PAKISTAN Special

BY: HARSH MANDER
Numbed with disgust and horror, I return from Gujarat ten days after the terror and massacre that convulsed the state. My heart is sickened, my soul wearied, my shoulders aching with the burdens of guilt and shame.

As you walk through the camps of riot survivors in Ahmadabad , in which an estimated 53,000 women, men, and children are huddled in 29 temporary settlements, displays of overt grief are unusual. People clutch small bundles of relief materials, all that they now own in the world, with dry and glassy eyes. Some talk in low voices, others busy themselves with the tasks of everyday living in these most basic of shelters, looking for food and milk for children, tending the wounds of the injured.

But once you sit anywhere in these camps, people begin to speak and their words are like masses of pus released by slitting large festering wounds. The horrors that they speak of are so macabre, that my pen falters in the writing. The pitiless brutality against women and small children by organized bands of armed young men is more savage than anything witnessed in the riots that have shamed this nation from time to time during the past century.

I force myself to write a small fraction of all that I heard and saw, because it is important that we all know. Or maybe also because I need to share my own burdens.

What can you say about a woman eight months pregnant who begged to be spared. Her assailants instead slit open her stomach, pulled out her fetus and slaughtered it before her eyes. What can you say about a family of nineteen being killed by flooding their house with water and then electrocuting them with high-tension electricity. What can you say?

A small boy of six in Juhapara camp described how his mother and six brothers and sisters were battered to death before his eyes. He survived only because he fell unconscious, and was taken for dead. A family escaping from Naroda-Patiya, one of the worst-hit settlements in Ahmedabad, spoke of losing a young woman and her three month old son, because a police constable directed her to `safety' and she found herself instead surrounded by a mob which doused her with kerosene and set her and her baby on fire.

I have never known a riot which has used the sexual subjugation of women so widely as an instrument of violence in the recent mass barbarity in Gujarat . There are reports every where of gang-rape, of young girls and women, often in the presence of members of their families, followed by their murder by burning alive, or by bludgeoning with a hammer and in one case with a screw driver. Women in the Aman Chowk shelter told appalling stories about how armed men disrobed themselves in front of a group of terrified women to cower them down further.

In Ahmedabad, most people I met - social workers, journalists, survivors - agree that what Gujarat witnessed was not a riot, but a terrorist attack followed by a systematic, planned massacre, a pogrom. Everyone spoke of the pillage and plunder, being organized like a military operation against an external armed enemy. An initial truck would arrive broadcasting inflammatory slogans, soon followed by more trucks which disgorged young men, mostly in khaki shorts and saffron sashes. They were armed with sophisticated explosive materials, country weapons, daggers and trishuls. They also carried water bottles, to sustain them in their exertions. The leaders were seen communicating on mobile telephones from the riot venues, receiving instructions from and reporting back to a  coordinating centre. Some were seen with documents and computer sheets listing Muslim families and their properties. They had detailed precise knowledge about buildings and businesses held by members of the minority community, such as who were partners say in a restaurant business, or which Muslim homes had Hindu spouses were married who should be spared in the violence. This was not a spontaneous upsurge of mass anger. It was a carefully planned pogrom.

The trucks carried quantities of gas cylinders. Rich Muslim homes and business establishments were first systematically looted, stripped down of all their valuables, then cooking gas was released from cylinders into the buildings for several minutes. A trained member of the group then lit the flame which efficiently engulfed the building. In some cases, acetylene gas which is used for welding steel, was employed to explode large concrete buildings. Mosques and dargahs were razed, and were replaced by statues of Hanuman and saffron flags. Some dargahs in Ahmedabad city crossings have overnight been demolished and their sites covered with road building material, and bulldozed so efficiently that these spots are indistinguishable from the rest of the road. Traffic now plies over these former dargahs, as though they never existed.

The unconscionable failures and active connivance of the state police and administrative machinery is also now widely acknowledged. The police is known to have misguided people straight into the hands of rioting mobs. They provided protective shields to crowds bent on pillage, arson, rape and murder, and were deaf to the pleas of the desperate Muslim victims, many of them women and children. There have been many reports of police firing directly mostly at the minority community, which was the target of most of the mob violence. The large majority of arrests are also from the same community which was the main victim of the pogrom.

