The refugees from Swat — in the north of Pakistan, near the Afghanistan border — are victims of a Pakistani Army offensive, backed by the U.S., against forces of the Taliban, which operate in both countries. Under pressure from the U.S., the Pakistani military broke a ceasefire arrangement with the Taliban and is carrying out a scorched-earth assault — with the excuse that this is the only way to flush out Taliban fighters. But the civilian population is paying a terrible price.

The nightmarish scene in Swat and other areas in the north marks the latest stage of Pakistan’s crisis, brought to a boil by the U.S. escalation of its war in Afghanistan, which is spilling across the border. But it also a sign of the deepening contradictions of Pakistani politics following the downfall of the U.S.-backed strongman, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, last year amid growing unrest.

Musharraf was replaced by Asif Ali Zardari, the husband of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto and leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party. But Zardari, who has a long record of corruption, has quickly lost credibility. He only reinstated Pakistan’s Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry — whose ouster by Musharraf spurred a mass movement spearheaded by lawyers — after huge protests in March forced his hand. Now, with the attacks in Swat, the Pakistani military is regaining the initiative.

Saadia Toor, an assistant professor of Anthropology and Social Work at Staten Island College and part of the group Action for a Progressive Pakistan, talked to Ashley Smith about the situation in Pakistan today.

Ashley Smith: For last few weeks, the media have been filled with reports of the “imminent threat of the Taliban,” and then coverage of Pakistani military assault on the Taliban in Swat. Why has the Pakistani military abandoned the former peace and launched this attack?

Saadia Toor: Finally, we’re beginning to see a lot of good analysis coming out of the left media. Earlier, the U.S. government’s rhetoric was being picked up uncritically. We’ve seen scaremongering in the media over the imminent takeover of Pakistani nukes by the Taliban.

The U.S. has created this bizarre new moniker “Af/Pak” as a way to cover over their expansion of the war from Afghanistan into Pakistan. Building consent for this expansion has been what all the State Department, Pentagon and media propaganda has been about in the last few weeks.

To address your question about why the Pakistani Army abandoned the peace, we have to step back and understand the relationship between the Army and the Taliban. The Pakistani military has not been interested in dealing with the Taliban because the Taliban don’t appear as a threat to them. The military’s primary and existential obsession is with India, and that’s where the majority of the Pakistani Army is deployed. The Pakistani Army knows that the Taliban is, in part, its own creation, and it can deal with them.

Moreover, the military knows very well that the Taliban are not in any sense an existential or military threat to the country. The army therefore allowed the Taliban to enter Swat. They accepted that Swat and some of the other border provinces are incompletely integrated into the country, and allowed the Taliban to exert its control.

The army has been under massive pressure from the U.S. to deal with the “Taliban problem,” and the fact that the Taliban broke the peace deal allowed the army to prove to its American masters that it’s a reliable ally. So now the military has driven back the Taliban quite easily from Buner and pummeled them in Swat.

The Pakistani Army isn’t concerned about what their attack on the Taliban would do to the civilian population in Swat, so what we have now is a humanitarian nightmare, with over a million internally displaced civilians.

Why did the Obama administration push Pakistan to abandon the peace deal?

Saadia Toor: The U.S. doesn’t respect any Pakistani rules or laws. It has its own imperial ambitions and priorities in the region. So it pressured Pakistan to essentially rip up the peace deal, and go on this brutal offensive.

The peace deal with the Taliban that was struck by the ruling party in the North West Frontier Province (NWFP) was pragmatic. The Taliban had been upping its threat in NWFP. It had killed ruling politicians and threatened their families. The civilian ANP government in the province also got no support from the army, and so was backed into a corner and had to accept the peace deal.

But the U.S. told the Pakistani government to ignore that deal after the Taliban attack on Buner.

Still, that’s only the superficial cause for the U.S. to back the assault on the Taliban. Tom Hayden has a fabulous piece in The Nation entitled “Understanding the long war” that goes a long way to explaining what U.S. ambitions are.

To understand those, you have to step back and examine the whole “war on terror.” It’s in reality a renewal of the “Great Game” of rivalries in the region over who’s going to control the oil and natural gas resources. Beyond that geopolitical battle, the military industrial complex has a material interest in perpetual warfare.

The U.S. wants to wind down its occupation in Iraq, which it sees as a distraction, and push ahead with a much larger scenario — what the U.S. State Department calls the arc of instability, from North Africa to the Middle East to South and Central Asia. The U.S. is gearing up for, in the shocking words of one official, 50 years of warfare in this area.

The question of resources is central. This is the new Great Game — between the U.S., Russia, China, India, Pakistan and Iran, to name a few — that we have been observing since the beginning of the war in 2001. The U.S. had planned a pipeline to go from Central Asia through the Pakistani province of Balochistan. It saw Afghanistan as strategically important in these designs.

Balochistan, in particular, is under the radar right now, but it’s going to be a key region in the imperial competition. The Chinese have already been active in Balochistan; they helped build one of the ports. To counter this Chinese presence, the CIA has overrun Balochistan. With the help of the Pakistani military, it’s also also been training forces for black ops in Iran.

You said that the Pakistani Army is primarily focused not on the Taliban, but India. How has the recent tilt by the U.S. toward India affected this?

Saadia Toor: The U.S. has cultivated India, which has been happy with this new relationship, and shifted toward a much greater alignment with the U.S. India has made a huge break with its traditional non-alignment posture of the past.

We saw that come together dramatically right after 9/11, when India, the U.S. and Israel formed a block of so-called democracies against terror. We saw the reactivation of this alignment after the terror attacks in Mumbai. Sadly and tragically, the attack in Mumbai gave India the boost it needed to convince the U.S. to pay attention to India’s strategic needs in relationship to Pakistan.

So in the State Department’s Af/Pak policy document, you see that India isn’t considered one of the regional players that needs to sit together and be told what to do. India has bought itself out of this trap. It’s not going to be asked to do anything.

For example, the U.S. isn’t going to pressure India to do anything about Kashmir. Because extremist groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, as well as the Pakistani military, are so Kashmiri-focused, the logical thing would be to force India and Pakistan to sit down with the Kashmiris to work out a solution that respects the Kashmiri people’s wishes.

Of course, if that were to happen, the Pakistani military wouldn’t change, nor would Lashkar-e-Taiba or Jaish-e-Mohammed disband. But it would result in stability along the border with India.

Since India has managed to extricate itself from these regional talks, it has avoided getting pressured toward a solution in Kashmir. But this, in turn, guarantees an ongoing conflict between Pakistan and India over Kashmir, at the expense of the region, and especially the people of Kashmir.

Couldn’t U.S. plans backfire and cause of further destabilization not only of Afghanistan, but now Pakistan as well?

Saadia Toor: We can’t underestimate the hubris of an imperialist state like the U.S. Despite eight years of war, occupation and counter-insurgency, and seeing that they aren’t working and are, in fact, backfiring, U.S. thinking doesn’t seem to be shifting at all.

In Pakistan, the U.S. policy could really destabilize the country. A military coup is a real possibility. The military is always happy to step in and overrule civilian democracy. The reason that it hasn’t done so is because it suffered such a severe public relations crisis in the last few years of the Musharraf regime. It did not feel it could come back.

But given the way things are going — especially all the finger-wagging by Secretary of State Hilary Clinton against the civilian government for being fragile and incapable of handling things–it seems like the U.S. might support a return to military dictatorship.

The U.S. has always been happier dealing with the Army, whether it has been in power or not. And the Pakistani Army’s most important backer is the U.S. state. The U.S. has fed the army, nurtured it and allowed it to become the monster it is. Certainly, the Pakistani military has had no support from below — that all comes from above, and from the U.S. in particular.

The army suffered this huge PR crisis under Musharraf because it was seen as doing the U.S.’s dirty work — which, to be honest, it has been doing for 50 years. So it retreated. Gen Ashfaq Kayani has been very happy to work behind the curtain of the civilian government, because the military ultimately knows that it’s always in control. It will do whatever it has to, and let the blame fall at the feet of the civilian government.

But if events turn in such a direction and the army is successful in winning back moral authority, it could take power. Part of the hysterics about “the Taliban are coming; the Taliban are coming” was drummed out for the U.S., and part was for the domestic consumption of the Pakistani elite.

The liberal elite supported the Pakistani Army in attacking the Taliban. This is just after having pushed Musharraf out of power.

There’s a constant vacillation among the liberal elite between democratic rule and the Pakistan Army. So knowing that the Pakistani military helped create and backed the Taliban in the first place, the liberal elite supported the attack. This is dangerous, since it is re-legitimizing one of the most reactionary forces in Pakistan — the military.

Recent opinion polls in Pakistan show the majority of Pakistanis are concerned about the economic mess, and not terrorism. What do you make of this?

Saadia Toor: What you see in these polls is the split between the haves and have-nots.

The aim of the army has been to win back the liberal elite. Of course, the military would love the support of the masses. But the liberal elite is what matters to them. And on the ground, conditions are so dire for the masses of the people that nothing the Pakistani military is doing is going to shore up mass support for it.

For example, people in Swat say that before this current operation, the Pakistani military targeted the Taliban. In the U.S. and Pakistani media, military leaders played out a drama for our consumption — they pretended to attack the Taliban, when, in fact, they weren’t.

The Pakistani state has always provided safe haven to the Taliban, as well as Lashkar-e-Taiba and Jaish-e-Mohammed, even when Musharraf declared them illegal. That was only done to please the U.S. It was obvious these groups were never repressed. When the military raided the offices, no one was there. When it arrested people, it wasn’t the leadership. This was all a drama staged for American consumption.

In Swat, the Pakistani military was doing nothing but terrorizing civilians. On top of that, those who lived close to the border with Afghanistan have had to deal with the U.S. drone strikes. So the masses of people feel completely helpless and angry at all sides.

The Pakistani military will never be able to win over those people who actually experienced what is happening on the ground. And certainly those people are not Taliban supporters either, since they have experienced the terror of the Taliban.

But the elite sitting in the cities are really terrified of the Taliban. Now, if one could assume the Taliban could become a major force in those cities, there would be something to be afraid of. But that’s not going to happen. My worry is that this whole fear of the Taliban will function to make that the Pakistani elite willing to accept anything else — from the former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, with all of his connections to the fundamentalists, to the military itself.

How has U.S. pressure for Pakistan to attack the Taliban affected the lawyers movement that developed in opposition to Musharraf after he got rid of Pakistan’s chief justice? Now the movement has had to confront the new president, Asif Ali Zardari, the corrupt husband of assassinated political leader Benazir Bhutto who succeeded Musharraf. Does the lawyers’ movement offer hope for progressive social change in Pakistan?

Saadia Toor: To begin with, some of leadership of the lawyers movement did come from the upper class, but the main section came from the middle class–the petty bourgeoisie–and extended on down from there.

So when the confrontation between the lawyers movement and Zardari came to a head, the liberal elite was against the Long March to demand that Zardari restore the chief justice. The elite’s biggest fear is the Taliban — that is, this religious takeover of Pakistan.

Never mind that they have been fine with the general religiosity that has flooded Pakistan since General Zia-ul-Hak’s dictatorship. They felt that it had no effect on their lives; they could go to their clubs and say, “So what if the rest of Pakistan is becoming more and more religious.”

The liberal elite was thus complicit with this spread of Islamism. It failed to step up and make secularism mainstream the way it used to be. In the 1970s, the political discourse was so different than it is now. This liberal elite therefore supports Zardari uncritically because it sees him as the only secular force.

Musharraf made his whole political career by saying that if it weren’t for him, the fundamentalists would take over. He sold this very effectively to the U.S., but also to the upper-class liberals. They very much saw him as their man until that was untenable.

This same kind of thinking is now behind the uncritical support for Zardari, because the elite wrongly believe that if it weren’t for him, the whole country would be taken over by the Taliban. The upper-class liberals were therefore critical of the Long March because they thought it was attacking Zardari, and any action or criticism would therefore open the floodgates for the fundamentalists or the army.

How has the left in Pakistan responded to the military operation against the Taliban?

Saadia Toor: The left is very fragmented and small in Pakistan. That, of course, has its own history because of its complete decimation under the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Zia-ul-Haq. Among some elements of the left, there is tremendous confusion about the situation.

For example, I can speak about the Communist Party of Balochistan and its positions. It has been anti-Taliban and pro-secular, and trying to speak from the position of the Swati people. But the discussion for a long time on its e-mail list was that it should support the army going in and attacking the Taliban.

This is a disastrous position. It does not take a very sophisticated analysis to see that the army stands to gain from this whole operation. The action is designed to build up support for the army and show that it is an effective force that needs more money.

Of course, there are always small groups and individuals which have taken a principled stand.

There have also been a few altercations between the principled left and the liberal elite on this issue. The elite’s position has been pro-army. The principled leftists have argued against army action because the army is deeply involved in creating this mess, isn’t interested in addressing the main issue of the Taliban, and the whole action is window-dressing. So there were actual altercations at public meetings between these two positions.

What should the principled left position be?

Saadia Toor: The principled position is always to be anti-army — not just on an abstract level, but drawing on the actual history of the relation of the army to groups like the Taliban and the Pakistani people. If you’ve been paying any attention to these things, it boggles the mind that someone would call on and expect the army to protect the people. It shows the ideological confusion.

It’s not so long ago that we were marching against the army for its cozy relationship with the US, the “war on terror,” and the disappearances under Musharraf. I don’t understand the basis on which the left would be calling on the Pakistani Army to solve the current problem.

I think a principled position would denounce the army for its disinterest in dealing with these groups, for actually cultivating these groups in Afghanistan and Pakistan, for its continuing extraction of money from the U.S., and for its ongoing mobilization against India.

Now with India’s investment in Afghanistan growing, the Pakistani Army investment in the Taliban is even higher. The Pakistani Army supported the Taliban against the Northern Alliance, which they perceived to be supported by India.

With India giving aid to Afghanistan, establishing an embassy there, and supporting infrastructural projects, the Pakistani Army will have a greater stake in supporting forces like the Taliban as a counterweight. The Pakistani Army is locked in this conflict with India, which is increasingly a sub-imperial power in the region.

What should the left say about the Taliban?

Saadia Toor: It’s sad and shocking to hear people talk about the Taliban as an expression of class anger. At one level, that analysis is really troubling because it presumes the Taliban has a vast amount of popular support. But if you talk with refugees coming from Swat, it’s clear that the Taliban doesn’t. We must oppose the Army, but clearly not because we support the Taliban. A principled left position is to oppose both.

A left position must talk about the disenfranchised and the federal issues in Pakistan, as well as expose the Pakistani military and the entire ruling elite’s complete disinterest in its people. The Pakistani state has never honored the rights of its federated units. [In the war of 1971], the ruling West Pakistani establishment was happy to let go of East Pakistan [now Bangladesh], rather than give in to its demands for a more balanced relationship between the center and the provinces. And East Pakistan was not a small federated unit; it was the majority of the population at the time.

The West Pakistani establishment constructed an image of East Pakistan as a hotbed of Hindus and communists, and during the army action in 1971, the army brutalized the population of East Pakistan, for which the Pakistani state has never apologized. That’s the real face of the army and its relation to the Pakistani people.

A left position should focus also on the developing class anger and struggles among the peasants, as well as among the proletariat across whole of the country, including in Punjab. These struggles must be reported and not ignored. The fact that they are ignored has a huge impact on the balance of power in the political sphere.

If you don’t acknowledge that these struggles exist and that they matter, then it can seem as if the Islamists are the only opposition to injustice and imperialism. That’s simply not the case, as the massive lawyers movement, as well as these many local class struggles, prove.

What should the U.S. antiwar movement say about Obama’s new surge in Afghanistan and his expansion of the war into Pakistan?

Saadia Toor: In liberal circles, Iraq is looked upon as the bad war, of course. That was Obama’s main argument. He was never an antiwar candidate. He was against the war in Iraq to some extent as a distraction.

But now, after his election victory, we’ve seen the split in the antiwar movement between people who opposed the entire “war on terror” and those who just opposed the Iraq war. So there is no effective antiwar movement to counter Obama’s escalation of the war into Afghanistan and Pakistan.

In this context, the American military is having a field day. It’s obvious for anyone to see that Obama has carried over the personnel, the ideologies and the policies of the Bush Administration.

The Obama administration is certainly trying to repackage essential continuity with the Bush administration’s policy in Afghanistan and Pakistan. But there isn’t a whole lot of finessing that needs to be done to sell this to the American public, since there is a whole lot of agreement that the Afghan war is the moral war, and that Pakistan is thought of as an untrustworthy and reluctant ally that is crawling with militants.

In this context, the antiwar movement must educate people about the true situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It must demand that the drone attacks stop, and that the U.S. get out of Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan.

The rhetoric of the Obama administration is disingenuous; the concern is not about getting bin Laden if it ever was. They have had eight years to do this and haven’t succeeded. Their real ambitions have little to do with bin Laden, and are actually much larger.

As Pepe Escobar, Tom Hayden and Gareth Porter have argued, the U.S. is planning a 50-year engagement, a new Great Game for control of the region — and that is not something that the U.S. antiwar movement should endorse. The antiwar movement should not let Obama continue this imperial policy of aggression into Afghanistan, Pakistan and potentially lots of other states.

Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
the blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
in the streets!

— Poem by Pablo Neruda

About a month before Barack Obama announced his candidacy for the presidency of the United States, former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski appeared on PBS’s Charlie Rose Show and was asked whether he thought Obama would be a good choice for president. Brzezinski paused for a minute, peered at Rose out of the corner of his eye, and answered, “Just think of the symbolism.” As soon as he said that, Brzezinski and Rose broke out into laughter as though they were sharing a private joke.

Brzezinski was right, of course. Obama was the perfect choice for president. Not because of his experience. He had none. He was a two year senator with a resume’ small enough to fit on the back of a matchbox. Still Obama had what Brzezinski and Co. were looking for, symbolism: the kind of symbolism that connected him to people around the world and made them feel like one of their own had finally clawed their way to the top. Even better, Obama was a charismatic populist who could fill stadiums with adoring fans and put a benign face on America’s interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq. What more could Brzezinski hope for? After eight years of dragging “Brand America” through the mud, the country would finally get the emergency facelift it needed and begin to restore its battered image as the world’s indispensable nation.

For leftists, Obama has been a total bust. He’s escalated the war in Afghanistan, increased the cross-border bombings of Pakistan, hemmed and hawed about prosecuting war crimes, refused to actively lobby House members to make it easier for workers to organize (EFCA), and surrounded himself with bank industry reps who’ve committed $12.8 trillion to sinking financial institutions with no assurance that the money would be repaid. Apart from a trifling bill on stem cells, Obama has done absolutely zero to confirm his bone fides as a liberal. The truth is, Obama is neither liberal nor conservative; he’s simply an inspiring orator and a skillful politician who has no strong convictions about anything. If he achieves greatness, it will be because he was thrust into a crisis he couldn’t avoid and reluctantly acted in the best interests of the American people. That possibility still exists, although it seems more unlikely by the day.

Foreign leaders are clearly relieved to see the last of George W. Bush, and they appear to be willing to give Obama every opportunity to mend fences and break with the past. But Obama has made little effort to reciprocate or show that he’s serious about real change. The emphasis seems to be more on public relations than policy. More on glitzy photo ops, grandiose speeches and gadding about from one capital to another, than ending the chronic US meddling and militarism. Where’s the beef or is it all just empty posturing?

No one’s ready to write off Obama just yet, but he needs to show he’s the real deal by taking steps to ratchet down the war machine and reign in the corporate elites and bank vermin. But is it really possible for one man — however well-meaning — to change the course of a nation by standing up to the gaggle of racketeers who pull the strings from behind the curtain? Keep in mind, America’s history of violent interventions, unprovoked wars, color-coded revolutions and coup d’ etats has a long pedigree that stretches from Bunker Hill to Baghdad. That river of blood did not begin with George Bush and it won’t end with Barack Obama. Every generation has produced its own litany of crimes, from Wounded Knee to Nagasaki to My Lai to Falluja. In Harold Pinter’s Nobel acceptance speech, the playwright invokes one such incident that epitomizes the pattern of hostility that has been repeated over and over again wherever the Washington mandarins detect opposition to their iron-fisted rule.

Harold Pinter, Nobel Acceptance Speech:

The United States supported the brutal Somoza dictatorship in Nicaragua for over 40 years. The Nicaraguan people, led by the Sandinistas, overthrew this regime in 1979, a breathtaking popular revolution.

The Sandinistas weren’t perfect. They possessed their fair share of arrogance and their political philosophy contained a number of contradictory elements. But they were intelligent, rational and civilized. They set out to establish a stable, decent, pluralistic society. The death penalty was abolished. Hundreds of thousands of poverty-stricken peasants were brought back from the dead. Over 100,000 families were given title to land. Two thousand schools were built. A quite remarkable literacy campaign reduced illiteracy in the country to less than one seventh. Free education was established and a free health service. Infant mortality was reduced by a third. Polio was eradicated.

The United States denounced these achievements as Marxist/Leninist subversion. In the view of the US government, a dangerous example was being set. If Nicaragua was allowed to establish basic norms of social and economic justice, if it was allowed to raise the standards of health care and education and achieve social unity and national self respect, neighboring countries would ask the same questions and do the same things. There was of course at the time fierce resistance to the status quo in El Salvador.

I spoke earlier about ‘a tapestry of lies’ which surrounds us. President Reagan commonly described Nicaragua as a ‘totalitarian dungeon’. This was taken generally by the media, and certainly by the British government, as accurate and fair comment. But there was in fact no record of death squads under the Sandinista government. There was no record of torture. There was no record of systematic or official military brutality. No priests were ever murdered in Nicaragua. There were in fact three priests in the government, two Jesuits and a Maryknoll missionary. The totalitarian dungeons were actually next door, in El Salvador and Guatemala. The United States had brought down the democratically elected government of Guatemala in 1954 and it is estimated that over 200,000 people had been victims of successive military dictatorships.

Six of the most distinguished Jesuits in the world were viciously murdered at the Central American University in San Salvador in 1989 by a battalion of the Atlacatl regiment trained at Fort Benning, Georgia, USA. That extremely brave man Archbishop Romero was assassinated while saying mass. It is estimated that 75,000 people died. Why were they killed? They were killed because they believed a better life was possible and should be achieved. That belief immediately qualified them as communists. They died because they dared to question the status quo, the endless plateau of poverty, disease, degradation and oppression, which had been their birthright.

The United States finally brought down the Sandinista government. It took some years and considerable resistance but relentless economic persecution and 30,000 dead finally undermined the spirit of the Nicaraguan people. They were exhausted and poverty stricken once again. The casinos moved back into the country. Free health and free education were over. Big business returned with a vengeance. ‘Democracy’ had prevailed.

But this ‘policy’ was by no means restricted to Central America. It was conducted throughout the world. It was never-ending. And it is as if it never happened.

The United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. I refer to Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile. The horror the United States inflicted upon Chile in 1973 can never be purged and can never be forgiven.

Hundreds of thousands of deaths took place throughout these countries. Did they take place? And are they in all cases attributable to US foreign policy? The answer is yes they did take place and they are attributable to American foreign policy. But you wouldn’t know it.

Analysis

Pinter’s speech is a somber indictment of US foreign policy; a policy which is now cloaked behind the rock-star facade of Barack Obama. Nothing has changed and, perhaps, nothing will change. The same barbarous campaign that thrived under Bush has been passed along to Obama intact. Wherever there is resistance to US ambitions; there lies the enemy. Whether its Marxists in Bogota, nationalists in Kosovo, Bolivarians in Caracas, Shia militias in Beirut, Islamic moderates in Mogadishu or Quakers in Toledo. They’re all enemies, every one of them, and they need to be dealt with.

Obama is no fool; he knows he’s being used. He knows he wasn’t chosen for his enlightened views on health care and stem cells. He was picked because the men in charge needed a new poster boy to hide behind while they carry out their illicit activities. Obama is not so much of a Commander in chief as he is master illusionist, diverting attention from the stealth war that goes on relentlessly with or without his consent. Here’s Pinter again:

“The crimes of the United States have been systematic, constant, vicious, remorseless, but very few people have actually talked about them. You have to hand it to America. It has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force for universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis . . . It’s a scintillating stratagem.”

Consider how the news was shaped to make it look like the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan were carried out for altruistic reasons. Thus, the war in Afghanistan became “Operation Enduring Freedom,” stressing the selfless generosity of bombing a country into oblivion and reinstating the thuggish warlords to power. The same strategy was used for the invasion of Iraq, which was celebrated as “liberation from a brutal dictator.” Liberation which cost the lives of over 1 million Iraqis and the displacement of 4 million more. Still, no one in the UN or so-called international community has pressed for removing the US from the Security Council or prosecuting its leaders for war crimes. It’s a testimony to the success of the US media in upholding the “tapestry of lies” of which Pinter speaks. Under Obama, the charade has only gotten worse. The coverage of the war has stopped entirely. War? What war? What matters now is Obama’s cheery banter with Jay Leno, or Michelle’s well-proportioned arms or Malia’s adorable Portuguese Waterdog. America is whole again. Let the killing resume.

Pinter:

What has happened to our moral sensibility? Did we ever have any? What do these words mean? Do they refer to a term very rarely employed these days – conscience? A conscience to do not only with our own acts but to do with our shared responsibility in the acts of others? Is all this dead? Look at Guantanamo Bay. Hundreds of people detained without charge for over three years, with no legal representation or due process, technically detained forever. This totally illegitimate structure is maintained in defiance of the Geneva Convention. It is not only tolerated but hardly thought about by what’s called the ‘international community.’ This criminal outrage is being committed by a country, which declares itself to be ‘the leader of the free world’. Do we think about the inhabitants of Guantanamo Bay? What does the media say about them? They pop up occasionally — a small item on page six. They have been consigned to a no man’s land from which indeed they may never return. At present many are on hunger strike, being force-fed, including British residents. No niceties in these force-feeding procedures. No sedative or anesthetic. Just a tube stuck up your nose and into your throat. You vomit blood. This is torture. What has the British Foreign Secretary said about this? Nothing. What has the British Prime Minister said about this? Nothing. Why not? Because the United States has said: to criticize our conduct in Guantanamo Bay constitutes an unfriendly act. You’re either with us or against us.

Obama doesn’t need to solve the world’s problems. He doesn’t have to reverse global warming or slow peak oil, cure AIDS or end world hunger. All he needs to do is meet the minimal requirement of his job as president, which is to deliver justice to his people. That’s why the prosecution of Bush for war crimes is more important than any other issue on the docket. Justice precedes everything; it’s the thread that keeps the social fabric stitched together. Justice for the victims who were killed in their homes with their families while they were sleeping or eating dinner. Justice for the people who were bombed in wedding parties or going to work or at the mosque praying to God. That’s what people want from Obama. Justice, nothing more. The Reverend Martin Luther King said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.” It’s up to Obama follow that arc and take at least one step on the path of legitimacy, accountability and justice.

Pinter:

How many people do you have to kill before you qualify to be described as a mass murderer and a war criminal? One hundred thousand? More than enough, I would have thought. Therefore it is just that Bush and Blair be arraigned before the International Criminal Court of Justice.

It’s highly unlikely that a black man with a background in community organizing really believes that expanding the war in Afghanistan is the right thing to do. Nor is it likely that he supports wiretapping, the crackdown on immigrants, penalizing sellers of medical marijuana, trillion dollar bank bailouts or “enhanced” interrogation. He is merely reading from the script that he has been given. But as the economic crisis deepens and the country becomes more radicalized and politically unstable, that script will have to be tossed aside. Obama will have plenty of opportunities to shrug off his handlers and show what he’s really made of. Perhaps he is great man after all.

Pinter: “When we look into a mirror, we think the image that confronts us is accurate. But move a millimeter and the image changes. We are actually looking at a never-ending range of reflections. But sometimes a writer has to smash the mirror — for it is on the other side of that mirror that the truth stares at us.”

Go ahead, Barack. Smash the mirror.

Some evidence indicates, moreover, that the top officials in the Barack Obama administration now see the program more as an incentive for the Pakistani military to take a more aggressive posture toward the militants rather than as an effective tool against the insurgents.

Although the strikes have been sold to the U.S. public as a way to weaken and disrupt al Qaeda, which is an explicitly counter-terrorist objective, al Qaeda is not actually the main threat to U.S. security emanating from Pakistan, according to some analysts. The real threat comes from the broader, rapidly growing insurgency of Islamic militants against the shaky Pakistani government and military, they observe, and the drone strikes are a strategically inappropriate approach to that problem.

“Al Qaeda has very little to do with the militancy in the tribal areas of Pakistan,” said Marvin Weinbaum, former Afghanistan and Pakistan analyst at the Bureau of Intelligence Research at the U.S. Department of State and now scholar-in-residence at the Middle East Institute.

