Trotsky in Baluchistan

Ahmed Rashid

IN AFGHANISTAN: a war going in the wrong direction, a fatally flawed election, reconstruction at a standstill and a growing political vacuum that the Taliban is filling even as some NATO countries contemplate withdrawing their troops.
In nuclear-armed Pakistan: a long-running multidimensional crisis, political and ethnic strife, an unprecedented economic depression, and growing local Islamic extremism which plays host to al-Qaeda and the Afghan Taliban.
In central Asia: the start of a suicide-bombing campaign by Taliban-inspired extremists wanting to derail regimes and governments that are themselves beset by corruption, unwilling to carry out economic reforms, practice authoritarianism and pauperize their people.
In Washington and European capitals: growing doubts about President Obama’s commitment to and the viability of the U.S.-led military and nation-building campaign in Afghanistan, continuing suspicions about the intentions of Pakistan’s military, the inability to push ahead with a regional strategy or engage with Taliban moderates, and now a lack of a credible government in Kabul.
Some of these points were highlighted by General Stanley McChrystal, the U.S. commander in Afghanistan, when he sent his new Afghan strategy document to the White House on August 30, 2009. McChrystal called for a widening and deepening of a proper counterinsurgency campaign with the deployment of more U.S. troops and civilians—a campaign that was outlined by President Barack Obama in March when he presented his assertive new Afghan strategy to the American public. Obama then, and McChrystal now, stressed the need to rebuild the Afghan government and win the people’s support—in other words, carry out nation building, a phrase that was banned from the Bush White House for eight years.
The speed of the deterioration in Afghanistan, however, has blighted Obama’s March strategy, depressed U.S. congressional and public opinion, and called NATO governments to openly question their future commitments. The rigged Afghan elections have created enormous doubts about Karzai’s credibility and legitimacy, while Western forces suffer the heaviest casualties to date under a continuing and withering Taliban offensive. Although talking to the Taliban has been a major plank of the Obama plan, it is impossible to imagine any such talks while the Taliban remains militarily strong and is convinced it is winning.
Every news day in Washington has brought different ideas and more dissent to the debate. Yet with all the talk about policy options, two issues remain exquisitely undebated. Although McChrystal clearly described the threat from the Taliban as lethal, what is still only hinted at in Washington is that it is the Taliban and not al-Qaeda that could capture power in Kabul and send the entire region into a tailspin as neo-Taliban members spread into Pakistan and central Asia.
Al-Qaeda still poses a global threat to Western and Muslim states alike, and defeating it is the main focus of U.S. policy. However, all the concerns about instability in Pakistan and central Asia should actually revolve around how to contain the Taliban and local extremists.
The proposal by some Americans to reduce the U.S. presence in Afghanistan and instead fight al-Qaeda with drone-fired missiles would only push this vast strategic region swiftly into chaos. Moreover, such thinking still does not address how to get at the leadership of al-Qaeda and the various Taliban movements—all of whom are sitting in Pakistan rather than Afghanistan. The Pakistani military has not been persuaded to turn its ship around and develop a clear policy that does not differentiate between the pro-Pakistan Taliban and the “bad” Taliban.
Ultimately the choices are stark. Either the United States and Europe abandon the region to the forces of violence, extremism, poverty and the danger of loose nukes—with all its consequences—or they remain committed and prepare to carry out both counterinsurgency and nation building. Afghanistan, Pakistan and central Asia are on the cusp of a critical historical moment on which the region’s future stability depends. Only U.S. leadership alongside that of the international community can assure that the region does not fall to extremists or other vicissitudes.

THE DISASTROUS legacy that Obama inherited in Afghanistan is primarily the fault of former-President George W. Bush and his failure to deliver sufficient political, military and economic resources to both the country and the region writ large. But lest we think revisiting the past is an unnecessary detour into mistakes no longer relevant, it is fixing these missteps that is key to preventing a complete radicalization of the region.
The descent of Afghanistan to the brink of anarchy was solidified last year. It was the result of eight years of blunders, miscalculations and wanton neglect. It is in these areas that Obama must now course correct.
It was the Bush team’s lack of a strategic agenda for Afghanistan in three critical areas that led to an inevitable escalation of violence. There were woefully insufficient U.S. troops and no comprehensive strategy that would have integrated U.S. military and civilian activity to help the Afghan government increase capacity, improve governance and speedily build its security forces. Greater interagency cooperation in Washington and Kabul—similar to the relationship built up in Iraq between U.S. Ambassador Ryan Crocker and U.S. commander General David Petraeus—was nonexistent.
Second, there was no comprehensive diplomatic or regional approach to Afghanistan’s six direct neighbors, a necessary precondition if Bush’s team was to come to grips with the complex history of these states’ interference and battle for influence in Afghanistan. Two of them, Iran and Pakistan, were clandestinely backing the Taliban. Still, Pakistan’s military ruler, then-President Pervez Musharraf, remained Bush’s hero. And Afghanistan’s influential distant neighbors Russia, India and Saudi Arabia were also ignored.
Last, there was no political strategy for state building and improving governance by dealing comprehensively with President Hamid Karzai, government ministers, warlords, tribal elders, governors, the parliament and other players. Setting out clear benchmarks for Karzai and his government to adhere to should have increased Afghan effectiveness, but Bush’s regular telephone calls to the president were largely wasted on fireside chats, rather than focusing on setting priorities and resolving policy issues. To top it all off, Bush made only two trips to Afghanistan in eight years, the last just a few weeks before he finally stepped down.
The only positive agenda that seeped through into Afghanistan in 2008 was the new U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine, pushed by General Petraeus, that was working well in Iraq. However there were insufficient troops to carry out its principal tactic, which rather than chasing insurgents meant protecting population centers and building trust in the government. In July 2008, Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned the Bush administration that Afghanistan needed at least three more brigades, about twelve thousand soldiers, but admitted troops could not be spared because of Iraq. Later that winter, Mullen diverted U.S. troops destined for Iraq to Afghanistan, so that they could clear out the Taliban from provinces adjacent to Kabul and reopen Taliban-blocked roads. But though necessary, this served only to stem disaster. It was not enough to make progress. Greater U.S. funding for a faster buildup of Afghan security forces only started in 2007. And, unlike Iraq, which had an existing army, the new Afghan army had to be built from scratch. By the end of 2008, Taliban attacks had risen by 40 percent over the previous year. Compared to Iraq, the new doctrine arrived in Afghanistan without resources.
This culminated in a critical deterioration—a reality pointed out repeatedly by the U.S. military, but unacknowledged by the Bush White House. In the spring of 2008, large tracts of Afghanistan in the south and east, and for the first time provinces around Kabul, were under the control of the Taliban, which began to appoint its own governors, courts, police and tax collectors to run these areas. The Taliban’s two greatest assets became its safe havens in Afghanistan and Pakistan, particularly the recruiting and logistic bases in Pakistan’s tribal areas and Baluchistan province, and the uninterrupted flow of money from the likes of donations, drug sales and kidnappings.
More than half of the country’s thirty-four provinces turned into no-go areas for Afghan government officials, foreign aid workers and even some NATO forces who were not allowed by their governments to fight the Taliban. For the first time since losing its regime, the Taliban had broken out of its traditional Pashtun ethnic power base in the south, making it easier to deploy guerrillas to the north and the west in 2009.
The Taliban expansion in 2008 was matched by its extraordinary progress in improved military tactics: more sophisticated ambushes, suicide car bombs, mine warfare, multiple urban terrorist attacks, and targeted killings and kidnappings to demoralize the Afghan public and Western civilians. The Taliban began to primarily target aid workers, the Afghan police and government officials, thereby undermining all attempts to establish state control.
In the last months of the Bush presidency, the military deterioration was in plain sight. Yet even then little was done. Only one comprehensive meeting took place between the Bush White House and the Obama and McCain campaign staffs on October 15 to warn them of the impending crisis in Afghanistan. The Obama team was horrified by what it learned at that meeting; the administration made clear it would do nothing until the handover to the new president.

