Instability In Pakistan- Merged Thread

[CougarKing]

The Pakistani Army renewing its drive against the Taliban:

Associated Press link

PARACHINAR, Pakistan – Army helicopter gunships pounded insurgent hideouts in northwest Pakistan on Sunday, killing at least 22 militants, a government official said.
Samiullah Khan said the hideouts hit were in the Dabori area and its neighboring villages of the Orakzai tribal region near the Afghan border. He added the aerial strikes also destroyed six militant compounds.

Khan said the militants fired mortars at an army checkpoint in Mishti Mela area in Lower Orakzai, wounding two soldiers.

Pakistani forces launched an operation in Orakzai in mid-March to flush out militants who last year fled an army offensive in South Waziristan. The troops are believed to have retaken several areas from the Taliban in the region.

Thousands of people have fled the area. Most of them have moved in with relatives in nearby districts.

Independent confirmation of the casualties and the identities of those killed is virtually impossible because the region is remote and dangerous and media access there is restricted.

The tribal region is the primary base of Pakistani Taliban chief Hakimullah Mehsud.

Mehsud was believed killed in a mid-January suspected U.S. missile strike, but intelligence officials now say he is thought to have survived.

The Taliban had always denied the strike killed Mehsud, though failed to offer any evidence such as video footage of him.


(...)

 

[MarkOttawa]

This is an excellent account of Pakistani realities (usual copyright disclaimer):

Islam's Nowhere Men
Millions like Faisal Shahzad are unsettled by a modern world they can neither master nor reject.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703338004575230142684329162.html

By FOUAD AJAMI

'A Muslim has no nationality except his belief," the intellectual godfather of the Islamists, Egyptian Sayyid Qutb, wrote decades ago. Qutb's "children" are everywhere now; they carry the nationalities of foreign lands and plot against them. The Pakistani born Faisal Shahzad is a devotee of Sayyid Qutb's doctrine, and Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, was another.

Qutb was executed by the secular dictatorship of Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1966. But his thoughts and legacy endure. Globalization, the shaking up of continents, the ease of travel, and the doors for immigration flung wide open by Western liberal societies have given Qutb's worldview greater power and relevance. What can we make of a young man like Shahzad working for Elizabeth Arden, receiving that all-American degree, the MBA, jogging in the evening in Bridgeport, then plotting mass mayhem in Times Square?

The Islamists are now within the gates. They fled the fires and the failures of the Islamic world but brought the ruin with them. They mock national borders and identities. A parliamentary report issued by Britain's House of Commons on the London Underground bombings of July 7, 2005 lays bare this menace and the challenge it poses to a system of open borders and modern citizenship.

The four men who pulled off those brutal attacks, the report noted, "were apparently well integrated into British society." Three of them were second generation Britons born in West Yorkshire...

A year after the London terror, hitherto tranquil Canada had its own encounter with the new Islamism. A ring of radical Islamists were charged with plotting to attack targets in southern Ontario with fertilizer bombs. A school-bus driver was one of the leaders of these would-be jihadists. A report by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service unintentionally echoed the British House of Commons findings. "These individuals are part of Western society, and their 'Canadianness' makes detection more difficult. Increasingly, we are learning of more and more extremists that are homegrown. The implications of this shift are profound."

And indeed they are, but how can "Canadianness" withstand the call of the faith and the obligation of jihad?..

... the Old Country, is never far. Pakistani authorities say Faisal Shahzad made 13 visits to Pakistan in the last seven years. This would have been unthinkable three or four decades earlier. Shahzad lived on the seam between the Old Country and the New. The path of citizenship he took gave him the precious gift of an American passport but made no demands on him.

From Pakistan comes a profile of Shahzad's father, a man of high military rank, and of property and standing: He was "a man of modern thinking and of the modern age," it was said of him in his ancestral village of Mohib Banda in recent days. That arc from a secular father to a radicalized son is, in many ways, the arc of Pakistan since its birth as a nation-state six decades ago. The secular parents and the radicalized children is also a tale of Islam, that broken pact with modernity, the mothers who fought to shed the veil and the daughters who now wish to wear the burqa in Paris and Milan.

In its beginnings, the Pakistan of Faisal Shahzad's parents was animated by the modern ideals of its founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah. In that vision, Pakistan was to be a state for the Muslims of the subcontinent, but not an Islamic state in the way it ordered its political and cultural life. The bureaucratic and military elites who dominated the state, and defined its culture, were a worldly breed. The British Raj had been their formative culture.

But the world of Pakistan was recast in the 1980s under a zealous and stern military leader, Zia ul-Haq. Zia offered Pakistan Islamization and despotism. He had ridden the jihad in Afghanistan next door to supreme power; he brought the mullahs into the political world, and they, in turn, brought the militants with them.

***

This was the Pakistan in which young Faisal Shahzad was formed; the world of his parents was irretrievable. The maxim that Pakistan is governed by a trinity—Allah, army, America—gives away this confusion: The young man who would do his best to secure an American education before succumbing to the call of the jihad is a man in the grip of a deep schizophrenia. The overcrowded cities of Islam—from Karachi and Casablanca to Cairo—and those cities in Europe and North America where the Islamic diaspora is now present in force have untold multitudes of men like Faisal Shahzad.

