A common strategy in geopolitical rivalries is to accrue alliances, strengthen positions and counter competitors. Of course, Asia is rich with historic rivalries: India and China, Pakistan and India, Iran and Pakistan, Iran and the US, the US and China. Two ports in the Arabian Sea, one in Iran and another Pakistan, demonstrate an emerging contest for power in the Arabian Sea, explains Christophe Jaffrelot, senior research fellow with the Centre for International Studies and Research, Sciences Po/CNRS. China helps Pakistan with its port at Gwadar while India assists Iran with the port at Chabahar. The development entails rail lines, highways and other massive construction projects and signals that the emerging Asian giants seek connections while resisting encirclement by rivals. Some of the new alliances make for strange bedfellows and, depending on political or military events, may not last for long. – YaleGlobal
A Tale of Two Ports
Gwadar and Chabahar display Chinese-Indian rivalry in the Arabian Sea
Christophe Jaffrelot
7 January 2011
The Great Game redux: China and India maneuver over Arabian Sea ports, Gwadar (top) and Chabahar (below)
PARIS: Sino-Indian rivalry in the Indian Ocean and India’s naval cooperation with the US draw the world’s attention. But quietly, out of sight, a contest has been building in the Arabian Sea centered between two ports, one based in Pakistan and the other in Iran. The first is backed by China, the second by India. The first, located in Gwadar, is intended to give China access to the Indian Ocean; the second, Chabahar, is supposed to connect India to Afghanistan and counter the first. The two ports represent longstanding rivalries in the region and anticipation for intense geo-strategic competition.
Gwadar, with its proximity to the vital sea lane between the Middle East and China, has strategic importance for China, especially for oil trade. If China wants to emancipate itself from transportation or military problems along Asia’s southern coastline, direct access to the Indian Ocean may be the solution.
Direct access to the India Ocean would give China a strategic post of observation and a key location for its navy. While Myanmar and Sri Lanka can offer substantial support, the country that can best help Beijing is Pakistan because of its location and long-time friendship.
India, feeling encircled, reacted to this development. In his recent book on the Indian Ocean, journalist Robert Kaplan writes that “the Indians’ answer to Sino-Pakistani cooperation at Gwadar was a giant new $8 billion naval base at Karwar, south of Goa on India’s Arabian coast, the first phase of which opened in 2005.”
Map of Gwadar, Chabahar & Karwar.
Karwar was only one part of the response to Gwadar. The other one is Chabahar. In 2002 India helped Iran to develop the port of Chabahar, located 72 kilometers west of Gwadar, soon after China began work at Gwadar.
Chabahar should provide India with access to Afghanistan via the Indian Ocean. India, Iran and Afghanistan have signed an agreement to give Indian goods, heading for Central Asia and Afghanistan, preferential treatment and tariff reductions at Chabahar.
Gwadar is located on the Gulf of Oman, close to the entrance of the Persian Gulf. Until 1958 it belonged to Oman, which gave this land to Pakistani rulers who expected that the location would contribute to what Kaplan calls “a new destiny.”
When President Richard Nixon visited Pakistan in 1973, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto sought US help to construct a new port at Gwadar, and reportedly offered the US Navy use of the facility. He was unsuccessful, and Pakistan then turned to China for help. Work started in 2002, and China has invested $200 million, dispatching 450 personnel for the first phase of the job completed in 2006 and resulting in a deep-sea port. [2]
Direct access to the India Ocean, with Gwadar, would give China a strategic post of observation and a
key location for its navy.
The Port of Singapore Authority was selected to manage Gwadar in 2007. But it did not invest much money, and Pakistan decided to transfer port management to another institution, not yet selected but which will probably be Chinese. On 6 November 2010 the Supreme Court of Pakistan asked the Gwadar Port Authority to seek cancellation of the concession agreement with the Port of Singapore Authority.
At the same time, Pakistan and China contemplate developing the Karakorum Highway to connect China’s Xinjiang and Gilgit-Baltistan region of Pakistan. In 2006, a memorandum of understanding was signed between both countries to upgrade this road and connect Kashgar and Abbottabad. But the Karakorum Highway, the highest point of which passes at 4,693 meters, can open between May and December. It’s also vulnerable to landslides, so large trucks may not use it easily.
Pakistan and China also discussed building a 3,000-kilometer rail line between Kashgar and Gwadar, during President Asif Ali Zardari’s July 2010 visit with President Hu Jintao in Beijing. The cost would be enormous, up to $30 million per kilometer in the highest mountains.
In addition, Baluchistan is one of Pakistan’s most unstable provinces today because of the development of a nationalist movement with separatist overtones. Insurgents have already kidnapped and killed Chinese engineers in Gwadar.
Soon after China began work at Gwadar, India helped Iran to develop the port of Chabahar, located 72 kilometers west of Gwadar.
But China persists. More than a gateway to the Indian Ocean, Gwadar, at least, will provide Beijing with, first, a listening post from where the Chinese may exert surveillance on hyper-strategic sea links as well as military activities of the Indian and American navies in the region, and second, dual-use civilian-military facilities providing a base for Chinese ships and submarines.
For the Indians, this is a direct threat. The Delhi-based Institute for Defence Studies and Analysis recently published a report on Pakistan: the “Gwadar port being so close to the Straits of Hormuz also has implications for India as it would enable Pakistan to exercise control over energy routes. It is believed that Gwadar will provide Beijing with a facility to monitor US and Indian naval activity in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea, respectively, as well as any future maritime cooperation between India and the US.”
India responded by helping Iran with the port of Chabahar. Work on the Chabahar-Milak-Zaranj-Dilaram route from Iran to Afghanistan is in progress. India has already built the 213-kilometer Zaranj-Dilaram road in Afghanistan’s Nimroz province and helps Iran to upgrade the Chabahar-Milak railroad. Developing railroads and port infrastructure near the border of Afghanistan could strengthen Iranian influence in Afghanistan, especially among the Shia and non-Pashtun ethnic groups.
In developing Chabahar, India must factor in US attempts
at isolating Iran because of Tehran’s nuclear policy.
However, this Indo-Iranian project is bound to suffer from two problems:
First, politically, Afghanistan is unstable and may not oblige Iran and India if the Taliban or any Pakistan-supported government is restored. Chabahar is also part of one of Iran’s most volatile regions where anti-regime Sunni insurgents have launched repeated attacks.
Secondly, the work is far behind schedule. In July 2010, Iranian Deputy Foreign Minister Mohd Ali Fathollahi said the port was functional, but has a capacity of only 2.5 million tons per year, whereas the target was 12 million tons. Speeding work on the port was urged during the 16th Indo-Iranian Joint Commission meeting, attended by Iranian Finance Minister Seyed Shamseddin Hosseini and India’s External Affairs Minister S.M. Krishna, who pointed out that “Iran’s assistance in developing the Chabahar port has been slow ‘til now.”
The connection between Gwadar and China remains distant, but could be the Suez Canal of the 21st century. At the minimum, this deep-sea port should provide Beijing with a strategic base soon.
The Chinese move prompted India to react – hence the development of Chabahar. But in developing this port, New Delhi must factor in US attempts at isolating Iran because of Tehran’s nuclear policy. How far the Indo-Iranian rapprochement is compatible with the growing Indo-American alliance remains to be seen.
The US and India may agree on the need to counter growing Chinese influence in Gwadar, but may also disagree on the policy India wants to pursue by joining hands with Iran.
Iran itself may not want to take any risk at alienating China, a country which has supported Tehran, including its nuclear policy, until recently.
Christophe Jaffrelot is a senior research fellow with the Centre for International Studies and Research, Sciences Po/CNRS.
Yale Global Online
http://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/tale-two-ports
Tuesday, January 11, 2011
U.S. efforts fail to convince Pakistan's top general to target Taliban
In spite of its compliance with the U.S. demands, on tactical level, Pakistan army is unwilling to abandon its proxy forces even in the face of U.S. pressure. It does so for right reason: that, in the end, the United States will withdraw from the region. And, given the growing opposition towards the Afghan war inside Washington D.C beltway -- especially among the realist policy-makers as well as the traditional anti-war left -- it is increasingly becoming apparent that the United States would wind up the war sooner rather than later. Thus, it is the notion of U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan that gives motivation to Pakistani military establishment to stay on course, i.e., keep on arming jihadi groups.
Still, Washington continues its carrot-wielding policy towards Pakistan. Why so?
Because the stakes in Afghan war, for the Americans, are not high enough so they could introduce stick in order to put inense pressure on Pakistani military. Long-term geopolitical interest in the region aside, the United States' immediate national security interests will triumph over any other catagory of interest. Thus, the main goal is to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a safe haven for jihadists.
With Taliban movement on a back foot, at least for now, the Americans are not interested in escalating this conflict beyond Afghanistan's borders and, therefore, neither are they interested in holding Pakistani military into account for its policy of deception and denial -- unless there is a major attack on American soil, which will surely alter the U.S. policy towards Pakistan dramatically.
The following report from the Washington Post shows how Pakistani military chief feels insecure, and even becomes paranoid, about Washington's "ultimate goal": depriving Pakistani state from its nuclear weapons. Also, his extreme resentment towards India does make strategic sense: that any opening up to a giant like India will, ultimately, undo the whole project of Pakistan -- overwhelming its fictitious national identity as well as making it permanently dependent on a much superior Indian economy.
– Belaar –
U.S. efforts fail to convince Pakistan's top general to target Taliban
By Karin Brulliard and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, December 31, 2010; 8:37 PM
ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN - Countless U.S. officials in recent years have lectured and listened to Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, the man many view as the most powerful in Pakistan. They have drunk tea and played golf with him, feted him and flown with him in helicopters.
But they have yet to persuade him to undertake what the Obama administration's recent strategy review concluded is a key to success in the Afghan war - the elimination of havens inside Pakistan where the Taliban plots and stages attacks on coalition troops in Afghanistan.
Kayani, who as Pakistan's army chief has more direct say over the country's security strategy than its president or prime minister, has resisted personal appeals from President Obama, U.S. military commanders and senior diplomats. Recent U.S. intelligence estimates have concluded that he is unlikely to change his mind anytime soon. Despite the entreaties, officials say, Kayani doesn't trust U.S. motivations and is hedging his bets in case the American strategy for Afghanistan fails.
In many ways, Kayani is the personification of the vexing problem posed by Pakistan. Like the influential military establishment he represents, he views Afghanistan on a timeline stretching far beyond the U.S. withdrawal, which is slated to begin this summer. While the Obama administration sees the insurgents as an enemy force to be defeated as quickly and directly as possible, Pakistan has long regarded them as useful proxies in protecting its western flank from inroads by India, its historical adversary.
"Kayani wants to talk about the end state in South Asia," said one of several Obama administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity about the sensitive relationship. U.S. generals, the official said, "want to talk about the next drone attacks."
The administration has praised Kayani for operations in 2009 and 2010 against domestic militants in the Swat Valley and in South Waziristan, and has dramatically increased its military and economic assistance to Pakistan. But it has grown frustrated that the general has not launched a ground assault against Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda sanctuaries in North Waziristan.
Kayani has promised action when he has enough troops available, although he has given no indication of when that might be. Most of Pakistan's half-million-man army remains facing east, toward India.
In recent months, Kayani has sometimes become defiant. When U.S.-Pakistani tensions spiked in September, after two Pakistani soldiers were killed by an Afghanistan-based American helicopter gunship pursuing insurgents on the wrong side of the border, he personally ordered the closure of the main frontier crossing for U.S. military supplies into Afghanistan, according to U.S. and Pakistani officials.
In October, administration officials choreographed a White House meeting for Kayani at which Obama could directly deliver his message of urgency. The army chief heard him out, then provided a 13-page document updating Pakistan's strategic perspective and noting the gap between short-term U.S. concerns and Pakistan's long-term interests, according to U.S. officials.
Kayani reportedly was infuriated by the recent WikiLeaks release of U.S. diplomatic cables, some of which depicted him as far chummier with the Americans and more deeply involved in Pakistani politics than his carefully crafted domestic persona would suggest. In one cable, sent to Washington by the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad last year, he was quoted as discussing with U.S. officials a possible removal of Pakistan's president and his preferred replacement.
On the eve of the cable's publication in November, the normally aloof and soft-spoken general ranted for hours on the subject of irreconcilable U.S.-Pakistan differences in a session with a group of Pakistani journalists.
The two countries' "frames of reference" regarding regional security "can never be the same," he said, according to news accounts. Calling Pakistan America's "most bullied ally," Kayani said that the "real aim of U.S. strategy is to de-nuclearize Pakistan."
The general's suspicions
Kayani was a star student at the U.S. Army's Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., in 1988, writing his master's thesis on "Strengths and Weaknesses of the Afghan Resistance Movement." He was among the last Pakistanis to graduate from the college before the United States cut off military assistance to Islamabad in 1990 in response to Pakistan's suspected nuclear weapons program. Eight years later, both Pakistan and India conducted tests of nuclear devices. The estrangement lasted until President George W. Bush lifted the sanctions in 2001, less than two weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Kayani is far from alone in the Pakistani military in suspecting that the United States will abandon Pakistan once it has achieved its goals in Afghanistan, and that its goal remains to leave Pakistan defenseless against nuclear-armed India.
Kayani "is one of the most anti-India chiefs Pakistan has ever had," one U.S. official said.
The son of a noncommissioned army officer, Kayani was commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1971. He was chief of military operations during the 2001-2002 Pakistan-India crisis. As head of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency from 2004 to 2007, he served as a point man for back-channel talks with India initiated by then-President Pervez Musharraf. When Musharraf resigned in 2008, the talks abruptly ended.
The Pakistani military has long been involved in politics, but few believe that the general seeks to lead the nation. "He has stated from the beginning that he has no desire to involve the military in running the country," said Shuja Nawaz, director of the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council. But that does not mean Kayani would stand by "if there was a failure of civilian institutions," Nawaz said. "The army would step in."
Kayani remains an enigmatic figure, chiefly known in Pakistan for his passion for golf and chain-smoking. According to Jehangir Karamat, a retired general who once held Kayani's job, he is an avid reader and a fan of Lebanese American poet Khalil Gibran.
'Mind-boggling'
Even some Pakistanis see Kayani's India-centric view as dated, self-serving and potentially disastrous as the insurgents the country has harbored increasingly turn on Pakistan itself.
"Nine years into the Afghanistan war, we're fighting various strands of militancy, and we still have an army chief who considers India the major threat," said Cyril Almeida, an editor and columnist at the English-language newspaper Dawn. "That's mind-boggling."
Kayani has cultivated the approval of a strongly anti-American public that opinion polls indicate now holds the military in far higher esteem than it does the weak civilian government of President Asif Ali Zardari. Pakistani officials say the need for public support is a key reason for rebuffing U.S. pleas for an offensive in North Waziristan. In addition to necessitating the transfer of troops from the Indian border, Pakistani military and intelligence officials say such a campaign would incite domestic terrorism and uproot local communities. Residents who left their homes during the South Waziristan offensive more than a year ago have only recently been allowed to begin returning to their villages.
Several U.S. officials described Kayani as straightforward in his explanations of why the time is not right for an offensive in North Waziristan: a combination of too few available troops and too little public support.
The real power broker
Pakistani democracy activists fault the United States for professing to support Pakistan's civilian government while at the same time bolstering Kayani with frequent high-level visits and giving him a prominent role in strategic talks with Islamabad.
Obama administration officials said in response that while they voice support for Pakistan's weak civilian government at every opportunity, the reality is that the army chief is the one who can produce results.
"We have this policy objective, so who do we talk to?" one official said. "It's increasingly clear that we have to talk to Kayani."
Most of the talking is done by Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In more than 30 face-to-face meetings with Kayani, including 21 visits to Pakistan since late 2007, Mullen has sought to reverse what both sides call a "trust deficit" between the two militaries.
But the patience of other U.S. officials has worn thin. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander of the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan, has adopted a much tougher attitude toward Kayani than his predecessor, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, had, according to several U.S. officials.
For his part, Kayani complains that he is "always asking Petraeus what is the strategic objective" in Afghanistan, according to a friend, retired air marshal Shahzad Chaudhry.
As the Obama administration struggles to assess the fruits of its investment in Pakistan, some officials said the United States now accepts that pleas and military assistance will not change Kayani's thinking. Mullen and Richard C. Holbrooke, who served as the administration's special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan until his death last month, thought that "getting Kayani to trust us enough" to be honest constituted progress, one official said.