OBAMA PROMISED a new strategy. By dovetailing several ongoing policy reviews, the new president delivered a plan in March—a mere three months after taking office. The Bush era’s strategic failings were largely corrected. There was to be a new comprehensive approach bringing civilian expertise and development work on par with that of the U.S. military, all to help the Afghan government build capacity and increase outreach to the villages. Additional U.S. assistance would be given to root out corruption, and investment in agriculture would help win the war on narcotics.
A new regional strategy would try to heal rifts and rivalries between the neighboring states, and a regional czar—veteran diplomat and deal-maker Richard Holbrooke—was put in charge. He assembled a group of experts to negotiate with these neighbors as well as a Washington-based interagency team that was duplicated at the U.S. embassy in Kabul to quicken implementation.
The new U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine would be followed even more rigorously with twenty-one thousand extra U.S. troops, a new chain of command with the appointment of General Stanley McChrystal as head of all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, and money and trainers for doubling the size of the Afghan army from a once-projected eighty thousand to two hundred fifty thousand soldiers.
A political strategy for the Afghan government remained to be developed. A handful of American and foreign experts warned that the Afghan presidential elections due in April 2009 and already delayed to August could lead to chaos and should possibly be put off again; the United States needed to get a grip on the military situation. But these calls went unheeded and thus we witnessed Obama’s first mistake, one that would lead to a botched election and the current crisis of confidence.
With the Afghan elections around the corner, the main players in Washington felt Karzai was an inept and unreliable leader. Leading officials on the Obama team had long ago made up their minds about the Afghan president. Obama criticized Karzai when he visited Afghanistan in July 2008, and as Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Joseph Biden had several testy conversations with the Afghan president. Holbrooke, who had visited Kabul in 2006 and 2008, had written articles criticizing Karzai. But there was no plan to deal with this leader they found so lacking.
Karzai clearly showed little interest in improving governance, curbing corruption or drugs, and rarely visited schools, hospitals or Afghan army units to see progress on the ground. He ignored the parliament, preferring to stitch deals together with the warlords. Every time I raised these issues with him he refused to accept any criticism and defended his actions vigorously, invariably turning the subject around to conspiracies he thought were being hatched against him by the United States and Britain.
Of course, the Afghan president liked dealing with Bush because Bush never made demands, while he found the Obama people too prickly and exacting. As former–Ambassador to Afghanistan Zalmay Khalilzad has said, “the administration, some key members of the administration, did not like [Karzai] and wanted to get rid of him . . . And the meetings with him were quite contentious.” Karzai’s reaction to the Obama team’s tougher stance was to play hard to get. He refused to dispense with his warlord and drug-trafficking friends in high places. He took on an anti-American stance, believing that this would win him Afghan votes and force Obama to woo him. The tension only ratcheted up further when Karzai heard gossip that some Americans were considering the idea of an interim government before the elections without him being part of it. In the end, the Obama team refused to endorse Karzai.
Holbrooke repeatedly said the United States wanted a level playing field for the elections, but the best of intentions had gone awry. Along with no plan to deal with Karzai, there was no clear U.S. policy toward the warlords and drug traffickers with whom Karzai was allied. There was no attempt to make the Afghan-run Independent Election Commission more neutral, which was stuffed full of Karzai’s nominees, or to insist that the commission and the UN rectify all the visible signs of pre-rigging—like multiple id cards being issued—that were apparent months before the elections.
Meanwhile, between January and August, over $300 million worth of preparations for the elections were to suck up all the oxygen in the country. The extra U.S. troops, the counterinsurgency strategy, the larger funding for development was all geared to guaranteeing the safety and viability of the elections rather than to beating back the Taliban.
And yet election-day security was still impossible to achieve. The Taliban launched some four hundred attacks as Afghans went to vote, and the 38 percent election turnout was slightly more than half that of 2004. The postelection uncertainty triggered by massive evidence of rigging by the government and some by Karzai’s main rival, Abdullah Abdullah, resulted in a flood of apprehension in Washington and European capitals. If there was no legitimate government, for whom would U.S. and NATO troops be fighting and dying?
There is no easy answer to the conundrum of a flawed election and the failure of the United States, the UN and the European Union to set down markers for a fair poll months earlier. Though the White House has admitted it expects Karzai to remain as president (despite the ongoing recount of 10 percent of the ballot boxes), the damage is done. Above all, it has cost Obama considerable support at home and abroad.

THERE IS now a palpable loss of will—for Obama (the very champion of a reinvigorated Afghan strategy), the American people, their European allies and the governments contributing to the NATO effort.
Lawmakers have begun to compare Afghanistan to the U.S. debacle in South Vietnam and to the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan. An ABC poll said that 51 percent of Americans want U.S. troops out of Afghanistan. The most bizarre turnaround has come from right-wing Republicans who now back Obama and urge more troops, while left-wing Democrats from Obama’s own party are pushing for a pullout.
The UN has called for a major conference by the end of 2009 to discuss future goals in Afghanistan. Already, several European countries have hinted they will discuss only one goal—a set date for certain withdrawal of NATO troops.
The truth is that a majority of Europeans want out. Spain (with one thousand troops in Afghanistan) has suggested leaving by 2015; Germany, with four thousand troops, has suggested a “transition strategy” by 2013; and some Italian leaders have demanded that their two thousand eight hundred troops leave by December. The Polish government faces 71 percent of the public opposed to the deployment of its two thousand troops. Japan’s new government has stopped its naval-refueling mission for NATO ships in the Indian Ocean.
The United States considers some of these countries to be far less than key to the mission because their forces are mandated by their governments NOT to fight the Taliban. Their task is instead described as reconstruction, as though Afghanistan was in a postconflict-nirvana building boom. Many of these contingents are confined to their camps, surrounded by the Taliban whom they choose not to fight.
But the real problem is that there are serious countries with fighting troops who are also tired, overstretched and don’t have the budgets to carry on. The Dutch say they will pull out their one thousand eight hundred troops from Uruzgan province by 2010, the two thousand eight hundred Canadians will pull out from Kandahar by 2011, while even stalwart Britain with nine thousand troops is debating a withdrawal date as its 2010 elections approach.
This is a disaster in the making. As Anders Fogh Rasmussen, NATO’s new secretary-general, categorically warned those looking to leave, the public debate about Afghanistan “has started to go in the wrong direction. . . . Let no one think that a run for the exits is an option. It is not.”
It is as if the dangers lurking in the region are almost forgotten.
What is at stake now is more than Afghanistan. And yet the situation only continues to deteriorate. The Taliban’s ideology and tactics are spreading beyond the borders of Afghanistan, into Pakistan and beyond. The region is now at risk of becoming a greater extremist threat than it was before 9/11.

OVER THE past eight years the Taliban has become a role model and inspiration for extremism in the whole region. Today there are Taliban movements in Pakistan and central Asia determined to overthrow their governments. It is entirely possible that the Taliban model could spread to Muslims in China and India. The Taliban’s religious ideology, its elevation of jihad above all other Islamic teachings, its effective guerrilla war, and its brutal methods of controlling and governing local populations are spreading. Moreover, all of these groups, including al-Qaeda, respect Afghan Taliban leader Mullah Muhammad Omar and consider him the regional leader of jihad against America.
Though the Taliban leaders are not global jihadists like al-Qaeda, they have learned that the Islamic revolution they brought about in Afghanistan from 1993 to 2001 cannot be sustained unless neighboring countries undergo the same process and support them. Perversely, it’s the Leon Trotsky doctrine—that revolution in one country is insufficient to secure the revolution.
The Taliban and al-Qaeda are working together. And their ranks are expanding. In recent years, the Afghan Taliban has spawned the Pakistan Taliban. Al-Qaeda has forged a close relationship with both groups and their allies, such as the extremist network led by Afghan Jalaluddin Haqqani and central Asian groups based in Pakistan’s tribal areas. All these extremists protect al-Qaeda by increasing the Pakistani and Afghan territory under their control, so that al-Qaeda has more room to hide from U.S. drones, while operating and planning for the future.
General McChrystal’s report makes it clear that the entire extremist Taliban and al-Qaeda leadership is based in Pakistan:
Afghanistan’s insurgency is clearly supported from Pakistan. Senior leaders of the major Afghan insurgent groups are based in Pakistan, are linked with al Qaeda and other violent extremist groups, and are reportedly aided by some elements of Pakistan’s ISI [Inter-Services Intelligence].
The threat the United States and the region face is that the Afghan insurgency will continue to grow and that if there is a Western withdrawal from Afghanistan, Pakistan will not allow a vacuum to develop in Afghanistan and instead will abet a Taliban victory. Pakistan has had a risky dual policy of supporting the Americans in combating al-Qaeda and the Pakistan Taliban, while also supporting the Afghan Taliban. This is because the Pakistani army’s national-security logic is dominated by the struggle to keep the Indians at bay. For the army, a Taliban regime in Kabul is preferable to any other warlord regime to guarantee that the Indians and their Afghan protégés (of which Karzai is considered one) are forever kept out of having a role—as they were when the Taliban ruled the lands of Afghanistan in the 1990s. Moreover, a pro-Pakistan Taliban regime in Kabul, possibly backed by Saudi Arabia, the Gulf states and China, would create a new Pakistan-led region of influence that would reduce the role of its two other main rivals—Iran and Russia. This strategy could become more imperative with talk of less U.S. support to Afghanistan, the collapse in credibility of the Karzai government and the growing perception in Pakistan that the Taliban is winning. Every sign of the United States or NATO dithering over strategy only convinces the Pakistani military about keeping its Taliban option open. Pakistan may well be prepared to take the risk of endangering its own stability by supporting a Taliban regime in Kabul, even as it will try unsuccessfully to separate the Pakistan Taliban from its Afghan brothers.

