South Asia Daily

Swipe that card again

 

For a nation in serious debt Pakistan has perfected the art of dunning the world for more money. President Asif Ali Zardari is not happy that when he swiped his debit card to take some money out at the Coalition Support Fund it was declined.

According to Dawn News now he is asking Washington to reimburse $1.6 billion that Islamabad is supposed to have spent on combating terrorism. He has to be the only debtor in the world who is actually chasing his creditors.

Zardari also wants an expeditious release of $6 billion that a donor conference in Tokyo pledged earlier this year. If you think it is already becoming hard to keep track of all the money Pakistan gets/wants/needs here is some more. They are awaiting the U.S. Congress to adopt a bill promising $1.5 billion a year for five years. This is on top of the $2.376 billion that the Congress approved on Monday for 2008-2009. There is already a request pending for an additional $2.282 billion for 2009-10.

I am sure all of these payments are perfectly justified. However, it is not entirely clear who keeps track of how these billions are spent. The other day former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf declared that some of the US military aid had been diverted to his country's defense against India. There has to be someone who audits Pakistan's accounts annually. I would love to talk that someone.

 

 

 

Not a dictator but felt like one

 

Pervez Musharraf

I am glad that former Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf has clarified that he was not a dictator. One would never have known the difference otherwise. After all dictators do not stage military coups, threaten to jail political opponents, dismantle the judiciary and refuse to step down as the army chief for a long time.

"If I was a dictator, the media would not have gotten independence during (my) tenure," he reportedly told a delegation of the Pakistan Muslim League-Quaid (PML-Q) in London according to, Online news agency. That's a fair point but then even dictators can chose to be selectively fair.

In August last year Musharraf resigned as president as part of a deal reportedly brokered by Saudi Arabia, Britain and the US. Under the deal Musharraf was said to have been granted immunity from his actions in office, including the declaration of an emergency and the firing of the Supreme Court judges in November, 2007.

There are reports that Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz invited former Pakistan Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, whom Musharraf had ousted in a bloodless coup and who is not the leading opposition figure in Pakistan, and Pakistani Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry to discuss Pakistan's political situation and the issue of Musharraf's trial. The Saudi king wants Pakistan to keep its side f the bargain not to prosecute Musharraf.

Is it just me or there are others who are amused by the complete absurdity of a Saudi king calling a former prime minister and a sitting chief justice of a "sovereign" country and discussing among other things not pursuing prosecution of a former coup leader? This plot is priceless. Too bad I cannot copyright it.

On a separate note, Musharraf spends most of his time these days in London. When he ruled his opponents Benazir Bhutto and Sharif were practically in exile in London. Now that Bhutto's husband Asif Ali Zardari is in power Musharraf spends as much time he as he possibly can in London. This plot is priceless.

‘You name it I can cook it’

 

Prsident Barack Obama (left for those of you who still may not know) and Dawn correspondent Anwar Iqbal. Picture courtesy www.dawnnews.net

 

Barack Obama says he can cook keema. OMG! He is a Muslim.

Then he says he can also cook daal. OMG! He is a Hindu.

But then he spoils it by saying he "You name it, I can cook it." That is such a downer. He is just human after all.

P.S. Obama's comments came in an interview with Anwar Iqbal of Dawn. Here is how the actual conversation went.

Anwar: 'What can you cook?'

Obama: 'Oh, keema … daal … You name it, I can cook it. And so I have a great affinity for Pakistani culture and the great Urdu poets.'

Anwar: 'You read Urdu poetry?'

Obama: 'Absolutely.'

Read the full interview here.

http://www.dawnnews.net/wps/wcm/connect/dawn-content-library/dawn/news/world/12-beat-extremists-you-can-says-obama--bi-04

'Pakistan on the brink'

Ahmed Rashid (www.ahmedrashid.com)

No country in the world inspires alarmism the way Pakistan does. By its very definition alarmist perspectives have an element of exaggeration or overstatement. However, when someone of the caliber of Ahmed Rashid writes the following passage one has to pay attention. All of us, including yours truly, have for a long time wondered and speculated over the what-if scenarios of the worst kind that Pakistan will soon have to confront or is already confronting. Rashid has a piece in the New York Review of Books’ June 11 issue that offers what is the likeliest conclusion of all the frenzied prognostications.