John McCreary, a senior intelligence analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency until his retirement in 2006, agrees with Weinbaum’s assessment. “The drone program is supposed to be all about al Qaeda,” he told Inter Press Service (IPS) in an interview, but in fact, “the threat is much larger.”

McCreary observes that the targets in recent months “have been expanded to include Pakistani Pashtun militants.” The administration apparently had dealt with that contradiction by effectively broadening the definition of al Qaeda, according to McCreary

Ambassador James Dobbins, the director of National Security Studies at the Rand Corporation, who maintains contacts with a range of administration national security officials, told IPS in an interview that the drone strikes in Pakistan are aimed “in the short and medium term” at the counter-terrorism objective of preventing attacks on Washington and other capitals.

But as they have shifted to Pakistani Taliban targets, Dobbins said, “To degree the targets are insurgents and are Pakistanis not Arabs it would be correct to assess that they are part of an insurgency.” That raises the question, he said, whether the drone program “is feeding the insurgency and popular support for it.”

The drone program cannot even be expected to be a decisive factor in al Qaeda’s ability to operate, according to McCreary. “All you can do with drones is decapitate leadership,” McCreary told IPS in a recent interview. “Even in relation to al Qaeda’s organizational dynamics, it has only limited, temporary impact.”

McCreary warned that the drone strikes will cause much more serious problems when they increase and expand into new parts of Pakistan as the administration is now seriously considering, according to an April 7th New York Times article. “Now al Qaeda is fleeing to other cities,” said McCreary. “The program is escalating and having ripple effects that are incalculable.”

McCreary said one of the longer-term consequences of the attacks is “the public humiliation of the Pakistan Army as a defender of the national patrimony.” That effect of striking Pakistani targets with U.S. aircraft is “the least understood dimension of the attacks, the most discounted and most dangerous”. McCreary said the attacks’ “ensure that successive generations of Pakistani military officers will be viscerally anti-American.”

Administration officials have defended the drone strikes program as necessary to weaken and disrupt al Qaeda to prevent terrorist attacks, and officials have leaked to the media in recent weeks the fact that the program has killed nine of 20 top al Qaeda leaders.

But the Pakistani government leaked data last week to The News in Lahore showing that only 10 drone attacks out of 60 carried out from Jan. 29, 2009 to Apr. 8, 2009 actually hit al Qaeda leaders, while 50 other strikes were based on faulty intelligence and killed a total of 537 civilians but no al Qaeda leaders.

The drone strikes have been even less accurate in their targeting in 2009 than they had been from 2006 through 2008, according to the detailed data from Pakistani authorities. Of 14 drone strikes carried out in those 99 days, only one was successful, killing a senior al Qaeda commander in North Waziristan and its external operations chief. The other 13 strikes had killed 152 people without netting a single al Qaeda leader.

Dobbins, speaking to IPS before the Pakistani data on drone strikes was released, said it was difficult for an outsider to evaluate the benefits of the program but that “we can assess that there is a significant price that is being paid” in terms of the impact on Pakistani opinion toward U.S. efforts to stem the tide of the insurgency.

Dobbins said one of the reasons for the continuing drone attacks, despite the high political price, is that “it is an incentive aimed prodding the Pakistani government.” He said he believes the United States would be happy to trade off the strikes in return for a more effective counterinsurgency campaign by the Pakistani government.

Further bolstering that interpretation of the objective of continued drone strikes is a report, in the same story in The News, that the most recent strike took place only hours after U.S. officials had reportedly received a rejection by Pakistani authorities Apr. 8 of a proposal for joint military operations against militant organizations in the tribal areas from U.S. South Asia envoy Richard Holbrooke and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen, who were visiting Islamabad.

Other analysts suggest that the program has acquired bureaucratic and political momentum because it a politically important symbol that the wars in Afghanistan and Pakistan are against al Qaeda and because the United States has no other policy instrument to demonstrate that it is doing something about the growth of Islamic groups that share al Qaeda’s extremist Islamic militancy.

McCreary believes that the program is related to the fear of the Obama administration that it would be unable to get support for operations in Afghanistan if it didn’t focus on al Qaeda. “I think it was a way to link Afghanistan operations to al Qaeda,” he said.

“That suggests to me that the tactic for motivating domestic support is influencing the policy,” said McCreary. The former senior DIA analyst added that the drone strike program “has acquired its own momentum, which is now having immense consequences.”

Weinbaum told IPS in an interview that the drone attacks are being continued, “primarily because we’re enormously frustrated, and they represent the only thing we really have.”

Earlier this month, we came perilously close to such a flashpoint when the Sri Lankan cricket team was attacked by a highly organized group of terrorists in Lahore.

It is worth noting that the Sri Lankan cricket team was in Pakistan to fill in for the Indians, who had withdrawn from the tour after the Mumbai attacks. But imagine that the Indian government had not canceled the tour — not an entirely unthinkable proposition, given that the two countries have played each other an incredible forty seven times in the last five years.

Imagine that it was the Indian cricket team making that fateful journey in the tour bus near Gadaffi stadium.

For millions of Indians, their cricketers are like Michael Jordan and Jesus Christ rolled into one, precocious bundles of talent delivering salvation on a daily basis. Even if one of those cricketers were to find themselves at the wrong end of a stray bullet, the Indian government would have little choice but to declare war — especially given that this is an election year.

In the event of an all-out war the first casualty (before the millions that will tragically follow in a battle between two nuclear rivals) would be the American war on terror. Pakistan would redeploy its troops from the troubled Afghanistan region to its Eastern border. An American military already strapped for resources would find it difficult, if not impossible to tackle a resurgent Taliban.

A dangerous reduction in Pakistani troop levels fighting the Taliban is not mere conjecture.

Most recently, in the immediate aftermath of the Mumbai terror attacks, the Pakistani army, fearing a reaction from India, moved over 10,000 troops from the western border to the Indian front.

In 2001, after armed terrorists launched an attack on the Indian Parliament, Pakistan redeployed over 120,000 troops that were otherwise engaged in fighting the Taliban to the Line of Control in Kashmir in response to an Indian build-up of over half a million soldiers.

To take a self-serving view (consistent with the last two decades of American foreign policy), a reduction of hundreds of thousands of soldiers is a luxury the American military can ill-afford.

To avoid an irreversible setback to the war on terror, President Obama should deliver on his election promise of adopting a twenty first century approach towards Pakistan. (During the debates, South Asians chuckled with glee, as he memorably became the first American Presidential candidate ever to pronounce “Pakistan” correctly, even as McCain grappled with a fictional “Qardari.”)

There have already been some significant breaks with the past.

Within a few months of assuming office, Hillary Clinton has called for a “big-tent” meeting with all players who have a stake in Afghanistan. “If we move forward with such a meeting,” she said, “It is expected that Iran would be invited, as a neighbor of Afghanistan.”

On a global footing, the Obama administration needs to take this progressive strategy one step farther to the East and make room for India, who like Pakistan, is a also victim of terrorism in the region (Several members of the Lashkar-E Taiba, the perpetrators of the Mumbai attacks operate freely in the North Western province).

A similar global outlook needs to be fostered even within Pakistan. A twenty first century approach would focus not merely on the troubled North West Frontier Province. It would also encourage the dismantling of terrorist infrastructures across the country — from the Al Qaeda camps in Swat to the LET training camps in far away Punjab.

A twenty first century approach would look beyond mere ideology. Surprisingly, the terrorists can teach us in this regard. They have consistently abandoned rigid fundamentalist positions to achieve more secular objectives. To give just one example, noted analyst B. Raman pointed out after the attacks on the Sri Lankan team that the Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (HUM), a member of the International Islamic Front (IIF) of Al Qaeda has a history of collaboration with the Sri Lankan LTTE — even though the LTTE has a track record of persecuting Muslims.

The Obama administration has already signaled a willingness to look beyond narrow geographies and ideologies. Let’s hope they stay the course. They could make headway in taking on the Taliban. They could deliver meaningful change to the people of India, who live every day not also in fear of a terror attack, but also in dread of an irrational response from their government. They could provide relief to the long-suffering population of Pakistan that has been an innocent victim of international crossfire since the 1980s. And they can inject life back again into the beautiful game of cricket, with which its silly points, leg slips and rest days has no reason to get mixed up in the messy affairs of the modern world.

Arun Krishnan is the author of The Loudest Firecracker, a coming of age novel set in urban India and the host of “Learn Hindi from Bollywood Movies,” the number one rated Indian podcast on iTunes.

Pakistan is already feeling the heat generated by the imperialist Dracula and the jihadi Frankenstein.

Despite promises that the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) would lay down their arms once the Army ceased operations in Swat Valley, the state’s capitulatory compact has instead provided militants with an excuse to exact vengeance on their opponents whilst establishing new training camps for pressed-ganged “recruits.”

Call it Pakistan’s “Year Zero” when “everything changed.” Not that the Americans, the state or the corporate grifters who preside over IMF-dictated privatization schemes and debt payments to foreign banks give a hoot.

The New York Times reported March 6, that just days after the truce was signed “a member of a prominent anti-Taliban family returned to his mountain village, having received assurances from the government that it was safe. He was promptly kidnapped by the Taliban, tortured and murdered.”

Pir Samiullah, a moderate religious leader who took up arms against the Taliban–it should be noted against “advice” by the Army–organized a local militia that fought the TTP and booted the miscreants from their mountain village. His cousin told the Times, that after his abduction the man was held for five days before his body was dumped February 25. “There was no skin on his back,” he said. “We had advised him, ‘You shouldn’t go, you shouldn’t trust.’”

On the ground, the situation for women is immeasurably worse. Dawn reported March 7: “Terrified, locked up at home and courting death if they go out alone, women oppressed by extremists in Swat have nothing to celebrate on International Women’s Day.”

Which is precisely the regime the purveyors of religious obscurantism and murderous sectarianism intend to impose throughout Pakistan, with or without blessings from Washington. After all, what better means to facilitate the drug trade or other illicit activities controlled, or “taxed,” by TPP “emirs” chauffeured about in up-scale Land Rovers or Mercedes!

With death threats against “immoral” women proliferating like flies around a corpse, the prospects for education, health care, or even the simple pleasures of going shopping with friends have all but evaporated. One ninth grade pupil told Dawn, “My mother told me I can do anything, but my inner soul is shattered.”

And with a recently concluded 17-point “peace” agreement with the TTP, the state and nominally “secular” parties such as the bourgeois Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) and Awami National League (ANL)–which trounced the fundamentalist Army clone, Jamaat-i-Islami party in last year’s national elections–has agreed to close shops, ban music, “obscene” videos and in general, make life a living hell.

As the state’s writ continues to contract in the face of the Taliban offensive, women, workers, religious minorities are under attack. On Thursday, a bomb partially destroyed the mausoleum of the 17th century Sufi poet Rahman Baba, in NWFP’s provincial capital Peshawar. Why? Because “women were coming to pray there,” according to the Los Angeles Times.

I. A. Rahman, the director of Pakistan’s independent Human Rights Commission told the L. A. Times, “They’ve given them a yard and now they’re taking 2 kilometers.”

Needless to say, the majority of Swat residents are terrified of TTP armed thugs and have voted on the compact with their feet, refusing to trek back to their homes, exiles in their own country. The prospects of ever returning to a semblance of a “normal” life are grim, particularly after TTP “emirs” announced in a local mosque “that every family in the village would have to contribute one young man to their ranks, according to the The New York Times. Some “peace.”

Mullah Omar Enters the Frame

While corporate media have focused on last month’s truce in Swat Valley, signed-off by the Zardari regime and the Army with the TTP’s sociopathic “emir” Maulana Fazlullah, little mention has been made of the strategically far more critical agreement hammered out by Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar.

That pact, forged between the TTP and their on-again, off-again allies in the North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) and the Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA) will have far-reaching ramifications for both nations.

While the Obama administration plans to deploy 17,000 additional American troops between now and May in Afghanistan, with additional deployments possibly numbering 30,000 by years’ end, Washington is desperate to wrest control of large swathes of territory controlled by the Taliban and the TTP. It would appear however, that Omar has other plans.

On February 21, The News reported that “three prominent Pakistani militant commanders … on Friday set aside their differences and promised to jointly fight their enemy in future.” A “senior militant commander” said that Pakistani and Afghan Taliban leaders,

had played a role in resolving differences among the three militant commanders. He said a 14-member Shura was formed after their final meeting that would comprise banned Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) chief Baitullah Mehsud, Hafiz Gul Bahadur, Taliban commander in North Waziristan and Maulvi Nazeer, militant commander in South Waziristan. (Mushtaq Yusufzai, “Top militant commanders resolve rift,” The News, February 21, 2009)

In a further sign that stepped-up attacks are in the offing, Mullah Omar and the “emir” of the Afghan-Arab database of disposable Western intelligence assets, Osama bin Laden, demanded that allied jihadi outfits in North and South Waziristan “immediately stop their attacks on the Pakistani security forces,” The News reported February 24.

According to the Lahore-based newspaper, Omar first sent an envoy and then wrote a letter to the TTP’s leadership council led by Mehsud, admonishing the group for attacks on their “Muslim brethren.”

He told them that if they really want to participate in Jihad, they must fight the US and Nato troops inside Afghanistan because their attacks on the Pakistani security forces are undermining the objectives of the war against the invaders and cause of the Taliban movement.

“If anybody really wants to wage Jihad, he must fight the occupation forces inside Afghanistan,” the source quoted Mullah Omar as having told the TTP leaders. “Attacks on the Pakistani security forces and killing of fellow Muslims by the militants in the tribal areas and elsewhere in Pakistan is bringing a bad name to Mujahideen and harming the war against the US and Nato forces in Afghanistan.” (Mazhar Tufail, “Mullah Omar orders halts to attacks on Pak troops,” The News, February 24, 2009)

The elusive Taliban leader, a protégé of Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence agency (ISI), was groomed by leading circles within the Army’s military and intelligence bureaucracy to seize the initiative in the 1990s, and bring an end to the chaos stoked by internecine fighting amongst former mujahedin chieftains squabbling over the spoils of that destroyed nation.

By 1996, when the Taliban swept out of Pakistan’s NWFP and seized Kabul, providing what Pakistan’s elite (including the Bhutto and Sharif families) believed would be “strategic depth” vis-à-vis imperialist arch-rival India, the move was applauded by the Clinton administration and the multinational petroleum giants whom they served. It would appear that Omar is reprising that role today.

The Guardian reported March 3 that as a result of February talks, the warring factions that previously fought over lucrative smuggling routes have launched a new organization, the Shura Ittihad-ul-Mujahideen (Council of United Holy Warriors, SIM).

According to Daily Times, SIM issued a pamphlet late last month vowing to target the militant groups three enemies: “Obama, Zardari and Karzai”. While Mehsud and the others have promised to stop attacking the Army, Daily Times points out that “the announcement of ‘Zardari’ as a target while letting the Pakistan army off the hook is a menacing signal for Pakistani politics.”

Pakistan is already under heavy pressure by the United States to crack down on the host of jihadi groups threatening to spread the TTP’s writ outside the tribal areas into major population centers. This will prove a daunting task considering that many alleged “holy warriors” are creatures of the ISI and organized crime-linked outfits who profit from the heroin trade, illegal logging, as well as lucrative extortion and kidnapping rackets.

In this context, Omar’s demand that jihadists cease attacks on Pakistani security and police and concentrate their fire instead on American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, may represent maneuvers within ISI and the Army to pressurize the weak Zardari administration into doing their bidding, i.e. supporting the return of a fundamentalist Afghan government that would provide Pakistan with its ever-elusive “strategic depth.” This was hammered home by Omar:

“Our aim is to liberate Afghanistan from the occupation forces and death and destruction inside neighbouring Pakistan has never been our goal,” he added. The source said according to Mullah Omar, the US was devising a new strategy and adopting new tactics to crush Mujahideen in Afghanistan so the Taliban, too, must forge unity in their ranks, and instead of operating in Pakistan, they must concentrate on actions against the US and Nato forces. (The News, ibid.)

The United States, ever-eager then as now, to secure oil and gas pipelines across Afghanistan for U.S. energy companies once courted the fundamentalists. Despite the upcoming “surge,” America may do so once again if dictated by ubiquitous “facts on the ground.”

On February 20, the Canadian Broadcasting Company reported that U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, a Bush holdover, said that the U.S. would be willing to accept a similar deal in Afghanistan if the Swat pact succeeded.

Gates, speaking at last month’s NATO conference in Krakow, Poland said: “If there is a reconciliation, if insurgents are willing to put down their arms, if the reconciliation is essentially on the terms being offered by the government, then I think we would be very open to that. We have said all along that ultimately some sort of political reconciliation has to be part of the long-term solution in Afghanistan.”

How would such a “reconciliation” play itself out?

Al Jazeera reported February 27, that “secret negotiations are under way to bring troops fighting alongside the Taliban into Afghanistan’s political process.” Negotiations between “Taliban-linked mediators, Western officials and the Afghan government,” might see the return of none other than Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the narcotrafficking leader of the ISI and CIA’s favorite gang during the anti-Soviet jihad, Hezb-i-Islami.

Believed to be directing attacks against NATO and American forces from northwest Pakistan, Hekmatyar “would first be offered asylum in Saudi Arabia, under the proposal being backed by the British government.” Indeed, Al Jazeera reveals the talks have progressed to the point that

Ghairat Baheer, one of Hekmatyar’s two son-in-laws released from the US prison at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan in May last year after six years in custody, is involved in the process, according to reports.

Baheer, an ambassador to Pakistan in the 1990s, was given a visa to travel to London by British authorities last month.

Humayun Jarir, a Kabul-based politician and son-in-law of Hekmatyar, is also said to have been involved. (”Secret talks with Taliban under way,” Al Jazeera, February 27, 2009)

This is rich though unsurprising, given the Americans’ love affair with a man once described as the world’s most powerful drug trafficker. And considering alleged ties between President Hamid Karzai’s brother, Ahmed Wali and the heroin trade, perhaps a deal with Hekmatyar isn’t as crazy as it seems at first blush.

According to The New York Times, “several American investigators said senior officials at the D.E.A. and the office of the Director of National Intelligence complained to them that the White House favored a hands-off approach toward Ahmed Wali Karzai because of the political delicacy of the matter.”

So, if Hekmatyar is ready to come on-board and kick his al-Qaeda pals to the curb–as the U.S. is preparing to do with former “best friend forever” Hamid Karzai–why not let bygones be bygones? Stranger things have happened.

Whose Hand Is Behind the Lahore “Cricket” Attacks?

Inside Pakistan however, it appears some militants haven’t gotten Omar’s memo. On March 3, 12 heavily-armed gunmen staged a brazen attack in Lahore, Punjab’s capital and Pakistan’s second largest city.

While the bare facts are known, the question of who the perpetrators are–and from a parapolitical perspective, who controlled them–remains as of this writing a mystery. There are however, any number of likely suspects. To recapitulate Tuesday’s events:

A convoy transporting Sri Lanka’s national cricket team to a Test match against Pakistan’s cricketers was ambushed by AK-47 toting terrorists who fired rockets and grenades at the entourage, killing six policemen as well as the driver of another van. 20 people were wounded including six of the athletes, two of whom remain hospitalized with bullet wounds.

Dawn reports that all of the attackers escaped and that police reinforcements from a nearby police station “only a couple of minute’s walk” from Qaddafi Stadium, arrived only after the gunmen had fled. Large quantities of hand grenades, rockets launchers, AK-47s, suicide jackets, plastic explosives, pistols and walkie-talkies were recovered near the scene of the attack. The paper avers,

The large arms cache indicated that the attackers were prepared to hold out law enforcers for a longer period and raised suspicion that it might actually have been an attempt to hijack the bus carrying the Lankan cricketers.

If the ambush, however bloody, was all that the attackers were looking for they did not need to burden themselves with all the weapons they were carrying. Even though the police later on displayed the large seizure of the weapons, they refused to comment on the possibility of it being an attempt at kidnapping. (Muhammad Faisal Ali, “Sri Lankan team narrowly escape terror attack,” Dawn, March 3, 2009)

Television images of backpack-toting assailants firing at the convoy bore striking similarities to last November’s Mumbai terror attacks by Lashkar-e-Toiba (LET) militants, aided and abetted by Dawood Ibrahim’s ISI-linked organized crime gang.

Indeed, on February 26, The Guardian IPS that “India wants to declare Pakistan a terrorist state” and that the Lahore assault “is related to that conspiracy.”

Similar charges were made, though more circumspectly, by Rehman Malik, the Prime Minister’s Interior adviser, who claimed that the LET had “no links” to the attacks. He did however, manage to imply according to Dawn, that “the involvement of foreign hands in the incident cannot be ruled out.” However, Asia Times reports,

Rather, judging by what was shown on Pakistani television, the attack is the hallmark of those that were waged by militants (many of them Punjabi) against Indian security forces in Indian-administered Kashmir up until a few years ago. They were trained by the Indian cell of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).

In 2005-06, these militants joined forces with the Pakistani Taliban and the Afghan resistance after Pakistan closed down their training camps in Pakistan-administered Kashmir, a move that changed the dynamics of the war theater in the region. (Syed Saleem Shahzad, “‘Cricket’ attack marks a shift in Pakistan,” Asia Times Online, March 4, 2009)

And considering the uncanny similarities to other recent attacks, The Independent avers,

The numerous failings fuelled speculation that the attack might have been, at least in part, an “inside job”. In previous terror attacks in Pakistan, the perpetrators appeared to have considerable intelligence about their targets. Car bombers have struck at army and anti-terror police headquarters in the past two years without the slightest hindrance. (Omar Waraich, “Suspicions grow that attack was an ‘inside job’,” The Independent, March 5, 2009)

Stressing the close interconnections amongst Pakistan’s security services, organized crime outfits and the shadowy networks of allied jihadi groups, security analyst Robert Emerson told The Independent, “There are various elements within the Pakistani military and intelligence set-up who appear to have special relationships with militant groups. There are also links between political and criminal organisations. It is a complex and shadowy world with conflicting agendas.”

Lashkar also has connections to the murky world of Pakistani cricket. Dawood Ibrahim, a Muslim gangster boss in Mumbai, is believed to have been responsible for organising a series of bombings at the Indian city in 1993, killing 250 people, after which he fled the country for Pakistan. Ibrahim, named by the US State Department as a “global terrorist with links to al-Qa’ida and Lashkar-e-Taiba”, and a major trafficker of Afghan opium, has also been accused of playing a part in the last Mumbai attack.

Victor Ivanov, the head of the Russian counter-narcotics service, said: “Evidence suggests that the regional drug baron Dawood Ibrahim had provided his logistics network to prepare and carry out the Mumbai terror attacks.” (Kim Sengupta, “Strike had hallmarks of Mumbai massacre,” The Independent, March 4, 2009)

What is not mentioned however, is that Ibrahim’s D-Company enjoyed historical ties with the American CIA and was an asset who assisted Washington’s arms smuggling to Afghan “holy warriors” during the anti-Soviet jihad. After the CIA’s favorite criminal financial institution, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) went belly-up in the early 1990s, Dawood took over “management” of the port of Karachi from BCCI’s “Black Network” of enforcers and assassins.

As I reported in mid-December, D-Company enjoys protected status afforded by the ISI and that Ibrahim’s extensive smuggling networks along the Indian coast were in all probability used to infiltrate LET thugs into Mumbai.

Asia Times investigative journalist Raja Murthy was told by Lahore-based journalist Amir Mir that “Dawood’s underworld connects and business ventures are extensive. And he sublets his name in Pakistan, Thailand, South Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates, among other countries, to franchises in the fields of drug trafficking and gambling dens.”

With contacts amongst serving and retired ISI officers, LET, other jihadi outfits and the near boundless riches afforded by his drug trafficking, smuggling and gambling empire, one cannot discount Dawood’s hand as a “plausibly deniable” asset capable of providing the Lahore attackers with intelligence, arms and the means to escape the area after Tuesday’s brazen assault.

Other analysts suggest that Tuesday’s attack was carried out to free LET and other militant leaders arrested in the wake of the Mumbai atrocities. Investigative journalist Amir Mir writes that authorities “are trying to ascertain whether it was an attempt by the Lashkar-e-Taiba militants to hijack the bus carrying the team and to bargain the release of their chief operational commander Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi.”

Lakhvi is currently detained in a Rawalpindi jail for his alleged role in the Mumbai attacks. Mir reports,

The authorities say the Lashkar militants involved in the Lahore assault might have in their mind the successful hijacking of an Indian passenger aircraft in 2000, which eventually compelled the BJP government in India to release Maulana Masood Azhar, the chief of the Jaish-e-Mohammad who had been serving term in an Indian jail on terrorism charges. (Amir Mir, “Was attack on Sri Lankan team a bid to release Lakhvi?”, The News, March 5, 2009)

In December 1999, Indian Airlines flight 814 was hijacked and flown to Afghanistan where 155 passengers were held hostage for eight days. In return for the release of three militants incarcerated in Indian prisons, the hostages were finally freed although one passenger was brutally murdered by the assailants.

In addition to JEM leader Azhar, Omar Saeed Sheikh, a reputed ISI-MI6 asset was also freed. Sheikh, currently under a death sentence in Pakistan for the 2002 murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, was a former student at the London School of Economics. In the early 1990s, he joined Harkat ul-Ansar (Movement of Supporters of the Faith, HUA) and fought in Bosnia in support of U.S.-NATO destabilization operations against the former Yugoslavia.

But as with the multitude of shadowy jihadi factions operating in Pakistan, JEM and HUA were creatures of the ISI and the Army. Indeed, The History Commons reports that HUA was “a Pakistani militant group originally formed and developed in large part due to Pervez Musharraf in the early 1990s.” After their release, Azhar and Sheik both returned to Pakistan, received a hero’s welcome and toured the country “for weeks under the protection of the ISI.”

Shortly before the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York and Washington, it is alleged that Sheikh, an ISI asset and al-Qaeda operative wired $100,000 to lead hijacker Mohamed Atta. Some versions hold that Sheikh did so with express authorization by ISI chieftain Mahmoud Ahmad. The History Commons avers,

In 2001, the flight’s captain, Devi Sharan, will say that the hijackers of his plane used techniques similar to the 9/11 hijackers, suggesting a common modus operandi. The hijackers praised Osama bin Laden, had knives and slit the throat of a passenger, herded the passengers to the back of the plane where some of them used cell phones to call relatives, and one hijacker said he had trained on a simulator. (”Profile: Maulana Masood Azhar,” The History Commons, no date.)

All of which begs the question: If the Lahore commando which attacked the Sri Lankan cricketers employed an operational script similar to Mumbai’s, and are connected to LET or other militants yet unknown, what role did ISI, retired officers or other elements of Pakistan’s deep state, including organized crime assets play in the terrorist atrocity?

Just as importantly, with the obvious motive of destabilizing the country and sowing chaos, it cannot be ruled out that the United States will seize on the attack and the Swat compact with the TTP, to pressure the Army’s General Headquarters in Rawalpindi, and particularly Chief of Staff General Asfaq Parvez Kayani, newly returned from “comprehensive multilateral talks” in Washington, to once again leave the barracks.

The emergence of a highly-trained and motivated far-right jihadi base in major population centers is an ominous development for Pakistan’s democratic opposition. With the weak and increasingly isolated, Zardari government planning to take stern administrative and police measures against pro-democracy protesters planning to shut Islamabad down next week, the potential for attacks by Army-backed provocateurs, under color of the “enforcement of Islamic law,” cannot be discounted.

This first part in the essay deals with legal and historical issues that define Palestinians’ struggle for independence, then describes their repercussions on the current status of the occupation. In the second and final part, I will present examples from the history of Palestinian unarmed struggle and then compare it with the Indian one. I will argue that the agreeable and reasonable sounding frame of the superiority of peaceful resistance sets up a false dichotomy. Presenting satyagraha as the exemplary approach to liberation is deceptive on two levels. First, India’s independence was not achieved through non-violence alone. And second, while inspirational and useful on many levels, it is not sufficient as sole guide or solution to achieving Palestinian liberation.

The Prevailing Western Mainstream Media Perspective on Palestinian Resistance Today

Language and the framing of issues is always the privilege of the strong. This applies to international and legal attitudes concerning national liberation movements. At the height of their occurrence in the 1960s and 1970s, there was an international consensus on the necessity and legal right of oppressed people living under colonial and/or racist states to resist their status by any means available to them, including armed conflict. However, since the 1980s, there has been a shift away from focusing on ultimate legitimate goals of national liberation to a discussion of methods. Concomitantly, there was an interjection of a growing set of rules of military engagement that the international community wanted to apply to even non-state actors who were fighting for their independence. Israel, being a colonial and ethnically-based state and seeking to curb the use of armed struggle against itself, is in the camp that marks as “aggression” and “terroristic” any and all active resistance to its occupation of Palestinian land. Thus in terms of language and its function in rationalizing or justifying events, there is a sharp contrast between descriptions of “armed conflict” depending on which side of the aisle one is on: on the one hand, “national liberation movements” and “freedom fighters” and on the other, “terrorists” and “pre-emptive strikes.”