This is a long twilight war, the struggle against radical Islamism. We can't wish it away. No strategy of winning "hearts and minds," no great outreach, will bring this struggle to an end. America can't conciliate these furies. These men of nowhere—Faisal Shahzad, Nidal Malik Hasan, the American-born renegade cleric Anwar Awlaki now holed up in Yemen and their likes—are a deadly breed of combatants in this new kind of war. Modernity both attracts and unsettles them. America is at once the object of their dreams and the scapegoat onto which they project their deepest malignancies.

Mr. Ajami, a professor at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution, is the author of "The Foreigner's Gift" (Free Press, 2007).
http://www.sais-jhu.edu/faculty/directory/bios/a/ajami.htm
http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/61936/l-carl-brown/the-dream-palace-of-the-empire-is-iraq-a-noble-failure

Update thought: An Islamist victory in Afstan, despite the efforts of the West, would give a huge boost to the creation/recruitment of "home grown" terrorists in the West.  A perceived triumph for bin Laden's "strong horse".    Just as the withdrawal of the Soviets (undefeated militarily but politically exhausted) in the face of the Mujahedin gave great encouragement to the first major wave of violent international jihadism (the blowback).

By the way, there seem to be almost no homegrown terrorists of Bangladeshi origin--a reflection of the fact that the country was created on the basis of ethnicity, not Islam?

Mark
Ottawa

 

[MarkOttawa]

Two useful pieces at Foreign Policy's "AfPak Channel":

Muddying the 'Taliban'
http://afpak.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/06/11/muddying_the_taliban

Pakistan's New Networks of Terror
It's not just about Waziristan anymore. How the country's various militias are joining forces -- and what it could mean for attacks within the United States. (by Imtiaz Gul)
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/06/10/pakistans_new_networks_of_terror

Mark
Ottawa

 

[MarkOttawa]

Meanwhile, in downtown Pakistan:

Illusions in Punjab, by Huma Imtiaz
http://afpak.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/06/19/illusions_in_punjab

On the economic and security fronts, it is safe to say, Pakistan is going through a tough time. To say that the Taliban are a threat to the country's present and future status is oversimplifying the issue. Economically, Pakistan faces a severe deficit as the cost of the war in the country's northwest grows and development funds get slashed.

Which is why it was rather startling to read a report that the government of Punjab province was handing over millions of rupees to madrassas run by the infamous Jamaat-ud-Dawa, Lashkar-e-Taiba's charity wing.

India accused JuD of carrying out the attacks in Mumbai in November 2008, following which the United Nations added four LeT leaders to its consolidated list and imposed "an assets freeze, travel ban and arms embargo" on them. The Pakistani government then sealed the JuD offices as part of a series of moves to assure India that it was serious about cooperating with investigation into the Mumbai attacks. It also put JuD leader Hafiz Saeed under house arrest, a move the Lahore High Court later declared unconstitutional.

However, attempts to remove JuD from the public sphere may have just been a smokescreen. Journalists travelling to camps housing internally displaced people who had left the Swat Valley because of the army offensive against militants in 2009 discovered that the JuD was at the forefront of disbursing aid, albeit under a new name -- the Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation.

While the priorities of provincial governments in fighting terrorism have often been questioned, the Punjab government has one-upped itself this time.

On June 14, Dawn reported that the provincial government of Punjab "gave more than Rs82 million to the Jamaat-ud-Dawa during the outgoing financial year, according to the budget documents for 2010-11." Additionally, Rs79 million were given to the JuD headquarters Markaz-i-Tayyaba in Muridke, and another Rs3 million went to different schools run by the JuD in Punjab. According to the Guardian, "The provincial law minister Rana Sanaullah said the funds were for charitable purposes and would be administered by government officials. A spokesman for Jamaat-ud-Dawa said the group had not yet received any official funds." ..

Mark
Ottawa

 

[CougarKing]

Associated Press link

AP Interview: Zardari open to Taliban talks

1 hour, 13 minutes ago


By Paisley Dodds, The Associated Press

LONDON - Pakistan's President Asif Ali Zardari said Friday he's willing to consider reopening negotiations with the Taliban in his country — a statement that came amid a flurry of criticism that some elements within Pakistan remain sympathetic to the extremist movement.


Zardari told The Associated Press that his country never closed the door to talks with the Taliban.


"We never closed the dialogue," Zardari told the AP, skirting the question of when talks could actually resume. "We had an agreement, which they broke. (Talks will resume) whenever they feel we're strong enough and they realize they can't win, because they won't win. It will be a painful difficult task, but defeat is not an option."


Last year, the Pakistani government struck a deal with the Taliban in the Swat Valley that gave them effective control over the region. The militants violated the agreement and moved into another region, prompting an all out offensive by the Pakistani army.