Here is what Rashid writes, “Pakistan is close to the brink, perhaps not to a meltdown of the government, but to a permanent state of anarchy, as the Islamist revolutionaries led by the Taliban and their many allies take more territory, and state power shrinks. There will be no mass revolutionary uprising like in Iran in 1979 or storming of the citadels of power as in Vietnam and Cambodia; rather we can expect a slow, insidious, long-burning fuse of fear, terror, and paralysis that the Taliban have lit and that the state is unable, and partly unwilling, to douse.”

The fuse that Rashid talks about has to be a particularly long and slow-burning one because when you look at the history of Pakistan you get the feeling that it has been on ever since its creation in 1947. For whatever reasons the country has always given the vibes of an entity eternally churning with profound restiveness. My visits to the country in the 1990s, although overwhelmingly hospitable, could not disguise the innate feeling of uncertainty that leapt out ever so frequently in many conversations. It was like meeting a highly excitable person at a street corner whose next move you could not anticipate.

It would be more than rewarding to read Rashid’s piece here.

A rejoinder

This morning I posted a short entry about how my blog on May 7 and Ahsan Butt’s blog http://fiverupees.blogspot.com/ on May 17 used a common expression of “take your son to work day” in describing Pakistan President Asif Ali Zardari bringing his son Bilawal to the White House summit recently. The entry was posted before I communicated with Ahsan, who presumed that I implied plagiarism on his part despite having communicated via email.

There has been some back and forth between Ahsan and I via email, extracts of which he has reproduced on his blog while denouncing my 'dishonesty.' It is not my natural disposition to be melodramatic and hence I am going to let his angry response slide by.

As far as I am concerned I accept his explanation that our using the same expression was merely a coincidence and that’s that. I removed my entry the moment I noticed Ahsan’s email this afternoon. It makes no difference to me whether he wants to retain his rebuttal on his blog.

I respect Ahsan’s sensitivity about intellectual property and conclude this futile discussion. For the record the entry was posted before I communicated with Ahsan.

And they dislike their women dressing up

Can you really blame these men for proscribing their women who dress up?

Photo by T Mughal/European Pressphoto Agency as it appears in the Lens section of The New York Times.

Terror marble and emerald

Going by what an editorial in The News of Pakistan says, the world trading community might have to evolve a label called “Taliban Free” on certain kinds of marble, emerald and timber. The paper says illicit trade in gemstones, timber and marble is helping fund the Taliban.

"It is not possible to put a definitive figure on how much the Taliban are making from their excursion into economic activity, but the government estimates that it is losing Rs.65 billion ($800 million) annually from the illegal timber trade and indiscriminate deforestation alone," the newspaper says.

It seems there is at least a reasonable chance that the marble on your kitchen countertop or on your floor may have come to you courtesy those who flog and behead in the name of religion. The funding sources of the Taliban and other such extremist groups have always been a matter of great international curiosity. While narcotics have also been said to be a source of revenues, gems and marble could well be playing a significant part.

The Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) in Pakistan’s northwest, where the Taliban enjoy considerable influence, is known for its marble deposits. The News reports that the Taliban took over Ziarat quarry in the Mohmand Agency in April last year. With a million tones of marble and granite being mined out that region, it is proving to be a substantial source of income

Hustling cannot be a national strategy

Asif Ali Zardari, left, Nawaz Sharif

Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari will be afforded perhaps five minutes of diplomatic niceties when he meets U.S. President Barack Obama on Wednesday before he is sat down for an extended period of a sobering talking-to. A nuclear armed jihad is at the top of Obama’s long list of nightmare scenarios that he would like to go through with Zardari.

It is not without purpose that The New York Times has carried a story today pointing out that administration officials are worried about “new vulnerabilities for Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal”. The timing of the story is deliberate and motivated by the Obama-Zardari meeting. Not that the White House needs the NYT shoulder to fire from but it helps to prime Zardari for what is in store for him. Zardari may be incompetent in delivering good governance but he has the political smarts to anticipate a discussion on the safety of the nuclear weapons.

