MOHRI PUR, Pakistan — The elementary school in this poor village is easy to mistake for a barn. It has a dirt floor and no lights, and crows swoop through its glassless windows. Class size recently hit 140, spilling students into the courtyard.

But if the state has forgotten the children here, the mullahs have not. With public education in a shambles, Pakistan’s poorest families have turned to madrasas, or Islamic schools, that feed and house the children while pushing a more militant brand of Islam than was traditional here.

The concentration of madrasas here in southern Punjab has become an urgent concern in the face of Pakistan’s expanding insurgency. The schools offer almost no instruction beyond the memorizing of the Koran, creating a widening pool of young minds that are sympathetic to militancy.

In an analysis of the profiles of suicide bombers who have struck in Punjab, the Punjab police said more than two-thirds had attended madrasas.

“We are at the beginning of a great storm that is about to sweep the country,” said Ibn Abduh Rehman, who directs the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, an independent organization. “It’s red alert for Pakistan.”

President Obama said in a news conference last week that he was “gravely concerned” about the situation in Pakistan, not least because the government did not “seem to have the capacity to deliver basic services: schools, health care, rule of law, a judicial system that works for the majority of the people.”

He has asked Congress to more than triple assistance to Pakistan for nonmilitary purposes, including education. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the United States has given Pakistan a total of $680 million in nonmilitary aid, according to the State Department, far lower than the $1 billion a year for the military.

But education has never been a priority here, and even Pakistan’s current plan to double education spending next year might collapse as have past efforts, which were thwarted by sluggish bureaucracies, unstable governments and a lack of commitment by Pakistan’s governing elite to the poor.

“This is a state that never took education seriously,” said Stephen P. Cohen, a Pakistan expert at the Brookings Institution. “I’m very pessimistic about whether the educational system can or will be reformed.”

Pakistani families have long turned to madrasas, and the religious schools make up a relatively small minority. But even for the majority who attend public school, learning has an Islamic bent. The national curriculum was Islamized during the 1980s under Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, a military ruler who promoted Pakistan’s Islamic identity as a way to bind its patchwork of tribes, ethnicities and languages.

Literacy in Pakistan has grown from barely 20 percent at independence 61 years ago, and the government recently improved the curriculum and reduced its emphasis on Islam.

Failures in Education

But even today, only about half of Pakistanis can read and write, far below the proportion in countries with similar per-capita income, like Vietnam. One in three school-age Pakistani children does not attend school, and of those who do, a third drop out by fifth grade, according to Unesco. Girls’ enrollment is among the lowest in the world, lagging behind Ethiopia and Yemen.

“Education in Pakistan was left to the dogs,” said Pervez Hoodbhoy, a physics professor at Quaid-e-Azam University in Islamabad who is an outspoken critic of the government’s failure to stand up to spreading Islamic militancy.

This impoverished expanse of rural southern Punjab, where the Taliban have begun making inroads with the help of local militant groups, has one of the highest concentrations of madrasas in the country.

Of the more than 12,000 madrasas registered in Pakistan, about half are in Punjab. Experts estimate the numbers are higher: when the state tried to count them in 2005, a fifth of the areas in this province refused to register.

Though madrasas make up only about 7 percent of primary schools in Pakistan, their influence is amplified by the inadequacy of public education and the innate religiosity of the countryside, where two-thirds of people live.

The public elementary school for boys in this village is the very picture of the generations of neglect that have left many poor Pakistanis feeling abandoned by their government.

Shaukat Ali, 40, a tall man with an earnest manner who teaches fifth grade, said he had asked everyone for help with financing, including government officials and army officers. A television channel even did a report. “The result,” he said, “was zero.”

A government official responsible for monitoring schools in the area, Muhamed Aijaz Anjum, said he was familiar with the school’s plight. But he has no car or office, and his annual travel allowance is less than $200; he said he was helpless to do anything about it.

With few avenues for advancement in what remains a feudal society, many poor Pakistanis do not believe education will improve their lives. The dropout rate reflects that.

One of Mr. Ali’s best students, Muhamed Arshad Ali, was offered a state scholarship to continue after the fifth grade. His parents would not let him accept. He quit and took up work ironing pants for about 200 rupees a day, or $2.50.

“Many poor people think salaried jobs are only for rich people,” Mr. Ali said. “They don’t believe in the end result of education.”

Safety Net From Despair

In Punjab, the country’s most populous province, the despair and neglect have opened a space that religious schools have filled.

“Madrasas have been mushrooming,” said Zobaida Jalal, a member of Parliament and former education minister.

The phenomenon began in the 1980s, when General Zia gave madrasas money and land in an American-supported policy to help Islamic fighters against the Soviet forces in Afghanistan.

The Islamic schools are also seen as employment opportunities. “When someone doesn’t see a way ahead for himself, he builds a mosque and sits in it,” said Jan Sher, whose village in southwestern Punjab, Shadan Lund, has become a militant stronghold, with madrasas now outnumbering public schools. Poverty has also helped expand enrollment in madrasas, which serve as a safety net by housing and feeding poor children.

“How can someone who earns 200 rupees a day afford expenses for five children?” asked Hafeezur Rehman, a caretaker in the Jamia Sadiqqia Taleemul Koran madrasa in Multan, the main city in south Punjab. The school houses and feeds 73 boys from poor villages.

Former President Pervez Musharraf tried to regulate the madrasas, offering financial incentives if they would add general subjects. But after taking the money, many refused to allow monitoring. “The madrasa reform project failed,” said Javed Ashraf Qazi, a retired general who served as education minister at the time.

Shahbaz Sharif, the chief minister of Punjab, says he is acutely aware of the problem and is trying a different approach, recently setting aside $75 million to build free model schools in 80 locations close to large madrasas, a tactic General Qazi had also proposed.

In the district that includes Mohri Pur, a mud-walled village of about 6,000 where farmers drive on dirt roads in tractors and donkey carts piled high with sticks and grasses, there are an estimated 200 madrasas, one-third the number of public schools, said Mr. Anjum, the education official.

