Month: May 2009

East Pakistan Redux

Pakistani Refugees flee fighting between Pakistan Army forces and the Taliban
Buner refugees travel by road as they flee fighting between the Pakistan army and the Taliban near Swabi, Pakistan. Photograph: Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images

Pakistan faces full scale war against the Taliban. ‘The Pakistani army are readying for an urban battle unprecedented in the short history of its battle against the Taliban’, Sana al Haq and Declan Walsh report. And we all know how urban battle’s end. (thanks Domenyk)

(This report curiously reproduces some of the same language and even the same interviewee from an earlier AP report without attribution.)

The skiing season at Malam Jabba, Pakistan‘s only ski resort, is over. Yesterday the pistes echoed with the sound of explosions as fighter jets screamed overhead, part of the Pakistan military’s intensifying campaign to dislodge the Taliban from the Swat Valley.

An hour’s drive away in Mingora, the war-racked valley’s main town, the Taliban and army are readying for an urban battle unprecedented in the short history of Pakistan’s battle against the Taliban.

Pakistan’s prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, today said the army was fighting for “the survival of the country”, speaking after an emergency cabinet meeting.

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Cynicism among Pakistani refugees

Internal refugees in the camp in Swabi
Displaced families in Swabi are living in tents supplied by the UN

The Pakistani Prime Minister now appears to have borrowed Hillary Clinton’s language as to how much of a threat the ‘Taliban’ pose to the country’s survival. This in my view is very myopic, and could easily turn into a self fufilling prophecy. As is evident from the following BBC report, the people may not like the ‘Taliban’, but they like the military even less. I find it unlikely that state will ever recover from the illwill it has sown.

The tent cities are growing in the district of Swabi, in north-west Pakistan: swelled with the thousands fleeing the fighting in nearby Buner district.

Last month, Taleban from the troubled district of Swat moved south into Buner and overran it, occupying government offices and police stations, and closing down locally popular Sufi shrines which they oppose.

The army moved in a couple of weeks ago to counter them, and is now engaged in heavy fighting in the area.

According to Shahram Khan, the head of Swabi district government, around 150,000 people have fled Buner during the last few days. This is three times the figure of 40,000 previously provided by the federal government.

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Afghans to Obama: Get Out, Take Karzai With You

Patrick Cockburn writes of the impotency of Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s seven years in power. Karzai was at the State Department this week for a meeting with US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and his Pakistani counterpart Asif Ali Zardari to discuss a joint strategy against terrorism, though the visit was inconveniently soured by the killing of as many as 100 Afghan civilians or more by US military strikes. However awkward, Karzai refused to allow the this symbolic display of ‘unity’ pass by and expressed his gratitude for Clinton “showing concern and regret” and added that “we hope we can work together to completely reduce civilian casualties in the struggle against terrorism.” Yet on Friday he adopted a markedly different tone to the media and demanded an end to US air strikes. With elections looming clearly Karzai recognises the political implications of his past grovelling and schmoozing with the Americans. Biting the hand that feeds you springs to mind.

When President Hamid Karzai drove to Kabul airport to fly to America earlier this week, the centre of the Afghan capital was closed down by well-armed security men, soldiers and policemen. On his arrival in Washington he will begin two days of meetings, starting today, with President Barack Obama and Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari about their joint efforts to combat the Taliban. Karzai is also to deliver a speech at the Brookings Institution think tank on “effective ways of fighting terrorism.”

The title of his lecture shows a certain cheek. Karzai’s seven years in power since the overthrow of the Taliban in 2001 have been notable for his failure to prevent their resurgence. Suppose the president’s motorcade this week had taken a different route and headed, not for the airport, but for the southern outskirts of Kabul, he would soon have experienced the limits of his government’s authority. It ends at a beleaguered police post within a few minutes’ drive of the capital. Drivers heading for the southern provincial capitals of Ghazni, Qalat and Kandahar nervously check their pockets to make sure that they are carrying no documents linking them to the government. Continue reading “Afghans to Obama: Get Out, Take Karzai With You”

Swat fighting threatens Pakistan army unity

The fighting between the Pakistani army and the Taliban in Swat valley can have great ramifications for the country.

If casualty figures rise to unacceptable levels, both from a military and a public point of view, the fear is that it could divide the army as well as the nation.

Al Jazeera’s Sohail Rahman reports from Islamabad.

