ON September 11, 2001, President Musharraf recalls in his book, he was in Karachi attending to his professional duties unaware of the fact that Pakistan was “about to be thrust into the front line of yet another war — a war against shadows”. He now describes 9/11, like others, as the “day that changed the world”. Opinions all over the world greatly differ on how to define the monumental change that took place as the twin towers collapsed.

But there is consensus on the important operational role played by him in the unfolding drama. No other ally of George Bush took such grave risks as he in implementing his faraway project.

Commitment to the new task is one of the main themes of his memoir; it is the magnet that pulls in the western reader. Amongst the lesser narratives is another shadowy Indo-Pakistan war bitterly fought in the summer of 1999 in the Kargil-Draz mountains of Kashmir. It is one of the ironies of recent history that the general who rightly praises the great valour of his irregular allies in that battle also stakes his claim to international attention as a ruthless hunter of thousands of other Mujahideen who once helped loosen the Soviet grip on Afghanistan.

Musharraf must have recognised that it would not be easy to reconcile these two roles either in terms of national interest or political morality. The strain is writ large on the autobiography and is mostly overcome through dogma rather than reason. He has obviously accepted the risk that his readers, especially in his own country, would either embrace his ex cathedra pronouncements or use the data, even when carefully selected, to reach altogether unintended and even contrary conclusions.

Soon after the fateful Bangladesh crisis, I went to my alma mater, Oxford, to meet Hugh Trevor-Roper, who was then the Regius professor of modern history there. He had been invited by late Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to visit Pakistan and our conversation turned to the question if Mr Bhutto should provide an authentic account of politics, war and secession in the lost half of the country. Professor Trevor-Roper believed that history should not be treated just as an esoteric subject but should become a part of people’s living experience.

Contemporary history needed contemporary witnesses but their problems, especially if they are politicians in power, should not be under-estimated. One should weigh the present cons against the future pros of writing history when time provides perspective and loss of office brings unsuspected freedom to tell the truth.

Considered as authentic history, Musharraf’s memoir poses the problems that the distinguished Oxford historian — author of The Last Days of Hitler — had in mind. Most of the major events that he addresses are not only controversial but also shrouded in a mystery that would take decades to unravel. He excludes a large number of questions from his ambit and seeks to apply a closure to the few that he has selected. He discards the dialectical process of arriving at the truth in favour of a unilateralist and assertive narration. It is a composition without a counterpoint. The faithful applaud while others just reject it.

Metaphorically, Afghanistan continues to be the Achilles’ heel of the Pakistani story. An engagement spanning 30 years cannot but leave a legacy of contradictions. The war against shadows that Musharraf joined with extraordinary verve in September 2001 presented a basic dilemma of demolishing the Taliban first to get at Al Qaeda. Pakistan’s ambivalence towards the Taliban does not get resolved even in President Musharraf’s retrospective harshness. The Taliban still cloud his relations with the Karzai government and its western backers.

Musharraf’s account would have resonated better with the reader if he had devoted a few paragraphs to how the military establishment suppressed the growing discontent with the Taliban in the civilian component of the governments of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, the two prime ministers who had the form but not the substance of power on the major strategic issues confronting the country.

I remember vividly how in early 1996, Dr Maleeha Lodhi from her post in Washington and I from Moscow argued in a high level Islamabad meeting, presided over by President Leghari and Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, that unless the Taliban acquired a “human face”, their regime would never win international recognition and legitimacy. I do not even now know what to make of President Musharraf’s belief that if “70 or 80 countries had established embassies in Kabul, we might have been able to exert some influence on them (the Taliban)”, perhaps specifically in the context of the outrageous destruction of the ancient Buddha statues in Bamiyan.

How did Pakistan ever entertain hopes of such universal recognition of the Taliban regime in the zeitgeist of the era and why did it take Musharraf so long to realise that they could not ensure Pakistan’s national interest?

Thomas Pickering was the United States’ ambassador to Moscow when I served there. He maintained a sharp focus on Central Asia and Afghanistan from that vantage point. Visiting Islamabad as US under-secretary of state in May 2000, he made a concerted, if polite, effort in talks with Pakistani leaders and also with the deputy foreign minister of the Taliban regime to break the Osama-Taliban connection.

He relied heavily on evidence linking Al Qaeda with attacks on US embassies in East Africa. Apparently, Musharraf assured him rightly that though Pakistan’s leverage with Mullah Omar was limited, it was doing its utmost to wean the Taliban from Osama Bin Laden. Meanwhile, Musharraf counselled that the Taliban should not be isolated further or subjected to harsher UN sanctions.

