Metastasis of Talibanism in Pakistan

Government of Pakistan has virtually agreed to the Talibanizaton of Swat district of its North West Frontier Province (NWFP). They have entered into a formal agreement with the militants for the promulgation of sharia laws of Islam.

The agreement is a fig leaf to Pakistan's total capitulation to militants in Swat. In the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) of Pakistan, the writ of Pakistani government never ran. Now Swat has been added to the list of places in Pakistan where nobody cares for the government at Islamabad.

Swat district is in the Malakand division of NWFP. It is home of the Swat valley which is known the world over for its skiing resorts, fruit orchards, flowing streams and snow-capped peaks. For Al Queda and Taliban it is not only a political victory over Pakistan, it is a triumph of tremendous implications. The pride of the formidable Pakistani army has been severely wounded.

Pakistani army did not have many options in Swat. Its troops were outmaneuvered by the militants. Many, if not the most, Pakistani soldiers, who had the background of madrassa education felt empathy with the fundamental Islamic goals of the militants. There was yet another factor which demoralized Pakistani troops in that area. Since 2007, when the Taliban activities began in Swat, Pakistani army had ceded about three-fourths of the Swat area to the enemy. Talibans used savage methods of public beheadings and public floggings to terrorize civilians and the soldiers alike. According to Amnesty International, a quarter to half a million people have fled Swat since 2007, and at least 1,200 civilians have been killed in the region. Barbaric cruelty of Talibans induced a speechless fear in a large number of Pak soldiers. Demoralization has set in all their ranks.

There is a reason why the Talibans of Afghan origin felt at home in fighting in NWFP. The NWFP is primarily an area inhabited by Pakhtoons (also called Pashtoons or Pathans). They are of the same ethnicity as the majority of Afghans. In fact, the people of NWFP, of which Swat is only a district, are culturally quite different from the rest of Pakistan. They speak a different language, and their traditional way of living has nothing in common with the rest of Pakistanis. They have always had a secret longing for uniting with Afghanistan.

It is interesting to visit the contemporary history of NWFP. Pakistan came into existence in 1947 as a result of the partition of erstwhile India into Hindu-majority India and Muslim-majority Pakistan. NWFP was the odd man out. Out of all of the 5 provinces proposed to constitute Pakistan, only NWFP did not have a Muslim League government in spite of its being a Muslim-majority province. It was governed by a coalition of Indian National Congress (INC), Khudai Khidmatgars and Jamiat-e-Ulema-e-Hind. INC and its coalition partners hated the ideology of Pakistan. People of NWFP were also averse to join the new state of Pakistan because they believed their ethnicity would be compromised by joining Pakistan, which might be ruled by Punjabis and the Urdu-speaking migrants from Northern India. However, the geography of the subcontinent was against them. They were landlocked and the choice given to them in the referendum ordained by India Independence Act 1947 was to join either Pakistan or India. Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, who was known as Frontier Gandhi, and his brother Dr Khan Sahib, who was the then Chief Minister of NWFP, agitated for an independent status for NWFP by the name of Pakhtoonistan. In June 1947, Acharya Kripalani, the president of INC, wrote a letter to Lord Mountbatten, the then Viceroy, pleading for an option for NWFP for independence along with the option of joining either India or Pakistan. Two months earlier to his letter, the British Legation in Kabul had written to Government of India, that “the view taken by the Afghan Government is that the tribesmen in tribal territory are more closely connected with the Afghan Government than with the Interim Government of India and the Afghans have, as you know, already asked that the tribes should be given the option of securing their complete independence or joining themselves to Afghanistan if they wish to do so rather than continue as part of India”. However, India Independence Act of the British Parliament did not give them that choice, and NWFP willy-nilly became a part of Pakistan. They could not vote for India as geography was against them. The turnout of the voters in the referendum was extremely poor in spite of a vicious and violent campaign launched in favor of Pakistan by Muslim League.

