PAKISTAN and Afghanistan have been having an argument about the causes of the intensification of insurgency in a widening arc in Afghanistan for the past several months. President Bush was part of it first during his February visit to the region and then again in the famous tripartite consultations with Presidents Musharraf and Karzai in Washington.

That Pakistan has now announced plans to fence and mine the 2,400-km border selectively shows that one of the interlocutors is succumbing to a counsel of despair if not simply ratcheting up the level of the tactical game being played in the region.

If the purpose was to deflect a rising chorus of allegations about why the Taliban were resurgent in Afghanistan, Pakistan is opting for a measure that is universally condemned these days. It is also associated with horrific suffering in Afghanistan, and happens to be a known impediment to rehabilitating Afghan refugees particularly in farming and pasturing. Pleading that landmines would be laid only on the Pakistani side of the frontier will not make the slightest difference to the moral opprobrium.

The global outrage at human losses caused by mines is expressed in the intense interest in the issue at the United Nations and in the large campaigns to ban landmines. The 1997 Nobel Peace prize went to one such campaign. A major anti-personnel mine ban agreement, the Ottawa Convention, stood out as a cooperative enterprise by governments, UN, the Red Cross and almost 1500 non-governmental organisations. By November 2006, 151 countries had ratified or acceded to the treaty that came into force on March 1, 1999.

The amended Protocol II of the 1980 Convention on Conventional Weapons focuses specially on landmines, booby-traps and other devices of a similar import. There is a large pile of reports on the subject and inter-agency cooperation in the United Nations has kept the question of explosive remnants of war in public awareness and advocacy. Israel’s deliberate attempt to cause long-term hazards for civilians south of the Litany River attracted worldwide disapproval.

In this international climate of opinion was it even prudent on Pakistan’s part to brandish this threat in a territory where freedom of movement has been a valued right since times immemorial? Even if the army uses extreme care in designating areas to be mined and then provides highly efficient monitoring and surveillance systems, the psychological backlash would all be directed against Pakistan. The measure is an open invitation to Kabul to revive its traditional claim to be the defender and guarantor of the well-being of the border tribes.

The tribal belt has a great deal of legend and mythology attached to it and invading it with devices that are now universally condemned for their capacity to kill and maim indiscriminately will add one additional item to the litany of human rights abuses and violations with which Pakistan is routinely pilloried.

The one group that may not be much worried about it is the Afghan resistance. During the last 30 years they have used more than one hundred routes and trails across the frontier and they will not fight shy of frequent gun battles to keep as many of them open as it would only enhance their appeal to the people. If the flurry of reports from international sources is to be believed at all, the Taliban already enjoy better resonance with them than the officials who were to carry out the much vaunted development projects in the area.

Pakistan sent its army into the tribal lands without much homework relying on a quick fix that would offset American pressure. It must not rush into fencing and mining in another similar ploy to head off international criticism particularly when there is very little chance that allegations from President Karzai and his international backers would abate. Adding yet another futile talking point to the rather stale repertoire of Pakistani spokespersons is far too great a price for more alienation that would inevitably re-fuel the Durand Line controversy.

Mr Karzai has been rather theatrical; his calculated outburst in Kandahar accusing the Pakistani government, though, fortunately, not the Pakistani people, of trying to enslave Afghans and reduce them to the status of doormen at Karachi hotels was doubtless provocative. It is as much for the Pakistan government as Kabul to explain why this “incident” took place despite the great opportunity that came Pakistan’s way in the shape of Foreign Minister Khurshid Kasuri’s Kabul visit. But more to the point are statements from western sources confirming Mr Karzai’s allegations of cross-border interference that is well beyond the widely accepted limited movement through the peculiar configuration of this long frontier.

Consider the following comment in the latest policy report of the Brussels-based International Crisis Group (ICG) on what it describes as “the most intense and deadly insurgent violence since the Taliban’s fall five years earlier”: “The Taliban, Hekmatyar’s Hezb-i Islami and fighters linked to Al Qaeda have used Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (Fata) bordering on Afghanistan’s south eastern provinces, to regroup, rearm and launch cross-border attacks on Afghan and international troops”. Consider further what the ICG has to say about the Miramshah accord that all of us have been extolling: “Infiltration into Afghanistan appears to have increased since the military, having suffered major losses, opted for a policy of appeasement of the Fata-based militants, signing peace accords, first in South Waziristan in April 2004, then in North Waziristan in September 2006.”

The ICG report’s in-depth analysis often gets marred by a poorly sketched political framework for explaining the backwardness of the tribal areas. For instance, it has difficulty in making up its mind about the role of the “maliks”. At one point it seems to be lamenting that Pakistan has perpetuated them as instruments of the British colonial policy with a view to denying the people a status equal to the other citizens of Pakistan.