The justice of the initial demands for independence is frequently obscured by the legalistic focus on the means of inducing change. Moreover, international institutions, like the Security Council or the General Assembly of the United Nations or the International Court of Justice did not develop the means (or the will — in the case of the Palestinians) to enforce the legitimate claims of colonized peoples, or to punish states, like Israel, that place themselves above the application of basic legal and ethical principles. In a sense, this shift in focus is a regression to more imperial / colonial attitudes of the past.

It is a frustrating endeavor to peel away obscurantist assumptions and pervasive and intentional misdirection to arrive at the truth. Keeping in mind that Gandhi defined satyagraha as to hold on to the truth, the most basic reality for the Palestinians is that they are dispossessed, displaced, occupied, oppressed and most recently, massacred in Gaza. But most Western media coverage ignores some basic background facts that constitute the basis of the problem and which I will review briefly below. Ignoring the root causes renders incomprehensible to the casual observer Palestinians’ resistance, thereby facilitating their designation as stereotypical “terrorists.”

Historical Background of Palestinian Plight

Palestinian dispossession started under the British Mandate, which “got” Palestine from the dismantled Ottoman Empire after World War I. The Balfour Declaration (1917) established a national “home” for the Jews in Palestine and disregarded the wishes of the “non-Jewish communities.” While the latter was the overwhelming majority, and despite promises of “non-prejudice” to their “rights,” they were considered not significant enough to warrant that the colonizer ask their opinion about the “giving” of their homeland to an imported ethnic and religious group. In addition, British troops had not even set foot in Palestine yet. Thus Britain contradicted the legal maxim nemo dat quod non habet, meaning no one can give that which he has not. But being a superpower at the time, ordinary laws did not apply to itself. And the “promise” in the Balfour Declaration was incorporated into the Mandate by the League of Nations, which promptly validated this gift, even though the League did not possess Palestine either. The League also overlooked its inconvenient commitment to the right of self- determination for peoples originally inhabiting a land.¹

Zionist actions to actively dispossess and remove Palestinians from their lands, exemplified in Plan Dalet, led to the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 people and created a majority Jewish area just in time for the declaration of the Israeli state in 1948. The dispossession both preceded and was concurrent with the war. The Palestinians’ legal right of return was reaffirmed more than one hundred times by the United Nations. But Israel placed itself above international law and passed The Prevention of Infiltration/Offenses and Jurisdiction Law in the Knesset in 1954. The defining of who is an “infiltrator” is instructive in explaining the violence and injustice done to the Palestinians, who were denied their legal right to return: the third definition for “infiltrator” in the law is a “Palestinian citizen or a Palestinian resident without nationality or citizenship or whose nationality or citizenship was doubtful and who, during the said period left his ordinary place of residence in an area which became a part of Israel for a place outside Israel.”² Later in 1967, the Israeli state expanded again and encompassed the rest of natural Palestine. The reason that there is an occupation in the new territory is simple. The Zionist enterprise, all proclamations to democracy not-withstanding, could not incorporate/digest the newly acquired territories without reducing the majority Jewish composition, thereby exposing the non-democratic, ethnocentric and racist premise of the state.

Evaluation of Losses and Achievements

The facts are simple enough. And yet that is not at all how current media narratives present the struggle. It is never referred to as one for liberation and freedom. Resistance to the oppressive occupation and to the expansionist and dispossessing Israeli state is never presented as a right, despite the self-evident moral and legal principle, that as the (occupying) aggressor, Israel cannot justify violence against resistance to its own initial aggression.³ And yet, in this last massacre, Gazans who are starving, imprisoned, mostly refugees from the original displacement that happened with Israel’s creation, and who have qualitatively modest (but technologically improving — distance/reach) weapons, are the ones being blamed for “starting” or inviting the attack on themselves. This is objectionable on several levels. Fundamentally, the framing of the story that equates Palestinian resistance with the fourth strongest army in the world is inherently deceptive. Additionally, it blames the victim for resisting annihilation.

But once again, because it is the strong who determine what is legal and what is not, the Palestinian struggle for national liberation and their resistance against their oppressors are illegal by definition and are presented as “terrorism.” The right of self-defense has been appropriated by the dominant, occupying, aggressing side and simultaneously denied to its victims. It is becoming increasingly apparent to the resisting Palestinians that this excessive use of legality is simply a means to preserve pre-existing power asymmetries that will perpetuate their oppression. It is ultimately aimed at their extinction as a people. It is the root cause of their resistance: for they refuse a peace built on injustice, no matter how much misinformation is produced disguise the facts.

The Oslo Peace Process must be evaluated from this perspective. It was started more than 15 years ago but has led to no tangible benefits for the Palestinians. On the contrary, it has led to their increasing dispossession and subjugation. It co-opted the PLO leadership and made the Palestinian Authority into a police arm of and chief appeaser/concessor to Israel, the occupier. The Process has served as legal cover for continued oppression. It is no different from the NATO announcement to “protect” Israel, or the Rice-Livni Accords, or the United Nations Resolutions that are never enforced.

All these entities and agreements give a cover of multilateralism and legality to what is essentially aggressive expansionism and intentional dispossession. Similarly, Israel’s “withdrawal” from Gaza in 2005, narratively presented in mainstream media with so much angst for the trauma of the occupier, does not remove the initial aggression of the original and consistently brutal occupation. Even when one allows for the prison that is Gaza to be considered “unoccupied,” the fact remains that Palestinians are one people and that the West Bank and East Jerusalem continue to be occupied. This is even acknowledged in the Oslo Accords, which defines them as “a single territorial unit.”

Moreover, Israeli expansionism continues, and even accelerates, in the shadow of the peace process and of the headline- grabbing events in Gaza. Just in the last week, Israel has announced the annexation of extensive areas of Palestinian-owned land, where the villagers have been non-violently protesting the apartheid wall. For three days the Israeli army invaded the village of Jayyous declaring it a “Closed Military Area” and arbitrarily arrested 65 Palestinians: “The Israeli wall confiscated about 600 dunums of lands and 8,600 dunums were isolated behind the wall, where the town’s area is 12,500 dunums,” leading to the loss of thousands of jobs lost as a result of the wall and the isolation of agricultural land.⁴ Similarly, on 1/26/2009, the Israeli High Court approved the complete destruction of the village of Tana, east of Nablus, in order to expand the settlement colony of Makhurah.⁵ In addition, an expansion to the Effrat settlement colony near Bethlehem was also announced, swallowing an additional 170 hectares of “state land.”⁶ All this is happening in the West Bank, ostensibly the co-operating segment under the dictatorial and oppressive control of the Palestinian Authority. And it is definitely not conducive to economic independence, let alone the mirage of prosperity that was promised to come with the pursuit of a negotiated and non-violent “settlement.”

The argument is frequently made that Hamas is a “terrorist organization” because it targets civilians. But that is a question that is both not for the militarily strong to ask and also ignores completely Israel’s far greater and more consistent targeting of civilians. In this last attack on Gaza, despite an earnest and far reaching hasbara/propaganda effort by Israel to change perceptions, the extent of the destruction was too blatant to repress. Any fair assessment of damage to civilians will plainly see the disproportionate suffering of the weaker party. It also must account for the slow strangulation and eradication of Palestinians even when there is no “war.” The means of destruction are so entrenched and persistent so as to become too banal for Western media to report on. The “targeted assassinations” that inevitably kill civilians, the ever-growing “settlements”/colonies, the land expropriations, the apartheid “separation” Wall, the roadblocks, the economic blockade and de-development, and so forth have effectively ended any hope of a two state solution. In fact, the Palestinians’ pursuit of the peaceful route of “settlement” through the peace process, recently “negotiated” at Annapolis, has resulted in a 20% increase in settlement expansion in the West Bank and a 36% settlement expansion in East Jerusalem, just in the last sixteen months.⁶

The Oslo Peace Process has essentially reached a dead end. Remember that it was launched after the First Intifada proved that a militarily powerful actor could not defeat Palestinian grassroots resistance. Hence, Israel’s resort to “settlement” and its reliance on the native enforcer, in the form of the Palestinian Authority. But that too failed. The endless peace process has been unable to accomplish the main (colonialist/racist) goal that gave it life: namely, to convince the Palestinians that they are defeated and are rightfully Untermenschen in the legally still border-less Zionist state.

Taken to its ultimate logical and counter-intuitive conclusion, this will eventually (and in fact has already started to) call into question the viability of a Zionist Israel in the long term. Increasingly, Israel’s own success in oppressing its Other has left it with two equally non-palatable options: either transition into an equal society or dismantle the colonialist enterprise. Its current choice of apartheid separation and oppression is demographically, morally, ethically, and in time, technologically unstable and unacceptable going forward.

1. For an extensive discussion of this topic, see, Musa E. Mazzawi, Palestine and the Law: Guidelines for the Resolution of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, Garnet & Ithaca Press, 1997: pp. 21-23.
2. Ibid, p. 178.
3. For a broader discussion of this issue, see Michael Mandel, “Israel’s Unjust War on Gaza: Self-Defense Against Peace,” Counterpunch, 2/5/2009
4. ”Israeli forces seize 65 youths in Jayyus in third day of mass arrest,” Maan News Agency, February 18, 2009. Also, for a broader perspective (Arabic), visit here.
5. Tiny URL
6. TINY URL

Consider: When President Obama commits this nation to war against the Islamic terrorists, as he already has in Afghanistan, he will take millions of previously alienated and disaffected Americans with him, and they will support our troops in a way that most of his party has refused to support them until now. When another liberal, Bill Clinton went to war from the air, there was no anti-war movement in the streets or in his party’s ranks to oppose him. That is an encouraging fact for us . . .

Horowitz is now locked in fast embrace with Katrina Vanden Heuvel, editor in chief of The Nation and Leslie Cagan and her cohorts at United For Peace and Justice (UFPJ). Vanden Heuvel’s most recent piece in The Nation runs under a title in the form of a query, “Obama’s War?” Whose war does she think it is anyway? Even the mainstream media calls it Obama’s war — sans question mark. Her piece ran shortly after Obama ordered 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan and almost a month after both Afghan and Pakistani civilians were first bombed at Obama’s orders. She concludes her piece, after citing the deployment of additional troops, “Up to this point the Afghan war belonged to George W. Bush, but Obama’s escalation threatens to make it his own. There’s still time to change direction. President Obama don’t make this your war”! (Emphasis mine. If escalation of the AfPak war (the war on Afghanistan and Pakistan) only “threatens” to make the war Obama’s, what will it take to give him ownership?)

Having supported Obama during the election when he was very clear about his coming Crusade in Afghanistan and having made no demands in exchange for their support, the liberals are now reduced, their leverage gone, to begging for a change in course. Pity, pathos, disgust or a sense of betrayal — it is hard to know what to feel when one encounters this stuff.

Similarly Cagan’s United for Peace and Justice, dominated by the “Progressive” Democrats of America (“P”DA) and the “Communist” Party of the U.S.A (“C”PUSA) — more or less the same thing, not because “P”DA is radical but because the “C”PUSA is not — has been all too silent on Obama’s AfPak War. As a result there have been discordant rumblings among the rank and file about UFPJ’s failure to call a national demonstration against the wars flaring from Iraq to Pakistan and refusal to join the only one called, that by ANSWER (Act Now To Stop War and End Racism) for March 21.

The first bombings of the AfPak war under Obama came on January 23, almost a month ago. Bombing a country is an act of war, and last time I looked Congress had not declared war on Pakistan, thus putting Obama in clear violation of the Constitution. The same crowd calling to “Indict Bush” should also be calling to “Impeach Obama.” Clearly a national action is called for in protest, but only ANSWER has done so. In fact until last Friday, Afghanistan was only mentioned in small print on the UFPJ web page. When ANSWER called for a national mobilization, UFPJ announced local actions for April 4, with no special mention of the AfPak war. This appears to be an attempt to divert people from the only national action to be called which will be a major embarrassment to Obama if the numbers are large. And a lot of people on the UFPJ national discussion groups, this writer included, have been told to shut up when protesting UFPJ’s inaction. But Obama’s imperialism will not go away despite the tut-tutting of the PC crowd — any more than his kowtowing to the banksters.

Let us be clear. I make no special brief for ANSWER. Their exclusionary politics are really not all that different from UFPJ’s, which loves to red bait them. (That is an amazing thing for those who call themselves “communists” or “progressives” to do.) But at least ANSWER has not been hypnotized into supporting Empire because the Dems are now in the imperial drivers’ seat. In this act of courage, they resemble the Libertarians and Greens and Naderites and many writers at The American Conservative who are consistent and impassioned in their aversion to war. That tells me we need a new and broad based antiwar movement which is open to one and all with an aversion to empire, no matter their feelings about tax breaks, abortion, national health insurance or anything else. Clearly UFPJ, the liberal democrats and others of that ilk are incapable of building such a movement — nor do they want to. We can only hope it will be born. Meanwhile I will be in DC for the ANSWER demonstration on March 21. For the moment it is the only game in a town now ruled by Emperor Obama and the Dems.

As anybody who has paid the least bit of attention to the nature of the US economy over the past century, its very foundations rest on the production of war and materials for war. Also apparent to those of us who have been paying attention is that the Democrats are just as responsible for this reality as the Republicans are. Just because George Bush and his administration were personally reprehensible and their arrogance and disregard for principles most Americans hold dear was as obvious as the nose on Pinocchio’s wooden face doesn’t mean that the policies of the Democrats are substantially different.

Consequently, the antiwar movement would be foolish to think they have a government of allies in Washington, DC now. There may be a more personable bunch of folks ruling the country now, but the odds of those folks pulling out of Afghanistan or Iraq now instead of later without a major push from the American people insisting that they do so are about as poor as they were under the Bush administration. The time for the antiwar movement to demand that the Obama administration end the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan is now, before its political ego becomes entangled in a military exercise that is ill-advised, poorly done, and just plain wrong.

Walking through New York’s financial district carrying signs expressing a hope that the trillion dollar war economy will go against its profit margin because it is morally wrong to profit from death is not a bad thing. It might feel good and even change some minds, but it won’t change the bottom line. And it is the bottom line that must be changed. Understanding this fact requires the antiwar movement to be united and specific. The demands are simple: Bring all of the troops back from Iraq and Afghanistan now. Not in 2010, or 2011 or 2012, but now. Both of these operations have gone on long enough, no matter what the generals tell Obama or the American people. Since the Pentagon hasn’t been able to accomplish what it wanted despite being militarily engaged for close to a decade in both countries, it’s high time that we insist that our timetable be put into effect.

Fortunately, a coalition has formed around this simple demand. The National Assembly to End the Wars and the ANSWER coalition have joined forces and are holding protests in at least three major US cities on March 21, 2009. Washington, DC, Los Angeles and San Francisco will be the sites of these protests. In addition to calling on the Obama administration and Congress to remove the troops from Afghanistan and Iraq now, the protests also address the issue of US support for the violent occupation of Palestine by Israel–another important issue that the UFPJ prefers not to highlight in their public calls to join their protest.

Unless and until the issue of Palestine is addressed in an honest and just way that does not merely echo the desires of the Israeli expansionists, things in the Middle East will remain volatile and dangerous. According to most public opinion polls, the majority of Americans understand this yet Washington continues to support Tel Aviv no matter what it does–murderous attacks on Gaza or illegal settlements in the West Bank, it doesn’t seem to matter. The US money and weaponry continues to flow. Additionally, in the wake of recent election results in Israel, the threat of an Israeli attack on Iran (with at least tacit US support) grows stronger. Unless the US government is put on notice that this is beyond the pale, the current relative calm in the Middle East and South Asia will become a thing of distant memory.

It is not my intention to disregard or disrespect UFPJ’s march on April 4th in New York. Indeed, if one can attend that protest and one of the protests on March 21st, please do. However, if one has to choose, the intentions of the March 21st protests are certainly more immediate and, if the world without war that UFPJ envisions is to ever occur, essential to that vision. After all, in order to move beyond the war economy, doesn’t it make sense that we must end the wars/military occupations currently taking place? If we don’t get this message out there, those who want to expand the war in Afghanistan and ultimately bring it into Pakistan on a much greater scale will assume they have the approval of the US public. The job of the antiwar movement is to let them know that this is not the case. March 21st, 2009 is the first national manifestation of this in the Obama era.

Newly installed officials describe the situation on the ground in Afghanistan as far more precarious than they had anticipated, with US government departments poorly organized to implement the plan Obama presented last week to his National Security Council and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Special envoy to Afghanistan-Pakistan Richard Holbrooke said it is “an extraordinarily dysfunctional situation in which the very objectives have to be reviewed.” Obama reacted by delaying the deployment of any further troops until defense chiefs presented a coherent “endgame”, though he can hardly afford to wait 60 days for the results of his “Afpak” policy review. After only a few weeks in office, Obama has painted himself into a corner on this, the stony cornerstone of his foreign policy.

Despite talk of change and both his and Vice President Joe Biden’s professed distaste and distrust for Afghan President Hamid Karzai, it appears that Obama is committed to continuing Bush’s ill-conceived policy of bombing both Afghanistan and Pakistan, supporting a puppet regime and expecting the starving shell-shocked natives to be thankful. One innovation from the “dying” days of the Bush regime that thankfully looks like it was still-born was proposed by General Bantz John Craddock, the Supreme Allied Commander for Europe, Commander of the US European Command and head of the International Security Assistance Force, the “peace-keeping force” operating in Afghanistan. He advocated giving troops a license to kill all suspected poppy farmers, in effect ordering the mass execution of tens of thousands of civilians.

This Pol Pot strategy of genocide led to a mutiny by NATO officers and it looks like Craddock will be forced to resign, but it is surely a sign of the times. In December 2008 US military doctrine was modified to permit the bombing of drug labs if intelligence suggested that no more than ten civilians would be killed. Last month, Defense Secretary Robert Gates stated, “If we have evidence that the drug labs and drug lords are supporting the Taliban, then they’re fair game.” Will he also be forced to resign? Or will genocide become the official US policy in Afghanistan ?

The latest problem for Obama is the loss of the US airbase in Kyrgyzstan. Kyrgyz President Kumanbek Bakiyev announced the decision in a Moscow press conference after talks with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev. He was attending the Collective Security Treaty Organization meeting, which set up a regional rapid reaction force to include Russia, Armenia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan. He explained the cancellation as due to the US mission in the “war on terror” being over, and besides, the US wasn’t paying enough and had whisked a US soldier accused of murder out of the country without so much as a howdy-do. On the closure of the precious US base, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said this was a sovereign decision of Kyrgyz authorities, albeit sweetened by Russia ’s $2 billion loan and $150 million gift to Kyrgyzstan, once the darling of the US neoliberals and scene of the US-sponsored “tulip” revolution, but now another bankrupt failed state.

Ending the US military presence in Kyrgyzstan puts the last piece into place in the Russian control of supply routes to Afghanistan through its “near abroad.” This is a serious blow to Obama’s plan to up the ante in Afghanistan. The Khyber Pass is no longer reliable and the only other access for supplies — apart from Iran — is now through Russia. Not unaware of this dilemma, the Kremlin has bent over backwards to show Washington it is ready to accommodate US transport needs. Lavrov said: “We expect the US side to send a request on the quantity and the nature of the supplies. We will give a relevant permission as soon as this happens.”

But for the US to benefit from Russian goodwill, it will have to abandon its missile plans for Eastern Europe and tear up its invitations to Ukraine and Georgia to join NATO. Will the US risk abandoning its vital supply links to 60,000 troops in Afghanistan just to put its toys in Eastern Europe and invite its “friends” Ukraine and Georgia into its private club? After the gay 90s, when Russian policy was made in Washington, is US policy now being made in Moscow? A delicious irony.

As a sign of which way the wind is blowing, Harvard professor Karl Kaiser confidently dismisses any further plans to expand NATO to include Georgia and Ukraine in a recent New York Times editorial, arguing that the former’s reckless war against Russia shows how easily NATO could be dragged into a senseless war, and that the latter is too divided a nation on the issue. If NATO were forced to undertake a conventional war in Europe which existing members don’t want, it would be shown up as a paper tiger, leading to its own collapse. Hmmm. Perhaps letting the Georgian joker into this exclusive club is not such a bad idea after all.

As an afterthought, Kaiser adds that it would further harm already bad relations with Russia and suggests the Obama administration push for a new understanding with Russia, including strategic arms control, a nonproliferation policy, a new “security architecture,” and reviving the Treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe. All of these issues will require serious compromise by the US, which would be wonderful, but how far and how fast can Obama go without raising the ire of US hawks? The answer depends very much on how successful Obama is in faraway Afghanistan in the next 12 months. Which depends on the Russians. Obama is painted into yet another corner, this time a Russian-Afghan one.

The standard line in Western media is to warn against “Russian expansionism,” as if it has no right to demand that its borders are safe and nearby countries don’t aim nuclear missiles at it. At last week’s Munich Security Conference (MSC), US Vice President Joe Biden vowed to resist the notion of a Russian sphere of influence (read: he accepts it grudgingly, and don’t tell anyone), promising that the new government under President Barack Obama would continue to press NATO to seek “deeper cooperation” with like-minded countries (read: Ukraine and Georgia will not get invitations to join NATO). He also said the Obama administration would continue to pursue the missile defense system, “in consultation with our NATO allies and Russia,” provided the technology works and is not too expensive (read: “Maybe we will, maybe we won’t. I dare you to put your missiles in Kaliningrad.”).

“So how can Obama reconcile the two goals of strengthening the American presence in Afghanistan while curbing Russian expansionism?” asks Stratfor chief George Friedman in another NYT oped. His answer (I’m not making this up) is to “rely less on troops, and more on covert operations like the CIA.” Covert operators travel lightly, as we know from James Bond movies, and can spot Bin Laden terrorist training camps, beam the coordinates to Scotty and — wham! Mission Accomplished. Friedman, taking a leaf from Rumsfeld’s scribblings, argues this would require far fewer forces and remove the irksome supply-routes problem. He does make the valid point that Obama’s conventional route of putting more troops on the ground is doomed, but more bombing, spying and other covert activities is hardly a credible option.

The only real alternative to the present military quagmire is negotiations with the Taliban, which will probably be the new policy, trying to replicate the “success” in Iraq with the Sunni Awakening councils. The idea is to offer the Taliban a share of power if they give up, allowing the US to concentrate on wiping out their friends in “terrorist camps” along the Pakistan border. This is derided by hardliners as appeasement. In any case, it is unlikely the Taliban will suddenly agree to get along with the detested Karzai and the heathen invaders. Such “coalitions” never last long without one side being destroyed. The comparison with Iraq is apples and oranges. And ungovernable tribal lands on the Pakistani border will remain just that.

Plans to attack Iran look laughable in this context. There are already rumors that Iran is beginning to look more favorably on the Taliban, which means US plans in Afghanistan will depend on Iran as well as Russia. On Iran, Biden told the MSC: “We will draw upon all the elements of our power — military and diplomatic, intelligence and law enforcement, economic and cultural.” Ari Larijani, the speaker of Iran’s parliament, noted Biden’s softer tone and called the MSC Obama’s decision to send George Mitchell as his envoy to the Middle East a “positive signal.” Iran is now waiting for a positive signal in its direction. Obama is painted into this corner, too. This time an Iranian-Afghan one.

Despite all the sympathy Obama has received from around the world, it is hard to translate any of it into support for US policies, either on the part of allies or foes. Nothing much has changed, except that existing problems have worsened, both on the military and economic fronts. Even the prospect of serious negotiations with the Taliban, Iran and Russia raise few hopes. The US would have to back down unilaterally on so many thorny issues that few expect this to happen.

This all looks spookily like the situation in 1961 when president John F Kennedy came to power. The conviction of many is that after initially proposing an escalation of the Vietnam War, the intelligent Kennedy soon realized the pointlessness of it and was about to reverse his position and quickly withdraw — until his assassination.

Many Americans are calling Afghanistan an unwinnable war and even Obama is now calling for an exit strategy before more troops are sent, much like Democrats were doing in the 1960s. The only way out of his dilemma with the Russians, Iranians and Afghans is to reverse his foolhardy pledge and end the war immediately. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

A federal jury in Manhattan convicted Noorzai September 22, for his involvement in an international narcotics trafficking conspiracy that sold tens of millions of dollars of heroin on world markets. The drug lord now faces life in prison and will be sentenced on January 7.

But things aren’t always what they seem.

Noorzai, described by federal investigators and journalists as “the richest man in Afghanistan,” enjoyed close and cosy relations with the Taliban’s top leader Mullah Omar, al-Qaeda and Pakistan’s Inter Service Intelligence agency (ISI).

Indeed, Noorzai had become one of the capo tutti capos of Afghanistan’s flourishing heroin rackets and profited handsomely from the protection of his Taliban “friends,” his ISI mentors and allegedly the CIA.

The Washington Post reported December 27, that Noorzai’s New York arrest was aided by a private security outfit, Rosetta Research and Consulting, a firm founded in 2003 by two “businessmen” which the Post refuses to name “because of the sensitive nature of their undercover work.”

“Mike A.,” a former Army Special Forces captain, “Patrick J.,” a former Treasury Department financial-crimes analyst and a group on investors connected to the law firm Motley Rice were principals in the sting that netted Noorzai. Rosetta’s mission according to the Post “was to assist in a mammoth legal case filed on behalf of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks by tracking the flow of terrorist-connected money.”

In April 2005, Noorzai was lured to the United States from his Dubai estate “at the instigation of the Drug Enforcement Agency.” After a lavish 11 day holiday at the Embassy Suites Hotel in Manhattan where he enjoyed room service “and considered himself a guest of the U.S. government,” the drug kingpin was arrested.

But here’s the kicker: even as law enforcement sought his arrest as a world-class drug trafficker, Noorzai “was considered an asset by the intelligence side of the government.” And why wouldn’t they?

As I revealed in “Unconventional Warfare in the 21st Century: U.S. Surrogates, Terrorists and Narcotraffickers,” (Antifascist Calling, December 19, 2008) citing the Pentagon’s Army Special Operations Forces FM 3-05.130 published by Wikileaks, unconventional warfare is conducted “by, with or through surrogates” and that their preferred assets are irregular forces:

Irregulars, or irregular forces, are individuals or groups of individuals who are not members of a regular armed force, police, or other internal security force. They are usually nonstate-sponsored and unconstrained by sovereign nation legalities and boundaries. These forces may include, but are not limited to, specific paramilitary forces, contractors, individuals, businesses, foreign political organizations, resistance or insurgent organizations, expatriates, transnational terrorism adversaries, disillusioned transnational terrorism members, black marketers, and other social or political “undesirables.” (Unconventional Warfare, p. 1-3)

It is hardly a stretch that a drug kingpin like Haji Bashir Noorzai, with documented links to the Taliban, al-Qaeda, the CIA and U.S. Special Forces would be viewed as one such “surrogate.”

Spooks, Drugs and Thugs

When the Taliban was routed by the U.S. during the initial phase of its 2001 invasion, Noorzai was entrusted with some $20 million of the Taliban’s cash for “safekeeping,” according to the History Commons.

But Noorzai turned himself in to U.S. military forces where he spent several days in custody at Kandahar airport. Though questioned by U.S. officials, Noorzai was released and quietly disappeared into Pakistan after an associate was killed by U.S. forces. In a 2002 CBS News account, Noorzai reportedly said, “I spent my days and nights comfortably. There was special room for me. I was like a guest, not a prisoner.”

Eventually, Noorzai resurfaced in Peshawar. Armed with a Pakistani passport allegedly furnished by the ISI, the kingpin operated drug-processing laboratories that turned raw opium into finished “product,” heroin bound for European and U.S. markets.

In 2004, USA Today reported that “according to House International Relations Committee testimony this year, Noorzai smuggles 4,400 lbs. of heroin out of the Kandahar region to al-Qaeda operatives in Pakistan every eight weeks.”

No surprise here. After all as journalist James Risen wrote in State of War, “Once the Taliban had been routed, top CIA officials had little interest in the drug problem.” Or if one took a more nuanced approach one would argue Noorzai’s operation amounted to a protected drug racket. The question is: whose racket was being protected? As Pakistani investigative journalist Ahmed Rashid documented,

The Pentagon had a list of twenty-five or more drug labs and warehouses in Afghanistan but refused to bomb them because some belonged to the CIA’s new NA [Northern Alliance] allies. The United States told its British allies that the war on terrorism had nothing to do with counter-narcotics. Instead, drug lords were fêted by the CIA and asked if they had any information about Osama bin Laden. Thus, the United States sent the first and clearest message to the drug lords: that they would not be targeted. (Descent into Chaos: The United States and the Failure of Nation Building in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia, New York: Viking, 2008, pp. 320-321)

This was serious business. With the rapid expansion of poppy cultivation in Afghanistan after the American invasion, the price of heroin plummeted on world markets leading the syndicates that control the illicit trade to stockpile opium in an effort to bolster sagging prices.