Islamabad seems to have had a genuine difficulty in reading US priorities. It was also reflected in the disproportionate zeal with which Musharraf’s foreign minister was trying to arrange Pakistan’s signatures on the comprehensive test ban treaty (CTBT). There was a touch of naivete in the thinking that CTBT would provide an easier route to winning American support for the Musharraf regime. For Washington, Islamic militancy and not the CTBT had already become the overriding concern. Pakistani diplomats were dissatisfied with the Taliban but lacked an effective policy towards them in the prevailing ambience of ambivalence.

No wonder then that the dramatic reversal of policy on September 12 is still seen by many as a panicky reaction to extreme intimidation by the United States. President Musharraf’s self-image as the uniquely privileged supreme leader, rather than reasons of state, seems to have made him assume total responsibility for the decision to accept the American demands before going to the cabinet or the corps commanders. Most rulers would have preferred to diffuse responsibility for such a momentous decision, a ploy that might even have given Pakistan better terms of engagement and also an enlarged public support.

Admittedly, President Musharraf faced no political crisis of any serious magnitude even as Pakistan got increasingly sucked into the American invasion plans that were to decimate the Taliban soon. A closer analysis, however, reveals serious damage to the national psyche and self-esteem which may get aggravated with disclosures, such as the one on page 237 of the president’s memoir, of 369 out of the 689 Al-Qaeda members captured by Pakistan being handed over to the United States. In case the point was missed, the book tells us that “we have received bounties totalling millions of dollars”.

A greater danger to Pakistan, however, lurks in what may be yet another misreading of history. It would probably not be fair to think that this slim 352-page autobiography exhausts, as it were, President Musharraf’s understanding of the world situation. One certainly hopes that it does not do so even if the book itself is constructed around a linear view of events. It draws much of its power from the mythology of a global war on terrorism. It is not sufficiently cognisant of the fact that this great myth is fast losing its lustre and that other counter-narratives are emerging all over the world. They look well beyond what for few years was the unquestioned gospel according to Bush, and now confirm with little inhibition, even in the United States, that it was only a convenient and transient metaphor for deeper objectives such as the reconstitution of the Middle East and, on a larger canvas, the perpetuation of American global hegemony.

The fiasco in Iraq, a creeping failure in Afghanistan, the increasing salience of non-state actors like Hamas in Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon, the growing leftist resistance to US economic and political hegemony in Latin America, and last but not the least, the time-honoured reaction to unilateral empire-building in the shape of countervailing alliances are all signs and symbols of a new world in the making. It will not be what the ideologues of George Bush had conspired to achieve. Afghanistan may end up as a bloody, vengeful prologue to an imperial drama of the reconquest of the region that met a tragic denouement.

This is an inexorable process which can easily rob President Musharraf of an honourable place in history unless he can reinvent himself fast. His account of the shadowy wars does not encourage one to think that he can do it. Bush will simply not give him room to manoeuvre. At home, he is, like other wielders of absolute power, unable to break the magic circle of sycophancy. He often gets irritated that nobody offers him useful advice. Since I have mentioned Hugh Trevor-Roper, let me end on one of his remarks. “The function of a genius,” he once wrote, “is not to give new answers, but to pose new questions which time and mediocrity can resolve.” Musharraf should either ask new questions or give us the freedom to do it for him.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.

INTELLIGENCE analysts believe that Iran is encountering technical difficulties in mastering the complex process of uranium enrichment. That means the West may have a bit more time than previously expected to pursue a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear standoff.

The problem, according to intelligence officials, is that the centrifuges that are supposed to enrich uranium are overheating. Some are breaking down and must be replaced. As a result, Iran has not ramped up its enrichment effort as quickly as analysts had expected.

This assessment is based on recent conversations with analysts from several western nations that are watching the Iranian programme closely and on an unpublished report by the International Atomic Energy Agency that was completed Aug. 31. To me, it’s the equivalent of adding some extra time to the clock in a tense football game. The urgency remains, but there is an opportunity for a few additional plays before the game is over. “There’s time, purely from the point of view of the technical development of the threat, to let diplomacy play out in the case of Iran,” says Harvard professor Ashton B. Carter, who closely follows the issue.