At another, it also seems to accuse the religious parties, especially that of Maulana Fazlur Rahman, and the military alike of getting the maliks supplanted by religious activists who have now created a mini-Taliban state. The authors had apparently interviewed too many Pakistanis and had not found enough time to synthesise their own conclusions. Without that, there is always the risk of falling into the pitfall of shoddy studies on the mullah-military alliance particularly popular with western readers.

Be that as it may, the indictment of Pakistan for having provided bases for militants to re-group, re-arm and launch attacks across the border has to be taken seriously.

Similarly, it needs to be established whether the upsurge in resistance inside Afghanistan is the result of Pakistani “appeasement” or other factors intrinsic to the failure of the Karzai government, the International Security Assistance Force and the Nato forces and the larger international community that has not fulfilled the commitments made in the wake of the Bonn agreement. For reasons which are not difficult to guess, the report is timid on these non-Pakistani factors. But where then is Pakistan’s counter-narrative? Instead of being upfront about it, Islamabad now wants to hide behind a fence and landmines.

Talking of narratives, a distinguished academic and a frequent flyer to Afghanistan in all seasons, Barnett R.Rubin, has a long essay entitled ‘Saving Afghanistan’ in the January-February 2007 issue of Foreign Affairs. After celebrating the success of Nato forces in turning back the Taliban offensive of the summer of 2006, he informs us that “the main centre of terrorism of global reach” is in Pakistan, that Al Qaeda has succeeded in reestablishing its base in the Pashtun tribal belt and that the “intelligence collected during western military offensives in mid-2006 confirmed that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) was continuing to actively support the Taliban leadership, which is now working out of Quetta”.

These judgments are reinforced in a later section of the essay called “Sanctuary in Pakistan”. He argues that 9/11 changed Pakistan’s behaviour but not its interests.” (Five) years later, he says, “the safe haven Pakistan has provided, along with continued support from donors in the Persian Gulf, has allowed the Taliban to broaden and deepen their presence both in the Pakistani regions and in Afghanistan.”

I can think of any number of fellow Pakistanis who say that they ought to sympathise with their government’s Afghan predicament but they don’t as it remains in a perpetual state of denial. I can imagine that the official reaction would be that Bush and Condoleezza Rice whom our leaders meet frequently do not make these allegations and that they are not overly exercised over opinions of the media and non-governmental analysts. There are many points made by these analysts that deserve serious thought. Above all, we need to think with gravitas about political reforms in the tribal belt.

The Musharraf era has left all past political structures there too debilitated to be revived. The president may not even want to do much till a failsafe device to elect him again in uniform is perfected. But the storm gathering over the region makes it important that he defines the future status of the tribal areas sooner rather than later. The moving finger writes and moves on. Let us at least read it.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.

Email: tanvir.a.khan@gmail.com

“THE Ethiopians now are advancing, but that is not the end,” Omar Idris, a senior official of Somalia’s Union of Islamic Courts (UIC), told the BBC on Wednesday. “We know what happened in Iraq, the experience of the Americans... I think this is very, very early to say that the Islamic Court forces were defeated.”

The war is starting in Somalia, but it may end up being fought in Ethiopia and Eritrea, too. Together, the three countries contain almost a hundred million of the poorest people on the planet.

On Thursday, the Ethiopian army took Mogadishu, Somalia’s capital, and the UIC, the closest thing to a government that Somalia has had since the country collapsed into anarchy fifteen years ago, retreated south towards the border with Kenya. Ethiopia has tanks, jet fighters and the tacit support of the United States; the UIC has only light weapons and the support of Somalis who distrust Ethiopians (i.e. almost all of them). So the UIC will probably win in the end, but it will take a long guerilla war.

This is a war founded on a misconception and driven by paranoid fantasies. The misconception was the US government’s belief that the Islamic Courts, local religious authorities backed by merchants in Mogadishu who wanted someone to curb the warlords, punish thieves, and enforce contracts, were just a cover for al-Qaeda. So the US instead backed the warlords who were making Somalis’ lives a misery.

American support is the kiss of death in Somalia, so the warlords were finally dislodged in Mogadishu last June by an uprising led by the UIC and supported by most of the population. The warlords fled to an American ship offshore, their clansmen went to ground, and the UIC rapidly took control of most of southern Somalia, bringing order for the first time since 1991. But the US immediately started plotting its overthrow.

Washington’s principal instrument in this enterprise was Ethiopia, Somalia’s giant neighbour to the west. Ethiopia’s 75 million people outnumber Somalis by more than seven-to-one — but although the Christians of the highlands have always dominated Ethiopia, almost half of its people are Muslims, like the Somalis. In Ethiopia’s sparsely populated eastern desert, the Ogaden, most of the people are not only Muslim but ethnically Somali. This is where the paranoid fantasies kick in.