But what Kayani has honestly told them, the official said, is: "I don't trust you."
W.P
Still, Washington continues its carrot-wielding policy towards Pakistan. Why so?
Because the stakes in Afghan war, for the Americans, are not high enough so they could introduce stick in order to put inense pressure on Pakistani military. Long-term geopolitical interest in the region aside, the United States' immediate national security interests will triumph over any other catagory of interest. Thus, the main goal is to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a safe haven for jihadists.
With Taliban movement on a back foot, at least for now, the Americans are not interested in escalating this conflict beyond Afghanistan's borders and, therefore, neither are they interested in holding Pakistani military into account for its policy of deception and denial -- unless there is a major attack on American soil, which will surely alter the U.S. policy towards Pakistan dramatically.
The following report from the Washington Post shows how Pakistani military chief feels insecure, and even becomes paranoid, about Washington's "ultimate goal": depriving Pakistani state from its nuclear weapons. Also, his extreme resentment towards India does make strategic sense: that any opening up to a giant like India will, ultimately, undo the whole project of Pakistan -- overwhelming its fictitious national identity as well as making it permanently dependent on a much superior Indian economy.
– Belaar –
U.S. efforts fail to convince Pakistan's top general to target Taliban
By Karin Brulliard and Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writers
Friday, December 31, 2010; 8:37 PM
ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN - Countless U.S. officials in recent years have lectured and listened to Gen. Ashfaq Kayani, the man many view as the most powerful in Pakistan. They have drunk tea and played golf with him, feted him and flown with him in helicopters.
But they have yet to persuade him to undertake what the Obama administration's recent strategy review concluded is a key to success in the Afghan war - the elimination of havens inside Pakistan where the Taliban plots and stages attacks on coalition troops in Afghanistan.
Kayani, who as Pakistan's army chief has more direct say over the country's security strategy than its president or prime minister, has resisted personal appeals from President Obama, U.S. military commanders and senior diplomats. Recent U.S. intelligence estimates have concluded that he is unlikely to change his mind anytime soon. Despite the entreaties, officials say, Kayani doesn't trust U.S. motivations and is hedging his bets in case the American strategy for Afghanistan fails.
In many ways, Kayani is the personification of the vexing problem posed by Pakistan. Like the influential military establishment he represents, he views Afghanistan on a timeline stretching far beyond the U.S. withdrawal, which is slated to begin this summer. While the Obama administration sees the insurgents as an enemy force to be defeated as quickly and directly as possible, Pakistan has long regarded them as useful proxies in protecting its western flank from inroads by India, its historical adversary.
"Kayani wants to talk about the end state in South Asia," said one of several Obama administration officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity about the sensitive relationship. U.S. generals, the official said, "want to talk about the next drone attacks."
The administration has praised Kayani for operations in 2009 and 2010 against domestic militants in the Swat Valley and in South Waziristan, and has dramatically increased its military and economic assistance to Pakistan. But it has grown frustrated that the general has not launched a ground assault against Afghan Taliban and al-Qaeda sanctuaries in North Waziristan.
Kayani has promised action when he has enough troops available, although he has given no indication of when that might be. Most of Pakistan's half-million-man army remains facing east, toward India.
In recent months, Kayani has sometimes become defiant. When U.S.-Pakistani tensions spiked in September, after two Pakistani soldiers were killed by an Afghanistan-based American helicopter gunship pursuing insurgents on the wrong side of the border, he personally ordered the closure of the main frontier crossing for U.S. military supplies into Afghanistan, according to U.S. and Pakistani officials.
In October, administration officials choreographed a White House meeting for Kayani at which Obama could directly deliver his message of urgency. The army chief heard him out, then provided a 13-page document updating Pakistan's strategic perspective and noting the gap between short-term U.S. concerns and Pakistan's long-term interests, according to U.S. officials.
Kayani reportedly was infuriated by the recent WikiLeaks release of U.S. diplomatic cables, some of which depicted him as far chummier with the Americans and more deeply involved in Pakistani politics than his carefully crafted domestic persona would suggest. In one cable, sent to Washington by the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad last year, he was quoted as discussing with U.S. officials a possible removal of Pakistan's president and his preferred replacement.
On the eve of the cable's publication in November, the normally aloof and soft-spoken general ranted for hours on the subject of irreconcilable U.S.-Pakistan differences in a session with a group of Pakistani journalists.
The two countries' "frames of reference" regarding regional security "can never be the same," he said, according to news accounts. Calling Pakistan America's "most bullied ally," Kayani said that the "real aim of U.S. strategy is to de-nuclearize Pakistan."
The general's suspicions
Kayani was a star student at the U.S. Army's Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., in 1988, writing his master's thesis on "Strengths and Weaknesses of the Afghan Resistance Movement." He was among the last Pakistanis to graduate from the college before the United States cut off military assistance to Islamabad in 1990 in response to Pakistan's suspected nuclear weapons program. Eight years later, both Pakistan and India conducted tests of nuclear devices. The estrangement lasted until President George W. Bush lifted the sanctions in 2001, less than two weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
Kayani is far from alone in the Pakistani military in suspecting that the United States will abandon Pakistan once it has achieved its goals in Afghanistan, and that its goal remains to leave Pakistan defenseless against nuclear-armed India.
Kayani "is one of the most anti-India chiefs Pakistan has ever had," one U.S. official said.
The son of a noncommissioned army officer, Kayani was commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1971. He was chief of military operations during the 2001-2002 Pakistan-India crisis. As head of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence agency from 2004 to 2007, he served as a point man for back-channel talks with India initiated by then-President Pervez Musharraf. When Musharraf resigned in 2008, the talks abruptly ended.
The Pakistani military has long been involved in politics, but few believe that the general seeks to lead the nation. "He has stated from the beginning that he has no desire to involve the military in running the country," said Shuja Nawaz, director of the South Asia Center at the Atlantic Council. But that does not mean Kayani would stand by "if there was a failure of civilian institutions," Nawaz said. "The army would step in."
Kayani remains an enigmatic figure, chiefly known in Pakistan for his passion for golf and chain-smoking. According to Jehangir Karamat, a retired general who once held Kayani's job, he is an avid reader and a fan of Lebanese American poet Khalil Gibran.
'Mind-boggling'
Even some Pakistanis see Kayani's India-centric view as dated, self-serving and potentially disastrous as the insurgents the country has harbored increasingly turn on Pakistan itself.
"Nine years into the Afghanistan war, we're fighting various strands of militancy, and we still have an army chief who considers India the major threat," said Cyril Almeida, an editor and columnist at the English-language newspaper Dawn. "That's mind-boggling."
Kayani has cultivated the approval of a strongly anti-American public that opinion polls indicate now holds the military in far higher esteem than it does the weak civilian government of President Asif Ali Zardari. Pakistani officials say the need for public support is a key reason for rebuffing U.S. pleas for an offensive in North Waziristan. In addition to necessitating the transfer of troops from the Indian border, Pakistani military and intelligence officials say such a campaign would incite domestic terrorism and uproot local communities. Residents who left their homes during the South Waziristan offensive more than a year ago have only recently been allowed to begin returning to their villages.
Several U.S. officials described Kayani as straightforward in his explanations of why the time is not right for an offensive in North Waziristan: a combination of too few available troops and too little public support.
The real power broker
Pakistani democracy activists fault the United States for professing to support Pakistan's civilian government while at the same time bolstering Kayani with frequent high-level visits and giving him a prominent role in strategic talks with Islamabad.
Obama administration officials said in response that while they voice support for Pakistan's weak civilian government at every opportunity, the reality is that the army chief is the one who can produce results.
"We have this policy objective, so who do we talk to?" one official said. "It's increasingly clear that we have to talk to Kayani."
Most of the talking is done by Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In more than 30 face-to-face meetings with Kayani, including 21 visits to Pakistan since late 2007, Mullen has sought to reverse what both sides call a "trust deficit" between the two militaries.
But the patience of other U.S. officials has worn thin. Gen. David H. Petraeus, the commander of the U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan, has adopted a much tougher attitude toward Kayani than his predecessor, Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, had, according to several U.S. officials.
For his part, Kayani complains that he is "always asking Petraeus what is the strategic objective" in Afghanistan, according to a friend, retired air marshal Shahzad Chaudhry.
As the Obama administration struggles to assess the fruits of its investment in Pakistan, some officials said the United States now accepts that pleas and military assistance will not change Kayani's thinking. Mullen and Richard C. Holbrooke, who served as the administration's special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan until his death last month, thought that "getting Kayani to trust us enough" to be honest constituted progress, one official said.
But what Kayani has honestly told them, the official said, is: "I don't trust you."
W.P
Essay: Zoroaster and the Ayatollahs
Of all socio-political forces – which play an important role in shaping peoples’ lives and even determine the fate of nations – both culture and ideology (or religion) tend to be the most powerful ones. In the past centuries, those who employed these forces, effectively, built vast empires while others, despite series of conquests and acquisition of territories, utterly failed in their bid to establish a lasting polity let alone an empire: because they failed to foster dynamic cultures and, hence, failed to project ideological appeal.
The case in point is the Mongolian imperial control of much of the Eurasian landmass by 1280. Genghis Khan and his successors, by adopting brilliant and ruthless tactics, achieved spectacular victories, thereby, occupying much of China in the east, Anatolia and Persia in the southwest, Central Europe in the northwest. They established an impressive territorial empire through military power.
However, in the end, they failed to consolidate the empire they had achieved through hard work. The absence of an assertive culture, as well as lack of a subjective sense of ethnic superiority, undermined the confidence of the Mongol elite. Consequently, they quickly assimilated into more advanced cultures: one grandson of Genghis Khan, who was the ruler of China, embraced Confucianism; another became devout Muslim, the sultan of Persia; while the third one adopted Persian cultural values and became the ruler of the Great Steppe.
By contrast, the Roman and Chinese empires sustained remarkably well. Indeed, the Roman Empire was the most dynamic one.
Although, the early Pagan-worshiping Romans laid the foundation of the Empire in the republican era, it was, nonetheless, a Rome equipped with Christian faith that expanded further afield, stretching from Britain to Mesopotamia. Civis Romanus sum (I am a Roman citizen) was a source of pride while Christianity became the official faith that provided the moral cover. Ironically, according to Edward Gibbon, Christianity became one of the causes of its decline and fall too.
While, from the Arab-Islamic Empire of the mid-seventh century to the Ottomans, the story of Islam has been dominated by the imperial dreams. Islam as a potent ideology used by the Arabs for regional, if not the world mastery. Their political ambitions cloaked by religious aura and constantly expanded the empire: stretching from Iran to Egypt and from Yemen to northern Syria under the banner of Islam – one of the most remarkable examples of empire building in history. Unlike European imperial statecraft, which marked a clear dividing line between master and subject, the Islamic empires were land based system: the distinction between ruled and ruling classes became increasingly blurred through extensive colonisation and assimilation.
Thanks to this rigorous imperial epoch (conquer and assimilate) the widely diverse ethnic groups in the Middle East, today, share same language and religion, hence, a unified Arabic culture. But some groups, despite being conquered and converted into Islam hereafter, succeeded in preserving their core cultural values. Reason: perhaps such values are deeply rooted in their society. They are, indeed, proved to be most resilient ones, that is why they often withstood in the face of socio-political upheavals such as invasion, revolution and occupation.
The following essay, authored by Abbas Milani of Stanford University, presents an interesting case: while Shiite dogmas, centrally imposed by Islamic regime, are aimed to crush the ancient values as well as subdue the cultural values of other nationalities in Iran, the ancient cultural influences tend to resist social engineering and are still embedded in peoples psyche and characters. It is not an easy task to remove such values through forceful indoctrination.
Zoroastrian, one of the oldest religions in our region, is believed to have some kind of connection with our ancestors. Nawab Akbar Bugti always relished the fact that Baloch heritage contains strong Zoroastrian attributes.
However, in this case study, Mr Milani attempts to analyse different socio-cultural paradigms that have emerged in contemporary Iranian society and shows how these social forces interact – often clash to one another – in different political settings.
This piece truly deserves attention of those who are interested in cultural and historical discourses.
– Belaar –
Zoroaster and the Ayatollahs
December 16, 2010
Abbas Milani
CULTURE IS hard to define and even harder to change. Beneath the surface solemnities of politics and the exigencies of economics lurks the intricate web of habits and rituals, practices and privileges, that we call culture. In its overt manifestations, culture may seem a docile tool, or perhaps an efficient vehicle for political change. In reality, culture has the capacity not only to survive upheaval in the halls of power but also to gradually and inexorably alter the nature of governance, molding politics in its enduring patterns. More than once in Iran’s history, after the country was vanquished by outsiders—from Arabs to Mongols—the culture of the conquered survived and eventually molded the customs of the victors to its own pattern. It is hard to imagine that the 1979 revolution will be an exception to this enduring reality.
In that upheaval of some thirty years ago, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini surprisingly emerged as the leader of the unwieldy and incongruent coalition of cultural forces that united to overthrow the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. In the months leading up to the revolution, Khomeini used remarkable discipline to conveniently hide his true theocratic, antimodern cultural paradigm, feigning instead support for the democratic, nationalist and leftist values and aspirations that defined the demands of the 1979 revolution. Once ensconced in power, however, Khomeini famously declared that the revolution was not carried out for economic gains but for pious ends. The economy, he said, “is for donkeys.” Creating a new Islamic society, fashioning new men and women based on an Islamic model that had been perfected in the prophetic era of Muhammad some fourteen centuries earlier, finally discarding the cultural values of modernity was, he now claimed, the real goal of the revolution.
Now even regime stalwarts concede that this project of cultural remodeling has failed miserably. And the failure, along with its incumbent cultural fluidity and political instability, is in no small measure the result of the resilient societal ethos dominant in Iran on the eve of the revolution.
IT HAS become something of a commonplace to say that for more than a thousand years Iran has been defined by a bifurcated, tormented, even schizoid cultural identity: pre-Islamic, Persian-Zoroastrian elements battling with forces and values of an Arab Islamic culture. The paisley, easily the most recurrent image in the Persian iconographic tradition, is said to capture this tormented division. It represents the cedar tree that Zoroaster planted in heaven which was bent by the winds of Islamic hegemonic culture. Adapting in this way has been the key to the ability of Iranian culture to survive marauding tribes and invading armies. But Iran and its heavenly cedar bend only to lash back to their upright gait when immediate danger has passed and occasion for reasserting traditional values has arisen.
Some scholars have gone so far as to argue that even Shiism—since the sixteenth century the dominant and “official” religion of Iran—is in its fundamental structure nothing but a form of Iranian nationalism. Recent remarks by Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, that Iran’s leaders in the last thirty years are all, in fact, Arabs and that their claims of being descendants of the prophet (symbolized by the black turbans they wear) reassert their Arab blood show clearly the continuing tensions between Persian identity and the Islamism of the rest of the Shia Middle East. Nasrallah needs to convince his followers thus that these Arab brothers have left nothing of a “Persian culture” to survive. These controversial comments indicate both the prevalence among ordinary Arabs of this view that Shiism might be an “un-Islamic invention”—and Iranian in origin. To justify his fealty to the country’s current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Nasrallah had to first make him an Arab.
For much of the twentieth century, these two cultural elements have been at war for domination in Iran. In power from 1925 until 1979, Reza Shah Pahlavi and then his son Mohammad Reza Shah tried to accentuate the pre-Islamic component of the country’s heritage and dilute the Islamic element. The shah’s infamously lavish celebration of two thousand five hundred years of monarchy in 1971—the international glitterati were invited, food was flown in from Maxim’s de Paris, and the ruins of Persepolis were used as a backdrop and a reminder of days of glory gone by—was more than anything intended to accentuate this imperial, pre-Islamic past. Even the country’s calendar was changed. The year 1355 in Iran’s Islamic calendar (or 1976 CE) suddenly became 2535. The beginning of the Islamic calendar went back to the journey of Islam’s prophet, Muhammad, from Mecca to Medina, while the new imperial time sought its genesis in the alleged birthday of Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Empire. As the tumult of the revolution began only two years later, in a gesture of concession to the opposition, the calendar was changed yet again. But neither the hubris of retuning the clock on a whim—earlier tried by the likes of Maximilien de Robespierre in France and Vladimir Lenin in the Soviet Union—nor hackneyed concessions to the opposition could alter the stubborn realities of Iran’s bifurcated culture, formed and ingrained over centuries.
