A force of 28,000 Pakistani army personnel is at the moment conducting an operation in South Waziristan. The operation was preceded by months of aerial bombing, and as the following Al Jazeera reports show the human cost in terms of lives lost, and displacement is high. A BBC crew earlier found the refugees so outraged with the Pakistani military’s operation that they were chanting slogans in support of Hakimullah Mehsud, the new leader of the Pakistani Taliban, and Maulvi Faqir Muhammad and other TTP leaders.
I leave Kamra (*) in Punjab at 7pm in a rickety old bus without air-conditioning. A pleasant wind rushes through the open windows: the late summer evening has mercifully sucked the humidity out of it. People who can’t afford air-conditioned transportation escape the infernal elements by travelling at night. And the passengers are mostly a destitute lot. When a man in the seat in front gets up I notice that his sādr — a cotton shawl used by Pakhtun men variously as a turban, windbreaker or bedspread — covers the long rip running down the back of his kameez. Next to that rip is an older tear crudely stitched together.
In two hours we are in Peshawar. For a third of each day the city has no electricity. It’s lights out as we arrive. I get off a stop early and decide to walk — though I have been advised against walking in western clothes outside the city centre. A pharmaceutical company salesman was killed a short while back for arriving at a hospital wearing pants, shirt and tie. But I feel safe despite my hiking outfit, backpack and sandals: I haven’t been in Peshawar long enough to think of it as anything but the city I grew up in. Wetook our safety for granted.
'Everything is coming up roses in Pakistan' -- ForeignPolicy.com
The day that I arrived in Pakistan mid-September, the frontpage story on Foreign Policy magazine’s ‘Af-Pak Channel’ carried the exuberant headline ‘Everything’s coming up roses in Pakistan’. In the next four days the frontier capital of Peshawar would be hit by five rocket attacks. The week after there would be a car bombing. And things have only gotten worse since.
There was much triumphalism about the Pakistani army’s decisive action in Swat. Some were even encouraged to claim ownership of the war; it wasn’t an American war anymore, they said, it was ‘our’ war. The Pakistani liberal elite exhorted the military to press on and carry out similar actions in the Federally Administered Tribal Agencies (FATA). The militants seemed demoralized; it was was time to finish the job. It was not to be.
Looks like the drone attack which purportedly eliminated the Taliban leadership killed yet more innocents. Hakimullah Mehsud is alive and well, and gave a press conference right in Srarogha. ‘In truth we don’t want to fight the Pakistan Army’, said Mehsud, ‘Our aim is to remove the Americans from this region and to fight the Americans’.
AlJazeeraEnglish — 06 October 2009 — This week, Pakistan’s interior minister said that military operations carried out against the Taliban in the Swat valley, and North and South Waziristan had “broken the back” of the Taliban.
However, South Waziristan is home to an estimated 10,000 Taliban fighters and it was here that Hakimullah Mehsud, the new Taliban leader, ended rumours that he had been killed by a recent drone attack.
You know that things for the Western occupation of Afghanistan have reached a pretty pass when the most devastating indictment of its failures comes from a former colonial manager. Here is Rory Stewart in the London Review of Books (the world’s best publication by far ) presenting what may be the most trenchant critique of the of the US-UK occupation of Afghanistan, but as can be expected from someone who had earlier played a key role in managing the UK occupation of Southern Iraq, he limits it to the handling of the occupation.
We are accustomed to seeing Afghans through bars, or smeared windows, or the sight of a rifle: turbaned men carrying rockets, praying in unison, or lying in pools of blood; boys squabbling in an empty swimming-pool; women in burn wards, or begging in burqas. Kabul is a South Asian city of millions. Bollywood music blares out in its crowded spice markets and flower gardens, but it seems that images conveying colour and humour are reserved for Rajasthan.
Barack Obama, in a recent speech, set out our fears. The Afghan government
is undermined by corruption and has difficulty delivering basic services to its people. The economy is undercut by a booming narcotics trade that encourages criminality and funds the insurgency . . . If the Afghan government falls to the Taliban – or allows al-Qaida to go unchallenged – that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can . . . For the Afghan people, a return to Taliban rule would condemn their country to brutal governance, international isolation, a paralysed economy, and the denial of basic human rights to the Afghan people – especially women and girls. The return in force of al-Qaida terrorists who would accompany the core Taliban leadership would cast Afghanistan under the shadow of perpetual violence.
When we are not presented with a dystopian vision, we are encouraged to be implausibly optimistic. ‘There can be only one winner: democracy and a strong Afghan state,’ Gordon Brown predicted in his most recent speech on the subject. Obama and Brown rely on a hypnotising policy language which can – and perhaps will – be applied as easily to Somalia or Yemen as Afghanistan. It misleads us in several respects simultaneously: minimising differences between cultures, exaggerating our fears, aggrandising our ambitions, inflating a sense of moral obligations and power, and confusing our goals. All these attitudes are aspects of a single worldview and create an almost irresistible illusion.
From the indispensable TomDispatch.com: Chalmers Johnson comments on the new $736 million US embassy in Pakistan and offers ‘A Modest Proposal for Garrisoned Lands‘.
The latest in Chalmer Johnson's Blowback Trilogy.
The U.S. Empire of Bases — at $102 billion a year already the world’s costliest military enterprise — just got a good deal more expensive. As a start, on May 27th, we learned that the State Department will build a new “embassy” in Islamabad, Pakistan, which at $736 million will be the second priciest ever constructed, only $4 million less, if cost overruns don’t occur, than the Vatican-City-sized one the Bush administration put up in Baghdad. The State Department was also reportedly planning to buy the five-star Pearl Continental Hotel (complete with pool) in Peshawar, near the border with Afghanistan, to use as a consulate and living quarters for its staff there.
Unfortunately for such plans, on June 9th Pakistani militants rammed a truck filled with explosives into the hotel, killing 18 occupants, wounding at least 55, and collapsing one entire wing of the structure. There has been no news since about whether the State Department is still going ahead with the purchase.
Democracy Now’s important interview with Imran Khan on the recent drone attacks and the general failure of US policy in Pakistan. Khan is the chairman of the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (Pakistan Justice Movement), and is one of the very few politicians who dissented from the military operation in Swat which has now displaced more than 3 million people. (He is of course also a retired cricketing legend who led Pakistan to world cup victory in the early 90’s.) He offers a useful antidote to the otherwise unbroken parade of native informers who spew nonsense on mainstream media, progressive or conservative. Khan on the other hand provides useful context and realist alternatives to the present impasse. (Also see Pankaj Mishra’s excellent piece on the failed US policy that we ran here earlier).
The video clips for parts two and three and the transcript over the fold.
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