Nonreligious private schools have also sprouted since the 1990s. They have better student-teacher ratios, but only the most exclusive — out of reach of most middle-class Pakistanis — offer a rigorous, modern education. Mr. Ali, the fifth-grade teacher, says the madrasas have changed Mohri Pur. They are Deobandi, adherents of an ultra-Orthodox Sunni school of thought that opposes music and festivals, which are central aspects of Sufism, a tolerant form of Islam that is traditional here.

There were no madrasas in Mohri Pur in the late 1980s, when Mr. Ali began teaching. Now there are at least five. Most are affiliated with a branch in the neighboring town of Kabirwala of Darul Uloom, a powerful Deobandi seminary founded in 1952, and whose leaders in other parts of Pakistan have links to the Taliban.

Fear and Respect

Several local residents said they believed the Kabirwala seminary was dangerous. Some of its members were involved in sectarian violence against Shiites in the 1990s, they said.

Even if the madrasas do not make militants, they create a worldview that makes militancy possible. “The mindset wants to stop music, girls’ schools and festivals,” said Salman Abid, a social researcher in southern Punjab. “Their message is that this is not real life. Real life comes later” — after death.

On a recent Thursday, the Kabirwala seminary was buzzing with activity. Officials showed rooms of boys crouched over Korans, reading and rocking. A full kitchen had an industrial-size bread oven. Flowers adorned walkways. The foundation for a new dormitory had been broken.

There was also a girls’ section, with its own entrance, where hundreds of young women chanted in unison after directions from a male voice that came from behind a curtain. “We have a passion for this work,” said Seraj ul-Haq, a computer teacher who is part of the family that founded the seminary. Teachers preach restrictions. February’s newsletter set out a list of taboos: Valentine’s Day. Music. Urban women “wearing imported perfume.” Talking about women’s rights.

Suicide bombings were neither encouraged nor condemned.

The ideology may be rigid, but it offers the promise of respect, a powerful draw for lower-class young men.

Abed Omar, 24, had little religious education before he was inspired by a sermon at the seminary last year. Better educated than most, he began to work in his family’s sweets shop.

Restless and unfulfilled, he joined a conservative Islamic group, paying about $625 to travel with them around the country for four months on a preaching tour. The group, Tablighi Jamaat, taught him that Islam forbids music and speaking with women. (He would speak to this reporter only through a male colleague.) American officials suspect that the group is a steppingstone to the Taliban. Pakistani officials say it is peaceful.

Now, when Mr. Omar visits his friends, “they turn off their tape players and give me their seat,” he said, a smile lifting his face, which, in the practice of some conservative Islamists, has a bushy beard but no mustache.

He is frustrated by a lack of opportunity and at how much of Pakistan’s bureaucracy requires political connections, which he does not have. “There is no merit,” he said. His faith gives him hope. “I want to make everyone a preacher of Islam,” Mr. Omar said brightly, eating honey-soaked fritters in his family’s shop.

He knows about 100 people in his town who have done a four-month tour like his. As for those who sign up for less, he said “they are countless.”

Waqar Gillani contributed reporting from Mohri Pur and Lahore, Pakistan.

WASHINGTON — As the insurgency of the Taliban and Al Qaeda spreads in Pakistan, senior American officials say they are increasingly concerned about new vulnerabilities for Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal, including the potential for militants to snatch a weapon in transport or to insert sympathizers into laboratories or fuel-production facilities.

The officials emphasized that there was no reason to believe that the arsenal, most of which is south of the capital, Islamabad, faced an imminent threat. President Obama said last week that he remained confident that keeping the country’s nuclear infrastructure secure was the top priority of Pakistan’s armed forces.

But the United States does not know where all of Pakistan’s nuclear sites are located, and its concerns have intensified in the last two weeks since the Taliban entered Buner, a district 60 miles from the capital. The spread of the insurgency has left American officials less willing to accept blanket assurances from Pakistan that the weapons are safe.

Pakistani officials have continued to deflect American requests for more details about the location and security of the country’s nuclear sites, the officials said.

Some of the Pakistani reluctance, they said, stemmed from longstanding concern that the United States might be tempted to seize or destroy Pakistan’s arsenal if the insurgency appeared about to engulf areas near Pakistan’s nuclear sites. But they said the most senior American and Pakistani officials had not yet engaged on the issue, a process that may begin this week, with President Asif Ali Zardari scheduled to visit Mr. Obama in Washington on Wednesday.

“We are largely relying on assurances, the same assurances we have been hearing for years,” said one senior official who was involved in the dialogue with Pakistan during the Bush years, and remains involved today. “The worse things get, the more strongly they hew to the line, ‘Don’t worry, we’ve got it under control.’ ”

In public, the administration has only hinted at those concerns, repeating the formulation that the Bush administration used: that it has faith in the Pakistani Army.

“I’m confident that we can make sure that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal is secure,” Mr. Obama said Wednesday, “primarily, initially, because the Pakistani Army, I think, recognizes the hazards of those weapons falling into the wrong hands.” He added: “We’ve got strong military-to-military consultation and cooperation.”

But that cooperation, according to officials who would not speak for attribution because of the sensitivity surrounding the exchanges between Washington and Islamabad, has been sharply limited when the subject has turned to the vulnerabilities in the Pakistani nuclear infrastructure. The Obama administration inherited from President Bush a multiyear, $100 million secret American program to help Pakistan build stronger physical protections around some of those facilities, and to train Pakistanis in nuclear security.

But much of that effort has now petered out, and American officials have never been permitted to see how much of the money was spent, the facilities where the weapons are kept or even a tally of how many Pakistan has produced. The facility Pakistan was supposed to build to conduct its own training exercises is running years behind schedule.

Administration officials would not say if the subject would be raised during Mr. Zardari’s first meeting with Mr. Obama. But even if Mr. Obama raises the subject, it is not clear how fruitful the conversation might be.