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNDOC) 2008 World Drug Report, the global increase in opium production “was almost entirely due to the 17% expansion of cultivation in Afghanistan.” In 2007, Afghanistan produced some 8,700 metric tons of opium that accounted for a staggering 92% of global opium production.

But in a twist that readers of Antifascist Calling are well aware, convicted narco Noorzai apparently enjoyed a cosy and productive relationship with both al-Qaeda and the CIA. According to the Post,

In an affidavit in his criminal case, he traced a history of cooperating with U.S. officials, including the CIA, dating to 1990. In early 2002, following the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, Noorzai said he turned over to the U.S. military 15 truckloads of Taliban weapons, including “four hundred anti-aircraft missiles of Russian, American and British manufacture.”

From the perspective of the CIA and Defense Department, Noorzai could be a useful intelligence asset. But law enforcement officials continued to consider him a notorious criminal whose drug proceeds supported militants battling U.S. forces. Rosetta’s interest seemed purely commercial: to pump him for information that could be reported back to its clients, the Rosetta documents indicate. (Richard Leiby, “Tangled U.S. Objectives Bring Down U.S. Spy Firm,” The Washington Post, December 27, 2008, A01)

But lest we fall into an obvious trap and think that the Afghan drugs trade is solely a creature of the ISI, al-Qaeda or the Taliban, similar charges of corruption have been leveled against Hamid Karzai’s government. Indeed, in 2006 Guardian reported that senior political figures in Kabul, including the president’s brother, Walid, and deputy interior minister for counternarcotics General Muhammad Daud, are heavily involved in the illicit trade.

One official told the Guardian, “He [Daud] moves competent officials from their jobs, locks cases up and generally ensures that nobody he is associated with will get arrested for drugs crime.” The Interior Ministry according to published sources didn’t just fail to take down the warlords, “it became a major protector of drug traffickers.”

Additional reports identified the governor of Helmand province, Sher Mohammed Akhunzada, a close friend and ally of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, as personally profiting from the illicit trade. Indeed, British counternarcotics officials told Rashid that Akhunzada “was accused of favoring his cronies with prime real estate parcels and commanded hundreds of well-paid gunmen, while the police force was undermanned and unpaid and mullahs, aid workers, teachers, and women activists who opposed poppy cultivation were being gunned down.”

Helmand province, under the nominal control of the Karzai government and American and NATO allies was the conduit for opium sales flowing towards the drug labs in southern Afghanistan and Pakistan from other provinces, particularly those from the far northern provinces of Mazar and Badakhshan, run by U.S.-backed warlords favored by Special Forces’ “unconventional warfare” theorists.

It wouldn’t be the first time nor the last, that the United States cultivated narcotraffickers as intelligence assets, including those connected to America’s reputed arch-enemy, Osama bin Laden. As Peter Dale Scott wrote on the convergence of international organized crime structures and the capitalist deep state,

Mafias and empires have certain elements in common. Both can be seen as the systematic violent imposition of governance in areas of undergovernance. Both use atrocities to achieve their ends; but both tend to be tolerated to the extent that the result of their controlled violence is a diminution of uncontrolled violence. (I would tentatively suggest an important difference between mafias and empires: that, with the passage of time, mafias tend to become more and more part of the civil society whose rules they once broke, while empires tend to become more and more irreconcilably at odds with the societies they once controlled.) (”Deep Events and the CIA’s Global Drug Connection,” Global Research, September 6, 2008)

Why then, given the decades-long collaboration amongst intelligence agencies and drug trafficking syndicates, do U.S. corporate media still find it “ironic” that current American efforts to stamp out Taliban-controlled drug networks in fact, simply hand control of the traffic over to narcos more amenable to American geopolitical goals?

One Big Happy Family

While the United States insists that international drug flows are financing terrorism, which indeed they are, U.S. agencies including the CIA and Army Special Forces continue to rely on trafficking networks as a reliable source for irregular fighters and as intelligence assets.

According to the Guardian, the relationships amongst Afghan government forces, opium smugglers and their Taliban “adversaries” are quite complex, but when it gets down to brass tacks, amazingly simple: money talks. Hameedullah, an opium smuggler and government employee told the Guardian,

He went on to explain how the economy of the poppy trade took in the Taliban and the government. “The Taliban benefit from the poppy because the farmers pay them taxes. And when the government destroys the fields, the people support the Taliban,” he said. “The government also benefits from the poppy–we pay officials so they won’t destroy our land. Two years ago we paid them so they only destroyed two jeribs (1 acre) of my land.” …

“The Taliban say we are doing the jihad and you are making money so you should support us. Smugglers give a lot: three Land Cruisers in Sangin a few weeks ago.”

The relationship between the Taliban, police and poppy trade is quite simple, he added: “If we don’t plant opium then smugglers don’t make money. If we [the smugglers] don’t make money the Taliban and police don’t make money. The Taliban and the officials have a very strong relationship–if they don’t then how can we do so much trade and travel to so many districts?” (Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, “Life in Helmand, where rich rewards are reaped by poppy farmers, police and the Taliban,” Guardian, 22 December 2008)

Its a relationship that has a proven track record: drug lords make money, intelligence agencies cultivate assets and perhaps, siphon illicit funds for off-budget operations, international banking cartels earn billions from laundered drug proceeds and corrupt comprador elites secure a comfortable existence.

Such richly-rewarded “arrangements” continued long after the Soviet military withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989. Indeed, international narcotrafficking and related terrorist networks with links to the the CIA, the ISI, Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States launched subsequent “jihads” against their geopolitical rivals in the Balkans and the ex-Soviet Union, where thousands of former Afghan veterans filled the ranks of the Bosnian, Kosovan and Chechen “mujahideen.”

According to economist Loretta Napoleoni, by the 1990s Pakistan hoped to create “a trans-Asian axis, under Pakistani hegemony, stretching from the eastern border with China, inclusive of Afghanistan and the Central Asian republics, to the oil-producing regions of the Caspian Sea.”

That the government of Benazir Bhutto did so with U.S. blessings as a means to destabilize Russia is evident with the subsequent assault in Chechnya by CIA-trained Afghan-Arab veterans aided and abetted by ISI and Saudi Arabia. The plan, according to Napoleoni, was “to divert Russian attention” by encouraging an “Islamist insurgency in Chechnya, forcing the Russians to fight in the Caucasus.”

Thusly, Shamil Basayev, a Chechen field commander, received extensive ISI training “at the Amir Muawia camp in the Khost province in Afghanistan,” under the operational control of ISI and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. Afghan-Arab veterans were sent to Chechnya to train future fighters. “Among them was the Jordanian-born Khattab, whom Basayev had met and befriended in Pakistan. Khattab was a hero of the anti-Soviet Jihad; he was also close to Osama bin Laden and his funding network. In 1995, Khattab was invited to Grozny to head the training of Mujahedin fighters.”

Indeed, Osama bin Laden is reported to have contributed some $25 million to the Chechen “jihad.” But as Napoleoni documents, the operation relied heavily on already-existent drugs and arms trafficking networks.

In 1995, Khattab’s move to Grozny was arranged by the International Islamic Relief Organisation, a Saudi-based charity funded by mosques and wealthy donors in the Gulf. The same year, Basayev, and later Khattab, linked up with criminal organisations in Russia as well as with Albanian organised crime and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). These alliance proved fruitful in generating profits from the drug trade and contraband, especially that of arms. Chechnya soon became an important hub for various rackets, including kidnapping and the trade in counterfeit dollars. Basayev also benefited financially from money laundering activities in Chechnya. (Loretta Napoleoni, Modern Jihad: Tracing the Dollars Behind the Terror Networks, London: Pluto Press, 2003, pp. 92-93)

Similar destabilization campaigns utilizing the same Pakistani-Saudi terrorist networks and international drug trafficking syndicates broke out in Ingushetia, Dagestan and North Ossetia. The United States and their NATO partners encouraged what Napoleoni terms “the expansionism of Muslim countries such as Pakistan and religious colonisation by Saudi Arabia” across the region.

These networks, with a wink and a nod from Washington, are fully operational today.

Mumbai Attack: Same Drugs, Same Thugs

Indeed, international drug trafficking syndicates connected to Pakistan’s ISI and the CIA are reported to have been operational assets during the November Laskhar-e-Toiba (LET) assaults in Mumbai. As I reported in mid-December, Dawood Ibrahim’s D-Company enjoys protected status afforded by the ISI and his extensive smuggling networks along the Indian coast were used to infiltrate LET thugs into Mumbai.

Despite these linkages, investigative journalist Jeffrey R. Hammond reported December 19, that Ibrahim associate “Mohammed Ali continues smuggling operations out of Mumbai for Ibrahim’s crime syndicate, D-Company, completely unmolested by Indian investigators and law enforcement.”

As the crisis deepens and Pakistan shifts troops towards the Indian border, a December 4 piece in The Times of India wonders why the Maharashtra government “has not taken any action against the D-Company here.”

One senior official asked, “What’s the point of asking Islamabad to hand over Dawood when we’re not doing anything to destroy his empire in Mumbai and other places in India?”

Similar questions must also be put to senior U.S. intelligence and counterterrorist officials as to why Afghan drugs kingpin Haji Bashir Noorzai was viewed as “a useful intelligence asset” up to the time of his arrest and conviction in New York federal court?

An unmentionable fact in Noorzai’s indictment, one that was raised however by defense attorney Ivan Fisher during the drug lord’s trial, was Noorzai’s work as a U.S. intelligence asset even as he grew rich off of Afghanistan’s heroin trade, through “efforts to reach working agreements with the Americans in Afghanistan since the 1990s,” Fisher told the International Herald Tribune. James Risen reports,

Noorzai was in Quetta when the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks occurred, and he returned soon after to Afghanistan, according to his lawyer. In November 2001, he met with men he described as American military officials at Spinboldak, near the Afghan-Pakistani border, Fisher, his lawyer, said. Small teams of U.S. Special Forces and intelligence officers were then operating in Afghanistan, seeking the support of local tribal leaders against the Taliban.

Noorzai was taken to Kandahar, where he was detained and questioned for six days by the Americans about Taliban officials and operations, according to his lawyer. He agreed to work with them and was released. In January 2002, he handed over 15 truckloads of weapons, including about 400 anti-aircraft missiles, that had been hidden by the Taliban inside his tribe’s territory, Fisher said. (”Afghan’s arrest shines light on dark side of U.S. terror fight,” International Herald Tribune, February 2, 2007)

But when State Department official Robert Charles suggested placing Noorzai on President Bush’s list of foreign narcotics kingpins, at the time no Afghan heroin traffickers were on the list which Charles thought was “a glaring omission.”

He suggested three names, including Noorzai’s, but said his recommendation was met with an awkward silence during an interagency meeting. He said there was resistance to placing any Afghans on the list because countering the drug trade there was not an administration priority. Charles persisted, and in June 2004, Noorzai became the first Afghan on the list. (Risen, op. cit.)

“Awkward silence” indeed! Even as tensions today continue to rise between India and Pakistan, the virtual disappearance of Dawood Ibrahim’s D-Company from the Mumbai frame is all the more astonishing given the narcoterrorists’ documented record of violence in furtherance of the geopolitical goals of his ISI masters.

But even though civilian rule has returned in Islamabad, retired Pakistani Army chief General Mirza Aslam Beg, a veteran of the Afghan campaign and a key figure responsible for toppling Benazir Bhutto’s government in 1990 cautioned the Wall Street Journal, “The ISI can make or break any regime in Pakistan. Don’t fight the ISI.”

9/11’s Drug Connection

These links are not new and were revealed long before the 9/11 attacks. Indeed, a former analyst with the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), Julie Sirrs, traveled undercover to Afghanistan in 1998 after al-Qaeda’s East African embassy attacks and learned that the Taliban regime, then a darling of the Clinton administration and the multinational oil giant Unocal, was being courted by Washington as a force for “regional stability.” Sirrs reveals that the regime “was being kept in power significantly by bin Laden’s money and the narcotics trade.”

In 2004, Gail Sheehy reported in the New York Observer that for her trouble, Sirrs had her security clearances revoked and was subsequently hounded out of the DIA.

Unocal, a California-based company, had been courting the Taliban to build a massive pipeline system across Afghanistan that would connect the vast oil and natural-gas reserves of Turkmenistan to ports in Pakistan. The American energy giant partnered with a Saudi company, Delta Oil Co. Ltd., and promised the Taliban that it could expect up to $100 million in transit fees from the proposed $4.5 billion project. …

Ms. Sirrs said she believed that her information was discounted because it was damaging to the Taliban.

“The State Department didn’t want to have anything to do with Afghan resistance, or even, politically, to reveal that there was any viable option to the Taliban,” she said. (Gail Sheehy, “Ex-Spook Sirrs: Early Osama Call Got Her Ejected,” The New York Observer, March 14, 2004)

And what of the 9/11 attacks themselves, the presumed “trigger” for the Global War on Terror?

In the introduction to Charles Brisard and Guillaume Dasquié’s book Forbidden Truth, investigative journalist Wayne Madsen wrote: “Yet the links [to 9/11] do not merely end with the greater bin Laden family–they involved the House of Saud, the Pakistani Inter Service Intelligence agency, other wealthy Saudi bankers and merchants, Islamic charities and madrassas, U.S. oil tycoons, and U.S. defense contractors like The Carlyle Group.”

An unholy alliance that has persisted since the end of World War II. Added to the mix are the invisible yet omnipresent tentacles of the international narcotics trade that cuts across global money flows and paves the way for U.S. “special operations.”

As investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker revealed in Welcome to Terrorland and subsequent reporting,

Just three weeks after Mohamed Atta and Marwan Al-Shehhi arrived on July 3, 2000 to attend the flight school at Huffman Aviation in Venice, FL., the owner of the flight school, Wallace J. Hilliard, had his Learjet surrounded by DEA agents with submachine guns on the runway of Orlando Executive Airport.

Agents found 43 pounds of heroin, arrested everyone onboard, and confiscated the plane. …

Moreover, the drug connection was uncovered independently in two different places: by our investigation in Venice, FL., and by FBI translator Sibel Edmonds in Washington D.C.

“The 9/11 terror plot intersected with the activities of a drug trafficking network of international scope, in ways that form a ‘crystal clear’ picture of what was going on,” said Edmonds. (”The 9/11 Heroin Connection,” MadCowMorningNews, September 7, 2006)

Indeed, according to German investigative reporter Jürgen Roth’s account in Netzwerke des Terrors, in 1995 the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA) investigated Atta for drug crimes and falsifying phone cards while a student at the Hamburg Technical University. While 9/11’s lead hijacker wasn’t charged, a record of the investigation will prevent him from obtaining a security job with Lufthansa Airlines in early 2001 according to Newsday, the History Commons revealed.

As FBI whistleblower Sibel Edmonds wrote on the connections amongst drug traffickers, terrorists and key U.S. allies such as Turkey, a major transportation hub for the flow of heroin into Europe, Edmonds wondered, “who are the real lords of Afghanistan’s poppy fields?”

For Al Qaeda’s network Turkey is a haven for its sources of funding. Turkish networks, along with Russians’, are the main players in these fields; they purchase the opium from Afghanistan and transport it through several Turkic speaking Central Asian states into Turkey, where the raw opium is processed into popular byproducts; then the network transports the final product into Western European and American markets via their partner networks in Albania. The networks’ banking arrangements in Turkey, Cyprus and Dubai are used to launder and recycle the proceeds, and various Turkish companies in Turkey and Central Asia are used to make this possible and seem legitimate. The Al Qaeda network also uses Turkey to obtain and transfer arms to its Central Asian bases, including Chechnya. (”The Hijacking of a Nation,” National Security Whistleblowers Coalition, November 29, 2006)

This too, follows a demonstrable pattern. Since the 1960s, the Turkish state has utilized far-right and Islamist surrogates to wage a dirty war against the left. Openly fascist political formations such as the National Action Party (MHP), the organization’s terrorist wing, the Grey Wolves and various Islamist “green gangs” such as the Army-controlled Turkish Hizbullah, have all been implicated in state terrorism and the international narcotics trade.

But the connections amongst narcotraffickers and terrorist financiers, though extensive, have all but been ignored by U.S. corporate media as it hyped the “failure of imagination” fairy tale spun by Washington insiders.

While the 9/11 Commission cited “intelligence failures” to “connect the dots” prior to the attacks, it is the contention of this writer that ongoing intelligence operations utilizing Afghan-Arab veterans and international narcotics syndicates, including al-Qaeda–in the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Middle East and South Asia–lie at the heart of 9/11’s cover-up.

In other words these cosy and highly profitable relationships built-up over decades, rather than unproven claims of an “inside job,” allegations which all-too-frequently disappear Western intelligence agencies and their Islamist partners, were central to the 9/11 plot and subsequent U.S.-led “war on terror,” a war of terror waged globally for resource extraction and geopolitical advantage over capitalist rivals.

One shudders to consider what the incoming Obama administration is contemplating when it recommends a “surge” of U.S. troops into Afghanistan. But if history is any judge, we can be certain that the illicit relationships amongst drug cartels and intelligence agencies will continue far into the future.

While drug lord Haji Bashir Noorzai awaits sentencing in Manhattan, someone else has already taken his place. After all, some things never change…

Pirapaharan spoke more about peace outlining the need for a peaceful settlement to the ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka. He outlined circumstances leading to Tamil youths taking up arms against the Sri Lankan government subsequent to the Sri Lankan state failing to address the grievances of Tamils through peaceful means since the country gained independence from Britain in 1948 and heaping oppressive terrorist measures upon the Tamil people: “In the beginning, it was a peaceful and democratic struggle by our people for justice. The racist Sinhala state resorted to armed and animal-like violence to suppress the peaceful struggle of the Tamil people for their political rights. It was when state oppression breached all norms and our people faced naked terrorism that our movement for freedom was born as a natural outcome in history. We were compelled to take up arms in order to protect our people from the armed terrorism of the racist Sinhala state. The armed violent path was not our choice. It was forced upon us by history.”

With this emphasis on peace, it seems that the LTTE leader has changed his strategy towards winning the rights of Tamils through peaceful means in stark contrast to his previous statements in which he gave much importance to dealing with the Sri Lankan state through military means. Although the LTTE has the potential to win the war in the long run, Pirapaharan’s speech with emphasis on peace rather than war shows that the LTTE wants peace. He realizes the need for a political solution to end the three-decade-old ethnic conflict, to prevent more civilian casualties and to buy time to win global support especially that of India.

This statement shows that the LTTE leader is handling the issue seriously through political and diplomatic thinking. The question is whether Sri Lanka would fall into the trap of the LTTE military, will it suffer political and diplomatic blows in the international arena or both? An answer to these questions will come to light before early next year.

In this context, it is important at this juncture to look at the perceptions of the LTTE leader and that of his opponents, as well as those of the global forces who hold the key to making an historic move in the months to come to help solve the Sri Lankan ethnic conflict.

LTTE leader outlining historical facts

“From the day that British colonialism was replaced with Sinhala oppression,” Pirapaharan said, “we have been struggling for our just rights – peacefully at first and with weapons thereafter. The political struggle for our right to self-determination has extended over the last sixty years. During this period our struggle has gone through different shapes, phases developments before advancing to maturity.”

Although these facts have been stated in the past, the weight of his latest statement is in the indirect accusation of the western world for creating the post-colonial conflicts. He quite rightly indicated that Britain should be held responsible for what is happening in Sri Lanka since it was Britain that brought the Tamil and Sinhala kingdoms together for their own administrative convenience.

The LTTE leader further stated that the LTTE had never stood in the way of national, geopolitical, or economic welfare of any other country, and added that the profound aspirations of the Tamil people were not harmful to the welfare of any other country or their people. He wanted neighbouring India to realize that the LTTE wouldn’t be a threat to their territorial integrity and sovereignty. The central government in New Delhi believes that the Dravidian race from the southern part of India could gain momentum for secession if the Dravidian race in other parts of the world gained power, and it is this perception that has cast New Delhi in a critical role against attaining independent Tamil Eelam from time to time. Southern Indian politicians, especially Tamil Nadu politicians and even Tamil Eelam leaders, have re-emphasized that New Delhi would never have to worry about it, but India still holds on to the belief.

He appealed to the countries that have banned the LTTE to remove this ban. With its greed for the land of the Tamil people Sinhalam has engaged on a militaristic path of destruction. It has sought to build the support of the world to confront us. It is living in a dreamland of military victory. It is a dream from which it will awake. That is certain. He said, “We have never been against adopting peaceful means and we have never hesitated to take part in peace talks.”

LTTE leader embraces India

Pirapaharan reiterated the past relationship between India and LTTE: “Great changes are taking place in India. The voices of support for our struggle that were stifled are again being heard loudly.”

Obviously the LTTE leader wants greater support from Tamil Nadu in order to win his struggle for an independent Tamil Eelam. Tamil Nadu is home to nearly 70 million Tamils and nearly 10 million more Tamils are living all around the world including India. The LTTE does not want to isolate the Tamils based on their birth place. They want unity among the Tamils. These are the aspirations of Tamil Nadu leaders. Hence, the political change in Tamil Nadu will be a boost for Pirapaharan.

Further, the LTTE wants India’s support which will in turn garner the support of the International Community. He expressed his gratitude to the people of India saying, “Not withstanding the dividing sea, Tamil Nadu, with its perfect understanding of our plight, has taken heart to rise on behalf of our people at this hour of need. This timely intervention has gratified the people of Tamil Eelam and our freedom movement and given us a sense of relief. I wish to express my love and gratitude at this juncture to the people and leaders of Tamil Nadu and the leaders of India for the voice of support and love they have extended.”

He also appealed to the Indian government to take constructive action to remove the ban which remains a stumbling block for the good relationship between India and the LTTE. It is obvious that the LTTE leader is a classic tactician with over three decades of military, political and diplomatic experience and manoeuvres. Once, India was his temporary home while his cadres fought in Eelam against Sri Lankan armed forces. He was the charismatic leader with the courage and the talents to force India to pull out the Indian armed forces from Eelam after three years of war between 1987 and 1990. All these show that Pirapaharan could do a lot in India on behalf of his homeland.

Slap on the face of International Community for helping Sri Lanka

Pirapaharan lambasted the International Community for helping the Sri Lankan state in the war against Tamils. He blamed the IC for playing a double game in the affairs of the Sri Lankan ethnic conflict saying that while they encouraged the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government in the peace process, they branded the LTTE a terrorist outfit giving the Sri Lankan government the upper hand in the peace talks.

He also posed the question of when the Sri Lankan state would grant autonomy for the Tamils. After cleansing the Tamils from Sri Lanka or after destroying the Tamils’ representatives, the LTTE? The IC has fallen into the political and diplomatic trap of the Sri Lankan government.

He said some countries identifying themselves as so-called “Peace Sponsors” rushed into activities which impaired negotiations. “They denigrated our freedom movement as a terrorist organisation. They put us on their black list and ostracized us as unwanted and untouchable. Our people living in many lands were intimidated into submission by oppressive limitations imposed on them to prevent their political activities supporting our freedom struggle.”

He further said: “Humanitarian activities pursued by our law-abiding people in many countries, well within the purview of the law of the land, have been belittled and curtailed. These activities were aimed at providing humanitarian aid to helpless victims of genocidal attacks by the Sinhala-run Sri Lanka state in Tamil areas. However, these humanitarian activities were branded as criminal activities in those countries. Representatives of the Tamil people, along with community leaders were arrested, jailed and insulted.

“The explicit bias shown by the activities of these countries affected the talks, in its balance and in its consideration of our status as an equal partner. This further aggravated the racist attitude of the Sinhala state. Sinhala chauvinism was encouraged to raise its head with impunity and inevitably push the Sinhala state further on its war path.”

The LTTE leader’s frustrations over the IC is reasonable because it was none other than the western world that wanted immediate peace talks in Sri Lanka because the LTTE was gaining the upper hand militarily. And, earlier in the last century, U.S.-led coalition forces intervened in Afghanistan and Iraq and wanted an immediate ceasefire in Sri Lanka allowing temporary peace in the Indian Ocean island nation. Even now these coalition partners want peace on the island for their own benefits with no heed to the grievances faced by the Tamils on the island.

Sri Lankan military continues its genocidal war

The LTTE leader described how the Tamils face military operations imposed upon them and how the LTTE has embarked on a historic journey, as hazardous and strenuous as never before as the Sri Lankan armed forces advance with the military aid of foreign governments with the aim to cleanse the Tamils from their traditional habitat.

“In this historic venture, we have encountered numerous turns, twists and confrontations. We have faced forces much mightier than ours. We have had direct confrontations even against superior powers, stronger than us. We have withstood wave after wave of our enemy attacks. Standing alone, we have blasted networks of innumerable intrigues, interwoven with betrayal and sabotage. We stood like a mountain and faced all dangers that loomed like storms. When compared to these happenings of the past, today’s challenges are neither novel nor huge. We will face these challenges with the united strength of our people.”

The LTTE leader rightly pointed out that the Tamils are not fighting to occupy Sinhalese areas. Rather they are fighting to save their own lands. Under the pretext of fighting terrorism or fighting to safeguard the sovereignty of Sri Lanka, it is indulging in violence causing heavy damages and casualties to the civilians.

When the Sri Lankan state realizes that the Tamils are living in their historical lands, the conflict on the island will end. The belief that entire areas of the island belong to Buddhist Sinhalese is fraught with danger and cannot hold water in empirical analysis. It could be argued that the Tamils were living in Sri Lanka for millennia well before the Sinhalese moved into Sri Lanka through Tamil Nadu from Orissa or via the Bay of Bengal. The Tamils have a solid claim for an independent Tamil Eelam as the Tamils have a great history, language, culture and religion. The claim for wiping out the Tamils or wiping out the LTTE is meant to weed out the Tamil race from their inhabited lands whose ancestors have lived on those lands for millennia.

Sri Lanka and India reject LTTE’s claims

Immediately after LTTE leader’s statement came out, the Sri Lankan high-portfolio ministers and military officials issued separate statements describing the LTTE leader’s speech as nothing but an acknowledgement that the LTTE could not continue war with the Sri Lankan state as before.

Sri Lanka’s defence spokesman, Keheliya Rambukkwella, said that the Sri Lankan government viewed the LTTE’s speech not as a hero’s speech, but as a plea to the International Community in the face of the Tigers loosing control of areas hitherto held by them.

He further said: “The LTTE leader has proved in his speech that he is a criminal and that through his speech he is just making a plea for pardon.” Pirapaharan was begging the International Community to grant him a pardon for the earlier actions of the LTTE. He said: “Now the world has realized that terrorism cannot be tolerated anymore.” Further he said Pirapaharan had not mentioned even a single word about the government requiring the Tigers to lay down arms as a prerequisite for talks. “By remaining silent about laying down arms he has proved that he is not ready for talks,” Minister Rambukkwella said.

Never in the course of his speech did Pirapaharan ask for pardon nor did he in any anyway suggest that the LTTE was losing its military prowess, and for Rambukwella to rush make such a pathetic and desperate conclusion is absurd. Pirapaharan says that he wants justice from the International Community because the rights of Tamils are being rejected by Sri Lanka and the Tamils want International Community recognition for their right to self-determination. He also wants India to lift the ban on the LTTE as a terrorist outfit since they are fighting for Tamil liberation who have sacrificed enough lives for their freedom.

Another hardcore Sinhalese, Foreign Minister Rohitha Bogollagama, said Pirapaharan’s overtures to India will not find accommodation. He has called upon Pirapaharan to heed President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s call to lay down arms, renounce terrorism and enter the democratic path, in order to be part of the political process that is already underway, to evolve a sustainable solution that will bring lasting peace and stability to Sri Lanka. Bogollagama is now desperately trying to link or equate LTTE militancy to the most recent Islamic terrorist attack in Mumbai. Fortunately for the Tamils it is becoming increasingly evident that Pakistan a sovereign state and a close ally of Sri Lanka, closer than to India, and has links to this international terrorist attack. We hope the only surviving assailant, a godsend to the Tamils, will be allowed to live long enough to tell the whole story. In fact the Pakistani High Commissioner to the UK in a BBC interview on 29 November 2008 stated that photographs of the assailants show them as being dark skinned so they were LTTE Tamils – as if there were no dark skinned people in Pakistan. A preposterous way of taking the red herring across its trail. And the question is, why?