No sooner had Ayatollah Khomeini and his clerical allies seized power than they not only began to reverse the pre-Islamic ardor of the Pahlavi era but they also moved to the other extreme, trying to dilute, diminish and at times altogether erase from cultural memory evidence of Iran’s non-Islamic past. Jahiliyyah, or the age of darkness, has long been a concept used by Islamist historians and ideologues to derisively describe what exists in a society before the advent of Islam. Now some fifteen hundred years of Iran’s imperial era was disparaged and diminished as jahiliyyah. In the early days of the revolution, some of the more ardent new Islamist victors moved to destroy Persepolis (and were forced to cease their destructive plans only in the face of stiff opposition both domestically and internationally), while one of Khomeini’s closest confidants, Ayatollah Sadegh Khalkhali, the man infamously known as the “hanging judge”—a title he had deservedly earned for his role in the judicial murder of hundreds of ancient-regime leaders and the new-regime opponents—dismissed Cyrus as a sodomite Jew, hardly worthy of veneration by a pious nation. Even today, thirty years after the victory of the revolution, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s zealots are taking their ideological hammer to the texts taught in Iranian schools, hoping to erase from the annals of history any sign of pagan “royal historiography.”
The clerics even tried to fight some of the most venerable rites and rituals of the nation. For a time, they focused their attention on eliminating, or at least diminishing in value, the ancient Persian habit of celebrating the vernal equinox as their new year (Nowruz). In retrospect, this anti-Nowruz crusade began even before the 1979 revolution, when in the sixties and seventies religious forces made a concerted effort to replace Nowruz with other religious holidays and feasts. While in those days many in society participated in these religious ceremonies only to spite the regime, since 1979 the tables have turned. Now, celebrating Nowruz is an easy way to show your sentiments about the ruling clerics. The clerical leaders have apparently reconciled themselves to the reality that they have failed in their crusade against the celebration. But their quixotic efforts at delegitimizing Persian habits have not ended. For the last three decades, they have also tried to dissuade the Iranian people from their ritualistic habit of jumping over fires on the last Wednesday of each year—said to symbolize the hope and desire to burn away the past twelve months’ troubles and travails. Even as late as 2010, Khamenei issued a new fatwa declaring the practice heresy and a form of fire worship. Yet both traditions are more alive and celebrated today than ever before. When a regime politicizes all cultural and personal practices, as do the clerics in Iran, then every facet of the culture, every gesture of personal behavior, every sartorial statement (from women’s defiant refusal to wear the forced veil to men’s insistence on wearing ties or shaving their faces) becomes a form of dissent and resistance.
The Persian language, spoken by a majority of Iran’s multiethnic society, and long considered a bastion of Iranian nationalism, has not been immune from the vicissitudes of this culture war either. While much was made of cleansing the Persian language of any Arabic words and influence during the Pahlavi era, Ayatollah Khomeini and his allies made an equally concentrated and futile attempt to infuse the language with more and more Arabic words, phrases and even grammatical structures. For them, Arabic is the language of God and of the Koran, while to the Iranian nationalists it is a detested tool of Arab and Islamic cultural invasion. Just as the effort to create a new “Islamic society” has failed, the attempt to introduce Arabic into the Persian language has also been unsuccessful. Not only is the Persian vernacular today replete with new, cleverly constructed Persian words, but a whole generation of parents are increasingly moving away from naming their children after religious figures, opting instead for names from Iran’s mytho-history, or newly minted names conjured or coined from the Persian vocabulary. In this sense, then, the 1979 revolution was only a moment in the centuries-old culture war to define the soul of Iran; yet another attempt in the long line of efforts to eliminate or diminish in influence certain components of the country’s bifurcated identity.
ADDING TO the complexity of this cultural dualism has been the temptation of modernity. For more than a century, Iran has faced the challenges of an increasingly global modernity—an interrelated set of changes that radically alter a society’s notions of self, identity, politics, economy, spirituality and aesthetic. Culture became the arena in which these battles were most intensely fought. Every discursive realm, from poetry and painting to sermons and stories, turned into at once “instruments” and loci of contention in a culture war between different narratives of selfhood and individual and collective identity.
In response to these formidable challenges, four starkly different cultural and political paradigms, each supporting or rejecting modernity from its own prism and based on its own set of axioms and ideals, emerged. All were vying for domination on the eve of the 1979 revolution. In a sense, the shah was “unkinged” by the very cultural forces he helped to create. He was himself an advocate of Western modernization, even modernity. He supported a woman’s right to vote and the right of religious minorities to practice their faiths (affording unprecedented assistance to Iran’s Jews and Baha’is in particular). He facilitated increased contact with the West, and the training of a large technocratic class, and finally offered patronage and support for experimentation with forms of art, all of course predicated on the society’s acceptance of his patriarchic, authoritarian personal rule.
In the last decade of his reign, inspired by the cultural sensibilities of his wife, Farah Pahlavi, a student of architecture before becoming queen, the shah’s stern political paradigm was accompanied by a well-supported effort to preserve hitherto-ignored elements of Iran’s cultural tradition. Everything from establishing an office entrusted with the task of finding and preserving classics of Persian music to attempts to renovate or preserve gems of Persian architecture flourished under the queen’s patronage and support.
Throughout the seventies, in the Shiraz Arts Festival, some of the most cutting-edge thespians and playwrights in the world put on radical and innovative shows. British director Peter Brook and his Polish contemporary Jerzy Grotowski brought their new experimental productions to the city. Conservative clergy attacked these performances as lewd and lascivious, intended to undermine “Islamic moral values,” yet they were not the only critics of this display. On the other side, the democratic and leftist opposition (which embraced modernity’s values through its support of the “rights of man”) dismissed the festival as the futile and expensive facade of tolerance created by an oppressive regime. For them, the shah’s authoritarianism, his “dependence” on the West and his “original sin” of participating in the 1953 CIA-backed removal of then–Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh from power, trumped in value any cultural freedoms his regime offered or supported.
While the leftist, centrist and clerical opposition to the shah “overdetermined” politics to the detriment of cultural freedoms, the ruler, for his part, failed to understand what increasingly became the clear iron law of culture: men (and women) do not live by bread alone, and when a society is introduced into the ethos of modernity—from the rule of reason and women’s suffrage to the idea of natural rights of citizens and the notion of a community joined together by social contract and legitimized by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s popular will—then it will invariably demand its democratic rights. That society will not tolerate the authoritarian rule of even a modernizing monarch capable of delivering impressive economic development. The shah tried to treat the people of Iran as “subjects” and expected their gratitude for the cultural freedoms and economic advancement he had “given” them. But he, and his father (and before them, the participants in the Constitutional Revolution at the turn of the twentieth century), had helped develop a new cultural disposition by creating a parliament and a system of law wherein the people considered themselves citizens and thought of these liberties as their right—not as gifts benevolently bestowed upon them.
FOR IF cultural and economic modernity, minus democracy, was the essence of the shah’s paradigm, the second-most-powerful cultural model of modernity was advocated by a disproportionately large segment of the Iranian intelligentsia. Though divided in aspects of their aesthetic and cultural sensibilities, advocates of this second paradigm included a wide variety of poets, scholars and historians who championed the idea of citizenship in a modern, democratic polity where rule of law was to be the only mode of adjudicating differences. Identity was, in this system, at once both individual and national. They advocated a modernity that was invariably “Westophile” in its disposition, looking to the Enlightenment, modernism and other Western aesthetic developments for at least part of their inspiration. They were thus culturally more or less on the same side of history as the shah and his modernizing efforts. Yet, steeped as many of these artists and scholars were in what Isaiah Berlin called the Russian concept of intelligentsia, and thereby believing that the necessary posture of an artist was criticism of the status quo, they saw the shah and his regime as an obstacle to, if not an enemy of, progress. The literary and scholarly efforts of this group cemented a sense of Iranian cultural identity. But they were often dismissed and at times harassed by the Pahlavi regime. Limits on their creativity, begot by the shah’s authoritarianism, only added to the schism between advocates of this paradigm and the Iranian ruler.
And within this paradigm was forged the uneasy relationship with the West still present in the battle to reconcile Iranian identity—particularly the pre-Islamic elements—with Enlightenment values. It may be masked beneath the heavy shroud of the current theocratic regime, but it lies in wait. Montesquieu might well have been the first to recognize the inherent difficulties of this sort of resolution when, in his Persian Letters, he asked how one can be at once modern and Persian. Indeed, among the advocates of a democratic polity—no less influential but far less famous—were the often self-effacing scholars, poets, historians, writers and musicians who in those years worked hard to discover, preserve, publish and display critical, often-ignored elements of Iran’s imperial era as well as its post-Islamic cultural heritage. Their efforts were indispensable to the emergence of a new form of Iranian cultural modernity that was less awed and intimidated by the West and more inclined to infuse into their work usable elements of Iran’s own tradition. From music and architecture to painting and poetry, there was initially a rush to reproduce in Iran the styles and forms that were popular in the West. But by the late sixties and early seventies, something fundamental happened to many advocates of this Westophile modernity; they forsook their earlier attempts at simply imitating the works of Western masters and began an eventful age of the “return” to native roots. Transcending the tradition of old and incorporating it into the best the West had to offer, rather than simply emulating the Western way of life, became the motto of this new Iranian ethos.
Many cultural fields witnessed this profound process of looking inward while innovating. Actor Parviz Sayyad and filmmaker Bahram Beizai, for example, took the traditional forms of Ta’ziyeh—religious musical pageantry and passion plays—and fashioned out of them a modernist interpretation that attracted the attention of many of the theater world’s most inventive directors and playwrights. Sayyad not only worked hard to preserve these traditional plays but also created for television some of the most memorable characters of modern Persian media. His Samad—a guileful peasant, ill at ease in his new urban surroundings but more than willing to milk his situation for all he could—was uncanny in capturing the pathos and pathologies in the “drama of modernization” that social scientists have long written about. And the cinematic displays of the likes of Ebrahim Golestan’s Asrar ganj dareheye jenni,or Mysteries of the Treasure at Ghost Valley (describing the destructive transformations in the life of a man who suddenly discovers a wealth of artifacts buried under his field), were prescient in anticipating the revolution and underscoring the cultural dislocations that defined Iran on the eve of the uprising. Golestan’s “man,” and his tragicomic effort to “modernize” his house by simply buying the accoutrements of a contemporary life, was an unmistakable allusion to the shah’s inability to wisely manage the sudden surge of income.
After the revolution, more than once, artists and intellectuals have similarly used myths and metaphors to underscore the implied, but now abrogated, contract between the clergy and the people. Khomeini had promised to go to a seminary once the shah was overthrown, thereby relinquishing any role in ruling Iran. He also promised to prevent any clergy from seizing the levers of power. But once the revolution was won, he breached that contract. Today, every post of importance is divided between some three hundred top clerics in the country. The Sufi tale of Sheikh Sanaan was cleverly used by one assaying to describe and deride this abrogation. In the original story, the sheikh fell in love with the Christian daughter of a pig farmer—something that should have been anathema to him as a Muslim. In the revived and revised account, the sheikh falls in love with Power—and her temptations lead him to forget every one of his promises.
Much the same can be said of a whole genre of “film-farsi” that developed in the seventies. These movies were known for the crass and primitive quality of their production, the archetypal simplicity of their stories—rich girl meets poor boy, family objects, problems arise and then a happy ending follows. Within a few years, even some of these popular films were beginning to delve into “social issues,” showing a culture of vigilantism and at times even nascent hints of newly assertive religiosity. Since the revolution, the enormous popularity of these “film-farsi” among the urban poor has made them into one of the favorite vehicles for pedagogy in the hands of the clerical regime. Hundreds of films, extolling “martyrdom” and describing the stories of war, have been made in the last two decades. The great divide between these highly popular but aesthetically crass movies and the tradition of art-house productions was in fact one aspect of the chasm that divided the preoccupations of the intelligentsia and the cultural habits of the masses under the shah. Today, too, serious Iranian filmmakers—from Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Jafar Panahi to Abbas Kiarostami and Tahmineh Milani—are creating works that are often only shown in international film festivals and deftly defy and transcend the pious shibboleths promoted by the regime’s own sanctioned cinema.
INDEED, ALONG with these aesthetic and intellectual developments, the needs of the “ordinary” Iranian have also long vied for dominance in Iran’s complicated encounter with modernity. In a country whose modernization was fashioned with petrodollars and controlled by the elites, it is no surprise then that Marxism should find itself as the third paradigm of modernity. Though by the mid-seventies there were numerous small groups and sects with varying versions of Marxism as their mottoes, the clearly dominant form was Stalinism, with its emphasis on a “statist” economy run by a totalitarian party and inclined not toward the West but the Soviet empire. Like Stalin, these Iranian Marxists also believed that culture was an auxiliary of the economy. Change the economic base, Stalin had opined, and the culture will change with it. Moreover, inspired by the same Russian tradition of “social criticism” and “committed art,” Iranian Marxists too believed that all cultural productions were nothing but instruments of the class struggle. Form was subservient to content; simple, even simpleminded cultural artifacts, supposedly understandable to the masses, were preferred over “decadent” bourgeois productions that privileged form and aesthetic excellence.
The animosity of most of these Marxists toward the shah was driven as much by dictates of theory—the discourse of imperialism and colonialism, and the shah as their “lackey” if not “client”—as by exigencies of their “big brother,” the Soviet Union. Their surprising support for Khomeini had the same roots. They saw in the religious leader an Aleksandr Kerensky, who lost his leadership to Lenin, and believed they would inherit or grab the power Khomeini would prove incapable of managing. Moreover, toppling the shah was seen by the Soviet Union as a first step in curtailing America’s influence in the region. Finally, striking structural similarities between Khomeini’s Shiism and this form of Marxism—their belief in a messiah, their claim to a monopoly on truth, their willingness to sacrifice the individual for the greater good, their eschatological view of history, their belief that the truly pious or revolutionary are invariably in the minority, their disparagement of liberal democracy, their Machiavellian willingness to use any means necessary to achieve their ends, their peculiar epistemology where a quote from sacred texts is used in lieu of rational arguments—created a cultural consanguinity between radical Shiism and Stalinist Marxists. Politics, they say, makes strange bedfellows; authoritarian politics, like the reality of Iran in the seventies, begets monstrously ill-conceived alliances to achieve the superficially common goal of ending despotism. And thus it was that advocates of the Marxist and the secular-democratic cultural paradigms of modernity formed an alliance against the shah, who advocated his own iteration of the same paradigm. Even more strangely, this incongruent coalition chose as its leader Ayatollah Khomeini, easily the most fervent enemy of modernity in contemporary Iran.
FACED WITH the inexorable challenge of modernity, Shiism in the twentieth century in fact split into two different camps, some trying to reconcile it with democracy and rationalism, while others, led by Khomeini, rejected nearly every cultural component of modernity as a colonial construct. In a sense, this was the fourth critical cultural paradigm in Iran’s encounter with modernity. The other three offered different ways of embracing change, while this version provided reasons why the whole temptation of the progressive era should be ignored and overcome. Ayatollah Khomeini and his small band of cohorts criticized nationalism and denigrated individualism as a ploy of colonialism. Instead, they advocated “brotherhood” in an internationalist “ummah,” or spiritual community of the believers. As early as 1944, with the publication of his book Kashf al-Asrar (Solving Mysteries), Khomeini offered a paradigm of politics and culture that not only dismissed modernity and much of the modernization project, but fought on two religious fronts as well. On the one hand, he took issue with clerics who advocated a “quietist” interpretation of Shiism like his mentor and teacher, Ayatollah Hairi, and Ayatollah Kazem Shariat-Madari (easily the most influential and senior cleric inside Iran in 1978) who believed the clergy must limit their interventions in politics and instead attend to the spiritual demands of the flock. At the same time, Ayatollah Khomeini fought against Islamist reformists—most notably Ali Shariati and his attempt to eclectically mix Marx, Freud, Sartre, Fanon, Che and Islam—who wanted Shiism stripped of its superstition and anachronistic rituals.
