now caught between a rock and four hard places — Afghanistan where the anti-Pakistani, pro-Indian Northern Alliance holds the key government positions in the new coalition under Hamid Karzai; a hostile India on the edge of retaliatory action; a disloyal ISI; and a belligerent extremist clergy.
Despite the appointment of a Musharraf loyalist as the new head of ISI when U.S. bombing started last October, the powerful agency has not been responding to the president`s pro-American policies. One regional ISI general even went so far as to rattle tribal chiefs by telling them Pakistan would be next in America`s crosshairs after the defeat of Taliban. The secret organization continues to undermine him at every turn. The country`s principal political leaders are fearful of ISI. They draw the initials with their fingers in the air when the subject comes out lest they be heard by ubiquitous bugs. And they say nothing short of a top-to-bottom reform of ISI, followed by accountability to a yet-to-be-created national security council of civilian and military leaders, will bring the agency back to its proper place in the body politic.
The Taliban infrastructure in Pakistan emerged unscathed from Taliban`s defeat in Afghanistan. While ISI is officially cooperating with the U.S. in hunting down Taliban`s deposed leaders, senior Taliban officials are now resting comfortably in their second homes in Quetta and Peshawar, the two frontier towns where they had parked their families when the bombing started. One has even given an interview to a British newspaper. Another has given a ``religious lecture`` at the madrassa — the ``University for the Education of Truth`` — where he graduated in the town of Khattak. ISI is doubtless aware of these activities. But is Mr. Musharraf?
Belatedly, over the Christmas weekend, Mr. Musharraf decided to freeze the accounts of LET and Umma Tamee-e-Nau (UTN), the group the U.S. believes passed nuclear weapons data to Osama bin Laden. The LET chief then resigned. It is to be hoped that a thorough housecleaning of ISI is next on Mr. Musharraf`s must-do list as he returns from a weeklong state visit to China.
Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor at large of The Washington Times and of United Press International
http://www.washingtontimes.com/commentary/20011227-79790204.htm
A Road To Siachen
Arnaud de Borchgrave
Dec. 27, 2001
Washington Times
In an attempt to avoid embarrassing Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, and to pre-empt any Indian campaign to extend the war against terrorism to cover terrorist training camps in Pakistan, the White House announced Dec. 20 it was blocking the assets of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LET) which it described as ``a Kashmiri terrorist organization that has conducted a number of operations against Indian troops and civilian targets in Kashmir since 1993.``
That was once over very lightly. If truth be known, the facts behind LET are identical to Osama bin Laden`s al Qaeda`s organization. The terrorists are interchangeable between both organizations. They were all trained in al Qaeda`s camps and some of bin Laden`s Afghan Arabs have already found refuge among LET`s ranks in Kashmir. The White House`s new formulation calls LET ``a stateless sponsor of terrorism.`` But LET is also Pakistan-based and Pakistan-sanctioned.
LET`s ranks consist of Pakistanis, Afghans, and Arabs led by Pakistani cadres. Pakistan`s Inter-Services Intelligence agency oversees LET`s terrorist operations. Headquartered at Muridke outside Lahore, LET holds annual conclaves that are attended by serving and retired officers of ISI and the regular army, political leaders, and retired scientists of Pakistan`s nuclear establishment. LET`s terrorists are ``freedom fighters`` dedicated to ``the liberation of Indian-occupied Kashmir.`` Its political cover is called Marka-ud-Dawa-wal-Irshad (MDI), a fiercely anti-U.S. pseudo-religious, extremist organization.
LET`s last big meeting was held in Muridke April 13-15 and was attended by retired Gen. Hameed Gul, a former head of ISI and currently ``strategic adviser`` to Pakistan`s extremist religious parties; Retired Gen. Javed Nasir, another former ISI director general; Abdul Qadir Khan, the father of Pakistan`s nuclear bomb; Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, formerly with the Atomic Energy Commission and recently detained at the request of the U.S. for questioning about his meetings with Osama Bin Laden. The conference passed a resolution calling on its ``freedom fighters`` to capture Hindu temples, destroy the idols and hoist the flag of Islam on them.
ISI was tasked with ensuring that no journalists gained access to the meeting. But some did. The News reported on April 22 that LET ``operates six private military training camps in Pakistan and Kashmir where several thousand are given both military and religious education.`` The newspaper also reported that LET runs 2,200 recruiting offices across Pakistan and some two dozen ``launching camps along the Line of Control [LOC] in Kashmir,`` which makes it ``the biggest jihadi [holy warrior] network in Pakistan.``
No militant training center in Pakistan can operate without the consent of the army, now in power, and ISI, a state within a state whose chief reports only to Mr. Musharraf. Yet the government continues to be in a state of deep denial. Presidential spokesman Gen. Rashid Quereshi says, ``No group operating in Kashmir has any base in Pakistan.``
Mr. Musharraf is riding a terrorist tiger and is having trouble dismounting. Last May 18, Najam Sethi, the editor of ``Friday Times,`` an authoritative weekly journal, summed up the president`s dilemma: ``The Musharraf model seeks to covertly ally with the jihadi groups while overtly keeping the mainstream religious parties out of the power loop. This is to enhance and sustain its covert external agenda, while internally maintaining an overtly moderate anti-fundamentalist stance for the comfort of the international community whose economic support is critical to Pakistan`s financial viability.``
The terrorist attack against the Indian Parliament Dec. 13 was almost certainly the work of Jaish-e-Mohammed (Soldiers of the Prophet), another Pakistan-based terrorist organization. This writer found its slogans painted in towns and villages throughout the Pakistani tribal belt last week, to wit: ``Jaish-e-Mohammed and al Qaeda are Bubbling Blood Brothers`` and ``For Commando Training, Contact Jaish-e-Mohammed.`` The motive for the attack was most probably an attempt to disrupt the budding U.S.-Pakistani alliance and isolate Mr. Musharraf.
After ditching Taliban, it becomes increasingly harder for Mr. Musharraf to crack down on those who would Talibanize Pakistan. In fact, he released from detention the No. 1 religious extremist firebrand, Fazrul Rehman.
Mr. Musharraf is now caught between a rock and four hard places — Afghanistan where the anti-Pakistani, pro-Indian Northern Alliance holds the key government positions in the new coalition under Hamid Karzai; a hostile India on the edge of retaliatory action; a disloyal ISI; and a belligerent extremist clergy.
Despite the appointment of a Musharraf loyalist as the new head of ISI when U.S. bombing started last October, the powerful agency has not been responding to the president`s pro-American policies. One regional ISI general even went so far as to rattle tribal chiefs by telling them Pakistan would be next in America`s crosshairs after the defeat of Taliban. The secret organization continues to undermine him at every turn. The country`s principal political leaders are fearful of ISI. They draw the initials with their fingers in the air when the subject comes out lest they be heard by ubiquitous bugs. And they say nothing short of a top-to-bottom reform of ISI, followed by accountability to a yet-to-be-created national security council of civilian and military leaders, will bring the agency back to its proper place in the body politic.