THIS IS why Pakistan is faced with a conundrum. Even as Islamabad tries to secure its interests in Afghanistan, it puts its own security at risk. Several American pundits have warned that any U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan would seriously destabilize Pakistan. That is true.
The Pakistan Taliban now threatens to overrun large parts of northern Pakistan. In the last two years, the Pakistan Taliban has increasingly turned its guns on the Pakistani army and state. Monster turns on creator.
This year the Pakistan Taliban’s capture of the Swat Valley north of Islamabad led to outrage from the Pakistani public and the international community. And the army was forced to take action, acknowledging for the first time that the Pakistan Taliban was now a dire threat. In recent months, the army has pushed the Taliban out of Swat and is fighting to regain control of the Khyber Pass where the Taliban has been attacking the hundreds of NATO supply containers that are trucked through to Afghanistan every day.
The army has also blocked off roads into South Waziristan, where the Pakistan Taliban is based, and is using long-distance shelling and bombing to destabilize the group. The United States has helped these efforts by killing Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistan Taliban, in a drone strike. The army has recently said after much American pressure that it may soon attack South Waziristan.
And thus we come to the end of the good news. If the army is now acting responsibly in dealing with the Pakistan Taliban, such is not the case with the Afghan Taliban. Key networks, such as those of Haqqani and Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, are based in North Waziristan, and they launch attacks into Afghanistan. For the past eight years they have never been bothered by the Pakistani army.
Neither have the main Afghan Taliban leaders who live in Quetta in Baluchistan province. From Quetta, the Taliban is able to resupply its forces in Afghanistan with money, ammunition, suicide bombers and materials to make bombs and mines—all under the watchful eye of the ISI. According to intelligence sources, the Taliban leader Mullah Omar is now in a safe house in Karachi because of the fear that the United States may start using drone attacks on Quetta.
Admiral Mullen and Richard Holbrooke have made major efforts to bring the army and Pakistan’s weak civilian leadership led by President Asif Ali Zardari onboard to help go after the Afghan Taliban and help stabilize rather than undermine Afghanistan. However, Pakistan’s civilian politicians are not strong enough to accept U.S. demands if it means contradicting the army’s policies. As the army takes on the Pakistan Taliban and clears Swat, its political influence and power has grown proportionally. The army still has to be won over to the simple and disturbing truth that a Taliban regime in Kabul would, through its Pakistani proxies, pose a major threat to the Pakistani state.
Worse, Pakistan is far less resilient than it was a few years ago. Even as Pakistani officials bluntly criticize Holbrooke for linking Afghanistan and Pakistan in his “AfPak” strategy, some Pakistanis already see a chronic “Afghanization” of their nation. Current realities include a collapse of law and order in parts of the country, state institutions riddled with corruption and ineffectiveness, a justice system that cannot deliver, a crashing economy with severe joblessness, increasing ethnic tensions and a strong separatist movement in Baluchistan province.
However, the real fear is that under such enormous external and internal pressures, there are no guarantees that the army will stay committed to a democratic system. More so, the military may not remain as united as it has been for the past six decades. What many Pakistanis fear and constantly talk about is not a traditional generals’ coup that may end democracy, but a colonels’ coup that could bring in a pro-Islamist and anti-Western coterie of officers linked to Islamic groups that would then negotiate a compromise with the Pakistan Taliban. That could put Pakistan’s nuclear weapons into the wrong hands. Neither a partial U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan nor a strategy of only using drones to target al-Qaeda could hope to handle such a regional catastrophe.
And a complete American departure would seal the region’s fate.

SOUTHERN REGIONS of Muslim central Asia are now at risk. The situation will only get worse if the Taliban offensives continue.
The regions bordering Afghanistan, including southern Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan and eastern Turkmenistan, are facing pauperization of their populations, the collapse of Soviet-era services like health and education, and growing joblessness. Their regimes remain dictatorial, corrupt, and deny political or economic reforms. Vast numbers of poverty-stricken workers migrate to Russia looking for work.
Uzbekistan is the largest of these states with some 27 million people and a history of Islamic revolt. Harsh policies and vicious crackdowns against anyone overzealously practicing Islam have led to a strong Islamist underground. After the massacre in Andijan in May 2005, when security forces killed up to eight hundred protesting citizens, hundreds of young dissidents have fled to join the two major Islamic groups operating from Pakistan’s tribal areas—the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and the Islamic Jihad Union (IJU). Both these groups fight for and model themselves on the Taliban, work closely with al-Qaeda and help fund the extremist terrorist network by transporting drugs through central Asia to Europe. Both the IMU and the IJU recruit widely from central Asia, the Caucasus, Russia, and most recently from Turkey and Turks living in Germany.
This summer, for the first time since 2001, allegedly under the auspices of al-Qaeda, the IMU and the IJU carried out suicide bombings and other small attacks against security forces in Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. Such attacks will certainly increase; both the Taliban and al-Qaeda would like to see central Asia in turmoil, perhaps eventually offering a safe haven to their leaders.
Until recently, both Russia and the United States have ignored the impending crisis in the broader region. The United States thought of central Asia only in terms of the military bases the states there provided, while Russia put front and center maintaining a sphere of influence in its near abroad.
However in the past few months, for the first time, Russia has started pressing the United States to cooperate with it more closely on Afghan policy, and Moscow has given the United States and NATO permission to transport supplies to Afghanistan by land. Moscow finally appears to understand the threat of Islamic militancy radiating from Afghanistan into central Asia and perhaps even into Russia itself. Any U.S. retreat from Afghanistan at this moment would certainly send an overwhelming message of U.S. weakness to Russia and the central Asian states. It would encourage extremism to grow and persuade the Afghan Taliban to step up support for its allies in central Asia.

A SENIOR NATO officer recently described this as “Year One for Afghanistan”—implying that the last eight years under Bush had largely been a waste of opportunities and resources to rebuild the country. If this is year one, then there has not been the time or opportunity to make progress. And yet, there is a growing impatience in Washington and among the American public for the Obama team to show tangible results in Afghanistan quickly in spite of the well-understood fact that counterinsurgency wars are not won in months but in years.
New U.S. resources, including troops, are still arriving. The Taliban offensive cannot be countered, and space for development cannot be created without them. Protecting population centers and denying people and territory to the Taliban is vital if the public perception in Afghanistan and the region is to change; the United States and NATO have to be seen as committed to winning and strengthening the Kabul government instead of seemingly set on wavering and losing.
It has been difficult for Afghans to accept how quickly their newly gained freedoms have been lost and how the opportunity to rebuild their country was squandered by the lack of Western resources and a corrupt, inefficient Afghan government. Though there have been advances in areas such as education and health, these are insufficient to convince the public about the sincerity of either the government or the international community. Ninety-five percent of the population celebrated its liberation from the Taliban regime in 2001, only to find that they are now helplessly hedging their bets against a Taliban return.
But there is still hope in Afghanistan. Despite being terrified by the Taliban advances and angry at the rigged election, most Afghans don’t want the Taliban back. The United States has to impress upon Afghanistan, Pakistan and other regional governments that it is not about to abandon the region to the Taliban. Increased international commitment to Afghanistan will still reap deep local results among the people. The United States also has to win the trust of the next leader in Kabul and demand a better standard of performance, insisting that the lack of good governance is as dangerous a threat as the Taliban.
Pakistan will have to be wooed, cajoled and bribed with aid and support to resist all forms of extremism. There is increasing public resistance to interference from the military and less support for a foreign policy that is dictated by the army’s national-security agenda. The Pakistani people want a stable, strong neighborhood and a strengthened Pakistani economy that is not hostage to suicide bombers. Yet the army still has a long way to go before it undertakes a more comprehensive struggle against all extremists.
Dealing with the crisis requires U.S. leadership. Obama has to convince Congress, the American public and NATO governments that succeeding in Afghanistan requires time and patience, but is vital to maintaining stability in the region and to countering the wider regional threat from Islamic extremism. It’s an argument he has so far failed to make convincingly.
Above all, Obama has to understand that what is at stake is not just Afghanistan but the stability of the entire region.

Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani journalist and writer, is the author most recently of Descent into Chaos: The U.S. and the Disaster in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia (Penguin, 2009).

Source: TNI

http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=22352

Let the Games Begin

by Geoffrey Kemp

The latest buzz is that Iran will agree to the UN plan to send most of its stockpile of low-enriched uranium (LEU) to Russia for processing, after which it will be returned in the form of fuel rods to be used in civilian reactors. However, as with all things related to the Islamic Republic, there will be a catch: Iran, it is reported, wants to send the LEU out of the country in dribs and drabs and simultaneously receive shipments of highly-enriched uranium (HEU) for medical purposes. To achieve this alternative plan, Iran will seek to renegotiate the agreement. It is clear that the Iranian leadership is under pressure from within its own inner circles to resist any concessions that give the impression of caving in to the international community. It is especially important that the leadership do not allow the nuclear issue to become yet another complication in their efforts to reestablish their legitimacy, following the crisis of the June 12 elections.
The problem is that both the Iranians and the international community are eager to show there has been some progress towards reconciliation, but neither party can be seen to be weak. In Washington, President Obama faces huge skepticism from Republicans, hawks from his own party, many in the arms-control community, as well as the government of Israel as to the value of the current negotiations. Hardliners believe Iran is stalling for time and that it has no intention of stopping its bomb program. They argue that precisely because there is trouble in Tehran, Obama should play a tough hand. But Obama would be wise not to act precipitously—at least until he can be sure the Europeans will join in imposing new, tougher sanctions on Iran (there is little hope the Russians would agree at this stage).
One chink of light is the fact that on December 1, Yukiya Amano will take over as the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency. Whatever the virtues of the current director Mohamed ElBaradei may have been, they seem to have vanished once he and his organization were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2005. Diplomats say privately that after this award ElBaradei became insufferably self-righteous. His departure will not be mourned by those who believe that a far more robust role for the IAEA is required. It is obvious that the Iranians have more nuclear facilities hidden away in their large country. These need to be found, inspected and, if appropriate, put under IAEA supervision. The political challenge for the international community is not to push the Iranians so hard that they unite behind the regime and formally withdraw from the NPT—as they are legally entitled to. Then the inspectors would have to leave, and we would enter into a much greyer area with no hope for achieving the transparency that is necessary before one can say with any confidence that Iran’s bomb program is in limbo. It would raise the stakes not only for more sanctions, but possibly for preemptive military action. This would be a most unfortunate development, given the other potential disasters in the region, including a highly unstable situation in Afghanistan and increasing terrorism in Iraq.