Presently there are three political forces swinging in the NWFP. First is the active political and military presence of Talibans and Al Qaeda. Second is the presence of the demoralized and confused Pak army. Third is the yearning of Pakhtoons to get detached from Pakistan. A virulent anti-American sentiment is cementing all these forces to the detriment to the concept of a united Pakistan.

Talibanism in FATA and Swat is thriving on the vulnerability of the dysfunctional body politic of Pakistan. It is difficult to see how a military effort alone can prevent it from encroaching upon the settled areas of NWFP. With the historical background of NWFP it is very difficult for Pakistan to retain political or military control over NWFP for a long time.

Talibans are now trying to gain footholds beyond NWFP. On Feb 7 and Feb 11 this year they attacked two police outposts in Mianwali district of Punjab which lies along the river Indus. Punjab has a chain of mosques where Wahabi brand of Islam is preached. Talibans may find them handy in promoting their agenda.

Talibanism is now beginning to metastasize.

Twin Rubik Cubes of Afghanistan and Pakistan

Mr Richard Holbrooke is bound to feel elated at the supreme confidence reposed in him by President Obama. However, he will soon realize that his job is not exactly a bed of roses.

He has been asked to clear the terrible mess American interests are in Pakistan and Afghanistan. USA has two primary goals in that region. One is to destroy completely the training camps and leadership of Al Qaeda and Taliban. Second goal is to ensure that the nuclear assets of the Pakistan do not fall in the hands of extremist elements.

It is easy to see that both these goals do overlap, making this region a veritable nightmare for the Obama administration.

Holbrooke's mission is much more than an uphill task. In Pakistan he is facing at least three main power centers at the federal level. One is the civilian government, another is the army, and yet another is Inter- Services Agency called ISI. They have different perspectives as to what the national interests of Pakistan are. In theory, army is subject to civilian control. In actual practice, it is the other way round. Government cannot take any crucial policy decision without taking army chief into confidence. In May 1999, the Pakistani army took the decision to rattle India by initiating what is known in the contemporary history as Kargil War. It is widely believed that the Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif was kept in total dark and he came to know only after the attack on the Indian positions by Pak army units actually began. Similarly, ISI is supposed to be a part of Pakistani defense establishment. But in actual practice it is an autonomous body who has its own foreign policy goals and own views on domestic politics. It believes brass of Pakistani army to be too soft and naive to understand the realpolitik. The head of the ISI is always a senior officer of the rank of Lieutenant General of the army who after being appointed to the post falls in the tradition of asserting ISI's Independence from the army headquarters. Before Ashfaq Parvez Kayani succeeded General Parvez Musharraf as the Chief of the Army Staff he had been the Director General of the ISI for three years. The attack on the Indian embassy at Kabul on July 7, 2008 was engineered by ISI presumably without the knowledge of Pakistani army or the Pakistani government. Taliban provided only the fig leaf for that attack. It is also believed that the dastardly attack on Mumbai in November 2008 was done by an extremist Pakistani outfit Lashkar-i-Taiba with the active support and professional training of ISI. Much of the power of ISI stems from the fact that it keeps dossiers on most of the politicians, many of whom have many skeletons in their cupboards.

There is yet another aspect of the fractured polity of Pakistan. Pakistan has four major provinces. Punjab, Sindh, Baluchistan and North West Frontier Province (NWFP). Between NWFP and Afghanistan lies an area called Federally Administered Tribal Area (FATA). Its area is more than 27000 square kilometers and its population more than three million. FATA is nominally a part of Pakistan but the writ of the Pakistani government does not run there. It is controlled by fiercely independent Pakhtoons. Culturally they consider themselves Afghans and are happy thriving on narcotic and arms trade. It is irony of history that they fall in east of the Durand Line which is the international border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Durand Line was drawn arbitrarily by the British Government in the year 1893 between the then British India and Afghanistan's the then ruler Amir Abdur Rehman Khan. The treaty formalizing the Durand Line was for one hundred years and has lapsed in the year 1993. The Afghan govt has refused to renew the treaty. No Afghan government has ever accepted Durand Line as the international border between them and British India (or its successor state Pakistan). In fact the Loya Jirga of Afghanistan has repudiated in 1949 the Durand Line as the international border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. However, Pakistan does not feel itself obliged to renegotiate the treaty. It believes that Durand Line is the international border in perpetuity. Even during the Taliban regime when Pakistan was extremely friendly with it, Afghan government did not agree to the legitimacy of Duranad Line. It is felt by Pakhtoons that it artificially divides Pukhtoons living in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Durand line has been a continuous source of tension between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