The technical difficulties involve the uranium enrichment facility in Natanz, north of Isfahan in central Iran. The Iranians broke IAEA seals at Natanz in January and began enriching uranium. It’s a highly complex process, in which uranium gas is injected into the linked array of centrifuges that spin at roughly the speed of sound. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced April 11 that the Iranians had succeeded in enriching uranium to an initial level of 3.5 per cent, and in June Iran told the IAEA it had achieved 5 per cent enrichment. That’s far below the 90 percent level needed for a nuclear weapon, but it suggested the Iranians were on their way to mastering the technology.

Western analysts had expected that the Iranians would move quickly to expand the enrichment effort to meet their near-term goal of having six cascades of 164 centrifuges each, or a total of nearly 1,000 centrifuges. The danger here was technological mastery rather than raw output of uranium. Even with 3,000 centrifuges operating, intelligence analysts estimate that it would take two to three years to produce enough highly enriched uranium for one bomb. Iran’s eventual goal is a massive array of more than 50,000 centrifuges at Natanz.

But problems surfaced this summer. The Aug. 31 IAEA report, marked “Restricted Distribution,” noted that since June, Iran had been feeding uranium into a small 20-centrifuge test cascade “for short periods of time,” and that it had conducted various tests in June, July and August of the initial 164-centrifuge cascade. “The installation of a second 164-machine cascade is proceeding,” the report noted, but it added that Iran planned to test the second cascade in September without injecting uranium.

What happened to slow the expected pace? IAEA analysts have told US and European officials that it appears the centrifuges are overheating when uranium gas is injected. “The Iranians are unable to control higher temperatures, and after a short period they must stop because of higher temperatures. So far they haven’t been able to solve this,” says one western intelligence official who has been briefed on the IAEA findings. In addition, this official said, some centrifuges “are simply crashing — 10 or so have broken down and must be replaced.”

There’s a lively debate among intelligence analysts about what may be causing these problems. One theory holds that Iran’s home-produced uranium, mixed with foreign ore, isn’t sufficiently pure for the delicate centrifuges, but other analysts reject that argument. Several analysts I talked to agreed, however, that if Iranian scientists continue with enrichment, they are likely to solve the technical problems eventually through trial and error. That’s why US and European officials are still calling for Iran to suspend enrichment, before they have cracked the puzzles they are encountering.

Iran continues to insist that its nuclear programme is peaceful. And although it’s taken for granted in many western countries that these statements mask a secret plan to build nuclear weapons, intelligence analysts from several nations told me they lack decisive evidence of an Iranian bomb effort. So far, there is no “smoking gun,” said an intelligence analyst from one western nation. Nevertheless, the United States, Israel and some European countries remain convinced that a covert weapons programme exists.

The clock is still ticking. That’s the real import of these new intelligence findings. Iran and the West still have time to find a diplomatic solution to the nuclear showdown. This genie isn’t quite out of the bottle.

—Dawn/Washington Post Service

UNTIL as recently as six months ago, President Bush and US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld used to say that Afghanistan was a success story, that the forces of terrorism had been defeated and that democracy was flourishing through the successful holding of elections and the countrywide approval of Hamid Karzai, a Pashtun, as president.

It was claimed that Kabul had become a bustling city, with a construction boom and that the central part of the city gave the impression of a prosperous capital. The size of the foreign community, it was said, had grown with some 40 countries maintaining resident missions and there was a large UN presence. It was even claimed that the writ of the government in Kabul was spreading to the outlying parts of the country and that signs of insurgency were limited to the provinces bordering Pakistan which had deployed over 80,000 troops on the border with Afghanistan to help prevent the movement of terrorists in either direction.

But the Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan has grown at a remarkable pace over recent months. Though US forces in Afghanistan, said to number 1,8000, have been joined by a large Nato force, the growing insurgency has caused many casualties. With the war in Iraq also intensifying, President Bush is facing increasing criticism for his handling of the war on terror.

The recent visit of Presidents Musharraf and Hamid Karzai to Washington, where they held a joint meeting with President Bush, saw the two exchange hot words over their handling of the Taliban problem. Comments by serving and retired western generals, as well as an in-depth analysis of the situation inside Afghanistan, reveal a lack of carefully coordinated action by the western alliance.

Tracing the history of events since 9/11, US military operations that relied heavily on the Northern Alliance carried out operations in a manner that showed scant regard for Pashtun rights. One can recall the massacre of 5,000 Taliban who had been taken as prisoners during operations in the north. The US, though professing concern for civilian casualties, used carpet-bombing against the Taliban forces north of Kabul, resulting in massive civilian losses.