Geoffrey Kemp is the Director of Regional Strategic Programs at The Nixon Center.

Source: TNI

http://www.nationalinterest.org/Article.aspx?id=22406

Think Again: God

BY KAREN ARMSTRONG

"God Is Dead."

No. When Friedrich Nietzsche announced the death of God in 1882, he thought that in the modern, scientific world people would soon be unable to countenance the idea of religious faith. By the time The Economist did its famous “God Is Dead” cover in 1999, the question seemed moot, notwithstanding the rise of politicized religiosity -- fundamentalism -- in almost every major faith since the 1970s. An obscure ayatollah toppled the shah of Iran, religious Zionism surfaced in Israel, and in the United States, Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority announced its dedicated opposition to “secular humanism.”
But it is only since Sept. 11, 2001, that God has proven to be alive and well beyond all question -- at least as far as the global public debate is concerned. With jihadists attacking America, an increasingly radicalized Middle East, and a born-again Christian in the White House for eight years, you’ll have a hard time finding anyone who disagrees. Even The Economist’s editor in chief recently co-authored a book called God Is Back. While many still question the relevance of God in our private lives, there’s a different debate on the global stage today: Is God a force for good in the world?

So-called new atheists such as Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens have denounced religious belief as not only retrograde but evil; they regard themselves as the vanguard of a campaign to expunge it from human consciousness. Religion, they claim, creates divisions, strife, and warfare; it imprisons women and brainwashes children; its doctrines are primitive, unscientific, and irrational, essentially the preserve of the unsophisticated and gullible.
These writers are wrong -- not only about religion, but also about politics -- because they are wrong about human nature. Homo sapiens is also Homo religiosus. As soon as we became recognizably human, men and women started to create religions. We are meaning-seeking creatures. While dogs, as far as we know, do not worry about the canine condition or agonize about their mortality, humans fall very easily into despair if we don’t find some significance in our lives. Theological ideas come and go, but the quest for meaning continues. So God isn’t going anywhere. And when we treat religion as something to be derided, dismissed, or destroyed, we risk amplifying its worst faults. Whether we like it or not, God is here to stay, and it’s time we found a way to live with him in a balanced, compassionate manner.

"God and Politics Shouldn’t Mix.

Not necessarily. Theologically illiterate politicians have long given religion a bad name. An inadequate understanding of God that reduces “him” to an idol in our own image who gives our likes and dislikes sacred sanction is the worst form of spiritual tyranny. Such arrogance has led to atrocities like the Crusades. The rise of secularism in government was meant to check this tendency, but secularism itself has created new demons now inflicting themselves on the world.
In the West, secularism has been a success, essential to the modern economy and political system, but it was achieved gradually over the course of nearly 300 years, allowing new ideas of governance time to filter down to all levels of society. But in other parts of the world, secularization has occurred far too rapidly and has been resented by large sectors of the population, who are still deeply attached to religion and find Western institutions alien.
In the Middle East, overly aggressive secularization has sometimes backfired, making the religious establishment more conservative, or even radical. In Egypt, for example, the remarkable reformer Muhammad Ali (1769-1849) so brutally impoverished and marginalized the clergy that its members turned their backs on change. When the shahs of Iran tortured and exiled mullahs who opposed their regime, some, such as Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, concluded that more extreme responses on the part of Iran’s future religious rulers were necessary.
Shiism had for centuries separated religion from politics as a matter of sacred principle, and Khomeini’s insistence that a cleric should become head of state was an extraordinary innovation. But moderate religion can play a constructive role in politics. Muhammad Abdu (1849-1905), grand mufti of Egypt, feared that the vast majority of Egyptians would not understand the country’s nascent democratic institutions unless they were explicitly linked with traditional Islamic principles that emphasized the importance of “consultation” (shura) and the duty of seeking “consensus” (ijma) before passing legislation.
In the same spirit, Hassan al-Banna (1906-1949), founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, began his movement by translating the social message of the Koran into a modern idiom, founding clinics, hospitals, trade unions, schools, and factories that gave workers insurance, holidays, and good working conditions. In other words, he aimed to bring the masses to modernity in an Islamic setting. The Brotherhood’s resulting popularity was threatening to Egypt’s secular government, which could not provide these services. In 1949, Banna was assassinated, and some members of the Brotherhood splintered into radical offshoots in reaction.
Of course, the manner in which religion is used in politics is more important than whether it’s used at all. U.S. presidents such as John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama have invoked faith as a shared experience that binds the country together -- an approach that recognizes the communal power of spirituality without making any pretense to divine right. Still, this consensus is not satisfactory to American Protestant fundamentalists, who believe the United States should be a distinctively Christian nation.

"God Breeds Violence and Intolerance.

No, humans do. For Hitchens in God Is Not Great, religion is inherently “violent … intolerant, allied to racism, tribalism and bigotry”; even so-called moderates are guilty by association. Yet it is not God or religion but violence itself -- inherent in human nature -- that breeds violence. As a species, we survived by killing and eating other animals; we also murder our own kind. So pervasive is this violence that it leaks into most scriptures, though these aggressive passages have always been balanced and held in check by other texts that promote a compassionate ethic based on the Golden Rule: Treat others as you would like them to treat you. Despite manifest failings over the centuries, this has remained the orthodox position.
In claiming that God is the source of all human cruelty, Hitchens and Dawkins ignore some of the darker facets of modern secular society, which has been spectacularly violent because our technology has enabled us to kill people on an unprecedented scale. Not surprisingly, religion has absorbed this belligerence, as became hideously clear with the September 11 atrocities.
But "religious" wars, no matter how modern the tools, always begin as political ones. This happened in Europe during the 17th century, and it has happened today in the Middle East, where the Palestinian national movement has evolved from a leftist-secular to an increasingly Islamically articulated nationalism. Even the actions of so-called jihadists have been inspired by politics, not God. In a study of suicide attacks between 1980 and 2004, American scholar Robert Pape concluded that 95 percent were motivated by a clear strategic objective: to force modern democracies to withdraw from territory the assailants regard as their national homeland.
This aggression does not represent the faith of the majority, however. In recent Gallup polling conducted in 35 Muslim countries, only 7 percent of those questioned thought that the September 11 attacks were justified. Their reasons were entirely political.
Fundamentalism is not conservative. Rather, it is highly innovative -- even heretical -- because it always develops in response to a perceived crisis. In their anxiety, some fundamentalists distort the tradition they are trying to defend. The Pakistani ideologue Abu Ala Maududi (1903-1979) was the first major Muslim thinker to make jihad, signifying “holy war” instead of the traditional meaning of “struggle” or “striving” for self-betterment, a central Islamic duty. Both he and the influential Egyptian thinker Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966) were fully aware that this was extremely controversial but believed it was justified by Western imperialism and the secularizing policies of rulers such as Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser.
All fundamentalism -- whether Jewish, Christian, or Muslim -- is rooted in a profound fear of annihilation. Qutb developed his ideology in the concentration camps where Nasser interred thousands of the Muslim Brothers. History shows that when these groups are attacked, militarily or verbally, they almost invariably become more extreme.

"God Is for the Poor and Ignorant."

No. The new atheists insist vehemently that religion is puerile and irrational, belonging, as Hitchens argues, to “the infancy of our society.” This reflects the broader disappointment among Western intellectuals that humanity, confronted with apparently unlimited choice and prosperity, should still rely on what Karl Marx called the “opiate” of the masses.
But God refuses to be outgrown, even in the United States, the richest country in the world and the most religious country in the developed world. None of the major religions is averse to business; each developed initially in a nascent market economy. The Bible and the Koran may have prohibited usury, but over the centuries Jews, Christians, and Muslims all found ways of getting around this restriction and produced thriving economies. It is one of the great ironies of religious history that Christianity, whose founder taught that it was impossible to serve both God and mammon, should have produced the cultural environment that, as Max Weber suggested in his 1905 book, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, was integral to modern capitalism.
Still, the current financial crisis shows that the religious critique of excessive greed is far from irrelevant. Although not opposed to business, the major faith traditions have tried to counterbalance some of the abuses of capitalism. Eastern religions, such as Buddhism, by means of yoga and other disciplines, try to moderate the aggressive acquisitiveness of the human psyche. The three monotheistic faiths have inveighed against the injustice of unevenly distributed wealth -- a critique that speaks directly to the gap between rich and poor in our society.
To recover from the ill effects of the last year, we may need exactly that conquest of egotism that has always been essential in the quest for the transcendence we call “God.” Religion is not simply a matter of subscribing to a set of obligatory beliefs; it is hard work, requiring a ceaseless effort to get beyond the selfishness that prevents us from achieving a more humane humanity.

