Sunday, January 31, 2010

ANALYSIS: Anti-Baloch clique? — II


Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur

The Kalat state’s forced merger with Pakistan ended 300 years of independent and semi-independent Baloch state. The sovereignty and will of the people of Balochistan was temporarily subverted. It was an epoch making event in the history of the Baloch people. Colonialism, be it of Iran, Afghanistan, Britain or Pakistan, has played the most important role in moulding the national consciousness that had been present in formative shape all through their history but had remained latent. This consciousness acquired at a bitter price is now becoming the determining factor in their struggle to be the masters of their destiny.Not willing to allow the Baloch a chance to recuperate and reorganise the second equally unjust and illegal assault on Kalat was carried out on October 6, 1958, once again on false pretences and premises. Nawab Nauroz Khan Zarakzai, a septuagenarian, took up arms and led the Baloch resistance. As in 1948, a wave of repression and reign of terror was let loose all over Balochistan. Political leaders and activists were incarcerated in the notorious ‘Kulli camps’ in the Quetta cantonment. The suppression of rights by force created abiding antagonism and animosity.On May 19, 1959, Nawab Nauroz Khan along with his fighters surrendered near Anari Mountain after the authorities promised acceptance of their demands on the Quran. Instead they were shifted to the Quetta cantonment and tried by a special military court and sentenced on July 7, 1960. The death sentences were carried out simultaneously on the July 15, 1960, at Sukkur and Hyderabad Central Jails.For the Baloch, Nawab Nauroz Khan and the seven martyrs symbolise the determination to not to bow to unjust and brutal assaults on their freedom and to resist regardless of the price that has to be paid for this honourable path. Emulating them is the dream of every politically conscious Baloch.The 60s decade saw sporadic Baloch resistance led by Mir Sher Mohammad Marri, Ali Mohammad Mengal and others. The dissolution of One-Unit and 1970 elections gave a glimmer of hope that the Baloch would get a chance of restricted self-rule. But the subsequent illegal and unjust dismissal of Ataullah Mengal’s government in February 1973 and the incarceration of Baloch leaders by ZA Bhutto-led PPP government shattered those hopes.This injustice naturally led to a resistance by the Baloch and large-scale military operations against them were launched on May 21, 1973, with Mawand in Marri area being occupied. The 1973-77 conflict resulted in enormous sufferings of the Baloch population in the province; forcing thousands of Marris and other Baloch to seek shelter in Afghanistan. It was during this period that the steel of the Baloch mettle was really tempered and for the first time they felt confident that they could take on the might of the state and survive to fight another day. This struggle blazed a path for the future generations and without it probably the flame of the Baloch struggle may have been extinguished forever.During the musical chairs democracy period the main players were too busy undermining each other and the Baloch were left alone. Then Musharraf unleashed a war of terror against the Baloch, which resulted in the death of Nawab Akbar Khan Bugti, Nawabzada Balach Khan Marri and hundreds of other innocent people. The plague of missing persons visited once again with a vengeance. Recently mass unmarked graves of victims of Indian atrocities were discovered in Kashmir. One wonders if ever such graves, for they certainly exist, will be found here. His era was the era of pseudo mega-projects, brutal mega-operations and super mega sufferings for the Baloch people. The present irreconcilable antagonisms are the result of the protracted and indiscriminate use of force against the Baloch.The PPP government has been long on promises and short on positive action. The much-trumpeted Balochistan package was rightly termed as a ‘band-aid on a bullet wound’ by Alia Amirali Sahiba, a student activist of QAU. The three-day joint session of parliament was expected to discuss the formulated proposals with expectations of opening a new chapter in the post-independence history of Balochistan. But the keenness or lack of it shown by the parliamentarians in this supposedly important and historic package belies the claims that this government or the state is or will ever be sincere in solving the problems faced by the Baloch people.A report released by Pildat said that out of total 438 MPs — 338 in the National Assembly and 100 in Senate — only 38 (nine percent) members spoke during this joint session. This pathetic indifference itself speaks volume about the interest that the government and parliament take in solving the problems. Unsurprisingly the 20 months of PPP rule have been as barren for the Baloch as were the nine years of Musharraf.The president cannot have the right to claim of serving the Baloch if the Sindh Chief Minister Qaim Ali Shah does not even know who ordered the Rangers’ action against the Baloch of Lyari. And yet they tire not of posing as the champions of Baloch problems. So much so that the president claims that he is under threat from the anti-Baloch clique, which would be committing an unpardonable blunder if it punished him for an act he is not even remotely guilty of.The rulers should understand that lip service does not soothe the wounds caused by decades of injuries and injustices. Difficult decisions are needed to solve the problems and win the hearts of the justifiably alienated Baloch. Obviously, no political party or individual has the will to take these decisions because they can only do so at the greatest risk to their own existence and none here would be willing to go to that extreme for the children of lesser gods.The establishment’s anti-Baloch policy is too entrenched, too consolidated and too committed to allow far-reaching measures to be endorsed and implemented; measures that may bring some relief for the people. Because those who have been calling the shots here — call them the anti-Baloch clique or the establishment — will not consent to even the most basic justified demands of the return of missing people, stopping construction of cantonments, military airports and naval ports, withdrawal of the army, a halt to military operations, rights over resources and the reining in of the FC because their financial, commercial and imaginary strategic interests will be surely hurt by any such roll back in Balochistan.You do not have to be a rocket scientist to understand that the establishment, guided by its self-preservation instinct, had to be anti-Baloch, anti-Sindhi anti-Pashtun and anti-Bengali since partition because without erasing the historical national consciousness and identities they could not hope to impose their ideology of Pakistaniat. However, they overlooked the fact that millenniums old consciousness and identities cannot be easily obliterated and replaced; little wonder that they have miserably failed to either forge or impose a new identity. Certainly the Baloch resistance has played a pivotal role in thwarting their designs.


Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur has an association with the Baloch rights movement going back to the early 1970s. He can be contacted at mmatalpur@gmail.com

Daily Times

Balochistan’s unattended IDP crisis


Malik Siraj Akbar

The government of Pervez Musharraf not only created an IDP (internally displaced persons) crisis in Balochistan, it also very dexterously kept the whole country in oblivion about it. Limited and restricted information was leaked about the fate of around 100,000 Baloch IDPs who were driven out of their homes during the military operation carried out in Marri and Bugti tribal areas. The dictator-sponsored humanitarian catastrophe was deplorable but officially denying accesses to national and international humanitarian groups to grapple with the IDP crisis in Balochistan was criminal.The first batch of IDPs from Dera Bugti reached the neighbouring districts of Naseerabad and Jaffarabad soon after the attack by paramilitary forces on the fort of Nawab Mohammad Akbar Khan Bugti on March 17, 2005. An incident billed by the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan (HRCP) as “extra judicial killing of non-combatants”, the March 17 assault killed 43 people, including 19 men and three women from the minority Hindu community. More people abandoned their homes as the military operation escalated in the Marri and Bugti tribal areas until it reached its culmination with the killing of Nawab Bugti on August 26, 2006.The government refuted media statements about the launching of a military operation in the oil-and-gas-rich region. It also brushed aside the impression that a humanitarian disaster was in the offing after the displacement of hundreds of families. Lies about the grave situation of Baloch IDPs were debunked only after an internal assessment report prepared by the UN International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) was leaked in July-August 2006 to the media. According to this report, the displaced persons, mostly women (26,000) and children (33,000) were living in makeshift camps without adequate shelter in Jaffarabad, Naseerabad, Quetta, Sibi and Bolan districts. The UNICEF report said that 28 percent of five-year-old children were acutely malnourished, and more than 6.0 percent were in a state of “severe acute malnourishment”, with their survival dependent on receiving immediate medical attention. Over 80 percent of deaths among those surveyed were among children under five.The UNICEF report came as an indictment to the Musharraf regime and gave currency to Baloch nationalists’ repeated stance that the military operation had caused a dire IDP crisis in the province that needed to be urgently tackled. On the other hand, the military junta was so incensed that not only did it ask the UNICEF chief to leave the country but also put pressure on UN officials to back out from the report they had prepared about Baloch IDPs.For instance, investigative journalist Ziad Zafar, while writing in Newsline in June 2007, quoted a senior official of the UN Human Rights Council saying that they had already made a “big mistake” by talking to the press earlier. “We will never know how many lives were lost because of it. We cannot make that mistake again.” The official went further and told the journalist: “Forget that you are a journalist. If, as a human being, you care at all about those who are suffering, you will not publish this report [about the IDPs]. I implore you: please do not aggravate the situation. It is already very precarious.” As the UNICEF report disclosed the plight of the IDPs of Balochistan, the government in Islamabad as well as in Quetta insisted that no such thing existed in the province. Instead, the government termed the UNICEF report as exaggerated. Most of the displaced citizens, claimed the government, had returned to their homes as peace had supposedly returned to the area after the killing of Nawab Bugti and the dismantling of the fugitive camps.After intense pressure from various NGOs, the government agreed to allow access to the UN agencies to operate in the area to help the displaced people. Nonetheless, this was an unconditional permission. The UN agencies were asked to help the people under official surveillance and without letting the media know about such relief operations.The UN, finally on December 21, 2006, managed to initiate its million dollar aid package for the Baloch IDPs, which included setting up 57 feeding centres. But this aid project was soon disbanded after a UN official told the media that the IDPs should have been approached with help much earlier. This was seen as a violation of the so-called terms and conditions brokered between the government and the UN that no details of the operations would be provided to the media. Thus the UN was asked to pull out of Balochistan as a ‘punishment’ for telling the media that more assistance for the IDPs was required. Similar treatment was meted out to the Edhi Foundation of Pakistan which, after the completion of the first phase of its operations, made the same blunder and informed the press that it was about to begin the second phase of relief operations for the Baloch IDPs. The government also ordered the Edhi Foundation never to return to the ‘sensitive region’ without providing any convincing reasons.There are obvious reasons for the country’s security establishment to create obstacles for aid workers. The grave violations of human rights during the military operation in Balochistan are likely to be exposed to the international community once they are granted access to Balochistan’s conflict zones.Three years down the line, nothing has changed for the Baloch IDPs. The military and the elected governments have both made every possible effort to prevent aid workers to assist the Baloch IDPs. While extraordinary assistance was provided to the victims of the earthquake in Kashmir and the recent IDP crisis in Pakhtunkhwa province, the federal government has still not officially acknowledged the Baloch IDP crisis. Currently, there is not a single officially recognised IDP camp in the province while the displaced people are spread in Balochistan’s Naseerabad, Jaffarabad, Sibi and Bolan districts. In Sindh, they have gone to Jacobabad, Sukkur, Dadu and Karachi, while many others are languishing in Dera Ghazi Khan and Rajanpur districts of Punjab.For the first time, the government announced Rs 1 billion for the rehabilitation of Bugti IDPs in the Aghaz-e-Haqooq-e-Balochistan Package. It was too little too late. Before the government could begin work on the rehabilitation of the IDPs, a new deadly conflict broke out between the supporters of two grandsons of late Nawab Akbar Bugti — Mir Aali and Shahzain Bugti — as was anticipated by political gurus. Instigated a week ago, the armed clash between the Bugti cousins being fought for the control of 2,000 acre land has killed around 20 people so far. With the previously displaced people still unsettled, the fresh conflict is forcing hundreds of neutral people, mainly from the Khosa tribe, to leave their homes and take shelter in safer places.The IDP situation in Balochistan was initiated by antagonistic polices of the previous government, while this time the issue is being perpetuated by those who want to divide and rule in the resource rich Balochistan province. At the end of the day, it is the poor masses who suffer. Instead of manipulating the unfolding conflict between the Bugti cousins, the government should immediately play a mediatory role in order to make sure that official plans to rehabilitate the Bugti IDPs are not derailed.