Bogollagama does not know the ground reality in India. He should know that over 20,000 students throughout India’s states took part in a rally in New Delhi recently urging the Indian government to put pressure upon Sri Lanka to declare a ceasefire and to grant autonomy for Eelam Tamils. The Indian central government would lose millions of dollars worth of tax money in a day if the Tamil Nadu state launched a state-wide strike. Tamil Nadu has already conducted such a protest. Sri Lanka’s conflict is boiling over externally and it will no doubt have a greater impact in the lives of Indian citizens on its soil, prompting India to take a leading role in solving Sri Lanka’s ethnic conflict and single-mindedly deal with the terrorism of Pakistan.

Sri Lankan officials claim, quoting Indian officials, that India would not lift the ban on the LTTE. Indian officials in New Delhi also confirmed this. They said the question of acceding to the request did not arise since the ban, first imposed in 1992, had been extended for another two years.

In any event, the LTTE leader’s speech was meant to draw the attention of India and the International Community to the conflict and the Eelam Tamils’ right to self-determination. This will only happen when the LTTE is internationally recognized as the freedom fighters of the Tamils and the terrorist brand is lifted. The claim that the LTTE leader is on his death bed and the LTTE is withdrawing from its controlled areas as a tactic to put the enemy in military and political defeat is groundless.

When Lashkar-e-Taiba (”Army of the Pure”–LET) militants slaughtered nearly 200 people in Mumbai during the November 26 siege in India’s financial capital, one name stood out among a list of 20 fugitives the Indian government has demanded Pakistan extradite as a key suspect responsible for providing funds and logistical support to the Kashmir-based terrorist outfit.

Enter Dawood Ibrahim, the enigmatic Mafia don of Mumbai’s D-Company whose far-flung organized crime empire stretches from Dubai through Pakistan to India and beyond. If anyone knows where the proverbial “bodies are buried,” that man may very well be Ibrahim. Wanted by Interpol and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), Ibrahim commutes between palatial homes in Dubai and Karachi where he enjoys the protection afforded by “friends in high places.”

According to a report in Asia Times Online, “Ibrahim is…suspected of orchestrating the November 26 Mumbai terrorist strikes through a businessman in Saudi Arabia said to be his frontman.” The Indian-born drug kingpin has been identified by journalists and investigators as a long-time asset of both the CIA and Pakistan’s notorious Inter Services Intelligence agency (ISI).

Asia Times Online investigative journalist Raja Murthy was told by Lahore-based journalist Amir Mir that “Dawood’s underworld connects and business ventures are extensive. And he sublets his name in Pakistan, Thailand, South Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia and the United Arab Emirates, among other countries, to franchises in the fields of drug trafficking and gambling dens.”

Karachi-based reporter Ghulam Hasnain described to Murthy why Ibrahim was amongst ISI’s most valued assets: “Dawood is Pakistan’s number one espionage operative. His men in Mumbai help him get whatever information he needs for Pakistan. Rumor has it that sometimes his men in Karachi accompany Pakistani intelligence agents to the airports to scan arriving passengers and identify RAW [Indian Research and Analysis Wing] agents.”

And what does this “number one espionage operative” get in return? According to Hasnain, “His home is a palatial house spread over 6,000 square yards, boasting a pool, tennis courts, snooker room and a private, hi-tech gym. He wears designer clothes, drives top-of-the-line Mercedes and luxurious four-wheel drives, sports a half-a-million rupee Patek Phillipe wristwatch, and showers money on starlets and prostitutes.”

Pakistan’s shadowy military intelligence bureau, with organizational and operational linkages to the Taliban, al-Qaeda, the CIA and Britain’s MI6 has long been suspected of funding planetary-wide terrorist operations and nuclear smuggling in part, through “black money” derived from the drugs trade and other rackets. Despite this sordid history, the ISI and their organized crime-linked assets have long been viewed by Washington as allies in America’s so-called “war on terror.”

While American “counterterrorism officials” are now calling for the heads of Ibrahim, his associate Tiger Memon and former ISI Director, retired Lieutenant General Hamid Gul, described by the usual unnamed sources as–what else!–”rogue elements,” the United States and their NATO partners have made liberal use of these jokers in a score of destabilization ops that span continents.

Indeed, after the Afghanistan operation during the 1980s, the CIA and ISI worked together in a score of global hot spots. From Bosnia to Chechnya and beyond, wherever the dirty work needed doing, a wide pool of disposable intelligence assets under cover of “Islamic fundamentalism” were ready, willing an able to fill the breech.

It should be noted that characters such as Dawood Ibrahim and others of his ilk have as much in common with Islam as former New York crime boss, the late, though unlamented, John Gotti did with Christianity.

Destabilization and Covert Ops in South Asia

Before his execution at the hands of the Taliban, Najibullah, Afghanistan’s last socialist president told an American reporter:

We have a common task–Afghanistan, the USA and the civilised world–to launch a joint struggle against fundamentalism. If fundamentalism comes to Afghanistan, war will continue for many years. Afghanistan will turn into a centre of world smuggling for narcotic drugs. Afghanistan will be turned into a centre for terrorism. (Michael Griffin, Reaping the Whirlwind: Afghanistan, Al Qa’ida and the Holy War, London: Pluto Press, 2003, p. 4)

Little did the former president know, this was precisely the fate chosen for his country by the ISI and their American partners in crime over at Langley.

Though now on the outs with Washington, Hamid Gul was a staunch U.S. ally during the 1980s anti-Soviet jihad when the CIA made liberal use of billions of taxpayer dollars to fund the so-called mujahedin or “holy warriors” in a successful bid to bring down Kabul’s socialist government.

During the war, U.S. and Pakistani intelligence assets linked to organized crime gangs and various smuggling rackets quickly learned the value of Afghanistan’s number one cash crop, poppy. By the time the first phase of the war ended in 1989 with the withdrawal of Soviet combat troops, heroin production had morphed into a multibillion dollar industry along Asia’s Golden Crescent, one that provided a limitless source of black funds–and hardened combat veterans–to enterprising intelligence agencies.

Occupying a prominent place in the spider’s web, the D-Company certainly fit the bill. India’s 1990s economic “reforms” bit hard into Ibrahim’s former “cash crop”–gold smuggling. As the globalized market, rather than bureaucratic Indian regulations gobbled-up D-Company profits, Ibrahim’s gang turned to another profitable source of income: the global drugs trade. As investigative journalist Misha Glenny points out, Ibrahim,

took the obvious plunge and started trafficking in drugs, chiefly in heroin bound for the European market and mandrax for South Africa. And in Dawood’s part of the world, if you want to guarantee the success of a narcotics business, there is only one organization you need to cozy up to–the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) Pakistan’s secret service. (McMafia: A Journey Through the Global Criminal Underworld, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008, p. 135)

Ibrahim followed in the footsteps of a long line of CIA-ISI “best friends forever.” As Alfred W. McCoy documented in his landmark study, The Politics of Heroin, another darling of dodgy intelligence agencies, the pathological killer Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who made his mark in the 1970s by throwing acid into the faces of Afghan university women, became the chief beneficiary of CIA largesse. McCoy writes,

…over the next decade, [the CIA] gave more than half its covert aid to Hekmatyar’s guerrillas. It was, as the U.S. Congress would find a decade later, a dismal decision. Unlike the later resistance leaders who commanded strong popular followings inside Afghanistan, Hekmatyar led a guerrilla force that was a creature of the Pakistan military. After the CIA built his Hezbi-i Islami into the largest guerrilla force, Hekmatyar would prove himself brutal and corrupt. Not only did he command the largest guerrilla army, but Hekmatyar would use it–with the full support of ISI and the tacit tolerance of the CIA–to become Afghanistan’s leading drug lord. (The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade, Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1991, pp. 449-450)

It would be a travesty however, to claim that Pakistan alone was responsible for launching Ibrahim along the path of international terrorism. India’s own neofascist movement, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (National Volunteers Organization–RSS), aligned with the Hindu supremacist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), are intent on constructing a “pure” Hindu state purged of “alien” Muslims. As Indian socialist analysts point out,

It is no coincidence that the flourishing of fascism has accompanied the establishment of the neoliberal regime at the centre. The India to which neoliberalism has given birth, with one-fifth engaged in consumer excess as never before and four-fifths in deep misery, can only with difficulty persist alongside the maintenance of civil rights, democracy and periodic elections. If the fundamental social question, imperialist capitalism vs. socialism, were ever to be put at the centre of things, the continued existence of the landlord-big business regime that has ruled since independence would be in danger, and a truly explosive situation result. (”The Christian Pogrom in Orissa and the Growing Threat of Hindutva Fascism,” Analytical Monthly Review, February 22, 2008)

This was tragically driven-home with a vengeance in the early 1990s. Indeed, the rise of Indian fascism coincides precisely with the rise of neoliberal globalization. As “market reforms” plunged tens of millions into abject poverty, the ruling elite cast about for scapegoats and, like European Jews in prewar Germany, the Muslim community became targets of religious intolerance and communalist fanaticism.

In 1992, during a 150,000 strong demonstration organized by Indian fascists, rampaging gangs destroyed the Babri Mosque in the city of Ayodhya. In the rioting that followed in a score of cities some 2,000 largely Muslim Indian citizens were murdered by Hindu supremacist mobs. Ibrahim, though nominally a Muslim, was greatly angered by the Mumbai pogrom and vowed revenge. It wasn’t long in coming.

On March 12, 1993, a series of explosions wracked Mumbai in coordinated attacks believed to have been organized by the D-Company working in tandem with ISI who, like their nominal enemies in New Delhi, had their own communalist agenda. The largest blast occurred at the Mumbai Stock Exchange when a half-ton of military grade RDX was detonated in the underground parking garage and killed more than 50 people. By the time the smoke cleared, nearly 300 people lay dead and hundreds more wounded.

According to a 2002 report in India Abroad, Ibrahim organized the blasts “under pressure from the Inter-Services Intelligence of Pakistan.”

The ISI, which controlled the shipping routes from the Gulf to India’s west coast, demanded that the mafia transport weapons and explosives into India in return for the use of Pakistani waters, the sources said quoting official information.

The Mumbai underworld’s financial interests were under pressure as gold prices had crashed and the smuggling routes between the Gulf nations and the western coast of India had come under ISI control. (”ISI pressured Dawood to carry out Mumbai blasts,” India Abroad, December 22, 2002)

It wouldn’t be the first time nor the last that the dapper Mafia don would do ISI’s bidding.

ISI: the Enforcement Arm of Pakistan’s “Military Inc.”

Hamid Gul’s history as a beneficiary of state largesse in the form of plum contracts and other dodgy schemes that benefitted his family goes back decades. Nor is his hostility to civilian rule. As Pakistani scholar and investigative journalist Ayesha Siddiqa writes, Gul’s maneuvering against Benazir Bhutto’s first government, led to her ouster in 1990 through a “soft coup” engineered by the general and other top army officials.

Benazir Bhutto…replaced the head of the ISI, Lt. General Hameed Gul, with a general of her choice, Major-General Shamsul Rehman Kallu. This did not make her popular with the army, and hence the organization retaliated. Reportedly, the higher echelons of the army, who were extremely unhappy with her attempts to curb their power by interfering in internal matters, used the ISI to remove her from power. The army chief, General Aslam Beg, and the head of the ISI, Lt. General Asad Durrani, obtained a slush fund of approximately Rs 60 million (US$1.03 million) from a private bank, and used to execute the plan for Bhutto’s removal. The money was given to the ISI to destabilize the civilian government. (Military, Inc.: Inside Pakistan’s Military Economy, Ann Arbor: Pluto Press, 2007, p. 91)

And what “private bank” pray tell, did the coup plotters reach out to in order to remove Bhutto from power? Why none other than Agha Hasan Abedi’s Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) of course! BCCI, a corrupt financial institution that stole billions from their depositors was a long time “friend” of both ISI and CIA in their dirty dealings–from drug money laundering to arms trafficking–that spanned continents, from the covert war in Afghanistan to the Iran-Contra affair.

Days after the 2007 Karachi bombings that greeted her return to Pakistan, and just two months before her assassination in Rawalpindi, Benazir Bhutto accused Gul and Intelligence Bureau (IB) Chief Ijaz Shah, among others, as the masterminds behind the savage attacks that left more than 140 people dead and 450 injured. After her assassination, although al-Qaeda commander Mustafa Abu al-Yazid claimed responsibility for her murder, reportedly on orders from al-Qaeda’s number two man, Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bhutto’s followers believe the plans for her assassination came from senior ISI officials formerly in the retinue of America’s “friend,” the dictator General Zia ul-Haq.

Since his 1989 “retirement” from ISI, Gul has been an outspoken proponent of utilizing proxies such as LET as witting or unwitting assets in Pakistan’s conflict with India over Kashmir–and as a supporter of the Taliban and another “former” group of U.S. intelligence assets, al-Qaeda. According to The Washington Post,

Gul, 71, has acknowledged that he once was a member of a group of retired ISI officers, Pakistani scientists and others that was suspected by the United States of giving material support to the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Gul said the organization, Ummah Tameer-e-Nau, was formed by a group of Pakistani businessmen to aid war-ravaged industries in Afghanistan.

The U.S. Treasury Department declared Ummah Tameer-e-Nau a terrorist group after a search of the group’s offices in the Afghan capital, Kabul, unearthed documents referencing plans to kidnap a U.S. diplomat and outlining basic physics related to nuclear weapons. (Candace Rondeaux, “Former Pakistani Official Denies Links to Lashkar,” The Washington Post, December 9, 2008, A12)

But what Gul (and The Washington Post) will not, cannot, reveal is that Ummah Tameer-e-Nau was also intimately connected–as was Dawood Ibrahim’s D-Company–to the illicit nuclear smuggling ring of Pakistani scientist A. Q. Khan. Allegedly run to ground after overwhelming evidence surfaced linking Khan and Pakistan’s military government to the underground trade in nuclear technology and know-how, nuclear smuggling is the proverbial third rail of the Pakistani–and American–defense establishments.

Operating for decades with a wink and a nod from Washington and London, Khan was quietly released from house arrest in April according to a report by the McClatchy Washington Bureau. This despite the fact that international investigators found electronic blueprints for an advanced nuclear weapon on computers belonging to Khan’s smuggling network. According to The New York Times,

the latest design found on Khan network computers in Switzerland, Bangkok and several other cities around the world is half the size and twice the power of the Chinese weapon, with far more modern electronics, the investigators say. The design is in electronic form, they said, making it easy to copy–and they have no idea how many copies of it are now in circulation. (David E. Sanger, “Nuclear Ring Reportedly Had Advanced Weapon Design,” The New York Times, June 15, 2008)

This closely tracks allegations made by whistleblower Sibel Edmonds earlier this year to The Sunday Times that a U.S. government official “warned a Turkish member of the [Khan] network that they should not deal with a company called Brewster Jennings because it was a CIA front company investigating the nuclear black market. The official’s warning came two years before Brewster Jennings was publicly outed when one of its staff, Valerie Plame, was revealed to be a CIA agent in a case that became a cause celebre in the US.”

Gul however, has a different take on Washington’s newly-minted animus towards him and told the press on Monday, “I was quite a darling of theirs at the time. I don’t know what this is about. It looks like they have a habit of betraying their friends.”

While true as far it goes, Gul’s disingenuousness is a cynical façade meant to conceal ISI’s murderous policies. In an obvious appeal to dubious Western constituencies Gul declared, “I simply fail to understand what all the hullabaloo is about. It’s simply because I speak loudly about the fact that 9/11 was a bloody hoax,” he told the Post. “It was an inside job.”

Mumbai: “Round Up the Usual Suspects!”

Though there is convincing evidence linking the D-Company to the Mumbai attacks, each new “revelation” by Indian and American authorities tend to erase Ibrahim from the picture. This subtle though noticeable reframing of the equation follows a predictable and well-known pattern. Independent press outlets such as Asia Times Online however, apparently haven’t gotten the memo. According to investigative journalist Raja Murthy:

The Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba terrorists set sail from Karachi to Mumbai in the ship MV Alpha, allegedly an Ibrahim-owned vessel. After being warned of Indian navy patrols along the Indian coast, the LET terrorists hijacked an Indian fishing trawler, Kuber, and murdered its crew except for the navigator, Amarsinh Solanki.

The terrorists slit Solanki’s throat five nautical miles off the Indian coast–the Indian Navy found his body aboard the abandoned trawler with his hands tied behind his back. Later, they linked up with an Ibrahim gang member in Mumbai who provided them motorized inflatable rubber dinghies in which they landed ashore after 9pm on November 26. Within 30 minutes, they struck pre-determined targets in South Mumbai starting with the Leopold Cafe in Colaba. (”India Wants its ‘Osama’ Back,” Asia Times Online, December 9, 2008)

These attacks however, didn’t come out of the blue. According to numerous reports, Mumbai police were given “solid information” from India’s Intelligence Bureau (IB) and the Research and Analysis Wing (RAW) that Mumbai was on a list of cities to be targeted by terrorists. India Abroad reports that

The first alert was sounded in February 2008 following the interrogation of a terrorist arrested in connection with the fidayeen (suicide) attack at the Central Reserve Police Force camp at Rampur, Uttar Pradesh. During the interrogation, the arrested terrorist had confessed that the Lashkar-e-Tayiba had planned on attacking Mumbai. He had specifically mentioned the Taj Mahal hotel during his interrogation.

Then came the various intercepts by both the IB and RAW, which both agencies claim had passed on to the Mumbai police. The first intercept of a satellite phone conversation was three months before the Mumbai attack. The conversation suggested that the next attack would be a hotel at Mumbai. The conversation also suggested that it would be better to take the sea route as it was safer. The final intercept was made on November 18, which was eight days before the attack. (Vicky Nanjappa, “Time & again, Mumbai cops had been warned: IB,” India Abroad, December 4, 2008)

This report was echoed by The New York Times, which claimed,

Two senior American officials said Tuesday that the United States had warned India in mid-October of possible terrorist attacks against “touristy areas frequented by Westerners” in Mumbai, but that the information was not specific. Nonetheless, the officials said, the warning echoed other general alerts this year by India’s intelligence agency, raising questions about the adequacy of India’s counterterrorism measures. (Eric Schmitt, Somini Sengupta and Jane Perlez, “U.S. and India See Link to Militants in Pakistan, The New York Times, December 3, 2008)

Despite these suspicions, Indian authorities insist that the terrorists had no “local support” in carrying out the attacks. According to a report in the Economic Times however, “the don is ensconced safely in his plush bungalow in Karachi. Sources in security agencies told TOI [Times of India] on Wednesday that it is business as usual for Dawood. … Mohammed Ali, who is the king of the docks and a key person of the Dawood gang, is continuing his operations with impunity. Even after the November 26 terror attacks his smuggling racket remains unchecked.”

And Express India reported November 29 that “Ajmal Amin, the only militant arrested during the operation, told interrogators that the dozen ultras who sailed from Karachi had come to Sasool dock from where they were taken first to Cuff Parade and later to Gateway of India in boats arranged by a front man of Dawood, who runs several custom clearing houses in Mumbai, the sources claimed.”

Meanwhile, the Associated Press reported December 9, that the head of Russia’s federal anti-narcotics agency, Viktor Ivanov, said that Ibrahim had helped the gunmen. “The information that has been received indicates that the well-known drug trafficker Dawood Ibrahim provided his logistics network for the preparation and implementation of the attacks.”

But Ibrahim wasn’t always the bête noire of U.S. intelligence agencies. According to Yoichi Shimatsu, a former editor of The Japan Times, during the CIA’s Afghan campaign of the 1980s, Ibrahim “personally assisted” U.S. deep cover operations by diverting money from U.S.-owned gambling casinos operating in Kathmandu, Nepal. Shimatsu, commenting on India’s demand for Ibrahim’s extradition for his role in the Mumbai attacks wrote,

Washington and London both agreed with India’s legal claim and removed the longstanding “official protection” accorded for his past services to Western intelligence agencies. U.S. diplomats, however, could never allow Dawood’s return. He simply knows too much about America’s darker secrets in South Asia and the Gulf, disclosure of which could scuttle U.S.-India relations. Dawood was whisked away in late June to a safe house in Quetta, near the tribal area of Waziristan, and then he disappeared, probably back to the Middle East. (”Did a Criminal Mastermind Stage the Mumbai Nightmare?,” AlterNet, November 28, 2008)

But as time passes both India and the United States are downplaying Ibrahim’s role while elevating that of alleged LET commander Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi, reportedly captured by Pakistani authorities during a raid on a training camp and now in custody. Allegations of an international whitewash of the affair are now being leveled by journalists. Jeffrey R. Hammond comments, “The recent promotion of Lakhvi to ‘mastermind’ of the attacks while Ibrahim’s name disappears from media reports would seem to lend credence to Shimatsu’s assertion.”

On Friday, according to a New York Times report, Hafiz Muhammad Saeed, the founder of LET, was detained in Lahore on Thursday by “Pakistani authorities.”

Despite the appearance of Pakistani resolve, the detention of Mr. Saeed was orchestrated by the government in a way to minimize what many here expect to be an angry reaction from the public, and from a broad spectrum of Islamic militant groups sympathetic to Lashkar-e-Taiba. (Jane Perlez and Salman Masood, “Pakistan Detains Founder of Group Suspected in Mumbai Attacks,” The New York Times, December 11, 2008)

Saeed, briefly detained in 2002 after an earlier “crackdown” on militant outfits, became the leader of the Islamic charity, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, which is a recruiting arm for the LET.

Meanwhile, according to the Times, “There was still uncertainty on Thursday about whether Maulana Masood Azhar, the leader of Jaish-e-Muhammad, another militant group, had been placed under house arrest, and whether the Lashkar commander suspected of running the Mumbai operation, Zaki ur-Rehman Lakhvi, had been arrested.”

So much for arresting Mumbai’s alleged “masterminds.” Sounds more like Captain Renaud’s quip in Casablanca: “Round up the usual suspects!”

Indeed, a deal earlier this year to have Pakistan hand Ibrahim over to Indian authorities was scotched by the CIA. The Agency, fearful that too many dirty little secrets would come to light, including the criminal activities of high-level CIA personnel, nixed the proposal. According to this reading, the Mumbai attacks were a backlash for the proposed double-cross of Ibrahim and that any future arrangements along these lines would have serious consequences.

Why would India seek to downgrade Ibrahim’s role? Hammond comments,

But while Lakhvi, Muzammil, and Hafiz Saeed have continued to be named in connection with last month’s attacks in Mumbai, the name of Dawood Ibrahim seems to be either disappearing altogether or his originally designated role as the accused mastermind of the attacks being credited now instead to Lakhvi in media accounts.

Whether this is a deliberate effort to downplay Ibrahim’s role in the attacks so as not to have to force Pakistan to turn him over because of embarrassing revelations pertaining to the CIA’s involvement with known terrorists and drug traffickers that development could possibly produce isn’t certain. But what is certain is that the CIA has had a long history of involvement with such characters and that the US has a track record of attempting to keep information about the nature of such involvement in the dark or to cover it up once it reaches the light of public scrutiny. (Jeffrey R. Hammond, “Role of Alleged CIA Asset in Mumbai Attacks Being Downplayed,” Foreign Policy Journal, December 10, 2008)

And so it goes, on and on… Meanwhile, business as usual will continue and the bodies pile up. Which just goes to show, as investigative journalist Daniel Hopsicker has reminded us on more than one occasion: “Being connected means never having to say your sorry.”

The role in the terrorist attacks in Mumbai last month of an underworld kingpin that heads an organization known as D-Company, has known ties to Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), and who is alleged to have ties with the CIA is apparently being whitewashed, suggesting that his capture and handover to India might prove inconvenient for either the ISI or the CIA, or both.

It was Dawood Ibrahim who was initially characterized by press reports as being the mastermind behind the attacks. Now, that title of “mastermind” is being given to Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi by numerous media accounts reporting that Pakistan security forces have raided a training camp of the group Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT), which evidence has indicated was behind the attacks. Lakhvi was reportedly captured in the raid and is now in custody.

At the same time Ibrahim’s role is being downplayed, Lakhvi’s known role is being exaggerated. Initial reports described him as the training specialist for LeT, but the major media outlets like the New York Times and the London Times, citing government sources, have since promoted his status to that of commander of operations for the group.

The only terrorist from the Mumbai attacks to be captured alive, Azam Amir Kasab, characterized Ibrahim, not Lakhvi, as the mastermind of those attacks, according to earlier press accounts.

Kasab reportedly told his interrogators that he and his fellow terrorists were trained under Lakhvi, also known as “Chacha”, at a camp in Pakistan. Indian officials also traced calls from a satellite phone used by the terrorists to Lakhvi.

But the phone had also been used to call Yusuf Muzammil, also known as Abu Yusuf, Abu Hurrera, and “Yahah”. And it has been Muzammil, not Lakhvi, who has previously been described as the military commander of LeT. It was an intercepted call to Muzammil on November 18 that put the Indian Navy and Coast Guard on high alert to be on the lookout for any foreign vessels from Pakistan entering Indian waters.

Kasab told his interrogators that his team had set out from Karachi, Pakistan, on a ship belonging to Dawood Ibrahim, the MV Alpha. They then hijacked an Indian fishing trawler, the Kuber, to pass through Indian territorial waters to elude the Navy and Coast Guard that were boarding and searching suspect ships.

Although the MV Alpha was subsequently found and seized by the Indian Navy, there have been few, if any, developments about this aspect of the investigation in press accounts, such as whether it has been confirmed or not that the ship was owned by Ibrahim.

Upon arriving off the coast near the city, they were received by inflatable rubber dinghies that had been arranged by an associate of Ibrahim’s in Mumbai.

The planning and execution of the attacks are indicative of the mastermind role not of either Lakhvi or Muzammil, but of Ibrahim, an Indian who is intimately familiar with the city. It was in Mumbai (formerly Bombay) that Ibrahim rose through the ranks of the underworld to become a major organized crime boss.

At least two other Indians were also connected to the attacks, Mukhtar Ahmed and Tausef Rahman. They were arrested for their role in obtaining SIM cards used in the cell phones of the terrorists. Ahmed, according to Indian officials, had in fact been recruited by a special counter-insurgency police task force as an undercover operative. His exact role is still being investigated.

One of the SIM cards used was possibly purchased from New Jersey. Investigators are looking into this potential link to the US, as well.

Dawood Ibrahim went from underworld kingpin to terrorist in 1993, when he was connected to a series of bombings in Bombay that resulted in 250 deaths. He is wanted by Interpol and was designated by the US as a global terrorist in 2003.

It’s believed Ibrahim has been residing in Karachi, and Indian officials have accused Pakistan’s ISI of protecting him.

Ibrahim is known to be a major drug trafficker responsible for shipping narcotics into the United Kingdom and Western Europe.

According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), most Afghan opium (or its derivative, heroin, which is increasingly being produced in the country before export) is smuggled through Iran and Turkey en route by land to Europe; but the percentage that goes to Pakistan seems to mostly find its way directly to the UK, either by plane or by ship.

Afghanistan is the world’s leading producer of opium, a trend that developed during the CIA-backed mujahedeen effort to oust the Soviet Union from the country, with the drug trade serving to help finance the war.

The principle recipient of CIA-ISI funding was Gulbaddin Hekmatyar, one of the major drug lords. Hekmatyar has since joined with the Taliban in the insurgency effort to expel foreign forces from the country – not the Soviet Union, this time, but the US.

A Taliban ban on the cultivation of opium poppies in 2000 resulted in the near total eradication of the crop. But since the US overthrow of the regime in 2001, Afghanistan has once again become the world’s leading producer of opium, surpassing all previous records.

While Hekmatyar chose to side with anti-government forces, a number of other warlords involved in the drug trade were members of the Northern Alliance to whom the CIA doled out cash in the US effort to overthrow the Taliban following the 9/11 attacks.

One such warlord is Abdul Rashid Dostum, who was appointed Chief of Staff of the army under the government of Hamid Karzai, and who has been described in US intelligence’s own files as a “Tier One Warlord”.

That list includes a number of other high ranking officials within the Afghanistan government, including former defense minister and parliament member Marshal Mohammad Fahim, Interior Minister for Counter-Narcotics General Mohammad Daoud, and former governor of Helmand province (now by far the largest producer of opium) Sher Mohammed Akhundzada.

Although government officials parroted by the mainstream media tend to characterize the Afghan opium trade as being controlled by the Taliban, in fact the estimated drug profits of all anti-government elements (AGEs) is a mere fraction of the trade’s total estimated export value. The UNODC estimated the export value this year at $3.4 billion. Of that, AGEs profited between $250-470 million, less than 14% of the total trade. Moreover, what fraction of that percentage has gone specifically to the Taliban as opposed to other AGEs is unknown.

