A divided nation | Peace or War with Taliban?

[AhsanAmin]

Open letter to Imran Khan - kamran shafi bashing IK
Open letter to Imran Khan - kamran shafi bashing IK

 

[niaz]

Doing nothing is even worse that doing good or bad. PMLN lead central gov't has been totally confused and without a clue about what to do. Here is a state with more than half a million strong army but her political leaders are letting it get demoralized by having PA jawans killed every day without letting the Army do her job of fighting Pakistan’s enemies.

Here is another article bemoaning the indecisiveness of Pakistan’s ruling party.

Ayaz AmirTuesday, January 21, 2014

We are losing this war not because the Taliban are strong but because we are weak, our weakness the principal strength of the other side. We have lost the will to fight and the country is in the hands of people more interested in their personal business affairs than the threat facing the country.

And more than half-a-million strong army is helpless and increasingly frustrated because its hands are tied, its feet hobbled, by political irresolution. So each time a bomb goes off and soldiers are killed the army’s response is piecemeal, bombing the Mir Ali bazaar and adjoining villages. In the process civilians are killed and the army is blamed.

The Taliban know what they are doing: fighting the Pakistani state and hoping to bring it down. What there is of Pakistani leadership is stricken by fear and confusion. Fear not just of the Taliban but fear of the army, for if there is to be fighting the army will be in charge, and power will gravitate towards it. And of the army this leadership has bad memories.

For a Punjab-centric leadership there is another fear, that if the ambit of this war widens Punjab, hitherto for the most part out of harm’s way, may also come within the arc of fire and paradise may be lost. So there is method to this feebleness of purpose, the leadership closing its eyes to what is happening and taking cover behind the mindless mantra of talks.

But since these are smart men when it comes to self-preservation what they have done is to push that other punishment for our sins, Imran Khan, out in front, to lead the charge of the talks’ brigade. And Khan, his foot-in-mouth disease by now serious, becomes a lightning rod, attracting to himself the flak that should rightly be directed at the federal government.

How long can this go on? We don’t have to sit in at the corps commanders’ conference to gain some insight into the state of mind of the high command. Any army would grit its teeth under such restrictions: subjected to a full-fledged offensive and constantly hit but unable to respond in kind because the political government says it has yet to make up its mind.

This is a dangerous state of affairs for out of such stuff is born – and here I am necessarily being coy – the unthinkable.

Zardari, because of the aura of corruption around him, could not exercise authority. That’s why security policy was run by Gen Kayani pretty much as he thought fit, Zardari and his horde of inept ministers mumbling the right things and applauding from the sidelines. Nawaz Sharif could exercise authority and could have given both the country and the army a sense of direction…if only the requisite strength and capacity were available. Things are moving so fast and the situation spinning so out of control that very soon it may become difficult to exercise any authority at all.

This is almost a surreal situation. Recorded history, from Herodotus to the present, has few if any instances of warring groups or nations voluntarily surrendering and laying down their arms when they think they are winning, or when they think time is on their side. The Taliban have the initiative and they think time is on their side. They have a secure base in the mountains of North Waziristan to which they return to regroup and from where they strike at will, at targets of their choosing. This is classic guerrilla warfare and the slight window of opportunity we might have had, with drones hitting from one side and the army undertaking an offensive from the other, will close as soon as the Americans complete their withdrawal from Afghanistan. Then we will be left holding the flag of our sovereignty close to our heart. And if anyone thinks the Taliban both here and in Afghanistan will not be on a roll, feeling more emboldened, he lives on another planet.

Here we have a government which even after seven months of being in office feels no qualms in proclaiming that it has yet to frame a ‘counterterrorism strategy’. This takes the prize. Do nations at war wait for counter-strategies? They have the luxury of exercising one of two options: war or surrender. And talks happen either when (a) one side has been beaten into submission or (b) a battlefield stalemate leads to give-and-take on the negotiating table.

What is our approach to talks? Has anyone clarified this point? Are the Taliban surrendering? Have we beaten them into
submission? Or is there a stalemate we hope to resolve in the course of talks? Or living in our fantasy world do we really think that our silvery tongues will be so persuasive that Maulana Fazlullah and his Shura will melt at our words and swear allegiance to the flag of Pakistan?

Our follies may be many but what have we done to deserve this, the present emirs of our national caravan? Looking at us and the sum of our national resolve the Taliban must be laughing up their sleeves. Taliban spokesmen, we know, indulge their sense of fun and humour when they talk to media persons. And government and state have no policy at all.

This has gone beyond the point where we could complacently say ‘this is America’s war’. The Americans are getting out: we have to get this into our brilliant heads. And we’ll be left with not just this mess but our soaring rhetoric. And there will be no one else to blame then, no drone attacks on which to pin the blame for our troubles.