"God Is Bad for Women."

Yes. It is unfortunately true that none of the major world religions has been good for women. Even when a tradition began positively for women (as in Christianity and Islam), within a few generations men dragged it back to the old patriarchy. But this is changing. Women in all faiths are challenging their men on the grounds of the egalitarianism that is one of the best characteristics of all these religious traditions.
One of the hallmarks of modernity has been the emancipation of women. But that has meant that in their rebellion against the modern ethos, fundamentalists tend to overemphasize traditional gender roles. Unfortunately, frontal assaults on this patriarchal trend have often proven counterproductive. Whenever "modernizing" governments have tried to ban the veil, for example, women have rushed in ever greater numbers to put it on. In 1935, Shah Muhammad Reza Pahlavi commanded his soldiers to shoot hundreds of unarmed demonstrators who were peacefully protesting against obligatory Western dress in Mashhad, one of Iran’s holiest shrines. Such actions have turned veiling, which was not a universal practice before the modern period, into a symbol of Islamic integrity. Some Muslims today claim that it is not essential to look Western in order to be modern and that while Western fashion often displays wealth and privilege, Islamic dress emphasizes the egalitarianism of the Koran.
In general, any direct Western intervention in gender matters has backfired; it would be better to support indigenous Muslim movements that are agitating for greater opportunities for improved women’s rights in education, the workplace, and politics.
JOHN PHILLIPS/TIME LIFE PICTURES/GETTY IMAGES

"God Is the Enemy of Science."

He doesn’t have to be. Science has become an enemy to fundamentalist Christians who campaign against the teaching of evolution in public schools and stem-cell research because they seem to conflict with biblical teaching.
But their reading of scripture is unprecedentedly literal. Before the modern period, few understood the first chapter of Genesis as an exact account of the origins of life; until the 17th century, theologians insisted that if a biblical text contradicted science, it must be interpreted allegorically.
The conflict with science is symptomatic of a reductive idea of God in the modern West. Ironically, it was the empirical emphasis of modern science that encouraged many to regard God and religious language as fact rather than symbol, thus forcing religion into an overly rational, dogmatic, and alien literalism.
Popular fundamentalism represents a widespread rebellion against modernity, and for Christian fundamentalists, evolution epitomizes everything that is wrong with the modern world. It is regarded less as a scientific theory than a symbol of evil. But this anti-science bias is far less common in Judaism and Islam, where fundamentalist movements have been sparked more by political issues, such as the state of Israel, than doctrinal or scientific ones.

"God Is Incompatible with Democracy."

No. Samuel Huntington foresaw a "clash of civilizations” between the free world and Islam, which, he maintained, was inherently averse to democracy. But at the beginning of the 20th century, nearly all leading Muslim intellectuals were in love with the West and wanted their countries to look just like Britain and France. What has alienated many Muslims from the democratic ideal is not their religion but Western governments’ support of autocratic rulers, such as the Iranian shahs, Saddam Hussein, and Hosni Mubarak, who have denied people basic human and democratic rights.
The 2007 Gallup poll shows that support for democratic freedoms and women's rights is widespread in the Muslim world, and many governments are responding -- albeit haltingly -- to pressures for more political participation. There is, however, resistance to a wholesale adoption of the Western secular model. Many want to see God reflected more clearly in public life, just as a 2006 Gallup poll revealed that 46 percent of Americans believe that God should be the source of legislation.
Nor is sharia law the rigid system that many Westerners deplore. Muslim reformers, such as Sheikh Ali Gomaa and Tariq Ramadan, argue that it must be reviewed in the light of changing social circumstances. A fatwa is not universally binding like a papal edict; rather, it simply expresses the opinion of the mufti who issues it. Muslims can choose which fatwas they adopt and thus participate in a flexible free market of religious thought, just as Americans can choose which church they attend.
Religion may not be the cause of the world’s political problems, but we still need to understand it if we are to solve them. "Whoever took religion seriously!” exclaimed an exasperated U.S. government official after the Iranian Revolution. Had policymakers bothered to research contemporary Shiism, the United States could have avoided serious blunders during that crisis. Religion should be studied with the same academic impartiality and accuracy as the economy, politics, and social customs of a region, so that we learn how religion interacts with political tension, what is counterproductive, and how to avoid giving unnecessary offense.
And study it we'd better, for God is back. And if "he" is perceived in an idolatrous, literal-minded way, we can only expect more dogmatism, rigidity, and religiously articulated violence in the decades ahead.

Want to Know More?

Karen Armstrong has spent the past 25 years writing about the centrality of religion to the human experience. Before her most recent book, The Case for God (New York: Knopf, 2009), she wrote The Bible: A Biography (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2007), an account of the not entirely orthodox way that the Bible came into being.
Over the last few years, the so-called New Atheists have become increasingly vocal about the dangerous shortcomings of religion in such books as Sam Harris' The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason (New York: W.W. Norton, 2004), Richard Dawkins' The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), and Christopher Hitchens' God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Hachette Book Group, 2007).
Recently, some books have sought out a middle ground between atheism and fundamentalism. These include Robert Wright's The Evolution of God (New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2009), which incorporates evolutionary psychology to explain shifts in belief over time, and Economist editors John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge's God is Back (New York: Penguin, 2009), examining the curiously vital relationship between modernity and religion.
Religion scholar John Esposito and polling expert Dalia Mogahed argue in Who Speaks for Islam: What a Billion Muslims Really Think (New York: Gallup Press, 2007), a book based on more than 50,000 interviews in Muslim countries, that Westerners have been getting Islam wrong for decades.

F.P

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/10/19/god_0

Iran's Enemy Is Not America's Friend

On Oct. 18, a suicide bomber in southeastern Iran killed at least 42 people and wounded scores of others in a lethal attack on senior commanders of Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).

BY JAMSHEED K. CHOKSY

The Shiite IRGC doesn't make an especially sympathetic victim -- it has quashed dissent in Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution and is now helping spearhead an autocracy there. The group taking credit for the attack, Jundallah (God's Soldiers), also known as the People's Resistance Movement of Iran, is a Sunni organization. It seeks full rights for Baluch tribesfolk specifically and Sunni Muslims generally either within a majority Shiite Iran or as a separate state. Hence it battles the Shiite clerics, secular autocrats, military, and paramilitary forces who rule Iran with an iron fist, styling itself a coalition of freedom fighters.
But that does not make Iran's Sunni insurgents the good guys, not by a long shot. Their tactics are reminiscent of Hezbollah, Sri Lanka's Tamil Tigers, al Qaeda, and the Taliban plus its local allies in Afghanistan and Pakistan. In fact, they derive inspiration and knowledge from that wider network of terrorist organizations.
Jundallah emerged in 2003, spawned by the Baluchi Autonomist Movement of the 1980s and 1990s. The movement's militants attempted to assassinate President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005 at Zabol along Iran's eastern border with Afghanistan and Pakistan. Three months later, the group killed civilians at nearby Tasuki just before the Iranian New Year. The group took responsibility for fatal car bomb attacks on the IRGC at Zahedan and Saravan in 2007, 2008, and earlier this year. The Jundallah also has attacked Shiite mosques and kidnapped civilians. The Iranian government has retaliated by executing captured militants.
Pishin, the area of the latest attack, like Zabol, Zahedan, Saravan, and other hot spots of Sunni rebellion in Iran, lies along the poorly defined borderland that is a stronghold of armed Baluch tribes -- many with ethnic and ideological links to the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban. Those tribes have traditionally been hostile to all three states and desirous of their own territory. Pakistan's military has confronted rebellious Baluch tribesmen since that country's independence in 1947. A deadly mix of narcotics, weapons, petroleum, and luxury goods flows through the region. Income from that illicit trade has funded separatist militants, religious fundamentalists, and international terrorists for the past three decades.
The Iranian government has charged that the United States, Britain, and even Pakistan are linked to Sunni militant activities within its borders as part of ongoing attempts at regime change. Although accepting Pakistan's official condemnation of Jundallah-planned attacks, Iran's leadership claims the group's leaders enjoy safe haven in Pakistan and insists that Pakistan cooperate in arresting and extraditing them to Iran for trial.
The Iranian charges are not made up from whole cloth, but they are probably still not true. There has long been talk of funding coming to the rebels from the Saudis -- with U.S. knowledge -- as part of tensions between Sunni Arabs and Shiite Iranians stretching as far back as the Arab conquest of Iran in the seventh century to more recent competition for dominance in the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, and Lebanon. Sources of those claims allegedly include Jundallah's top leadership. Moreover, public and private reports indicate that officials in the George W. Bush administration at the very least strongly considered the idea themselves. Both Iranian and Pakistani officials and citizens think that Saudi funding for Baluch rebels in Iran had tacit U.S. consent at that time. Hard-liners against Iran in Washington still raise the option as a means of destabilizing Iran's antagonistic regime.
Indeed, the Barack Obama administration might be tempted to use direct or indirect funding as a means of surrogate warfare to further pressure Iran's government. Violent anti-Iranian Sunni groups like Jundallah have not been placed on the U.S. State Department's terrorism list. And the Obama administration might feel that it's already being punished for the perception that it's funding the rebels and may as well try to reap some of the rewards.
But this would be shortsighted. The basic problem with any strategy to destabilize Iran via Sunni tribal rebellions is that Baluch nationalism spans three countries -- not just Iran, but also Afghanistan and Pakistan. Supporting a pan-Baluchistan movement would only worsen societal instability and national fragmentation in West Asia and South Asia.
Militant groups, especially ones linked to ethnic and religious notions, have brought little but trouble to the world. It is important to recall the obvious: The United States and its partners once supported the Taliban materially because they were battling the Soviets and Russians. The United States shouldn't repeat the mistake, fooling itself that Sunni Baluch nationalists will be better disposed toward the West just because they are now fighting a common foe in the Iranian government.
Yes, there might be the temptation to exert pressure, via internal strife, on Ahmadinejad's autocratic regime for eliciting nuclear and international compromises. But Iran's Sunni insurgency isn't just bad news for the IRCG -- it's also bad news for the Middle East, Asia, and the United States. Ultimately, therefore, whether or not the Iranian regime's charges of foreign interference are accurate, no country should welcome or aid an insurgency in eastern Iran. NGOs for terrorism really are harder to subdue than nation-states supporting such activities.