The writer is a staff member and can be reached at maliksiraj@dailytimes.com.pk

Daily Times



Thursday, January 28, 2010

Pakistan the oppressor

Peter Tatchell
A series of massacres of peaceful protesters by Pakistani security forces look set to sink hopes of a settlement deal between the government in Islamabad and Baloch nationalists who are campaigning for self-rule. There are fears that the sinister, shadowy Pakistani military and intelligence agencies are behind these killings, in a deliberate attempt to sabotage the reconciliation package put forward by the government of President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Yousaf Raza Gilani.
On 15 January, at least two Baloch political activists were shot dead and four others seriously wounded after Pakistani security forces opened fire on a peaceful protest organised by the Baloch Students Organisation (BSO) in the Khuzdar district of Balochistan. The rally had been called to protest against the recent murder of Baloch citizens in Karachi and the launching of a new military crackdown in Pakistani annexed and occupied Balochistan.
The shootings are the latest of many killings of Baloch protesters and nationalist leaders. They've been targeted because of their support for the six-decades-long campaign of resistance against Pakistan's invasion and subjugation of their homeland.
In September last year, Pakistani forces opened fire on a public gathering at Tump High School in Balochistan, killing a 20-year-old political activist, Mukhtar Baloch, and wounding 27 others, including four women and a six-year-old child. Five members of the BSO were arrested at the scene and taken to unknown locations. Watch this mobile phone footage of the attack – the shooting begins just over four minutes into the film.
A similar Pakistani military assault on a peaceful Baloch rally took place in January 2009 in Turbat. A month later at Dashte Goran the army attacked a wedding party, killing 13 people, including the bride, groom, six family members and the wedding officiator. A total of 21 people were injured – the majority of them women.
Rasool Bux Mengal, joint secretary of the Baloch National Movement (BNM), was abducted from Uthal last August. His tortured dead body, slashed and covered in cigarette burns, was found hanging from a tree. The intention was clear: to terrorise and intimidate the Baloch people. Mengal was the second BNM leader murdered in the last year. In April 2009, the body of Ghulam Mohammad, chair of the BNM, was found partly decomposed in a vat of toxic chemicals.
In October last year, Baloch medical students were beaten up and arrested by Pakistani forces in a raid on the Bolan Medical College. The same month, 11 innocent civilians, including women and children, were killed in the Dera Bugti district by Pakistan army bombardments.
Little wonder then that Baloch nationalist leaders have rejected the latest peace and reconciliation package proposed by the government in Islamabad. They cite the ongoing military repression and the inadequate nature of the proposals.
At first glance, the "Rahe-i- Haqooq Balochistan" deal doesn't seem unreasonable. It offers a cessation in military operations, a ban on the construction of new army garrisons (although existing ones would remain), the release of most (not all) political detainees and a payment of $1.4bn in gas royalties, spread over 12 years.
Baloch nationalists say the offer does not give the people of Balochistan control over their own natural resources or a fair price for them. Moreover, of the 4,000 Baloch people who have been arrested and disappeared, only a handful have been released since the democratic civilian government of Prime Minister Gilani was elected in 2008.
The torture of Baloch rights campaigners remains routine and widespread. Promises of de-militarisation are contradicted by continued military operations, attacks on civilian targets and by the building of more police and military garrisons in Balochistan, including a 62% increase in police stations and a 100% increase in paramilitary checkpoints.
Baloch human rights groups report that the kidnapping and torture of peaceful, lawful Baloch activists continues unabated. Indeed, the Pakistani government itself has admitted that in 2009 at least 1,102 people were seized by the security forces in Balochistan and disappeared. In recent years, an estimated 80,000 Baloch people have been displaced by Pakistan's military attacks.
These attacks have been aided and abetted by military supplies from the UK, including small arms, artillery, helicopter components and military communications equipment. The US has sold the Pakistani military billions in arms, including F-16 attack aircraft, and Bell and Cobra attack helicopters, which have been used against the people of Balochistan.
Rejecting Islamabad's proposals, nationalist leaders such as Nawab Khair Bakhsh Marri and Akhtar Mengal, leader of the Balochistan National Party and a former chief minister of Balochistan, argue that the deal would not ensure genuine autonomy and self-rule. They see it as a way of continuing the Pakistani colonisation of their homeland.
Indeed, if the government in Islamabad has a genuine intention to negotiate a settlement, why has it taken nearly two years to put forward these proposals and why are they so inadequate and qualified?
The 1973 constitution of Pakistan promised complete provincial autonomy for Balochistan within 10 years. It never happened. Democratically elected Baloch chief ministers who have tried to defend the interests of the people of Balochistan have been sacked by Islamabad. The current chief minister, Aslam Raisani, has limited authority and can be overruled at any time by the federal government and the military top brass if he steps out of line.
Even if the government of Pakistan had good intentions, its options are limited. Whatever President Zardari and Prime Minister Gilani may want to happen in Balochistan, they are in office but not truly in power. They are the public face of a Pakistani state that is beholden to more powerful forces – the Pakistani military and intelligence services, including the Intelligence Bureau (IB), Federal Investigation Agency (FIA), Inter Service Intelligence (ISI) and Military Intelligence (MI). Together with the army, these intelligence services are the real power in Pakistan. They are implicated in six decades of disappearances, torture, detention without trial and extra-judicial killings in Balochistan.
The former dictator and general, Pervez Musharaff, may have been ousted from the presidency in 2008 but his cronies still hold many of the key levers of power, especially in the all-crucial military, security and intelligence agencies. They continue to call the shots and pull the strings, regardless of what the democratic, civilian government says and wants.