Furthermore, while the Taliban profits from the production of opium through ushr, a 10% tax on all agricultural products, and possibly through a protection racket in which it receives compensation for providing security along smuggling routes, the UNODC has acknowledged that there is little indication that the Taliban itself is responsible for either the actual production or trafficking of the drug.

This is an inconvenient truth for the US, which has so far managed through its propaganda efforts to successfully obfuscate the truth about the Afghan drug trade and portray the Taliban as being almost wholly responsible.

A known drug trafficker, Dawood Ibrahim is naturally also involved in money laundering, which is perhaps where the role of gambling operations in Nepal comes into the picture.

Yoichi Shimatsu, former editor of the Japan Times, wrote last month after the Mumbai attacks that Ibrahim had worked with the US to help finance the mujahedeen during the 1980s and that because he knows too much about the US’s “darker secrets” in the region, he could never be allowed to be turned over to India.

The recent promotion of Lakhvi to “mastermind” of the attacks while Ibrahim’s name disappears from media reports would seem to lend credence to Shimatsu’s assertion.

Investigative journalist Wayne Madsen similarly reported that according to intelligence sources, Dawood Ibrahim is a CIA asset, both as a veteran of the mujahedeen war and in a continuing connection with his casino and drug trade operations in Kathmandu, Nepal. A deal had been made earlier this year to have Pakistan hand Ibrahim over to India, but the CIA was fearful that this would lead to too many of its dirty secrets coming to light, including the criminal activities of high level personnel within the agency.

One theory on the Mumbai attacks is that it was backlash for this double-cross that was among other things intended to serve as a warning that any such arrangement could have further serious consequences.

Although designated as a major international terrorist by the US, media reports in India have characterized the US’s past interest in seeing Ibrahim handed over as less than enthusiastic. Former Indian Deputy Prime Minister L K Advani wrote in his memoir, “My Country My Life”, that he made a great effort to get Pakistan to hand over Ibrahim, and met with then US Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice (now Secretary of State) to pressure Pakistan to do so. But he was informed by Powell that Pakistan would hand over Ibrahim only “with some strings attached” and that then Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf would need more time before doing so.

The handover, needless to say, never occurred. The Pakistan government has also publicly denied that Ibrahim is even in the country; a denial that was repeated following the recent Mumbai attacks.

Others suspected of involvement in the attacks and named among the 20 individuals India wants Pakistan to turn over also have possible connections to the CIA, including Hafiz Mohammad Saeed, the founder of LeT, and Maulana Masood Azhar, both veterans of the CIA-backed mujahedeen effort.

Azhar had been captured in 1994 and imprisoned in India for his role as leader of the Pakistani-based terrorist group Karkut-ul-Mujahideen. He was released, however, in 1999 in exchange for hostages from the takeover of Indian Airlines Flight 814, which was hijacked during its flight from Kathmandu, Nepal to Delhi, India and redirected to Afghanistan. After Azhar’s release, he formed Jaish-e-Mohammed (JeM), which was responsible for an attack on the Indian parliament in 2001 that led Pakistan and India to the brink of war. LeT was also blamed for the attack alongside JeM.

Both LeT and JeM have links to the ISI, which has used the groups as proxies in the conflict with India over the territory of Kashmir.

Hafiz Saeed travelled to Peshawar to join the mujahedeen cause during the Soviet-Afghan war. Peshawar served as the base of operations for the CIA, which worked closely with the ISI to finance, arm, and train the mujahedeen. It was in Peshawar that Saeed became the protégé of Abdullah Azzam, who founded an organization called Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK) along with a Saudi individual named Osama bin Laden.

MAK worked alongside the CIA-ISI operations to recruit Arabs to the ranks of the mujahedeen. The ISI, acting as proxy for the CIA, chose mainly to channel its support to Afghans, such as Gulbaddin Hekmatyar. The U.S. claims the CIA had no relationship with MAK, but bin Laden’s operation, which later evolved into “al-Qaeda”, must certainly have been known to, and approved by, the CIA.

But there are indications that the CIA’s relationship with MAK and al-Qaeda go well beyond having shared a common enemy and mutual interests in the Soviet-Afghan war. A number of al-Qaeda associates appear to have been protected individuals.

Branches of MAK existed elsewhere, including in the United States. The US Treasury Department lists one of MAK’s aliases as Al-Kifah. The Al-Kifah Refugee Center in Brooklyn, New York, served as a recruitment center during the 1980s, but its operations did not end after the end of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Al-Kifah was also a recruitment center for efforts by extremist groups in the Balkans.

Just as in Afghanistan, the US also had mutual interests with Bosnian Muslims and extremist groups acting in the Balkans. MAK had since evolved into al-Qaeda under Osama bin Laden, which had links to groups operating in Bosnia. Despite an arms embargo against such groups, they managed to obtain weapons and supply shipments in which the US at best looked the other way and at worst played an active role.

The operations to arm al-Qaeda linked groups in Bosnia were carried under the watch of then director of the US European Command Intelligence Directorate Gen. Michael V. Hayden. Hayden subsequently served as the director of the National Security Agency from 1999 to 2005 and is currently the Director of Central Intelligence, or DCI, which is the head of the CIA.

A former official at the US consular office in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, Michael Springman went public after 9/11 to explain how his office was used by the CIA to bring recruits to the US for training during the 1980s.

The Jeddah office is where most of the 9/11 hijackers obtained their visas to enter the US.

Two other of the hijackers, Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid al-Mihdhar, were in fact known to the CIA and were being monitored. Despite being known al-Qaeda operatives, they were allowed to enter the US under their real names and neither the FBI nor the State Department were notified.

The US explains this as the result of the CIA losing the terrorists’ trail when they travelled to Thailand after an al-Qaeda meeting in Kuala Lumpur. But this explanation does not stand up to scrutiny since it was known that they had obtained visas to enter the US. Thus, even if the CIA did in fact lose track of the terrorists, standard procedure should have dictated that the FBI and State Department be alerted.

The 9/11 Joint Inquiry and subsequent 9/11 Commission were apparently satisfied with the CIA’s explanation that it lost al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar, and nobody was ever held accountable for the “mistake” of knowingly allowing two known al-Qaeda operatives on the terrorist watchlist to enter the United States unhindered.

Upon arriving in the US, al-Hazmi and al-Mihdhar were assisted by an individual under FBI surveillance for his possible connections to terrorist groups and, furthermore, even lived in a house rented from an FBI informant. But the FBI claims that it didn’t know anything about the men, despite them using their real names and being listed in the phone book, because the CIA hadn’t informed them the two were in the country. The Joint Inquiry report described this as perhaps the single greatest missed opportunity to break up the 9/11 operation and prevent the attacks.

Additionally, it was in fact the CIA who not once, but at least on six separate occasions, approved a visa, including from the office in Jeddah, for or the entry of Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman, a.k.a. “the Blind Sheikh”, into the US, despite his known connection to terrorist acts in Egypt, including the assassination of Anwar Sadat, and despite having been on the State Department’s terrorist watchlist. This, too, was described as a series of “mistakes” after the government was forced to admit that it had occurred – an explanation that the New York Times, which reported this information in a series of articles, seemed to find perfectly satisfactory.

Many, however, find such incompetency and coincidence theories to be simply not credible, preferring instead alternative, oftentimes much more plausible, conspiracy theories.

The Blind Sheikh had also travelled to Peshawar during the mujahedeen effort, and was good friends with Gulbaddin Hekmatyar, the CIA’s top asset during the Soviet-Afghan war. He later became the spiritual head of the terrorist group that carried out the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, a plot which the FBI had known about in advance through two or more informants.

One of the informants served as a bodyguard for the Blind Sheikh and was made responsible for obtaining materials to make the bomb with. Tape recordings he secretly made of conversations with his FBI handlers reveal that the original sting operation involved a plan to replace a chemical used in making the bomb with an inert stimulant that would render it inoperative. But this plan was withdrawn by a supervisor at the FBI and the terrorist cell was allowed to go ahead and make a real bomb – which was then used to blow up the World Trade Center.

Another notable character connected to Al-Kifah training and recruitment efforts for al-Qaeda is Ali Mohammed. He also happened to be an in FBI informant, a CIA asset, and a member of the special forces in the US Army. It is Ali Mohammed whom some suspect of actually being the mastermind of the 1993 WTC bombing. He was later charged in connection to the 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, but has since seemingly disappeared off the map.

After the 9/11 attacks, the investigation into the financing of the attacks led to Omar Saeed Sheikh, a British national of Pakistani origin. According to Indian officials, a joint investigation with the FBI revealed evidence that it was at the direction of the head of the ISI, Lt. Gen. Mahmud Ahmed, that Omar Sheikh transferred $100,000 to lead hijacker Mohammed Atta in Florida.

Omar Sheikh, a known associate of Osama bin Laden, was captured and imprisoned in India for his role in the kidnapping of American and British nationals in 1994. He was released in 1999 along with Maulana Massod Azhar in exchange for the hostages from Flight 814. According to former Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf, Omar Sheikh was also an agent of Britain’s spy agency, MI6, for whom he served in operations in the Balkans.

Omar Sheikh’s role in the 9/11 attacks has also been downplayed. Mention of him in the media instead focus on his role as the man responsible for the murder of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl. He is currently being held in Pakistan on charges relating to Pearl’s murder.

After Mahmud Ahmed’s alleged role in the 9/11 attacks became known publicly, Musharraf quietly replaced him and the whole affair was hushed up in the US. When a reporter from a foreign news agency asked then National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice whether she was aware of the reports that the ISI chief had financed the hijackers and was in Washington meeting with high level officials at the time of the attacks, she denied having seen “that report” and protested that, “he was certainly not meeting with me.”

Interestingly, the White House website transcript of the press briefing censored the words “ISI chief” from the reporter’s question, despite the words clearly being audible in the video of the briefing.

The 9/11 Commission also acted to whitewash Mahmud Ahmed’s alleged role in the attacks. Despite the question of the ISI chief’s involvement being included on a list of items for the Commission to investigate from families of the victims of the attacks, the Commission’s report made no mention of it, either to confirm or deny the information, which, despite having received zero coverage in the US major media (with the one exception of a citation of a report from the Times of India in a blog on the Wall Street Journal’s opinion website), was widely reported internationally (as well as in US alternative media).

Rather, the 9/11 Commission simply acted as though such reports didn’t exist. Despite Bob Graham, one of the chairs of the earlier Congressional Joint Inquiry, publicly stating that he was surprised by the evidence of foreign government involvement (he added that this information would not be made public for another twenty or thirty years when it would be due for release to the national archives), the 9/11 Commission report arrived at the opposite conclusion, saying there was no evidence of any such involvement and, moreover, that the question of who financed the attacks was “of little practical significance”.

Another former head of the ISI is now being privately accused by the US of involvement with the group responsible for the Mumbai attacks, according to reports citing a document listing former ISI chief Lt. Gen. Hamid Gul and four other former heads of Pakistan’s intelligence agency as being involved in supporting terrorist networks. The individuals named have been recommended to the UN Security Council to be named as international terrorists, according to Pakistan’s The News.

The document has been provided to the Pakistan government and also accuses Gul, who was head of the ISI from 1987-1989, of providing assistance to criminal groups in Kabul, as well as to groups responsible for recruiting and training militants to attack US-led forces in Afghanistan, including the Taliban.

Hamid Gul responded to the reports by calling the allegations hilarious. The US denied that it had made any such recommendations to the UN.

But the US has similarly accused the ISI of involvement in the bombing of India’s embassy in Kabul last July. This was unusual not because of the allegation of an ISI connection to terrorism but because it was in such stark contrast with US attempts to publicly portray Pakistan as a staunch ally in its “war on terrorism” when the country was under the dictatorship of Pervez Musharraf.

The US attitude toward Pakistan shifted once an elected government came to power that has been more willing to side with the overwhelming belief among the public that it is the “war on terrorism” itself that has exacerbated the problem of extremist militant groups and led to further terrorist attacks within the country, such as the assassination of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto last year or the bombing of the Marriot Hotel in September. While the world’s attention has been focused on the attacks in Mumbai, a bomb blast in Peshawar last week killed 21 and injured 90.

While the purported US document names Gul and others as terrorist supporters, another report, from Indian intelligence, indicates that the terrorists who carried out the attacks in Mumbai were among 500 trained by instructors from the Pakistan military, according to the Sunday edition of the Times. This training of the 10 known Mumbai terrorists would have taken place prior to their recent preparation for these specific attacks by the LeT training specialist Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi.

But while Lakhvi, Muzammil, and Hafiz Saeed have continued to be named in connection with last month’s attacks in Mumbai, the name of Dawood Ibrahim seems to be either disappearing altogether or his originally designated role as the accused mastermind of the attacks being credited now instead to Lakhvi in media accounts.

Whether this is a deliberate effort to downplay Ibrahim’s role in the attacks so as not to have to force Pakistan to turn him over because of embarrassing revelations pertaining to the CIA’s involvement with known terrorists and drug traffickers that development could possibly produce isn’t certain. But what is certain is that the CIA has had a long history of involvement with such characters and that the US has a track record of attempting to keep information about the nature of such involvement in the dark or to cover it up once it reaches the light of public scrutiny.

The attackers specifically targeted American and British citizens in the two luxury hotels that were under assault. They also killed residents of a Jewish center. The continued occupation of Iraq, which was spearheaded by the United States and the United Kingdom, continues after five long years and will last at least another three. Israel’s occupation of Palestine and theft of its land also continues unchecked with the full support of western nations. India’s Muslim population has been victimized by orchestrated mob violence. Relations between mostly Hindu India and mostly Muslim Pakistan are always strained.

So we know why the terrorists are mad and with whom. The need to ask “Why?” is understandable but ultimately useless and dishonest. Terror is usually the result of unacknowledged grievance. Muslims are mad at the United States, Great Britain and the Indian government, and those who are angry enough to commit acts of violence would obviously choose India’s financial capital to inflict maximum damage and gain world wide attention in the process.

The scenes of dead bodies and bloody streets were painful but necessary to see. In five years of the Iraq occupation American television networks have not seen fit to broadcast images of dead and maimed Iraqis. That absence of vital information is shameful and keeps the country in a state of blissful ignorance. It makes already incurious and uninformed Americans more susceptible to propaganda from the government and the media.

The reaction to the Mumbai terror attacks is all too predictable. People are shocked at first, then saddened and frightened. Muslims feel compelled to apologize for their violent coreligionists. Christians and Jews are exempt from guilt by association, however. They are even permitted and encouraged to embrace the violent acts committed by individuals among them.

As always, Americans never see a connection between themselves, the acts of terror committed by their own government and anger directed at them around the globe. Empathy for terror victims in Mumbai is sadly not extended to the victims of the American government.

Warfare is the ultimate act of terror. It kills not just scores of people, but many thousands, or in the case of the Congo, millions. War is given a pass by religious groups, by politicians and by the media. It is considered an acceptable form of murder. The victims in Mumbai will be mourned by Americans, as they should be. The victims of the United States government in Iraq and Afghanistan are not.

They are considered “collateral damage” of worthy acts. Americans are told that some good will come from the deaths committed in their names. The dead victims of our government are even said to be helped by America’s aggression. We have to save Iraqis from Saddam and Afghans from the Taliban. If they are killed by America’s helpfulness so be it. If survivors complain they are called ungrateful and stupid or crazed fanatics who don’t know a good thing when they see it.

As Americans watch the news coverage from Mumbai and feel revulsion at the sight of so much suffering, they ought to ask themselves about their own involvement in bringing suffering to the rest of the world. Victims of violence should be mourned and killers should be condemned. The terrorists who attacked Mumbai should be condemned along with soldiers from many countries who kill in even larger numbers. The Mumbai toll is shocking but less than that created by bombs that fall from airplanes or missiles and rockets that come from tanks.

It is especially important now to remember how our country creates so much suffering. The new president will have a honeymoon, a pass to start his own evil doing. It won’t even be called evil doing. After all, change has come. George W. Bush, the wicked witch, is dead. All must be right with the country, even if it continues to do wrong.

“Both agree,” the Post said, “on a course of action in Afghanistan that could lead to a long-term commitment of American soldiers without a clear statement of how long they might remain or what conditions would lead to their withdrawal.”

In addition, “Neither candidate has spoken explicitly about how American and NATO forces would get out of Afghanistan.”¹

During the presidential debates, Senator Obama insisted that the US had a right to bomb Pakistan if it had intelligence on the whereabouts of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, while declining to explicitly state that he would not use military force against the country under other circumstances, thus leaving open the possibility that he might well continue the policy of the Bush administration, which has been to wage airstrikes and even put boots on the ground despite strong protests from both the Pakistani government and its people.

McCain disagreed with Obama’s position. He, like Obama, declined to say whether he would shift policy away from that implemented by the Bush administration, but added that he wasn’t going to “announce” positively that he would attack Pakistan. He had no real objection to doing so, it was just that he would rather it be a surprise than to “telescope” his intentions by answering in the affirmative that, yes, he too would bomb the country. And that was the only discernible difference between their positions.

U.S. allies and political analysts, meanwhile, have increasingly come to view the use of force in the region as not being a solution by itself, with some going so far as to recognize it as part of the problem. This has long been recognized — indeed, the consequences that have come to pass were predicted well in advance — by a large number of critics of US foreign policy whose views are marginalized by the corporate media, but only recently has begun find its way into the mainstream political discussion.

While both Obama and McCain have announced their intention to increase the troop presence, with McCain saying that an Iraq-style “surge” is “going to have to be employed in Afghanistan,” the US commander General David D. McKiernan has emphasized that such a policy would not end the conflict.

The so-called “surge” of troop numbers in Iraq has widely been credited with the decrease in violence there; a claim trumpeted by McCain and parroted by Obama. But the fact is that there were numerous other factors that led to progress in that regard, which occurred not because of but in spite of the “surge”.

The sectarian violence wound down after reaching its peak as the process of ethnically cleansing neighborhoods in Baghdad and other Iraqi cities became finalized. In Baghdad, walls were constructed around Shiite and Sunni communities to separate them where people of both Islamic faiths once lived peaceably as friends and neighbors.

Some Sunni groups also began turning against organizations such as Al Qaeda in Iraq that were responsible for terrorist attacks against civilians, which served to inflame the ethnic tensions. This movement of Sunni groups once engaged in armed resistance against the US military occupation shifting their focus to fighting terrorist elements, including other Sunni groups, led to many even becoming allied with US forces. These groups came to be known as “Awakening Councils” or “Sons of Iraq”, and this shift was largely responsible for helping to bring about the decrease in violence.

Other contributing factors included the decision by influential Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr to order his Mehdi Army to stand down and the withdrawal of foreign occupying forces from the south. As both the British commanding officer and US General David Petraeus noted, the violence in Basra plummeted as a result of the British withdrawal from the city.

And, of course, most Iraqis themselves point to the continuing US presence in Iraq as the principle causal factor in the violence.²

While both candidates announced their intention to implement a “surge”-type increase of forces in Afghanistan, Gen. McKiernen, while agreeing that he wanted more troops, said, “Afghanistan is not Iraq…. I don’t want the military to be engaging the tribes” in Afghanistan. “It wouldn’t take much to go back to a civil war,” he added, saying that engaging tribes there was necessary, but that it was the Afghan government itself that should be responsible for doing it.³

Early this month, a leaked diplomatic cable revealed that the British envoy to Afghanistan, Sherard Cowper-Coles, had said that “The current situation is bad, the security situation is getting worse, so is corruption, and the government has lost all trust.”

“The presence of the coalition, in particular its military presence, is part of the problem, not part of the solution,” he observed, before going on to opine that the collapse of the Afghan government and its replacement with “an acceptable dictator” would be preferable.⁴, October 3, 2008.

While the British ambassador’s alternative proposal was worthy of the criticism it received, it no less negated the validity of his statement that US policy was part of the problem.

Right about the same time the leaked diplomatic cable was reported, for instance, Britain’s most senior military commander in Afghanistan, Brigadier Mark Carleton-Smith, said there would be no “decisive military victory” and that the current strategy was “doomed to fail”.

“We’re not going to win this war,” he said. “It’s about reducing it to a manageable level of insurgency that’s not a strategic threat and can be managed by the Afghan army.”

To do that, he said, “We want to change the nature of the debate from one where disputes are settled through the barrel of the gun to one where it is done through negotiations. If the Taliban were prepared to sit on the other side of the table and talk about a political settlement, then that’s precisely the sort of progress that concludes insurgencies like this.”⁵

In response, the US Secretary of Defense Robert Gates rejected the notion that the US and its allies would not “win” the war, saying there was “no reason to be defeatist”. Like the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates, he suggested that “We continue to see the need for additional forces in Afghanistan.”

Yet his position differed from the candidates’ in that he also agreed with the British commander that peace negotiations with the Taliban were a “key long-term solution.” McCain has rejected the very notion of engaging in diplomacy with “enemies” of the United States. Obama, on the other hand, has expressed a willingness to sit down and talk in general terms, but has not specified that he would do so in the case of the Taliban.

“Part of the solution is strengthening the Afghan security forces,” Gates added. “Part of the solution is reconciliation with people who are willing to work with the Afghan government.”⁶

The British high commissioner in Islamabad, Pakistan, said that Carleton-Smith’s views were not new and echoed Gates, saying, “We are prepared to talk to good Taliban, who renounce violence and lay down their arms.”⁷

The Russian ambassador to Afghanistan, Zamir N. Kabulov, was once Moscow’s top KGB agent in Kabul, serving there during the Soviet military occupation of the country. “They’ve already repeated all of our mistakes,” he said of the US government and its policy in the region. “Now, they’re making mistakes of their own, ones for which we do not own the copyright.”

“One of our mistakes,” he suggested, “was staying, instead of leaving.”

“We abused human rights,” he acknowledged, “including the use of aggressive bombardment. Now, it’s the same, absolutely the same.” Criticizing the notion that increasing the military presence could solve the problem, he said, “The more foreign troops you have roaming the country, the more the irritative allergy toward them is going to be provoked.”⁸

US Army Colonel Christopher D. Kolenda, who served as a task force commander in Afghanistan, has also criticized the policy set by Washington. Writing in the Weekly Standard, he said, “Simply killing militants is not enough.”

“While building up the central government is important,” he wrote, “that effort will be in vain without a complementary effort to build systems and institutions at the local level, which can eventually be connected to the national government.”

While also favoring an increase in “international security forces”, he argued that these forces “must concentrate on protecting the population” and “reduce the friction associated with the presence of foreign forces” by working “with local leaders to promote security in villages and on roads” and “promote local solutions to local problems”.

A focus on international assistance to build Afghanistan’s infrastructure and economy is needed “to develop durable systems relevant to everyday life” in order to “mitigate the real risk of a return to the warlordism that racked the country after the Soviet war.”

The same focus on helping to rebuild the country and empower tribal leaders at the local level should also be implemented in neighboring Pakistan, Kolenda argued.⁹

Just last week, two more British experts on counterterrorism spoke out against the US policy. Former director general of Britain’s MI5 domestic intelligence agency suggested the US should “stop using the phrase ‘war on terror.’” She described the US response to the terrorist attacks of 9/11 “a huge overreaction”, saying that its “war on terror” had “got us off on the wrong foot because it made people think terrorism was something you could deal with by force of arms primarily.”

Ken Macdonald, a top prosecutor for England and Wales who has overseen terrorism trials rejected “the Guantanamo model” applied by the US, in which detainees in the “war on terror” are denied their rights. “Of course, you can have the Guantanamo model,” he said. “You can have the model which says that we cannot afford to give people their rights, that rights are too expensive because of the nature of the threats. Or you can say, as I prefer to, that our rights are priceless. That the best way to face down those threats is to strengthen our institutions rather than to degrade them.”¹⁰

The Afghan government itself, under President Hamid Karzai, has also taken a more conciliatory approach. A month ago, he told reporters, “A few days ago I called upon their [the Taliban’s] leader, Mullah Omar, and said, ‘My brother, my dear, come back to your homeland, come and work for the peace and good of your people and stop killing your brothers.”¹¹

Talks have reportedly taken place between representatives of the Afghan government and the Taliban, with Saudi Arabia acting as intermediary, though both parties have denied this.¹² The denials may be technically accurate. The Reuters news agency reported that the talks were held in Saudi Arabia between “a group of pro-government Afghan officials and former Taliban officials.”¹³

The Taliban have said that they will not accept talks unless occupying forces leave the country. Karzai acknowledged, however, that he had asked the Saudi king to use his influence to help bring peace to Afghanistan. Prior to 9/11, Saudi Arabia was the Taliban’s second most important benefactor after Pakistan, and one of only three countries to officially recognize the Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

Afghan political and tribal leaders also met this week with their Pakistani counterparts to discuss how to bring an end to the ongoing conflict in both their countries. Former Pakistani ambassador to Afghanistan Ayaz Wazir criticized any approach that rejected the logic of entering negotiations. “If you say you will talk only if they lay down arms then what’s the point in talking?” he asked. “The trouble is, they are not laying down their arms and you have to talk to them to convince them to lay down arms.”¹⁴

The US-led “war on terror” in Afghanistan has increasingly come under criticism for the deaths of civilians, such as an August 22 attack against the village of Azizabad in Herat Province. Afghan officials and United Nations investigators said the evidence pointed to the deaths of 90 or more civilians, mostly women and children. The Department of Defense first denied the claim, stating that as many as 30 militants had been killed, acknowledging the deaths of only five to seven civilians. Later, when images taken by villagers’ cell phones emerged showing the bodies of dozens of victims laying where they had been gathered on the floor of a building that served as the local mosque, the Pentagon was forced to change its estimate, but still only acknowledged 30 civilian deaths – the very minimum it could claim and still maintain even the least amount of credibility since that was about the number whose corpses were shown in the cell phone images.¹⁵

Another attack earlier this month in Helmand Province killed 25 to 30 civilians, most of whom were women and children, according to Afghan accounts.¹⁶ Another recent attack that resulted in the deaths of nine Afghan Army soldiers was called a case of “mistaken identify”.¹⁷

Some Afghan soldiers and police have grown so disillusioned with the increasing numbers of civilian deaths and ineffectiveness of the government to establish law and order that they have begun to defect to join the Taliban, seeking to expel the U.S. forces from their country. “Our soil is occupied by Americans and I want them to leave this country,” said Sulieman Ameri, who just a month before had served with police forces. “That is my only goal.” 16 other men that had been under his leadership joined him in switching sides to fight the occupying forces.

Another new recruit, Fida Mohammed, told Al Jazeera, “When Russia came it was only one country. Today we have 24 foreign infidel countries on our soil. All our men and women should come and join the jihad.”

The defectors had received training from the US or by the private military contractor Blackwater, and some still held certificates showing their completion of the training.¹⁸

Another who has turned against the occupying forces is the former mayor of Heart province, Ghullam Yahya Akbari, who says he now has bases training fighters. He’s grown so disillusioned with the Afghan government the foreign occupation that he says he’d also turn against the Taliban if they were to engage in talks with Karzai. “I do not believe that Mullah Omar [the Taliban leader] would do that, but if they sit with the Afghan government and negotiate then for us they will be like all the other members of the government and we’ll continue our jihad,” he said.¹⁹

Similarly, locals in Logar Province, have grown frustrated at the ineffectiveness of the Afghan government to establish law and end the thievery of bandits. “So people turned to the Taliban,” explained Abdel Qabir, a local resident. “They may not provide jobs, but at least they share the same culture and brought security.” The Taliban have rid the area of crime and established their own government with police chiefs, judges, and education committees.²⁰

And it’s not just the outlying provinces. Crime has gotten so rampant in the capital of Kabul itself, and the perception of corruption within the government so great, the Washington Post reported last month, that “It is making some Afghans nostalgic for the low-crime days before 2001, when the Taliban ruled most of the country.”

Nader Nadery, an official at the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, told the Post, “The government is weak, and it has an enormously high level of tolerance for crime, abuse and corruption. If you have power and money, you don’t have to account for your actions. Instead of rule of law, there is a state of impunity, which is one of the factors contributing to the growth of the Taliban.”

Another Afghan, Mohammed Hussain, who had recently been attacked while driving a passenger bus, said, “In the Taliban time, the roads were totally safe. You could drive anywhere in the country, 24 hours a day. Now, you take your life in your hands every time you leave on a trip.”²¹

Many critics of the US “war on terror”, though marginalized by the government and media, opposed the US actions in Afghanistan from the beginning and predicted in advance the consequences that have now led to criticism from an increasing number of analysts and government and military officials even within the political mainstream.

After 9/11, the Taliban said it would negotiate the handing over of Osama bin Laden if the US would share the evidence it claimed it had that he was responsible for the attacks. The Bush administration rejected diplomacy, however, and preferred to use military force. Critics argued that war would only bring more violence and more innocent deaths; and, indeed, more Afghan civilians were estimated to have been killed during the first several months of the U.S. campaign than had been killed in the attacks on 9/11. And, of course, the US never did capture Osama bin Laden.