Most of Ethiopia’s Muslims are too busy scratching a living to challenge the Christian near-monopoly of power in their country, but the last thing Ethiopia’s rulers want to see is an Islamic regime next-door in Somalia. To make matters worse, the Ethiopians suspected that their enemies, the Eritreans, were sending troops and arms to help the Islamic Courts regime in Somalia.

Ethiopia has fought and won two wars with Somalia over the Ogaden, in 1964 and 1977 (back when Somalia had a government and an army). It fought a bitter border war in 1998-2000 with Eritrea, a breakaway province that won its independence in 1993. (Ethiopia has rejected the decision of an independent panel on the border, and that war is just waiting to start again.) So over the past year, Ethiopia’s paranoid fantasies have come together with Washington’s.

The official American position, stated last week by Jendayi Frazer, assistant secretary of state for African affairs, is that the UIC is now “controlled by Al Qaeda cell individuals. The top layer of the Court are extremists. They are terrorists.” Even US diplomats in the region privately reject this assertion, but it is now an article of faith in Washington.

Ethiopia accuses the UIC of “threatening Ethiopian sovereignty,” which merely means that senior UIC members make the same claims about the Somali-Ethiopian border that all Somali nationalists of every party have always made. No UIC troops have even approached that border — but just after the UIC took control of Mogadishu in June, Ethiopia started sending troops into Somalia.

The Ethiopians said they were there to support the so-called “transitional government” of Somalia, a body led by Abdullahi Yusuf, a Somali warlord who is a long-standing ally of Addis Ababa. But the “transitional government,” which emerged from UN-backed talks between Somali factions in 2004, lacked popular support and never controlled much except the town of Baidoa, near the Ethiopian border.

In early December, Islamic Court troops moved on Baidoa with the declared intention of driving the Ethiopian troops out. On 24 December, Ethiopia responded with the offensive that has now taken Mogadishu. With overwhelming material superiority and US-supplied satellite surveillance data, the Ethiopians have won an easy victory, and already the warlords who used to dominate the capital are reasserting their control under the shelter of the “transitional government.”

But this is just the start of a long guerilla war that will sap the strength of the Ethiopian army, a Christian-led force backing unpopular warlords in a Muslim country. It will radicalise the Islamic Courts and turn them into exactly the extremist force that Washington and Addis Ababa fear. It will probably radicalise Ethiopian Muslims and start insurrections there. It will almost certainly trigger a new war between Ethiopia and Eritrea (which has sent troops to Somalia to back the UIC).

The Ethiopian invasion is illegal, unjustified and deeply, deeply stupid, but it has Washington’s strong support.

—Copyright

2006 has been a momentous year in Pakistan in more ways than one. There have been a number of developments, some positive others questionable. There has been the toppling of a couple of iconoclasts and a rekindling of the hope of a brighter future after the signing of the Charter of Democracy. But there has been no change in the lifestyle of the majority of the population, and the imbalance of power between the executive and the judicial organs of the state still sticks out like a sore thumb.

However, if one was to single out the overriding theme that the regime has pursued with tunnel vision and single-mindedness of purpose, it would be the extension of its lease of life, the marginalisation of the PPP and its allies in the ARD and the firm resolve of getting the president re-elected for another five-year term. In order to accomplish this, the energies and resources of the nation have been harnessed, much to the discomfort of the opposition which during the course of the year had become increasingly frustrated.

The developments have been both subliminal as well as demonstrative. Welfare projects extolling the virtues of the government, accompanied by a catalogue of achievements, have been unveiled on a regular basis in the media and at large rural gatherings, with either the president or the prime minister in harness.

In the process the nation has witnessed the further entrenchment of the military into the nooks and crannies of civilian life and the further consolidation of their power. The president’s all too frequent appearances on the national glass bucket, with private channels following in hot pursuit, were designed to not only sanctify his position as head of state, and to allow him to continue on his own terms, but also to endorse his claim to continue to guide the destiny of the country for at least another five years. In the process there have been some contentious issues which have not endeared him to the public at large.

During the past year the nation had seen the huge escalation of the war in Waziristan, with attendant losses on both sides, followed by the abrupt and sudden cessation of hostilities. The attacks by government forces at the behest of the Americans raised wide protests throughout the length and breadth of the land and endorsed the view, held not only by the opposition, but also by many of the fringe parties who sympathise with the opposition, that the country had played Judas and bartered its sovereignty for a handful of silver. The demonstrations were at their most volatile in the northwest frontier which is the epicentre of anti-American activity.