The Guardian Cif


Military partnerships may be the nation's best path to peace


By David Ignatius

Gen. Stanley McChrystal this week expressed a truth that military commanders know better than anyone: "A political solution to all conflicts is the inevitable outcome," he told the Financial Times. The problem is getting to that political settlement in a way that the combatants find acceptable. This can take years, even decades.
The United States is now in its ninth year of fighting Muslim extremists around the world. People sometimes wonder whether America has learned anything during this painful time, or whether we are condemned to keep digging deeper holes for ourselves. Certainly, we're still digging in Afghanistan, where McChrystal, the U.S. commander there, believes that an acceptable political settlement won't be possible unless we squeeze the Taliban harder. I think he's right about that.
But I sense there's a growing recognition, especially within the U.S. military, that America has to get out of the business of fighting expeditionary wars every time a new flash point erupts with al-Qaeda. The Pentagon has adopted this proxy strategy of training "friendly" countries (meaning ones that share with us the enemy of Islamic extremism) from North Africa to the Philippines.
This "partnership" approach hasn't been articulated by the Obama administration as a formal strategy, and it doesn't get much media coverage. But it's worth a careful look, because it may offer the best path toward a world where the United States isn't always operating as an anti-terrorist Robocop.
The essence of this strategy is to train other countries to fight Islamic extremism that threatens them at least as much as us. As a senior military officer says: "We can't possibly go everywhere that al-Qaeda metastasizes. The idea is to build capacity for foreign militaries to deal with problems inside their borders."
Yemen offers the clearest example of how this "partnering" can work -- and how it differs from the direct combat the United States waged in Iraq and Afghanistan. For more than a year, the United States has been training Yemeni special forces and intelligence agencies to deal with a growing al-Qaeda presence there. The United States supplies some high-tech hardware, but the Yemenis do the fighting.
The breakthrough came last July, when Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh decided that his regime was threatened. It was his fight, in other words, not just ours. "We had an embrace in July, literally and figuratively," says Gen. David Petraeus, the Centcom commander who has been the U.S. point man with Yemen.
Traveling with Petraeus several months ago, I saw evidence of this forward-training approach nearly everywhere we stopped. They're low-visibility programs, deliberately, and Petraeus was reluctant to discuss some of them. But other military officials sketched the outlines.
Let's start with Central Asia, where the goal is to prevent the Taliban contagion from spreading to former Soviet republics. The United States is training special forces or other security units in Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan. To gain Russian support, Petraeus dropped the old rhetoric about competing for energy in Central Asia and instead stressed common enemies.
Other below-the-radar U.S. training missions are helping East Asian countries with large Muslim populations, such as Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines.
The big battlegrounds remain Afghanistan and Pakistan. The White House held its first review of its new Afghan strategy on Jan. 15, and a top White House official says Obama came away "satisfied" with progress there. The meeting analyzed new polls showing the Taliban's unpopularity; improved Afghan army recruitment rates; better security in some districts of Helmand and Kandahar provinces; and steps to ensure that at least 90 percent of President Obama's surge of 30,000 soldiers arrives by August. "It's not a critical mass yet, just guideposts," cautions the White House official.
The toughest theater of this conflict is Pakistan. The U.S. advisory role is evident there, as roughly 100 U.S. Special Forces soldiers "train the trainers" of the Pakistani Frontier Corps. But just last week, the Pakistanis balked at closer partnership, saying they would delay for six months the next phase of their campaign against Taliban extremists.
Partnership is about shared interest, and the American fight against the Taliban gives Pakistan a golden opportunity to secure the tribal areas along its western frontier for the first time in its history -- with a big American army over the border to help.
American troops won't be in Afghanistan forever -- all wars do end, eventually -- and the Pakistanis may miss their chance. That would be a historic mistake, but as U.S. commanders have come to understand, it's their fight, not ours.

W.P

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Enough Is Enough



Two schools of thought have traditionally competed to determine how America should approach the world. Realists believe we should care most about what states do beyond their borders—that influencing their foreign policy ought to be Washington's priority. Neoconservatives often contend the opposite: they argue that what matters most is the nature of other countries, what happens inside their borders. The neocons believe this both for moral reasons and because democracies (at least mature ones) treat their neighbors better than do authoritarian regimes.
placeAd2(commercialNode,'bigbox',false,'')

