Kabul meetings
July 22, 2012
All of last year, both US and Afghan officials repeatedly acknowledged the indispensability of Pakistan in the process of engaging the Taliban and openly sought Pakistan’s help in urging the Afghan Taliban to start talks with the Kabul government. However, the Salala attack changed the narrative and brought the process to an abrupt halt, creating unprecedented tensions between the three countries. As relations turned almost entirely pear-shaped between the US and Pakistan just as things were shaping up rapidly in Afghanistan, it looked as if Pakistan might get sidelined in the talks’ process. This seemed like an even greater possibility once spring arrived and the Afghan Taliban launched a fierce offensive, shifting the narrative once again to the permanent thorn in the American side: the alleged sanctuaries along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan.
However, during Prime Minister Ashraf’s daylong visit to Kabul last Thursday, a genuine attempt seems to have been made to shift the narrative back to where it rightly belongs: the Afghan peace process and stalled negotiations with the Taliban. Following the three-way talks in Kabul, the leaders of Pakistan, Afghanistan and Britain were all agreed that Afghan efforts to negotiate with the Taliban could not be successful without Islamabad’s help. Karzai has long sought to negotiate with the Taliban, who have refused to deal with his administration, branding it an American puppet. Prime Minister Ashraf reiterated that Pakistan wanted a strategic partnership agreement with Afghanistan for a deeper bilateral military and security dialogue, repeating an offer that Pakistan has for long been pushing: the provision of equipment and training by Pakistan to the Afghan National Security Forces. Pakistan believes this would help in closer cooperation between the two countries in effectively combating terrorism and dealing with cross-border challenges. Currently, under a strategic partnership agreement, India is training the Afghan security forces and providing some equipment, a move that has significantly raised Pakistani fears of the cultivation of anti-Pakistan sentiment in the Afghan army. As things stand, Pakistan has legitimate stakes in a peaceful and friendly Afghanistan. It is thus important for the international community to take steps to placate Pakistani fears vis-à-vis Indian efforts to step up exposure to the security scenario in Afghanistan, and also to re-launch efforts to revive the stalled negotiations with the Taliban. The meetings in Kabul were certainly a step in the right direction. The days ahead also hold promise. The two countries will soon resume regular meetings of the ‘two-tier’ joint commission to seek peace with the Taliban, an initiative that was suspended last year following the assassination of former Afghan president and peace envoy Burhanuddin Rabbani. Now, after months of deadlock, the Afghan High Peace Council, led by Rabbani’s son, will soon arrive in Islamabad to revive the crucial process and evolve a joint strategy to seek a peaceful end to the Afghan conflict. We hope that all these initiatives will not be mere window-dressing but will bear tangible results to facilitate the peace process.
Syria unravels
July 22, 2012
President Assad, though still nominally in power, is living on borrowed time. He leads a powerful family that has a multitude of interests across the whole country and will do all it can to protect and preserve its assets. A number of bloody events in the last six months were flagged as ‘turning points’ but proved to be little more than waymarkers in a continuum of violence and savagery. But the death of four senior figures in the regime in a bomb explosion inside the tightly guarded room where they were meeting is still not adequately explained – and may be a genuine turning point. At first the incident was attributed to a suicide bomber, but that story faded and a ‘pre-planned’ device was claimed by the Free Syrian Army (FSA). A day after the bombing there was fierce fighting in several parts of Damascus, with the Syrian army battling a highly mobile and increasingly well-organised and disciplined, rebel force. On the same day the rebels seized control of border crossings at Jerablus and Bab-al-Hawa, but surrendered them to government forces within hours. There are now 30,000 refugees that have fled to Lebanon in the last 48 hours alone. Generals are on the run too – 22 of them are now in Turkey. The banks are running out of cash and the bakeries are out of flour just as Ramazan begins. The Syrian conflict is now in danger of infecting all around it, and the world stands largely paralysed.
For all his gravitas and undoubted sincerity Kofi Annan was handed a poisoned chalice when he was given the job of trying to broker peace in Syria by the UN. Diplomacy in the widest sense has failed comprehensively. For diplomacy to work in a conflict zone there has to be meaningful dialogue which can be conducted while the fighting may go on, but in Syria it is absent. The UN itself is hamstrung by the dogged persistence of Russia and China which refuse to shift their position and continue to support the Assad regime. There has been agreement in the UN Security Council to extend for 30 days the mandate of the monitoring mission in Syria but this is just as pointless as Kofi Annan shuttling back and forth. The opposing forces in Syria – and there are a multitude of tribes and sects and factions all with a set of vested interests – appear determined to fight it out to the bitterest of ends. Assad still holds the cities, mostly, but he has lost the rural hinterlands everywhere. One might wish him a more dignified end than Saddam Hussein or Colonel Qaddafi, but the omens are poor.
The darkest night
July 22, 2012
It took James Holmes about two minutes to kill 12 people and wound 59 more. A young PhD student with no previous criminal record, he gave himself up without a struggle and the US justice system is now going to have to decide if he is mad or bad or both, and what to do with him. Thus far there is no indication as to motive, why an otherwise unremarkable man achieved instant notoriety by committing mass murder at a cinema showing the last of the Batman trilogy – The Dark Knight Rises. He used four guns in the attack – an AR-15 semi-automatic assault rifle possibly fitted with a high capacity magazine, two Glock pistols and a 12-gauge Remington shotgun. All the guns were legally held and had been purchased by Holmes, as had 6,000 rounds of ammunition that he bought on the internet.
The right to keep and bear arms is enshrined as the Second Amendment to the American constitution, and there are few issues more socially and politically divisive in modern America than gun ownership and gun control – or the lack of it. American citizenry and the media will go into paroxysms of analysis and trenchant defences of long-held positions and, as happens after every mass-slaying involving firearm – nothing will change and America will continue its love affair with guns. It has always been a violent country and leads the world when it comes to individuals going mad with a gun. It happens in other countries as well but it happens in America more than anywhere else. Both sides of the gun debate are committed to absolutist positions that have taken on an almost religious hue. In 2010 there were 12,996 murders in the USA, 8,775 of which were committed with a firearm. Guns are woven into the American psyche, an embedded part of the American paradigm, and even those who might be considered relatively liberal would not support a repeal of the Second Amendment. It is also a nation that prizes individual liberty and adulates violence in popular culture. Ideological rigidity has paralysed the gun debate for decades in America and it will do so again, and it may not be long before we see Americans bleeding and dying from yet another self-inflicted wound.