Although some U.S. and British politicians have suggested talking to the "enemy" may be the only way to win the war, many in the U.S. administration and Pakistan's other Western allies have publicly urged the country to continue fighting the Pakistani Taliban, not talk to them.

(...)

Associated Press link

US targets militant group in Asia

1 hour, 5 minutes ago


By The Associated Press


WASHINGTON - The United States is targeting a group called Harakat-ul Jihad Islami it says supports al-Qaida operations and has been involved in attacks against the Pakistani government.


The U.S. says the group is a terrorist organization and is freezing the assets of its commander, Mohammad Ilyas Kashmiri.


The United Nations took similar actions against the group and Kashmiri.


Kashmiri is believed to have been behind numerous terrorist attacks, including a 2009 attack against the offices of the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence and the Pakistani police in Lahore that killed 23 people and left hundreds injured.


The group has also provided fighters for the Taliban in Afghanistan battling U.S forces.

 

[MarkOttawa]

"Talibanization" in Karachi?

Ethnic strife threatens tinderbox city of Karachi
http://www.france24.com/en/20100806-karachi-pakistani-politician-killing-ethnic-strife-threatens-tinderbox-violence

The August 2 killing of a local politician at a Karachi mosque sparked deadly violence in Pakistan’s commercial capital. But the ethnic tensions that underlie this port city are often overlooked, as more and more bad news comes out of the country.

It was a precise, planned attack, executed with deadly professionalism, and the outcome was devastating.

On Monday evening at around 5pm, a local Pakistani politician was entering a mosque in the middleclass Nazimabad area of Karachi - Pakistan’s teeming, financial capital - when gunmen stormed the premises.

The bodyguard of Raza Haider, a provincial parliamentarian and member of the secular Muttahida Quami Movement (MQM) party, was quickly gunned down.

Armed with at least one pistol and an automatic rifle, the assailants then chased Haider into the mosque premises, where they shot him dead. Witnesses say the gunmen then fled on motorbikes and vanished into the congested streets of this old part of town.

“Within minutes, it was all over,” Faisal Sabzwari, a senior MQM official, told FRANCE 24 in a phone interview from Karachi. “And this was in an area (Nazimabad) where the MQM has been winning elections for years. It’s a pro-MQM area.”

Within hours, Karachi was up in flames. Rioters set fire to shops, vehicles and houses, bringing Pakistan’s largest city to a halt. Gun battles ripped through the city’s troubled eastern and western suburbs. By the end of the week, the death toll had climbed to 85  according to police officials, prompting Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani to rush to Karachi on Friday for talks between rival political parties.

While the government blamed the Taliban and a banned militant group, the Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan (SSP) for the attack, few gave much credence to the claim...

Leaders of the MQM, a party that represents the Urdu-speaking “mohajirs” - or Muslim migrants who fled India during the 1947 partition of the subcontinent - have blamed the rival Awami National Party (ANP).

The ANP represents Karachi’s ethnic Pashtun community, which has grown in recent years due to mass migration of people fleeing the Pakistani military’s counter-terror offensive in the tribal areas near the Afghan border.

Overnight, the spectre of ethnic strife haunted Karachi, a sprawling metropolis home to around 18.5 million people from diverse backgrounds. The city is no stranger to violence - sectarian killings, ethnic strife, crime and kidnappings have plagued this city for decades.

The late 1980s and early 1990s were a particularly bloody period, when a cycle of massacres and brutal police crackdowns traumatised the country’s financial hub. But while the bad old days are over, violence has been increasing in recent months. Rights groups say 260 targeted killing cases were reported in Karachi during the first six months of the year, compared with 156 during the same period in 2009...

Created in the mid-1980s, the MQM was founded on a platform of highlighting the marginalisation of the city’s mohajirs.

Karachi, the capital of Pakistan’s Sindh province, saw a large influx of mohajirs who, unlike their ethnic Sindhi brethren, were not traditional landowners or tillers. Nor did they speak the native Sindhi language.

A largely urban group, mohajirs tended to gravitate toward small businesses and were politically sidelined in a country where politics is dominated by affluent, land-owning families, and the military by ethnic Punjabis.

But while a host of ethnic groups compete for influence and resources in the ethnic tinderbox that is Karachi, the MQM’s chief target has been the city’s Pashtuns, who have traditionally dominated the critical transportation business in this port city...

The influx of Pashtuns fleeing the Pakistani army offensives against the Taliban has opened new rifts between the two communities.

The MQM has long spoken out against the alleged ''Talibanisation'' of the city. “We have been trying to tell the civilized world that there is a threat of Talibanisation,” senior MQM official Sabzwari told FRANCE 24. “But the first to reject our concerns is the ANP. For sure the ANP gives support to the extremists.”

Leaders of the liberal, nationalist ANP reject the criticism however, and note that ANP officials in the Pashtun-dominated areas of Pakistan have been prime targets for the Taliban.

Many experts suspect that the current wave of targeted killings and the violence following Haider’s assassination is more likely linked to gangland turf battles for the control of lucrative economic sectors such as real estate rather than Islamist violence...

Mark
Ottawa

 

[MarkOttawa]

Pak government in trouble?