Mr. Zardari heads the country’s National Command Authority, the mix of political, military and intelligence leaders responsible for its arsenal of 60 to 100 nuclear weapons. But in reality, his command and control over the weapons are considered tenuous at best; that power lies primarily in the hands of the army chief of staff, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, the former director of Inter-Services Intelligence, the country’s intelligence agency.

For years the Pakistanis have waved away the recurring American concerns, with the head of nuclear security for the country, Gen. Khalid Kidwai, dismissing them as “overblown rhetoric.”

Americans who are experts on the Pakistani system worry about what they do not know. “For years I was concerned about the weapons materials in Pakistan, the materials in the laboratories,” said Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, who ran the Energy Department’s intelligence unit until January, and before that was a senior C.I.A. officer sent to Pakistan to determine whether nuclear technology had been passed to Osama bin Laden.

“I’m still worried about that, but with what we’re seeing, I’m growing more concerned about something going missing in transport,” said Mr. Mowatt-Larssen, who is now at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Several current officials said that they were worried that insurgents could try to provoke an incident that would prompt Pakistan to move the weapons, and perhaps use an insider with knowledge of the transportation schedule for weapons or materials to tip them off. That concern appeared to be what Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was hinting at in testimony 10 days ago before the House Appropriations Committee. Pakistan’s weapons, she noted, “are widely dispersed in the country.”

“There’s not a central location, as you know,” she added. “They’ve adopted a policy of dispersing their nuclear weapons and facilities.” She went on to describe a potential situation in which a confrontation with India could prompt a Pakistani response, though she did not go as far as saying that such a response could include moving weapons toward India — which American officials believed happened in 2002. Other experts note that even as Pakistan faces instability, it is producing more plutonium for new weapons, and building more production reactors.

David Albright and Paul Brannan of the Institute for Science and International Security wrote in a recent report documenting the progress of those facilities, “In the current climate, with Pakistan’s leadership under duress from daily acts of violence by insurgent Taliban forces and organized political opposition, the security of any nuclear material produced in these reactors is in question.” The Pakistanis, not surprisingly, dismiss those fears as American and Indian paranoia, intended to dissuade them from nuclear modernization. But the government’s credibility is still colored by the fact that it used equal vehemence to denounce as fabrications the reports that Abdul Qadeer Khan, one of the architects of Pakistan’s race for the nuclear bomb, had sold nuclear technology on the black market.

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Passion is the driving force behind every success!

As Taliban forces edged to within 60 miles of Islamabad late last month, the Obama administration urgently asked for new intelligence assessments of whether Pakistan's government would survive. In briefings last week, senior officials said, President Obama and his National Security Council were told that neither a Taliban takeover nor a military coup was imminent and that the Pakistani nuclear arsenal was safe.

Beyond the immediate future, however, the intelligence was far from reassuring. Security was deteriorating rapidly, particularly in the mountains along the Afghan border that harbor al-Qaeda and the Taliban, intelligence chiefs reported, and there were signs that those groups were working with indigenous extremists in Pakistan's populous Punjabi heartland.

The Pakistani government was mired in political bickering. The army, still fixated on its historical adversary India, remained ill-equipped and unwilling to throw its full weight into the counterinsurgency fight.

But despite the threat the intelligence conveyed, Obama has only limited options for dealing with it. Anti-American feeling in Pakistan is high, and a U.S. combat presence is prohibited. The United States is fighting Pakistan-based extremists by proxy, through an army over which it has little control, in alliance with a government in which it has little confidence.

The tools most readily at hand are money, weapons, and a mentoring relationship with Pakistan's government and military that alternates between earnest advice and anxious criticism. As criticism has dominated in recent weeks -- along with reports that the administration is wooing Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari's principal political opponent, former prime minister Nawaz Sharif -- the partnership has grown strained.

"What are the Americans trying to do, micromanage our politics?" a senior Pakistani official said testily. "This is not South Vietnam."

As Zardari arrives this week for his first official visit with Obama -- part of a tripartite summit with Afghan President Hamid Karzai -- the administration has asked Congress to quickly approve hundreds of millions of dollars in emergency military aid for Pakistan. That money, and billions more over the next several years, is to come with new authority for the Defense Department to decide what to spend it on.

Obama has also backed a five-year $7.5 billion economic assistance package and is resisting congressional efforts to impose strict conditions on any aid to Pakistan. Last month, the administration orchestrated an international donors' conference in Tokyo that netted $5.5 billion in pledges for Pakistan.

When he sits down with Zardari on Wednesday at the White House, Obama will urge him to put more effort into building domestic support by meeting critical public needs and to resolve his differences with Sharif and others so that he can concentrate on governing, according to officials who discussed sensitive and fluid Pakistan issues on the condition of anonymity.

Of particular concern are hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis who have been displaced by fighting in the North-West Frontier Province, U.S. officials said.

Security proposals up for discussion with Zardari and other members of his high-level delegation include counterinsurgency training for Pakistani army troops at U.S. bases in the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, the United States or elsewhere. The administration wants to expand a small, in-country training force -- now limited to about 70 Americans -- that is working with the Frontier Corps, the local, poorly armed force in the border regions.

As 17,000 additional U.S. troops deploying to southern Afghanistan this spring and summer begin to push Taliban fighters toward the Pakistan border, there are hopes the extremists can be trapped in "hammer and anvil" operations with Pakistani forces in the southern province of Baluchistan. Right now, however, Pakistan fields only one army brigade and about 40,000 minimally trained and equipped Frontier Corps members in the vast region, according to U.S. officials.

In deference to Pakistani objections, the administration has not initiated covert ground attacks, approved by the Bush administration last year, in mountain villages farther to the north, in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas, where it believes high-value al-Qaeda figures are located. But Obama authorized stepped-up attacks on the area by missiles launched from unmanned drone aircraft.