While the shah was busy fighting the cultural influence of the Left, and while the Left, ever self-congratulatory in its exaggeration of its own importance and influence, flirted with the clergy as “allies” in the anti-imperialist struggle, Khomeini and his cohorts worked quietly to enhance their own influence and strengthen their labyrinthine network of groups, mosques, neighborhood “mourning” committees and even professional organizations. They used this vast network to dominate the democratic movement that emerged in 1978 in Iran. Khomeini’s concealment of his true intentions just before the revolution, as well as his ability to portray himself both to the majority in Iran and even to the American embassy in Tehran as a proponent of democracy, allowed for the formation of the unwieldy alliance of advocates and foes of modernity against the shah’s authoritarianism.
THE COALITION that overthrew the shah brought together technocrats and merchants of the bazaar, members of the urban middle class and much of the working classes, along with the women’s movement, labor unions, students, forces of the Left and the clergy. Yet no sooner had Khomeini come to power than the coalition broke apart; the clergy successfully sidelined secular leftist and centrist factions. With Khomeini’s seizure of control, and with clerical despotism increasing its total grip on power, Iran entered a period of political strife and instability. Since 1979, disillusioned advocates of democracy and modernity have continued their sometimes overt, other times covert struggle to realize the democratic dream. For in this theocratic version of Iran, the cultural influences of its Persian past and its adaptation of those influences with the political and economic rights of man have been subsumed by the Arab Islamism foreign to the vibrant intellectual struggle of this nation to free itself of monarchical and autocratic forces. But this culture war continues to play out in the background of politics—the ethos of the “conquered” people working quietly but relentlessly to subvert, change and eventually replace the alien culture of their usurping rulers.
And this current manifestation was clear during the June 2009 uprising. Once again, that same democratic coalition that formed a foolhardy alliance with the clerical regime—and now numerically stronger than ever but still denied a chance to organize itself politically—came together to invigorate what Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and his conservative allies hoped would be an anemic presidential campaign by a dour, uncharismatic Mir Hussein Moussavi. But the remarkable surge of social energy in support of Moussavi forced the conservatives to steal the election for Ahmadinejad. And then suddenly, the country’s seemingly docile population rose up around a beguilingly simple slogan: Where is my vote? In Tehran alone, 3 million people marched in remarkable discipline to demand their democratic rights. Their slogan pithily captured in a mere four words the hundred-year-old dream of modernity and democracy in Iran. Using thugs and guns, prison and torture, the ayatollah has so far succeeded in intimidating the people back into their homes. But a critical look at the past shows the bleak future of Khamenei and other champions of despotism. Violence can only delay but not destroy the rights of man in a nation that has embraced the cultural ethos of modernity. The hushed, brutalized quiet of today is at best a prelude to the liberating storms of tomorrow.
Abbas Milani is the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University, where he is also the codirector of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution. His book, The Shah, was published in January 2011 by Palgrave Macmillan.
TNI
http://nationalinterest.org/article/zoroaster-the-ayatollahs-4580
The case in point is the Mongolian imperial control of much of the Eurasian landmass by 1280. Genghis Khan and his successors, by adopting brilliant and ruthless tactics, achieved spectacular victories, thereby, occupying much of China in the east, Anatolia and Persia in the southwest, Central Europe in the northwest. They established an impressive territorial empire through military power.
However, in the end, they failed to consolidate the empire they had achieved through hard work. The absence of an assertive culture, as well as lack of a subjective sense of ethnic superiority, undermined the confidence of the Mongol elite. Consequently, they quickly assimilated into more advanced cultures: one grandson of Genghis Khan, who was the ruler of China, embraced Confucianism; another became devout Muslim, the sultan of Persia; while the third one adopted Persian cultural values and became the ruler of the Great Steppe.
By contrast, the Roman and Chinese empires sustained remarkably well. Indeed, the Roman Empire was the most dynamic one.
Although, the early Pagan-worshiping Romans laid the foundation of the Empire in the republican era, it was, nonetheless, a Rome equipped with Christian faith that expanded further afield, stretching from Britain to Mesopotamia. Civis Romanus sum (I am a Roman citizen) was a source of pride while Christianity became the official faith that provided the moral cover. Ironically, according to Edward Gibbon, Christianity became one of the causes of its decline and fall too.
While, from the Arab-Islamic Empire of the mid-seventh century to the Ottomans, the story of Islam has been dominated by the imperial dreams. Islam as a potent ideology used by the Arabs for regional, if not the world mastery. Their political ambitions cloaked by religious aura and constantly expanded the empire: stretching from Iran to Egypt and from Yemen to northern Syria under the banner of Islam – one of the most remarkable examples of empire building in history. Unlike European imperial statecraft, which marked a clear dividing line between master and subject, the Islamic empires were land based system: the distinction between ruled and ruling classes became increasingly blurred through extensive colonisation and assimilation.
Thanks to this rigorous imperial epoch (conquer and assimilate) the widely diverse ethnic groups in the Middle East, today, share same language and religion, hence, a unified Arabic culture. But some groups, despite being conquered and converted into Islam hereafter, succeeded in preserving their core cultural values. Reason: perhaps such values are deeply rooted in their society. They are, indeed, proved to be most resilient ones, that is why they often withstood in the face of socio-political upheavals such as invasion, revolution and occupation.
The following essay, authored by Abbas Milani of Stanford University, presents an interesting case: while Shiite dogmas, centrally imposed by Islamic regime, are aimed to crush the ancient values as well as subdue the cultural values of other nationalities in Iran, the ancient cultural influences tend to resist social engineering and are still embedded in peoples psyche and characters. It is not an easy task to remove such values through forceful indoctrination.
Zoroastrian, one of the oldest religions in our region, is believed to have some kind of connection with our ancestors. Nawab Akbar Bugti always relished the fact that Baloch heritage contains strong Zoroastrian attributes.
However, in this case study, Mr Milani attempts to analyse different socio-cultural paradigms that have emerged in contemporary Iranian society and shows how these social forces interact – often clash to one another – in different political settings.
This piece truly deserves attention of those who are interested in cultural and historical discourses.
– Belaar –
Zoroaster and the Ayatollahs
December 16, 2010
Abbas Milani
CULTURE IS hard to define and even harder to change. Beneath the surface solemnities of politics and the exigencies of economics lurks the intricate web of habits and rituals, practices and privileges, that we call culture. In its overt manifestations, culture may seem a docile tool, or perhaps an efficient vehicle for political change. In reality, culture has the capacity not only to survive upheaval in the halls of power but also to gradually and inexorably alter the nature of governance, molding politics in its enduring patterns. More than once in Iran’s history, after the country was vanquished by outsiders—from Arabs to Mongols—the culture of the conquered survived and eventually molded the customs of the victors to its own pattern. It is hard to imagine that the 1979 revolution will be an exception to this enduring reality.
In that upheaval of some thirty years ago, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini surprisingly emerged as the leader of the unwieldy and incongruent coalition of cultural forces that united to overthrow the shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. In the months leading up to the revolution, Khomeini used remarkable discipline to conveniently hide his true theocratic, antimodern cultural paradigm, feigning instead support for the democratic, nationalist and leftist values and aspirations that defined the demands of the 1979 revolution. Once ensconced in power, however, Khomeini famously declared that the revolution was not carried out for economic gains but for pious ends. The economy, he said, “is for donkeys.” Creating a new Islamic society, fashioning new men and women based on an Islamic model that had been perfected in the prophetic era of Muhammad some fourteen centuries earlier, finally discarding the cultural values of modernity was, he now claimed, the real goal of the revolution.
Now even regime stalwarts concede that this project of cultural remodeling has failed miserably. And the failure, along with its incumbent cultural fluidity and political instability, is in no small measure the result of the resilient societal ethos dominant in Iran on the eve of the revolution.
IT HAS become something of a commonplace to say that for more than a thousand years Iran has been defined by a bifurcated, tormented, even schizoid cultural identity: pre-Islamic, Persian-Zoroastrian elements battling with forces and values of an Arab Islamic culture. The paisley, easily the most recurrent image in the Persian iconographic tradition, is said to capture this tormented division. It represents the cedar tree that Zoroaster planted in heaven which was bent by the winds of Islamic hegemonic culture. Adapting in this way has been the key to the ability of Iranian culture to survive marauding tribes and invading armies. But Iran and its heavenly cedar bend only to lash back to their upright gait when immediate danger has passed and occasion for reasserting traditional values has arisen.
Some scholars have gone so far as to argue that even Shiism—since the sixteenth century the dominant and “official” religion of Iran—is in its fundamental structure nothing but a form of Iranian nationalism. Recent remarks by Sheik Hassan Nasrallah, the head of Lebanon’s Hezbollah, that Iran’s leaders in the last thirty years are all, in fact, Arabs and that their claims of being descendants of the prophet (symbolized by the black turbans they wear) reassert their Arab blood show clearly the continuing tensions between Persian identity and the Islamism of the rest of the Shia Middle East. Nasrallah needs to convince his followers thus that these Arab brothers have left nothing of a “Persian culture” to survive. These controversial comments indicate both the prevalence among ordinary Arabs of this view that Shiism might be an “un-Islamic invention”—and Iranian in origin. To justify his fealty to the country’s current supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Nasrallah had to first make him an Arab.
For much of the twentieth century, these two cultural elements have been at war for domination in Iran. In power from 1925 until 1979, Reza Shah Pahlavi and then his son Mohammad Reza Shah tried to accentuate the pre-Islamic component of the country’s heritage and dilute the Islamic element. The shah’s infamously lavish celebration of two thousand five hundred years of monarchy in 1971—the international glitterati were invited, food was flown in from Maxim’s de Paris, and the ruins of Persepolis were used as a backdrop and a reminder of days of glory gone by—was more than anything intended to accentuate this imperial, pre-Islamic past. Even the country’s calendar was changed. The year 1355 in Iran’s Islamic calendar (or 1976 CE) suddenly became 2535. The beginning of the Islamic calendar went back to the journey of Islam’s prophet, Muhammad, from Mecca to Medina, while the new imperial time sought its genesis in the alleged birthday of Cyrus, the founder of the Persian Empire. As the tumult of the revolution began only two years later, in a gesture of concession to the opposition, the calendar was changed yet again. But neither the hubris of retuning the clock on a whim—earlier tried by the likes of Maximilien de Robespierre in France and Vladimir Lenin in the Soviet Union—nor hackneyed concessions to the opposition could alter the stubborn realities of Iran’s bifurcated culture, formed and ingrained over centuries.
No sooner had Ayatollah Khomeini and his clerical allies seized power than they not only began to reverse the pre-Islamic ardor of the Pahlavi era but they also moved to the other extreme, trying to dilute, diminish and at times altogether erase from cultural memory evidence of Iran’s non-Islamic past. Jahiliyyah, or the age of darkness, has long been a concept used by Islamist historians and ideologues to derisively describe what exists in a society before the advent of Islam. Now some fifteen hundred years of Iran’s imperial era was disparaged and diminished as jahiliyyah. In the early days of the revolution, some of the more ardent new Islamist victors moved to destroy Persepolis (and were forced to cease their destructive plans only in the face of stiff opposition both domestically and internationally), while one of Khomeini’s closest confidants, Ayatollah Sadegh Khalkhali, the man infamously known as the “hanging judge”—a title he had deservedly earned for his role in the judicial murder of hundreds of ancient-regime leaders and the new-regime opponents—dismissed Cyrus as a sodomite Jew, hardly worthy of veneration by a pious nation. Even today, thirty years after the victory of the revolution, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s zealots are taking their ideological hammer to the texts taught in Iranian schools, hoping to erase from the annals of history any sign of pagan “royal historiography.”
The clerics even tried to fight some of the most venerable rites and rituals of the nation. For a time, they focused their attention on eliminating, or at least diminishing in value, the ancient Persian habit of celebrating the vernal equinox as their new year (Nowruz). In retrospect, this anti-Nowruz crusade began even before the 1979 revolution, when in the sixties and seventies religious forces made a concerted effort to replace Nowruz with other religious holidays and feasts. While in those days many in society participated in these religious ceremonies only to spite the regime, since 1979 the tables have turned. Now, celebrating Nowruz is an easy way to show your sentiments about the ruling clerics. The clerical leaders have apparently reconciled themselves to the reality that they have failed in their crusade against the celebration. But their quixotic efforts at delegitimizing Persian habits have not ended. For the last three decades, they have also tried to dissuade the Iranian people from their ritualistic habit of jumping over fires on the last Wednesday of each year—said to symbolize the hope and desire to burn away the past twelve months’ troubles and travails. Even as late as 2010, Khamenei issued a new fatwa declaring the practice heresy and a form of fire worship. Yet both traditions are more alive and celebrated today than ever before. When a regime politicizes all cultural and personal practices, as do the clerics in Iran, then every facet of the culture, every gesture of personal behavior, every sartorial statement (from women’s defiant refusal to wear the forced veil to men’s insistence on wearing ties or shaving their faces) becomes a form of dissent and resistance.
The Persian language, spoken by a majority of Iran’s multiethnic society, and long considered a bastion of Iranian nationalism, has not been immune from the vicissitudes of this culture war either. While much was made of cleansing the Persian language of any Arabic words and influence during the Pahlavi era, Ayatollah Khomeini and his allies made an equally concentrated and futile attempt to infuse the language with more and more Arabic words, phrases and even grammatical structures. For them, Arabic is the language of God and of the Koran, while to the Iranian nationalists it is a detested tool of Arab and Islamic cultural invasion. Just as the effort to create a new “Islamic society” has failed, the attempt to introduce Arabic into the Persian language has also been unsuccessful. Not only is the Persian vernacular today replete with new, cleverly constructed Persian words, but a whole generation of parents are increasingly moving away from naming their children after religious figures, opting instead for names from Iran’s mytho-history, or newly minted names conjured or coined from the Persian vocabulary. In this sense, then, the 1979 revolution was only a moment in the centuries-old culture war to define the soul of Iran; yet another attempt in the long line of efforts to eliminate or diminish in influence certain components of the country’s bifurcated identity.
ADDING TO the complexity of this cultural dualism has been the temptation of modernity. For more than a century, Iran has faced the challenges of an increasingly global modernity—an interrelated set of changes that radically alter a society’s notions of self, identity, politics, economy, spirituality and aesthetic. Culture became the arena in which these battles were most intensely fought. Every discursive realm, from poetry and painting to sermons and stories, turned into at once “instruments” and loci of contention in a culture war between different narratives of selfhood and individual and collective identity.
In response to these formidable challenges, four starkly different cultural and political paradigms, each supporting or rejecting modernity from its own prism and based on its own set of axioms and ideals, emerged. All were vying for domination on the eve of the 1979 revolution. In a sense, the shah was “unkinged” by the very cultural forces he helped to create. He was himself an advocate of Western modernization, even modernity. He supported a woman’s right to vote and the right of religious minorities to practice their faiths (affording unprecedented assistance to Iran’s Jews and Baha’is in particular). He facilitated increased contact with the West, and the training of a large technocratic class, and finally offered patronage and support for experimentation with forms of art, all of course predicated on the society’s acceptance of his patriarchic, authoritarian personal rule.
In the last decade of his reign, inspired by the cultural sensibilities of his wife, Farah Pahlavi, a student of architecture before becoming queen, the shah’s stern political paradigm was accompanied by a well-supported effort to preserve hitherto-ignored elements of Iran’s cultural tradition. Everything from establishing an office entrusted with the task of finding and preserving classics of Persian music to attempts to renovate or preserve gems of Persian architecture flourished under the queen’s patronage and support.
Throughout the seventies, in the Shiraz Arts Festival, some of the most cutting-edge thespians and playwrights in the world put on radical and innovative shows. British director Peter Brook and his Polish contemporary Jerzy Grotowski brought their new experimental productions to the city. Conservative clergy attacked these performances as lewd and lascivious, intended to undermine “Islamic moral values,” yet they were not the only critics of this display. On the other side, the democratic and leftist opposition (which embraced modernity’s values through its support of the “rights of man”) dismissed the festival as the futile and expensive facade of tolerance created by an oppressive regime. For them, the shah’s authoritarianism, his “dependence” on the West and his “original sin” of participating in the 1953 CIA-backed removal of then–Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh from power, trumped in value any cultural freedoms his regime offered or supported.