I am a card-carrying realist on the grounds that ousting regimes and replacing them with something better is easier said than done. I also believe that Washington, in most cases, doesn't have the luxury of trying. The United States must, for example, work with undemocratic China to rein in North Korea and with autocratic Russia to reduce each side's nuclear arsenal. This debate is anything but academic. It's at the core of what is likely to be the most compelling international story of 2010: Iran.
In the wake of 9/11, the Bush administration judged incorrectly that Iran was on the verge of revolution and decided that dealing directly with Tehran would provide a lifeline to an evil government soon to be swept away by history's tide. A valuable opportunity to limit Iran's nuclear program may have been lost as a result. The incoming Obama administration reversed this approach and expressed a willingness to talk to Iran without preconditions. This president (like George H.W. Bush, whose emissaries met with Chinese leaders soon after Tiananmen Square) is cut more from the realist cloth. Diplomacy and negotiations are seen not as favors to bestow but as tools to employ. The other options—using military force against Iranian nuclear facilities or living with an Iranian nuclear bomb—were judged to be tremendously unattractive. And if diplomacy failed, Obama reasoned, it would be easier to build domestic and international support for more robust sanctions. At the time, I agreed with him.
I've changed my mind. The nuclear talks are going nowhere. The Iranians appear intent on developing the means to produce a nuclear weapon; there is no other explanation for the secret uranium-enrichment facility discovered near the holy city of Qum. Fortunately, their nuclear program appears to have hit some technical snags, which puts off the need to decide whether to launch a preventive strike. Instead we should be focusing on another fact: Iran may be closer to profound political change than at any time since the revolution that ousted the shah 30 years ago.
The authorities overreached in their blatant manipulation of last June's presidential election, and then made matters worse by brutally repressing those who protested. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has lost much of his legitimacy, as has the "elected" president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The opposition Green Movement has grown larger and stronger than many predicted.
The United States, European governments, and others should shift their Iran policy toward increasing the prospects for political change. Leaders should speak out for the Iranian people and their rights. President Obama did this on Dec. 28 after several protesters were killed on the Shia holy day of Ashura, and he should do so again. So should congressional and world leaders. Iran's Revolutionary Guards should be singled out for sanctions. Lists of their extensive financial holdings can be published on the Internet. The United States should press the European Union and others not to trade or provide financing to selected entities controlled by the Guards. Just to cite one example: the Revolutionary Guards now own a majority share of Iran's principal telecommunications firm; no company should furnish it the technology to deny or monitor Internet use.
New funding for the project housed at Yale University that documents human-rights abuses in Iran is warranted. If the U.S. government won't reverse its decision not to provide the money, then a foundation or wealthy individuals should step in. Such a registry might deter some members of the Guards or the million-strong Basij militia it controls from attacking or torturing members of the opposition. And even if not, the gesture will signal to Iranians that the world is taking note of their struggle.
It is essential to bolster what people in Iran know. Outsiders can help to provide access to the Internet, the medium that may be the most important means for getting information into Iran and facilitating communication among the opposition. The opposition also needs financial support from the Iranian diaspora so that dissidents can stay politically active once they have lost their jobs.
Just as important as what to do is what to avoid. Congressmen and senior administration figures should avoid meeting with the regime. Any and all help for Iran's opposition should be nonviolent. Iran's opposition should be supported by Western governments, not led. In this vein, outsiders should refrain from articulating specific political objectives other than support for democracy and an end to violence and unlawful detention. Sanctions on Iran's gasoline imports and refining, currently being debated in Congress, should be pursued at the United Nations so international focus does not switch from the illegality of Iran's behavior to the legality of unilateral American sanctions. Working-level negotiations on the nuclear question should continue. But if there is an unexpected breakthrough, Iran's reward should be limited. Full normalization of relations should be linked to meaningful reform of Iran's politics and an end to Tehran's support of terrorism.
Critics will say promoting regime change will encourage Iranian authorities to tar the opposition as pawns of the West. But the regime is already doing so. Outsiders should act to strengthen the opposition and to deepen rifts among the rulers. This process is underway, and while it will take time, it promises the first good chance in decades to bring about an Iran that, even if less than a model country, would nonetheless act considerably better at home and abroad. Even a realist should recognize that it's an opportunity not to be missed.


Haass, president of The Council on Foreign Relations, is author of War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars.