As one who has served in the Indian Administrative Service for over two decades, I feel great shame at the abdication of duty of my peers in the civil and police administration. The law did not require any of them to await orders from their political supervisors before they organized the decisive use of force to prevent the brutal escalation of violence, and to protect vulnerable women and children from the organized, murderous mobs. The law instead required them to act independently, fearlessly, impartially, decisively, with courage and compassion. If even one official had so acted in Ahmedabad, she or he could have deployed the police forces and called in the army to halt the violence and protect the people in a matter of hours. No riot can continue beyond a few hours without the active connivance of the local police and magistracy. The blood of hundreds of innocents are on the hands of the police and civil authorities of Gujarat , and by sharing in a conspiracy of silence, on the entire higher bureaucracy of the country.

I have heard senior officials blame also the communalism of the police constabulary for their connivance in the violence. This too is a thin and disgraceful alibi. The same forces have been known to act with impartiality and courage when led by officers of professionalism and integrity. The failure is clearly of the leadership of the police and civil services, not of the subordinate men and women in khaki who are trained to obey their orders.

Where also, amidst this savagery, injustice, and human suffering is the `civil society', the Gandhians, the development workers, the NGOs, the fabled spontaneous Gujarathi philanthropy which was so much in evidence in the earthquake in Kutch and Ahmedabad? The newspapers reported that at the peak of the pogrom, the gates of Sabarmati Asram were closed to protect its properties, it should instead have been the city's major sanctuary. Which Gandhian leaders, or NGO managers, staked their lives to halt the death-dealing throngs? It is one more shame that we as citizens of this country must carry on our already burdened backs, that the camps for the Muslim riot victims in Ahmedabad are being run almost exclusively by Muslim organizations. It is as though the monumental pain, loss, betrayal and injustice suffered by the Muslim people is the concern only of other Muslim people, and the rest of us have no share in the responsibility to assuage, to heal and rebuild. The state, which bears the primary responsibility to extend both protection and relief to its vulnerable citizens, was nowhere in evidence in any of the camps, to manage, organize the security, or even to provide the resources that are required to feed the tens of thousands of defenseless women, men and children huddled in these camps for safety.

The only passing moments of pride and hope that I experienced in Gujarat , were when I saw men like Mujid Ahmed and women like Roshan Bahen who served in these camps with tireless, dogged humanism amidst the ruins around them. In the Aman Chowk camp, women blessed the young band of volunteers who worked from four in the morning until after midnight to ensure that none of their children went without food or milk, or that their wounds remained untended. Their leader Mujid Ahmed is a graduate, his small chemical dyes factory has been burnt down, but he has had no time to worry about his own loss. Each day he has to find 1600 kilograms of food grain to feed some 5000people who have taken shelter in the camp. The challenge is even greater for Roshan Bahen, almost 60, who wipes her eyes each time she hears the stories of horror by the residents in Juapara camp. But she too has no time for the luxuries of grief or anger. She barely sleeps, as her volunteers, mainly working class Muslim women and men from the humble tenements around the camp, provide temporary toilets, food and solace to the hundreds who have gathered in the grounds of a primary school to escape the ferocity of merciless mobs.

As I walked through the camps, I wondered what Gandhiji would have done in these dark hours. I recall the story of the Calcutta riots, when Gandhi was fasting for peace. A Hindu man came to him, to speak of his young boy who had been killed by Muslim mobs, and of the depth of his anger and longing for revenge. And Gandhi is said to have replied: If you really wish to overcome your pain, find a young boy, just as young as your son, a Muslim boy whose parents have been killed by Hindu mobs. Bring up that boy like you would your own son, but bring him up with the Muslim faith to which he was born. Only then will you find that you can heal your pain, your anger, and your longing for retribution.

There are no voices like Gandhi's that we hear today. Only discourses on Newtonian physics, to justify vengeance on innocents. We need to find these voices within our own hearts, we need to believe enough in justice, love, tolerance.

There is much that the murdering mobs in Gujarat have robbed from me. One of them is a song I often sang with pride and conviction. The words of the song are:

Sare jahan se achha
Hindustan hamara.

It is a song I will never be able to sing again.

(Harsh Mander, the writer, is a serving IAS Officer, who is working on deputation with a development organization)

                                                                                                                            Download Adobe File...

By: ERIC SCHMITT and DAVID E. SANGER
American officials reached a quiet understanding with Pakistan’s leader last month to intensify secret strikes against suspected terrorists by pilotless aircraft launched in Pakistan, senior officials in both governments say. But the prospect of changes in Pakistan’s government has the Bush administration worried that the new operations could be curtailed.