Although the missile attacks are privately approved by the Pakistani government, despite its public denunciations, they are highly unpopular among the public. As Zardari's domestic problems have grown, the Obama administration last month cut the frequency of the attacks. Some senior U.S. officials think they have reached the point of diminishing returns and the administration is debating the rate at which they should continue.

Always simmering, administration concern about Pakistani governance rose sharply last month when the Parliament approved an agreement between regional authorities and the Taliban to authorize sharia, or Islamic law, in the Swat Valley, located about 100 miles northwest of Islamabad. Rather than lay down their arms in exchange, Taliban forces began moving eastward. By the third week in April, they had established a presence in Buner district, 60 miles from the capital, with no apparent government resistance.

The day after the Buner reports surfaced, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton infuriated the Pakistani government by telling Congress it was "abdicating to the Taliban and to the extremists" and that the situation posed a "mortal threat" to the world.

"Absolutely, they're getting irritated," a senior U.S. official said of the Pakistanis. Clinton, he said, "knows she went too far" in her unscripted testimony. "But on the other hand," he said, "it was that kind of statement that helped wake up the Pakistanis."

A Pakistani military offensive in the Buner region was underway Tuesday, even as Obama's national security team met at the White House, and continued through the weekend. Administration officials said they were watching to see whether the military followed through or would simply stop without finishing the job, as it has in the past.

Meanwhile, Pakistan's government says it is in no mood for criticism or conditions on aid. After "billions of dollars were poured into Pakistan under the dictatorship" of Gen. Pervez Musharraf by the Bush administration, Pakistani ambassador to Washington Husain Haqqani said yesterday, the Obama administration has produced little but promises and disapproval of the democratically elected government.

"It is unfair to blame the civilian leadership that is bravely mobilizing the nation against terrorism when it is our American partners who have also slowed us down in the war effort by slowing down the flow of assistance," Haqqani said. "We trust that President Obama's emphasis on Pakistan will also translate promises into deliverables."

"You can't spend more in Iraq and Afghanistan," he said, "and then wonder why the effort in Pakistan is lagging behind."

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Passion is the driving force behind every success!

By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, May 5, 2009

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, May 4 -- Taliban forces tightened their grip on Pakistan's Swat region Monday and continued resisting the military's efforts to dislodge them from neighboring Buner, bringing a fragile peace accord closer to collapse and the volatile northwest region nearer to full-fledged conflict.

Yet even as the Taliban continued its rampage and rejected the government's latest concession to its demands -- the appointment of Islamic-law judges in Swat -- Pakistan's military leaders clung to hopes for a nonviolent solution, saying that security forces were "still exercising restraint to honor the peace agreement."

Behind this strained hope for a peaceful solution lie an array of factors -- competing military priorities, reluctance to fight fellow Muslims, lack of strong executive leadership and some internal sympathy for the insurgents -- that analysts say have long prevented the Pakistani army from making a full-fledged assault on violent Islamist groups.

Over the past two days, extremists in the northwest have attacked a military convoy, beheaded two soldiers, imposed a curfew and blown up a boys' high school and a police station. Troop reinforcements were sent into Buner on Monday after heavy fighting, and there were reports that the army would imminently launch an attack on Swat, an action that could coincide with a crucial aid-seeking visit to Washington this week by President Asif Ali Zardari, whose government has been criticized by U.S. officials for capitulating to the insurgents.

In the past five years, the army has made periodic moves against various militant strongholds but has frequently pulled back, often amid public anger over bombing raids. Insurgent leaders hold news conferences and spew religious hatred on FM radio stations with no interference.

Even now, despite a blitz of military operations during the past week and a raft of official statements about defending the writ of the state, analysts said it is doubtful the army has the stomach for a sustained fight against Taliban forces if the peace accord does collapse.

"The militants have resolve, determination, focus and ideology. On the other side, I don't see any of those," said Aftab Khan Sherpao, a former interior minister and a member of Parliament who comes from northwest Pakistan. "The army understands the threat from the militants, but they are more permanently worried about India. They are waiting for civilian leadership and direction, and there isn't any."

Over the next several days, Zardari and a delegation of aides will be in Washington, along with leaders from Afghanistan, to seek aid and antidotes to the rapidly growing regional threat from Islamist insurgents. The Obama administration is eager to help Pakistan -- with military training, equipment and massive quantities of assistance -- but is worried that Zardari's government is not taking the problem seriously enough.

Analysts said that in the past several weeks, the growing defiance and ambitions of the Taliban -- whose forces reached within 60 miles of this capital city when they seized Buner -- have frightened the country and begun to shake its leaders out of their complacency.

"The occupation of Buner did raise alarm bells, and a shift in thinking has started to take place. But I'm not sure it can be sustained," said Talat Masood, a retired general and defense analyst. "People are still confused about whether this is our war or America's war, and nobody in the government is getting out and explaining to them why we should fight it. Nobody has the guts to say that cutting off people's heads is un-Islamic. People don't seem to realize how dangerous Talibanization is for Pakistan. It would destroy us."

Despite the Taliban's record of rapaciousness, it is hard for the Pakistani military establishment, trained to view Hindu-dominated India as its mortal enemy and inculcated with an Islamist mind-set during the military dictatorship of the 1980s, to accept Muslim insurgents as adversaries. Soldiers home on leave have been taunted for fighting their own people; desertions are rising.

The military leadership, headed by Gen. Ashfaq Kiyani, the army chief, has another list of concerns: how to rebuild its reputation after a period of unpopularity under Gen. Pervez Musharraf; how to contain extremist fighters without leaving the Indian border underprotected; and how to handle the fallout from civilian casualties and massive human flight from conflict zones.

There is no doubt that the army, though lacking expertise in counterinsurgency tactics, is equipped to crush the insurgents. But now that Pakistan is under democratic rule, analysts said, the army has no desire to be seen as making policy and is determined to seek civilian cover for its actions.