F.P

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2009/10/20/irans_enemy_is_not_americas_friend?page=full

Iran's evasive blame game

Massoumeh Torfeh

The phobia of foreign intrigue is never far away in the Islamic Republic. Iran seems to blame all its internal problems on "the intelligence services" of the UK and US, and this time we have an additional culprit: Pakistan. Whether it is the peaceful post-presidential-election demonstrations of June or Sunday's bombing in the south-eastern province of Sistan-Baluchistan, they are all "organised from abroad", according to officials.
The Revolutionary Guards chief General Mohammad Ali Jafari said on Monday that the intelligence services of US, UK and Pakistan had been behind the bombing in Sistan-Baluchistan that killed 42, including six Revolutionary Guards commanders. Jafari promised revenge: "We shall choose an appropriate time for retaliation," he said. In a veiled threat, he added it would not be difficult for any intelligence agency "to mount an attack like that anywhere". President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad also blamed Pakistan and promised retaliation against the perpetrators.
However, this seemed like an easy response to the lingering ethno-religious problems in the province, where the Baluchi Sunni minority feel they are treated as second-class citizens. They have often accused the government of ignoring their mounting economic and social deprivation. Outspoken members of the Baluchi community are often arrested and treated harshly in Revolutionary Guard prisons.
There have been similar attacks in the past claimed by the Jundallah organisation, who claim to be fighting against political oppression in the province and often mount attacks when a member of their tribe is captured by Revolutionary Guards. A similar attack in February 2007 killed 11, including Revolutionary Guards. In May this year a bomb exploded at a mosque in the provincial capital, Zahedan, killing 19. So how Iran's parliamentary speaker Ali Larijani could blame the US for the attack is unclear. The US, British and Pakistani governments have all rejected the accusations.
Iran seems to be in the habit of heaping blame on the US and Britain without providing evidence. Four months on from the disputed June elections, the leaders of three opposition parties remain in the notorious Evin prison accused of being involved in sabotage "orchestrated by the US and Britain".
Today, long jail sentences were imposed on two journalists who took part in the demonstrations, the Iranian-American academic Kian Tajbakhsh (12 years), and Masoud Bastani, a young journalist (six years). Opposition leaders such as Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mohammad Khatami are repeatedly accused of "collaborating with foreigners", and there are calls for their being condemned for treason. There are fresh demands today for the prosecution of Mousavi. Not a shred of evidence is offered. Documents are being fabricated against them including crimes that could carry the death penalty. Some have been sentenced to death and many others live under the daily threat of such pronouncements.
The problem is compounded when the international community remains relatively silent on these human rights abuses while entering into nuclear negotiations. Yet the Islamic Republic plays its double act again. It agrees to a percentage of Iran's uranium being enriched in France and Russia and it allows the EU foreign policy chief, Javier Solana, to announce the agreement, only to deny it two weeks later. Then it announces it was only interested in the purchase of new enriched uranium, adding that France has been cut out of the deal because it has "foregone its commitments".
The Iranian delegation to Vienna consisted of one adviser, two technical officials and Iran's representative at IAEA, none of whom are capable of making any commitments on what the international community is hoping to achieve: a timetable for the gradual reduction in nuclear enrichment. Official media in Iran reported that the Vienna meeting was solely for the "purchase" of enriched uranium.
The international community is being subjected once again to Iran's delaying tactics. Ahmadinejad boasted at home that Iran was victorious at the Geneva talks, using the episode to boost for his damaged presidential legitimacy. It may benefit Iran to slow down enrichment and postpone weapons production, so as to let the talks continue, and allow the question of internal repression to gradually fade away as international diplomats pat Iran on the back.
But one question will continue to be posed: whether or not a deal is reached with Iran, what are the ramifications of dealing with the Islamic Republic? Experience shows that Iran will not change its ways and sanctions are a non-starter, as is military action. However, there is one path that may prove more effective.
Putting relentless international pressure on Iran for its serious abuse of human rights and questioning the legitimacy of Ahmadinejad's presidency may be both more appropriate and more effective than other paths at present. Contrary to Iran's constitution, the regime has consistently abused religious and minority rights, it has blocked all opposition activity, created a total media blackout, used excessive police force, made arbitrary arrests, tortured and abused inmates, fabricated evidence against opposition, and continued with juvenile executions. Perhaps questioning today's long jail sentences against two journalists could be a start.
The warning by the UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon in a report on 15 October about these violations of human rights was ignored by the international community and by those diplomats who continue to pat Iran on its back for its broken promises.

Guardian CIF

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/oct/20/iran-baluchistan-bombing-ahmadinejad

ANALYSIS - Iran bombing hurts image of Revolutionary Guards

By Alistair Lyon,

Special Correspondent
BEIRUT (Reuters) - Iranian leaders have blamed foreign foes for a suicide bombing by Sunni militants, masking their shock at an attack that killed 42 people and dented the prestige of the increasingly powerful Revolutionary Guards.
Iranian leaders, already under international pressure over their nuclear policy and facing domestic discontent over a disputed June election, have sworn revenge for Sunday's attack, which they blamed on the United States, Britain and Pakistan.
"It damages the Revolutionary Guards because people will ask: how can people who can't look after themselves take care of the country's security?" said London-based analyst Baqer Moin.
Guards commander Mohammad Ali Jafari said on Monday Iran had documents indicating direct ties between Jundollah and U.S., British and, "unfortunately", Pakistani spy agencies.
"Behind this scene are the American and British intelligence apparatus, and there will have to be retaliatory measures to punish them," the ISNA news agency quoted him as saying.
The bombing, the deadliest in years, occurred in the poor and neglected southeastern province of Sistan-Baluchistan, a conduit for smugglers and drug traders near the Pakistan border.
The deputy head of the Guards ground forces was among those killed in the blast, which state media said was claimed by the rebel Sunni Jundollah group, active locally since 2004-5.
The Revolutionary Guards, set up after the 1979 Islamic revolution, have grown over the past 30 years into a potent force with military, political, social and economic interests.
Its influence has expanded since hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected in 2005. The Guards and the Basij religious militia they control, led efforts to quell public protests after Ahmadinejad's disputed re-election in June.
FEEBLE CONTROL
A study published on Monday by the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment said Jundollah's existence highlighted precarious security and feeble government control in the region.
"It also shows the limits to Islamic unity within the Islamic Republic itself. This deals a blow to the credentials of the revolution and the international revolutionary aspects of (the late Ayatollah Ruhollah) Khomeini's doctrine," it said.
Iran's harsh accusations -- the pro-government Kayhan daily said Israel's Mossad spy agency was behind the attack -- disguised consternation among the leadership, Moin argued. "They have to find a foreign perpetrator to excuse themselves."
The United States, Britain and Pakistan denied any hand in the bombing, which followed a blast that killed 25 people in a Shi'ite mosque in the provincial capital Zahedan in May.
At least 18 people accused of involvement in that attack or jailed as suspected members of Jundollah were later hanged.
"The great paradox is that Iran, which has been active in support of different Islamist movements outside her own territory after the revolution, is now faced with serious armed opposition within her own borders," the Norwegian study said.
Several analysts say Jundollah, believed to be motivated partly by Baluch nationalism and partly by an austere brand of Sunni Islamic militancy, has had links in the past with the Taliban and Pakistan's ISI intelligence service.
Most say there is no evidence it is connected to al Qaeda, but suggest it may get help from other sympathisers.
"Are there forces in Pakistan who are anti-Shi'ite and anti-Iranian supporting them?" Moin asked. "Are there Wahhabi or Salafi groups in the Gulf supporting them because they think the Shi'ite government in Iran is suppressing the Sunnis?"
COVERT BACKING?
He did not discount Iran's claims that Jundollah received U.S. backing as part of clandestine efforts to subvert Iran during former President George W. Bush's administration.
Iran itself may have inadvertently aided Jundollah, according to Lieutenant General Hadi Khan, who was Afghanistan's deputy interior minister for security from 2006 to 2008.
He told the Jamestown Foundation's Terrorism Monitor last month that Iran had at one point helped arm Taliban forces fighting U.S. troops in neighbouring Afghanistan, despite Tehran's ideological aversion to the Sunni Taliban militants, and that some Iranian weapons had ended up in Jundollah hands.
"(Iran) wanted to keep NATO forces occupied in southern Afghanistan, but the result was now both Taliban and NATO on their border, and Jundollah attacking from (Afghanistan's) Zabul province in Pakistani Baluchistan," Khan said.
Iran denies supplying any weapons to the Taliban.
Khan, who said different Iranian institutions often pursued contradictory policies, described Jundollah as operating freely in the ethnic Baluch regions of Afghanistan, Iran and Pakistan.
"When Jundollah started making some attacks against Iranian security forces, Iran realised that covert support of the Taliban was not in their interest," the former official said.
Moin suggested that the latest bombing might prompt Tehran to review the way it handles the troubled southeastern province.
"It may force them to think hard and have a more flexible strategy in that area, because it has really affected the ability of the Revolutionary Guards to look after themselves, let alone all the other issues," he said.