Will slow response to Pakistan flood threaten democracy?
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Asia-South-Central/2010/0812/Will-slow-response-to-Pakistan-flood-threaten-democracy

...
Anger is spreading throughout this flooded region at the local politicians who have been missing from a scene in which Pakistan's Red Crescent, Red Cross branches and even the US Marines have been providing aid. The feeling of abandonment by local politicians is common among Pakistan's poorest, and raises questions about future support democracy in Pakistan. Militant groups who have challenged central government authority have been quick to jump in with promises of aid...

On Thursday, Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari, who has been harshly criticized for not canceling a trip to France and Britain during the flooding, made his first visit to the flood affected areas. The president visited his home province of Sindh and was shown on state television patting the head of an elderly woman before inspecting a flood barrier...

But stepping in to fill a perceived void  have been groups such as the Falah-e-Insaniat Foundation, allegedly a front organization for banned militant outfit Lashkar-e-Taiba, which is believed to have been behind the Mumbai attacks in 2008, as well as the Al Khidmet foundation, the charitable wing of Pakistan’s hardline Jamaat-e-Islami.

At a medical camp on Muzaffargarh’s main road, Ghulam Mustafa, chief of the Falah-e-Insaniat medical team, sits with several helpers and dispenses drugs. In between prescribing diarrhea medication to a small infant who has been brought along by his mother, Dr. Mustafa explains: “Only we and the Jamaat-e-Islami have camps in the villages and far flung areas. It is our Islamic duty” to help, he said. In a text message to the Monitor, the Al Khidmet foundation makes similar boasts about its efforts in Layyah, Sindh. “In one area we have 10 boats busy rescuing those affected. Here there are no Army or civilian government representatives.”..

The perceived failure of public officials ultimately weakens Pakistan's civilian institutions, especially when contrasted with the high-profile efforts of the Army, says Dr. Raes.

“The Army isn’t acting with some political objective in mind. But if you look at the character and level of integrity of the political class it seems they don’t belong to Pakistan,” he says, adding that through their perceived corruption and negligence, politicians are cutting away at the future of democracy here...

The United States has pledged $71 million in emergency assistance to the Pakistan, and Thursday a shipload of Marines and US helicopters arrived to help, amid more calls from the Pakistan government for assistance.

Also on Friday, Pakistani Taliban spokesman Azam Tariq denounced foreign aid, "We condemn American and other foreign aid and believe that it will lead to subjugation," he told AFP.

"The government should not accept American aid and, if it happens, we can give $20 million to them as aid for the flood victims," he continued offering to distribute relief, instead of the US in exchange for a promise not to be arrested.

On Wednesday, United Nations humanitarian chief John Holmes launched an appeal for $459 million to provide immediate help to millions of flood victims. The disaster has claimed some 1,600 lives and affected up to 14 million people...

More:

Pakistan floods: an emergency for the West
Unless we act decisively, large parts of flood-stricken Pakistan will be taken over by the Taliban, writes Ahmed Rashid.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/pakistan/7941820/Pakistan-floods-an-emergency-for-the-West.html

Mark
Ottawa

 

[MarkOttawa]

From Terry Glavin:

Goodbye Pakistan?
http://transmontanus.blogspot.com/2010/08/goodbye-pakistan.html

Mark
Ottawa

 

[MarkOttawa]

Lengthy piece in NY Times worth the read (F-16 base involved):

Pakistan, Drowning in Neglect
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/26/opinion/26sethi.html?ref=todayspaper

Plus:

Crush of Refugees Inflames Karachi
Local government says it can accommodate one million, but with some 30,000 in camps, ethnic tensions are rising
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704540904575451512217585010.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_MIDDLENexttoWhatsNewsSecond

KARACHI, Pakistan—Hundreds of thousands of refugees from Pakistan's devastating floods are seeking refugee in this city of 18 million, exacerbating ethnic strife that has already escalated this year and threatens to destabilize the government of President Asif Ali Zardari.

Most of the refugees are ethnic Sindhis from areas outside Karachi, the capital of Sindh province, whose homes and livelihoods have been destroyed in the flooding that began more than three weeks ago.

The United Nations says 800,000 people are stranded by the flooding, which has severed major roads in Sindh and nearby Baluchistan province. Some 1,500 people have been killed and six million made homeless by the deluge, which started in the north but swept south along the Indus River and continues to threaten to submerge towns and villages in Sindh and Baluchistan.

Sindh's provincial government has set up camps on the outskirts of Karachi, where 30,000 people are trying to keep their families together under tarpaulins in the searing heat.

The local administration says it is expecting and can cope with up to one million of the refugees. But many others who have made it to Karachi say they are being turned away from shelters on the outskirts and are pouring in to the city, deepening ethnic rivalries with Karachi's majority ethnic community that have simmered for years...

For Karachi's dominant group, the Urdu-speaking Muhajirs, the influx of Sindhi refugees poses a threat to the established order.

"If they come in hundreds of thousands, how will they survive?" says Khawaja Izhar ul Hassan, a member of the provincial assembly from the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, or MQM, which is largely a Muhajir political party and forms part of Sindh province's ruling coalition government.