"The government is trying its best to give time and space to the other side to allow the reconciliation process to reach its logical conclusion," Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas, the military's spokesman, told a Pakistani news channel. He said that the army's orders were limited to clearing the Taliban from Buner and that if reconciliation fails, "it will be the decision of the government whether to extend operations to Swat."

Abbas referred to the Taliban in noticeably respectful terms, even as he complained that it had killed prisoners whose hands had been tied. His language contrasted sharply with the mocking defiance of recent Taliban pronouncements. In the past two days, Taliban spokesmen have asserted that democracy is "infidel" and that the fighters will never lay down their weapons.

In Swat, meanwhile, Taliban forces were described Monday as preparing for sustained resistance against any attack, taking positions on rooftops in the district capital, hiding in a labyrinth of tunnels in local emerald mines and occupying homes and offices from which thousands of people have fled.

"It is very clear what they want: to turn Pakistan into an Islamic emirate," said Sherpao, the former minister. "They have taken the government for a ride while they are preaching on TV, training boys in camps, imposing curfews and spreading fear across the populace. This is our problem, and if we don't want American troops on our soil, we need to do something about it."

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Passion is the driving force behind every success!

by David Ignatius

Where do you draw the line between helpful American assistance to Pakistan in fighting the Taliban insurgency and counter-productive American meddling? Obama administration officials are weighing that balance as they prepare for a crucial visit to Washington this week by Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari.

The administration is finalizing an ambitious package of aid measures, ranging from urgent financial assistance to counter-insurgency training for Pakistani troops at a U.S. base in Kuwait.


To relieve political pressure on Zardari, the administration has even discussed the possibility of joint U.S.-Pakistani oversight of the CIA's secret program of Predator strikes on Al Qaeda and Taliban targets in Pakistan's tribal areas. But administration officials appear to have decided against any changes in the current approach, in which the Pakistani government privately okays the attacks but publicly criticizes them. Explained one official familiar with the program: "'Jointness' has been tried and it hasn't worked. These operations are designed to save American lives, and who wants to gamble at that table?"

As Washington frets about Zardari's political weakness, and debates a greater role for the opposition, his allies are pushing back--warning that American attempts to meddle in their country's internal politics may backfire.

"The more Americans get in the weeds of Pakistani politics, the less they will accomplish," warned a senior Pakistani official who supports Zardari. He described the growing U.S. pressure against Zardari as an example of "the Diem phenomenon," a reference to the U.S.-supported coup in 1963 against its former darling, South Vietnam's President Ngo Dinh Diem. That coup began a series of ultimately disastrous American attempts to steer Saigon politics and suppress the communist insurgency.

Zardari became Pakistan's president last year, with strong U.S. support, after the assassination of his wife, Benazir Bhutto. Since then, despite Zardari's pro-American policies, U.S. enthusiasm for him has waned, to the point that administration officials have urged a greater role for his political rival, former prime minister Nawaz Sharif.

"There's too much discussion of who can fix the problem, rather than what should be done," complained the pro-Zardari senior Pakistani official.

The sensitivity in the Zardari camp to U.S. criticism illustrates a broader phenomenon in Pakistani politics. Politicians of every stripe are wary of offending Pakistani national pride by appearing too close to Washington--even when they know they need U.S. help. A cartoon on one anti-American website in Pakistan last week showed Zardari talking with Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai, another former American favorite who now gets low marks. The Afghan is telling his Pakistani counterpart: "The Americans used and ditched me. Now it's your turn to get screwed!"

To show that it's serious about supporting Pakistan, the administration is preparing a series of initiatives for this week's trilateral summit with Karzai and Zardari. According to knowledgeable sources, the list includes:
--quick delivery of $953 million in promised U.S. aid for Pakistan that has been delayed in the pipeline.
--a new Pakistani counter-terrorism strategy, drafted by Zardari's government and the Pakistani military after consultation with counter-insurgency experts on the staff of Centcom commander Gen. David Petraeus.
--training for two battalions of Pakistani soldiers a month at a U.S. base in Kuwait that was used to ready American forces for combat in Iraq.
--an expanding Pakistani offensive against the Taliban, including a joint U.S.-Pakistani effort to suppress Taliban radio stations that have been operating in the tribal areas.
--a new agreement on third-country trade that transits Pakistan to Afghanistan. This "transit-trade" agreement would open the way for more shipments to and from India.
--a new framework for sharing information between the Pakistani and Afghan militaries and intelligence services.
--additional joint border posts for monitoring the Afghan-Pakistan frontier.

"We have a plan. We have the will. We are negotiating on getting the means," said Husain Haqqani, Pakistan's ambassador here and one of the architects of the Islamabad-Washington alliance.

Haqqani argued that if Washington really wants the Pakistani army to move troops from the Indian border to the tribal areas, as U.S. officials often say, then it should get the Indians to reduce their military forces.

"It's time for Obama to put in a call to the Indians telling them, 'If you move some of your troops, they'll move theirs," Haqqani said. According to sources, Pakistani chief of staff Ashfaq Kiyani made just that promise in a recent meeting with U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke.

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Passion is the driving force behind every success!

By David Alexander

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Barack Obama will urge the leaders of Pakistan and Afghanistan to put aside a history of mistrust and join Washington in an alliance against Islamic extremists at a White House meeting on Wednesday, senior administration officials said.

Offering billions of dollars in U.S. military and civilian aid, Obama will warn that al Qaeda and its Taliban allies pose an existential threat and press Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and Afghan President Hamid Karzai to toughen their response, the officials said.

"He's going to make the obvious general points that have to be said and carry such enormous weight when they are said by the president of the United States -- that these two countries have to work together for their mutual benefit, despite their history, despite the suspicions," said one official.

The White House gathering, part of Obama's new strategy for the U.S. war against al Qaeda, could produce specific agreements for cooperation on policing and border issues, the officials said.

Meetings between the three delegations begin on Wednesday morning at the State Department and continue in the afternoon with heads of government sessions at the White House. Obama will hold separate meetings with each of the leaders as well as a joint session.