Saturday, January 23, 2010

Glimmers of hope as Nato targets hearts and minds in Afghanistan


Julian Borger

Seven men wearing explosive vests drove into Kabul last week and showed how easy it is to bring a city of more than three million to a halt if you are prepared to die doing it.
The burning buildings and prolonged gunfights with the army shattered the Afghan government's always tenuous claims that it could protect its capital, or even its ministries. But there was another striking aspect of Monday's attack that may have a longer-term significance. In all the mayhem caused by the four-hour battle – involving rocket-propelled grenades, a shoot-out in a shopping centre and the final detonation of their vests by the surviving insurgents – only five civilians were killed. That was a much smaller toll than the one caused by a similar, less ambitious, attack last February.
The Afghan army and police put this down to their speedy intervention – and they were undoubtedly quick to deploy. But it almost certainly had more to do with the fact that when the attackers reached the shopping centre, they told the stall holders and shoppers to get out. At one point the attackers used children as human shields, but let them go before blowing themselves up. The seven suicide bombers appear to have been under orders to target government institutions and the people who worked there, but to avoid harming bystanders. It was not an attack aimed solely at creating terror for its own sake, suggesting Nato may not be the only party in the fight trying to limit civilian casualties. The insurgents, whether it was the Taliban or another group that attacked last Monday, seem aware of their own deep unpopularity and are rethinking tactics accordingly.
Such an isolated example of scruples would not add up to much were it not for a recent cluster of other positive signs for the Kabul government and its Nato backers. An opinion poll published this month by the BBC found a leap in optimism among Afghans, with 70% believing the country was going in the right direction, compared with 40% a year ago. Support for Nato troops rose from 59% to 62%. Meanwhile, opium production dipped in 2009, with the area of poppy cultivation down by a third in Helmand – the province under British control that has hitherto been the poppy centre of the country. Also in Helmand, district centres that were run or threatened by the Taliban until a few months ago are now under Afghan army and police control, and peaceful enough for the shops and bazaars to reopen. At the same time, anecdotal evidence from the villages suggests an increasing number of ­Taliban fighters – battle-weary or drawn by new jobs – are returning home to their ­families.
Such flickers of hope have been rare in the past four years in Afghanistan. The question is whether they are evidence of a lasting change or merely a statistical blip on the long descent into chaos. There is a growing sense among politicians, diplomats and soldiers that the next few months will provide the answer, and determine which way Afghanistan turns. "We all know 2010 needs to be a decisive year in Afghanistan. The momentum needs to be reversed away from a deepening insurgency," David Miliband, the foreign secretary, told the Observer during a visit to Kabul and Helmand last week.
On Thursday, President Hamid Karzai arrives in London for an international conference aimed at getting the Afghan government and its international backers – so often at loggerheads – to work together on a common strategy and ­ultimately open the door to a political solution to the conflict. Among those preparing the conference, there is more determination than optimism. Some worry that the recent flurry of good news is built on the surge of US troops and money flowing into the country, and will come to an abrupt end when the troops begin to leave as Barack Obama has pledged next year. Diplomats bemoan a lack of political will in Kabul, both to reform government and to seek a settlement with the insurgents – a deficit that is being masked or even worsened by the constant infusion of foreign help.
One official compared the Afghan body politic to a "corpse that we are ­constantly having to jiggle around to make it look alive". Another likened it to "a cancer patient on a lot of painkillers". There is no doubt that Helmand is in intensive care. It is home to three out of the four most violent districts in Afghanistan, but US marines are flooding into the province. There are 13,000 now and by March that will rise to 20,000, fighting alongside 10,000 British troops – a tripling of Nato strength. With a new Afghan army corps being set up in Helmand, the troop levels will approach the 25:1000 ratio of forces to local population that the US command believes is needed to win a counter-insurgency.
The extra troops have quickly helped secure districts that were recently no-go areas, allowing normal business to return. It helps that the US marines have deep pockets. They have paid out £150m in employment projects in the villages. Perhaps not surprisingly, they have won a good reputation among Helmandis. Ahmad Naveed Nazari, a journalist in the provincial capital, Lashkar Gah, said: "Since the Americans came to my home district, it has been peaceful. There have been no casualties and people are coming back to the village because marines are paying for construction work.
"I know a lot of people who were ­Taliban. My cousin and my uncle were Taliban, but now they are at home working," he added. "When the British were in our district, unemployment was very high, everyone was Taliban. But the US marines are working with the people very well." But if the work and the money dried up, would the uncle and cousin go back to the Taliban? Nazari is not sure.
It is not just the new troops and money that have made a difference in Helmand. Last February, Nazari said he lost six relatives – his cousin's wife and five children on her side of the family – in an air strike ordered by British troops on his home village. "The British said the Taliban were there, but they were two or three kilometres away," Nazari said. "There was no compensation."
British officers at the Lashkar Gah base confirmed there was a record of Nazari's complaint, but only about a single relative. They said the incident happened during another brigade's tour. Incidents such as this, over the past four years, are one of the main reasons Nato has been alienating Afghans and helping the Taliban recruit. The son of Nazari's dead relative left soon after the air strike to join the insurgents.
One of the first orders General Stanley McChrystal issued after he took over command of Nato forces last summer was to limit the use of air power and artillery. The military priority would be the protection of the population rather than killing insurgents.
The British 11 Light Brigade – a unit put together specifically for counter-insurgency which is now manning the Lashkar Gah garrison – was training on Salisbury Plain when the order came through. They started using the new targeting practices the next day, relying more on manoeuvre than firepower. The use of high-explosive artillery shells by British troops is down more than 60% and the use of smoke shells to mask movement up by nearly 70%. The impact of McChrystal's "courageous restraint" policy has been felt around the country. According to a UN report this month, the Taliban are now responsible for about 78% of ­civilian casualties.
Another piece of good news coming out of Helmand ahead of the London conference is more ambiguous – the 33% drop in poppy cultivation. Narcotics experts say that largely reflects the ­earlier success of the traffickers. There is a glut of heroin on the market, so raw opium prices have dropped and farmers have switched to other crops.
Abdul Rahman Tariq, the chief executive in the Helmand governor's office, argues there is more to the poppy figures than a simple case of oversupply, however. "In areas the government controls, the growth of poppy goes way down. It's about more than the market. It's about the social relations between the government and the farmers," he said. Helmand's governor, Mohammad Gulab Mangal, has been widely praised for a subsidised wheat seed programme, which has reached 40,000 farmers, giving an alternative to poppy crops. He has also visited the districts to show the government is ready to listen and respond.
That performance has not been matched, however, by the national ­government in Kabul. In fact, Karzai has sought to undermine Mangal and is still backing his rival, Sher Mohammad Akhundzada, who was forced out of office in 2005 after nine tonnes of heroin were found in his cellar. It is the fecklessness of the Kabul government, created in the wake of a rigged election last August, that has done most to sap hopes that the gains of recent months can endure.
A report published last week by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime found that half the Afghan population had paid a bribe to a public official over the course of the year, and that most Afghans (59%) thought government corruption was a bigger problem than insecurity. "It's important to recognise that the Afghan government doesn't just need to avoid being outgunned by the insurgency, it must not be outgoverned by the insurgency either," Miliband told the US Senate foreign relations committee on Thursday.
Nato's generals mostly believe that the route out of Afghanistan is to build up Afghan security forces to a newly agreed ceiling of about 300,000 by next year, to demoralise the Taliban and wait for its troops to defect. But a growing number of western diplomats believe the path is not so straightforward. They see the Bonn agreement that established post-Taliban Afghanistan as deeply flawed – a "victors' peace" that excluded powerful Pashtun tribes. "We have interfered in the market in Pashtun politics and put it out of balance," one diplomat said.
Karzai has pledged to hold a peace council in the next few months, but he has a long way to go to earn the trust of insurgents who view him as a ­western puppet. By all accounts, there is a deal to be done. The Taliban want ­foreign troops out, and those troops want to leave. There are credible reports of a younger generation of Taliban leaders who want to sever ties with the Arabs of al-Qaida and are prepared to tolerate a measure of education for girls. The trick will be to draw those voices to the fore and strike a bargain with them. Getting there from here is not going to be easy. At best, this week's meeting in London will be the first step.