FATA which is politically a part of Pakistan has become adopted home of Al Qaeda. American intelligence agencies believe that Osama bin Laden and his top operators are hiding in FATA. The mountainous and rugged terrain of FATA also helps the Al Qaeda fighters. American pilotless drone aircraft are repeatedly bombing the suspected hideouts of Al Qaeda as and when they get actionable intelligence. Americans do not share their intelligence with Pakistan, because they suspect their intelligence might be clandestinely passed by the ISI to the Taliban or maybe even to Al Qaeda.

The chief reason of Pakistan facing problems in FATA is the fact that inhabitants of FATA think themselves as more of Afghans than Pakistanis. Kabul has always claimed that NWFP as a whole belongs to Afghanistan as it is inhabited by Pakhtoons. The name NWFP itself is not an ethnic name unlike Punjab, Sindh or Baluchistan.

The story of Swat is intriguing. It is an administrative district in th NWFP and home of Swat Valley, which is popularly known to be the Switzerland of Pakistan. It is a place of exquisite natural beauty and home to a number of skiing resorts. Since December 2008, practically the entire Swat is under control of Talibans. They have banned female education, watching TV, listening to music. Men are obliged to keep beards. They have burnt down more than 170 schools for girls. Swat is hardly 100 miles away from the capital of Pakistan, and its falling into the hands of Taliban militants has introduced a new equation in the already tangled political and military situations in Pakistan.

Situation in Afghanistan is no better, if not far more worse. The writ of Hamid Karzai government does not run beyond Kabul. The functionaries of his government are steeped in corruption and the governors of Afghan provinces do not care for the central authority. The Afghan army is ill-trained and poorly organized and virtually ineffective as a fighting force. Present position is little short of pathetic. Presently there are deployed troops from the USA and other NATO countries. They have dual function of supporting the Karzai government and hunting Taliban and Al Qaeda. There is a United Nations Military force International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) stationed there since December 2001. Presently it is commanded by Eurocorps since August 9, 2004. The function of this 6500-strong force is to help the Afghan administration reconstruct the country in all fields of public life. Unlike NATO forces, it is supposed to be politically neutral.

Afghanistan is a multi-ethnic society. Pakhtoons are the most prominent group. Then there are Hazaras, Tajiks and Ujbeks. All these groups have their own political agendas. Hazaras are supported by Iran, because they are shias like Iranians. Not only this, almost the entire opium produced in Afghanistan is exported via Iran. All these factors make the role and authority of Kabul utterly diminished. The American envoy might find it difficult logistically talk to the leaders of the major ethnic groups who are corrupt and do not care for anybody in Kabul or Washington, but without whose support the Afghan imbroglio cannot be untangled.

Holbrooke is a great negotiator and has unquestionably profound skills of a star diplomat. However, the situation in Afghanistan and Pakistan is tangled, messy and full of so many power centers that the distinguished American envoy may not find it easy to solve the twin Rubik cubes of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Pedigree of American Recession

The present recession in the USA has a complicated pedigree.

The story begins with the tragic events on September 11, 2001. The dastardly attack on the USA by Al Qaida shook the soul of America as never before. The earlier major national traumatic experience was Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. But it was peanuts in comparison with what took place on 9/11. Al Qaida pierced the very heart of America. Japanese had used their own aircraft as weapons at Pearl Harbor. In 9/11, Al Qaida used the American aircraft to stress the humiliation heaped on American psyche.