Meetings continue on Thursday, with many U.S. Cabinet officials -- including interior, intelligence and agriculture -- hosting their counterparts in what one official described as an "exceedingly intensive" U.S. government involvement with Afghan and Pakistani leaders.

"Our goal is to get the two countries to work more closely together. You can't succeed in this war given the geography unless they cooperate," the official said.

"We'd like an alliance with these two countries against this kind of (extremist) threat," another official said. "It's very simple ... but quite profound."

The gathering comes as the United States is pressing Zardari to deal more aggressively with the threat from the Taliban, whose movement into the Buner valley 60 miles northwest of Islamabad prompted a military offensive to eject them.

"Pakistan must demonstrate its commitment to rooting out al Qaeda and the violent extremists within its borders," Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, said on Tuesday in prepared congressional testimony.

The Taliban was driven out of Afghanistan, where it once hosted al Qaeda, by the United States and its allies after the September 11, 2001, attacks.

The group, once nurtured by Pakistan's military and intelligence services, moved into the lawless region along Pakistan's frontier and his been expanding its influence in that country as well as in Afghanistan.

NUCLEAR ARSENAL SAFE?

The United States has been pressing Pakistan to adopt a counterinsurgency approach combining both military and civilian efforts to weaken Taliban influence. That would require Pakistan to shift military focus away from its traditional enemy India.

Obama has urged the U.S. Congress to provide $1.5 billion annually for five years to help Pakistan develop roads, schools, clinics and other civilian infrastructure.

The Taliban advance toward Islamabad has alarmed U.S. officials and raised concerns about the security of Pakistan's nuclear arsenal, but Zardari said on Tuesday the atomic weapons were safe.

Zardari told CNN he would ask Obama to let Pakistan purchase pilotless U.S. drones for his military arsenal. He said he did not want Washington to use the weapons to carry out attacks on his soil and Pakistan did not need a U.S. troop presence.

U.S. forces have used drone aircraft against suspected al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan, but the attacks often kill civilians and many Pakistanis are angry the Obama administration continues to use them.

"I will request the president of the United States to give it a thought that we own them (drones), then we take out our targets rather than somebody else coming and do it for us," Zardari told CNN.

U.S. officials have criticized Zardari for the weakness of his government and have met with his political opponents. But Holbrooke sent an unambiguous signal of support for the president, the widower of former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto who was assassinated in 2007.

"We have the highest strategic interests in supporting this government," Holbrooke said in his congressional testimony. "Our goal must be unambiguously to support and help stabilize a democratic Pakistan headed by its elected president, Asif Ali Zardari," he said.

(Editing by Vicki Allen)

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Passion is the driving force behind every success!

By William Maclean, Security Correspondent - Analysis

LONDON (Reuters) - Turbulent Pakistan has replaced Iraq as the place to go for militants bent on striking the West, but the threat of U.S. attacks means al Qaeda recruits may spend more time out of sight in a classroom than on an assault course.

Long a favored destination of British militants of Pakistani descent, Pakistan's northwestern tribal areas are now attracting Arabs and Europeans of Arab ancestry who three years ago would probably have gone to Iraq to fight U.S. forces.

With the Iraq war apparently winding down, security sources say, the lure for these young men is to fight U.S. forces in neighboring Afghanistan or to gain the skills to carry out attacks back home in the Middle East, Africa or the West.

One consequence: Western armies in Afghanistan increasingly face the possibility of having to fight their own compatriots.

These foreign militants are likely to feature in Wednesday's meetings between U.S. President Barack Obama, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari and Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

Obama wants to end the use of Pakistan's tribal zones as a staging area for al Qaeda activities in support of the hardline Islamist Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan, as well as their role as a training ground for new attacks around the world.

Dennis Blair, Obama's national intelligence director, said in February the primary threat from Europe-based extremists stemmed from members of al Qaeda and its affiliates "who returned from training in Pakistan to conduct attacks in the West."

"We remain concerned about an influx of Western recruits into the (Pakistani) tribal areas since mid-2006," he said.

Western officials estimate there are several hundred non-Afghan foreign militants training in the tribal areas at any one time. That is probably more than three years ago, although the foreigners are outnumbered by Pakistanis and Afghans undergoing similar training at the same, or similar, facilities.

Little detailed information is known in the West about the training operation, and analysts differ on whether the inflow of militants has risen or just held steady in recent months.

But the assumption among many Western officials is that U.S. success in Iraq since 2006 has diverted some recruits for the anti-Western cause to the Pakistan-Afghan theater.

MILITARY TRAINING OR ADVENTURE HOLIDAY?

U.S. General David McKiernan told Reuters in October 2008 that intelligence had picked up the presence in Afghanistan of Chechens, Arabs, Uzbeks, Punjabis and even Europeans.

Some were old-time residents of neighboring Pakistan's rebellious border regions, but others were new arrivals.

Andrei Novikov, anti-terrorism chief of the Russian-led Commonwealth of Independent States, told Reuters in February "uncountable" militants from Central Asia had long been part of the Afghan Taliban, which has bases in Pakistan's tribal zone.

Richard Barrett, coordinator of the U.N.'s al Qaeda-Taliban monitoring team, said that the number of foreigners going for training in northwest Pakistan appeared to be rising, but might not exceed "a few hundred all told."

"Training over the last couple of years has typically taken place in small compounds which you find throughout the area of northwest Pakistan, rather than in large purpose-built camps," he said. "I have also heard of it taking place in apartments or houses in places like Karachi. It is hard to spot and quantify."

Of Britons, Barrett said: "It seems that a fair proportion of the UK volunteers return home, which may reflect their attitude toward the training as only half-serious -- an adventure holiday or bragging rights back home."

"But it is very hard to distinguish between the serious and the less serious, and of course to identify people who go with one intention and return with another."

Western officials say the move to more discreet locations has been prompted by a series of missile attacks by U.S. unmanned aircraft on suspected al Qaeda bases in recent months.