The Observer

Thursday, January 21, 2010

In Haiti quake, a tragedy that defies logic

By David Ignatius
When an overwhelming natural disaster such as the Haiti earthquake kills many thousands of people, there is a natural human tendency to look for causes and assign blame. We want to understand why the terrible event occurred, beyond the freakish geological lottery of moving plates and structural faults.
An extreme example of this desire to "explain" tragedy was the Rev. Pat Robertson's statement a day after the quake. He said that Haiti had been "cursed" by God because its people "swore a pact to the devil" two centuries ago through voodoo rites.
There are secular versions of this same desire to interpret horrifying events. Looking at the devastation, some observers have seen the effects of Haiti's class system, with poor people suffering disproportionately, as reported by The Post's William Booth ["Haiti's elite spared from much of the devastation," news story, Jan. 18]. Richard Kim blamed harsh international loan policies for Haiti's chronic poverty in a Jan. 15 post on the Nation's Web site.
Other commentators have drawn different lessons. David Brooks faults Haitian culture. "Some cultures are more progress-resistant than others, and a horrible tragedy was just exacerbated by one of them," he wrote in the New York Times. Anne Applebaum argued in The Post that this was "a man-made disaster" and that the earthquake's impact "was multiplied many, many times by the weakness of civil society and the absence of the rule of law."
There's some truth in all of the secular explanations. But they leave out the most painful and perplexing factor we encounter whenever terrible things happen: bad luck. The same problem arises when catastrophic events befall people we love -- a life-threatening disease, say. We look for a rational explanation of why this person got cancer, but his neighbor, who has all the same risk factors, didn't. Often, the most honest answer is: It just happened.
Talking about the Haitian earthquake, my friend Garrett Epps, a professor of constitutional law at the University of Baltimore, recommended a book called "Evil in Modern Thought," by the philosopher Susan Neiman. Her starting point in discussing how people respond to evil events was the 1755 earthquake that destroyed Lisbon, Portugal, and killed at least 15,000 people.
The Lisbon earthquake was so catastrophic that it traumatized all of Europe. The quake itself lasted 10 minutes and buried thousands in the rubble. It was followed by fires that raged across the city and then by a series of tidal waves that ravaged the port and drowned hundreds who had taken refuge on the coast. It seemed obvious to most people, in that religious time, that this devastation of a magnificent city was an act of God -- a terrible punishment for human transgressions. But why Lisbon?
"Orthodox theologians welcomed the earthquake in terms they barely troubled to disguise," writes Neiman. "For years they had battled Deism, natural religion, and anything else that tried to explain the world in natural terms alone." The theologians debated what sins might have brought down so much divine wrath. A few argued that the quake was punishment for Portuguese plunder in the New World and "the millions of poor Indians your forefathers butchered for the sake of gold."
Philosophers, too, struggled to comprehend the meaning of this disaster. Immanuel Kant wrote three essays about earthquakes for a weekly paper in Konigsberg; his main point was that earthquakes didn't happen in Prussia and thus could be explained without divine involvement. Rousseau and Voltaire argued over whether such evil events could be understood at all, says Neiman.
The hero of the Lisbon tale was the man who led the relief efforts, the marquis of Pombal, who served as prime minister under King Joseph I of Portugal. Pombal had no use for the anguishing debate. He famously said: "What now? We bury the dead and feed the living." And he did just that, rapidly disposing of the corpses, seizing stocks of grain to feed the hungry and ordering the militia to halt looting and piracy. Within a year, the city was being restored.
I will think of Pombal as I watch the reconstruction of Haiti. His response to imponderable devastation was to rebuild, boldly and confidently, making sure the new buildings could withstand a future quake.
"Nature has no meaning; its events are not signs," concludes Neiman. Earthquakes are not evil; evil requires intent; it is what human beings do. The response to inexplicable events is not debate but action.