The Taliban infrastructure in Pakistan emerged unscathed from Taliban`s defeat in Afghanistan. While ISI is officially cooperating with the U.S. in hunting down Taliban`s deposed leaders, senior Taliban officials are now resting comfortably in their second homes in Quetta and Peshawar, the two frontier towns where they had parked their families when the bombing started. One has even given an interview to a British newspaper. Another has given a ``religious lecture`` at the madrassa — the ``University for the Education of Truth`` — where he graduated in the town of Khattak. ISI is doubtless aware of these activities. But is Mr. Musharraf?
Belatedly, over the Christmas weekend, Mr. Musharraf decided to freeze the accounts of LET and Umma Tamee-e-Nau (UTN), the group the U.S. believes passed nuclear weapons data to Osama bin Laden. The LET chief then resigned. It is to be hoped that a thorough housecleaning of ISI is next on Mr. Musharraf`s must-do list as he returns from a weeklong state visit to China.
Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor at large of The Washington Times and of United Press International
http://www.washingtontimes.com/commentary/20011227-79790204.htm
Posted by
mohajir
Dec 27, 2001 01:57 pm
Connecting terrorism`s dotsArnaud de Borchgrave
Dec. 27, 2001
Washington Times
In an attempt to avoid embarrassing Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, and to pre-empt any Indian campaign to extend the war against terrorism to cover terrorist training camps in Pakistan, the White House announced Dec. 20 it was blocking the assets of Lashkar-e-Taiba (LET) which it described as ``a Kashmiri terrorist organization that has conducted a number of operations against Indian troops and civilian targets in Kashmir since 1993.``
That was once over very lightly. If truth be known, the facts behind LET are identical to Osama bin Laden`s al Qaeda`s organization. The terrorists are interchangeable between both organizations. They were all trained in al Qaeda`s camps and some of bin Laden`s Afghan Arabs have already found refuge among LET`s ranks in Kashmir. The White House`s new formulation calls LET ``a stateless sponsor of terrorism.`` But LET is also Pakistan-based and Pakistan-sanctioned.
LET`s ranks consist of Pakistanis, Afghans, and Arabs led by Pakistani cadres. Pakistan`s Inter-Services Intelligence agency oversees LET`s terrorist operations. Headquartered at Muridke outside Lahore, LET holds annual conclaves that are attended by serving and retired officers of ISI and the regular army, political leaders, and retired scientists of Pakistan`s nuclear establishment. LET`s terrorists are ``freedom fighters`` dedicated to ``the liberation of Indian-occupied Kashmir.`` Its political cover is called Marka-ud-Dawa-wal-Irshad (MDI), a fiercely anti-U.S. pseudo-religious, extremist organization.
LET`s last big meeting was held in Muridke April 13-15 and was attended by retired Gen. Hameed Gul, a former head of ISI and currently ``strategic adviser`` to Pakistan`s extremist religious parties; Retired Gen. Javed Nasir, another former ISI director general; Abdul Qadir Khan, the father of Pakistan`s nuclear bomb; Sultan Bashiruddin Mahmood, formerly with the Atomic Energy Commission and recently detained at the request of the U.S. for questioning about his meetings with Osama Bin Laden. The conference passed a resolution calling on its ``freedom fighters`` to capture Hindu temples, destroy the idols and hoist the flag of Islam on them.
ISI was tasked with ensuring that no journalists gained access to the meeting. But some did. The News reported on April 22 that LET ``operates six private military training camps in Pakistan and Kashmir where several thousand are given both military and religious education.`` The newspaper also reported that LET runs 2,200 recruiting offices across Pakistan and some two dozen ``launching camps along the Line of Control [LOC] in Kashmir,`` which makes it ``the biggest jihadi [holy warrior] network in Pakistan.``
No militant training center in Pakistan can operate without the consent of the army, now in power, and ISI, a state within a state whose chief reports only to Mr. Musharraf. Yet the government continues to be in a state of deep denial. Presidential spokesman Gen. Rashid Quereshi says, ``No group operating in Kashmir has any base in Pakistan.``
Mr. Musharraf is riding a terrorist tiger and is having trouble dismounting. Last May 18, Najam Sethi, the editor of ``Friday Times,`` an authoritative weekly journal, summed up the president`s dilemma: ``The Musharraf model seeks to covertly ally with the jihadi groups while overtly keeping the mainstream religious parties out of the power loop. This is to enhance and sustain its covert external agenda, while internally maintaining an overtly moderate anti-fundamentalist stance for the comfort of the international community whose economic support is critical to Pakistan`s financial viability.``
The terrorist attack against the Indian Parliament Dec. 13 was almost certainly the work of Jaish-e-Mohammed (Soldiers of the Prophet), another Pakistan-based terrorist organization. This writer found its slogans painted in towns and villages throughout the Pakistani tribal belt last week, to wit: ``Jaish-e-Mohammed and al Qaeda are Bubbling Blood Brothers`` and ``For Commando Training, Contact Jaish-e-Mohammed.`` The motive for the attack was most probably an attempt to disrupt the budding U.S.-Pakistani alliance and isolate Mr. Musharraf.
After ditching Taliban, it becomes increasingly harder for Mr. Musharraf to crack down on those who would Talibanize Pakistan. In fact, he released from detention the No. 1 religious extremist firebrand, Fazrul Rehman.
Mr. Musharraf is now caught between a rock and four hard places — Afghanistan where the anti-Pakistani, pro-Indian Northern Alliance holds the key government positions in the new coalition under Hamid Karzai; a hostile India on the edge of retaliatory action; a disloyal ISI; and a belligerent extremist clergy.
Despite the appointment of a Musharraf loyalist as the new head of ISI when U.S. bombing started last October, the powerful agency has not been responding to the president`s pro-American policies. One regional ISI general even went so far as to rattle tribal chiefs by telling them Pakistan would be next in America`s crosshairs after the defeat of Taliban. The secret organization continues to undermine him at every turn. The country`s principal political leaders are fearful of ISI. They draw the initials with their fingers in the air when the subject comes out lest they be heard by ubiquitous bugs. And they say nothing short of a top-to-bottom reform of ISI, followed by accountability to a yet-to-be-created national security council of civilian and military leaders, will bring the agency back to its proper place in the body politic.
The Taliban infrastructure in Pakistan emerged unscathed from Taliban`s defeat in Afghanistan. While ISI is officially cooperating with the U.S. in hunting down Taliban`s deposed leaders, senior Taliban officials are now resting comfortably in their second homes in Quetta and Peshawar, the two frontier towns where they had parked their families when the bombing started. One has even given an interview to a British newspaper. Another has given a ``religious lecture`` at the madrassa — the ``University for the Education of Truth`` — where he graduated in the town of Khattak. ISI is doubtless aware of these activities. But is Mr. Musharraf?
Belatedly, over the Christmas weekend, Mr. Musharraf decided to freeze the accounts of LET and Umma Tamee-e-Nau (UTN), the group the U.S. believes passed nuclear weapons data to Osama bin Laden. The LET chief then resigned. It is to be hoped that a thorough housecleaning of ISI is next on Mr. Musharraf`s must-do list as he returns from a weeklong state visit to China.