Pilotless drones have killed about 350 people in about 35 attacks in northwest Pakistan since last year.

The content of training may also be changing, with as much or more emphasis on suicide bombing as on guerrilla war, curbing the need for assault course-style camps, some analysts say.

In Berlin, security analyst Berndt Georg Thamm said the flow of militants to Pakistan "has grown over the past few years."

He cited German officials as saying that since the September 11, 2001 attacks, about 140 people from Germany had gone to training camps in the Afghanistan/Pakistan region. Some 60 to 80 of them had come back to Germany.

Raphael Perl, Head of the Action Against Terrorism Unit at the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, said risks remained even if trainees did nothing on returning home.

"If I had to give a gut percentage, I'd say 60 percent do nothing with the training. They just come home. But at some point they may be contacted to do a favor for somebody, give someone a place to sleep, buy something, rent a car," he said.

Some observers believe increasing numbers of would-be militants are heading to Yemen and possibly also to Somalia.

Al Qaeda's second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahri on February 23 urged Somali militants to fight the "U.S.-made government" in Mogadishu, and praised what he described as an "increasing jihadist awakening in the Arabian Peninsula."

(Additional reporting by Adrian Croft in London, Andrew Hammond in Dubai, Simon Cameron-Moore in Islamabad, Aaron Gray-Block in Amsterdam, Sophie Hardach in Paris, Kerstin Gehmlich in Berlin, Daniel Wallis in Nairobi)

(Editing by Mark Trevelyan)

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Passion is the driving force behind every success!

Source : Reuters


By Arshad Mohammed and David Alexander

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Barack Obama won a fresh promise from the leaders of Pakistan and Afghanistan on Wednesday to work together to defeat al Qaeda, and vowed he would make "every effort" to avoid civilian deaths.

Afghanistan's Hamid Karzai and Pakistan's Asif Ali Zardari came to Washington after heavy criticism of their efforts to combat a Taliban resurgence in their countries.

After their talks Obama said both men "fully appreciate the seriousness of the threat" posed by al Qaeda and their allies.

Despite the warm words, the deaths of dozens of Afghan civilians this week, possibly in U.S.-led air strikes, cast a shadow on the talks.

"The road ahead will be difficult. There will be more violence and there will be setbacks," Obama said, with Karzai and Zardari at his side in the Grand Foyer of the White House.

"But let me be clear -- the United States has made a lasting commitment to defeat al Qaeda but also to support the democratically elected sovereign governments of both Pakistan and Afghanistan. That commitment will not waiver and that support will be sustained."

The Red Cross said dozens of Afghans died in U.S.-led air strikes in Farah province this week while local officials said more than 100 civilians may have been killed.

If that figure is confirmed it would make it among the deadliest incidents involving Afghan civilians since the fall of the Taliban in 2001.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton offered her deep regret for the incident, without implying U.S. responsibility for it. An American official, who asked not to be named, said it appeared that U.S. bombing may have caused the deaths.

The Obama administration has sharply criticized both Karzai and Zardari in the past, questioning their commitment and capability to tackle the threat from al Qaeda and the Taliban.

Civilian casualties caused by U.S. military operations in both countries, including drone strikes inside Pakistan, have infuriated many Afghans and Pakistanis and made it harder for both countries' leaders to cooperate with the United States.

"We deeply, deeply regret that loss," Clinton said of the civilian deaths before meeting Karzai and Zardari.

Later she called that meeting "in some ways a breakthrough" and said she was "very optimistic" the process was making a difference.

Obama announced a new approach to the fight against al Qaeda in both countries in late March, offering more aid but also more than 20,000 extra troops to Afghanistan this year.

"We turned a corner," Richard Holbrooke, the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, said after Obama's brief address. "We gave physical reality to the strategic plan."

"MY DEMOCRACY ... NEEDS NURTURING"

Karzai, whose office said earlier that he called the civilian deaths "unjustifiable and unacceptable," thanked Clinton for expressing concern and regret, saying he hoped all civilian casualties could be prevented.

U.S. officials have been frustrated with what they see as rampant corruption in Karzai's government, and Obama told his Afghan counterpart he wanted to see "concrete results" to stamp out graft, national security adviser Jim Jones told reporters.

Pakistan's Zardari, who has been under fierce criticism for his response to Taliban militants who have made inroads in the Swat and Buner valleys this year, pleaded for support for his fledgling democracy.

"My democracy needs attention and needs nurturing," Zardari said. "Pakistani democracy will deliver, the terrorists will be defeated by our joint struggle. Me, my friend President Karzai and the United States ... will stand shoulder to shoulder with the world to fight this cancer and this threat."

Many Pakistanis blame America for undermining democracy in their country for decades by supporting and funding its powerful military, but Clinton said U.S. support for the democratic government was "very, very firm."

She also asked for American understanding and patience for Zardari, just eight months into his new job.

"He inherited a very difficult and unmanageable situation," she said. "I think a little more understanding on our part about what he confronted -- you know, he has successfully navigated some real crises."

VILLAGERS MOURN

The Pakistani military said security forces attacked Taliban fighters in the Swat valley, killing at least 64 of them after the United States called on the government to show its commitment to fighting militancy.

In Afghanistan, villagers mourned relatives buried in mass graves following the bombing in Farah province.

People who survived the bombing of houses packed with terrified civilians told Reuters dozens from one extended family alone had died. They wept as they spoke of orphaned children and burying their loved ones' fragmented remains.

The air strikes, which lasted about an hour, killed 50 members of Sayed Azam's extended family, he said.

"There were Taliban in the area, and fierce fighting during the day but it ended when it was dark. People thought the fighting was over when suddenly bombings began."

(Additional reporting by Sharafuddin Sharafyar in HERAT and Washington bureau; Editing by Simon Denyer and Chris Wison

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Passion is the driving force behind every success!