Among other things, the new arrangements allowed an increase in the number and scope of patrols and strikes by armed Predator surveillance aircraft launched from a secret base in Pakistan — a far more aggressive strategy to attack Al Qaeda and the Taliban than had existed before.

But since opposition parties emerged victorious from the parliamentary election early this week, American officials are worried that the new, more permissive arrangement could be choked off in its infancy.

In the weeks before Monday’s election, a series of meetings among President Bush’s national security advisers resulted in a significant relaxation of the rules under which American forces could aim attacks at suspected Qaeda and Taliban fighters in the tribal areas near Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan.

The change, described by senior American and Pakistani officials who would not speak for attribution because of the classified nature of the program, allows American military commanders greater leeway to choose from what one official who took part in the debate called “a Chinese menu” of strike options.

Instead of having to confirm the identity of a suspected militant leader before attacking, this shift allowed American operators to strike convoys of vehicles that bear the characteristics of Qaeda or Taliban leaders on the run, for instance, so long as the risk of civilian casualties is judged to be low.

The new, looser rules of engagement may have their biggest impact at a secret Central Intelligence Agency base in Pakistan whose existence was described by American and Pakistani officials who had previously kept it secret to avoid embarrassing President Pervez Musharraf politically. Mr. Musharraf, whose party lost in this week’s election by margins that surprised American officials, has been accused by political rivals of being too close to the United States.

The base in Pakistan is home to a handful of Predators — unmanned aircraft that are controlled from the United States. Two Hellfire missiles from one of those Predators are believed to have killed a senior Qaeda commander, Abu Laith al-Libi, in northwest Pakistan last month, though a senior Pakistani official said his government had still not confirmed that Mr. Libi was among the dead. A C.I.A. spokesman declined on Thursday to comment on any operations in Pakistan.

The new agreements with Pakistan came after a trip to the country on Jan. 9 by Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, and Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the C.I.A. director. The American officials met with Mr. Musharraf as well as with the new army chief, Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, and offered a range of increased covert operations aimed at thwarting intensifying efforts by Al Qaeda and the Taliban to destabilize the Pakistani government.

But Bush administration officials and American counterterrorism experts are expressing concern that these arrangements could come under review or be scaled back by the winners of Pakistan’s parliamentary elections. The two winning parties have said they want to enter talks with Pashtun tribal leaders who opposed the military government of Mr. Musharraf and who at times have supported the Taliban and given refuge to foreign Qaeda fighters.

“A new government may be able to reach an accord with the militants, and that would buy the government a certain respite,” said Robert L. Grenier, a former director of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Counterterrorism Center. “But that would give the militants space to provide safe haven to Al Qaeda and other extremists engaged in attacks in Afghanistan.”

Xenia Dormandy, the director for South Asia at the National Security Council until 2005, said Thursday that if talks resulted in the kind of truce — and pullback of Pakistani troops — that Mr. Musharraf negotiated nearly two years ago, the militants would probably continue to gain strength.

“If they try to replicate what we’ve already seen, I don’t know why the result would be any different,” she said. But she added that if the Pakistani military remained in the area, the government might retain some leverage.

The question of what to do next in Pakistan is likely to preoccupy the Bush administration in its last year. Officials say there is clear, if unstated, pressure to make a last effort to capture or kill Osama bin Laden before Mr. Bush leaves office. But several senior officials in the State Department have been warning that the administration’s full-scale backing of Mr. Musharraf was a wrong-headed strategy that could now blow up.

Other administration officials warned not to read too much into the initial comments from Asif Ali Zardari, the leader of the Pakistan Peoples Party and widower of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, about reaching accords with the tribal leaders. Mr. Zardari, they noted, has made clear that he wants to defeat terrorism.

Opposition parties and analysts say American officials were misinterpreting the outcome of the elections, which were dominated by the country’s liberal, secular parties. An alliance of religious parties that controlled the provincial government in the North-West Frontier Province was driven from power and even lost the majority of seats in the tribal areas.

Opposition parties say a new civilian-led government will be more effective at countering militancy than the military-dominated one under Mr. Musharraf. They say that Mr. Musharraf’s strategy has failed and that a new approach is needed.

Instead, the opposition parties have called for a strategy in the tribal areas similar to the new counterinsurgency strategies employed by the American military in Afghanistan and Iraq. There, the United States has tried to use a combination of military force, reconstruction and political dialogue to turn local tribes against militants.