With the Northern Alliance striking out against the Taliban, who had driven them out of Kabul, and the US displaying its anger over the 9/11 attacks that were organised under the Taliban regime, there was a degree of indifference to Pashtun sensitivities that has resulted in the current breakout of Taliban resistance in east and south Afghanistan.

It is worth recalling that apart from deploying forces looking for Osama Bin Laden and other Al Qaeda leaders, the US kept its military largely confined to Kabul. Indeed, even the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) was kept confined to Kabul and during the first two years, requests from Karzai for western military support for other parts of Afghanistan was denied, so that the authority of the US-backed regime was limited to Kabul with local warlords assuming authority in other parts of Afghanistan. These warlords proceeded to expand the cultivation of poppy, which had been brought under control during the Taliban period.

The opinion is expressed increasingly by critics in the US that the diversion of the bulk of US forces to the attack on Iraq in March 2003, led to Afghanistan being treated as a secondary area of interest. President Bush had long planned to attack Iraq, both to gain control over oil, and to augment the security of Israel. Where he went wrong, was that while Saddam Hussein had denied any role to foreign inspired extremists, his removal virtually turned Baghdad into the nerve-centre of Islamic extremists.

Over the period starting with the attack on Iraq, Afghanistan appears to have become a country of secondary importance, because it hardly has economic assets, and was in desperate need of reconstruction after 25 years of conflict and destruction.

The presence of US and western missions had been reflected in the pledging of over 17 billion dollars for the rehabilitation and the reconstruction of Afghanistan. In actual fact, with Kabul lacking control over the countryside, and in the absence of infrastructure, very little has been achieved by way of reconstruction. Though nearly three million Afghan refugees were brought back from Pakistan and Iran, there was neither housing nor employment for them, and many of them went back. This has created disappointment with, even hostility against, the US and the Nato presence which are being seen as foreign occupations.

The Pashtun population, concentrated mainly in the east and south, has not only experienced neglect but also military repression. Though the policy of keeping the ISAF confined to Kabul has been changed and both US and Nato forces have taken on security duties in east and south Afghanistan they are running into growing resistance on the part of a people who are always armed.

Except for Osama bin Laden, and his close associates the Al Qaeda does not pose a serious threat, and President Musharraf was justified in claiming success in eliminating Al Qaeda elements who had gone to the tribal areas of Pakistan.

The resistance is now from the Taliban. The present force level of the US and Nato of about 40,000 is grossly inadequate to bring peace and order to Afghanistan.

The police and army under the Karzai regime is far from effective and, in keeping with Afghan tradition do not relish suppressing their own people. The US and affluent western countries have done very little in terms of economic reconstruction. President Karzai who is largely under the influence of the non-Pashtun ethnic groups of the Northern Alliance has very little credibility with the Pashtuns, and tends to blame Pakistan for allowing sanctuary to Taliban fighters. President Musharraf holds the view that the insurgency does not originate in Pakistan but is native to Afghanistan.

Furthermore, even before 9/11, there were many religious madressahs in the tribal areas of Pakistan. The anti-Islamic rhetoric of the Bush administration has made the Americans unpopular, notably in the Pashtun areas and President Musharraf has to attend to domestic issues, that include using the tribal system to discourage the resort to jihadism. The success that the Pashtun residents of Afghanistan are confronting in their insurgency is partly a reflection of the Afghan tradition of resisting foreign occupation.

The indepth analysis of the poor performance of the US and Nato in Afghanistan is being traced to two major factors. The first is that the western military presence is too small. When US and Nato forces were sent to the Balkans in the 1990’s they were much more substantial in numbers and equipment. Nearly 40,000 allied forces had been stationed in Kosovo that is less than five per cent of Afghanistan. A similar situation existed in Bosnia. Western military commanders, both serving and retired, believe that Nato and the US must increase their military involvement substantially to effectively bring under control a country like Afghanistan.

Perhaps more important is the need for urgent action to step up economic reconstruction. According to figures mentioned in Newsweek, the amount spent on economic reconstruction in Afghanistan works out to be nine dollars per person as against $ 249 in Kosovo. Above all, the anti-Pashtun bias emanating from the Afghan government in Kabul, which is dominated by non-Pashtuns, must be corrected.

We in Pakistan have a stake in a united, stable and peaceful Afghanistan. The policy of extending assistance to Afghanistan, without any desire to interfere in its internal affairs, is basically correct. The future economic development of our region will be ensured if there is peace and stability in Afghanistan. In particular problems of scarcity of both energy and water require the participation of this neighbour.