While as the president is supposed to be in charge of the National Command Authority that oversees nuclear warheads, everybody knows that it is his Army Chief and permanent nemesis General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani who really has the operational control of this most important national strategic asset. Kayani is as likely to let Washington know the locations where the up to 100 nuclear weapons have been stored safely as Obama is likely to tell him where US warheads are. When everything else about Pakistan seems to be coming apart, these weapons are really the country’s absolutely final bargaining chip. If it comes to that the generals in Pakistan would hide them in their pants.

Obama does not really have any option other than engaging Zardari even though he knows the inherent futility of that exercise. The president’s control over the Pakistani state is tenuous at best and is in jeopardy of unraveling without any notice. His odd rise to the country’s highest office, despite some very obvious flaws, gave Zardari an extraordinary opportunity to redeem not just himself but to fundamentally alter the direction of the national discourse. Instead he chose to make ineffectual noises and yield to the very forces he is supposed to marginalize. The Swat Valley deal with the Taliban over the imposition of Sharia laws was an embarrassing example of his inept governance. How is it a deal when you are giving whatever the adversary wants but not getting anything in return? Laying down arms was supposed to be the Taliban’s side of the deal. Instead they invaded Buner district in a clear move to expand their influence close to Islamabad.

There are some speculations that the U.S. may already be courting former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif in the eventuality that Zardari is dislodged. People should not forget that the same Sharif was done in by then Army Chief Pervez Musharraf in a bloodless coup in 1999. The intelligentsia in Pakistan knows that their country needs to graduate beyond cynical deal-making that has been the mainstay of its fake democracy for decades. Unless it first creates a visionary leadership and then gets behind it to radically overhaul all national institutions for the next 20 years, the world will continue to find hustlers as its interlocutors from Islamabad.

Rediscovering sovereignty in Pakistan

Now that Pakistan has taken the fight to the Taliban, one wonders why it did not so earlier. The country’s Interior Minister Rehman Malik has been quoted as saying of the Taliban, “We will not tolerate them anymore.” The resolve in that assertion ought to make the international community happy.

He also said something that should have been the guiding principle of the government from the get-go. "No one will be allowed to challenge the writ of the government," Malik said. The writ of the government was not just challenged by the Taliban when it took over the Swat Valley, it was ridiculed when it walked into Buner District unmolested.

A major military offensive was launched in the Lower Dir area, which is about 170 kilometers northwest of the capital Islamabad. So far some 70 militants have been killed in the action which is likely to continue. North West Frontier Province (NWFP) Information Minister Iftikhar Hussain repeated Malik’s comment when he said, "The government needed to deploy security forces in Buner because the militants were challenging its writ.”

Pakistan has to be aware that this is not a fight it can leave halfway in the hope that the military has made its point. The Taliban has been known to be both persistent because it sees its fight as an eternal one. Their goals and those of Al-Qaeda are so nebulous that it is hard for any military force trained to understand and deal with a conflict in terms of its beginning and end to effectively deal with the Taliban-Al Qaeda combine.

It is some consolation that Islamabad was propelled into action by the mounting criticism of its handling of the crisis around the world, particularly in Washington. Unless the Pakistanis see this fight as a battle for their own survival and create enough pressure on the country’s military and political institutions it is unlikely that the campaign against the Taliban will be sustained.

In this context one has to mention the highly mature role played by some of the country’s leading newspapers in reminding the government as well as the military that their focus should be the Taliban’s immediate threat rather than obsessing over what India might or might not do. "At this juncture, we know that we have the army strong in numbers and strength to take care of the Taliban, but we first must convince it that the threat from India is only relative while that of the Taliban is absolute,” The Daily Times said in an editorial.

This distinction must be at the center of any policy shift in Pakistan vis-à-vis India. There is no serious constituency in India that is even remotely interested in engaging in any military adventurism in Pakistan. The major demographic shift in India in the past two decades, which has led to a population of 550 million people below the age of 25, is bound to cause a fundamental policy shift as well. Young Indians, like young people anywhere in the world, are no longer interested in settling historic scores. Slow but surely India’s political classes have begun to understand this important development.

Taliban and adultery

This is how the Taliban deals with adultery.