The 9/11 attack kicked-off a chain of events. It triggered off invasion of Iraq as the American government believed on the basis of the evidence available to it that the next attack on the United States, possibly nuclear, might come from Iraq. Iraq war was a huge military success in the initial phase, but since then it has dragged on interminably. The military activities are over in Iraq, but a huge contingent of troops continues to stay there. It continues to drain the American treasury.

There are various estimates as to the cost of Iraq war. The Bush administration understandably downplayed the cost. We must take into consideration not only the upfront cost incurred on the military deployment and operations but also the staggering social and economic costs which might not be obvious. According to Linda Bilmes and Joseph Stiglitz, in a scholarly article published in the Washington Post on March 9, 2008, the total cost of Iraq war might exceed 3 trillion dollars. Even if we assume that their estimate was liberal by a factor of 2, in a 14-trillion economy, a wasteful and entirely non-productive outlay of 1.5 trillion dollars is bound to be impactful.

Even before the Iraq war, the federal budget of the United States had a huge deficit. The war opened the floodgates of expenditure. This expenditure was met with the borrowed money of national debt, which was soaring by about $1 billion a day, thanks to the heavy purchase of the debt by China and other exporters to the United States. Iraq War, along with Afghanistan war, made its own contribution to the recession which is plaguing the United States and therefore the world, today.

The balance of trade between China and the USA has been continuously rising in favor of China since 1986. During recent times, it has grown from $203 billion in the year 2003 to $266 billion in the year 2008. Cumulatively it adds up to about one and a quarter billion dollars over the last six years. Quite a good chunk of this money has been used by the Chinese in purchasing the US national debt. Can we, therefore, not say that Chinese-American trade also played a role, albeit indirectly, in deepening the financial crisis?

However, the greatest and most visible contribution to the recession was made by so-called subprime landing. These were the loans granted by bankers for buying houses, cars and other assets without checking the paying capacity of the borrowers. Most of the borrowers of such loans did not have adequate capacity to service their mortgages. Such mortgages were then collated by the first lenders in various bundles, securitized and sliced suitably in the form of attractive looking bonds at high coupon rates and sold to greedy investors who believed they were too clever to go for the traditional form of investments. Thus banks created assets for themselves some of which were ab initio non-performing assets or toxic assets. The ultimate value of such bank assets depends upon whether the mortgages taken against those bonds are repaid or not.

The bubble burst, as it was destined to, and the people ran for cover. The value of the assets based on such securitized bonds fell freely as though under gravity. Value of stocks of banks and other corporations in the share market plummeted. It severely restricted the capacity of banks to open fresh lines of credit. In turn, this made the entire economic system totter on the brink of uncertainly, if not sure disaster. Moralists feel it all happened due to human greed. Economists say it was all due to lack of adequate regulation and overseeing of the financial system.

Consumer spending has got steeply diminished. The 14-trillion dollar American economy depends at least 65 per cent on consumer spending, both on goods and services. Demand of goods and services is falling and and people have lost jobs in consequence. According to Bureau of Labor Statistics, the payroll employment has declined by 3.6 million since December 2007. Imagine the misery it must have brought to so many households. People are finding it very painful to survive.

The fundamental strategy to address this grim scenario is to boost demand, which can only be done by injecting huge outlays in the system. Food stamps and unemployment benefits are sure shot as the recipients are bound to spend the money as soon as possible. Tax cuts to the low income groups is another way to inject expendable money in the system. President Obama has creative ideas like going in a big way building infrastructure like new roads and schools. Giving money to states is also a good idea as it will stimulate social security programs like Medicaid. Banks should also get huge chunks of money so that they are able to reactivate their lines of credit to the borrowers who might be willing to invest in productive ventures.

At this point of time it is difficult to say what should be the nitty-gritty of stimulus package. Time alone can say to what extent Obama administration will succeed in averting the economic disaster.