The refugee crisis is adding a new dimension to a running struggle for control of Karachi between the MQM and ethnic Pashtuns, a group with origins in northwest Pakistan. The number of Pashtuns in Karachi has swollen in the past few years as many have fled fighting between the Pakistan Taliban and the military in their homelands bordering Afghanistan.

Almost 1,000 people have died in Karachi since the start of the year, many in violence largely between Muhajir and Pashtun armed groups. Mr. Zardari's administration has been unable to stem the violence...

Mark
Ottawa

 

[MarkOttawa]

How much longer for Zardari?

Generals in Pakistan Push for Shake-Up of Government
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/29/world/asia/29pstan.html?ref=todayspaper

The Pakistani military, angered by the inept handling of the country’s devastating floods and alarmed by a collapse of the economy, is pushing for a shake-up of the elected government, and in the longer term, even the removal of President Asif Ali Zardari and his top lieutenants.

The military, preoccupied by a war against militants and reluctant to assume direct responsibility for the economic crisis, has made clear it is not eager to take over the government, as it has many times before, military officials and politicians said.

But the government’s performance since the floods, which have left 20 million people homeless and the nation dependent on handouts from skeptical foreign donors, has laid bare the deep underlying tensions between military and civilian leaders.

American officials, too, say it has left them increasingly disillusioned with Mr. Zardari, a deeply unpopular president who was elected two and a half years ago on a wave of sympathy after the assassination of his wife, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto.

In a meeting on Monday that was played on the front page of Pakistan’s newspapers, the army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, confronted the president and his prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gilani, over incompetence and corruption in the government.

According to the press and Pakistani officials familiar with the conversation, the general demanded that they dismiss at least some ministers in the oversized 60-member cabinet, many of whom face corruption charges.

The civilian government has so far resisted the general’s demand. But the meeting was widely interpreted by the Pakistani news media, which has grown increasingly hostile to the president, as a rebuke to the civilian politicians and as having pushed the government to the brink.

After the meeting, the president’s office issued a statement, approved by all the men, saying they had agreed “to protect the democratic process and to resolve all issues in accordance with the constitution.”

...Washington, not unlike Pakistan’s military, is caught, American officials say, because there is no appetite for a return of military rule. Nor is there desire to see the opposition politician and former prime minister, Nawaz Sharif, resume power.

Mr. Sharif, who has also faced corruption charges during his career, is considered by Washington to be too close to some of Pakistan’s militant groups, whose members vote in Punjab, the Sharif electoral base...

Mark
Ottawa

 

[MarkOttawa]

Lots of background to the assassination of Punjab's governor:

Pakiban?
http://unambig.com/pakiban/

Three worth reading:

1) Foreign Policy’s “AfPak Channel“
...
2) Wall St. Journal
...
3) The Economist
...
Predate: Do you think this sort of, er, context from ace Globeite Graeme Smith (of Taliban reporting renown) is worth reading?

    "…
    Some analysts expressed hope that the death might ease the in-fighting among political elites, forcing them to confront the broader division between Pakistan’s wealthy urbanites [and the rural, feudal landowners like the Bhuttos] and the poorer, conservative masses. The spot where Mr. Taseer lay bleeding to death could not have been more symbolic of that divide, a row of expensive shops and restaurants known as Kohsar Market. Not far from the presidential palace, it’s one of the rare places in Islamabad that overflows with Christmas decorations during the holiday season [how terribly provocative, eh?], and where stylish cafés rival their European counterparts.

    Such places stand a world apart from the village outside Islamabad where Mr. Taseer’s bodyguard reportedly grew up…"

Guess he deserved it. But it is true that those few who have effectively ruled the country since 1947 have done a dreadfully dismal job for their people whilst mesmerizing them with the Indian menace.

Mark
Ottawa

 

[sean m]

Here is a great documentary from Frontline about the Pakistani government, army, Intelligence agencies involvement with the Taliban and the tribal area.  It is a couple of years old yes it seems like it is still relevant.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/video/flv/generic.html?s=frol02s40eq5d&continuous=1

 

[MarkOttawa]

It will be a long time, if ever, for much major to come of this:

India, Pakistan to restart wide-ranging talks
The dialogue ended after the 2008 attack in Mumbai by Pakistan-based terrorists. Senior officials will meet to talk about issues such as peace, the economy and Kashmir.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-india-pakistan-20110211,0,4115082.story

Reporting from New Delhi —

India and Pakistan said Thursday [Feb. 10] that they would resume talks suspended after the 2008 terrorist attack in the Indian city of Mumbai that saw nearly 170 people killed and hundreds injured by militants based in Pakistan.

The Mumbai assault continues to loom large. But the two sides decided to move ahead during a meeting of their foreign secretaries on the sidelines of a regional gathering in Bhutan this week.

Despite the two-year gap in formal talks, the format and the issues for the most part will be the same. Senior diplomats will discuss counter-terrorism, humanitarian issues, peace and security, the divided Kashmir region, water resources and the regional economy. The talks will be capped by a meeting, supposedly before July, of the two countries' foreign ministers who will attempt to consolidate the gains.

