Editorial: American drones and Taliban terrorism

arsa · #1 Thursday, January 22, 2009

Thursday, January 22, 2009
An important visit by the chief of US Central Command (CENTCOM), General David Petraeus, on Tuesday ended on a note of disagreement in Islamabad. President Asif Ali Zardari “expressed concern” over the US drone attacks on Al Qaeda and Taliban targets in Pakistan’s Tribal Areas in his meeting with him. But to no avail apparently. While General Petraeus tried to sound upbeat about Pakistan’s efforts to fight terrorism by calling them “sacrifices”, Pakistan’s Joint Chiefs of Staff Committee Chairman General Tariq Majid called on “outside powers” to stop demanding Pakistan do more: “Repetitive rhetoric by some of the external players asking Pakistan to do more and prove sincerity... Such unhelpful statements must stop”.

One Pakistani “sacrifice” that the US has decided to do without exclusively is the supply route of the NATO-ISAF forces going through Pakistan. General Petraeus said in Islamabad that he had visited Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan and reached agreements with them about an alternative route, and that this includes the support of Russia. The decision to find an alternative route was taken after a series of attacks near Peshawar destroyed convoys of large carrier trucks, resulting in theft of equipment by the Taliban. Some thought that the attacks were a reaction to America’s refusal to accede to Pakistan’s request to stop drone attacks inside the Pakistani territory. But this doesn’t stand to reason because the theft of equipment has led directly to the beefing up of the Taliban resistance to the Pakistan’s military efforts to regain lost territory in the Tribal Areas.

The Americans have taken the trouble to go back to some of the Central Asian states they had offended not long ago for the route concession. This tells us how important they think the drone attacks are for them. In particular, the approach made to Russia in the wake of President Bush’s anti-Russia line on the question of the Russian invasion of Georgia and the inclusion of Georgia and Ukraine in NATO signals a new direction of policy under President Obama. Washington is apparently satisfied by the terrorist-casualties the drone attacks have claimed. A number of important Al Qaeda leaders have been killed. This gibes with the common US-European understanding that these attacks have pressured Al Qaeda into looking to its own security and not plan more attacks in the West.

The opinion at the popular level in Pakistan is intensely opposed to the drone attacks and, derived from there, to the policy of allowing a transit route for supplies meant for NATO forces in Afghanistan. The media interprets drone attacks as an American violation of Pakistan’s sovereignty and territorial integrity. The PPP government in Islamabad is therefore opposed to the attacks. Equally, the army, once tacitly accepting under General Pervez Musharraf, now seemingly rejects them. To the outside world, however, this protest looks ironical because Pakistan’s sovereignty is more completely destroyed by the Taliban and Al Qaeda than America. Recent news that Osama bin Laden’s son has moved from Iran to Pakistan because of the “improvement” of his security situation in Pakistan’s lost territories must have aroused the world’s impatience with Pakistan’s stance.

In the coming days, President Obama’s policy of beefing up forces in Afghanistan and offering Pakistan an aid package it cannot resist will cause a lot of internal strife in Pakistan. The government will find the “package” irresistible, but the army may pay less attention to questions related to the survival of the national economy. Since the media and the public opinion in Pakistan are greatly incensed at drone attacks, the government may find the job of caring for the economy more difficult. How unfortunate. *

Second Editorial: Going back to old politics

On Tuesday, the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PMLN) took another step in the direction of institutional anarchy when it decided in a meeting in Islamabad not to accept any anti-PMLN verdict by the Supreme Court on an ongoing case related to the electoral eligibility of the Sharif brothers. The fiery opposition leader in the National Assembly, Chaudhry Nisar Ali Khan, presided over the meeting and saw that the political temperature in the country went up a notch. Pulling down one constitutional plank of the country, the meeting heard the argument that the “controversial judges” had no right to judge the eligibility of the Sharif brothers: “how can judges who took oath under Pervez Musharraf’s PCO make a judgement on the eligibility of the country’s popular leadership?”

The discrediting of the judiciary has not happened in the country to this level of contempt in the past although judges have been more “realistic” in their assessment of the “doctrine of necessity” before March 2007. The lawyers’ movement was ground-breaking in that it threw away the fig-leaf of respecting the courts manned by judges not held in high esteem by civil society. But the joining of a mainstream party in this defenestration of the judiciary has ushered in an era of what might soon look like judicial anarchy. The participation of “civil society” and the media — highlighting Mr Nawaz Sharif’s likening of the Supreme Court to a buffalo — has made disrespect of the institution almost universal. Tragically, the judges of the superior judiciary, eschewing application of the laws of contempt, helplessly watch the judiciary losing ground in the country.