While the leftist, centrist and clerical opposition to the shah “overdetermined” politics to the detriment of cultural freedoms, the ruler, for his part, failed to understand what increasingly became the clear iron law of culture: men (and women) do not live by bread alone, and when a society is introduced into the ethos of modernity—from the rule of reason and women’s suffrage to the idea of natural rights of citizens and the notion of a community joined together by social contract and legitimized by Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s popular will—then it will invariably demand its democratic rights. That society will not tolerate the authoritarian rule of even a modernizing monarch capable of delivering impressive economic development. The shah tried to treat the people of Iran as “subjects” and expected their gratitude for the cultural freedoms and economic advancement he had “given” them. But he, and his father (and before them, the participants in the Constitutional Revolution at the turn of the twentieth century), had helped develop a new cultural disposition by creating a parliament and a system of law wherein the people considered themselves citizens and thought of these liberties as their right—not as gifts benevolently bestowed upon them.
FOR IF cultural and economic modernity, minus democracy, was the essence of the shah’s paradigm, the second-most-powerful cultural model of modernity was advocated by a disproportionately large segment of the Iranian intelligentsia. Though divided in aspects of their aesthetic and cultural sensibilities, advocates of this second paradigm included a wide variety of poets, scholars and historians who championed the idea of citizenship in a modern, democratic polity where rule of law was to be the only mode of adjudicating differences. Identity was, in this system, at once both individual and national. They advocated a modernity that was invariably “Westophile” in its disposition, looking to the Enlightenment, modernism and other Western aesthetic developments for at least part of their inspiration. They were thus culturally more or less on the same side of history as the shah and his modernizing efforts. Yet, steeped as many of these artists and scholars were in what Isaiah Berlin called the Russian concept of intelligentsia, and thereby believing that the necessary posture of an artist was criticism of the status quo, they saw the shah and his regime as an obstacle to, if not an enemy of, progress. The literary and scholarly efforts of this group cemented a sense of Iranian cultural identity. But they were often dismissed and at times harassed by the Pahlavi regime. Limits on their creativity, begot by the shah’s authoritarianism, only added to the schism between advocates of this paradigm and the Iranian ruler.
And within this paradigm was forged the uneasy relationship with the West still present in the battle to reconcile Iranian identity—particularly the pre-Islamic elements—with Enlightenment values. It may be masked beneath the heavy shroud of the current theocratic regime, but it lies in wait. Montesquieu might well have been the first to recognize the inherent difficulties of this sort of resolution when, in his Persian Letters, he asked how one can be at once modern and Persian. Indeed, among the advocates of a democratic polity—no less influential but far less famous—were the often self-effacing scholars, poets, historians, writers and musicians who in those years worked hard to discover, preserve, publish and display critical, often-ignored elements of Iran’s imperial era as well as its post-Islamic cultural heritage. Their efforts were indispensable to the emergence of a new form of Iranian cultural modernity that was less awed and intimidated by the West and more inclined to infuse into their work usable elements of Iran’s own tradition. From music and architecture to painting and poetry, there was initially a rush to reproduce in Iran the styles and forms that were popular in the West. But by the late sixties and early seventies, something fundamental happened to many advocates of this Westophile modernity; they forsook their earlier attempts at simply imitating the works of Western masters and began an eventful age of the “return” to native roots. Transcending the tradition of old and incorporating it into the best the West had to offer, rather than simply emulating the Western way of life, became the motto of this new Iranian ethos.
Many cultural fields witnessed this profound process of looking inward while innovating. Actor Parviz Sayyad and filmmaker Bahram Beizai, for example, took the traditional forms of Ta’ziyeh—religious musical pageantry and passion plays—and fashioned out of them a modernist interpretation that attracted the attention of many of the theater world’s most inventive directors and playwrights. Sayyad not only worked hard to preserve these traditional plays but also created for television some of the most memorable characters of modern Persian media. His Samad—a guileful peasant, ill at ease in his new urban surroundings but more than willing to milk his situation for all he could—was uncanny in capturing the pathos and pathologies in the “drama of modernization” that social scientists have long written about. And the cinematic displays of the likes of Ebrahim Golestan’s Asrar ganj dareheye jenni,or Mysteries of the Treasure at Ghost Valley (describing the destructive transformations in the life of a man who suddenly discovers a wealth of artifacts buried under his field), were prescient in anticipating the revolution and underscoring the cultural dislocations that defined Iran on the eve of the uprising. Golestan’s “man,” and his tragicomic effort to “modernize” his house by simply buying the accoutrements of a contemporary life, was an unmistakable allusion to the shah’s inability to wisely manage the sudden surge of income.
After the revolution, more than once, artists and intellectuals have similarly used myths and metaphors to underscore the implied, but now abrogated, contract between the clergy and the people. Khomeini had promised to go to a seminary once the shah was overthrown, thereby relinquishing any role in ruling Iran. He also promised to prevent any clergy from seizing the levers of power. But once the revolution was won, he breached that contract. Today, every post of importance is divided between some three hundred top clerics in the country. The Sufi tale of Sheikh Sanaan was cleverly used by one assaying to describe and deride this abrogation. In the original story, the sheikh fell in love with the Christian daughter of a pig farmer—something that should have been anathema to him as a Muslim. In the revived and revised account, the sheikh falls in love with Power—and her temptations lead him to forget every one of his promises.
Much the same can be said of a whole genre of “film-farsi” that developed in the seventies. These movies were known for the crass and primitive quality of their production, the archetypal simplicity of their stories—rich girl meets poor boy, family objects, problems arise and then a happy ending follows. Within a few years, even some of these popular films were beginning to delve into “social issues,” showing a culture of vigilantism and at times even nascent hints of newly assertive religiosity. Since the revolution, the enormous popularity of these “film-farsi” among the urban poor has made them into one of the favorite vehicles for pedagogy in the hands of the clerical regime. Hundreds of films, extolling “martyrdom” and describing the stories of war, have been made in the last two decades. The great divide between these highly popular but aesthetically crass movies and the tradition of art-house productions was in fact one aspect of the chasm that divided the preoccupations of the intelligentsia and the cultural habits of the masses under the shah. Today, too, serious Iranian filmmakers—from Mohsen Makhmalbaf and Jafar Panahi to Abbas Kiarostami and Tahmineh Milani—are creating works that are often only shown in international film festivals and deftly defy and transcend the pious shibboleths promoted by the regime’s own sanctioned cinema.
INDEED, ALONG with these aesthetic and intellectual developments, the needs of the “ordinary” Iranian have also long vied for dominance in Iran’s complicated encounter with modernity. In a country whose modernization was fashioned with petrodollars and controlled by the elites, it is no surprise then that Marxism should find itself as the third paradigm of modernity. Though by the mid-seventies there were numerous small groups and sects with varying versions of Marxism as their mottoes, the clearly dominant form was Stalinism, with its emphasis on a “statist” economy run by a totalitarian party and inclined not toward the West but the Soviet empire. Like Stalin, these Iranian Marxists also believed that culture was an auxiliary of the economy. Change the economic base, Stalin had opined, and the culture will change with it. Moreover, inspired by the same Russian tradition of “social criticism” and “committed art,” Iranian Marxists too believed that all cultural productions were nothing but instruments of the class struggle. Form was subservient to content; simple, even simpleminded cultural artifacts, supposedly understandable to the masses, were preferred over “decadent” bourgeois productions that privileged form and aesthetic excellence.
The animosity of most of these Marxists toward the shah was driven as much by dictates of theory—the discourse of imperialism and colonialism, and the shah as their “lackey” if not “client”—as by exigencies of their “big brother,” the Soviet Union. Their surprising support for Khomeini had the same roots. They saw in the religious leader an Aleksandr Kerensky, who lost his leadership to Lenin, and believed they would inherit or grab the power Khomeini would prove incapable of managing. Moreover, toppling the shah was seen by the Soviet Union as a first step in curtailing America’s influence in the region. Finally, striking structural similarities between Khomeini’s Shiism and this form of Marxism—their belief in a messiah, their claim to a monopoly on truth, their willingness to sacrifice the individual for the greater good, their eschatological view of history, their belief that the truly pious or revolutionary are invariably in the minority, their disparagement of liberal democracy, their Machiavellian willingness to use any means necessary to achieve their ends, their peculiar epistemology where a quote from sacred texts is used in lieu of rational arguments—created a cultural consanguinity between radical Shiism and Stalinist Marxists. Politics, they say, makes strange bedfellows; authoritarian politics, like the reality of Iran in the seventies, begets monstrously ill-conceived alliances to achieve the superficially common goal of ending despotism. And thus it was that advocates of the Marxist and the secular-democratic cultural paradigms of modernity formed an alliance against the shah, who advocated his own iteration of the same paradigm. Even more strangely, this incongruent coalition chose as its leader Ayatollah Khomeini, easily the most fervent enemy of modernity in contemporary Iran.
FACED WITH the inexorable challenge of modernity, Shiism in the twentieth century in fact split into two different camps, some trying to reconcile it with democracy and rationalism, while others, led by Khomeini, rejected nearly every cultural component of modernity as a colonial construct. In a sense, this was the fourth critical cultural paradigm in Iran’s encounter with modernity. The other three offered different ways of embracing change, while this version provided reasons why the whole temptation of the progressive era should be ignored and overcome. Ayatollah Khomeini and his small band of cohorts criticized nationalism and denigrated individualism as a ploy of colonialism. Instead, they advocated “brotherhood” in an internationalist “ummah,” or spiritual community of the believers. As early as 1944, with the publication of his book Kashf al-Asrar (Solving Mysteries), Khomeini offered a paradigm of politics and culture that not only dismissed modernity and much of the modernization project, but fought on two religious fronts as well. On the one hand, he took issue with clerics who advocated a “quietist” interpretation of Shiism like his mentor and teacher, Ayatollah Hairi, and Ayatollah Kazem Shariat-Madari (easily the most influential and senior cleric inside Iran in 1978) who believed the clergy must limit their interventions in politics and instead attend to the spiritual demands of the flock. At the same time, Ayatollah Khomeini fought against Islamist reformists—most notably Ali Shariati and his attempt to eclectically mix Marx, Freud, Sartre, Fanon, Che and Islam—who wanted Shiism stripped of its superstition and anachronistic rituals.
While the shah was busy fighting the cultural influence of the Left, and while the Left, ever self-congratulatory in its exaggeration of its own importance and influence, flirted with the clergy as “allies” in the anti-imperialist struggle, Khomeini and his cohorts worked quietly to enhance their own influence and strengthen their labyrinthine network of groups, mosques, neighborhood “mourning” committees and even professional organizations. They used this vast network to dominate the democratic movement that emerged in 1978 in Iran. Khomeini’s concealment of his true intentions just before the revolution, as well as his ability to portray himself both to the majority in Iran and even to the American embassy in Tehran as a proponent of democracy, allowed for the formation of the unwieldy alliance of advocates and foes of modernity against the shah’s authoritarianism.
THE COALITION that overthrew the shah brought together technocrats and merchants of the bazaar, members of the urban middle class and much of the working classes, along with the women’s movement, labor unions, students, forces of the Left and the clergy. Yet no sooner had Khomeini come to power than the coalition broke apart; the clergy successfully sidelined secular leftist and centrist factions. With Khomeini’s seizure of control, and with clerical despotism increasing its total grip on power, Iran entered a period of political strife and instability. Since 1979, disillusioned advocates of democracy and modernity have continued their sometimes overt, other times covert struggle to realize the democratic dream. For in this theocratic version of Iran, the cultural influences of its Persian past and its adaptation of those influences with the political and economic rights of man have been subsumed by the Arab Islamism foreign to the vibrant intellectual struggle of this nation to free itself of monarchical and autocratic forces. But this culture war continues to play out in the background of politics—the ethos of the “conquered” people working quietly but relentlessly to subvert, change and eventually replace the alien culture of their usurping rulers.
And this current manifestation was clear during the June 2009 uprising. Once again, that same democratic coalition that formed a foolhardy alliance with the clerical regime—and now numerically stronger than ever but still denied a chance to organize itself politically—came together to invigorate what Khomeini’s successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and his conservative allies hoped would be an anemic presidential campaign by a dour, uncharismatic Mir Hussein Moussavi. But the remarkable surge of social energy in support of Moussavi forced the conservatives to steal the election for Ahmadinejad. And then suddenly, the country’s seemingly docile population rose up around a beguilingly simple slogan: Where is my vote? In Tehran alone, 3 million people marched in remarkable discipline to demand their democratic rights. Their slogan pithily captured in a mere four words the hundred-year-old dream of modernity and democracy in Iran. Using thugs and guns, prison and torture, the ayatollah has so far succeeded in intimidating the people back into their homes. But a critical look at the past shows the bleak future of Khamenei and other champions of despotism. Violence can only delay but not destroy the rights of man in a nation that has embraced the cultural ethos of modernity. The hushed, brutalized quiet of today is at best a prelude to the liberating storms of tomorrow.
Abbas Milani is the Hamid and Christina Moghadam Director of Iranian Studies at Stanford University, where he is also the codirector of the Iran Democracy Project at the Hoover Institution. His book, The Shah, was published in January 2011 by Palgrave Macmillan.
TNI
http://nationalinterest.org/article/zoroaster-the-ayatollahs-4580
Pakistan Faces a Divide of Age on Muslim Law
By CARLOTTA GALL
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Cheering crowds have gathered in recent days to support the assassin who riddled the governor of Punjab with 26 bullets and to praise his attack — carried out in the name of the Prophet Muhammad — as an act of heroism. To the surprise of many, chief among them have been Pakistan’s young lawyers, once seen as a force for democracy.
Their energetic campaign on behalf of the killer has caught the government flat-footed and dismayed friends and supporters of the slain politician, Salman Taseer, an outspoken proponent of liberalism who had challenged the nation’s strict blasphemy laws. It has also confused many in the broader public and observers abroad, who expected to see a firm state prosecution of the assassin.
Instead, before his court appearances, the lawyers showered rose petals over the confessed killer, Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri, a member of an elite police group who had been assigned to guard the governor, but who instead turned his gun on him. They have now enthusiastically taken up his defense.
It may seem a stark turnabout for a group that just a few years ago looked like the vanguard of a democracy movement. They waged months of protests in 2007 and 2008 to challenge Pakistan’s military dictator after he unlawfully removed the chief justice.
But the lawyers’ stance is perhaps just the most glaring expression of what has become a deep generational divide tearing at the fabric of Pakistani society, and of the broad influence of religious conservatism — and even militancy — that now exists among the educated middle class.
They are often described as the Zia generation: Pakistanis who have come of age since the 1980s, when the military dictator, Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, began to promote Islam in public education and to use it as a political tool to unify this young and insecure nation.
Today, the forces he set loose have gained such strength that they threaten to overwhelm voices for tolerance in Pakistan’s feeble civilian government. They certainly present a nagging challenge for the United States.
Washington has poured billions of dollars into the Pakistani military to combat terrorism, but has long neglected a civilian effort to counter the inexorable pull of conservative Islam. By now the conservatives have entered nearly every part of Pakistani society, even the rank-and-file security forces, as the assassination showed. The military, in fact, has been conspicuously silent about the killing.
“Over time, Pakistani society has drifted toward religious extremism,” said Hasan Askari Rizvi, a political and defense analyst from Lahore. “This religious sentiment has seeped deep into government circles and into the army and police at lower levels.”
“The lower level are listening to the religious people,” he said.
Indeed, the Pakistan of today, and the brand of Islam much of the nation has embraced, is barely recognizable even to many educated Pakistanis older than the Zia generation. Among them is Athar Minallah, 49, a former cabinet minister and one of the leaders of the lawyers’ protest campaign against Gen. Pervez Musharraf in 2007 and 2008.
Mr. Minallah studied law at Islamic University in Islamabad from 1983 to 1986, and the first lesson any student learned in his day was that the preservation of life was a pillar of Islamic law, he said.
But under General Zia in the 1980s, the government began supporting Islamic warriors to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and the Indian control of Kashmir, and the syllabus was changed to encourage jihad. The mind-set of students and graduates changed along with it, Mr. Minallah said.
That change is now no more apparent than among the 1,000 lawyers from the capital, Islamabad, and the neighboring city of Rawalpindi, who have given their signed support for the defense of Mr. Qadri, who has been charged with murder and terrorism.
Their leader is Rao Abdur Raheem, 30, who formed a “lawyers’ forum,” called the Movement to Protect the Dignity of the Prophet, in December. The aim of the group, he said, was to counter Mr. Taseer’s campaign to amend the nation’s strict blasphemy laws, which promise death for insulting the Prophet Muhammad.