Arnaud de Borchgrave is editor at large of The Washington Times and of United Press International
http://www.washingtontimes.com/commentary/20011227-79790204.htm
Looking Through Glass
On 125th birth anniversary of Jinnah
http://www.rpi.edu/dept/union/paksa/www/html/pakistan/jinnah1.html
Pakistan : The biggest blunder of my life
Mohammad Ali Jinnah created Pakistan out of oratory and blood
By Carl Posey
When he stood up in court, slowly looking toward the judge, placing his monocle in his eye—with the sense of timing you would expect from an actor---he became omnipotent. Yes, that is the word---omnipotent.`` Thus an Indian barrister upon his remarkable and enigmatic subject, Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Courtroom omnipotence may have brought the Bombay lawyer wealth and comfort, but Jinnah’s portal to immortality lay elsewhere. By sheer force of will, he sundered the grand ruby that had been British India and raised Pakistan from shards.
Nothing in Jinnah’s early history suggested that this tall, almost transparently thin man would be anything more, or less, than a distinguished barrister, what a contemporary called a great pleader. Jinnah spent most of his life stalking the courts an parliament of London and Bombay, almost a caricature of a Victorian attorney---1,9m tall, less than 54kg in weight, a monocle, fine clothing and, an extraordinary, very British voice, of such quality that he was once offered a spot with troupe of English actors.
A marvelous subject for Charles Dickens, perhaps, who might have observed that the heart was no fatter than the man, and that the man was incorruptible as a strip of desiccated hide. Jinnah was not particularly religious, at least not in the beginning. Yet he would finally be reviled by Hindus as the Muslim serpent in the garden of independence---and revered by Muslims as Quaid-e-Azam: Great Leader.
Among the many paradoxical myths still swirling around Jinnah was that he had been born a Hindu, on Christmas Day 1876, and later converted to Islam. In fact, he was the first of seven children of Jinnahbhai Poonja, an affluent merchant in Karachi; the son would later derive his surname from Jinnahbhai. After matriculating at the University of Bombay, 16-year-old Jinnah was married off to a young girl, then sailed alone to study for the bar at London’s Lincoln’s Inn. His bride would die before he returned.
This was the liberal, end-of-the-century Britain of William Gladstone, however, and Jinnah’s political glands began to stir. From the outset he was a frequent visitor to Parliament, and he worked hard for India pioneer nationalist Dadabhai Naoroji, who in 1892 became the first Indian seated in the House of Commons. Called to the English bar in 1895, Jinnah returned to Karachi. Appointed advocate of the Bombay High Court in 1906, he was, according to one account, ``the best showman of them all. Quick, exceeding clever, sarcastic, and colorful, his greatest delight was to confound the opposing lawyer by confidential asides and to outwit the presiding judge in repartee.``
Like the other lawyer-nationalists fencing with the British Raj, Jinnah believed fervently in an independent India; and like them, he say that independence was a secular mosaic in which a Hindu majority and Muslim minority---a huge one, to be sure---lived in amity and equity. Though not a man of the masses, he was elected in 1910 to India’s Imperial Legislative Council, where he began a long, distinguished tenure. He kept himself apart from the nascent All-India Muslim League until he was assured that Indian nationalism was its primary concern. Once in, he became what one colleague called the ``best ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity.`` At the historic Lucknow meeting of the Indian National Congress and Muslim League in 1916, his speeches for unity were so strong as later to be an embarrassment to the Muslim League.
Soon after Lucknow, the 39-year-old barrister met and fell hopelessly in love with Ruttie, the beautiful 16-year-old daughter of Parsi millionaire Sir Dinshaw Manockjee Petit. Two years later, deaf to her family’s objections, the pari eloped into a marriage that turned out to be as bad as it was brave. Ruttie would give him on daughter, Dina, but leave him in 1928, fleeing Paris. When he followed and learned she was deathly ill, he arranged her care. She recovered, but returned without him to Bombay, where she died the following year. He would be consoled then, and forever after, by his sister, Fatima.
Something curdled in Jinnah during those years. Gandhi’s policy of non-cooperation repelled him. Believing it would not advance independence, he left the Indian Congress. The man of the hour at Lucknow was becoming steadily less relevant. From the sidelines he watched Gandhi’s non-cooperation fail against a hard-willed British Raj, and the emergence of a militant Hinduism and ensuing riots between Hindus and Muslims---riots of a violence no one had foreseen. By 1932, Jinnah had abandoned India to its factions. He took up a quiet life in north London’s posh Hampstead district with daughter Dina and sister Fatima, and made another grand success in law.
His political life appeared to be over. Attempting to find a seat in the Commons, he found he was too much the toff for Labour, too dark for the Tories. At home the enfeebled Muslim League was splintering into factions. When Jinnah heard that students were pushing something called PAKISTAN---an acronym made of the initial letters of Punjab, Afghan province, Kashmir and Sind and tan from Baluchistan---he would not even see them
Yet when the Muslim League asked him to return and heal them, Jinnah moved his elegant practice and life-style back to Bombay and Delhi. By then he was quite a different man from the reasonable, unity-minded Jinnah of old. This Jinnah had discovered in the Congress Party’s dismissive treatment of the league the one thing worse than British rule: Hindu Raj. Islam, he began to caution his auditors, was in danger. Nehru would wipe away wealth with the ``red pen`` of his socialism. Islamic culture would be diluted to extinction in a Hindu sea.
Jinnah remained the Muslim who eschewed the Mosque, smoked and partook wine and spirits; who made no pilgrimages and endured no fasts. But the snob described by Nehru had vanished. He embraced the masses, though a trifle gingerly and without perceptible warmth, bringing them along with the sheer force of his oratorical technique. He breathed life back into the league---indeed, he had become the league. On Oct. 15, 1973, Jinnah signaled his real destination at a league convention in Lucknow. He had arrived there in the costume of the British barrister. But when he took the podium, it was in the Muslims’ long, black sherwani, and a black Persian lamb cap borrowed from a Muslim nabob. Then he told the assembly that they held a ``magic power`` with which they could spin a new and better future. ``It is by resisting, by overcoming, by facing these disadvantages, hardships and suffering, and maintaining your true convictions and loyalty, that a nation will emerge.``
His opportunity arrived in September 1939, when it became clear that Britain would be fighting for its life in Europe---and later for its Asian empire against the Japanese. The British Indian Army counted many Muslims among its members. As their political leader, Jinnah could bargain with their continued loyalty. The price: dismissal of the Congress Party ministers. ``Turn them out at once,`` on writer quotes Jinnah as saying. ``They will never stand by you.`` And he also hinted at a terrible choice: partition or civil war. In October, unable to get what they wanted from the British viceroy, Congress ministers began to resign. The unexpected result---to everyone but Jinnah---was to make the league a full member of all future negotiations, and to hand Jinnah a veto. Muslims, he told his 80 million, would celebrate the fall of the Congress government as ``a day of deliverance and thanksgiving`` on Dec. 22. India trembled with fear and loathing.