Terrorist leaders have been captured, but not through the use of military force. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, for instance, the alleged mastermind of the 9/11 plot, was arrested by Pakistani intelligence and handed over to the US.

Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, regarded early in the investigation into 9/11 as the money-man behind the plot and infamous for his alleged role in the murder of journalist Daniel Pearl, was similarly arrested by Pakistani police.

It was not military action, but police work, that resulted in the capture of Ramzi Ahmed Yousef in Pakistan in 1995. Yousef was one of the planners of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and a mastermind of the foiled Bojinka plot to hijack airliners and fly them into targets including the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

Writing in the journal Foreign Affairs, Barnett R. Rubin of the Center on International Cooperation and renowned Pakistani expert on the region Ahmed Rashid explain in the current issue how, “The crisis in Afghanistan and Pakistan are beyond the point where more troops will help.”

They note that U.S. military action in Afghanistan served to push the Taliban and al Qaeda leadership into Pakistan, which has been increasingly destabilized as a result. “For years,” they acknowledge, “critics of U.S. and NATO strategies have been warning that the region was headed in this direction.”

They criticize the Bush administration’s “Cross-border attacks into Pakistan”, which they state “will not provide security”, but serve rather only to further stir up the region and threaten to spread the conflict “even to other continents — as on 9/11 — or lead to the collapse of a nuclear-armed state” (referring to Pakistan). U.S. reliance on air strikes, they observe, “cause civilian casualties that recruit fighters and supporters to the insurgency.”

So patently counter-productive and “irrational” has been the US policy in the region that “Many Afghans believe that Washington secretly supports the Taliban as a way to keep a war going to justify a troop presence that is actually aimed at securing the energy resources of Central Asia and countering China.”

Moreover, “the concept of ‘pressuring’ Pakistan is flawed”, they argue, because “No state can be successfully pressured into acts it considers suicidal.” The Pakistani people and their government view the US “war on terror” as being opposed to their own interests and serving only to generate further militancy and terrorism within their own borders.

“U.S. diplomacy has been paralyzed by the rhetoric of ‘the war on terror’” that “thwarts sound strategic thinking by assimilating opponents into a homogeneous ‘terrorist’ enemy. Only a political and diplomatic initiative that distinguishes political opponents of the United States — including violent ones — from global terrorists such as al Qaeda can reduce the threat faced by the Afghan and Pakistani states and secure the rest of the international community from the international terrorist groups based there.”

Furthermore, to make negotiations possible between the Afghan government and the Taliban, “the United States would have to alter its detention policy. Senior officials of the Afghan government say that at least through 2004 they repeatedly received overtures from senior Taliban leaders but that they could never guarantee that these leaders would not be captured by US forces and detained at Guantanamo Bay or the U.S. air force base at Bagram, in Afghanistan.”

In conclusion, they write that “The goal of the next US president must be to put aside the past, Washington’s keenness for ‘victory’ as the solution to all problems, and the United States’ reluctance to involve competitors, opponents, or enemies in diplomacy.”

But to date, neither candidate for president has expressed their recognition of these facts on the ground in the region, and there is little indication that US policy in the “war on terror” is likely to be significantly altered from its present course under either a McCain or an Obama administration.

1. Robert G. Kaiser, “Iraq Aside, Nominees Have Like Views on Use of Force,” Washington Post, October 27, 2008; Page A04.
2. Karen DeYoung, “All Iraqi Groups Blame U.S. Invasion for Discord, Study Shows,” Washington Post, December 19, 2007; Page A14.
3. Ann Scott Tyson, “Commander in Afghanistan Wants More Troops,” Washington Post, October 2, 2008; Page A19.
4. Elaine Sciolino, “Afghan ‘Dictator’ Proposed in Leaked Cable,” New York Times
5. Christina Lamb, “War on Taliban cannot be won, says army chief,” Sunday Times, October 5, 2008.
6. “Gates rejects defeatism in Afghanistan”, The News (Pakistan), October 8, 2008; Richard Halloran, “US teeters on the edge of swamp of uncertainty in Afghanistan,” Taipei Times, October 14, 2008.
7. Muhammad Saleh Zaafir, “US, UK agree on settlement with Taliban: British HC,” The News (Pakistan), October 1, 2008; “US, UK agree on settlement with Taliban,” Press TV (Iran), October 11, 2008.
8. John F. Burns, “An Old Afghanistan Hand Offers Lessons of the Past,” New York Times, October 19, 2008.
9. Christopher D. Kolenda, “How to Win in Afghanistan: It’s time to adjust the strategy,” Weekly Standard, October 13, 2008; Volume 014, Issue 05.
10. Raymond Bonner, “2 British Antiterror Experts Say U.S. Takes Wrong Path,” New York Times, October 21, 2008.
11. “Taliban chief offers safe exist to allied forces: Karzai seeks Saudi help for talks with Mullah Omar,” Daily Times (Pakistan), October 1, 2008.
12. Nic Robertson, “Source: Saudi hosts Afghan peace talks with Taliban reps,” CNN, October 5, 2008.
13. “Pakistani and Afghan Elders to Meet to Ponder Violence,” Reuters, October 26, 2008.
14. Reuters, October 26, 2008.
15. Eric Schmitt, “30 Civilians Died in Afghan Raid, U.S. Inquiry Finds,” New York Times, October 7, 2008.
16. John F. Burns, “Afghans’ Toll Shakes Generals,” New York Times, October 18, 2008.
17. Abdul Waheed Wafa and Carlotta Gall, “‘Mistaken Identity’ Cited in 9 Afghan Deaths,” New York Times, October 22, 2008.
18. “Defections hit Afghan forces”, Al Jazeera, October 15, 2008.
19. “Afghan mayor turns Taliban leader,” Al Jazeera, October 17, 2008.
20. Anand Gopal, “Some Afghans live under Taliban rule — and prefer it,” Christian Science Monitor, October 15, 2008.
21. Pamela Constable, “As Crime Increases in Kabul, So Does Nostalgia for Taliban,” Washington Post, September 25, 2008; Page A13.

Ali was a leader of the popular resistance movement that spread through Pakistan in the late 1960s, culminating in the 1969 fall of Ayub Khan’s military dictatorship. It is his participation in this movement that informs his passionate belief that a truly democratic Pakistan can exist. Unfortunately, it is also the defeat of that movement — most graphically illustrated in the decision by President Yahya Khan (under pressure from Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) leader Zufiqar Ali Bhutto and others) to attack East Pakistan in 1970 in a murderous civil war that resulted in the birth of Bangladesh — that forces Ali to admit that the rule of the military must be removed in order for such a democracy to come into fruition. Furthermore, the corruption that defines Pakistan’s major parties has to be destroyed.

The Duel is a tale of conflict not only between the government and the people, but between different agencies of the government, various landed families that fight to rule the land, and even occasionally murderous feuds between family members. It is also a history of a nation created because religious differences were fanned into armed conflict to serve imperial needs. In other words, it is a tale that is representative of many nations created in the wake of World War Two and the the dissolution of earlier colonial empires that followed that disruptive war. At the same time, it is a story that is uniquely Pakistani.

When discussing the role of Islamist fundamentalist groups in Pakistan’s history and current reality Ali is consistent in his portrayal of these groups as perpetual supporters of the most reactionary elements in the Pakistani military and government. He also looks at the roots of these groups and explains how those same forces were involved in their creation. He challenges their intolerant application of their version of Islam and argues that this interpretation is contrary to the sentiment of most Pakistanis and their historical roots in forms of Islam that have nothing to do with the Wahabbist beliefs expressed by the fundamentalists. At the same time, Ali mocks the popular western Christian contention that Islam is a monolith and all of Islam is a threat to the western world. He writes that a primary reason that the neo-Taliban are enjoying popular support in Afghanistan and the tribal regions of the NW Frontier in Pakistan is not because people necessarily agree with their interpretation of Islam, but because they are the most effective resistance to the occupation of Afghanistan and the NATO incursions into Pakistan. Furthermore, Foreign troops’ lack of knowledge of local cultures, ethnic differences, and religious commitments creates a situation where the US in its arrogance sees an entire ethnic group as the enemy. By doing so, they create a the reality they describe.

This is a provocative history that informs the reader and challenges the western perception that Pakistan is a democracy, Ali’s text spares no Pakistani general or politician in its narrative. Nor does it rationalize or minimize the constant intervention by Washington into Pakistan’s affairs. Written by a man who understands what his country might be while rejecting what it is, the narrative is analytical with an undertone of love for a people. As always, Ali brings in literary and other cultural references which do more than merely spice up the text; they reveal the true spirit of a people. It is that spirit where Ali places his hope as he describes a history of corruption, sycophancy, and ego. Challenging the dominant political view in Pakistan and India, he challenges both peoples to look at each other as allies, not as enemies. He further argues that maintaining the latter situation only serves those whose interests lie with Washington and the local war machines.

The book ends by asking questions as to Pakistan’s future, especially as regards Washington’s bipartisan insistence that not only is Afghanistan a good war, but that it is also a war that must be won by the US and its NATO allies. It is quite clear that Ali believes further US armed intervention into Pakistani territory is not only dangerous to the stability of the region, but to the world. Ali’s description of the US-created government in Kabul is applicable to that in Iraq and other US colonies as well: “an army not meant to serve the nation, but to impose order on its people, on behalf of outside powers; a civil administration that will have no control over health, education, etc. all of which will be run by foreign NGOs . . . and a government whose foreign policy is identical to Washington’s.”

The Duel is an important book. There has been very little published in English about Pakistan that doesn’t merely parrot the positions of the Pakistan government, the US desires for that government, or some combination of the two. It is written in an engaging and accessible style. As the US widens its war against those who would defy its designs into Pakistan, it becomes essential reading for anyone who refuses to accept the Orientalist narrative spewed by the policy makers in Washington, DC. Ali has written a history that explains and interprets the reality of Pakistan that is free of western prejudices and self-serving assumptions conceived in the foreign policy bureaucracies of DC and London.

To conceal my American upbringing, I wore pants in the oppressive heat (shorts were derided as “underwear” at the time), grew my hair out of its crew-cut shape, and avoided slipping into English. If the merchants pegged me as a foreigner, my uncle warned, they would be less willing to field questions about their wares and more eager to sell them at high prices.

Today, American leaders surveying options in the region display even less prudence than a child in an unfamiliar marketplace. They openly speak the language of violence, fail to ask necessary questions, and evince little concern about the costs of their decisions.

Barack Obama, emulating previous Democrats’ attempts to outflank Republicans from the right on foreign policy, calls the Pakistan-Afghanistan border the “central front in the war on terror” and pledges to send more troops. John McCain, a modern-day Captain Ahab if there ever was one, soon followed suit with vows to hunt down bin Laden at “the gates of hell.” Secretary Gates, whose military boasts a budget bigger than the next 21 nations’ combined, announced a $20 billion effort to erase enemies who have danced circles around his army in $2 sandals.

In a sense, the proposed “soft surge” is understandable. The Iraq disaster has made almost any military venture seem wise by comparison, and no one doubts that Al-Qaeda and the Taliban are gaining ground quickly in the tribal belt.

But in pressing and prodding Pakistan to take greater military action alongside America, U.S. leaders reveal just how little they know about the country and the path to lasting peace.

Does the civilian government — whose “cooperation” we seek in the intensified fight — possess any real authority? What are the priorities of Pakistan’s perennially-looming institution, the army? Why should ordinary Pakistanis back an escalating war against some of their own?

Failing to answer — let alone pose — such basic questions is an open invitation to a second Iraq.
The civilian leadership’s wavering commitment in the war has American elites seething. Unable to fathom why their Pakistani “allies” do not advance like pawns in a game of chess, they miss the larger point: there is no chessboard.

A nation of 170 million people, Pakistan is deeply fractured, war or no war. Loosely bound together only by religion, the people are separated by region, culture, language, and ethnicity. Sindhis, Balochis, Pashtuns, and Punjabis are generally more concerned with local and tribal rather than national interests.

Non-Punjabis harbor bitterness toward Punjab for its unequal dispensation of resources and its command of the army — an army which lost half the country in an unjust campaign against Bengalis in East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, in 1971.

Most Pakistanis are worried about their immediate survival, which the federal government does little to address. The literacy rates stand at 55% and 29% for men and women, respectively. People depend heavily on local contacts and connections, with little sense of allegiance to the federal government.
This is true even among the middle class. Housing, university positions, and government jobs all depend heavily on local ties. Even the smallest matters do not escape the long shadow of nepotism: for one trip back home on the nationally-owned airline, my father had to rely on the favors of a family connection just to make sure our seats on the plane were not “given away” to someone else. My father found the whole affair unpalatable, but in the absence of honest government, what are the alternatives?

None are offered by Pakistan’s present leadership. Though it never ceases to remind anyone within earshot of its “democratic” credentials, the “new” government would be mistaken for a troupe of rotating circus clowns anywhere else. After throwing Musharraf overboard with threats of corruption charges, the leaders of the two main parties, Nawaz Sharif and Asif Zardari, recently split because of a dispute over judges who might confront Zardari with — what else — corruption charges. Sharif, dislodged from power by Musharraf in a bloodless coup nine years ago, has himself faced corruption charges.

The scene is so dispiriting that much of the middle class simply ignores politics altogether. My mother’s side of the family, all educated and solidly middle-class, have to my recollection never evinced interest in any of the parties in light of the transparent hankering for power displayed by the politicians. Against this backdrop, the government’s cachet among its people is limited. The notion that such a fragile institution, beset by incompetence, invisibility, and cronyism, can simply wave its hands in the air and convince its citizens to become an appendage of the U.S. “war on terror” is a wild fantasy.
The government’s ability to make a case for war is also hampered by the intelligence service (ISI) and its military sponsor — another major organ of power the U.S. has failed to understand.

Just after September 11th, understanding was irrelevant: America handed Musharraf an ultimatum to back the “war on terror” and he complied. But all that is old news now and America finds itself frustrated with the Pakistan army’s ambivalence in serving as America’s most poorly-paid mercenary force.

The army’s stance is prompted by two concerns: its own interests and the nation’s interests, which are not identical but nonetheless overlap.

As is well-known, the ISI developed its prestige and power during the tenure of Islamist military dictator Zia ul-Haq, who found generous American backing and financial support for his role in the jihad against the Soviet invasion in the 1980s. Less well-known is the timing of American-backed intervention: six months before the Soviets actually invaded, when the fledgling Marxist government was trying to enact crucial reforms to protect women and wrest natural resources from the control of warlords.

Once the Soviets were defeated, America’s interest in the country’s “freedom” evaporated and it began lending tacit support to the ISI’s backing of the Taliban.

Like any unaccountable institution, the ISI developed breathtaking rationales for defending the indefensible. According to the doctrine of “strategic depth”, arch-rival India had to be contained, and its access to Central Asia curtailed, through the insertion of Islamist proxies in this key conduit country.

Sections of the military still cling to this doctrine despite its manifest absurdity. Far from achieving strategic depth in Afghanistan, Pakistan has become a victim of the strategic depth achieved by Islamists, who have struck its soldiers and assets with a level of impunity India would dare not dream of.

Nonetheless, the U.S. cannot bully the Pakistani military into abandoning its militant ties. According to veteran journalist Ahmed Rashid’s new book, Descent into Chaos, Musharraf decided to retain Pakistan’s only — albeit unwieldy — form of leverage when he surmised that America was more interested in pursuing neoconservative pipe dreams in Iraq than in rebuilding Afghanistan.

Rashid also writes that the Pakistani military harbors great enmity toward Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who has presided over business deals with India, and who was once banished from Pakistan for his anti-Taliban stance.

The lesson is clear. Without guarantees and concessions — such as opportunities in Afghan reconstruction — the Pakistani military has no incentive to ease its obsession over Indian ambitions or to abandon its sole means of countering those ambitions: the militants and the chaos they create.
Even the military, however, ultimately bows to another master: the masses. The clamor to see Musharraf ousted, muddily refracted in the platform of the civilian politicians, forced the generals to stand aside as one of their own was removed.

America, too, must pay heed to the street if it wants to win genuine support for the war. And yet, it does little more than mouth platitudes about “the Pakistani people.” Although most Pakistanis take a dim view of the Taliban — the secularists decisively won the NWFP regional elections — their view of American policy is even dimmer.

This is not without reason. The one uniting factor among Pakistanis is religion, and America’s attitude towards Muslims has few defenders outside of those aching to strike Muslim countries. Unrelenting support for Israel’s brutality toward Palestinians is a source of enduring anger. That this support might be occasioned by the pressure of entrenched pro-Israeli lobbies, rather than some fleeting and correctable prejudice, inspires little hope for a fair American foreign policy among Muslims anywhere. The record of atrocities in Iraq and the betrayal of American’s own values at Guantanamo scarcely require mention.

Pakistanis also have more immediate grievances. America supported Musharraf the dictator so long as he fought “America’s war.” It poured billions of dollars into military coffers but gave almost nothing to strengthen Pakistan’s civil society or infrastructure. Hundreds of innocent Pakistanis have been illegally rounded up and disappeared by their own government because of American pressure to capture terrorists.

The oft-repeated American vow, “We will fight the terrorists abroad so that we don’t have to fight them in our own streets,” has but one meaning to most Pakistanis: the fight will take place in their streets, at the expense of their security, jeopardizing their lives. The stark slogans’ implications have already been realized for about 200,000 Pakistanis forced to flee the north, where “their” army has tried to smash flies with sledgehammers.

Predictions in the world of politics are a fool’s venture, but it is not hard to see where things are headed. Unwilling to look seriously at Pakistan’s needs, America sees only one reality: the presence of terrorists and an absence of action.

One might offer a few obligatory words about the need to build schools, hospitals, and roads in Pakistan — combating terror without inflicting more terror. But why bother? Can a government that stared blankly as one of its own cities drowned really be moved to invest in the well-being of a foreign people?

As my uncle would sometimes say to merchants at the bazaar, that is asking too much.

No, that’s just not the way the story should go. Pakistan has been through this so many times before. How many times will there be a new beginning? Martial law — this time, simply termed an ‘Emergency’ — has once again been declared. But despite the violence, terrorism and even suicide bombings that pervaded Pakistan’s political landscape this past year, the government of President General Pervez Musharraf has focused its attentions on dismissing the Supreme Court, imprisoning lawyers and social activists, and silencing private media outlets which it nurtured until recently. Musharraf swears he will reinstate democracy just as soon as elections are held, but democracy cannot emerge when one man is able to stand up and suspend a constitution, imprison the Chief Justice of a Supreme Court, and arrest civil activists demanding its restitution. Barrister Aitzaz Ahsan has been arrested for contesting two legitimate cases in front of the Supreme Court: whether the dismissal of Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudary was legal, and if Pervez Musharraf was able to contest the October 6, 2007 presidential election legitimately.

Through most of its political history, Pakistan’s government has been controlled by the military. Despite Jinnah’s vision of a secular democracy, the influence of parliamentary processes have been limited. Jinnah died of cancer a year after the new country was born and his successor, Liaqat Ali Khan, was assassinated three years later. The ensuing political chaos combined with myriad social cleavages, the absence of a charismatic civilian leader with strong national standing, and the military threat from India created an opening for military rule to be widely condoned, at least for a while. The influence of the military in governing Pakistan remains potent today. Hasan-Askari Rizvi, a Pakistani political scientist who has researched the military extensively, contends that its influence extends far beyond the barracks in Pakistan as extended direct and indirect rule have enabled the military to spread out in the civilian administration, semi-government institutions, the economy and the major sectors of the society. Its clout no longer depends solely on controlling political power.

Musharraf claims to the BBC that he did not “go mad” nor become a “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” though his actions in abrogating the liberal, parliamentary solutions he has championed since seizing power in October 1999 in the name of ‘enlightened moderation’ certainly don’t sustain his arguments. He notes nothing concerning what comprises the necessary components of a participatory democracy. As there is no national consensus on such vital, everyday matters as how to share water, the rights women inherently have, what comprises a ‘good education’ aside from having served time as a student, or even on how to curtail the rampant air pollution that has engulfed the entire country making it difficult for people from all classes to breathe, a shared vision of civil-military relations and the contours of a desirable, functional political system remain evasive.

The Pakistan military, for historical reasons, has long ago become a class in itself, serving its own interests foremost. It holds a unique class position in the country as it postures itself as the sole defender of Pakistan. Hostility with India had been an integral element of how the military has fashioned itself and created an identity. The conflictual relationship with India over Kashmir became a much more proactive policy in the 1990s, though this is now waning in part due to efforts towards rapprochement between the two countries. However, India no longer considers the expenditures — both financial and military — in Kashmir to be compelling and would rather invest in its economy and expand its horizons as the regional superpower. Pakistan, on the other hand, which has provided safe haven to the jihadis it had trained during both the 1980s conflict in Afghanistan and their subsequent involvement in Kashmir, must now quell the instability being wrought by extremist groups while ensuring its troops are not humiliated or compromised.

Yet these issues are critical to our understanding of Pakistan’s strategic importance in today’s world. What transpires domestically is now intrinsically related to myriad global concerns in a variety of ways and for a variety of reasons. The persistent uneasy relationship between Baluchis in Baluchistan and the federal government has culminated in explosions that have wracked the natural gas pipeline near Sui since January 2005. Baluchis had been demanding a greater share of proceeds from the sale of natural gas from their province to the rest of Pakistan. The resultant animosity toward the federal government over this matter essentially just added another layer to the pre-existing antagonistic relationship that harkens back to the 1970s provincial separatist movement. Context, however, is important. While the global community had the luxury to ignore the divisiveness that existed here in the 1970s, it can no longer do so today as U.S. and allied forces seek to hunt out insurgents who have ostensibly retreated from Afghanistan and taken refuge in the province of Baluchistan.

The October 2001 U.S. attack on and ultimate overthrow of the Taliban government in neighboring Afghanistan has served to further exacerbate pre-existing tensions, which have concomitantly fueled local anti-U.S. resentment as the national government is seen as a staunch ally of the United States. In the picturesque vale of Swat, followers of Maulana Fazlullah — son-in-law of Sufi Muhammad, founder of TNSM in the 1990s and imprisoned since then — calling themselves the Pakistan Taliban have gone from hamlet to hamlet, putting up their white flags and declaring the Government of Pakistan no longer has jurisdiction to rule them. After committing a few beheadings, this Pakistan Taliban has met with no resistance as it conquers area after area. Few arrests have been made here; prisoner exchanges — of kidnapped military personnel for imprisoned Fazlullah supporters — are instead more common as Pakistan’s president seeks to retain the support of the military lest he be overthrown himself. Indeed, the day after Musharraf’s coup on himself — November 4, 2007 – news spread like wildfire throughout the country that another military officer had arrested Musharraf. Perhaps it was just wishful thinking for now, or an omen of what would be if the military becomes disenchanted.

Sectarian differences have been a particularly compelling issue not only in the ways various groups are negotiating changing power dynamics — and sometimes violently — between them, but also in the ongoing process of constructing civil society in the country. While political parties had been at the forefront of voicing demands in the past, today we instead see various contingents of civil society — lawyers, journalists, university students, human rights activists, among others – at the vanguard of the protest movement to restore the Pakistan Constitution, lift media restrictions, reinstate an independent judiciary, and allow for Pakistan to follow a path of participatory democracy.

Pakistan finally has the opportunity to create political and economic space for the masses in the country. Indeed, the reverberations from the Musharraf administration aligning itself with the United States against the Taliban since October 2001 has created both enormous political and economic opportunities for Pakistan as well as considerable social conflict. A new layer of animosity exists toward President Musharraf and his administration for supporting the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan, for carrying out a violent operation in Waziristan, and now for abrogating the Constitution in the name of fighting terrorism while imprisoning judges and clamping down on the media. I attended John Negroponte’s press conference this morning: he spoke of talking to Benazir Bhutto, but not of pushing Musharraf to reinstate the judiciary and lift the curbs on news media. Pakistanis are now concerned that the U.S. is attempting to micro-manage the political arena, resulting in further disaster.

These concerns, however, are further exacerbated by growing poverty in the country. Pakistan lags behind countries with comparable per capita income in most social indicators. According to the World Bank, while the “poverty headcount fell in Pakistan during the 1980s, from 47 percent in 1985 to29 percent in 1995, more recently, it has been increasing…” and that “poverty remains a serious concern in Pakistan. . . . more importantly, difference in income per capita across regions have persisted or widened.” Over a third of children under age five are inappropriately underweight, a telling statistic of the failure of development efforts to promote equity in development and opportunity.

How to get to the point where all members of the society can contribute openly to the country’s future, participate democratically and reap the benefits of social and economic development equitably is by far Pakistan’s greatest challenge of all. People must be able to access the state on their own merits, not solely through the systems of power and patronage in place today, which results in the view that corruption is rampant in Pakistan. Franky, it is, because this has thus far been the only way to get things done. In the best of outcomes, the mist will lift and Pakistan will hold truly free elections during the first week of January 2008. But I won’t hold my breath waiting for that to happen.

In January 2002, when President George Bush defined his near-term agenda for waging wars, he fixed his sights on Iraq, Iran and North Korea: the “axis of evil,” marked for regime change. These countries were targeted, we were told, because they were developing “weapons of mass destruction.” In the case of Iraq and Iran, this was only a cover. More likely, the two countries were targeted because they opposed Israeli hegemony. Perhaps, too, the US wanted their oil.

Oddly, Pakistan was not targeted for regime change. Yes, Pakistan has no oil. But the US-Israel axis could find her culpable on several other counts, each quite damnable. Pakistan is the only Islamicate country to possess nuclear weapons; she was guilty of nuclear proliferation; she was the chief patron of the Taliban regime; she has been accused by India of supporting cross-border terrorism in Kashmir; and, on the first two counts, Israel could tag Pakistan as the most serious threat to her security.

Why was Pakistan not being targeted?

This question has gathered even greater force over the past two years; and for two reasons. After being stalled for a while by the ferocity of the Iraqi resistance, US plans for war against Iran are once again gathering steam. In the past few weeks, Israelis, Neocons, Christian Zionists and assorted hawks have again been baying for Iranian blood. Now, the US Senate too has joined the chorus. On September 26, with an overwhelming vote, it virtually handed President Bush the license to wage war against Iran.

At the same time, there is little doubt now that Pakistan is “hosting” both al-Qaida and the Taliban. Now rejuvenated, both organizations are operating from “liberated” territories in Pakistan’s Waziristan. More ominously, last July, Pakistani allies of the Taliban dared to challenge the authority of the state in Pakistan’s capital. And since their rout there, they have continued to mount deadly attacks on the Pakistan army.

Yet, even today there is no talk of adding Pakistan to the “axis of evil.” Why is there no clamor in the United States or Israel to invade Waziristan, to attack Pakistan’s nuclear facilities, to punish her for nuclear proliferation, or to launch covert operations to seize Pakistan’s nuclear assets before they fall into the hands of Pakistani nationalists, the Taliban or al-Qaida? This is the Pakistani paradox.

This paradox has a simple explanation: simple but also indicative of the malaise that afflicts nearly all the Islamicate world. In Pakistan, the US effected regime change without a change of regime. There was no need for an invasion, no need to fire a shot, no need for covert operations. At the first American touch, almost overnight, a terrible beauty was born. Instantly, the US had drafted the Pakistani military, nay the Pakistani state, to wage war against Islamic “extremists.” The US had gained an army: and Pakistan’s military dictators had gained longevity.

The ease with which Pakistan’s sovereignty was terminated, the speed of this transaction, and no less the completeness of the foreign take-over, speaks volumes about Pakistan’s history, the nature of her ruling elites, the timbre of her “national” institutions, and the alienation, degradation and dereliction of Pakistan’s middle classes. Within a few years of her birth, the state was privatized by landlords, generals and bureaucrats: three factions created, nurtured and guided into positions of leadership by the British.

Instead of mobilizing the people, instead of educating them in the values of citizenship, instead of enriching Islamic traditions, instead of building a national economy, instead of developing indigenous technologies, Pakistan’s ruling elites built bridges to the United States, to the US military, to foreign corporations, and to US-dominated multilateral institutions to create a technologically weak, a debt-ridden, and financially dependent economy controlled from outside through local elites.

Pakistan today is the fruit, the logical culmination of the agenda of accommodation launched in the nineteenth century by the two Ahmads of India — one founded a college to produce clerks who would be loyal to the British, another fashioned a whole new religion to instill servitude. The glorious hope of the two Ahmads was to serve the Empire. They were Muslims for the Empire. More than a hundred years later, their spiritual progeny serve a different Empire. If they are still around fifty years from now, they will be serving new Empires risen from the east.