The question, senior American and Pakistani officials said Thursday, was how the strategy to accomplish these common goals might change.

“In the short term, there will be some confusion and some hiccups,” said Henry A. Crumpton, a former top State Department counterterrorism official. “But in the medium and longer term, there will be continued and perhaps even closer cooperation, because of our mutual interests.”

BY: COL(RETD) DANIEL SMITH

A prominent politician of a “third world” country is killed by “unknown foreign parties.”

The dead politician either was at odds with the ruling party or power center or had recently offended an ethnic or sectarian minority.

The assassination threatens to or actually paralyzes the country’s political life.

At least titular control of the political party of the deceased former leader passes to the next of kin, with results very uncertain for weeks or months.

International pressure forces the country’s head of state to accept international “technical” assistance in the investigation. 

In the end, nothing is proven, nothing is resolved.

Indira Gandhi: In October 1984, when India’s Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was killed by two of her Sikh bodyguards in retaliation for ordering the Indian army’s assault on the Sikh’s Golden Temple in Amritsar , more than 1,000 rioters were dead within hours. Indira’s son Rajiv succeeded his mother. (Rajiv was later killed by a bomb while campaigning in 1991 in Tamil Nadu by suspected agents of Sri Lanka ’s rebel Tamil Tigers who resented Rajiv’s dispatch of troops when he was prime minister to intervene as “peace-makers” in the island’s civil war. Sonia, Rajiv’s widow, was instrumental in rebuilding Rajiv’s Congress Party and led them to victory in 2004. But as she was foreign-born, she was unable to become prime minister.)

Kabila, Hariri:In January 2001, just days after finally dislodging armed opposition from Kinshasa , The Democratic Republic of Congo’s new leader, Laurent Kabila, was shot in the presidential palace. His son, Joseph, inherited a war-torn country that, seven years on and with a 17,000-strong United Nations peacekeeping force in the country, is still verging on state failure.

Musharraf and Blame: And that brings us back to December 27, 2007 in Pakistan, the day Benazir Bhutto was assassinated in Rawalpindi – less than two weeks before the January 8 parliamentary elections.

It could hardly do otherwise. The alternatives, which range from “mere” incompetence to active collusion with or even direction of extremists, aren’t just bad. They’re disastrous.

And More Blame: Spokespersons for the Musharraf government, thrown on the defensive by accusations that government-provided security for Bhutto was not only lax but totally non-existent, gave conflicting accounts of the cause of death. Then they were entirely discredited by video footage of the attack obtained from a number of private citizens who had come to see and hear the former prime minister. Moreover, in a CBS “60 Minutes” interview aired January 6, Musharraf blamed Bhutto for ignoring threats to her life and taking unnecessary and provocative risks.

Yet, days later, Musharraf announced that Britain’s New Scotland Yard would provide technical assistance to Pakistani investigators as the latter tried to piece together what happened and why the 100 security personnel present at the campaign stop (as asserted by Musharraf in a meeting with Western correspondents) did not thwart the assassination.

Pakistani Peacekeepers: Another possible effect could be felt at the United Nations. The question is whether Islamabad will continue to be willing and able to supply large numbers of troops for the 20 current operations run by the United Nations Department of Peacekeeping Operations. With 10,623 troops, observers, and police detailed to UN peacekeeping, Pakistan is the largest source (just under 13% of the total deployed “blue helmets”) of manpower for these efforts. It may come down to whom would Pakistan want to offend least – the United States in Afghanistan or the UN around the globe – should Islamabad decide to move more forces into internal security.

Nine Months Later: But these were thoughts enunciated nine months before Musharraf took off his general’s uniform, nine months before Bhutto’s assassination, nine months before Musharraf’s world turned upside down.

BY: NIALL FERGUSON

Future historians will look back on the current decade as a turning point comparable with that of the Seventies. No, not the 1970s. This is not going to be another piece pointing out the coincidence of an unpopular Republican president, soaring oil prices, a sagging dollar and an unwinnable faraway war. I am talking about the 1870s.

At first sight, the resemblances across 130 years may not seem obvious. The 1870s were a time when conservative leaders such as Benjamin Disraeli, British prime minister, were powerful and popular. It was a time of falling commodity prices, after the financial crash of 1873 and the opening up of the American plains to agriculture. And it was an era of currency stability, as one country after another followed the British lead by pegging to gold. Yet, on closer inspection, we are indeed living through a global shift in the balance of power very similar to that which occurred in the 1870s.