(Additional reporting by William Maclean in London; Editing by Samia Nakhoul)

Reuters India

http://in.reuters.com/article/worldNews/idINIndia-43269320091019

Suicide attack on Iran's Revolutionary Guard leaves 42 dead

Video grab of the meeting of the elite Revolutionary Guards minutes before the attack

October 19, 2009

From The Times
Iran vowed revenge on Britain and the US yesterday after blaming them for a devastating suicide attack against the elite Revolutionary Guards that killed 42 people, including six senior commanders.
The bombing, at a Revolutionary Guards gathering in the turbulent southeast of the country, was the worst attack on the powerful unit in recent years. Responsibility was swiftly claimed by Jundallah, a militant Sunni group that has regularly attacked the Guards in its battle against the Government and the Shia majority. It is thought to operate across the lawless border with Pakistan.
Last night Islamabad’s Ambassador to Tehran was summoned to the Iranian Foreign Ministry, which protested against “the use of Pakistani territory by the terrorists” against Iran. But the harshest words were reserved for the US and Britain, which Tehran accused of backing Jundallah in an attempt to overthrow the Islamic regime. The Guards blamed the bombing on “terrorists” backed by “the Great Satan America and its ally Britain”.
An official military statement added: “Not in the distant future we will take revenge. There is no doubt that this savage and inhuman act falls within the Satanic strategy of the foreigners and enemies of the regime, who are trying to break the unity among the Shias and Sunnis.”
Iranian state television quoted “informed sources” who said that the British Government was directly involved in the attack by “organising, supplying equipment and employing professional terrorists”.
The accusations increased tensions with the West a day before six-party talks in Vienna today over Iran’s nuclear programme. In Geneva this month Iran agreed in principle to a deal in which most of its low-enriched uranium stockpiles would be transferred overseas for further processing — a compromise that the West hopes will help to thwart the diversion of nuclear fuel to a suspected weapons programme. A failure to sign off on the details of that deal today would question Iran’s sincerity to address international concerns.
President Ahmadinejad of Iran warned of swift retribution against those who carried out the attack. “I am ordering the relevant officials to identify quickly the elements of this terrorist crime and hand them over to the judiciary,” he said.
Ali Larijani, the parliament’s hardline Speaker, accused the US of ordering the bombing and reneging on its new policy of engagement with Tehran. “Mr Obama has said he will extend his hand towards Iran, but with this terrorist action he has burnt his hand,” he said.
Britain and the US firmly denounced the attack and the claims of their involvement. “We reject in the strongest terms possible the assertions that this has anything to do with the UK,” a spokesman for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office said. The State Department in Washington added: “Reports of alleged US involvement are completely false.”
The attack was a serious blow for the Guards at a national as well as a local level. The dead reportedly included the deputy commander of the Guards’ ground force, General Noor Ali Shoushtari, as well as a chief provincial Guard commander for Sistan-Baluchistan province, Rajab Ali Mohammadzadeh. General Shoushtari was also a senior official of the powerful al-Quds force, an elite intelligence unit within the Guards.
The commanders were travelling to a meeting in the city of Pishin, near the border with Baluchistan province in Pakistan when an attacker blew himself up next to their convoy.
Jundallah — meaning “Soldiers of God” — has waged a low-level insurgency, carrying out bombings and kidnappings, including an attack in February 2007 that killed 11 members of the Guard near Zehedan. Iran has resisted taking major military action against the group for fear of stirring up a ShiaSunni battle that could draw in Sunni militants, including al-Qaeda, particularly from neighbouring Pakistan.
Iran has accused Britain and the US of funding and backing Jundallah. Reports have surfaced in recent years from anonymous CIA sources who say that money is channelled to the group to sow discontent in Iran. Britain and the US have officially denied involvement in such activity.



Times Online

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/middle_east/article6879850.ece

Iran Guard Commanders Are Killed in Bombings

By MICHAEL SLACKMAN

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia — At least five commanders of Iran’s elite Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps were killed and dozens of others left dead and injured in two terrorist bombings in the restive region of the nation’s southeastern frontier with Pakistan, according to multiple Iranian state news agencies.
The coordinated attacks appeared to mark an escalation in hostilities between Iran’s leadership and one of the nation’s many disgruntled ethnic and religious minorities, in this case the Baluchis. The southeast region, Sistan-Baluchistan, has been the scene of terrorist attacks in the past, and in April the government put the Guards Corps in control of security there to try to stop the escalating violence.
Iranian officials have accused foreign enemies of supporting the terrorist insurgents and repeated that charge Sunday, a day before Iran is set to meet for another round of sensitive talks on its nuclear program with several Western countries.
“There is no doubt that this violent and inhumane act was part of the strategy of foreigners and enemies of the regime and the revolution to destroy unity between Shias and Sunnis and create divisions among the unified ranks of the great Iranian people,” said a statement issued by the Revolutionary Guards through the official IRNA news service.
A terrorist group calling itself Jundallah — or Soldiers of God — took responsibility for the attacks, according to the state-owned Press TV. The group is made up of ethnic Baluchis, who can also be found in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and has taken credit for other attacks in the region in recent years.
The Jundallah has ties across the border into Pakistan, and Iranian officials say it has been encouraged, financed and armed by the United States.
In a brief statement on Sunday, the United States condemned the suicide bombing and denied it had anything to do with it. “We condemn this act of terrorism and mourn the loss of innocent lives. Reports of alleged U.S. involvement are completely false,” said Ian Kelly, U.S. State Department spokesman.
The bombers struck early Sunday as the Guards prepared to bring together leaders of the region’s Shiite and Sunni Muslim communities to try to reconcile differences.
Iran is a nation of about 70 million people. More than half are Persians, with the remainder comprising ethnic groups, like the Baluchis of Sistan-Baluchistan or the Arabs of Khuzestan, both of which are Sunni Muslims. Many ethnic and religious groups have complained of discrimination in areas like education and employment. But in the south, those complaints have spawned some violent protests.
“With regards to Sistan-Baluchistan area, there is an ethnic and sectarian nature to the issue,” said Mustafa El Labbad, director of the East Center for Regional and Strategic Studies in Cairo, Egypt. “There is the Baluchi versus Persian, and there is Sunni versus Shiite. It also lies on the border with Pakistan, which is not totally secured — weapons can come through. So there is a very explosive blend there.”
The meeting Sunday was to be held in the city of Pisheen to try to improve the dialogue among the different communities, according to the Iranian news reports. In one attack, a suicide bomber wearing a military uniform and an explosive belt entered a mosque where guard commanders were organizing a reconciliation meeting between local Sunni and Shiite Muslim leaders, according to the semi-official ILNA news service.
A second attack took place on a road in the same area when a car carrying a group of Guards members was attacked and bombed, according to multiple state news agencies. According to the Fars News Agency, which is affiliated with the Guards, those killed included the lieutenant commander of ground forces, Brigadier General Nourali Shoushtari, as well as the commanders of Sistan and Baluchistan province, the Iranshahr Corps, the Sarbaz Corps and the Amiralmoemenin Brigade.
“The commanders had traveled to the southeastern province to provide the ground for the ‘Shiite-Sunni Tribes’ Solidarity Conference,” Fars reported.
Though the attacks come in the context of local issues, they also come at a time when the Guards have emerged as the most powerful political, social and economic bloc in the nation, eclipsing all others, from the clergy to the conservatives. In the aftermath of Iran’s contested presidential election, the Guards took control of national security, overseeing a violent crackdown on protests as well as mass arrests of journalists, former officials, academics and ordinary protestors.
In this context, Mr. Labbad said, an attack on the Guard — no matter the motivation — has symbolic resonance across the nation and the world. “It is designed to affect the image of Iran,” Mr. Labbad said. “Iran now looks like a state that is not secure. It is secure, but it has the image of being internally unstable.”
Iranian officials are slated to meet Monday in Vienna with officials of several countries to discuss an accord reached recently in Geneva to ship most of Iran’s publicly declared stockpile of lightly enriched uranium to Russia, where it would be further enriched. It would then be returned to Iran, where it would fuel a research reactor in Tehran.
The negotiations are part of a longstanding effort by the West to try to halt Iran’s nuclear program, which many in the West say is geared toward producing weapons. Iran says the program is designed to generate energy.
Mona el-Naggar contributed reporting from Riyadh.

