Category: Violence

Obama’s bulldozer risks turning the Taliban into Pakistan’s Khmer Rouge

The caption reads Pakistan first
The caption reads "Pakistan first"

Pankaj Mishra is one of the most astute analysts of South Asian politics. In the following he argues that ‘Unless the US president can break his hardline posture, the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan could prove his Vietnam’.

Last month Richard Holbrooke, the US state department’s special representative, met students from Pakistan’s north-west tribal ­areas. They were ­enraged by drone attacks, which – ­according to David Kilcullen, counterinsurgency adviser to General Petraeus – have eliminated only about 14 terrorist leaders while killing 700 civilians. One young man told Holbrooke that he knew someone killed in a Predator drone strike. “You killed 10 members of his family,” he said. ­Another claimed that the strikes had unleashed a fresh wave of refugees. “Are many of them Taliban?” Holbrooke asked. “We are all Taliban,” he replied.

Describing this scene in Time, Joe Klein said he was shocked by the declaration, though he recognised it as one “of solidarity, not affiliation”. He was also bewildered by the “mixed loyalties and deep resentments [that] make Pakistan so difficult to handle”. One wishes Klein had paused to wonder if people anywhere else would wholeheartedly support a foreign power that “collaterally” murders 50 relatives and friends from the air for every militant killed.

Continue reading “Obama’s bulldozer risks turning the Taliban into Pakistan’s Khmer Rouge”

In Pakistan, an exodus that is beyond biblical

Saima is one of 37 refugees now sharing the house of a stranger. Their host, Rizwan Ali, 59, says: 'It would be easier to die than to ask displaced people to leave for the camps'
Saima is one of 37 refugees now sharing the house of a stranger. Their host, Rizwan Ali, 59, says: 'It would be easier to die than to ask displaced people to leave for the camps'

‘Locals sell all they have to help millions displaced by battles with the Taliban’, Andrew Buncombe reports. This is in stark contrast to how Punjab and Sindh reacted. Both have restricted entry of refugees into their territory. In the latter MQM organized two strikes, the first one with the support of the ruling PPP, and Pakhtun property was destroyed, two people burnt alive. It is already generating resentment in the NWFP with more and more coming to see this as a war on the Pukhtuns, as Rustum Shah Mohmand argues here. The response of the non-Pakhtun provinces to the refugee crises has done little to disabuse them. Meanwhile this displaced mass of humanity survives on the generosity of the type described in the caption above. I avoid indulging in any type of group chauvinism but for once, I’m proud of my people.

The language was already biblical; now the scale of what is happening matches it. The exodus of people forced from their homes in Pakistan’s Swat Valley and elsewhere in the country’s north-west may be as high as 2.4 million, aid officials say. Around the world, only a handful of war-spoiled countries – Sudan, Iraq, Colombia – have larger numbers of internal refugees. The speed of the displacement at its height – up to 85,000 people a day – was matched only during the 1994 genocide in Rwanda. This is now one of the biggest sudden refugee crises the world has ever seen.

Continue reading “In Pakistan, an exodus that is beyond biblical”

The Darfur Debate


This debate between Mahmood Mamdani and John Prendergast took place on April 14, 2009 at the School of International and Public Affairs and the Institute for African Studies, Columbia University. I recently finished Mamdani’s new book Saviors and Survivors, which I will be reviewing for The Electronic Intifada shortly. The book is a tour de force brimming with political, historical, and anthropological insights. I would highly recommend it to anyone with interest in the subject.

(Also see James North’s review of the debate, and this follow up post.)

The Taliban bogeyman

Swabi, Pakistan: Buner refugees travel by road as they flee fighting (Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images)
Swabi, Pakistan: Buner refugees travel by road as they flee fighting (Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images)

UNHCR warns that the human exodus from the war-torn Malakand division is turning into the most dramatic displacement since the 1994 crisis in Rwanda. The Guardian reports:

Almost 1.5 million people have registered for assistance since fighting erupted three weeks ago, the UNHCR said, bringing the total number of war displaced in North West Frontier province to more than 2 million, not including 300,000 the provincial government believes have not registered. “It’s been a long time since there has been a displacement this big,” the UNHCR’s spokesman Ron Redmond said in Geneva, trying to recall the last time so many people had been uprooted so quickly. “It could go back to Rwanda.”