This is the story of how an over-extended empire sought to cope with an external debt crisis by selling off revenue streams to foreign investors. The empire that suffered these setbacks in the 1870s was the Ottoman empire . Today it is the US . In the aftermath of the Crimean war, both the sultan in Constantinople and his Egyptian vassal, the khedive, had begun to accumulate huge domestic and foreign debts. Between 1855 and 1875, the Ottoman debt increased by a factor of 28. As a percentage of expenditure, interest payments and amortization rose from 15 percent in 1860 to 50 per cent in 1875. The Egyptian case was similar: between 1862and 1876, the total public debt rose from EPounds 3.3m to EPounds 76m. The 1876 budget showed debt charges accounting for more than half of all expenditure.

The loans had been made for both military and economic reasons: to support the Ottoman military position during and after the Crimean war and to finance railway and canal construction, including the building of the Suez canal , which had opened in 1869. But a dangerously high proportion of the proceeds had been squandered on conspicuous consumption, symbolized by Sultan Abdul Mejid's luxurious Dolmabahce palace and the spectacular world premiere of Aida at the Cairo Opera House in 1871. In the wake of the financial crisis that struck the European and American stock markets in 1873, a Middle Eastern debt crisis was inevitable. In October 1875 the Ottoman government declared bankruptcy.

The crisis had two distinct financial consequences: the sale of the khedive's shares in the Suez canal to the British government (for Pounds 4m, famously advanced to Disraeli by the Rothschilds) and the hypothecation of certain Ottoman tax revenues for debt service under the auspices of an international Administration of the Ottoman Public Debt, on which European bondholders were represented. The critical point is that the debt crisis necessitated the sale or transfer of Middle Eastern revenue streams to Europeans.

The US debt crisis has taken a different form, to be sure. External liabilities have been run up by a combination of government and household dissaving. It is not the public sector that is defaulting but sub prime mortgage borrowers. As in the 1870s, though, the upshot of this debt crisis is the sale of assets and revenue streams to foreign creditors. This time, however, creditors are buying bank shares not canal shares. And the resulting shift of power is from west to east.

Since September, Middle Eastern and east Asian sovereign wealth funds have made a succession of investments in four US banks: Bear Stearns, Citigroup, Morgan Stanley and Merrill Lynch. Most commentators have been inclined to welcome this global bail-out: better to bring in foreign capital than to shrink balance sheets by reducing lending. Yet we need to recognize that these "capital injections" represent a transfer of the revenues from the US financial services industry into the hands of foreign governments. This is happening at a time when the gap between eastern and western incomes is narrowing at an unprecedented pace.

In other words, as in the 1870s the balance of financial power is shifting. Then, the move was from the ancient oriental empires (not only the Ottoman but also the Persian and Chinese) to western Europe. Today the shift is from the US-and other western financial centres - to the autocracies of the Middle East and east Asia.

In Disraeli's day, the debt crisis turned out to have political as well as financial implications, presaging a reduction not just in income but also in sovereignty.

In the case of Egypt , what began with asset sales continued with the creation of a foreign commission to manage the public debt, the installation of an "international" government and finally, in 1882, to British military intervention and the country's transformation into a de facto colony. In the case of Turkey , the debt crisis was followed by the sultan's abdication and Russian military intervention, which dealt a lethal blow to the Ottoman position in the Balkans.

It remains to be seen how quickly today's financial shift will be followed by a comparable geopolitical shift in favour of the new export and energy empires of the east. Suffice to say that the historical analogy does not bode well for America's quasi-imperial network of bases and allies across the Middle East and Asia . Debtor empires sooner or later have to do more than just sell shares to satisfy their creditors.

The writer is a professor at Harvard University and Harvard Business School and a senior fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford.

The language loved by Bush and Musharraf has translated into a global disaster bringing death and misery to millions

BY: SIMON JENKINS
Nothing and nobody can stop bombs going off. No citizen, no police force, no army, no government and no global military alliance can prevent a determined suicide bomber from blowing himself up. It will happen and innocent people will die as a result, horribly, as they do on the roads, from drugs and alcohol, or from natural disasters - again without responsible authority being able to stop it.

What is recent is the admission of this truism into the mainstream of government under the rubric of "terrorism". This week two outgoing presidents, America's George Bush and Pakistan's Pervez Musharraf, defined their terms of office in relation to terror. Bush did so in his final state of the union message on Monday and Musharraf that same day in London during a charm offensive prior to next month's elections.