Source : New York Times

By HELENE COOPER
Published: May 7, 2009

WASHINGTON — There was a lot of talk at the White House on Wednesday about all of the ways that the United States is trying to help Afghanistan and Pakistan work together to improve the lot of ordinary people.

President Obama spoke of how members of his cabinet, including Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, would hold meetings with their Afghan and Pakistani counterparts to help them build democratic institutions for governance. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton talked about a trade pact between the two countries to increase commerce over the borders. The national security adviser, James L. Jones, talked about judicial reform and the need to stamp out corruption in Afghanistan.

But as Taliban and other insurgents have battled government troops closer and closer to Islamabad, the one thing that no one seemed to be talking about publicly is the one thing that, privately, Obama officials acknowledge is the most important: how to get the Pakistani government and army to move the country’s troops from the east, where they are preoccupied with a war with India that most American officials do not think they will have to fight, to the west, where the Islamist insurgents are taking over one town after another.

Mr. Obama gave only passing reference to the problem, which American officials have been privately pressing their Pakistani counterparts to address all week. Standing next to the visiting heads of state of Afghanistan and Pakistan — Hamid Karzai and Asif Ali Zardari — Mr. Obama said simply that “we meet today as three sovereign nations joined by a common goal: to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat Al Qaeda and its extremist allies in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their ability to operate in either country in the future.”

Then he went on to talk about the drug trade in Afghanistan and the $5.5 billion raised for the region at a donors’ conference in Tokyo.

Part of the reason for the gap between the public and private diplomacy is that administration officials do not want to go on the record explicitly with what they are seeking from the two governments, less they be held to account when neither government comes through with promises made behind closed doors.

The other reason why no one wants to talk too much publicly about what the United States wants Pakistan to do is that there is a real difference in the way that the two countries view the insurgency in the western part of Pakistan. While Americans see this as an existential threat to the Pakistani government, Pakistanis look at things differently.

“This situation has been going on for decades,” one Pakistani official explained on Wednesday, speaking on condition of anonymity. “These people have always tried to impose Shariah law in the tribal areas.”

Pakistan is more concerned, he said, with getting the American government to stop the unmanned Predator strikes in the western part of the country, which he characterized as far more damaging to the survivability of the Pakistani government than Islamist insurgents in the Swat valley.

His comments came just after a senior Obama administration official said that the administration believes the Pakistani government is finally starting to come around to the American way of thinking about the nature of the Islamist threat to the Pakistani government, further underscoring the disconnect between the two governments.

When such a disconnect exists, those involved in diplomacy just stick to public pronouncements on judicial reform and economic development.

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Passion is the driving force behind every success!

Source : Reuters


By Junaid Khan

MINGORA, Pakistan (Reuters) - Thousands of people took advantage of a break in a curfew in Pakistan's Swat valley Thursday to get out of the region as government aircraft attacked Taliban positions.

The government's handling of Swat has become a test of its resolve to fight a growing Taliban militant insurgency. President Asif Ali Zardari assured U.S. President Barack Obama in Washington Wednesday of Islamabad's commitment to defeating al Qaeda and its allies.

A February peace pact aimed at ending Taliban violence in Swat has collapsed and Wednesday the military launched assaults in the outskirts of the region's main town of Mingora.

"We can't stay here when bombs are falling all around," said resident Mohammad Hayat Khan as he loaded his family of 14 onto a pick-up truck. He said there had been shelling near his home.

Many other people were heading out of Mingora on foot, loaded up with whatever they could carry.

Authorities agreed in February to a Taliban demand for the introduction of Islamic sharia law in the former tourist valley but the militants have refused to disarm and pushed out of the valley into neighboring districts.

The aggression raised alarm in the United States and led to accusations the government was capitulating to the militants.

Security forces launched an offensive on April 26 to expel militants from two of Swat's neighboring districts, Dir and Buner, and security has deteriorated sharply in Swat since then.

Zardari met Obama and Afghanistan's President Hamid Karzai in Washington Wednesday. Obama later said both men "fully appreciate the seriousness of the threat" posed by al Qaeda and their allies.

"The road ahead will be difficult. There will be more violence and there will be setbacks," Obama said, with Karzai and Zardari at his side at the White House.

"But let me be clear -- the United States has made a lasting commitment to defeat al Qaeda but also to support the democratically elected sovereign governments of both Pakistan and Afghanistan."

CLERIC'S SON "KILLED"

Pakistani security forces said at least 64 militants were killed in Swat and the nearby Buner district in fighting on Wednesday. Two soldiers were also killed.

A Taliban spokesman said more than 30 civilians had been killed in Swat.

There was no independent confirmation of either side's tolls.

Security forces used jets and helicopters to attack militant strongholds in at least four parts of the Swat valley Thursday, residents and government officials said.

There was no word on casualties but a son of radical cleric Sufi Mohammad, who brokered the Swat peace deal, was killed when an artillery shell hit his house in the neighboring Dir district, a spokesman for the cleric said.

It was not clear who fired the shell but it is the military that generally uses artillery. The militants tend to fire rockets and smaller weapons.

People began streaming out of Mingora after authorities temporarily lifted a curfew. Swat's top administrator, Khushal Khan, said people were not being advised to leave but authorities were helping those who wanted to go.

"There are troops convoys coming and once that is over, public transport will be able come into the town. In the meantime, we are extending whatever help possible to people leaving," he said.

Up to 38,000 people have been displaced from Swat and nearby areas since fighting flared last month, provincial authorities said Wednesday, adding that up to 800,000 people could flee from the valley, which has a population of about 1.6 million. Several hundred thousand have already fled fighting in different parts of the northwest since August.

Many displaced stay with friends, relatives and in rented accommodation but the exodus puts an extra burden on an economy propped up by a $7.6 billion International Monetary Fund loan.

Authorities have set up camps for people leaving Swat with the help of the United Nations and aid agencies.

(Writing by Augustine Anthony; Editing by Robert Birsel and Jerry Norton)

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Passion is the driving force behind every success!