As far as the political parties are concerned, they tacitly accepted the post-November 2 courts when they decided to take part in the 2008 elections. The lawyers as “purists” had demanded that the elections be boycotted, as if pegging their protest to the test of elections, but when the elections went ahead and were hailed as free and fair, they did not give up their protest but subliminally relied on the traditional PPP-PMLN rivalry to carry on their movement. Now the political parties want to achieve moral immaculacy and popularity by joining in the largely media-supported Long March. The not so openly declared intent is to “purify” the parties of past ill-record and to depose the government through agitation while the army appears disinclined — so far — to return to its own reflex of overthrowing governments. Meanwhile, the economic crisis and terrorism vie with each other in vain to attract the attention of the nation. *

PERISCOPE: The sum of all expectations —Mahmud Sipra
If Pakistan decides to play ball for its own good, fine, but if it continues to believe that it is the only conduit for supplies to US troops embedded in Afghanistan, a rethink in Islamabad might well be in order

Years ago, a young and talented singer called Billy Joel came up with a hit song that became almost an anthem. It was titled: “We didn’t start the fire”. It hit the high notes with a compendium of events that had shaped the world before us and of the brash and bold world of our times then.

Today, somewhere, a new singer, rapper, lyricist is plucking away at his guitar while sitting in front of his Mac as he tries to set to music the familiar polemic of the Bush years — “with us or against us” — and tells of an America being “only one of the two super powers in the world, the other being world opinion.”

President Obama is expected to change the tune of such discordant notes that America has been identified with for the past eight years.

Perhaps it is that world opinion that brought the inhabitants of this planet in different time zones in unprecedented numbers to watch America place the mantle of leadership on to the shoulders of its new president.

President Obama inherits an America in financial crisis; a world in economic turmoil; two wars, with one of them threatening to become an even larger area of conflict; and a planetary environment that is suffering the onslaught of irresponsible industrial excess.

Given his cross-cultural background and having read the lips of the majority of his fellow Americans and the rest of the world, he will be taking that first walk to the Oval Office to the beat of a different drum; unilateralism having now departed and replaced by the cadence of a new buzzword “multilateralism”. Just how soon Mr Obama starts walking the talk of this new mantra is expected to become evident in his first 100 days in office.

His inaugural address perhaps disappointed those that were looking for quotable lines in the style that John F Kennedy or Ronald Reagan delivered theirs. President Obama’s speech addressed his world audience by focusing on an America that needed to reinvent and reinvigorate itself. To those who would disrupt the world and seek to impose a regime of terror and destruction, he sent out the stark warning: “We will defeat you”.

A message that ought to be heeded by those who have had a relatively free run in the contiguous and uncharted area that makes up Afghanistan and Pakistan.

It needs to be emphasised that unlike his predecessor, President Obama will not be required to prove the existence of “weapons of mass destruction” to justify and to augment the existing presence of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan. If Pakistan decides to play ball for its own good, fine, but if it continues to believe that it is the only conduit for supplies to US troops embedded in Afghanistan, a rethink in Islamabad might well be in order.

That “save your powder for the real enemy” mindset also needs to be revisited. Better to do it on one’s own rather than to be told to do it. Kabuki may be a Japanese word for theatre but its relevance here should not be lost on anyone. In simplistic terms, know your lines and stick to the script.

There are many areas and internal problems that Pakistan is facing which threaten its very existence, where President Obama, despite his inestimable qualities, will be unable to help. The lessons of what happened to America’s ill conceived plans to bridge the Shia/Sunni divide in Iraq will be fresh in his mind. That the same problem is now rearing its ugly head in Pakistan as well is something that no American administration will be willing to find itself embroiled in.

Pakistan’s sectarian and ethnic mix has always been a sensitive subject that Pakistan has handled with maturity and reverence for the past sixty years. But that was before Al Qaeda, the Taliban and their misguided satellites started running out of fertile ground, safe havens and impoverished young recruits considered a soft touch. That climate can only change if Pakistan grits it teeth and reaches deep within itself and finds the moral and political will to root out the elements that are devouring it.

The appointment of Richard Holbrooke as President Obama’s “special envoy” to the quartet comprising Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan and India, while signalling a fresh approach, may not be as welcome to India as it might be to the other three. India would much rather have Bill Clinton, but he may not be acceptable to the other three. It is too early to start second guessing the new president but there is a very impatient world out there that, having grown weary after eight years of Bush and Cheney, is now expecting this bold new young American president to start setting their world right.

Tough call, but nobody said it was going to be easy

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