In interviews, Mr. Raheem and six of his colleagues insisted they were not members of any political or religious party, and were acting independently and interested only in ensuring the rule of law.
All graduates of different Pakistani universities, they insisted they were liberal, not religious conservatives. Only one had religious training. They said they had all taken part in the lawyers’ protest campaign in 2007 and 2008, and that they were proud that the movement helped reinstate the chief justice.
Yet they forcefully defended Mr. Qadri, saying he had acted on his own, out of strong religious feeling, and they denied that he had told his fellow guards of his plans in advance. He was innocent until proved guilty, they said. They have already succeeded in preventing the government from changing the court venue.
In their deep religious conviction, and in their energy and commitment to the cause of the blasphemy laws, they are miles apart from the older generation of lawyers and law enforcement officials above them.
“I felt this is a different society,” said one former law enforcement official when he saw the lawyers celebrating Mr. Qadri. “There is a disconnect in society.”
The former security official, who has worked in fighting militancy and who requested anonymity because of his work, said that within just four hours of the killing, 2,500 people had posted messages supporting Mr. Qadri on Facebook pages.
Mass rallies championing him and the blasphemy laws have continued since then.
This conservatism is fueled by an element of class divide, between the more secular and wealthy upper classes and the more religious middle and lower classes, said Najam Sethi, a former editor of The Daily Times, a liberal daily newspaper published by Mr. Taseer. As Pakistan’s middle class has grown, so has the conservative population.
Besides his campaign against the blasphemy laws, it was Mr. Taseer’s wealth and secular lifestyle that made him a target for the religious parties, Mr. Sethi said.
“Salman had an easygoing, witty, irreverent, high-life style,” he said, “so the anger of class inequality mixed with religious passion gives a heady, dangerous brew.”
Government officials, analysts and members of the Pakistan Peoples Party, the secular-leaning party to which Mr. Taseer belonged, blame the religious parties and clerics who delivered speeches and fatwas against Mr. Taseer for inciting the attack. On Monday, Mr. Qadri, who confessed to the killing, provided a court with testimony saying he was inspired by two clerics, Qari Hanif and Ishtiaq Shah.
The police say they are now seeking the clerics for questioning, but with the growing strength of the conservative movement on the streets, religious leaders — even those who incite violence and terrorism — are nearly untouchable to the authorities and are almost never prosecuted.
The blasphemy law has been condemned by human rights groups here, who say it has been used to persecute religious minorities, like Christians, and on Monday, Pope Benedict XVI called on Pakistan to undo the law. But the law has become an opportunity for religious parties looking to whip up public sentiment, Mr. Sethi said.
A dark presence in the background is the military establishment, which has sponsored the religious parties for decades, using them as tools to influence politics and as militant proxies abroad. The military also has a heavy influence on much of Pakistan’s brash media, which fanned the flames of the blasphemy issue with sensationalist coverage.
“Democracy has brought us a media that is extremely right-wing, conservative,” Mr. Sethi, 62, said. “Most are in their 30s and are a product of the Zia years, of the textbooks and schools set by the Zia years, which are not the sort of things that we were taught.”
“The silence of the armed forces is ominous,” Mr. Sethi added.
Indeed, whether on the military or civilian side, the government has failed to act forcefully on the case at every stage, the former security official said. Whether through fear or lack of policy, it has done little to challenge the ideology behind the attack or the spreading radicalism in Pakistani society.
“The entire state effort has been on the capture and kill approach: how many terrorists can you arrest and how many can you kill,” the former security official said. “Nothing has been done about the breeding ground of extremism.
“Unless the government does something serious and sustained,” the official warned, “we are on a very dangerous trajectory.”
Salman Masood contributed reporting from Islamabad, and Waqar Gillani from Lahore, Pakistan.
N.Y.T
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/world/asia/11pakistan.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha22
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Cheering crowds have gathered in recent days to support the assassin who riddled the governor of Punjab with 26 bullets and to praise his attack — carried out in the name of the Prophet Muhammad — as an act of heroism. To the surprise of many, chief among them have been Pakistan’s young lawyers, once seen as a force for democracy.
Their energetic campaign on behalf of the killer has caught the government flat-footed and dismayed friends and supporters of the slain politician, Salman Taseer, an outspoken proponent of liberalism who had challenged the nation’s strict blasphemy laws. It has also confused many in the broader public and observers abroad, who expected to see a firm state prosecution of the assassin.
Instead, before his court appearances, the lawyers showered rose petals over the confessed killer, Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri, a member of an elite police group who had been assigned to guard the governor, but who instead turned his gun on him. They have now enthusiastically taken up his defense.
It may seem a stark turnabout for a group that just a few years ago looked like the vanguard of a democracy movement. They waged months of protests in 2007 and 2008 to challenge Pakistan’s military dictator after he unlawfully removed the chief justice.
But the lawyers’ stance is perhaps just the most glaring expression of what has become a deep generational divide tearing at the fabric of Pakistani society, and of the broad influence of religious conservatism — and even militancy — that now exists among the educated middle class.
They are often described as the Zia generation: Pakistanis who have come of age since the 1980s, when the military dictator, Gen. Mohammad Zia ul-Haq, began to promote Islam in public education and to use it as a political tool to unify this young and insecure nation.
Today, the forces he set loose have gained such strength that they threaten to overwhelm voices for tolerance in Pakistan’s feeble civilian government. They certainly present a nagging challenge for the United States.
Washington has poured billions of dollars into the Pakistani military to combat terrorism, but has long neglected a civilian effort to counter the inexorable pull of conservative Islam. By now the conservatives have entered nearly every part of Pakistani society, even the rank-and-file security forces, as the assassination showed. The military, in fact, has been conspicuously silent about the killing.
“Over time, Pakistani society has drifted toward religious extremism,” said Hasan Askari Rizvi, a political and defense analyst from Lahore. “This religious sentiment has seeped deep into government circles and into the army and police at lower levels.”
“The lower level are listening to the religious people,” he said.
Indeed, the Pakistan of today, and the brand of Islam much of the nation has embraced, is barely recognizable even to many educated Pakistanis older than the Zia generation. Among them is Athar Minallah, 49, a former cabinet minister and one of the leaders of the lawyers’ protest campaign against Gen. Pervez Musharraf in 2007 and 2008.
Mr. Minallah studied law at Islamic University in Islamabad from 1983 to 1986, and the first lesson any student learned in his day was that the preservation of life was a pillar of Islamic law, he said.
But under General Zia in the 1980s, the government began supporting Islamic warriors to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and the Indian control of Kashmir, and the syllabus was changed to encourage jihad. The mind-set of students and graduates changed along with it, Mr. Minallah said.
That change is now no more apparent than among the 1,000 lawyers from the capital, Islamabad, and the neighboring city of Rawalpindi, who have given their signed support for the defense of Mr. Qadri, who has been charged with murder and terrorism.
Their leader is Rao Abdur Raheem, 30, who formed a “lawyers’ forum,” called the Movement to Protect the Dignity of the Prophet, in December. The aim of the group, he said, was to counter Mr. Taseer’s campaign to amend the nation’s strict blasphemy laws, which promise death for insulting the Prophet Muhammad.
In interviews, Mr. Raheem and six of his colleagues insisted they were not members of any political or religious party, and were acting independently and interested only in ensuring the rule of law.
All graduates of different Pakistani universities, they insisted they were liberal, not religious conservatives. Only one had religious training. They said they had all taken part in the lawyers’ protest campaign in 2007 and 2008, and that they were proud that the movement helped reinstate the chief justice.
Yet they forcefully defended Mr. Qadri, saying he had acted on his own, out of strong religious feeling, and they denied that he had told his fellow guards of his plans in advance. He was innocent until proved guilty, they said. They have already succeeded in preventing the government from changing the court venue.
In their deep religious conviction, and in their energy and commitment to the cause of the blasphemy laws, they are miles apart from the older generation of lawyers and law enforcement officials above them.
“I felt this is a different society,” said one former law enforcement official when he saw the lawyers celebrating Mr. Qadri. “There is a disconnect in society.”
The former security official, who has worked in fighting militancy and who requested anonymity because of his work, said that within just four hours of the killing, 2,500 people had posted messages supporting Mr. Qadri on Facebook pages.
Mass rallies championing him and the blasphemy laws have continued since then.
This conservatism is fueled by an element of class divide, between the more secular and wealthy upper classes and the more religious middle and lower classes, said Najam Sethi, a former editor of The Daily Times, a liberal daily newspaper published by Mr. Taseer. As Pakistan’s middle class has grown, so has the conservative population.
Besides his campaign against the blasphemy laws, it was Mr. Taseer’s wealth and secular lifestyle that made him a target for the religious parties, Mr. Sethi said.
“Salman had an easygoing, witty, irreverent, high-life style,” he said, “so the anger of class inequality mixed with religious passion gives a heady, dangerous brew.”
Government officials, analysts and members of the Pakistan Peoples Party, the secular-leaning party to which Mr. Taseer belonged, blame the religious parties and clerics who delivered speeches and fatwas against Mr. Taseer for inciting the attack. On Monday, Mr. Qadri, who confessed to the killing, provided a court with testimony saying he was inspired by two clerics, Qari Hanif and Ishtiaq Shah.
The police say they are now seeking the clerics for questioning, but with the growing strength of the conservative movement on the streets, religious leaders — even those who incite violence and terrorism — are nearly untouchable to the authorities and are almost never prosecuted.
The blasphemy law has been condemned by human rights groups here, who say it has been used to persecute religious minorities, like Christians, and on Monday, Pope Benedict XVI called on Pakistan to undo the law. But the law has become an opportunity for religious parties looking to whip up public sentiment, Mr. Sethi said.
A dark presence in the background is the military establishment, which has sponsored the religious parties for decades, using them as tools to influence politics and as militant proxies abroad. The military also has a heavy influence on much of Pakistan’s brash media, which fanned the flames of the blasphemy issue with sensationalist coverage.
“Democracy has brought us a media that is extremely right-wing, conservative,” Mr. Sethi, 62, said. “Most are in their 30s and are a product of the Zia years, of the textbooks and schools set by the Zia years, which are not the sort of things that we were taught.”
“The silence of the armed forces is ominous,” Mr. Sethi added.
Indeed, whether on the military or civilian side, the government has failed to act forcefully on the case at every stage, the former security official said. Whether through fear or lack of policy, it has done little to challenge the ideology behind the attack or the spreading radicalism in Pakistani society.
“The entire state effort has been on the capture and kill approach: how many terrorists can you arrest and how many can you kill,” the former security official said. “Nothing has been done about the breeding ground of extremism.
“Unless the government does something serious and sustained,” the official warned, “we are on a very dangerous trajectory.”
Salman Masood contributed reporting from Islamabad, and Waqar Gillani from Lahore, Pakistan.
N.Y.T
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/11/world/asia/11pakistan.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha22
Strategic Comments: South Asia still beset by violent extremism
As a major focus of jihadist activity, threatening not just the states of the region but also Europe and increasingly the United States, South Asia has endured high levels of violent extremism over the past year. The assassination of the governor of Pakistan's Punjab province in January 2011 revealed growing support in that country for radical views. While India recorded counter-terrorism successes, the key to regional stability is the India–Pakistan relationship, which remains tense. In 2010 US Defense Secretary Robert Gates warned of a 'syndicate' of terrorist groups, operating under the umbrella of al-Qaeda and working to destabilise South Asia by provoking a war between India and Pakistan. The evidence is unclear, but relationships between militant groups do appear to have grown closer. And while improved regional intelligence cooperation has begun to have an impact on the activities of jihadists, it is still in its infancy.
India: ISI moratorium brings relative calm
India to some extent bucked the regional trend with only one major act of jihadist violence during 2010 (though it was still plagued by high levels of Naxalite violence in the north, and there were renewed troubles in Kashmir). This was a bomb attack in February in Pune on a bakery popular with foreign visitors, which killed 17 people. Lashkar-e-Tayiba (LeT), the Pakistan-based group behind the 2008 Mumbai attacks, claimed responsibility. But a much-anticipated spate of attacks in the run-up to the Commonwealth Games, held in Delhi in October, did not materialise. This may reflect an improved performance on the part of India's security and intelligence agencies, aided by much-enhanced levels of US assistance, with 13 jihadist plots having been disrupted during the course of the year. It may also reflect efforts on the part of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to discourage further anti-Indian activity by LeT.
Interrogations by the US and India of David Coleman Headley (also known as Daoud Gilani), a US national of part-Pakistani parentage arrested by the FBI in late 2009, have offered important insights into the origins of the Mumbai attacks, in particular the extent of Pakistani official complicity. Headley had been involved in extensive reconnaissance of Mumbai targets on behalf of LeT and has told his interrogators that, at an operational level, ISI had advance knowledge of the operation.
According to Headley, who has pleaded guilty to the charges against him and is cooperating with the FBI, the ISI had seen the Mumbai attacks as a means of restoring the jihadist credentials of LeT. Many of LeT's members, frustrated by the restrictions imposed on them by ISI, had been leaving to join more extreme Pakistani jihadist groups which, in contrast to LeT, had turned against the Pakistani state. However, Headley's account suggests that the top leadership of ISI were not aware of the operation, indicating that ISI's command structure may be less efficient than has been supposed. According to Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, the ISI's chief, Lieutenant-General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, admitted to then-CIA Director Mike Hayden that at least two retired Pakistani Army officers had been involved in planning the Mumbai attack. This is hardly reassuring given that ISI's 'S Wing', the department responsible for relations with jihadist groups and for operations outside Pakistan, is known to consist solely of retired military officers so that the government can deny responsibility for its actions. Shuja Pasha reportedly told Hayden: 'It was rogue … There may have been people associated with my organisation who were associated with this. That's different from authority, direction and control'.
The wealth of detail that has emerged about the Mumbai operation may have created pressure on ISI to impose a tighter moratorium on further such operations – though in late December 2010 the Indian government issued an alert relating to threats from LeT elements which had supposedly already infiltrated the country.
However, LeT does not appear to have been involved in an increase in violence in Kashmir, which for some years had been in an uneasy state of relative calm guaranteed by a pervasive Indian security presence. In June 2010 the death of a teenager in one of a series of stone-throwing confrontations with security forces led to rioting, which brought the Indian army out of their barracks and onto the streets. A curfew was reimposed. Although Indian Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram initially accused LeT of fomenting unrest, the government has since acknowledged that the violence, which resulted in more than 60 civilian deaths, was in effect a popular uprising with no structure or leadership. The real causes of the unrest are both political and economic – an unrequited desire for independence and frustration with heavy security measures and alleged human-rights abuses, coupled with high levels of youth unemployment. The Indian government has partially acknowledged the validity of some grievances and has sought to minimise the use of force in controlling demonstrations.
Afghanistan: the key link
One reason for the relative lack of jihadist activity inside India may be that jihadism has moved westward, with many Pakistani extremist groups now increasingly focusing their efforts either on operations inside Afghanistan or against the Pakistani state, both in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas or the settled areas, including Peshawar, Rawalpindi and Islamabad.
This shift is part of a complex series of moves in anticipation of an endgame in Afghanistan, which is widely expected at some point to involve a negotiation between the Afghan government and the main insurgent groups. Pakistan has sought to insert itself into any such negotiation by manipulating its relationships with some key jihadist groups: the Afghan Taliban, also known as the 'Quetta Shura'; the Haqqani network; Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hizb-i-Islami; as well as LeT. According to General Michael T. Flynn, the senior US military intelligence officer in Afghanistan, LeT operatives are coming to Afghanistan in increasing numbers to gain combat experience and are active in eight Afghan provinces. Much of the focus of these groups, in particular the Haqqani network, has been on countering an Indian presence in Afghanistan which represents a constant source of strategic concern for Pakistan. Indeed, Pakistani politicians have begun to talk about the resolution of the Afghan conflict as more important than Kashmir in terms of defining their country's relations with India.