There should be a war cabinet and everything should be subsumed to the war against the Taliban. But we are playing games about talks fooling no one except ourselves. And the Prime Minister is either caught up in foreign visits or chimerical projects – a metro-bus service for Islamabad the latest fancy. And Musharraf’s trial must take first priority because the constitution must be protected. And so on. We don’t seem to have much sense of the peril threatening us.

So the fear in uncertain hearts that things can’t go on like this, that something will have to give. Some things are better left unsaid. But the ineptitude on display is having two opposite effects. To one side it is putting the nation to sleep, conditioning people to accept terrorism as a way of life, something about which nothing much can be done. To the other side it is encouraging the muttering, so far mercifully only the muttering, of dangerous thoughts.

Perhaps this is for the good. Stagnation is killing Pakistan, stagnation of thought and action. Maybe we need a shaking up, some kind of creative disorder to set the pulse of the nation to beat faster. Still, it’s a pity seeing the world going where it is, new things happening, new frontiers being explored, and we stuck where we are, deceiving ourselves, refusing to see what should be so obvious, and not having the courage or will to confront the dangers we face.

Owing to involvement in civilian affairs, thanks to Musharraf’s extended stay at the helm, the army by year 2008-9 had virtually lost the will to fight. Not a chocolate army but a real estate army is what it had become. The Swat situation and Maulana Fazlullah’s excesses (the same luminary now heading the Taliban) forced the army’s hands and re-taught it the use of arms. To the Swat Taliban the army thus owes a debt of gratitude.

Now because of a political dispensation the situation facing the army and the nation is worse than anything seen in Swat. But the army’s hands are tied, and it is frothing at the mouth. Can this situation last?

Email: winlust@yahoo.com
How long can this paralysis last? - Ayaz Amir

 

[PeaceGen]

Sounds to me, after reading the latest reports on this forum about the new 'offensive' against the Taliban, like Pakistan AND Afghanistan could each use a dreamteam like Mubarak ran in Egypt.. Someone who will get rid of the terrorism threat and return power to civilians whenever possible. I STRONGLY SUGGEST to the current Pakistani and Afghan leaderships to find themselves such a team, and UNLEASH THEM. Before your populations find you such a team.

I don't need to tell decent (fairly-moderate) Pakistanis and Afghans that YOU ARE AT WAR. In war, the military leads, or you perish slowly or quickly. When your country is safe enough for white foreigners to come to your land as TOURISTS, is the time when there can be "real civilian leadership". BUT ALWAYS (well, for the next 50 to 300 years or so) under the guidance of your Mubarak-type military leaders. I dare bet half my monthly spare income that you have PLENTY of these types of people waiting to help you deal with the Taliban in a way that secures lasting peace and security, and eventually; tourism income.

 

[PeaceGen]

And a real good tip I have for anyone willing to fill the heavy shoes of the Mubarak role for Pakistan / Afghanistan / any other country plagued by religious violent extremists, is this:

Attack not the individual terrorists, nor their leaders as they rise through their ranks, but rather the core of the problem: the education system of the Taliban and other deeply extremist religious PEOPLE (never forget they are humans too!). Your objective is not to dominate another culture, your objective should be to CHANGE their education system. Make that your top priority to even be able to have hope of actually fixing the problem for real.

 

[PeaceGen]

On the other side, to any teenager / kid from Asia or Africa reading this post of mine, and thinking to himself: I can be that Mubarak-type guy for my country and people! ......... try to understand the risks BEFORE you put your fate on a course of swimming in the deep pool, filled with sharks, and with limited battery-power on your acoustic shark-repeller (in reality: your alertness level combined with a relaxed mind, under threat of torture and/or death to you, your loved ones, your men and women, all those you care about).

 

[PeaceGen]

Do you want a military education in a fun way? Start with stargate sg-1 torrent then stargate atlantis torrent then stargate universe torrent all can be downloaded for free without spy- or malware using µTorrent - a (very) tiny BitTorrent client

 

[PeaceGen]

You may be interested to hear what I think needs to change in the alQuada and Taliban education programs:

1: remove all desire for conquest or conversion to islam by force or threat of force.
2: remove all physical punishments for social / religous transgressions(=offenses), and replace them with non-crippling financial fines instead.
3: allow Muslims to convert to any faith they desire, and to intermarry with other faiths without requiring the new partner to convert to Islam.

do this, alQuada, and you'll be updated and at peace with the world. try non-violent evangalism for a change.

As for the many people I see in this thread who like me have had enough of terrorists and terrorism, I wish you all the best of luck with the tips I gave you. My pen is empty, I have no more quality tips for you until the fog of war reveals more facts sometime down the line. I hope I can focus on my regular life over here, which is quite peaceful and safe due to the kind of suggestions I feed you here, being the norm here.

 

[Solomon2]

A few days back I happened to meet a recently retired brigadier.Short conversation.,

Me:It is said army is not fighting with Taliban but giving them protection why?