On March 23, 1940, a Muslim League conference in Lahore defined the ethnic fault lines of the subcontinent. ``The area in which the Muslims are numerically in a majority, as in the North-Western and Eastern zones of India, should be grouped to constitute ‘Independent States’ in which the constituent units shall be autonomous and sovereign.`` Away from the negotiating table, however, the mood had been less formal. ``The only course open to us all is to allow major nations to separate to their homelands, ``Jinnah told 100,000 followers gathered in the killing heat. A permanent Muslim minority in independent India, he added, ``must lead to civil war and the raising of private armies.`` The fuse laid that day would sputter for seven more years.
Another fuse sizzled within. Behind what he had for decades called just a smoker’s cough lived a fatal tuberculosis, which had long ago begun gnawing its way beyond his ruined lungs. It was a race. If his body ran anything less than a dead heat, he would die, and so would Pakistan. His new nation was just that fragile.
Jinnah lived long enough to see what he had created---a bath of blood between Hindus and Muslims. The Dominion of Pakistan was born on Aug. 15, 1947, and the Quaid-e-Azam became its first Governor General in the capital of Karachi. His new nation was huge, and hugely poor. He survived long enough to be aware, perhaps, that the separatist forces unleashed by partition had propelled Hindu assassins to Gandhi’s side that January. And then, on Sep. 11, 1948, just 13 months after independence, the tuberculosis fuse burned down to nothing. On his death bed, according to his doctor, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the wealthy lawyer of Bombay, rendered his final judgement on his signal achievement: Pakistan, he said, had been ``the biggest blunder of my life.``
Posted by
mohajir
Dec 27, 2001 01:57 pm
Pakistan, Jinnah said had been ``The biggest blunder of my life``On 125th birth anniversary of Jinnah
http://www.rpi.edu/dept/union/paksa/www/html/pakistan/jinnah1.html
Pakistan : The biggest blunder of my life
Mohammad Ali Jinnah created Pakistan out of oratory and blood
By Carl Posey
When he stood up in court, slowly looking toward the judge, placing his monocle in his eye—with the sense of timing you would expect from an actor---he became omnipotent. Yes, that is the word---omnipotent.`` Thus an Indian barrister upon his remarkable and enigmatic subject, Mohammad Ali Jinnah. Courtroom omnipotence may have brought the Bombay lawyer wealth and comfort, but Jinnah’s portal to immortality lay elsewhere. By sheer force of will, he sundered the grand ruby that had been British India and raised Pakistan from shards.
Nothing in Jinnah’s early history suggested that this tall, almost transparently thin man would be anything more, or less, than a distinguished barrister, what a contemporary called a great pleader. Jinnah spent most of his life stalking the courts an parliament of London and Bombay, almost a caricature of a Victorian attorney---1,9m tall, less than 54kg in weight, a monocle, fine clothing and, an extraordinary, very British voice, of such quality that he was once offered a spot with troupe of English actors.
A marvelous subject for Charles Dickens, perhaps, who might have observed that the heart was no fatter than the man, and that the man was incorruptible as a strip of desiccated hide. Jinnah was not particularly religious, at least not in the beginning. Yet he would finally be reviled by Hindus as the Muslim serpent in the garden of independence---and revered by Muslims as Quaid-e-Azam: Great Leader.
Among the many paradoxical myths still swirling around Jinnah was that he had been born a Hindu, on Christmas Day 1876, and later converted to Islam. In fact, he was the first of seven children of Jinnahbhai Poonja, an affluent merchant in Karachi; the son would later derive his surname from Jinnahbhai. After matriculating at the University of Bombay, 16-year-old Jinnah was married off to a young girl, then sailed alone to study for the bar at London’s Lincoln’s Inn. His bride would die before he returned.
This was the liberal, end-of-the-century Britain of William Gladstone, however, and Jinnah’s political glands began to stir. From the outset he was a frequent visitor to Parliament, and he worked hard for India pioneer nationalist Dadabhai Naoroji, who in 1892 became the first Indian seated in the House of Commons. Called to the English bar in 1895, Jinnah returned to Karachi. Appointed advocate of the Bombay High Court in 1906, he was, according to one account, ``the best showman of them all. Quick, exceeding clever, sarcastic, and colorful, his greatest delight was to confound the opposing lawyer by confidential asides and to outwit the presiding judge in repartee.``
Like the other lawyer-nationalists fencing with the British Raj, Jinnah believed fervently in an independent India; and like them, he say that independence was a secular mosaic in which a Hindu majority and Muslim minority---a huge one, to be sure---lived in amity and equity. Though not a man of the masses, he was elected in 1910 to India’s Imperial Legislative Council, where he began a long, distinguished tenure. He kept himself apart from the nascent All-India Muslim League until he was assured that Indian nationalism was its primary concern. Once in, he became what one colleague called the ``best ambassador of Hindu-Muslim unity.`` At the historic Lucknow meeting of the Indian National Congress and Muslim League in 1916, his speeches for unity were so strong as later to be an embarrassment to the Muslim League.
Soon after Lucknow, the 39-year-old barrister met and fell hopelessly in love with Ruttie, the beautiful 16-year-old daughter of Parsi millionaire Sir Dinshaw Manockjee Petit. Two years later, deaf to her family’s objections, the pari eloped into a marriage that turned out to be as bad as it was brave. Ruttie would give him on daughter, Dina, but leave him in 1928, fleeing Paris. When he followed and learned she was deathly ill, he arranged her care. She recovered, but returned without him to Bombay, where she died the following year. He would be consoled then, and forever after, by his sister, Fatima.
Something curdled in Jinnah during those years. Gandhi’s policy of non-cooperation repelled him. Believing it would not advance independence, he left the Indian Congress. The man of the hour at Lucknow was becoming steadily less relevant. From the sidelines he watched Gandhi’s non-cooperation fail against a hard-willed British Raj, and the emergence of a militant Hinduism and ensuing riots between Hindus and Muslims---riots of a violence no one had foreseen. By 1932, Jinnah had abandoned India to its factions. He took up a quiet life in north London’s posh Hampstead district with daughter Dina and sister Fatima, and made another grand success in law.
His political life appeared to be over. Attempting to find a seat in the Commons, he found he was too much the toff for Labour, too dark for the Tories. At home the enfeebled Muslim League was splintering into factions. When Jinnah heard that students were pushing something called PAKISTAN---an acronym made of the initial letters of Punjab, Afghan province, Kashmir and Sind and tan from Baluchistan---he would not even see them
Yet when the Muslim League asked him to return and heal them, Jinnah moved his elegant practice and life-style back to Bombay and Delhi. By then he was quite a different man from the reasonable, unity-minded Jinnah of old. This Jinnah had discovered in the Congress Party’s dismissive treatment of the league the one thing worse than British rule: Hindu Raj. Islam, he began to caution his auditors, was in danger. Nehru would wipe away wealth with the ``red pen`` of his socialism. Islamic culture would be diluted to extinction in a Hindu sea.