To Bush, the "war on terror" is the ruling mantra of his politics of fear. Since 9/11 gave a prop to his weakening presidency, his language has scaled new heights of alarmist rhetoric. It has validated every internal repression and every external war. "He who is not with us is against us," he cries. Terrorists everywhere are "opposing the advance of liberty ... evil men who despise freedom, despise America and aim to subject millions to their violent rule".

As the sociologist Ulrich Beck has written, "properly exploited, a novel risk is always an elixir to an ailing leader". By declaring a threat so awful as to be intolerable, a politician can limit the liberties of a free society in the name of risk-aversion. Musharraf utters hardly a sentence that does not contain the word terror. Pivotally close to the base from which 9/11 was apparently launched, his dictatorship has been indulged by London and Washington for a full seven years. This week Gordon Brown hailed him as a "key ally on terrorism", enabling him to take comfort in sacking his judiciary and curbing his media. Had the war on terror been used only as a metaphor for better policing, like rhetorical "wars" on drugs, poverty and street crime, it might have passed muster. Bush and Musharraf have found the military metaphor too potent to resist and duly carried it into literal effect. The result has been a disaster for their countries, and incidentally for themselves.

The west's Afghan adventure is now devoid of coherent strategy. Soldiers are dying, the opium trade is booming and aid lies undistributed. Command and control of the war against the Taliban is slipping from the most bizarre western occupying force since the fourth Crusade to a tight cabal around the Afghan ruler, Hamid Karzai, who is fighting to retain a remnant of authority in his own capital. 

Karzai's exasperation with the west has led him to refuse the services as "coordinator" of the former Liberal Democrat leader, Paddy Ashdown. The latter may have cut a dash in the subsidy swamp of Sarajevo, but in Afghanistan he would have been a boy on a man's errand. Karzai knows well that his fate lies not with the patronising platitudes of western proconsuls but in the hard graft of provincial warlords, drug gangsters and Taliban go-betweens.

These go-betweens have had their status massively boosted by the war on terror. Bush's demand in 2001 that Musharraf "join the war" sent Pakistani forces into the border territories, breaking old treaties and driving the Pashtun tribes into the eager arms of Taliban leaders. This undoubtedly saved Osama bin Laden's skin from the fury of the northern Tajiks, committed to avenge his murder of their leader, Ahmed Shah Massoud.

Musharraf, at America's bidding and with $10bn of American money, has done what even his craziest predecessors avoided, and recklessly set the Pashtun on the warpath - increasingly in thrall to a revived al-Qaida. The result is a plague of suicide bombings and killings in the heartland of his benighted state. From the law courts of America to the mosques of west London and the mountains of the Hindu Kush, the war on terror has been lethally and predictably counter-productive. It embodies the new stupidity in international affairs.

Nobody disputes that there are killer cells at large in the world, most of them proclaiming various Islamist creeds. It is the job of intelligence agencies and the police to catch as many as they can. After a hesitant start, they appear to be quite good at it. Some bombs will get through but they will not be deterred by draconian laws, any more than by machine gun-toting policemen in Downing Street and Heathrow. Robust societies can handle this admittedly intermittent threat. Only weak ones will capitulate to it.

The menace of these killers lies not in their firepower but in their capacity to distort the judgment and commitment to freedom of politicians too cowardly to bear on their shoulders the burden of risk. In two weeks' time, the fragile democracy of Pakistan will defy the bombers and hold an election prior, it is hoped, to some version of democratic rule. Such communities will defy a probable burst of terror bombs only if their leaders stop setting "terrorists" on a pedestal and using language that exaggerates their capacity, as Bush puts it, "to oppose the advance of freedom".

It is leaders, not bombers, who have the power to balk the advance of freedom. Already those leaders have used the war on terror to introduce the Patriot Act, Guantánamo Bay and a $1.5 trillion war in Iraq. In Pakistan they have used it as an excuse for emergency rule, the imprisonment of senior judges, and the provocation of unprecedented insurgency in the north-west frontier territories. In Britain leaders have used the war as an excuse for 42-day detention without trial, the world's most intrusive surveillance state, and not one but two contested military occupations of foreign soil.