W.P

Friday, January 15, 2010

analysis: Anti-Baloch clique? — I

Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur

The Khan affirmed his intention to build Balochistan as a prosperous sovereign country in which the Baloch could retain their identity and live in accordance with their traditions and establish relations through treaties of friendship with neighbouring statesThe secret, if it ever was, is eventually out that there is in fact an anti-Baloch clique with its own agenda and powerful enough to threaten even the highest office of the land. No, this not the surmise of a pro-Baloch columnist but comes direct from the horse’s mouth, well at least a horse lover’s mouth: yes, the president himself.At the ground breaking ceremony of the Winder Dam project he said that espousal of the rights of Balochistan by him had angered “certain elements” and they were now out to remove him; some journalists termed these elements as the ‘anti Baloch clique’. He said, “The Aghaz-e-Huqooq-i-Balochistan package is the right of the people of Balochistan and we have to implement it. But they do not want this to happen. Therefore, they want to remove me.” So now we know that this powerful clique does not even tolerate an ineffective and largely useless Balochistan package.The president, as constrained and curbed as his authority and movement may be, still has the entire resources of the state at his disposal to learn and be informed about matters that common citizens or for that matter out-of-power politicians do not even get a whiff of. With his wherewithal he certainly knows that this anti-Baloch clique has the clout to threaten his tenure if he is overtly pro-Baloch or even seems to be patronising them.This clique definitely has to be anti-democratic and paranoid as who else would remove an elected head of state simply for perceived misdeeds; because certainly the president has done nothing to curb the injustices against the Baloch or redress their grievances in the nearly two years that his party has been in power. Empty apologies do nothing to heal grievous wounds.This clique certainly has not come into being all of a sudden or only after Zardari became the president. It must have existed long before and must be having a few achievements to its credit. It must also have the power to even threaten someone who has the entire — maybe minus that certain clique — state machinery at his disposal. Presumably this ‘clique’ is as powerful as the rest of the state apparatus. Little wonder that people keep disappearing without a trace and some turning up dead as the Baloch leaders did in Turbat.Let us dispassionately examine the evidence if there really exists an anti-Baloch clique or it is just a figment of the imagination of a beleaguered president. To do this we will have to go way back to 1947. In June 1947, the British government announced plans for the partition of India. The fate of British Afghanistan and the Baloch Tribal Areas, which included the Marri-Bugti, Khetran and Baloch Tribal Areas of Dera Ghazi Khan, was to be decided by a referendum. It was decided to hold a jirga on June 30th but was deviously held on the 29th without informing all the members. With this referendum as its basis, British Balochistan, including the leased and tribal areas that were constitutionally part of the Khanate were quite illegally acceded to Pakistan on August 15, 1947.It is interesting to note that after partition the chiefs of Derajat were given the choice to relinquish their privileges by joining Balochistan or retain them by joining Punjab. This British Administered Baloch area of DG Khan was misappropriated by Punjab in 1950. The Tumandars signed the agreement under threat of forsaking their large land holdings if they did not opt for Punjab. A monument to that injustice stands at Fort Munro, 6,470 feet above sea level.On August 4, 1947, a tripartite agreement was signed between Pakistan, the British and Balochistan, called The Standstill Agreement, in which the sovereign status of Balochistan was accepted. The Khan declared Balochistan independent on August 11, 1947, three days before the independence of Pakistan. The Khan affirmed his intention to build Balochistan as a prosperous sovereign country in which the Baloch could retain their identity, live in accordance with their traditions and establish relations through treaties of friendship with the neighbouring states of Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan as well as with India and the outside world.Soon after independence, elections were held to the Diwan, Balochistan’s bi-cameral legislature, and a period of tranquillity and peace was ensured in the country. The Assembly held sessions in September and December 1947 and most favoured alliance and not accession with Pakistan. On December 14, 1947, Ghaus Baksh Bizenjo made a landmark speech and it is still considered as a valid argument for the independence of Balochistan.He said, “We have a distinct civilisation and a separate culture like that of Iran and Afghanistan. We are Muslims but it is not necessary that by virtue of being Muslims we should lose our freedom and merge with others. If the mere fact that we are Muslims requires us to join Pakistan, then Afghanistan and Iran, both Muslim countries, should also amalgamate with Pakistan. “We were never a part of India before the British rule. Pakistan’s unpleasant and loathsome desire that our national homeland, Balochistan should merge with it is impossible to consider. We are ready to have friendship with that country on the basis of sovereign equality but by no means ready to merge with Pakistan. We can survive without Pakistan. But the question is, what would Pakistan be without us? “I do not propose to create hurdles for the newly created Pakistan in the matters of defence and external communication. But we want an honourable relationship, not a humiliating one. If Pakistan wants to treat us as a sovereign people, we are ready to extend the hand of friendship and cooperation. If Pakistan does not agree to do so, flying in the face of democratic principles, such an attitude will be totally unacceptable to us, and if we are forced to accept this fate then every Baloch son will sacrifice his life in defence of his national freedom.”His speech moved the Baloch and strengthened their desire for independence and their will to maintain their new-found independence. But in the meantime Pakistan began to pressurise the newly independent Kalat state to join Pakistan and an uneasy calm appeared in relations between Kalat and Pakistan. Talks between Pakistan and Kalat dragged on. Pakistan continued to harass the Khan and Baloch state machinery on various pretexts and was engaged in conspiracies and underhand tactics to compel the Khan to join Pakistan.When Pakistan was convinced that the Khan would not accede, separate instruments of accession by the states of Lasbela and Kharan, which were feudatories of the Khan, and of Makran, which was never more than a district of the state of Kalat, were announced on March 18. Accession of Makran, Kharan and Lasbela robbed Kalat of more than half its territory and its access to the sea.The following day the Khan of Kalat issued a statement refusing to believe that Pakistan as a champion of Muslim rights in the world would infringe upon the rights of small Muslim neighbours, pointing out that Makran as a district of Kalat had no separate status and that the foreign policy of Lasbela and Kharan was placed under Kalat by the Standstill Agreement.On March 26, 1948, the Pakistan Army was ordered to move into the Baloch coastal region of Pasni, Jiwani and Turbat. This was the first act of aggression prior to the march on Kalat by a Pakistani military detachment on April 1, 1948. The Khan capitulated on March 27 after the army moved into the coastal region and it was announced in Karachi that the Khan of Kalat has agreed to merge his state with Pakistan. Under the Constitution of Kalat, the Khan was not authorised to take such a basic decision. The Balochistan Assembly had already rejected any suggestion of forfeiting the independence of Balochistan on any pretext. The sovereign Baloch state after British withdrawal from India lasted only 227 days.The evidence certainly leads one to conclude that this clique has had the influence and power to thwart the Baloch people’s rightful struggle to be independent as they were for 227 days after partition and use their resources without even partly sharing with them.(To be continued)




Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur has an association with the Baloch rights movement going back to the early 1970s. He can be contacted at mmatalpur@gmail.com




Daily Times


Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Iran can be bombed says General Petraeus


By Alex Spillius in Washington

Gen David Petraeus, head of Central Command or Centcom, did not elaborate on the plans, but said the military has considered the impacts of any action taken there.
Asked about the vulnerability of Iran's nuclear installations, he told CNN: "Well, they certainly can be bombed. The level of effect would vary with who it is that carries it out, what ordnance they have, and what capability they can bring to bear."
He added: "It would be almost literally irresponsible if Centcom were not to have been thinking about the various 'what ifs' and to make plans for a whole variety of different contingencies."
Iran maintains its nuclear programme is for peaceful purposes, but the United States and other Western nations fear Tehran wants to acquire nuclear weapons.
Israel has called Iran's nuclear programme the major threat facing its nation. Gen Petraeus declined to comment about Israel's military capabilities, according to CNN.
Iran had until the end of last year to accept a deal offered five permanent UN Security Council members – Britain, China, France, Russia and the United States, plus Germany.
It did not do so. Instead, Tehran gave the West until the end of January to accept its own proposal.
Petraeus said he thought there was still time for the nations to engage Iran in diplomacy, noting there is no deadline on the enactment of any US contingency plans.
But he added that "there's a period of time, certainly, before all this might come to a head".


The Telegraph
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/6963311/Iran-can-be-bombed-says-General-Petraeus.html