Jinnah remained the Muslim who eschewed the Mosque, smoked and partook wine and spirits; who made no pilgrimages and endured no fasts. But the snob described by Nehru had vanished. He embraced the masses, though a trifle gingerly and without perceptible warmth, bringing them along with the sheer force of his oratorical technique. He breathed life back into the league---indeed, he had become the league. On Oct. 15, 1973, Jinnah signaled his real destination at a league convention in Lucknow. He had arrived there in the costume of the British barrister. But when he took the podium, it was in the Muslims’ long, black sherwani, and a black Persian lamb cap borrowed from a Muslim nabob. Then he told the assembly that they held a ``magic power`` with which they could spin a new and better future. ``It is by resisting, by overcoming, by facing these disadvantages, hardships and suffering, and maintaining your true convictions and loyalty, that a nation will emerge.``
His opportunity arrived in September 1939, when it became clear that Britain would be fighting for its life in Europe---and later for its Asian empire against the Japanese. The British Indian Army counted many Muslims among its members. As their political leader, Jinnah could bargain with their continued loyalty. The price: dismissal of the Congress Party ministers. ``Turn them out at once,`` on writer quotes Jinnah as saying. ``They will never stand by you.`` And he also hinted at a terrible choice: partition or civil war. In October, unable to get what they wanted from the British viceroy, Congress ministers began to resign. The unexpected result---to everyone but Jinnah---was to make the league a full member of all future negotiations, and to hand Jinnah a veto. Muslims, he told his 80 million, would celebrate the fall of the Congress government as ``a day of deliverance and thanksgiving`` on Dec. 22. India trembled with fear and loathing.
On March 23, 1940, a Muslim League conference in Lahore defined the ethnic fault lines of the subcontinent. ``The area in which the Muslims are numerically in a majority, as in the North-Western and Eastern zones of India, should be grouped to constitute ‘Independent States’ in which the constituent units shall be autonomous and sovereign.`` Away from the negotiating table, however, the mood had been less formal. ``The only course open to us all is to allow major nations to separate to their homelands, ``Jinnah told 100,000 followers gathered in the killing heat. A permanent Muslim minority in independent India, he added, ``must lead to civil war and the raising of private armies.`` The fuse laid that day would sputter for seven more years.
Another fuse sizzled within. Behind what he had for decades called just a smoker’s cough lived a fatal tuberculosis, which had long ago begun gnawing its way beyond his ruined lungs. It was a race. If his body ran anything less than a dead heat, he would die, and so would Pakistan. His new nation was just that fragile.
Jinnah lived long enough to see what he had created---a bath of blood between Hindus and Muslims. The Dominion of Pakistan was born on Aug. 15, 1947, and the Quaid-e-Azam became its first Governor General in the capital of Karachi. His new nation was huge, and hugely poor. He survived long enough to be aware, perhaps, that the separatist forces unleashed by partition had propelled Hindu assassins to Gandhi’s side that January. And then, on Sep. 11, 1948, just 13 months after independence, the tuberculosis fuse burned down to nothing. On his death bed, according to his doctor, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, the wealthy lawyer of Bombay, rendered his final judgement on his signal achievement: Pakistan, he said, had been ``the biggest blunder of my life.``
Looking Through Glass
http://www.rpi.edu/dept/union/paksa/www/html/pakistan/jinnah2.html
A TIGERISH MAN, ATOP A SECTARIAN TIGER
The chronicle of a leader and the passions he fanned into flames
By Carl Posey
Delhi in the spring heat of 1946 was not relaxed,`` TIME reported that April. ``It was taut with waiting, gravid with conflict and suspense. Two socialist lawyers and a former Baptist lay preacher from Britain had sat of 25 days in the southeast wing of the viceregal palace, preparing to liquidate the richest portion of empire that history had ever seen---to end the British Raj, the grand and guilty edifice built and maintained by William Hawkins and Robert Clive, Warren Hastings and the Marquess Wellesley, the brawling editor James Silk Buckingham and the canny merchant Lord Inchcape and by the great Viceroys, austere Curzon and gently Halifax. The Raj was finished.``
Finished, perhaps, but still difficult to put down. The Raj at the end was like one of the unexploded bombs still lettering postwar Europe, and it held the same promise: peaceful independence if you do it right, explosive civil war if you fail. ``The issue,`` said TIME, ``seemed to turn on one man---Mohammed Ali Jinnah.`` On Boris Chaliapin’s portrait cover, the metaphorical tingers of East and West Pakistan stalked the subcontinent.
TIME had watched Jinnah intermittently since 1930, first as an ardent articulator of Indian nationalism, then as a spark flashing perhaps too close to the subcontinent powder keg. ``Where the low, bare limestone ridges of Sukkur, Sind slope like unkempt stairs down to the banks of the Indus,`` TIME reported in December 1939, ``Indians who loudly object to fighting Germans in the name of Empire last week fought each other in the name of their various gods.`` Muslims had claimed a government building near the river as the site of an ancient mosque and ``threatened to hold it until nirvana-come. Whereupon Hindus swept the city, storming, looting, burning Moslem shops.`` It was a chilling preview of bloodbaths ahead.
``The leaders of the Moslems,`` TIME observed, ``usually thinks first about independence for Moslems and afterward about independence for Indians. His name is Mohammed Ali Jinnah, and he is probably the greatest single force for disunity in all disunited India.`` As TIME watched the inexorable progress of the cracks that would culminate in India’s partition, that view of Jinnah would be modulated, but it would not fundamentally change.
There was, in fact, a good deal to admire in Jinnah’s tough single-mindedness and the way he played his cards. Talking with TIME correspondent William Fisher in 1942, Jinnah said he would accept a national government that gave Muslims ``a fair break,`` but that he would stop cooperating if the British made peace with the Hindu-dominated Congress Party.
The April 1946 Jinnah cover story reported by Pacific bureau chief Robert Sherrod was more than TIME’s bittersweet obituary for the British Raj; it was one of the world’s first real close-ups of the man who would have Pakistan, in all his coldly tigerish colorations. Here was a charismatic leader who during Gandhi’s 1942 Quit India campaign had ``boasted that if his followers joined Gandhi’s pacifist program, the British would have 500 times more trouble ‘because we have 500 times more guts than the Hindus.’`` It was also a grim prophecy. ``The British Raj had given India a unified defense and a unified region of internal free trade,`` said TIME. ``Jinnah would destroy both ... Between mighty Russia to the north and the main body of India to the south, Pakistan would dangle like two withered arms.``
In August, Jinnah unleashed---perhaps inadvertently, perhaps not---an ugly sample of the horrors to come. Opposed to a British plan for Indian independence that did not also create Pakistan, he designated the 18th day of Ramadan as ``Direct Action Day.`` ``Though direct,`` TIME reported, ``the action was supposed to be peaceful. But before the disastrous day was over, blood soaked the melting asphalt of sweltering Calcutta’s streets.