This so-called war on terror has filled the pockets of those profiting from it. It has killed thousands, immiserated millions and infringed the liberty of hundreds of millions. The only rough justice it has delivered is to ruin the careers of those who propagated it. Tony Blair was driven to early resignation. Bush has been humiliated and Musharraf's wretched rule brought close to an overdue end. It may be an ill wind that blows no good, but it is hardly enough.

BY: SHAFQAT MEHMOOD
The easiest explanation is that Al Qaeda or Pakistani Taliban killed her and this is what the government has been pedaling. In twenty four hours, it not only determined the exact cause of Benazir Bhutto death but also solved the case. Baitullah Mehsud, we were told, is the culprit and there are tapes to prove it. I wish the interior ministry had shown similar efficiency in protecting her.

While these explanations are convenient let us look at Mr Mehsud's motives. There is little doubt that Benazir Bhutto hated Al Qaeda/Taliban and had vowed a relentless struggle against them. But, how was this any different from what Mr Musharraf has been saying and doing. What extra measures would she have undertaken that are not being used now. The only instrument available to her for crushing the extremists was Pakistan army and it is already engaged in a war against them. What was the extra that Ms Bhutto would have brought to the table that scared Al Qaeda/Taliban so much that they were determined to eliminate her?
Let us be clear. The October 18 attack on her procession, the day she arrived back in Pakistan from exile, was a serious assassination attempt. She survived because the armored truck protected her. What her killers learnt from this was that while a bomb may fail because of the protective measures, it disables the vehicle and makes it necessary for the target to be shifted to another vehicle. The process of shifting, which in Karachi was actually filmed by a TV crew, and further transportation in a non-amour plated vehicle, became the weak link in the security measures.

On December 27, the murder attempt included a suicide bomber, plus one or more shooters. In fact, for such a serious attempt, up to a dozen people may have been involved. Even if she had not come out of the hatch to wave to her supporters, they would have exploded the bomb and then attacked her while she was being shifted and transported in an unprotected vehicle. Her coming out just made it easier for the killers and the sequence was reversed. They were determined to get her this time.

I am not ruling out the Al Qaeda/Taliban as the suspects but the relentless desire to kill her requires a bigger motive than the fear of a focused drive against them. The state is already taking them on and I don't believe holding its punches. What else could Benazir have done? It is this that makes the easy explanation of their involvement suspect. They may have wanted her dead but it was probably in a general sense, just as they want all their opponents dead. Their going after her again and again lacks a specific focused motive.

If not the Pakistani Taliban, then who else? For this, one has to look at a bigger scenario that may sound conspiratorial but dealing with a tragedy like this, everything needs to be discussed. There is a body of opinion in this country that believes that United States is looking for an opportunity to take out our nuclear programme and dismantle the effective strength of our armed forces. Some columnists keep harping on this and one Ahmed Quraishi articulated this in an article that has been widely circulated.

His thesis is that movement against Musharraf after March 9, was sponsored by the US and everyone was paid including lawyers, journalists, judges etc. He further goes on to add that the real target was not Mr Musharraf but the Pakistan Army and by extension its nuclear arsenal . Also please remember that while referring to this period, Mr Musharraf keeps talking of conspiracy without actually explaining what it was. I don't know how much he subscribes to the Quraishi view, but the ire against Geo is allegedly because it tows the American line. Sponsored articles on the net actually accuse the channel of being directly in the Americans pay and of working against the interest of Pakistan.
This worldview that America is out to destabilize Pakistan and take control of its nuclear weapons, is bolstered by the statements of US leaders and reporting in the American media. Newsweek famously declared Pakistan the most dangerous country in the world, and op-ed articles in The Washington Post and The New York Times have called for US troops to go and 'secure' Pakistan's nuclear weapons. One piece by Frederick Kagan was particularly absurd and spoke in detail about how a million troops would be required for the invasion.

Other articles in prestigious papers also talk of how Mr Musharraf would not allow American special forces to operate in Pakistani tribal areas. Some hint at the involvement of the Pakistan army in the nuclear proliferation activities of Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan. Almost everyone talks of Pakistan as a failing state with nuclear weapons. The implication being that the west can't sit back and let this dangerous place slide into chaos. In other words, the sum total of American opinion reaching Pakistan, fuels the paranoia that is already present in certain circles within the country.

Ms Bhutto stepped into this cauldron by saying all the things that would make the paranoiacs mad. She said that under certain circumstances she would allow the American forces to target terrorists in the tribal areas. She said that she would make Dr Abdul Qadeer Khan available to the International Atomic Energy Commission for questioning. Both these statements touched very sensitive nerves. She also spoke often to American diplomats and officials of the state department and they in turn made no bones of the fact that she was their favourite candidate for Prime Minister.

