My choice today: Sunday 1 June 2008 – The Role of ISI in Pakistani Politics – By Asghar Khan
The role of ISI in Pakistan’s politics (Did IMC hear that case?)
Is ‘the judiciary restoration’ the only crisis in Pakistan?
The spirit of charity work in the Pakistani nation
So al-Qa’ida’s defeated, eh? Go tell it to the marines: Robert Fisk
Robert Fisk: So al-Qa’ida’s defeated, eh? Go tell it to the marines
Last week the head of the CIA claimed it was winning the battle. Nonsense, argues Robert Fisk. The extremists in the Middle East are growing stronger
Sunday, 1 June 2008
So al-Qa’ida is “almost defeated”, is it? Major gains against al-Qa’ida. Essentially defeated. “On balance, we are doing pretty well,” the CIA’s boss, Michael Hayden, tells The Washington Post. “Near strategic defeat of al-Qa’ida in Iraq. Near strategic defeat for al-Qa’ida in Saudi Arabia. Significant setbacks for al-Qa’ida globally – and here I’m going to use the word ‘ideologically’ – as a lot of the Islamic world pushes back on their form of Islam.” Well, you could have fooled me.
Six thousand dead in Afghanistan, tens of thousands dead in Iraq, a suicide bombing a day in Mesopotamia, the highest level of suicides ever in the US military – the Arab press wisely ran this story head to head with Hayden’s boasts – and permanent US bases in Iraq after 31 December. And we’ve won?
Less than two years ago, we had an equally insane assessment of the war when General Peter Pace, the weird (and now mercifully retired) chairman of the US joint chiefs of staff, said of the American war in Iraq that “we are not winning but we are not losing”. At which point, George Bush’s Defence Secretary, Robert Gates, said he agreed with Pace that “we are not winning but we are not losing”.
James Baker, who had just produced his own messy report on Iraq then said – reader, please do not laugh or cry – “I don’t think you can say we’re losing. By the same token, I’m not sure we’re winning.” Then Bush himself proclaimed, “We’re not winning; we’re not losing.” Pity about the Iraqis. But anyway, now we really, really are winning. Or at least al-Qa’ida is “almost” – note the “almost”, folks – defeated. So Mike Hayden tells us.
Am I alone in finding this stuff infantile to the point of madness? As long as there is injustice in the Middle East, al-Qa’ida will win. As long as we have 22 times as many Western forces in the Muslim world as we did at the time of the Crusades – my calculations are pretty accurate – we are going to be at war with Muslims. The hell-disaster of the Middle East is now spread across Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Gaza, even Lebanon. And we are winning?
Yes, we’ve bought ourselves some time in Iraq by paying half of the insurgents to fight for us and to murder their al-Qa’ida cousins. Yes, we are continuing to prop up Saudi Arabia’s head-chopping and torture-practising regime – no problem there, I suppose, after our enthusiasm for “water-boarding” – but this does not mean that al-Qa’ida is defeated.
Because al-Qa’ida is a way of thinking, not an army. It feeds on pain and fear and cruelty – our cruelty and oppression – and as long as we continue to dominate the Muslim world with our Apache helicopters and our tanks and our Humvees and our artillery and bombs and our “friendly” dictators, so will al-Qa’ida continue.
Must we live this madness through to the very end of the Bush regime in Washington? Is there no one in that magnificent, imperial city who understands what “we” are doing out here in the Middle East? Why on earth does The Washington Post even give room to the fantasies of a functionary from the CIA, the very organisation that failed to prevent 9/11 because – if we are to believe what we are told – a phone call in Arabic about crashing planes into the twin towers hadn’t been translated in time? Are we going to bomb Iran? Is this what we are waiting for now? Or is it to be another proxy Iranian-American war in Lebanon, fought out by Hizbollah and the Israelis? And does Mike believe al-Qa’ida is in Iran?
Israel continues to build settlements for Jews – and Jews only – on Arab land. And Washington does nothing. Illegal though these settlements are, George Bush goes along with it. They fuel anger and frustration and a righteous sense of grievance – and Washington will not prevent this outrage from continuing. I open my Arab papers each morning to find new reasons why the Bin Ladens of this world will not go away.
Take the story that came out of Gaza this week. Eight Palestinian students won grants from the Fulbright scholarship programme to study in the United States. You’d think, wouldn’t you, that it was in the interest of America to bring these young Muslim people to the land of the free. But no. Israel won’t let them leave Gaza. It’s all part of the “war on terror” which Israel claims it is fighting alongside America. So the US State Department has cancelled the scholarships. No, it’s not worth turning yourself into an al-Qa’ida suicide bomber for such a nonsense. But it would be difficult to find anything meaner, pettier, more vicious than this in yesterday’s papers.