After three wars and more than six decades of tension between the nuclear neighbors since independence from Britain in 1947, expectations are muted at best...

The two sides also have been under pressure from Washington to lower the temperature on a rivalry that complicates U.S.-led efforts to stabilize neighboring Afghanistan, where India and Pakistan vie for influence.

Analysts say that weak governments in both India and Pakistan make it difficult for officials to sell compromises to their respective electorates.

India's ruling Congress Party has been battered by corruption scandals [emphasis added--see this post "Corruption? What stinking corruption? And what stinking torture?"
http://www.cdfai.org/the3dsblog/?p=44  ]
involving real estate, telecommunications and sporting events that have paralyzed Parliament. It also has come under sharp criticism over the rising cost of food, making Prime Minister Manmohan Singh look increasingly ineffective.

The ruling Pakistan People's Party, meanwhile, has been criticized domestically for its handling of last summer's devastating flooding disaster, growing extremism and for allowing attacks by unmanned U.S. aircraft against militants based in Pakistani territory...

Mark
Ottawa

 

[MarkOttawa]

Lengthy piece at Foreign Policy's "AfPak Channel", worth a read, lots of further links:

Diplomatic duplicity
http://afpak.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/02/18/diplomatic_duplicity

LAHORE -- This much is clear about the latest convulsion in U.S.-Pakistan relations: an American man, operating under the name of Raymond Davis, shot and killed two men in Lahore in the populous province of the Punjab. After the event, an "emergency vehicle," presumably from the U.S. consulate, rushed to rescue Davis and careened into a crowd. The as yet unidentified driver of the rescue vehicle killed a third person. Davis is currently being held in Pakistani custody in Lahore. He has been added to Pakistan's exit control list while his status is being determined in Pakistan's courts, which precludes his exit from the country.

The U.S. government maintains a simple account: he was an employee of the U.S. consulate in Lahore who shot two men in self defense. Since he has "diplomatic immunity," he should be released under the Geneva Convention immediately. President Obama has himself argued that he should be released for these reasons. Concurrent with Obama's appeals for the man's diplomatic immunity, U.S. Senator John Kerry travelled to Pakistan this week to resolve the ever more complicated row. With such high-level demands, the very credibility of the U.S. presidency is at stake. This is not lost upon Pakistan or its citizens.

Pakistan has its own stylized, yet starkly divergent, account from that heard in the United States. Whereas Raymond Davis is a niche topic of the chattering classes in Washington D.C. in the United States, he is the mainstay of conversation across all stratum of Pakistani society and has become a national obsession in Pakistan's print and television media. Pakistanis have called for the hanging of Davis in public rallies.

From the Pakistani viewpoint, the "facts" are far less clear. Davis was first described in peculiar, ambiguous terms as a "U.S. consulate employee." He was driving his own unarmored vehicle and carrying a gun. Most diplomats in Pakistan -- American or otherwise -- now travel in armored cars. They certainly do not drive their own cars, and they generally don't carry guns.

Despite Pakistanis' assertions that he is a spy, he does not have the profile of a bona fide operative of the Central Intelligence Agency...

Mark
Ottawa

 

[Edward Campbell]

I don't know how this got transposed.

Mark's post says (my emphasis added): "The U.S. government maintains a simple account: he was an employee of the U.S. consulate in Lahore who shot two men in self defense. Since he has "diplomatic immunity," he should be released under the Geneva Convention immediately. President Obama has himself argued ..." The original account, at the link says, correctly: "The U.S. government maintains a simple account: he was an employee of the U.S. consulate in Lahore who shot two men in self defense. Since he has "diplomatic immunity," he should be released under the Vienna Convention immediately. President Obama has himself argued ..."

The original article is, as I said, correct, it is the Vienna Convention that provides, inter alia, immunity from prosecution for accredited diplomats. The original article is also correct is saying that the US, especially the US "intelligence community" plays fast and loose with the letter and spirit of the Vienna Convention. That means, to be clear, they lie and cheat and misuse the Convention and, in the process, endanger the business of diplomacy for all of us.

 

[MarkOttawa]

From the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, 1963:
http://www.sos.state.tx.us/border/intlprotocol/vienna.shtml

...
Article 19
Appointment of Members of Consular Staff

  1. Subject to the provisions of Articles 20, 22 and 23, the sending State may freely appoint the members of the consular staff.
  2. The full name, category and class of all consular officers, other than the head of a consular post, shall be notified by the sending State to the receiving State in sufficient time for the receiving State, if it so wishes, to exercise its rights under paragraph 3 of Article 23.
  3. The sending State may, if required by its laws and regulations, request the receiving State to grant an exequatur to a consular officer other than the head of a consular post.
  4. The receiving State may, if required by its laws and regulations, grant an exequatur to a consular officer other than the head of a consular post.
...