Brig: Why not!-India is our enemy and off course Talibans are our assets.should we cut our hands?.

Me: But India is not fighting with us why we call her enemy.

Brig: India is stealing our water and fighting proxy war in Baluchistan.

Me: Isn’t it the job of civilians to decide who is enemy and who not.

Brig: No civilians can not be trusted.

Me: Why?

Brig:They are corrupt and incompetent to look after national security matters.

Express Tribune: Six months on, no vision

 

[fatman17]

Good and Bad Taliban in Pakistan

Anatol Lieven
April 7, 2011

The Pakistan Army’s counter-insurgency campaign in Swat has been undeniably successful, not least in comparison to our own efforts in Afghanistan. Though until the spring of 2009 the district was one of the centers of militancy in Pakistan, the last suicide bombing there was in July 2010. The leadership of the Pakistani Taliban and their local allies have been killed, captured or driven out. The main leader, Fazlullah, has reportedly taken refuge in Kunar province of Afghanistan, where he was based as a leader of Pakistani volunteers against the Soviets back in the 1980s.

In the lower Swat valley at least, reconstruction has also gone well – astonishingly well, given that on top of the damage caused by the Taliban and the war against them came the floods of August 2010, which hit the narrow Swat valley especially badly. On the whole, I was very impressed by what I saw in Swat when I visited it last month for the first time since the summer of 2009.

That said, there are also grounds for concern about the future. The first is that while the operation has not been very brutal by South Asian standards, it has nonetheless been brutal. To judge by the accounts I heard from a local journalist and a lawyer (on top of interviews when I visited the valley in August 2009), the report by Human Rights Watch on extra-judicial executions by the military was completely accurate. I was told that between 400 and 500 of these have taken place since the end of the full-scale military operation in 2009, and that they are still continuing at a rate of between one and six a week – though to be fair, some of these are genuine “encounters” between military patrols and armed militants trying to filter back through the hills.

So far, however, these killings do not seem to have caused as much resentment in the valley as might have been expected. For this two things are responsible. Firstly, by the time the military launched their counter-offensive in the spring of 2009, the local militants had made themselves thoroughly hated among much of the local population by their cruelties and oppressions; and the Pakistan Army does take a good deal of care that the people it shoots are in fact hardcore militants, and not vaguer supporters or innocent bystanders. In this, the military is helped by the fact that several of the units they have deployed have a high proportion of Pashtun soldiers, which improves relations with the local Pashtun population. In more than nine-tenths of cases, I was told by locals, the soldiers do therefore kill the right man. This may seem a hard equation, but then this is a hard country and a hard region.
As a local journalist told me,

I myself am divided 50:50 on killings by the military. After all, the militants did have to be defeated. By 2009 no educated person in Swat was safe from them. But now the killings should stop, or they will cause a long-term desire for revenge and a sympathy for the terrorists if they start to come back. Already you can see this in the families of men who have been killed.

The second question hanging over the success of the counter-insurgency operation in Swat is what happens when most of the Army leaves – which it is very anxious to do, since the deployment of the whole of one division and elements of another is a serious drain on resources. Most of the local population seems to want a return of the police, viewing them as locals, and less ruthless than the army. The problem is that with the police comes the whole rotten apparatus of the Pakistani political, judicial and administrative systems, whose abuses did so much to create mass support for the Taliban in the first place.

I spoke to two low-level Taliban detainees, whom the military were putting through a re-education and de-radicalization program called mishal (beacon) at a center near the town of Barikot (a very good program by the way, with vocational training to give the detainees a better chance in life when they emerged). One, Habib-ur-Rehman, had been a low-level religious teacher in a local mosque, while the 37-year-old Ataullah had been a laborer. Both stressed how the Taliban had used class appeals to gain support: “They said that the poor should fight against the rich, because only the poor are good Muslims, because the rich have been oppressing the poor, and because land and wealth belong to everybody.”

The local landowning class in Swat – the khans – had made themselves widely hated in Swat in recent decades for their aggrandizements vis-à-vis poor farmers, though part of the reason for agrarian tension would also seem to have been simply the vastly growing population in a narrow strip of cultivatable land. The Taliban killed a number of them and chased the rest out, thereby destroying their prestige. Military officers with whom I spoke were worried that the khans might use violence to re-assert their authority, and were in consequence determined to keep a close eye on the anti-Taliban “village defense committees” that have been set up in Swat, for fear that they might be used for private vengeance and oppression by the elites. But as to what to do about elite domination in itself, that was of course beyond them – even though the contempt of middle class officers for hereditary landowner politicians was much in evidence.

The face of the military as that of (highly relative) modernity was literally in evidence when I visited a vocational training center that the army had set up near the town of Matta, to teach sewing, embroidery and handicrafts to local women so as to integrate them into the market economy and diminish local poverty. By way of inspiring them, the military had hung on the walls photographs of women cadets in the army, and of Pakistan’s five female fighter pilots. This impression of modernity was reinforced by some of the officers whom I met – especially a Lt Colonel commanding a battalion most of whose family were in Canada, and who in terms of education and intellect could have served in any military in the world.