Does Mike Hayden read this stuff? Or is he, like most of Washington, so frightened of Israel that he wouldn’t say boo to a goose? Doesn’t the CIA realise – or imagine – that as long as we allow the Middle East to fester under a cloak of injustice, al-Qa’ida will continue? Why are our forces – and this is a question I was asked in Baghdad – in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Jordan, Turkey, Egypt, Algeria (yes, US special forces have a base near Tamanraset), Bahrain, Kuwait, Yemen, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Qatar and Tajikistan? (Yes again, French bomber pilots are based at Dushanbe to fly “close air support” for our lads in Afghanistan.)
And as long as we have stretched this iron curtain across the Middle East, we will be at war and al-Qa’ida will be at war with us. This new iron curtain, by the way, starts up in Greenland and stretches down through Britain and Germany, through Bosnia and Greece to Turkey. What is it for? What’s on the other side? Russia. China. India.
These are questions we do not ask; certainly they’re not the kind of questions that The Washington Post would dare to put to Mike and his chums at the CIA. Yes, we huff and we puff about democracy and freedom and human rights, though we give little enough of them to the Muslim world. For the kind of freedom they want – the kind of freedom that allows outfits like al-Qa’ida to flourish – is freedom from “us”. And this, I fear, we do not intend to give them.
Mike Hayman may think the Muslim world is “pushing back” al-Qa’ida’s “form of Islam”, but I doubt it. Indeed, I rather suspect al-Qa’ida is growing stronger. Mike says they’re defeated in Iraq and Saudi Arabia. But are they defeated in London? And Bali? And in New York and Washington? (Independent)
Militant strategy and the new government
Quetta witnessed a most inhumane act of violence Friday when six youths playing cricket were gunned down on the charge of “spying for the Military Intelligence and the Inter-Services Intelligence”. The target of the public violence that followed was the hospital where the boys were brought, and not the Balochistan Liberation Army (BLA) which owned the deed.
The report said: “Friends and relatives of the dead and injured boys rushed to the hospital and shouted slogans against the attackers, the police and the administration. They also broke hospital windows and blocked the road. A majority of the murdered boys belonged to Quetta ’s ethnic Hazara minority”. Balochistan’s Chief Minister, Nawab Muhammad Aslam Raisani, was nonplussed by the event. All he could say was: “if my government remains unable to resolve the situation in the province, my government will resign”. He also claimed that the BLA was not responsible but he would “bring the real culprits to justice”.
The Hazaras in Quetta have been targeted repeatedly in the past. The massacres they suffered have been religious and sectarian. Because of the helplessness of the clergy on both sides of the sectarian divide in the face of their militant fringe, an absurd policy of blaming the deaths on America has been adopted. The Balochistan chief minister is logical — despite claims by the BLA spokesman — when he says that the BLA could not have done it. But how will he handle the case as he investigates the event?
In parallel to the developments n Quetta, Nawabzada Brahamdag Bugti, 28, son of the late Nawab Akbar Bugti, spoke from an unknown place after a long silence since August 2008, saying: “The only way to rid the Baloch of the injustices being perpetrated against them by the military is by joining the armed struggle against the government”. He said he extended “100 percent support” to all the militant groups operating in Balochistan because “the only way forward for the Baloch was to stop begging for provincial autonomy and jobs from the central government”.
Despite pledges by the Balochistan chief minister, Mr Brahamdag Bugti, also stated: “The Baloch issue has moved past constitutional compensation. We refuse to be a part of any reconciliatory efforts in the province. Why does the government talk of reconciliation when it is still engaged in a full-fledged operation against the Baloch people”? Significantly, Mr Raisani has been clearly hinting at a new “arrangement” of the province with the federation if his cooperation with the PPP government at the centre is to be successful.
This gives us a measure of what the federation of Pakistan is up against. The difficulty of actually sitting down and framing the terms of reference of a dialogue with the BLA, and the nationalist elements backing it, will spring from the weakness of the state’s response to the acts of violence noted above. Militancy in Pakistan follows a familiar pattern in the various parts of the country: violence is used to derail the writ of the state and establish alternative authority. Therefore the protesters who damaged property in Quetta and raised slogans against the government are of a piece with the various jirgas of the Tribal Areas demanding that Pakistani troops leave the areas where militant violence is in evidence…. (Editorial, Daily Times)