Pakistan's ultimate aim is a reasonably stable Afghanistan not inimical to Pakistan and in which Indian influence is limited to a point where it presents no strategic threat. Pakistani political leaders appear to have modified their position to a point where they talk publicly of not wishing to 'repeat the mistakes of the 1990s' – a reference to Pakistan's role in enabling the Taliban to assume power in 1996. Pakistani Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Kayani has been increasingly open in discussing with US counterparts Pakistan's interests and ability to help achieve a negotiated settlement. At the same time, Pakistan has shown itself ready to act forcefully to ensure a seat at the negotiating table for itself, as demonstrated by its arrests of a number of high-ranking members of the Quetta Shura – including Taliban military commander Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar – who were suspected of pursuing negotiations with the Afghan government independently of Pakistan.
Referring to it as a 'national interest', Pakistan has also been more ready to acknowledge the nature of its relationship with the Haqqani network, an organisation with close links to al-Qaeda that has been at the forefront of attacks against both the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and Indian interests in Afghanistan. Pakistan's increasingly thinly disguised support for the Haqqani network represents a source of increasing frustration to ISAF commanders, who have determined until now that hot-pursuit operations inside Pakistani territory would prove counterproductive. The nearest ISAF has come to such operations was in September 2010 when US forces killed two Pakistani border guards who were providing covering fire for Haqqani fighters escaping back from Afghanistan into Pakistan. This incident led Pakistan temporarily to close the Torkham Gate border crossing in Khyber Agency through which 1,000 trucks, carrying 25% of ISAF non-lethal supplies, cross each day into Afghanistan, and served as a reminder of ISAF's dependence on Pakistan's goodwill.
Lashkar al-Zil: alliance of jihadist groups
Meanwhile, links between a variety of jihadi groups spanning both sides of the Afghanistan–Pakistan border appear to have grown closer. In 2009, ISAF sources in Afghanistan began to talk of the emergence of a new umbrella group, known as 'Lashkar al-Zil' – Shadow Army – comprising al-Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban, the Haqqani network and the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which has been waging war against the Pakistani state in Pakistan's tribal areas and Swat. The commander of Lashkar al-Zil is reported to be Ilyas Kashmiri, a senior commander in the Pakistani jihadist group Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI), who is also thought to have replaced Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, killed in a CIA drone strike in May 2010, as al-Qaeda's military chief in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Kashmiri has also been identified as the driving force behind a number of recent al-Qaeda plots aimed at Western European targets.
Characterised as a replacement for al-Qaeda's Afghan-based guerrillas known as 'Brigade 055', it is far from clear how structured this new entity is. But ISAF commanders have cited evidence of increasing collaboration between jihadist groups which until recently had pursued their own agendas. Meanwhile, senior US officials have claimed that al-Qaeda's presence in Afghanistan is now limited to as few as 100 fighters. Its leadership in Pakistan's tribal areas has been subject to a ferocious campaign of attrition by means of CIA drone strikes. Lashkar al-Zil may, therefore, enable al-Qaeda to have a greater impact in Afghanistan than the small numbers quoted might suggest. But it is clear that an exclusive focus on al-Qaeda as an organisation may be increasingly meaningless as other related groups take up the al-Qaeda baton.
Al-Qaeda's leadership recently received a shot in the arm when an undetermined number of its senior figures, as well as members of the family of fugitive leader Osama bin Laden, were released after being detained in Iran since 2002. According to the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Watan, their release was brokered by Sirajuddin Haqqani, de facto leader of the Haqqani network, as part of negotiations that included the release of Heshmetollah Attarzadeh, an Iranian diplomat kidnapped in Peshawar in late 2008. The same report suggested that Haqqani secured a supply of anti-aircraft weapons as part of the deal.
In addition to holding a number of al-Qaeda leaders under house arrest, Iran has for some time been supplying training, weapons and money to the Afghan Taliban as a relatively low-risk way of sustaining pressure on the US. The release of leaders as significant as Saif al-Adel, a former Egyptian military officer, and Suleiman abu Ghaith, a Kuwaiti former al-Qaeda spokesman, suggests that Iran may have decided the moment has come to up the ante. Although experience suggests that any of the al-Qaeda leaders who make their way from Iran to Afghanistan or Pakistan will be targeted by CIA drone strikes, the return to battle of some experienced fighters with good strategic skills is bound to have an impact at least in the short term.
Continuing violence in Pakistan
Within Pakistan itself, levels of jihadist violence remained high throughout 2010, though the total number of fatalities, at 7,199, was markedly lower than the 2009 figure of 11,704, possibly reflecting the slowdown in military operations in Pakistan's tribal areas. Following the operations in 2009 to clear the TTP out of Swat and South Waziristan, the Pakistani Army now has a presence in six of the seven tribal agencies with the majority of insurgents now bottled up in North Waziristan, which was the target of 104 of the 118 drone strikes launched by the CIA in 2010.
According to US Defense Secretary Gates, the Pakistani Army has transferred the equivalent of six divisions from the border with India, representing a significant departure from its previous preoccupations. It has so far resisted US pressure to move against militant groups in North Waziristan, citing the need to consolidate existing gains in the other tribal agencies and to allow its forces to rest and recuperate – a genuine necessity given the high level of casualties suffered during the 2009 operations.
Meanwhile within the settled areas, Pakistan has continued to see high levels of jihadist violence both against its security forces and other government targets, and against minority Shia and Ahmadiyah communities. Much of this violence has been perpetrated by groups such as Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Jaish-e-Mohammed, HUJI and Harkat-ul-Mujahedin which, together with LeT, are collectively known as the 'Punjab Taliban', a term which reflects their growing alignment with the TTP and Afghan Taliban. That such groups pose a serious threat to the Pakistani state is no longer in doubt and reflects the degree to which jihadism in Pakistan has become a double-edged sword. The growing culture of radicalisation within Pakistan was exemplified by the assassination on 4 January 2011 of Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer by a member of his security detail. The assassin, who was allegedly under investigation for his extremist links, was motivated by a desire to punish Taseer for seeking amendments to Pakistan's harsh blasphemy laws. It is unclear whether he was linked to any specific group. The high level of public support for Taseer's murder, including among Pakistan's Islamic clergy, is indicative of the degree to which radical views have entered Pakistan's mainstream.
Green shoots?
Although South Asia remains a major focus of jihadist activity, the news from the region is not unremittingly bad. Intelligence cooperation between South Asian states has seen some cautious improvements over the past two years, notably between Pakistan and Afghanistan where intelligence relationships, though still suffering from high levels of mistrust, are starting to become institutionalised. There are faint signs that South Asian states see the need to take a more direct role in resolving regional differences, with Afghanistan possibly serving as a test case should conditions on the ground reach the point where a political negotiation is a realistic possibility. But in the long term the relationship between India and Pakistan remains the key determinant of regional stability. And for as long as the two states remain locked in an intelligence war, with India supporting Baluch separatist groups, and the TTP and Pakistan continuing to see jihadism as an asymmetric tool against India, a significant drop in violent extremism seems a remote prospect.
IISS
http://www.iiss.org/publications/strategic-comments/past-issues/volume-17-2011/january/south-asia-still-beset-by-violent-extremism/
India: ISI moratorium brings relative calm
India to some extent bucked the regional trend with only one major act of jihadist violence during 2010 (though it was still plagued by high levels of Naxalite violence in the north, and there were renewed troubles in Kashmir). This was a bomb attack in February in Pune on a bakery popular with foreign visitors, which killed 17 people. Lashkar-e-Tayiba (LeT), the Pakistan-based group behind the 2008 Mumbai attacks, claimed responsibility. But a much-anticipated spate of attacks in the run-up to the Commonwealth Games, held in Delhi in October, did not materialise. This may reflect an improved performance on the part of India's security and intelligence agencies, aided by much-enhanced levels of US assistance, with 13 jihadist plots having been disrupted during the course of the year. It may also reflect efforts on the part of Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) to discourage further anti-Indian activity by LeT.
Interrogations by the US and India of David Coleman Headley (also known as Daoud Gilani), a US national of part-Pakistani parentage arrested by the FBI in late 2009, have offered important insights into the origins of the Mumbai attacks, in particular the extent of Pakistani official complicity. Headley had been involved in extensive reconnaissance of Mumbai targets on behalf of LeT and has told his interrogators that, at an operational level, ISI had advance knowledge of the operation.
According to Headley, who has pleaded guilty to the charges against him and is cooperating with the FBI, the ISI had seen the Mumbai attacks as a means of restoring the jihadist credentials of LeT. Many of LeT's members, frustrated by the restrictions imposed on them by ISI, had been leaving to join more extreme Pakistani jihadist groups which, in contrast to LeT, had turned against the Pakistani state. However, Headley's account suggests that the top leadership of ISI were not aware of the operation, indicating that ISI's command structure may be less efficient than has been supposed. According to Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, the ISI's chief, Lieutenant-General Ahmed Shuja Pasha, admitted to then-CIA Director Mike Hayden that at least two retired Pakistani Army officers had been involved in planning the Mumbai attack. This is hardly reassuring given that ISI's 'S Wing', the department responsible for relations with jihadist groups and for operations outside Pakistan, is known to consist solely of retired military officers so that the government can deny responsibility for its actions. Shuja Pasha reportedly told Hayden: 'It was rogue … There may have been people associated with my organisation who were associated with this. That's different from authority, direction and control'.
The wealth of detail that has emerged about the Mumbai operation may have created pressure on ISI to impose a tighter moratorium on further such operations – though in late December 2010 the Indian government issued an alert relating to threats from LeT elements which had supposedly already infiltrated the country.
However, LeT does not appear to have been involved in an increase in violence in Kashmir, which for some years had been in an uneasy state of relative calm guaranteed by a pervasive Indian security presence. In June 2010 the death of a teenager in one of a series of stone-throwing confrontations with security forces led to rioting, which brought the Indian army out of their barracks and onto the streets. A curfew was reimposed. Although Indian Home Minister Palaniappan Chidambaram initially accused LeT of fomenting unrest, the government has since acknowledged that the violence, which resulted in more than 60 civilian deaths, was in effect a popular uprising with no structure or leadership. The real causes of the unrest are both political and economic – an unrequited desire for independence and frustration with heavy security measures and alleged human-rights abuses, coupled with high levels of youth unemployment. The Indian government has partially acknowledged the validity of some grievances and has sought to minimise the use of force in controlling demonstrations.
Afghanistan: the key link
One reason for the relative lack of jihadist activity inside India may be that jihadism has moved westward, with many Pakistani extremist groups now increasingly focusing their efforts either on operations inside Afghanistan or against the Pakistani state, both in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas or the settled areas, including Peshawar, Rawalpindi and Islamabad.
This shift is part of a complex series of moves in anticipation of an endgame in Afghanistan, which is widely expected at some point to involve a negotiation between the Afghan government and the main insurgent groups. Pakistan has sought to insert itself into any such negotiation by manipulating its relationships with some key jihadist groups: the Afghan Taliban, also known as the 'Quetta Shura'; the Haqqani network; Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hizb-i-Islami; as well as LeT. According to General Michael T. Flynn, the senior US military intelligence officer in Afghanistan, LeT operatives are coming to Afghanistan in increasing numbers to gain combat experience and are active in eight Afghan provinces. Much of the focus of these groups, in particular the Haqqani network, has been on countering an Indian presence in Afghanistan which represents a constant source of strategic concern for Pakistan. Indeed, Pakistani politicians have begun to talk about the resolution of the Afghan conflict as more important than Kashmir in terms of defining their country's relations with India.
Pakistan's ultimate aim is a reasonably stable Afghanistan not inimical to Pakistan and in which Indian influence is limited to a point where it presents no strategic threat. Pakistani political leaders appear to have modified their position to a point where they talk publicly of not wishing to 'repeat the mistakes of the 1990s' – a reference to Pakistan's role in enabling the Taliban to assume power in 1996. Pakistani Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Kayani has been increasingly open in discussing with US counterparts Pakistan's interests and ability to help achieve a negotiated settlement. At the same time, Pakistan has shown itself ready to act forcefully to ensure a seat at the negotiating table for itself, as demonstrated by its arrests of a number of high-ranking members of the Quetta Shura – including Taliban military commander Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar – who were suspected of pursuing negotiations with the Afghan government independently of Pakistan.
Referring to it as a 'national interest', Pakistan has also been more ready to acknowledge the nature of its relationship with the Haqqani network, an organisation with close links to al-Qaeda that has been at the forefront of attacks against both the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) and Indian interests in Afghanistan. Pakistan's increasingly thinly disguised support for the Haqqani network represents a source of increasing frustration to ISAF commanders, who have determined until now that hot-pursuit operations inside Pakistani territory would prove counterproductive. The nearest ISAF has come to such operations was in September 2010 when US forces killed two Pakistani border guards who were providing covering fire for Haqqani fighters escaping back from Afghanistan into Pakistan. This incident led Pakistan temporarily to close the Torkham Gate border crossing in Khyber Agency through which 1,000 trucks, carrying 25% of ISAF non-lethal supplies, cross each day into Afghanistan, and served as a reminder of ISAF's dependence on Pakistan's goodwill.
Lashkar al-Zil: alliance of jihadist groups
Meanwhile, links between a variety of jihadi groups spanning both sides of the Afghanistan–Pakistan border appear to have grown closer. In 2009, ISAF sources in Afghanistan began to talk of the emergence of a new umbrella group, known as 'Lashkar al-Zil' – Shadow Army – comprising al-Qaeda, the Afghan Taliban, the Haqqani network and the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), which has been waging war against the Pakistani state in Pakistan's tribal areas and Swat. The commander of Lashkar al-Zil is reported to be Ilyas Kashmiri, a senior commander in the Pakistani jihadist group Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (HUJI), who is also thought to have replaced Mustafa Abu al-Yazid, killed in a CIA drone strike in May 2010, as al-Qaeda's military chief in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Kashmiri has also been identified as the driving force behind a number of recent al-Qaeda plots aimed at Western European targets.
Characterised as a replacement for al-Qaeda's Afghan-based guerrillas known as 'Brigade 055', it is far from clear how structured this new entity is. But ISAF commanders have cited evidence of increasing collaboration between jihadist groups which until recently had pursued their own agendas. Meanwhile, senior US officials have claimed that al-Qaeda's presence in Afghanistan is now limited to as few as 100 fighters. Its leadership in Pakistan's tribal areas has been subject to a ferocious campaign of attrition by means of CIA drone strikes. Lashkar al-Zil may, therefore, enable al-Qaeda to have a greater impact in Afghanistan than the small numbers quoted might suggest. But it is clear that an exclusive focus on al-Qaeda as an organisation may be increasingly meaningless as other related groups take up the al-Qaeda baton.
Al-Qaeda's leadership recently received a shot in the arm when an undetermined number of its senior figures, as well as members of the family of fugitive leader Osama bin Laden, were released after being detained in Iran since 2002. According to the Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Watan, their release was brokered by Sirajuddin Haqqani, de facto leader of the Haqqani network, as part of negotiations that included the release of Heshmetollah Attarzadeh, an Iranian diplomat kidnapped in Peshawar in late 2008. The same report suggested that Haqqani secured a supply of anti-aircraft weapons as part of the deal.
In addition to holding a number of al-Qaeda leaders under house arrest, Iran has for some time been supplying training, weapons and money to the Afghan Taliban as a relatively low-risk way of sustaining pressure on the US. The release of leaders as significant as Saif al-Adel, a former Egyptian military officer, and Suleiman abu Ghaith, a Kuwaiti former al-Qaeda spokesman, suggests that Iran may have decided the moment has come to up the ante. Although experience suggests that any of the al-Qaeda leaders who make their way from Iran to Afghanistan or Pakistan will be targeted by CIA drone strikes, the return to battle of some experienced fighters with good strategic skills is bound to have an impact at least in the short term.
Continuing violence in Pakistan
Within Pakistan itself, levels of jihadist violence remained high throughout 2010, though the total number of fatalities, at 7,199, was markedly lower than the 2009 figure of 11,704, possibly reflecting the slowdown in military operations in Pakistan's tribal areas. Following the operations in 2009 to clear the TTP out of Swat and South Waziristan, the Pakistani Army now has a presence in six of the seven tribal agencies with the majority of insurgents now bottled up in North Waziristan, which was the target of 104 of the 118 drone strikes launched by the CIA in 2010.
According to US Defense Secretary Gates, the Pakistani Army has transferred the equivalent of six divisions from the border with India, representing a significant departure from its previous preoccupations. It has so far resisted US pressure to move against militant groups in North Waziristan, citing the need to consolidate existing gains in the other tribal agencies and to allow its forces to rest and recuperate – a genuine necessity given the high level of casualties suffered during the 2009 operations.