But – and it is a big but – the colonel suffered just as much as anyone from the central obsession and motivation of the Pakistani military, which is hostility to India. Indeed, to judge by conversations with him and other officers, it seems that to a considerable extent, the military has only been able to motivate its men to fight against the Pakistani Taliban by convincing them that India is backing the Taliban in an effort to destroy Pakistan. This line has worked: it is believed implicitly by most soldiers of my acquaintance and indeed by most of Pakistan’s population.

As the colonel told me:

Initially, our morale in the fight against the militants was poor. A large number of officers resigned their commissions rather than fight against fellow Muslims and fellow Pakistanis on behalf of the US, which is how things were seen in the army. The change came in 2007-2009 as a result of Indian backing for the TTP [Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan] and because of TTP atrocities both against civilians and soldiers – we saw how soldiers they captured were tortured, beheaded, mutilated.

But still there is a problem in the home communities from which the soldiers come. In my own village a neighbor asked me when I went home on leave, ‘Why are you killing good Muslims who only want to bring the Sharia? It is not the Taliban who are carrying out these terrorist attacks.’

People are very confused. There is a belief that a man who prays, wears a beard, says he is a good talib [religious student] cannot really be killing Muslim women and children. Hence the attempt of ordinary people to distinguish between “good” and “bad” Taliban, which has done so much to undermine public support for military action against the Taliban. And then, there is the problem of distinguishing between the Pakistani and the Afghan Taliban. As you yourself have said, most Pakistanis have some sympathy for the Afghan Taliban as people who are resisting American occupation of their country.

Nonetheless, belief in Indian support for the Taliban, and irrefutable evidence of TTP atrocities, has meant that military motivation to fight against the Pakistani Taliban now seems very high. To this extent, I suppose that belief in “the Indian hand” is to be welcomed. However, this belief brings with it two major drawbacks. The first is that it almost certainly isn’t true, or at least that there isn’t a scrap of real evidence for it, and it seems to put it mildly counter-intuitive that India would support a force in league with terrorists who have carried out dreadful attacks on India. The belief in Indian backing for the Taliban therefore goes to swell still further the mass of paranoid, irrational conspiracy theories that corrode the Pakistani intellect and dominate the world view of so many Pakistanis. And indeed, the most virulent hostility to India expressed to me in Swat came not from the military but from a local lawyer.

The second drawback is that by encouraging the view of India as an implacably hostile, omnipresent enemy, this belief encourages still further the Pakistani military view that India is seeking to use Afghanistan in order to surround and destabilize Afghanistan; and therefore that Pakistan’s policy towards Afghanistan should be dictated above all by a desire to reduce Indian influence (something for which some of India’s actions in Afghanistan have, it must be said, given real support).

This of course encourages continued ties to the Afghan Taliban, who are seen as Pakistan’s only Afghan allies. Among more intelligent officers in the senior ranks of the military, this is no longer the old desire for “strategic depth” against India, and it is accompanied by serious thinking about how Pakistan can help to bring about a peace settlement in Afghanistan. Nonetheless, lurking in the background is always the perception of the Indian threat – and indeed, unless wise statesmanship in Washington can make use of Pakistan to help bring about an Afghan peace settlement, the future of Afghanistan may indeed be largely defined by Pakistani-Indian rivalry.

More by
Anatol Lieven​

 

[jaibi]

Good and Bad Taliban in Pakistan

Anatol Lieven
April 7, 2011

The Pakistan Army’s counter-insurgency campaign in Swat has been undeniably successful, not least in comparison to our own efforts in Afghanistan. Though until the spring of 2009 the district was one of the centers of militancy in Pakistan, the last suicide bombing there was in July 2010. The leadership of the Pakistani Taliban and their local allies have been killed, captured or driven out. The main leader, Fazlullah, has reportedly taken refuge in Kunar province of Afghanistan, where he was based as a leader of Pakistani volunteers against the Soviets back in the 1980s.

In the lower Swat valley at least, reconstruction has also gone well – astonishingly well, given that on top of the damage caused by the Taliban and the war against them came the floods of August 2010, which hit the narrow Swat valley especially badly. On the whole, I was very impressed by what I saw in Swat when I visited it last month for the first time since the summer of 2009.

That said, there are also grounds for concern about the future. The first is that while the operation has not been very brutal by South Asian standards, it has nonetheless been brutal. To judge by the accounts I heard from a local journalist and a lawyer (on top of interviews when I visited the valley in August 2009), the report by Human Rights Watch on extra-judicial executions by the military was completely accurate. I was told that between 400 and 500 of these have taken place since the end of the full-scale military operation in 2009, and that they are still continuing at a rate of between one and six a week – though to be fair, some of these are genuine “encounters” between military patrols and armed militants trying to filter back through the hills.