Article 23
Persons Declared "Non Grata"
...
  3. A person appointed as a member of a consular post may be declared unacceptable before arriving in the territory of the receiving State or, if already in the receiving State, before entering on his duties with the consular post. In any such case, the sending State shall withdraw his appointment...
 
Article 24
Notification to the Receiving State of Appointments, Arrivals and Departures

  1. The Ministry for Foreign Affairs of the receiving State or the authority designated by that Ministry shall be notified of:

        1. the appointment of members of a consular post, their arrival after appointment to the consular post, their final departure or the termination of their functions and any other changes affecting their status that may occur in the course of their service with the consular post...

Article 41
Personal Inviolability of Consular Officers

  1. Consular officers shall not be liable to arrest or detention pending trial, except in the case of a grave crime and pursuant to a decision by the competent judicial authority.
  2. Except in the case specified in paragraph 1 of this Article, consular officers shall not be committed to prison or liable to any other form of restriction on their personal freedom save in execution of a judicial decision of final effect.
  3. If criminal proceedings are instituted against a consular officer, he must appear before the competent authorities. Nevertheless, the proceedings shall be conducted with the respect due to him by reason of his official position and, except in the case specified in paragraph 1 of this Article, in a manner which will hamper the exercise of consular functions as little as possible. When, in the circumstances mentioned in paragraph 1 of this Article, it has become necessary to detain a consular officer, the proceedings against him shall be instituted with the minimum of delay.

Article 42
Notification of Arrest, Detention or Prosecution

In the event of the arrest or detention, pending trial, of a member of the consular staff, or of criminal proceedings being instituted against him, the receiving State shall promptly notify the head of the consular post. Should the latter be himself the object of any such measure, the receiving State shall notify the sending State through the diplomatic channel.

Article 43
Immunity From Jurisdiction

  1. Consular officers and consular employees shall not be amenable to the jurisdiction of the judicial or administrative authorities of the receiving State in respect of acts performed in the exercise of consular functions...

Article 45
Waiver of Privileges and Immunities

  1. The sending State may waive, with regard to a member of the consular post, any of the privileges and immunities provided for in Articles 41, 43 and 44... 

Two questions seem most pertinent to a claim to immunity in this case:

1) Were the Pakistani authorities properly notified of Mr Davis' appointment and arrival, and of any change in his status?
2) Was he carrying out (legitimate?) official consular functions at the time of the incident?

Mark
Ottawa

 

[MarkOttawa]

If you think the Middle (Near) East is scary...:

An alarming South Asia powder keg, By Juan C. Zarate
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/02/18/AR2011021807465.html

In 1914, a terrorist assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo - unleashing geopolitical forces and World War I. Today, while the United States rightly worries about al-Qaeda targeting the homeland, the most dangerous threat may be another terrorist flash point on the horizon.

Lashkar-i-Taiba holds the match that could spark a conflagration between nuclear-armed historic rivals India and Pakistan. Lashkar-i-Taiba is a Frankenstein's monster of the Pakistani government's creation 20 years ago. It has diverse financial networks and well-trained and well-armed cadres that have struck Indian targets from Mumbai to Kabul. It collaborates with the witches' brew of terrorist groups in Pakistan, including al-Qaeda, and has demonstrated global jihadist ambitions. It is merely a matter of time before Lashkar-i-Taiba attacks again.

Significant terrorist attacks in India, against Parliament in 2001 and in Mumbai in 2008, brought India and Pakistan to the brink of war. The countries remain deeply distrustful of each other. Another major strike against Indian targets in today's tinderbox environment could lead to a broader, more devastating conflict.

The United States should be directing political and diplomatic capital to prevent such a conflagration...

This is among the thorniest U.S. national security and counterterrorism problems. It requires officials to focus on imagining the "aftershocks" of a terrorist attack and act before the threat manifests - even as other national security issues such as unrest in the Middle East boil over. Yet without political attention, diplomatic capital and sustained preventative actions, a critical region could descend into chaos...

The writer, a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, was deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser for combating terrorism from 2005 to 2009.

Time for Canada to play that leadership role, I guess .

Mark
Ottawa

 

[MarkOttawa]

Confirmed.  NYT being responsible--and US in pretty deep:

American Held in Pakistan Shootings Worked With the C.I.A.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/22/world/asia/22pakistan.html

WASHINGTON — The American arrested in Pakistan after shooting two men at a crowded traffic stop was part of a covert, C.I.A.-led team of operatives conducting surveillance on militant groups deep inside the country, according to American government officials.

Working from a safe house in the eastern city of Lahore, the detained American contractor, Raymond A. Davis, a retired Special Forces soldier, carried out scouting and other reconnaissance missions as a security officer for Central Intelligence Agency case officers and technical experts conducting surveillance operations, the officials said.

Mr. Davis’s arrest and detention, which came after what American officials have described as a botched robbery attempt, has inadvertently pulled back the curtain on a web of covert American operations inside Pakistan, part of a secret war run by the C.I.A. It has exacerbated already frayed relations between the American intelligence agency and its Pakistani counterpart, created a political dilemma for the weak, pro-American Pakistani government, and further threatened the stability of the country, which has the world’s fastest growing nuclear arsenal.