Meanwhile, it appears the story has all but disappeared from international media. It had fallen out of the headlines within the first week, now it barely makes the news. The Pakistani english language press (on which most Western ‘experts’ rely) is on most days about as distant from the realities of the North-West frontier as the hacks bloviating in Washington and London. They even have their native Ann Coulter in the execrable Farhat Taj who is given frequent platform to slander anyone who fails to see the virtues of the US regional agenda. In her latest installment she informs readers that there is ‘very little collateral damage’, and that most of the 1,000 dead are ‘confirmed Taliban’. As Gerald Kaufmann would say, these are the words of a Nazi; the woman appears bent on matching the military’s assault on Swat with her own on reality. Continue reading “The Taliban bogeyman”

Ausländer

Before Rage Against the Machine there was Living Colour, an all black comprising of four virtuoso musicians who recorded some of the most politically charged music of the late 80s and early 90s. The vocalist Corey Glover appeared in Oliver Stone’s Platoon (and contrary to what I wrote earlier based on an old Circus magazine article, has no relation to Danny Glover) and the guitarist Vernon Reid I’m told has divine relations. The bassist Doug Wimbish went on to play with guitar legend Joe Satriani and the drummer Will Calhoun was likewise an honored graduate of the Berkeley School of Music.

This anti-Fascist classic was inspired by the rampant anti-immigrant violence against Turks in Germany.

Rumsfeld’s roving band of executioners

Afghan villagers sift through the rubble of destroyed houses after the coalition air strikes in the Bala Baluk district of Farah province, Afghanistan
Afghan villagers sift through the rubble of destroyed houses after the coalition air strikes in the Bala Baluk district of Farah province, Afghanistan

The Independent reports that US Marines Corps’ Special Operations Command, or MarSOC, which was created three years ago on the express orders of Donald Rumsfeld, was behind at least three of Afghanistan’s worst civilian casualty incidents, including the recent bombing in Bala Baluk, in Farah  which killed up to 147 people including more than 90 women and children. This news comes just days after the Special Forces Lieutenant-General Stanley McChrystal, who was himself involved in the coverup of the death of Pat Tillman, was named to take over as the top commander of US and Nato troops in Afghanistan. His has prompted speculation that commando counterinsurgency missions will increase in the battle against the Afghan resistance.

According to the paper MarSOC faces opposition from within the Marine Corps and the wider Special Forces community with an article in the Marine Corps Times accusing the unit of bringing shame on the corps. The US Army commander in Nangahar likewise said he was “deeply ashamed” of the units behavior which is “a stain on our honour”. Apparently at the first sign of danger, these ‘special forces’ pansies panick and call in the airforce to bomb everything within sight. These are apparently the same skills that they are now imparting to the Pakistani military with, as we have noted, very similar consequences.

Continue reading “Rumsfeld’s roving band of executioners”

Caught in the crossfire – the Swat valley’s fleeing families

Farhad Bibi survived the jet attack on her home, but her one-year-old daughter, Hassina, was one of 11 people killed (Declan Walsh)
Farhad Bibi survived the jet attack on her home, but her one-year-old daughter, Hassina, was one of 11 people killed (Declan Walsh)

Declan Walsh seeks out the refugees trapped in a brutal war between Pakistan’s army and the Taliban after an uneasy and short-lived truce.

Army footage shows laser-guided missiles slamming into mountain buildings that explode into a fountain of fragments. Warplanes blast away at Taliban targets in the Swat valley and ground troops push towards the main town, Mingora. When Pakistani forces kill the Taliban, few complain – this is a popular war, for now.

“We are progressing well,” a spokesman, Major General Athar Abbas, said.

Sometimes, though, they hit the wrong target. Jan Nawab, a slightly-built man with a scraggly beard, stood outside the house where he has taken refuge, and sobbed softly under the weight of the calamity that had befallen him.

Last Monday morning a fighter jet screamed over Matta, a Taliban-overrun district in the heart of Swat. Its first bomb landed on Jan Nawab’s home, where his wife, four children, his sister-in-law and two other children, were sheltering. All were killed.