So far, however, these killings do not seem to have caused as much resentment in the valley as might have been expected. For this two things are responsible. Firstly, by the time the military launched their counter-offensive in the spring of 2009, the local militants had made themselves thoroughly hated among much of the local population by their cruelties and oppressions; and the Pakistan Army does take a good deal of care that the people it shoots are in fact hardcore militants, and not vaguer supporters or innocent bystanders. In this, the military is helped by the fact that several of the units they have deployed have a high proportion of Pashtun soldiers, which improves relations with the local Pashtun population. In more than nine-tenths of cases, I was told by locals, the soldiers do therefore kill the right man. This may seem a hard equation, but then this is a hard country and a hard region.
As a local journalist told me,

I myself am divided 50:50 on killings by the military. After all, the militants did have to be defeated. By 2009 no educated person in Swat was safe from them. But now the killings should stop, or they will cause a long-term desire for revenge and a sympathy for the terrorists if they start to come back. Already you can see this in the families of men who have been killed.

The second question hanging over the success of the counter-insurgency operation in Swat is what happens when most of the Army leaves – which it is very anxious to do, since the deployment of the whole of one division and elements of another is a serious drain on resources. Most of the local population seems to want a return of the police, viewing them as locals, and less ruthless than the army. The problem is that with the police comes the whole rotten apparatus of the Pakistani political, judicial and administrative systems, whose abuses did so much to create mass support for the Taliban in the first place.

I spoke to two low-level Taliban detainees, whom the military were putting through a re-education and de-radicalization program called mishal (beacon) at a center near the town of Barikot (a very good program by the way, with vocational training to give the detainees a better chance in life when they emerged). One, Habib-ur-Rehman, had been a low-level religious teacher in a local mosque, while the 37-year-old Ataullah had been a laborer. Both stressed how the Taliban had used class appeals to gain support: “They said that the poor should fight against the rich, because only the poor are good Muslims, because the rich have been oppressing the poor, and because land and wealth belong to everybody.”

The local landowning class in Swat – the khans – had made themselves widely hated in Swat in recent decades for their aggrandizements vis-à-vis poor farmers, though part of the reason for agrarian tension would also seem to have been simply the vastly growing population in a narrow strip of cultivatable land. The Taliban killed a number of them and chased the rest out, thereby destroying their prestige. Military officers with whom I spoke were worried that the khans might use violence to re-assert their authority, and were in consequence determined to keep a close eye on the anti-Taliban “village defense committees” that have been set up in Swat, for fear that they might be used for private vengeance and oppression by the elites. But as to what to do about elite domination in itself, that was of course beyond them – even though the contempt of middle class officers for hereditary landowner politicians was much in evidence.

The face of the military as that of (highly relative) modernity was literally in evidence when I visited a vocational training center that the army had set up near the town of Matta, to teach sewing, embroidery and handicrafts to local women so as to integrate them into the market economy and diminish local poverty. By way of inspiring them, the military had hung on the walls photographs of women cadets in the army, and of Pakistan’s five female fighter pilots. This impression of modernity was reinforced by some of the officers whom I met – especially a Lt Colonel commanding a battalion most of whose family were in Canada, and who in terms of education and intellect could have served in any military in the world.

But – and it is a big but – the colonel suffered just as much as anyone from the central obsession and motivation of the Pakistani military, which is hostility to India. Indeed, to judge by conversations with him and other officers, it seems that to a considerable extent, the military has only been able to motivate its men to fight against the Pakistani Taliban by convincing them that India is backing the Taliban in an effort to destroy Pakistan. This line has worked: it is believed implicitly by most soldiers of my acquaintance and indeed by most of Pakistan’s population.

As the colonel told me:

Initially, our morale in the fight against the militants was poor. A large number of officers resigned their commissions rather than fight against fellow Muslims and fellow Pakistanis on behalf of the US, which is how things were seen in the army. The change came in 2007-2009 as a result of Indian backing for the TTP [Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan] and because of TTP atrocities both against civilians and soldiers – we saw how soldiers they captured were tortured, beheaded, mutilated.

But still there is a problem in the home communities from which the soldiers come. In my own village a neighbor asked me when I went home on leave, ‘Why are you killing good Muslims who only want to bring the Sharia? It is not the Taliban who are carrying out these terrorist attacks.’

People are very confused. There is a belief that a man who prays, wears a beard, says he is a good talib [religious student] cannot really be killing Muslim women and children. Hence the attempt of ordinary people to distinguish between “good” and “bad” Taliban, which has done so much to undermine public support for military action against the Taliban. And then, there is the problem of distinguishing between the Pakistani and the Afghan Taliban. As you yourself have said, most Pakistanis have some sympathy for the Afghan Taliban as people who are resisting American occupation of their country.

