Category: Pakistan

The biggest human flood since 1947

Refugee camp near Mardan
Children line up to receive food in a refugee camp near Mardan. Photograph: Greg Baker/AP

The United States has doubled military aid to Pakistan. Kamal Hyder of Al Jazeera reports that a ‘big catastrophe is unfolding in the Northwest Frontier Province – I have never seen anything on this scale…This is a huge humanitarian crisis; the largest number of internally displaced people in the world, and in the smallest possible time…Anger is growing that the government did not give the citizens adequate warning to escape…Many people are saying their government has abandoned them … what is unfolding here is the tip of the iceberg, the worst is yet to come.’

According to Al Jazeera:

Bodies were reported to be lying in roads, homes reduced to ruins and people left cowering with no means of escape after the military imposed curfews across the region amid the fighting…Hyder reported that those who have fled the fighting are in refugee camps and receiving little government help.

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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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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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Major Foreign Tests Likely Over Next 100 Days

Jim Lobe‘s prognosis for the Obama presidency’s upcoming 100 days:

While Barack Obama has clearly improved Washington’s image abroad during his first 100 days in office, the next 100 will almost certainly prove much more challenging for the new president’s foreign policy.

Putting aside the possibility that the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression could become much more severe than the White House currently anticipates, or that the swine flu currently spreading out of Mexico explodes into a modern-day version of the 1918 epidemic over the coming months, Obama will face a series of difficult decisions on how to deal with a plethora of actual and potential geo-strategic crises.

Continue reading “Major Foreign Tests Likely Over Next 100 Days”

Eric Margolis on Pakistan and Afghanistan

Eric Margolis is one of the world’s leading experts on Afghanistan and Pakistan. He is particularly insightful in this interview with Scott Horton of Antiwar Radio.

Eric Margolis, author of American Raj: Liberation or Domination, discusses the causes of instability in Pakistan, the unrealistic expectations the U.S. places on its puppet governments, the Taliban’s inability to fill the Pakistan power vacuum and why the U.S. can’t resist the lure of imperialism.

MP3 here. (23:59)

Eric Margolis is a regular columnist with the Quebecor Media Company and a contributor to The Huffington Post. He is the author of War at the Top of the World: The Struggle for Afghanistan, Kashmir and Tibet.