``Rioting Moslems went after Hindus with guns, knives and clubs, looted shops, stoned newspaper offices, set fire to Calcutta’s British business district. Hindus retaliated by firing Moslem mosques and miles of Moslem slums ... By the 21 day of Ramadan, direct action had killed some 3,000 people and wounded thousands more.``
Interspersed with what TIME called ``musical chairs`` of negotiation, in which neither the Hindu side nor the Muslim side could be budged by British nudging, the killing went on and on. ``Perhaps, after all, there would be no independent India,`` TIME mused sadly in May 1947. ``Indeed, there might be no India.``
Pakistan was by then an idea nothing could contain. In August 1947 it became the world’s largest Muslim nation. The forces of hatred unleashed by Jinnah’s rhetoric, however, had acquired a life of their own. By late October 1947 the plague of enmity flared in Kashmir, where a Muslim majority lived under a Hindu maharaja who decided to throw in with India. ``In Moslem Karachi,`` TIME reported, ``Pakistan Governor General Mohammed Ali Jinnah raged at the news. He ordered Pakistan troops ... into Kashmir.`` But as the raiders pushed into the Vale, ``the blind butchery of neighbor by neighbor had reached Kashmir. Pakistan heard that 50,000 Moslems had been slaughtered by Hindus. British officials said that 100,000 fleeing refugees from Kashmir and nearby Jammu had crowded south into the still reeking Punjab.``
Jinnah, meanwhile, seemed to fade even as his discordant creation took form. ``Last week,`` TIME reported in early December 1947, ``after less than four months of independence, Pakistan was economic wreck, and serious social unrest was rising.`` The new country coul dnot afford to feed its millions of refugees; its checks bounced around the globe. As for the health of the seldom seen Jinnah, TIME added, ``The Pakistan Ministry indignantly said: ‘There is absolutely no truth in the rumors that Quaid-e-Azam [the Great Leader] is seriously ill.’``
In fact, as evidently only he was aware, Jinnah was dying.
``Out of the travail of 400 million in the Indian subcontinent,`` TIME wrote in September 1948, ``have come two symbols---a man of love and a man of hate. Last winter the man of nonviolence, Gandhi, died violently at the hands of an assassin. Last week, the man of hate, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, at 71, died a natural death in Karachi, capital of state he had founded.``
Enemies gave Jinnah his due, though. ``The Hindustani Times,`` TIME observed, ``devoted a page to an uncompromising attack on Jinnah’s motives and methods. However, it concluded: ‘A man of destiny, he was perhaps the greatest man of Islam since Mohammed.’`` But, TIME noted warily, his death ``raised the possibility that his political heirs might seek the final solution for insolvent, disorganized governments: war.`` Indeed, Jinnah’s chief legacy proved to be an eternity of discord
Posted by
mohajir
Dec 27, 2001 01:57 pm
TIME, December 23, 1996http://www.rpi.edu/dept/union/paksa/www/html/pakistan/jinnah2.html
A TIGERISH MAN, ATOP A SECTARIAN TIGER
The chronicle of a leader and the passions he fanned into flames
By Carl Posey
Delhi in the spring heat of 1946 was not relaxed,`` TIME reported that April. ``It was taut with waiting, gravid with conflict and suspense. Two socialist lawyers and a former Baptist lay preacher from Britain had sat of 25 days in the southeast wing of the viceregal palace, preparing to liquidate the richest portion of empire that history had ever seen---to end the British Raj, the grand and guilty edifice built and maintained by William Hawkins and Robert Clive, Warren Hastings and the Marquess Wellesley, the brawling editor James Silk Buckingham and the canny merchant Lord Inchcape and by the great Viceroys, austere Curzon and gently Halifax. The Raj was finished.``
Finished, perhaps, but still difficult to put down. The Raj at the end was like one of the unexploded bombs still lettering postwar Europe, and it held the same promise: peaceful independence if you do it right, explosive civil war if you fail. ``The issue,`` said TIME, ``seemed to turn on one man---Mohammed Ali Jinnah.`` On Boris Chaliapin’s portrait cover, the metaphorical tingers of East and West Pakistan stalked the subcontinent.
TIME had watched Jinnah intermittently since 1930, first as an ardent articulator of Indian nationalism, then as a spark flashing perhaps too close to the subcontinent powder keg. ``Where the low, bare limestone ridges of Sukkur, Sind slope like unkempt stairs down to the banks of the Indus,`` TIME reported in December 1939, ``Indians who loudly object to fighting Germans in the name of Empire last week fought each other in the name of their various gods.`` Muslims had claimed a government building near the river as the site of an ancient mosque and ``threatened to hold it until nirvana-come. Whereupon Hindus swept the city, storming, looting, burning Moslem shops.`` It was a chilling preview of bloodbaths ahead.
``The leaders of the Moslems,`` TIME observed, ``usually thinks first about independence for Moslems and afterward about independence for Indians. His name is Mohammed Ali Jinnah, and he is probably the greatest single force for disunity in all disunited India.`` As TIME watched the inexorable progress of the cracks that would culminate in India’s partition, that view of Jinnah would be modulated, but it would not fundamentally change.
There was, in fact, a good deal to admire in Jinnah’s tough single-mindedness and the way he played his cards. Talking with TIME correspondent William Fisher in 1942, Jinnah said he would accept a national government that gave Muslims ``a fair break,`` but that he would stop cooperating if the British made peace with the Hindu-dominated Congress Party.
The April 1946 Jinnah cover story reported by Pacific bureau chief Robert Sherrod was more than TIME’s bittersweet obituary for the British Raj; it was one of the world’s first real close-ups of the man who would have Pakistan, in all his coldly tigerish colorations. Here was a charismatic leader who during Gandhi’s 1942 Quit India campaign had ``boasted that if his followers joined Gandhi’s pacifist program, the British would have 500 times more trouble ‘because we have 500 times more guts than the Hindus.’`` It was also a grim prophecy. ``The British Raj had given India a unified defense and a unified region of internal free trade,`` said TIME. ``Jinnah would destroy both ... Between mighty Russia to the north and the main body of India to the south, Pakistan would dangle like two withered arms.``
In August, Jinnah unleashed---perhaps inadvertently, perhaps not---an ugly sample of the horrors to come. Opposed to a British plan for Indian independence that did not also create Pakistan, he designated the 18th day of Ramadan as ``Direct Action Day.`` ``Though direct,`` TIME reported, ``the action was supposed to be peaceful. But before the disastrous day was over, blood soaked the melting asphalt of sweltering Calcutta’s streets.