Nonetheless, belief in Indian support for the Taliban, and irrefutable evidence of TTP atrocities, has meant that military motivation to fight against the Pakistani Taliban now seems very high. To this extent, I suppose that belief in “the Indian hand” is to be welcomed. However, this belief brings with it two major drawbacks. The first is that it almost certainly isn’t true, or at least that there isn’t a scrap of real evidence for it, and it seems to put it mildly counter-intuitive that India would support a force in league with terrorists who have carried out dreadful attacks on India. The belief in Indian backing for the Taliban therefore goes to swell still further the mass of paranoid, irrational conspiracy theories that corrode the Pakistani intellect and dominate the world view of so many Pakistanis. And indeed, the most virulent hostility to India expressed to me in Swat came not from the military but from a local lawyer.

The second drawback is that by encouraging the view of India as an implacably hostile, omnipresent enemy, this belief encourages still further the Pakistani military view that India is seeking to use Afghanistan in order to surround and destabilize Afghanistan; and therefore that Pakistan’s policy towards Afghanistan should be dictated above all by a desire to reduce Indian influence (something for which some of India’s actions in Afghanistan have, it must be said, given real support).

This of course encourages continued ties to the Afghan Taliban, who are seen as Pakistan’s only Afghan allies. Among more intelligent officers in the senior ranks of the military, this is no longer the old desire for “strategic depth” against India, and it is accompanied by serious thinking about how Pakistan can help to bring about a peace settlement in Afghanistan. Nonetheless, lurking in the background is always the perception of the Indian threat – and indeed, unless wise statesmanship in Washington can make use of Pakistan to help bring about an Afghan peace settlement, the future of Afghanistan may indeed be largely defined by Pakistani-Indian rivalry.

More by
Anatol Lieven​

Exactly! I wonder why people do not appreciate what we achieved!

 

[Vinod2070]

The first is that it almost certainly isn’t true, or at least that there isn’t a scrap of real evidence for it, and it seems to put it mildly counter-intuitive that India would support a force in league with terrorists who have carried out dreadful attacks on India. The belief in Indian backing for the Taliban therefore goes to swell still further the mass of paranoid, irrational conspiracy theories that corrode the Pakistani intellect and dominate the world view of so many Pakistanis. And indeed, the most virulent hostility to India expressed to me in Swat came not from the military but from a local lawyer

Facts are at a premium when a whole generation has been raised on a particular narrative of hate and paranoia.

 

[BATMAN]

A few days back I happened to meet a recently retired brigadier.Short conversation.,

Me:It is said army is not fighting with Taliban but giving them protection why?

Brig: Why not!-India is our enemy and off course Talibans are our assets.should we cut our hands?.

Me: But India is not fighting with us why we call her enemy.

Brig: India is stealing our water and fighting proxy war in Baluchistan.

Me: Isn’t it the job of civilians to decide who is enemy and who not.

Brig: No civilians can not be trusted.

Me: Why?

Brig:They are corrupt and incompetent to look after national security matters.

Express Tribune: Six months on, no vision

How is it possible only you got to see all such shit and come to share, while Pakistanis missed it?
It is same as India blamed every crime in its country to ISI, even before it happened.

Good and Bad Taliban in Pakistan

Anatol Lieven
April 7, 2011

The Pakistan Army’s counter-insurgency campaign in Swat has been undeniably successful, not least in comparison to our own efforts in Afghanistan. Though until the spring of 2009 the district was one of the centers of militancy in Pakistan, the last suicide bombing there was in July 2010. The leadership of the Pakistani Taliban and their local allies have been killed, captured or driven out. The main leader, Fazlullah, has reportedly taken refuge in Kunar province of Afghanistan, where he was based as a leader of Pakistani volunteers against the Soviets back in the 1980s.

In the lower Swat valley at least, reconstruction has also gone well – astonishingly well, given that on top of the damage caused by the Taliban and the war against them came the floods of August 2010, which hit the narrow Swat valley especially badly. On the whole, I was very impressed by what I saw in Swat when I visited it last month for the first time since the summer of 2009.

That said, there are also grounds for concern about the future. The first is that while the operation has not been very brutal by South Asian standards, it has nonetheless been brutal. To judge by the accounts I heard from a local journalist and a lawyer (on top of interviews when I visited the valley in August 2009), the report by Human Rights Watch on extra-judicial executions by the military was completely accurate. I was told that between 400 and 500 of these have taken place since the end of the full-scale military operation in 2009, and that they are still continuing at a rate of between one and six a week – though to be fair, some of these are genuine “encounters” between military patrols and armed militants trying to filter back through the hills.