Without describing Mr. Davis’s mission or intelligence affiliation, President Obama last week made a public plea for his release. Meanwhile, there have been a flurry of private phone calls to Pakistan from Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A. director, and Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, all intended to persuade the Pakistanis to release the secret operative. Mr. Davis has worked for years as a C.I.A. contractor, including time at Blackwater Worldwide, the controversial private security firm (now called Xe) that Pakistanis have long viewed as symbolizing a culture of American gun slinging overseas.

The New York Times had agreed to temporarily withhold information about Mr. Davis’s ties to the agency at the request of the Obama administration, which argued that disclosure of his specific job would put his life at risk. Several foreign news organizations have disclosed some aspects of Mr. Davis’s work with the C.I.A.

On Monday, American officials lifted their request to withhold publication [emphasis added]. George Little, a C.I.A. spokesman, declined to comment specifically on the Davis matter, but said in a statement: “Our security personnel around the world act in a support role providing security for American officials. They do not conduct foreign intelligence collection or covert operations.”..

Several American and Pakistani officials said that the C.I.A. team in Lahore with which Mr. Davis worked was tasked with tracking the movements of various Pakistani militant groups, including Lashkar-e-Taiba, a particularly violent group that Pakistan uses as a proxy force against India but that the United States considers a threat to allied troops in Afghanistan. For the Pakistanis, such spying inside their country is an extremely delicate issue, particularly since Lashkar has longstanding ties to Pakistan’s intelligence service, the Directorate for Inter-Services Intelligence, or ISI.

Still, American and Pakistani officials use Lahore as a base of operations to investigate the militant groups and their madrasas in the surrounding area.

The officials gave various accounts of the makeup of the covert task force and of Mr. Davis, who at the time of his arrest was carrying a Glock pistol, a long-range wireless set, a small telescope and a headlamp...

Even before his arrest, Mr. Davis’s C.I.A. affiliation was known to Pakistani authorities [emphasis added], who keep close tabs on the movements of Americans. His visa, presented to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in late 2009, describes his job as a “regional affairs officer,” a common job description for officials working with the agency.

According to that application, Mr. Davis carried an American diplomatic passport and was listed as “administrative and technical staff,” a category that typically grants diplomatic immunity to its holder.

American officials said that with Pakistan’s government trying to clamp down on the increasing flow of Central Intelligence Agency officers and contractors trying to gain entry to Pakistan, more of these operatives have been granted “cover” as embassy employees and given diplomatic passports...

Mark
Ottawa

 

[MarkOttawa]

Consular
http://forums.milnet.ca/forums/threads/69230/post-1019800.html#msg1019800

or diplomatic?  That is the question:

Pakistan Case Tests Laws on Diplomatic Immunity
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/23/world/asia/23immunity.html

WASHINGTON — An American C.I.A. contractor is accused of killing two men at a crowded intersection in Pakistan. Can Pakistani officials lawfully prosecute him for murder?

In debating the fate of Raymond A. Davis, who is charged with gunning down two people in Lahore last month under circumstances that remain murky, the United States and Pakistan are writing a new chapter in the long history of operatives who work under diplomatic cover...

...this case also rests on legal technicalities, with confusion arising from contradictory statements by the State Department in the first days after Mr. Davis’s arrest. Those statements have called into question whether Mr. Davis was working — officially, at least — as a diplomatic official or a consular one. Consular officials are afforded somewhat weaker legal protections because they are thought of as administrators, rather than diplomats.

Initially, State Department officials described Mr. Davis as a staff member for the United States Consulate in Lahore.

Days later, however, the United States government said that Mr. Davis was actually listed with the administrative and technical staff of the United States Embassy in Islamabad — and that it had formally notified the Pakistani Foreign Ministry of his status there on Jan. 20, 2010.

The distinction is crucial. If Mr. Davis was listed as a technical staff member for the embassy’s diplomatic mission, then he would be covered by a 1961 treaty that gives diplomats total immunity to criminal prosecution. In that case, Pakistan should be allowed only to expel him. Victims’ families, however, might still be able to sue him for civil damages.

But if Mr. Davis were instead listed as a staff member for the consulate in Lahore, then he would be covered by a 1963 treaty that governs the rights of consular officials and that allows host countries to prosecute them if they commit a “grave crime.”.. 

Mark
Ottawa

 

[MarkOttawa]

Thank goodness:

Daily brief: American CIA contractor in Pakistan freed
http://afpak.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/03/16/daily_brief_american_cia_contractor_freed

Day in court

Raymond Davis, the CIA contractor who shot and killed two Pakistanis in Lahore in late January, has just been released by Pakistani authorities after the families of the victims agreed to accept compensation from him (BBC, Reuters, AP, AFP, ET). A lawyer for the family said they were "forcibly taken" to the jail and "made to sign papers" pardoning him (ET, Reuters). Davis has flown to London, according to some reports.  Earlier today, a judge in Lahore had formally charged Davis with two counts of murder (AJE, Reuters, Dawn, ET)...

Mark
Ottawa