``Rioting Moslems went after Hindus with guns, knives and clubs, looted shops, stoned newspaper offices, set fire to Calcutta’s British business district. Hindus retaliated by firing Moslem mosques and miles of Moslem slums ... By the 21 day of Ramadan, direct action had killed some 3,000 people and wounded thousands more.``
Interspersed with what TIME called ``musical chairs`` of negotiation, in which neither the Hindu side nor the Muslim side could be budged by British nudging, the killing went on and on. ``Perhaps, after all, there would be no independent India,`` TIME mused sadly in May 1947. ``Indeed, there might be no India.``
Pakistan was by then an idea nothing could contain. In August 1947 it became the world’s largest Muslim nation. The forces of hatred unleashed by Jinnah’s rhetoric, however, had acquired a life of their own. By late October 1947 the plague of enmity flared in Kashmir, where a Muslim majority lived under a Hindu maharaja who decided to throw in with India. ``In Moslem Karachi,`` TIME reported, ``Pakistan Governor General Mohammed Ali Jinnah raged at the news. He ordered Pakistan troops ... into Kashmir.`` But as the raiders pushed into the Vale, ``the blind butchery of neighbor by neighbor had reached Kashmir. Pakistan heard that 50,000 Moslems had been slaughtered by Hindus. British officials said that 100,000 fleeing refugees from Kashmir and nearby Jammu had crowded south into the still reeking Punjab.``
Jinnah, meanwhile, seemed to fade even as his discordant creation took form. ``Last week,`` TIME reported in early December 1947, ``after less than four months of independence, Pakistan was economic wreck, and serious social unrest was rising.`` The new country coul dnot afford to feed its millions of refugees; its checks bounced around the globe. As for the health of the seldom seen Jinnah, TIME added, ``The Pakistan Ministry indignantly said: ‘There is absolutely no truth in the rumors that Quaid-e-Azam [the Great Leader] is seriously ill.’``
In fact, as evidently only he was aware, Jinnah was dying.
``Out of the travail of 400 million in the Indian subcontinent,`` TIME wrote in September 1948, ``have come two symbols---a man of love and a man of hate. Last winter the man of nonviolence, Gandhi, died violently at the hands of an assassin. Last week, the man of hate, Mohammad Ali Jinnah, at 71, died a natural death in Karachi, capital of state he had founded.``
Enemies gave Jinnah his due, though. ``The Hindustani Times,`` TIME observed, ``devoted a page to an uncompromising attack on Jinnah’s motives and methods. However, it concluded: ‘A man of destiny, he was perhaps the greatest man of Islam since Mohammed.’`` But, TIME noted warily, his death ``raised the possibility that his political heirs might seek the final solution for insolvent, disorganized governments: war.`` Indeed, Jinnah’s chief legacy proved to be an eternity of discord
Looking Through Glass
By Mubarak Ali
Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah had all the qualities and characteristics in his personality which go into the making of a myth. He was reticent, reserved, kept his personal matters secret, behaved coolly and proudly and was not warm towards anybody. Thus he created a halo of awe and fear around himself.
Sri Prakash, the first Indian High Commissioner to Karachi, in his book Pakistan: birth and early years gives an account of a reception which was given by the Governor-General of Pakistan, just after Independence to the diplomatic corps. It was also attended by the party leaders and bureaucrats. According to his version, Mr Jinnah was sitting at a distance alone on a sofa and called one by one those he wanted to talk to. He exchanged notes with each one of them just for five minutes. To the High Commissioner, he appeared a lonely man, averse to people. His serious and sombre expression made all those who interacted with him uneasy in his company.
This conveyed the impression that he was the final authority in every matter. The Muslim League and its leaders were merely rubber stamps. His image of being the sole spokesman of his party and people created a number of myths. For instance, the myth about his serious illness which is recounted by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre in their book Freedom at midnight fascinates everybody and compels readers to take it seriously. The version of their story is:
``If Louis Mountbatten, Jawaharlal Nehru or Mahatma Gandhi had been aware in April 1947 of one extraordinary secret, the division threatening India might have been avoided. The secret was sealed onto the gray surface of a film, a film that could have upset the Indian political equation and would almost certainly have changed the course of Asian history. Yet, so precious was the secret that that film harboured that even the British CID, one of the most effective investigative agencies in the world, was ignorant of its existence.``
These were the X-rays of Jinnah diagnosed as a TB patient. The authors, after creating a suspense, further write that: ``The damage was so extensive that the man whose lungs were on the film had barely two or three years to live. Sealed in an unmarked envelope, those X-rays were locked in the office safe of Dr J.A.L. Patel, a Bombay physician.``
On the basis of the story, Jinnah emerged as the one on whom depended the whole movement of Pakistan. The story further becomes interesting when a Hindu doctor kept the secret at the cost of Indian unity. His professional integrity was more important than his political inclinations.
In 1997, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of India-Pakistan Independence, Patrick French published a book, Liberty or death. After his own investigation, French refutes the whole story narrated by Collins and Lapierre. According to him: ``The idea that Jinnah`s poor state of health was a closely guarded secret is absurd: it was referred to in the press at that time, and it is obvious from photographs taken in the mid-1940s that Jinnah was unwell.
Moreover, the reduction of the Muslim League`s wide popular backing to the whim of one man`s `rigid and inflexible` attitude is indicative of the way that Pakistan history has been traduced. A second problem with Collins and Lapierre`s story is that it is not correct. Jinnah did not go to Bombay in May or June 1946, since he was busy in negotiating with Cripps in Simla and New Delhi. Nor did he have a doctor by the name of J.A.L. Patel. Although it is possible that Jinnah had tuberculosis in 1946, there is no evidence among his archive papers to support the theory.``
However, Jinnah himself on many occasions expressed the view that he was the sole creator of Pakistan. In one of his famous quotes, he said that he and his typewriter made Pakistan. The statement disregarded the efforts of his colleagues and the other Muslim League leaders in the Pakistan movement. It also downgraded the people`s participation in the struggle for a separate homeland.
There is evidence that he did not think highly of the leaders of the Muslim League. He found them mediocre and not capable of leading the nation. Perhaps, that was the reason that Jinnah, knowing his fatal illness, accepted `the moth eaten and truncated Pakistan`. The later history of Pakistan vindicates Jinnah`s assessment of the Muslim League leaders who miserably failed to solve the problems of a nascent nation.
The failure of these leaders has boosted Jinnah`s image as a superman. He overshadowed everybody. The nation also paid respect to him by naming universities, colleges, airports, roads, hospitals, and institutions of different kinds after him with the result that a citizen of Pakistan feels his presence every where in the country, wherever he goes.
Moreover, his image as a ``Great Leader`` (the Quaid-i-Azam) is presented in the textbooks to mould the mind of the young generation encouraging them to follow in his footstep. Scholars are eulogizing different aspects of his life. A film is screened to counter the film Gandhi in which Attenborough distorts the image of Jinnah. These efforts have made Jinnah sacrosanct. Any criticism of him is regarded a treason. He has become a paragon of super human virtues, beyond all weaknesses normal in human being.
The reverence accorded to him is such that mere association with him catapults a person from a humble position to the rank of freedom fighter. People take pride in their claim to have shaken hands with him (though he avoided shaking hands with people), or having seen him, talked to him, or merely attended his public meeting. The rulers of Pakistan, realizing the impact of his association, create myths of their links with him. Z.A. Bhutto claimed that as a student he wrote a letter to the Quaid - it is not known whether he replied to that letter or not, Zia`s sycophant bureaucrats discovered a diary of Jinnah (that was the time when Hitler`s diaries were discovered and later on proved false) which disappeared along with him.
Nawaz Sharif, assuming to follow in his footsteps, called himself `Quaid-i-Sani` (the second leader). One such similar example is found in the history of France when Napoleon III made an attempt to revive the image of Napoleon I in order to legitimize his authority. Marx jokingly comments in The eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that ``Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.`` Nawaz Sharif`s self-given title proves it.