The plane curled in the sky, two witnesses said, and turned for a second pass. The second explosion crushed his neighbour’s house, where a woman and two children were killed. “Eleven people in total,” he said, in a faltering voice, knotting his fingers. Continue reading “Caught in the crossfire – the Swat valley’s fleeing families”

The Writing on the Wall for Obama’s ‘Af-Pak’ Vietnam

Af and Pak at the press conference with Obama

Tony Karon–The Rootless Cosmopolitan–nails it in this excellent analysis of the myopic US policy towards Afghanistan and Pakistan.

There was something almost painful about watching President Barack Obama last week reprising a track from his predecessor’s Greatest Hits when he hosted the leaders of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Just like Bush, Obama invited us to suspend well-grounded disbelief and imagine that Hamid Karzai and Asif Ali Zardari have the intent, much less the capability, to wage a successful war against the Taliban. Then again, there had been something painful even earlier about watching Obama proclaim Afghanistan as “the right war” and expanding the U.S. footprint there, reprising the Soviet experience of maintaining an islet of modernity in the capital while the countryside burns.

It requires a spectacular leap of faith in a kind of superheroic American exceptionalism to imagine that the invasion of Afghanistan that occurred in November 2001 will end any differently from any previous invasion of that country. And it takes an elaborate exercise in self-delusion to avoid recognizing that the Taliban crisis in Pakistan is aneffect of the war in Afghanistan, rather than a cause — and thatPakistan’s turmoil is unlikely to end before the U.S. winds down its campaign next door.

Continue reading “The Writing on the Wall for Obama’s ‘Af-Pak’ Vietnam”

Survivors of the Swat massacre

Fleeing refugees
Families flee from an army offensive against Taliban militants in the Shamuzai area of Pakistan's Swat Valley yesterday. More than half a million refugees have been registered (AFP/GETTY IMAGES)

They have walked for days, forsaking their homes to escape Pakistan’s campaign against the Taliban. And these refugees are the lucky ones. Andrew Buncombe and Omar Waraich report from Swabi.

The old woman fell to her knees in the dust, her arms covering her head to show how she had tried to hide as the shells fell around them. “There was so much noise and chaos,” said the woman, Shirina, who said she was 80. “We walked over the hills on foot. Then we hired a car.” Asked if the bombardment had caused any casualties, she and her family responded as one: “The world was killed. Lots of people were killed. Too many.”

Two days earlier, the family from Pakistan’s Buner district had arrived in this makeshift refugee camp after fleeing the military’s increasingly forceful battle with Taliban militants. There are hundreds of thousands like them, driven from the war zone, and they tell similar tales of fear, anguish and loss. They talk too, of an unknown number of civilians being killed in what is in effect a hidden war.

Continue reading “Survivors of the Swat massacre”

Confusion over Taliban muddies the issues in Pakistan

Refugees Flee Fighting in North-West Frontier Province
A man sits at a camp in Mardan, Pakistan, for those who fled the military offensive in Swat Valley, where helicopters and jets are pounding militant positions. Militants reportedly fired rockets at an army base in Mingora. (Daniel Berehulak / Getty Images)

‘Are fighters religious zealots, thugs or revolutionaries? The perceptions of the public, leaders and U.S. are at odds’, writes Mark Magnier, ‘but the overriding sentiment in Pakistan is that “America created this problem”‘. (thanks Tina)

Reporting from Islamabad, Pakistan — Islamic militants who burn schools and threaten women in the name of religious purity. A righteous force battling corrupt and venal officials. Or gun-waving gangsters who conceal their crimes under a banner of spiritual renewal.

Weeks of turmoil have made it appear as though a unified Taliban is on the march out of the wild northwest, staking out strategic ground for an assault on Pakistan’s heartland.

But who exactly the Taliban is may rest in the eye of the beholder.

Many Pakistanis don’t see the Taliban as much of a threat and are not eager for a confrontation. On the other hand, oversimplification may lead policymakers toward a one-size-fits-all solution that is ineffective — or even counterproductive.

Continue reading “Confusion over Taliban muddies the issues in Pakistan”