Meanwhile within the settled areas, Pakistan has continued to see high levels of jihadist violence both against its security forces and other government targets, and against minority Shia and Ahmadiyah communities. Much of this violence has been perpetrated by groups such as Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Jaish-e-Mohammed, HUJI and Harkat-ul-Mujahedin which, together with LeT, are collectively known as the 'Punjab Taliban', a term which reflects their growing alignment with the TTP and Afghan Taliban. That such groups pose a serious threat to the Pakistani state is no longer in doubt and reflects the degree to which jihadism in Pakistan has become a double-edged sword. The growing culture of radicalisation within Pakistan was exemplified by the assassination on 4 January 2011 of Punjab governor Salmaan Taseer by a member of his security detail. The assassin, who was allegedly under investigation for his extremist links, was motivated by a desire to punish Taseer for seeking amendments to Pakistan's harsh blasphemy laws. It is unclear whether he was linked to any specific group. The high level of public support for Taseer's murder, including among Pakistan's Islamic clergy, is indicative of the degree to which radical views have entered Pakistan's mainstream.
Green shoots?
Although South Asia remains a major focus of jihadist activity, the news from the region is not unremittingly bad. Intelligence cooperation between South Asian states has seen some cautious improvements over the past two years, notably between Pakistan and Afghanistan where intelligence relationships, though still suffering from high levels of mistrust, are starting to become institutionalised. There are faint signs that South Asian states see the need to take a more direct role in resolving regional differences, with Afghanistan possibly serving as a test case should conditions on the ground reach the point where a political negotiation is a realistic possibility. But in the long term the relationship between India and Pakistan remains the key determinant of regional stability. And for as long as the two states remain locked in an intelligence war, with India supporting Baluch separatist groups, and the TTP and Pakistan continuing to see jihadism as an asymmetric tool against India, a significant drop in violent extremism seems a remote prospect.
IISS
http://www.iiss.org/publications/strategic-comments/past-issues/volume-17-2011/january/south-asia-still-beset-by-violent-extremism/
Clinton asks Arabs to help undermine Iran's nuclear plans
By Joby Warrick
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, January 11, 2011; A12
ABU DHABI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES - Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton lobbied Arab governments on Monday to help tighten the screws on their Iranian neighbor, saying that sanctions and other measures are hurting Tehran and undermining its ability to acquire components for its nuclear program.
Clinton, in the Middle East for four days of talks, also pushed oil-rich Persian Gulf states to do more to back fragile governments in the West Bank and Iraq to create stability in a region that has so frequently veered into war.
The top U.S. diplomat expressed solidarity with Arabs in battling against domestic extremists, citing Saturday's attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) as an example of extremist-inspired violence in the United States.
"That is not who you are, and that is not who we are," Clinton said in a television talk show in which she took questions from audience members. "We have to make clear that this does not represent either Arabs or Americans."
Repeating a theme she has sounded frequently in trips to the region, Clinton warned that a nuclear-armed Iran would trigger an "extremely dangerous" arms race, and she said Arabs should show common cause with Western powers by helping enforce economic sanctions. She said current sanctions already were having a significant effect, echoing claims made by other administration officials in testimony in recent weeks.
"Sanctions have been working," Clinton said. "They have made it much more difficult for Iran to pursue its nuclear ambitions."
Iran also is having unspecified "technological problems" that have made it slow down its timetables, Clinton said, a possible reference to technical glitches believed to have been caused by a computer virus. "But the real question is, how do we convince Iran that pursuing nuclear weapons will not make it safer and stronger, but just the opposite?" she asked.
Clinton also brought up Iran in private sessions with the United Arab Emirates' president, Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed al Nahyan, and with Dubai's ruler, Prime Minister Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum. She is expected to travel to Oman and Qatar later in the week before returning to Washington.
Clinton made her public comments on the set of a popular women's television show, "Soft Talk" - the United Arab Emirates' equivalent of "The View" - where she chatted with the hosts on subjects ranging from her political career to her husband's saxophone playing. The hosts and questioners from the audience asked polite but pointed questions about the prospects for war in the Middle East and why the United States tolerated nuclear weapons for Israel but not for Iran. On the latter question, Clinton said the Obama administration supports the idea of a nuclear-free Middle East, eventually.
The Giffords shooting came up when a young woman in the audience asked why Americans seem to blame all Muslims for the actions of the handful of radicals responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Clinton assured the audience that most Americans are not anti-Muslim, but she explained that extremist voices are amplified because they command media attention.
Asked repeatedly about the foundering Israeli-Palestinian peace process, Clinton reiterated the Obama administration's support for an independent Palestine, but she also called on the gulf states to do more to foster economic stability in the West Bank to create conditions that could lead eventually to a prosperous, independent Palestinian state. Ultimately, to achieve peace, Israelis and Palestinians will have to want an accord badly enough to agree to painful compromises, she said. But in the meantime, there is "an essential role for outsiders," Clinton said.
W.P
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/10/AR2011011006157.html
Washington Post Foreign Service
Tuesday, January 11, 2011; A12
ABU DHABI, UNITED ARAB EMIRATES - Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton lobbied Arab governments on Monday to help tighten the screws on their Iranian neighbor, saying that sanctions and other measures are hurting Tehran and undermining its ability to acquire components for its nuclear program.
Clinton, in the Middle East for four days of talks, also pushed oil-rich Persian Gulf states to do more to back fragile governments in the West Bank and Iraq to create stability in a region that has so frequently veered into war.
The top U.S. diplomat expressed solidarity with Arabs in battling against domestic extremists, citing Saturday's attempted assassination of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-Ariz.) as an example of extremist-inspired violence in the United States.
"That is not who you are, and that is not who we are," Clinton said in a television talk show in which she took questions from audience members. "We have to make clear that this does not represent either Arabs or Americans."
Repeating a theme she has sounded frequently in trips to the region, Clinton warned that a nuclear-armed Iran would trigger an "extremely dangerous" arms race, and she said Arabs should show common cause with Western powers by helping enforce economic sanctions. She said current sanctions already were having a significant effect, echoing claims made by other administration officials in testimony in recent weeks.
"Sanctions have been working," Clinton said. "They have made it much more difficult for Iran to pursue its nuclear ambitions."
Iran also is having unspecified "technological problems" that have made it slow down its timetables, Clinton said, a possible reference to technical glitches believed to have been caused by a computer virus. "But the real question is, how do we convince Iran that pursuing nuclear weapons will not make it safer and stronger, but just the opposite?" she asked.
Clinton also brought up Iran in private sessions with the United Arab Emirates' president, Sheik Khalifa bin Zayed al Nahyan, and with Dubai's ruler, Prime Minister Mohammed bin Rashid al Maktoum. She is expected to travel to Oman and Qatar later in the week before returning to Washington.
Clinton made her public comments on the set of a popular women's television show, "Soft Talk" - the United Arab Emirates' equivalent of "The View" - where she chatted with the hosts on subjects ranging from her political career to her husband's saxophone playing. The hosts and questioners from the audience asked polite but pointed questions about the prospects for war in the Middle East and why the United States tolerated nuclear weapons for Israel but not for Iran. On the latter question, Clinton said the Obama administration supports the idea of a nuclear-free Middle East, eventually.
The Giffords shooting came up when a young woman in the audience asked why Americans seem to blame all Muslims for the actions of the handful of radicals responsible for the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Clinton assured the audience that most Americans are not anti-Muslim, but she explained that extremist voices are amplified because they command media attention.
Asked repeatedly about the foundering Israeli-Palestinian peace process, Clinton reiterated the Obama administration's support for an independent Palestine, but she also called on the gulf states to do more to foster economic stability in the West Bank to create conditions that could lead eventually to a prosperous, independent Palestinian state. Ultimately, to achieve peace, Israelis and Palestinians will have to want an accord badly enough to agree to painful compromises, she said. But in the meantime, there is "an essential role for outsiders," Clinton said.
W.P
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/10/AR2011011006157.html
Saturday, January 8, 2011
In Sudan, an Election and a Beginning
By BARACK OBAMA
Washington
NOT every generation is given the chance to turn the page on the past and write a new chapter in history. Yet today — after 50 years of civil wars that have killed two million people and turned millions more into refugees — this is the opportunity before the people of southern Sudan.
Over the next week, millions of southern Sudanese will vote on whether to remain part of Sudan or to form their own independent nation. This process — and the actions of Sudanese leaders — will help determine whether people who have known so much suffering will move toward peace and prosperity, or slide backward into bloodshed. It will have consequences not only for Sudan, but also for sub-Saharan Africa and the world.
The historic vote is an exercise in self-determination long in the making, and it is a key part of the 2005 peace agreement that ended the civil war in Sudan. Yet just months ago, with preparations behind schedule, it was uncertain whether this referendum would take place at all. It is for this reason that I gathered with leaders from Sudan and around the world in September to make it clear that the international community was united in its belief that this referendum had to take place and that the will of the people of southern Sudan had to be respected, regardless of the outcome.
In an important step forward, leaders from both northern and southern Sudan — backed by more than 40 nations and international organizations — agreed to work together to ensure that the voting would be timely, peaceful, free and credible and would reflect the will of the Sudanese people. The fact that the voting appears to be starting on time is a tribute to those in Sudan who fulfilled their commitments. Most recently, the government of Sudan said that it would be the first to recognize the south if it voted for independence.
Now, the world is watching, united in its determination to make sure that all parties in Sudan live up to their obligations. As the referendum proceeds, voters must be allowed access to polling stations; they must be able to cast their ballots free from intimidation and coercion. All sides should refrain from inflammatory rhetoric or provocative actions that could raise tensions or prevent voters from expressing their will.
As the ballots are counted, all sides must resist prejudging the outcome. For the results to be credible, the commission that is overseeing the referendum must be free from pressure and interference. In the days ahead, leaders from north and south will need to work together to prevent violence and ensure that isolated incidents do not spiral into wider instability. Under no circumstance should any side use proxy forces in an effort to gain an advantage while we wait for the final results.
A successful vote will be cause for celebration and an inspiring step forward in Africa’s long journey toward democracy and justice. Still, lasting peace in Sudan will demand far more than a credible referendum.
The 2005 peace agreement must be fully implemented — a goal that will require compromise. Border disputes, and the status of the Abyei region, which straddles north and south, need to be resolved peacefully. The safety and citizenship of all Sudanese, especially minorities — southerners in the north and northerners in the south — have to be protected. Arrangements must be made for the transparent distribution of oil revenues, which can contribute to development. The return of refugees needs to be managed with extraordinary care to prevent another humanitarian catastrophe.
If the south chooses independence, the international community, including the United States, will have an interest in ensuring that the two nations that emerge succeed as stable and economically viable neighbors, because their fortunes are linked. Southern Sudan, in particular, will need partners in the long-term task of fulfilling the political and economic aspirations of its people.
Finally, there can be no lasting peace in Sudan without lasting peace in the western Sudan region of Darfur. The deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Darfuris — and the plight of refugees like those I met in a camp in neighboring Chad five years ago — must never be forgotten. Here, too, the world is watching. The government of Sudan must live up to its international obligations. Attacks on civilians must stop. United Nations peacekeepers and aid workers must be free to reach those in need.
As I told Sudanese leaders in September, the United States will not abandon the people of Darfur. We will continue our diplomatic efforts to end the crisis there once and for all. Other nations must use their influence to bring all parties to the table and ensure they negotiate in good faith. And we will continue to insist that lasting peace in Darfur include accountability for crimes that have been committed, including genocide.
Along with our international partners, the United States will continue to play a leadership role in helping all the Sudanese people realize the peace and progress they deserve. Today, I am repeating my offer to Sudan’s leaders — if you fulfill your obligations and choose peace, there is a path to normal relations with the United States, including the lifting of economic sanctions and beginning the process, in accordance with United States law, of removing Sudan from the list of states that sponsor terrorism. In contrast, those who flout their international obligations will face more pressure and isolation.
Millions of Sudanese are making their way to the polls to determine their destiny. This is the moment when leaders of courage and vision can guide their people to a better day. Those who make the right choice will be remembered by history — they will also have a steady partner in the United States.
Barack Obama is the president of the United States.
NYT
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/opinion/09obama.html?_r=1
Washington
NOT every generation is given the chance to turn the page on the past and write a new chapter in history. Yet today — after 50 years of civil wars that have killed two million people and turned millions more into refugees — this is the opportunity before the people of southern Sudan.
Over the next week, millions of southern Sudanese will vote on whether to remain part of Sudan or to form their own independent nation. This process — and the actions of Sudanese leaders — will help determine whether people who have known so much suffering will move toward peace and prosperity, or slide backward into bloodshed. It will have consequences not only for Sudan, but also for sub-Saharan Africa and the world.
The historic vote is an exercise in self-determination long in the making, and it is a key part of the 2005 peace agreement that ended the civil war in Sudan. Yet just months ago, with preparations behind schedule, it was uncertain whether this referendum would take place at all. It is for this reason that I gathered with leaders from Sudan and around the world in September to make it clear that the international community was united in its belief that this referendum had to take place and that the will of the people of southern Sudan had to be respected, regardless of the outcome.
In an important step forward, leaders from both northern and southern Sudan — backed by more than 40 nations and international organizations — agreed to work together to ensure that the voting would be timely, peaceful, free and credible and would reflect the will of the Sudanese people. The fact that the voting appears to be starting on time is a tribute to those in Sudan who fulfilled their commitments. Most recently, the government of Sudan said that it would be the first to recognize the south if it voted for independence.
Now, the world is watching, united in its determination to make sure that all parties in Sudan live up to their obligations. As the referendum proceeds, voters must be allowed access to polling stations; they must be able to cast their ballots free from intimidation and coercion. All sides should refrain from inflammatory rhetoric or provocative actions that could raise tensions or prevent voters from expressing their will.
As the ballots are counted, all sides must resist prejudging the outcome. For the results to be credible, the commission that is overseeing the referendum must be free from pressure and interference. In the days ahead, leaders from north and south will need to work together to prevent violence and ensure that isolated incidents do not spiral into wider instability. Under no circumstance should any side use proxy forces in an effort to gain an advantage while we wait for the final results.
A successful vote will be cause for celebration and an inspiring step forward in Africa’s long journey toward democracy and justice. Still, lasting peace in Sudan will demand far more than a credible referendum.
The 2005 peace agreement must be fully implemented — a goal that will require compromise. Border disputes, and the status of the Abyei region, which straddles north and south, need to be resolved peacefully. The safety and citizenship of all Sudanese, especially minorities — southerners in the north and northerners in the south — have to be protected. Arrangements must be made for the transparent distribution of oil revenues, which can contribute to development. The return of refugees needs to be managed with extraordinary care to prevent another humanitarian catastrophe.
If the south chooses independence, the international community, including the United States, will have an interest in ensuring that the two nations that emerge succeed as stable and economically viable neighbors, because their fortunes are linked. Southern Sudan, in particular, will need partners in the long-term task of fulfilling the political and economic aspirations of its people.
Finally, there can be no lasting peace in Sudan without lasting peace in the western Sudan region of Darfur. The deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Darfuris — and the plight of refugees like those I met in a camp in neighboring Chad five years ago — must never be forgotten. Here, too, the world is watching. The government of Sudan must live up to its international obligations. Attacks on civilians must stop. United Nations peacekeepers and aid workers must be free to reach those in need.
As I told Sudanese leaders in September, the United States will not abandon the people of Darfur. We will continue our diplomatic efforts to end the crisis there once and for all. Other nations must use their influence to bring all parties to the table and ensure they negotiate in good faith. And we will continue to insist that lasting peace in Darfur include accountability for crimes that have been committed, including genocide.
Along with our international partners, the United States will continue to play a leadership role in helping all the Sudanese people realize the peace and progress they deserve. Today, I am repeating my offer to Sudan’s leaders — if you fulfill your obligations and choose peace, there is a path to normal relations with the United States, including the lifting of economic sanctions and beginning the process, in accordance with United States law, of removing Sudan from the list of states that sponsor terrorism. In contrast, those who flout their international obligations will face more pressure and isolation.
Millions of Sudanese are making their way to the polls to determine their destiny. This is the moment when leaders of courage and vision can guide their people to a better day. Those who make the right choice will be remembered by history — they will also have a steady partner in the United States.
Barack Obama is the president of the United States.
NYT
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/opinion/09obama.html?_r=1
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