A Catastrophe Foretold

Pakistani refugees fleeing fighting in Swat, Buner and Lower Dir queue for rations in a relief camp at Mardan yesterday (DANIEL BEREHULAK/GETTY IMAGES)

There is an exodus of Pakistani civilians as battle against Taleban rages, Zahid Hussain reports. They may yet succeed, but it appears no one seems to have told the Pakistani government the first rule of counterinsurgency: it is not the driving out of opposition that constitutes success, it is the ability to hold on the gains. The militants could have been neutralized through the use of sparing and targeted force in conjunction with a political settlement. This one is guaranteed to backfire.

With jet fighters screeching overhead, tens of thousands of people fled Pakistan’s once-idyllic Swat Valley yesterday, increasing a humanitarian crisis that threatens to undermine public support for the military campaign against the Taleban.

The UN says that more than 200,000 people have left Swat in the past few days, and another 300,000 are on the move or trying to leave after the collapse of a three-month-old peace deal between the Government and the Islamists this week. They will join the estimated 555,000 who have fled other conflict zones in northwestern Pakistan since August, taking the total number of displaced people in the region to more than one million.

As government forces claimed to have killed 143 militants since Thursday, The Times spoke to dozens of refugees arriving — bedraggled, exhausted and crammed into buses, vans and trucks — at a makeshift camp in Jalala, just outside Swat.

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Kabul’s New Elite Live High on West’s Largesse

Patrick Cockburn reports about the self-enriching practices of the Western ‘donor’ community in Afghanistan. As despicable as it may be to siphon off wealth from one of the poorest countries in the world, it really ought to come as no suprise. It is but the continuation of the the multi-billion international development industry’s standard practice. Graham Hancock, a former World Bank employee and one of the first to expose the endemic corruption of the aid policies of the IMF, World Bank and USAID in the late 1980s, aptly calls them the “Lords of Poverty“.

Kabul – Vast sums of money are being lavished by Western aid agencies on their own officials in Afghanistan at a time when extreme poverty is driving young Afghans to fight for the Taliban. The going rate paid by the Taliban for an attack on a police checkpoint in the west of the country is $4, but foreign consultants in Kabul, who are paid out of overseas aids budgets, can command salaries of $250,000 to $500,000 a year.

The high expenditure on paying, protecting and accommodating Western aid officials in palatial style helps to explain why Afghanistan ranks 174th out of 178th on a UN ranking of countries’ wealth. This is despite a vigorous international aid effort with the US alone spending $31bn since 2002 up to the end of last year.

The high degree of wastage of aid money in Afghanistan has long been an open secret. In 2006, Jean Mazurelle, the then country director of the World Bank, calculated that between 35 per cent and 40 per cent of aid was “badly spent”. “The wastage of aid is sky-high,” he said. “There is real looting going on, mainly by private enterprises. It is a scandal.”
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Pakistan has world’s attention now

Veteran journalist Eric Margolis on the overblown hysteria in Washington and the affluent quarters of Islamabad about the Taliban threat. This context is useful for understanding why the present Pakistani military operation in Malakand portends catastrophic consequences. Margolis’s comment about the rebellious Pashtun being seen as heroes may be true of those fighting in Afghanistan but not of the ones across the border. In Pakistan they are led mostly by extreme elements who have little support. Nevertheless, as Anatol Lieven observed after a recent visit to the region, ‘the level of support for them there is such that crushing them completely would take a huge campaign of repression.’

PARIS — The Taliban are coming! The Taliban are coming!

French troops in Afghanistan were just rocketed by Taliban.

Last week, a bunch of lightly-armed Pashtun tribesmen rode down from the Malakand region on motorbikes and in pickup trucks and briefly swaggered around Buner, only 100 km from Pakistan’s capital, Islamabad.

Hysteria erupted in Washington. Hillary Clinton, still struggling through foreign affairs 101, warned that these scruffy tribesmen were a global threat.

Pakistan’s generals dutifully followed Washington’s orders by attacking the tribal miscreants in Buner, who failed to obey the American raj.

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Israel ‘targeted UN buildings’ during Gaza war

The UN has accused Israel of failing to respect its property and assets during the Gaza war early this year.

In a damning report, a UN panel review of nine incidents blamed the Israeli army’s direct and intentional strikes in seven of them, and recommended further investigations into alleged war crimes.

UN chief denies Gaza report ‘watered down’

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