So far, however, these killings do not seem to have caused as much resentment in the valley as might have been expected. For this two things are responsible. Firstly, by the time the military launched their counter-offensive in the spring of 2009, the local militants had made themselves thoroughly hated among much of the local population by their cruelties and oppressions; and the Pakistan Army does take a good deal of care that the people it shoots are in fact hardcore militants, and not vaguer supporters or innocent bystanders. In this, the military is helped by the fact that several of the units they have deployed have a high proportion of Pashtun soldiers, which improves relations with the local Pashtun population. In more than nine-tenths of cases, I was told by locals, the soldiers do therefore kill the right man. This may seem a hard equation, but then this is a hard country and a hard region.
As a local journalist told me,

I myself am divided 50:50 on killings by the military. After all, the militants did have to be defeated. By 2009 no educated person in Swat was safe from them. But now the killings should stop, or they will cause a long-term desire for revenge and a sympathy for the terrorists if they start to come back. Already you can see this in the families of men who have been killed.

The second question hanging over the success of the counter-insurgency operation in Swat is what happens when most of the Army leaves – which it is very anxious to do, since the deployment of the whole of one division and elements of another is a serious drain on resources. Most of the local population seems to want a return of the police, viewing them as locals, and less ruthless than the army. The problem is that with the police comes the whole rotten apparatus of the Pakistani political, judicial and administrative systems, whose abuses did so much to create mass support for the Taliban in the first place.

I spoke to two low-level Taliban detainees, whom the military were putting through a re-education and de-radicalization program called mishal (beacon) at a center near the town of Barikot (a very good program by the way, with vocational training to give the detainees a better chance in life when they emerged). One, Habib-ur-Rehman, had been a low-level religious teacher in a local mosque, while the 37-year-old Ataullah had been a laborer. Both stressed how the Taliban had used class appeals to gain support: “They said that the poor should fight against the rich, because only the poor are good Muslims, because the rich have been oppressing the poor, and because land and wealth belong to everybody.”

The local landowning class in Swat – the khans – had made themselves widely hated in Swat in recent decades for their aggrandizements vis-à-vis poor farmers, though part of the reason for agrarian tension would also seem to have been simply the vastly growing population in a narrow strip of cultivatable land. The Taliban killed a number of them and chased the rest out, thereby destroying their prestige. Military officers with whom I spoke were worried that the khans might use violence to re-assert their authority, and were in consequence determined to keep a close eye on the anti-Taliban “village defense committees” that have been set up in Swat, for fear that they might be used for private vengeance and oppression by the elites. But as to what to do about elite domination in itself, that was of course beyond them – even though the contempt of middle class officers for hereditary landowner politicians was much in evidence.

The face of the military as that of (highly relative) modernity was literally in evidence when I visited a vocational training center that the army had set up near the town of Matta, to teach sewing, embroidery and handicrafts to local women so as to integrate them into the market economy and diminish local poverty. By way of inspiring them, the military had hung on the walls photographs of women cadets in the army, and of Pakistan’s five female fighter pilots. This impression of modernity was reinforced by some of the officers whom I met – especially a Lt Colonel commanding a battalion most of whose family were in Canada, and who in terms of education and intellect could have served in any military in the world.

But – and it is a big but – the colonel suffered just as much as anyone from the central obsession and motivation of the Pakistani military, which is hostility to India. Indeed, to judge by conversations with him and other officers, it seems that to a considerable extent, the military has only been able to motivate its men to fight against the Pakistani Taliban by convincing them that India is backing the Taliban in an effort to destroy Pakistan. This line has worked: it is believed implicitly by most soldiers of my acquaintance and indeed by most of Pakistan’s population.

As the colonel told me:

Initially, our morale in the fight against the militants was poor. A large number of officers resigned their commissions rather than fight against fellow Muslims and fellow Pakistanis on behalf of the US, which is how things were seen in the army. The change came in 2007-2009 as a result of Indian backing for the TTP [Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan] and because of TTP atrocities both against civilians and soldiers – we saw how soldiers they captured were tortured, beheaded, mutilated.

But still there is a problem in the home communities from which the soldiers come. In my own village a neighbor asked me when I went home on leave, ‘Why are you killing good Muslims who only want to bring the Sharia? It is not the Taliban who are carrying out these terrorist attacks.’

People are very confused. There is a belief that a man who prays, wears a beard, says he is a good talib [religious student] cannot really be killing Muslim women and children. Hence the attempt of ordinary people to distinguish between “good” and “bad” Taliban, which has done so much to undermine public support for military action against the Taliban. And then, there is the problem of distinguishing between the Pakistani and the Afghan Taliban. As you yourself have said, most Pakistanis have some sympathy for the Afghan Taliban as people who are resisting American occupation of their country.

Nonetheless, belief in Indian support for the Taliban, and irrefutable evidence of TTP atrocities, has meant that military motivation to fight against the Pakistani Taliban now seems very high. To this extent, I suppose that belief in “the Indian hand” is to be welcomed. However, this belief brings with it two major drawbacks. The first is that it almost certainly isn’t true, or at least that there isn’t a scrap of real evidence for it, and it seems to put it mildly counter-intuitive that India would support a force in league with terrorists who have carried out dreadful attacks on India. The belief in Indian backing for the Taliban therefore goes to swell still further the mass of paranoid, irrational conspiracy theories that corrode the Pakistani intellect and dominate the world view of so many Pakistanis. And indeed, the most virulent hostility to India expressed to me in Swat came not from the military but from a local lawyer.