NYT

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/19/world/middleeast/19iran.html?_r=1

Iran blames west for deadly suicide bombing

Robert Tait

Sunday 18 October 2009 19.35 BST

Iran vows revenge after blast kills six Revolutionary Guards commanders and 37 others in Sistan-Baluchistan province.

Iran's Revolutionary Guards today vowed to take revenge after blaming Britain and the US for a suicide bombing that killed six of its commanders and 37 others in one of the country's most unstable provinces.
The attack, which killed the deputy commander of the guard's ground forces, General Noor Ali Shooshtari, and Rajab Ali Mohammadzadeh, the provincial commander for Sistan-Baluchistan, inflicted Iran's worst military casualties in years and raised questions of intelligence and security failures in a region long blighted by a violent Sunni insurgency.
A Sunni group, Jundallah ("soldiers of God"), claimed responsibility and said it was a response to "the constant crime of the regime in Baluchistan". It named the bomber as Abdol Vahed Mohammadi Saravani.
Iranian media said the attacker had detonated a bomb belt as Revolutionary Guard commanders arrived for a meeting with tribal elders in a sports hall in Pishin, near Iran's frontier with Pakistan. It was the latest in a series of gatherings meant to foster unity in Sistan-Baluchistan, Iran's poorest province, after a spate of attacks.
Those caught in the explosion had to be taken to hospitals more than 150 miles away because Pishin lacked proper medical facilities. Some are understood to have died en route.
The Revolutionary Guards condemned the bombing as the work of "terrorists" supported by "the great Satan America and its ally Britain", and promised to respond.
"Not in the distant future we will take revenge … and Baluchis will clear this region from terrorists and criminals," read a statement released to the semi-official Fars news agency.
The statement echoed another call for revenge by the Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, a former guard. "The criminals will soon get the response for their anti-human crimes," the official news agency IRNA quoted him as saying.
State television cited an "informed source" as saying that Britain was to blame "by organising, supplying equipment and employing professional terrorists".
A US state department spokesman, Ian Kelly, dismissed allegations of American involvement as "completely false", adding: "We condemn this act of terrorism and mourn the loss of innocent lives."
Over the last five years it has become a standard Iranian position that the US-British alliance is a source of unrest in Sistan-Baluchistan and other provinces. Officials point to the presence of Nato forces in neighbouring Afghanistan as a launchpad for Anglo-American interference.
While Iran has blamed Britain and the US for previous attacks on its territory, the latest allegation came as negotiations were due to resume in Vienna over its nuclear programme, which western governments fear may be designed to build an atomic bomb.
Iranian officials have previously linked Jundallah with al-Qaida, although other sources have suggested the group may have connections with the Pakistani Taliban. In Tehran, the Iranian foreign minister summoned the Pakistani charge d'affaires to complain.
The attack appeared to be a direct challenge to the Revolutionary Guards, who took over direct responsibility for Sistan-Baluchistan's security last April. The guards have taken an increasingly prominent role in Iranian affairs in recent times under the auspices of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
Jundallah has taken up arms on behalf of Sistan-Baluchistan's Sunni Baluch population, which it says suffers discrimination at the hands of Iran's Shia rulers. Commanded by Abdolmalek Rigi, the group claims to have killed more than 400 Iranian troops during its insurgency.
It claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing that killed 25 people at a Shia mosque in Zahedan, Sistan-Baluchistan's provincial capital, last May. The authorities responded by hanging 13 group members they said had been involved.
Sistan-Baluchistan lies on a major drug transit route from Afghanistan. Nearly 4,000 Iranian security officers are believed to have been killed in clashes with smugglers since 1979.

Guardian

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/18/iran-suicide-bomb-revenge-vow/print

Revolutionary Guard commanders killed in Iran bomb

By ALI AKBAR DAREINI and NASSER KARIMI

The Associated Press Sunday,

October 18, 2009; 9:28 AM

TEHRAN, Iran -- A suicide bomber killed five senior commanders of the elite Revolutionary Guard and at least 26 others in an area of southeastern Iran that has been at the center of a simmering Sunni insurgency, state media reported.
The official IRNA news agency said the dead included the deputy commander of the Guard's ground force, Gen. Noor Ali Shooshtari, as well as a chief provincial Guard commander for the area, Rajab Ali Mohammadzadeh. The other dead were Guard members or local tribal leaders. More than two dozen others were wounded, state radio reported.
The commanders were on their way to a meeting with local tribal leaders in the Pishin district near Iran's border with Pakistan when an attacker with explosives around his waist blew himself up, IRNA said. The explosion occurred at the entrance of a sports complex where the meeting was to be held.
Top provincial prosecutor Mohammad Marzieh was quoted by the semi-official ISNA news agency as saying that a militant group from Iran's Sunni Muslim minority called Jundallah, or Soldiers of God, claimed responsibility.
The region in Iran's southeast has been the focus of violent attacks by Jundallah, which has waged a low-level insurgency in recent years. The group accuses Iran's Shiite-dominated government of persecution and has carried out attacks against the Revolutionary Guard and Shiite targets in the southeast.
Iranian officials have accused Jundallah of receiving support from al-Qaida and the Taliban in neighboring Pakistan, though some analysts who have studied the group dispute such a link.
Jundallah's campaign is one of several small-scale ethnic and religious insurgencies in Iran that have fueled sporadic and sometimes deadly attacks in recent years - though none have amounted to a serious threat to the government.
The attack does raise questions about Iran's grip on a sensitive border region beset by criminal gangs and drug smuggling.
The latest violence, a symptom of the tension between Iran's majority Shiites and impoverished minority Sunnis in the southeast, appeared to have no connection with the street unrest triggered by the dispute over President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's re-election in June.
Ahmadinejad vowed to strike back at those behind Sunday's attack, the official IRNA news agency reported.
"The criminals will soon get the response for their anti-human crimes," IRNA quoted him as saying. Ahmadinejad also accused unspecified foreigners of involvement.
Iranian officials have often raised concerns that the United States might try to incite members of Iran's many ethnic and religious minorities against the Shiite-led government, which is dominated by ethnic Persians.
In Washington, State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said the United States condemned what he called an "act of terrorism." Reports of alleged U.S. involvement are "completely false," he said.
The Guard commanders targeted Sunday were heading to a meeting with local tribal leaders to promote unity between the Shiite and Sunni Muslim communities.
In April, Iran increased security in Sistan-Baluchistan Province, at the center of the tension, by placing it under the command of the Guard, which took over from local police forces.
The 120,000-strong Revolutionary Guard controls Iran's missile program and has its own ground, naval and air units.
Iran's parliamentary speaker, Ali Larijani, condemned the assassination of the Guard commanders, saying the bombing was aimed at disrupting security in southeastern Iran.
"We express our condolences for their martyrdom. ... The intention of the terrorists was definitely to disrupt security in Sistan-Baluchistan Province," Larijani told an open session of the parliament broadcast live on state radio.
In May, Jundallah claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing at a Shiite mosque that killed 25 people in Zahedan, the capital of Iran's Sistan-Baluchistan province, which has witnessed some of Jundallah's worst attacks. Thirteen members of the faction were convicted in the attack and hanged in July.
Jundallah is made up of Sunnis from the Baluchi ethnic minority, which can also be found in Pakistan and Afghanistan.
The group has carried out bombings, kidnappings and other attacks against Iranian soldiers and other forces in recent years, including a car bombing in February 2007 that killed 11 members of the Revolutionary Guard near Zahedan.
Jundallah also claimed responsibility for the December 2006 kidnapping of seven Iranian soldiers in the Zahedan area. It threatened to kill them unless members of the group in Iranian prisons were released. The seven were released a month later, apparently after negotiations through tribal mediators.
Despite Iran's claims of an al-Qaida link, Chris Zambelis, a Washington-based risk management consultant who has studied Jundallah, said in a recent article that there is no evidence al-Qaida is supporting the group. He does note, however, that the group has begun to use the kinds of suicide bombings associated with the global terror network.
He said Jundallah likely looks to Baluchi insurgents in Pakistan as a source of inspiration and possibly material support. Its ties to the Taliban based in Pakistani Baluchistan are less clear, but Zambelis said any connections are probably limited to smuggling between the two countries.
"Jundallah's contacts with the Taliban are most likely based on jointly profiting from the illicit trade and smuggling as opposed to ideology," Zambelis wrote in the July issue of West Point's CTC Sentinel

Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/10/18/AR2009101800596.html?hpid%3Dtopnews&sub=AR