Moving from the north to the west, the targeted killing of a tribal chief, Nawab Akbar Bugti, referred to as the Tiger of Balochistan, while it ruffled quite a few feathers in rival clans, sent shock waves through the rest of the country. However, the reaction of the public to the slaying wasn’t quite as impulsive or spontaneous as it was to the skirmishes in the tribal belt.

While aspersions were cast on the methods employed to flush out the inveterate warrior, the fact is that the Bugti tribesmen, whatever the moral and financial justification for their actions might have been, had for a number of years been stubbornly engaged in a systematic destruction of national assets, as gas pipelines were blown up with regular frequency in a spirit of calculated mendacity.

Nevertheless, though Bugtis authoritarianism, his private jails, and the harshness and tyrannical way in which he dealt with his own tribesmen, might have endeared him to other tribal and feudal elements in the country, they certainly did not attract any recruits in the urbanised areas. However, the province is in deep turmoil and it would take a Herculean effort to normalise relations between the centre and the Baloch nationalists.

The passing year in the National Assembly, after a spate of trivial pursuits, witnessed the enactment of the bill designed to protect women against the capricious and belligerent attitude of those members of society who still believe in and follow the norms of a Stone-Age culture. While the gesture certainly chalked up a few points on the president’s popularity chart, it was also significant for two other reasons.

It exposed the retrogressive attitude of the MMA and left them out in the cold, with only members of the Muslim League-N producing the occasional whimper. And it caused deep dissensions in the rank and file of the alliance of religious parties by exposing serious differences that existed between the leaders of two of the most important components in the coalition — the JI and the JUI, on how to handle the situation that had arisen from the passing of the bill. This led to the speculation that the two groups might contest the next election as separate entities.

Both Qazi Hussain Ahmed, the hard-liner, and Maulana Fazlur Rehman, the pragmatist, had earlier threatened to resign from the National Assembly if the bill became law. It was a little theatrical, and Maulana Fazlur Rehman swiftly decided that resigning wasn’t such a good idea. Initially the Jamaat chief stuck to his guns and didn’t show the slightest signs of budging from his principled stand, and even chided the JUI chief whose resolve had began to wilt. And then, in an astonishing move, the Jamaat chief did a political somersault and stated in a meeting in Abbottabad that there was really no point in resigning as it would only weaken the alliance.

Unfortunately that was not the end of the matter. While Maulana Fazlur Rehman distanced himself from the politics of agitation, Qazi Hussain Ahmed went in for the oldest weapon in the armoury of dissent. He started to orchestrate a series of strikes. In Karachi, the demonstrations caused a loss of over a billion rupees for every day the city was paralysed.

This evoked a stern warning from the exiled MQM chief in London who said the people of Karachi would no longer tolerate the dislocation of activity and the destruction of life and property, irrespective of who it was that decided to publicly air a grouse. The point is, no matter how many people join the waltz of the toreadors, it is always the people of Karachi who eventually bear the brunt of every foolish pronouncement, decision, act or endeavour.

Take for instance the elusive Karachi circular railway which surfaced on three separate occasions during the year, once again raising the hopes of the weary strap-hanging commuters. After a series of high-level meetings chaired by different officials in the pecking order, the local politburo announced with startling suddenness that what the people of Karachi really needed was not another railway but more flyovers, flyunders, overpasses and underpasses.

And so the denizens of south Karachi were gifted a subterranean vehicular passage which came to be known as the Clifton Underpass. All went well until the monsoon deluge, when the underpass was suddenly turned into a huge pond, while the totally inadequate drainage system marooned parts of Bath Island and Clifton.

The sudden appearance of a reservoir of dirty water in the underpass led to some interesting exchanges between the Karachi Port Trust, the city government and the KESC, and exemplified the kind of buck passing that characterises much of life in the port city with its clogged drains, broken roads and interminable traffic jams. The last named claimed a few lives when chronically ill patients died in traffic jams caused by VVIP movements, because their ambulances couldn’t reach the hospital in time.

And then there were those depressing statistics which appeared on a daily basis which chronicled the number of cars and cell phones which were being snatched with impunity. The suave governor of Sindh finally enlightened the editors and columnists of newspapers in a specially held briefing in late December. The reason for the alarming escalation in street crimes was that the bulk of the local police force was engaged in the task of combating terrorist activity and therefore had little time for the robbers who were operating with increased sophistication.

Finally as a tailpiece ... there was the sudden and sad demise of The Star, an evening newspaper that for 56 years blitzed corruption in high places, fearlessly fought the battles of the minorities and took up unpopular and lost causes. There was no explanation ... no obituary ... no cause of death. It was like losing an old friend. I listened to Bach that night.