The second drawback is that by encouraging the view of India as an implacably hostile, omnipresent enemy, this belief encourages still further the Pakistani military view that India is seeking to use Afghanistan in order to surround and destabilize Afghanistan; and therefore that Pakistan’s policy towards Afghanistan should be dictated above all by a desire to reduce Indian influence (something for which some of India’s actions in Afghanistan have, it must be said, given real support).

This of course encourages continued ties to the Afghan Taliban, who are seen as Pakistan’s only Afghan allies. Among more intelligent officers in the senior ranks of the military, this is no longer the old desire for “strategic depth” against India, and it is accompanied by serious thinking about how Pakistan can help to bring about a peace settlement in Afghanistan. Nonetheless, lurking in the background is always the perception of the Indian threat – and indeed, unless wise statesmanship in Washington can make use of Pakistan to help bring about an Afghan peace settlement, the future of Afghanistan may indeed be largely defined by Pakistani-Indian rivalry.

More by
Anatol Lieven​

I'm amazed, how no one in the world talk about the hundreds of captives been released by Zardari regime, without making a sound!
No Pakistani even know the how the operation started on the first place, and how civil administration (hand picked by Zardari) in Sawat assisted so called TTP in take over of Sawat.
Neither, any one is bothered to think, how biug swat is and how much man power TTP may have used to take over its control.
I still remember, that time western news papers broke the story and mentioned Talibans are just 50km away from trigger of Pakistani atom bomb.

 

[Irfan Baloch]

Open letter to Imran Khan - kamran shafi bashing IK
Open letter to Imran Khan - kamran shafi bashing IK

a west funded Kamran Shafi is bashing Imran Khan?
does that SOB think that people dont remember who he is? and who dictates his "articles"?

a disgraced ex soldier who was dishonorably discharged from army due to misconduct stripping him from his rank as well. at that point he was lucky that he was not put in front of the firing squad but that piece of shite afterwords became a forefront of writing filth against Pakistan army and Pakistani ideology which makes him eligible for (death by jojo).

the existance of two people in Pakistan mostly make me question the abilities of my khaki friends. one being that Burka Mullah of Lal Masjid and his constant and brazen anti-state taunts and sermons and 2nd this Kamran Shafi who doesnt criticize Pakistan army (NO sir) but is on a personal campaign against the military.

 

[Solomon2]

How is it possible only you got to see all such shit and come to share, while Pakistanis missed it?

I don't know.

 

[fatman17]

Pakistan-Taliban peace talks look to be going nowhere

Author:Farhan Bokhari, Islamabad

Last posted:2014-02-12

Recently launched peace talks between the Pakistani government of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif and Taliban militants suffered a major setback on 11 February when at least 10 people were killed and 20 injured in a suspected Taliban attack that targeted a cinema in the northern city of Peshawar.

The mid-afternoon attack took place when at least 50 people were inside the cinema watching a film. Although the Taliban denied responsibility in phone calls to Pakistan's news organisations, a senior Pakistani intelligence official stated that the attack "has the imprint of the Taliban written all over it".

The attack came just three days after a team of government representatives and representatives of the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the main umbrella organisation representing the militants, met on 8 February at a secret location in the rugged north Waziristan region along the Afghan border. For years Pakistan has refused to comply with US-led Western demands for a concerted military campaign in north Waziristan to shut down suspected Taliban sanctuaries.

However, Western and Pakistani officials stated that Sharif was increasingly under pressure to oversee a military campaign there as the Taliban have showed few signs of being conciliatory towards the government.

A set of 15 demands handed by the Taliban to Pakistani government representatives on 8 February included measures such as the enforcement of sharia (Islamic law) in Pakistan, an end to Pakistan's relations with the United States, and the introduction of an Islamic-styled economy where banks neither pay nor receive interest payments.

"If you look at the list of demands, the Taliban clearly seem to believe they are in a position of strength and therefore able to extract concessions [from the government]," one Western diplomat in Islamabad stated . "Clearly the Taliban want the moon," he added. "I doubt if the Pakistanis will be able to even begin negotiating on such terms."

ANALYSIS
Senior Pakistani government officials stated that the influential Pakistan Army does not appear to be eager to enter a peace process with the Taliban. Meanwhile, continuing attacks such as the one in Peshawar present a dilemma for Sharif's administration, since they suggest the Taliban are either refusing to be in the least bit conciliatory or are unable to control many of the militants fighting the Pakistani government. Some analysts believe there are up to 60 militant groups of varying size who together form the TTP.

JDW