For sixty years, Pakistan has been managed by different factions of its ruling elites — the military, bureaucracy, landlords — taking turns to plunder the people, competing against each other to serve foreign masters, at first covertly, but of late more openly, more blatantly, more treasonously. So complete now is the alienation of the domestic elites from their own society that their bidding against each other, the domestic competition to sell the institutions of the “state” is now conducted in open view.

In order to stifle resistance, this dependent state methodically creates a weak, alienated, demoralized, and corrupt society. By failing to provide education, skills, and jobs, the state forces people to look outward, to turn to foreign shores for education, for jobs, and cultural inspiration. For every person who leaves for foreign shores, there are ten who are forced to stay at home, and whose education, careers, and very lives are organized around the chance of leaving the country. Pakistani society increasingly consists of would-be migrants waiting for their chance to dash out of the country’s airports, ports and border-crossings.

It is the middle classes now who ape the elites, who in turn have been aping their foreign masters for more than a century. As English increasingly becomes the passport to success, they are forsaking their native languages. In the colonial era, the elites sent their children to the grammar schools, the missionary schools, and then they were packed off to Cambridge and Oxford. On succeeding their white masters, these “whitened” natives brandished their command of English as the visible symbol of their new elevation to power. It marked them off from the “natives” over whom they now ruled. A new caste had emerged, the native “whites” segregated from their “backward” cousins by their alien language, their affluence, their Western loyalties and dress, their moral turpitude, and their Western vacations and honeymoons.

The most damaging product of this alienation has been a deepening intellectual sterility. Despite the proliferation of degrees, every new generation of Pakistanis is intellectually more sterile than its predecessor. Each new generation has eagerly surrendered the traditional virtues of its predecessor without acquiring the virtues of its masters, their scholarship, their energy, and the humanity which they practice among their own kind. The aping and mimicking of the diseases of foreign masters is far easier than the cultivation of the virtues that distinguish them, that are the sources of their power over their dark subjects.

Yet, resistance revives in some troubled hearts. At some point, this wholesale degradation of a society, this prostitution of national institutions, this miscegenation of foreign and native elites, produces revulsion in a few sensitive hearts. It gives birth to anger, art, struggle, new theories, and hopes for regenerating society.

But this regeneration is arduous. The mongrel elites have raised many barriers, they have strung barbed-wire fences with watch-towers across the country’s landscape. They have trained a mercenary military and perfidious police, led by officers schooled in the arts of repressing dissent. However, it is not these overt forces of repression alone that weaken and deflect the resistance.

The resistance can stand up to repression if it resonates with the people, if it can engage, stir, and mobilize them behind the cause of justice. But the alienation in society is so deep, the demoralization and apathy so complete that the few sensitive souls who choose to resist are left to twist in the wind, unsupported, unshielded, to be singled out and decapitated by the mercenary military and police.

Yet, Pakistan is not without hope. In one corner of Pakistan, that hope comes from the sons and daughters of the mountains, yet uncontaminated by “civilization”, firm in their faith, clear in their conviction, proud of their heritage, and ready to fight for their dignity. Though unschooled, they are clear-eyed as the eagle of the mountains. Their poverty steels their determination. They stood up against the Soviet marauders: and defeated them. Today, they are standing up again to reclaim their dignity and their lands from foreigners and native mercenaries.

In Pakistan now, as in much of the Islamic world, the alienation of the institutions of the state has reached its climax. In Iraq, the United States could not have restored colonialism without planting her boots on the ground. In Iran too, they dare not dream of capturing the state without boots on the ground. In Pakistan, however, the task of regime change has been truly a cake walk: it was achieved with Pakistani boots on the ground.

A US weekly, Newsweek, has written that the Pentagon “wants [Musharraf] to turn much of Pakistan’s military into a counterinsurgency force, trained and equipped to combat Al-Qaeda and its extremist supporters along the Afghan border.” There, you have it, dear Pakistanis, in clear, bold print. What is this if not a plan for plunging your country into civil war, into a carnage far worse than what the Algerians have gone through?

How is it that the Pentagon dares to make such outlandish demands on the Pakistani army? The answer is simple. They do it because they know for a certainty that Pakistan’s elites are eager to deliver; they know that Pakistan’s mercenary-generals compete for American patronage; and Pakistan’s scavenger-politicians crawl to Washington begging not to be left out of the deals to sell the Pakistani state. Worse, until recently, Pakistanis have watched from the sidelines, or turned away, and let it happen.

For the first time now, a tiny segment of Pakistan’s middle classes, the lawyers — though still outfitted in the ridiculous black attire given them by their erstwhile English masters — have stuck out their necks against the mercenary-generals, against the mercenary military, against the commodification of their state. It is an auspicious turning point for Pakistan.

It is a sign that the Iqbalian spirit stirs a few Pakistanis. And observe what it has already accomplished. A few hundred Iqbalians have put the mercenary-generals on notice. The mercenary-generals postured, they scowled, they threatened, in desperation they turned to their masters for advice, they called up the scavenger-politicians to provide civilian cover. In short, for a brief moment, there was panic in the top ranks of the mercenary military.

For a brief moment only. The mercenary generals will not surrender so soon, or so easily. Indeed, it does not matter if one batch of mercenary-generals departs the scene: many more wait in the wings to take their place. If Pakistanis wish to avert civil war — and a bloody civil war it will be — then they must steel their hearts, they must gather courage, they must plan, they must organize, they must mobilize to take back their country, their state, and their military: to take it back definitively and with a clear understanding of how to make this nationalist appropriation irrevocable.

The lawyers alone cannot do it for them; when they become too troublesome, the mercenary state will start disappearing the lawyers. Nevertheless, change will come to Pakistan: for those who can read the signs, the writing is on the wall. Pakistan’s mercenary elites have hitched their wagon to the US “global war on terror.” The United States will direct this war, and it will be a dirty war. As in Iraq, American experts in counterinsurgency will not hesitate to turn Pakistan into a Guatemala or worse.

Will Pakistanis dare to exert to make a stand for the change they want? If they choose to stay unconcerned, unthinking, disengaged, impassive, change will be imposed on them by the mercenary state. They will find themselves being dragged through a dirty war: many will loose their lives. Disappearances, executions, arbitrary arrests, in short, state terror will become common: the order of the day.

If Pakistanis dare to change themselves, they can choose the change they want: to make the state work for them not against them, to reclaim history, to become the historical force that produces change. However, this change demands a price, a price in will, values and sacrifice. Pakistanis must search their hearts to revive the fire they have smothered for too long: the will to struggle, to resist, to live in dignity, connected to their history, drawing on their best traditions to forge a future that they will control. If they fail now, the game is lost. It may be lost forever.

Pakistanis can learn from Latin America, whose oppressed peoples — in particular, their indigenous people — after five centuries of oppression are raising their heads everywhere. Together, they are throwing off the shackles of the predatory state, the mercenary state that collaborated with a succession of Empires to destroy their lives, their hopes, their struggles. Today, they are reclaiming the state in Venezuela, in Bolivia, in Ecuador, in Nicaragua, and they are getting ever closer to victory across the entire continent.

The United States today is powerless to roll back these revolutions. It is powerless because the struggles of oppressed peoples are interconnected, interwoven. When the dispossessed resist in Palestine, when Iraqis battle behemoths in their country, when underdogs make a stand in Lebanon, when Afghan peasants run circles around armies of occupation: in short, when the wretched of the earth tie down the Empire in West Asia, they raise hopes of liberation in every quarter of the world, even amongst the oppressed classes in the very centers of power.

The struggles of the past six years in West Asia have quickened the pace of history: they have opened a window for the liberation of the oppressed peoples everywhere. Just when the Empire was hatching its Project for the New American Century, history decided otherwise. It will be a new century alright, but there is scarce a doubt six years later that it will not be an American century, a reality that Americans should have the courage to accept graciously. Instead, it will be multipolar century, with many centers of power, scattered across all the continents of the world. Once again, power is being decentralized, and we can hope that this new round of decentralization will produce more enduring results than the last one. The men and women leading the new decentralization are a new breed: they have not been chosen by their erstwhile masters.

It is for Pakistanis now to seize this historical moment, to join the forward march of history. The historic changes underway in Latin America, and the new forms of resistance being forged in Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan and Palestine are delivering new hope, new ideas, and new inspiration to oppressed peoples everywhere. Global empires are too costly to be sustained anymore: that is the singular message that Iraqis and Afghans are delivering to the world.

Will Pakistanis dare to join this universal struggle, harness its power, and seize the scales of justice? Will they follow the lead of the brave lawyers so that the streets of every city, every town, every village in Pakistan reverberate with their cries for honor and justice? Or will they choose to lengthen their vegetative seance, embrace ignominious death, and become the litter in the graveyard of history, their epitaph written by the foreign masters they have served for so long and so well?

These questions are historical: they are also urgent. The choices before Pakistanis are clear: it is life or death. If they fail to act now, they will concede the stage to the Taliban and the mercenary elites. May the Pakistanis ponder deeply for an answer: may they choose to walk in the paths of justice: and may their difficult journey be victorious.

The quest of looking at the political conundrum that the bilateral peace process has created within Kashmir manifests in a badly split Hurriyet Conference, the dissonant offshoots of which effect other surrounding pro-freedom parties. This phenomenon raises significant concerns for understanding which faction represents the true aspirations of Kashmiri people and more importantly, brings the scope of inquiry into understanding motivations behind the dalliances that either country, whether India or Pakistan is carrying on with them.

It is quite evident that both countries would prefer a minimalist approach to a Kashmiri participation in the peace process. There are staunch believers in the fact that Hurriyet was an impressive presence for New Delhi before the split, lending credence to the belief that New Delhi and Islamabad were burning the midnight oil to create a rift among the separatists.² As the factions combat internal bickering and ever-spreading schisms, their placebo inclusion on the sidelines has become handy and convenient for both Pakistan and India. The Kashmiri participation at the bilateral negotiating table has been a tacit non-issue for India and Pakistan. The rampant diversity in the agenda proffered by the consultant groups makes it more and more elusive. With the steady departure from core issue being Kashmir, the thrust on a composite dialogue which discusses “outstanding issues especially Kashmir” as opposed to what should have been “the core dispute of Kashmir and other outstanding issues” has become stronger.

The inquiry into the composition and representation of the Kashmiri aspirations is not intended to challenge the legitimacy of Kashmiri parties involved on the fringes of the peace process, but their placement amidst the dialogue with either Pakistan or India is indicative of success they will be able to garner as they pursue finding solutions for Kashmir. Their genuine intentions of finding the way out from the status quo is more than evident in the variety of propositions and plans that they have put forth before India and Pakistan and the extreme flexibility they have shown in their departure from previous positions and the alacrity in shuttling between New Delhi and Islamabad. However, there is a considerable reserve emerging from people concerning the original sentiment personified by a united front from Kashmir and the departure from that position towards compromises, which are at the moment mostly viewed as pro-India or pro-Pakistan. The allegiance these factions have shown for a peace process that has had little to offer Kashmiris apart from the 14 buses that traveled the Srinagar-Muzafarabad route in the last two years is no doubt a matter of skepticism in the valley.

Consultation with Kashmiris in matters of a composite dialogue also indicates the dilemma, the peace process represents for Kashmiri people and the priority it accords them in the whole scenario. The location of the repository of Kashmiri will, which the two countries — either India or Pakistan can address, is needed to garner a relevance that this engagement will have for the entire Kashmir, not just for a particular faction. These are crucial issues, which need an urgent cognizance in case Pakistan and India are genuinely motivated to solve the Kashmir issue for the sake of Kashmir and its people, and not just for their mutual benefit or the global audience.

The Indo-Pak motivations and their engagement with moderate Hurriyet and other outfits, manifest the preconditions that each country clings to inherently, even if the extrinsic gestures, at least at the level of CBM’s appear to be internationally endearing. The progress in bilateral relations over Kashmir and in their contact with Kashmiri representation, whichever faction that is, is to be viewed, through what President Musharraf expressed, in no uncertain words, “Certainly, because none of us [Pakistan or India] is in favor of their independence”.³ This sentiment offered Pakistan’s stand and in an ironic twist, President Musharaf also spoke on behalf of India to Kashmiris; nevertheless, India had for its part, had issued a diktat way earlier, if Kashmiris ever wanted to negotiate. In 2003, the then prime minister of India, Atal Bihar Vajpayee had declared, “Our doors are open, to all those, who reject militancy and extreme positions and wish to play a constructive role in taking Jammu and Kashmir forward on the high road of peace and rapid development.”

So within the ambit of the rules laid out, independence and extreme positions have come to be perceived as an anathema by a deeply fatigued and war torn Kashmiri leadership, foremost by Hurriyet who scurried to reorganize their positions and plans in order to find some audience for their woes and views. Pakistan’s departure from its historically stated position of implementing United Nations security Council Resolution on Kashmir, and succumbing to the rhetoric for demilitarization and self-governance as alternate solutions, even as India stands firm on Kashmir being an integral part of India and its avoidance of calling it a disputed territory, has added fuel to the harried reactions issuing from the valley and furthered deviations and diversions in the political map within Kashmir. The split in Hurriyet also marked a surge in diverse and chaotic narratives that currently exist elsewhere on the Kashmiri political firmament. For Kashmiri representatives renouncing pre-conditions and extreme positions, may have garnered them a presence in the dialogue and consultations at different level of talks, but it is highly improbable that there will be a mature benefit, which satisfies all of them.

The present strategy of the bilateral process and indigenous engagement utilized by India and Pakistan have relegated Kashmir issue to pesky tangle in the overall political and intellectual goodwill generated in both countries in the recent years. Within that context, as both countries veer towards establishing what has been time and again termed as a relation of mutual benefit, Kashmir issue seems to devolve into a mere issue of self-governance or its variant at best. The present Pakistani government may be poised for historical glory in opting for flexible, creative “out of the box” solution for Kashmir but in terms of the actual implementation this move appears short-sighted at best. The same goes for the union government in India, which is taking full advantage of playing on the schisms ravaging Kashmir’s erstwhile single-front leadership. India tacitly continues to reiterate its hold on the valley, be it in shape of the pro-India parties administering the region or the security forces, which continue the scourge of human rights abuses.

Pandering to the clamor for Kashmiri participation, which is overridden at the bilateral table, and in the recent times engaged less surreptitiously at the sidelines, is not a working solution for involving Kashmiri will in its true splendor. President Musharaf’s four point proposal, which includes reorganization, demilitarization and specific withdrawal of Indian forces, self-governance in Jammu and Kashmir and “Joint Management” or what was agreeably re-termed as “Institutional Arrangements” similar to those in Northern Ireland is a strategy which emphasizes a categorical negation of self-determination and independence as an option for Jammu and Kashmir. Within these parameters the engagement with Kashmiris in general and the consultant groups in particular can be viewed as a mollifying interaction, which calms the outcry for their inclusion. It also assuages international pressures engulfing both Pakistan and India, as well as becomes a talking point for intellectuals and media, which is ever keen on reporting the supposedly historical developments.

In consulting the specific Kashmiri groups, who claim to represent peoples will, is indicative of Pakistan conferring with preferred ideologues, which will no doubt widen the scope of dissent in future, if ever any solution were to be reached. As far as India is considered, in widening their span of dialogue, they have thrown open the door to more chaos and bickering within the Kashmiri parties. This lends a shadow of doubt to the motivations of both the countries towards resolving the Kashmir issue. The validity of a relevant long term solution for Kashmir, is also falling prey to foreseeable benefits for some genuine concerns that the Hurriyet factions or other parties in Kashmir voice repeatedly; which is finding an end to this long protracted conflict and stopping the violence in Kashmir. Even as the core objectives appear to be genuine and crucial, the strategy envisaged and implemented to attain them is not plausible.

Contrary Missions: Quest for Fragments of Peace

The spate of contrary narratives emerging from the moderate Hurriyet faction led by Mirwaiz Umar Farooq and the extreme faction, Tehreek E Hurriyet, headed by Syed Ali Shah Geelani, indicate changing perceptions of the solution for Kashmir, within the valley. In January 2006, this dissonance was showcased for international audience, as the Mirwaiz Umar Farooq expressed support for Pakistan’s Kashmir policy and arrived in Islamabad for consultations. This visit was opposed in a rally organized by Millat-e-Islamia Kashmir, an outfit that supports Syed Ali Shah Geelani’s breakaway Hurriyet faction. Geelani’s faction dismisses the peace process as a sham meant to divert people from the UN promised plebiscite. It perceives the moderate Hurriyet’s stand as a surrender and opposes reopening the bus route between Muzaffarabad and Srinagar fearing dilution of the Kashmir problem. As a votary of self-determination, Geelani does not engage in plans for self-governance, autonomy, joint management, and soft border, that he thinks will be a surrender before India.⁴ Ironically, Geelani as a staunch ally and a passionate advocate of the state’s accession to Pakistan is perceived as fighting against the very entity he has been drawing succor from all his life. Although, Geelani may remain committed to plebiscite and seeking people’s aspiration, he has so far presented no plan or strategy for achieving this goal within the modalities and ground realities of the existing situation and his politics stands deeply isolated by both Pakistan and India. Another section of Kashmiris, the Jammu Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) is actively pursuing the third option of Independence, instead of a plebiscite which would offer choice between Kashmir’s accession to either India or Pakistan. JKLF launched a public protest in 2001, also in Pakistan-administered Kashmir when the contestants in the assembly elections required there to declare their support for the accession of the entire State of Jammu and Kashmir to Pakistan. Neither India nor Pakistan, however, has taken cognizance of the third option.⁵ Amanullah Khan, one of the founding members of JKLF expresses motivation for outright independence; believing the Kashmiri will for independence is overwhelming and assesses that the Hindus of Jammu will never opt for Pakistan and have no option other than independence.⁶ Yasin Malik, heading the JKLF in the Indian administered valley, in an unprecedented campaign gathered about 1.5 million signatures (or thumb impressions of people, with names and addresses). This campaign has been hailed by progressives in India for affirming Kashmiri identity cutting across religious, regional and ethnic divides and his language of peace and the Gandhian mould of activism is more than welcome in the intellectual circles in India.⁷ If on one hand, Malik is successful in abstaining from violence and putting a positive agenda before the people, on the other hand, he has not put forth any strategy for achieving Independence for Kashmir. His campaign for Kashmiri participation does not offer much understanding of the role or benefit that such engagement will yield at the Indo-Pak negotiating table, which does not recognize the third option for Independence. In the saga of deepening fragmentation in the political firmament in the valley, JKLF has also broken up with the rival group staking a claim at the party leadership. Another splinter faction, led by Javed Mir, a former staunch colleague of Malik, joined Geelani’s breakaway party, only to leave and ally with Mirwaiz’s Hurriyet faction, which for a heady period was pivotal in parleying with Islamabad and Delhi.

The interesting part of the bilateral political theatre which began with accepting a Kashmiri consultation for a largely premeditated agenda, heightened further, after Sajjad Lone of the People’s Conference was invited by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to Delhi, close on the heels of Hurriyet’s Islamabad visit. In an article in Tribune titled, “Invitation to Lone: PM kills two birds with one stone”,⁸ this development was seen as Delhi emphasizing a deliberate change. In engaging groups other than the Hurriyet, Delhi was undermining the credence that Pakistan has bestowed on them as well as their claim of being the sole representatives of the genuine will of Kashmiris. Despite Hurriyet’s outcry at being sidelined even though it was the largest conglomerate, Delhi was in no mood to appease and continued its strategy of what they called, “broadening the scope of dialogue”; and which in the case of Kashmir, amounts to nothing short of a cacophony. Hurriyet was even relegated to present their proposals to Narayanan (National Security Advisor) before discussing them with the prime minister.⁹ So as the bilateral seduction worked its magic intermittently on the different Kashmiri representatives, attaching ephemeral importance and assuring them of alternate benefits, the more their role eroded in the whole exercise. As far as the mood of the Kashmiri people during the apparently breakthrough meetings was concerned, newspapers reported that the Indian meeting (Sajjad Lone with Manmohan) did not generate any enthusiasm in the valley and people remained equally indifferent to the Hurriyat’s Pakistan sojourn.¹⁰

The most complex aspect of intra-Kashmir political scenario, the interweave and contrariness that exists therein, is a sad legacy of combating powers which have ravaged the very core of Kashmir polity. Although this complexity does not invalidate the existence of the political pursuits, it nevertheless makes them extremely vulnerable. Sajjad Lone had been a part of Hurriyet and was expelled after attacking Mirwaiz Umar Farooq for attending the funeral of his father’s alleged killers. In attending the funeral of the man killed by the Indian security forces and who was named in the FIR on Lone’s assassination, Farooq invoked Sajjad’s ire who demanded a public apology for “glorifying the killers of our leader.” The senior Lone, who favored negotiation with India was shot dead in 2002. He was also expected to field several proxy candidates in the upcoming state legislative, a move that some of his opponents called a sellout to India.¹¹ Sajjad Lone, who incidentally is married to JKLF chief Amanullah Khan’s daughter, was dismissed from Hurriyet, which led to bifurcation of the Peoples Party and his brother Bilal Lone, continued representing his faction in the moderate Hurriyet.

Moreover, in the political food chain in Kashmir, one cannot forgo the “in-power and out of power rhetoric” practiced by the carriers of the mainstream pro-India politicians. In the current milieu, prominent amongst them is Mehbooba Mufti, of the People’s Democratic Front (PDP), who is calling for demilitarization after her father Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, completed three years in power. In the chaotic political formulations and their subsequent aspirations, the thin line between some mainstream pro-India parties and pro-freedom groups seems to be growing vague, as their demands have begun to sound alike. The over zealous media assiduously reports the unfocused rhetoric further worsening the chaos for the hapless masses. An editorial in times of India indicated that PDP’s support for demilitarization signifies the growing proximity between it and Hurriyat¹² [ostensibly the moderate faction]. This can be interpreted in a myriad of ways, either casting doubts on Hurriyet’s intentions or a change of heart in PDP, whatever it may be — it inevitably becomes the indicator of the extreme political befuddlement that has been planted in the Kashmiri soil. With active engagement of pro-freedom groups like the Sajjad’s faction of the People’s party, which is perceived as being inclined to join mainstream politics, the bedlam seems poised to proliferate further rather than be stanched any time soon.

The Only Way Forward

In the past few years, as is quite evident that New Delhi and Islamabad have embarked on bold initiatives to bolster mutual relations and chalk out, at least a rudimentary plan for resolving the crucial issues between them. Although the Kashmir issue, which fits the definition of what actually is crucial (or wrong) between them, has been substituted by a host of CBM’s and an unwavering need for a seemingly protracted composite dialogue process. In the meantime, the opening up of Line of Control (LoC) for the Srinagar-Muzaffarabad bus service, which by far an apparent manifestation of the whole process, comes across as a mere peripheral milestone for people in Kashmir whose real problem stands sidelined. There is criticism foremost within Kashmir, as well as India and Pakistan regarding this peace process, which has yielded so little for Kashmiris.

In the initial days of rummaging for a way forward with India, as Pakistan became receptive to the winds of change blowing through Asia for greater economic integration, a 9/11 hued world and hinted at making borders irrelevant, an article in Tribune expressed the following views,

President Pervez Musharraf ultimately realized the significance of softening the Line of Control for handling the question of Kashmir. India has been hammering this point for a long time. This was the central idea behind promoting people-to-people contacts by starting the bus service between Srinagar and Muzaffarabad with the minimum requirement of travel documents. Once people find it easy to travel from one side of Jammu and Kashmir to the other with facilities for trade and commerce, they will develop a stake in peace. The advantages of peaceful coexistence will make the people concentrate on their economic well-being. The pressure from the people, which is bound to increase in such a situation, may force the two governments to find a workable remedy for the problem, which has been one of the major roadblocks to peace (Tribune, May 2005)

Although this report chalks a cyclical roadmap for achieving an end to the Kashmir dispute. However, it evokes apprehensions about the historical malady that ails both India and Pakistan, which is a predilection for diluting Kashmir issue. Moreover, there is strong precedence to support the premise of trying to solve Kashmir problem first, and then awaiting the rest to follow. Currently, the whole scenario has become a conundrum similar to that of chicken before egg or egg before chicken. It reverberates incessantly as Pakistan continues to rustle up plans, reworks its historical stand, urges India to reciprocate; while Indian government firm on its stated positions on Kashmir, stresses the condition of creating an environment suitable for stable peace.

In a recent development, India downplayed Pakistan’s assertion that Kashmir was the core issue between the two countries, saying it was not perturbed and remains optimistic about progress in the bilateral composite dialogue. With the fourth round of composite dialogue underway, confidence-building measures piling up and the ceasefire in place for the last three years, India seems confident. With its newfound global alliances and economic potential, Kashmir issue in the Indian mainstream has almost been demoted to the status of a chronic malaise. It is also being conveniently lumped within the overarching threat of the so-called Islamic terrorism, a stereotype that finds a ready and sympathetic audience inside and abroad. With such reinforcement and the fact that Kashmiri cry for self-determination has been subsumed within new overarching narratives for self-governance and joint institutions; Kashmir issue is gradually undergoing an unsolicited makeover.

Kashmiris for their part, living in the siege like atmosphere prevalent in the valley and suffering unbated human rights abuses, are hard to convince regarding an easy achievable solution. Their disenchantment with the peace process and the parties involved therein, is rooted in the failures of past and shortcomings in the current one. They have watched too many people and parties fall prey to the demon of interim solutions borne of the edgy friendship between India and Pakistan. The Indo-Pak romance has a familiar pattern for those who know it intimately, “talks — tension — and more talks. Rather than enjoying the peace initiatives, one gets more concerned when the honeymoon is going to end.”¹³

The peace process to many keen eyes appears to be a big rigmarole which is has been birthed by the two countries, only to be carried upon a desperate population represented by a reactive, diverse, and impressionable leadership. There is an evidence of preordained mindsets, which are reworking the canonical truths about Kashmir in order to maintain the claim on the real estate within their grasp and the efforts they make to override the constraints created therein; in order to catch up with the global trends and pressures as they make cosmetic changes in the regional relations.

Even if the basic travesty of a democratic process was to be followed in Kashmir, no non-elected leadership can be engaged on behalf of hapless people or substituted for an overarching process of self-determination, as in a UN mandated plebiscite. Having said that does not lend any credence to the elected or governing parties, who with their pro-Indian loyalties are inherently discredited in the eyes of Kashmiri people especially during the last 16 years. Therefore, the issue remains, what is the best viable option for a stable peace in Kashmir? To court that resolution requires more patience and sincerity than, India or Pakistan is willing to extend to Kashmiri people. The solution can only be found in a UN mandated plebiscite. The demand for plebiscite is not an irrelevant one, provided it has an option for Independence. However, the very idea of plebiscite leading to a free Kashmir, which has cost a lot of Kashmiri blood is pushed on to the backburner by most factions, including the moderate Hurriyet and is endorsed by the Pakistan. If anything, it is most relevant in the current situation prevailing in the valley where the narratives emerging from the Kashmiri political firmament are fragmented. In such circumstances, the groups which are courted may be appeased momentarily but the ones sidelined and disgruntled will multiply and create further unrest. As far as Kashmiri masses are considered, they have receded into an inert and fearful submission. They can only be roused to express their free will if no threat exists to their life or property, and which in the current circumstance is not possible.

The UN Resolution albeit updated with a third option, is the only means to pave way for a permanent solution for Kashmir. Contemporary world, has witnessed South Africa, Angola, and East Timor emerge as Independent countries. More recently, Montenegro, became a sovereign state after a little over the required 55% of the population opted for independence in a May 2006 referendum. In Kashmir a two-phased referendum could be held under the UN auspices; the first one would have options for Independence or Union14. The second would only take place if people chose Union and would have options to join either India or Pakistan. Fanciful or naïve as it seems, such a resolution is not an irrelevant pipe dream; it can be a lasting solution for genuine deliverance of Kashmiri people, that is if bilateral will and motivation is ever dedicated towards solving Kashmir for Kashmir’s sake.

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3. Noorani, A. G. , (August 12-25 2006), There is so much to gain mutually, Retrieved on April 3 2007.
4. Kashani, S (March 9 2007), Interview with Geelani, IANS, Retrieved on April 10.
5. Sriraman, J., (October 10 2004), Solving Kashmir Without the Kashmiris, Global Policy Forum.
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7. Bidwai, P. (March 26, 2005), Marching to Peace – New citizens’ initiatives are afoot, The News International, Retrieved March 13, 2007 from Communication & Mass Media Complete database.
8. Kak, L.M, Invitation to Lone: PM kills two birds with one stone. Retrieved March 13, 2007 from Communication & Mass Media Complete database.
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10. Mirwaiz Asks Delhi To Give Proposals On Kashmir, (January 11 2006) The Daily Excelsior.
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12. Bamzai, S., Valley Needs Army, Retrieved on April 2, 2007.
13. Rashid, A. (2006), No mourners for a dying peace process in Kashmir, Retrieved on March 30th 2007.