Jinnah has become such a symbol of wisdom in the Pakistani society that people visualize Pakistan with his reference. His vision, his agenda, his dream and his ideals, all remained unaccomplished because he died soon after Independence. It is commonly believed that had he lived some more years, the history of Pakistan would have been different. There are few nations which rely so heavily on one individual.
No doubt, Jinnah was a great leader of his people. He was a man of integrity and honesty, but to idealize him to such an extent as to preempt the emergence of another rank of leaders out of his shadow is strange. Every generation has its own dreams and vision which it wants to accomplish without interference. Not imitation but freedom is required to build a new world. Therefore, an attempt should not be made to repeat but to make new history. People should be liberated from the shadows and allowed to flourish in a free society. Great leaders should be respected but not worshipped.
http://www.dawn.com/weekly/books/books4.htm
December 25, 2001
Posted by
mohajir
Dec 27, 2001 01:57 pm
Jinnah: making of a myth By Mubarak Ali
Quaid-i-Azam Mohammad Ali Jinnah had all the qualities and characteristics in his personality which go into the making of a myth. He was reticent, reserved, kept his personal matters secret, behaved coolly and proudly and was not warm towards anybody. Thus he created a halo of awe and fear around himself.
Sri Prakash, the first Indian High Commissioner to Karachi, in his book Pakistan: birth and early years gives an account of a reception which was given by the Governor-General of Pakistan, just after Independence to the diplomatic corps. It was also attended by the party leaders and bureaucrats. According to his version, Mr Jinnah was sitting at a distance alone on a sofa and called one by one those he wanted to talk to. He exchanged notes with each one of them just for five minutes. To the High Commissioner, he appeared a lonely man, averse to people. His serious and sombre expression made all those who interacted with him uneasy in his company.
This conveyed the impression that he was the final authority in every matter. The Muslim League and its leaders were merely rubber stamps. His image of being the sole spokesman of his party and people created a number of myths. For instance, the myth about his serious illness which is recounted by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre in their book Freedom at midnight fascinates everybody and compels readers to take it seriously. The version of their story is:
``If Louis Mountbatten, Jawaharlal Nehru or Mahatma Gandhi had been aware in April 1947 of one extraordinary secret, the division threatening India might have been avoided. The secret was sealed onto the gray surface of a film, a film that could have upset the Indian political equation and would almost certainly have changed the course of Asian history. Yet, so precious was the secret that that film harboured that even the British CID, one of the most effective investigative agencies in the world, was ignorant of its existence.``
These were the X-rays of Jinnah diagnosed as a TB patient. The authors, after creating a suspense, further write that: ``The damage was so extensive that the man whose lungs were on the film had barely two or three years to live. Sealed in an unmarked envelope, those X-rays were locked in the office safe of Dr J.A.L. Patel, a Bombay physician.``
On the basis of the story, Jinnah emerged as the one on whom depended the whole movement of Pakistan. The story further becomes interesting when a Hindu doctor kept the secret at the cost of Indian unity. His professional integrity was more important than his political inclinations.
In 1997, on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of India-Pakistan Independence, Patrick French published a book, Liberty or death. After his own investigation, French refutes the whole story narrated by Collins and Lapierre. According to him: ``The idea that Jinnah`s poor state of health was a closely guarded secret is absurd: it was referred to in the press at that time, and it is obvious from photographs taken in the mid-1940s that Jinnah was unwell.
Moreover, the reduction of the Muslim League`s wide popular backing to the whim of one man`s `rigid and inflexible` attitude is indicative of the way that Pakistan history has been traduced. A second problem with Collins and Lapierre`s story is that it is not correct. Jinnah did not go to Bombay in May or June 1946, since he was busy in negotiating with Cripps in Simla and New Delhi. Nor did he have a doctor by the name of J.A.L. Patel. Although it is possible that Jinnah had tuberculosis in 1946, there is no evidence among his archive papers to support the theory.``
However, Jinnah himself on many occasions expressed the view that he was the sole creator of Pakistan. In one of his famous quotes, he said that he and his typewriter made Pakistan. The statement disregarded the efforts of his colleagues and the other Muslim League leaders in the Pakistan movement. It also downgraded the people`s participation in the struggle for a separate homeland.
There is evidence that he did not think highly of the leaders of the Muslim League. He found them mediocre and not capable of leading the nation. Perhaps, that was the reason that Jinnah, knowing his fatal illness, accepted `the moth eaten and truncated Pakistan`. The later history of Pakistan vindicates Jinnah`s assessment of the Muslim League leaders who miserably failed to solve the problems of a nascent nation.
The failure of these leaders has boosted Jinnah`s image as a superman. He overshadowed everybody. The nation also paid respect to him by naming universities, colleges, airports, roads, hospitals, and institutions of different kinds after him with the result that a citizen of Pakistan feels his presence every where in the country, wherever he goes.
Moreover, his image as a ``Great Leader`` (the Quaid-i-Azam) is presented in the textbooks to mould the mind of the young generation encouraging them to follow in his footstep. Scholars are eulogizing different aspects of his life. A film is screened to counter the film Gandhi in which Attenborough distorts the image of Jinnah. These efforts have made Jinnah sacrosanct. Any criticism of him is regarded a treason. He has become a paragon of super human virtues, beyond all weaknesses normal in human being.
The reverence accorded to him is such that mere association with him catapults a person from a humble position to the rank of freedom fighter. People take pride in their claim to have shaken hands with him (though he avoided shaking hands with people), or having seen him, talked to him, or merely attended his public meeting. The rulers of Pakistan, realizing the impact of his association, create myths of their links with him. Z.A. Bhutto claimed that as a student he wrote a letter to the Quaid - it is not known whether he replied to that letter or not, Zia`s sycophant bureaucrats discovered a diary of Jinnah (that was the time when Hitler`s diaries were discovered and later on proved false) which disappeared along with him.
Nawaz Sharif, assuming to follow in his footsteps, called himself `Quaid-i-Sani` (the second leader). One such similar example is found in the history of France when Napoleon III made an attempt to revive the image of Napoleon I in order to legitimize his authority. Marx jokingly comments in The eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that ``Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.`` Nawaz Sharif`s self-given title proves it.
Jinnah has become such a symbol of wisdom in the Pakistani society that people visualize Pakistan with his reference. His vision, his agenda, his dream and his ideals, all remained unaccomplished because he died soon after Independence. It is commonly believed that had he lived some more years, the history of Pakistan would have been different. There are few nations which rely so heavily on one individual.
No doubt, Jinnah was a great leader of his people. He was a man of integrity and honesty, but to idealize him to such an extent as to preempt the emergence of another rank of leaders out of his shadow is strange. Every generation has its own dreams and vision which it wants to accomplish without interference. Not imitation but freedom is required to build a new world. Therefore, an attempt should not be made to repeat but to make new history. People should be liberated from the shadows and allowed to flourish in a free society. Great leaders should be respected but not worshipped.
http://www.dawn.com/weekly/books/books4.htm
December 25, 2001
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