Her American connection thus became her bane as far as the paranoiacs were concerned. As Benazir's political fortunes rose, they saw her as a Trojan horse for American interests who would allow American forces ingress into Pakistan and expose our nuclear program. These people saw her as a clear and present danger to the very survival of the country and a big enough reason in their mind to eliminate her. This is why they tried again and again until they succeeded.

The difficult part to prove is who 'they' are. I find it hard to believe that Mr Musharraf or our state institutions are involved in any of this. They may have had misgivings about her but that did not extend to seeing her as traitor or someone who would compromise our national interest. In any case, the Prime Minister would only have been one element of the tripod of power and they could checkmate her as and when they desired.

If the state establishment is not involved then who? It has to be the shadowy groups who have connection with the state but operate independently. They also have 'soldiers' in the shape of elements who worked closely with them in the past during the Afghan and Kashmir proxy wars. While the state has stopped sponsoring them, they have not disappeared. It is they who I believe are prime suspects in the tragic murder of Mohtarma Benazir Bhutto.

"The assassination of Benazir Bhutto was not an attack on this brave woman alone; it was an attack upon democracy, freedom and the United States ." This statement by Asa Hutchinson, former undersecretary of homeland security, was typical of the reaction of the American political and media establishments.

The claim that the assassination was an attack on democracy and freedom is dubious because Bhutto's two spells as prime minister of Pakistan were not notable for either one. Whether it was an attack on the United States depends on what that means. It certainly was not an attack on the American people. How could it be construed that way, unless one has such an imperialist notion of "our interests" that nothing can happen in the world without impinging on them?

But if by "United States " we mean the policies of the current administration, then indeed it was such an attack. Bhutto, after all, favored bringing U.S. military forces into Pakistan , according to Michael Scheuer, a former CIA analyst and region specialist. If that's an option President Bush planned to exercise, the loss of Bhutto is a grave blow to his policy.

It is during a crisis that the establishment hoists its true colors for all to see. With few exceptions, the most prominent voices in politics and the news media are chanting in unison that Bhutto's assassination proves that the United States needs to be more involved in Pakistan than it has been.

Could the United States be more involved? American presidents have been meddling in Pakistani politics for a long time. After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979 both Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan regarded the brutal military dictator Gen. Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq, who had come to power by overthrowing — and later executing — Bhutto's father, the elected prime minister, Zulifqar Ali Bhutto, as a key ally. Once again the U.S. government used the Cold War as an excuse to back a despot.

Shortly before the current Pakistan president, Pervez Musharraf, staged a coup and named himself chief executive, Bill Clinton had pressured then-Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to get Musharraf, who was then the head of the army, to pull his forces out of the part of Kashmir controlled by rival India . Sharif was thus perceived as a puppet of the United States . That could not have helped his fortunes.

Since 9/11, of course, Musharraf has been crowned a key ally in Bush's "war on terror." Some $10 billion in cash and arms has poured into the dictator's coffers. The largess did not slow down when Musharraf suspended the constitution, sacked the Supreme Court, declared martial law, and arrested lawyers and civil-libertarians — all to fight terrorism and protect democracy.

When even Bush couldn't escape the fact that the Pakistanis were outraged about Musharraf, his administration tried to engineer an unlikely political marriage between the dictator and Bhutto. Whether her death came at the hands of Musharraf's security forces, parts of which have notorious ties to radical Islamic elements, or al-Qaeda and the Taliban, the murderers' opportunity has the mark of bumbling U.S. interventionism all over it. Before someone calls this a "blame America first" point of view, note that former Bush UN ambassador John Bolton told Fox News, "We in effect helped — helped — precipitate this dynamic that led to her tragic assassination."

What is so fascinating is how impervious the political and media establishments are to the lessons of reality. After all that's happened, the dominant voices still insist that Bush redouble efforts to determine Pakistan 's future. The arrogance and pretense of knowledge displayed by such people are astounding. Haven't they learned that America's political leaders can't possibly know what they would need to know to run Pakistan ? Their meddling here creates one mess after another — how can they hope to succeed there?

But Pakistan is the most dangerous country in the world, we're told incessantly. If that's true, it's all the more reason for the United States to keep its hands off. Intervention only creates and provokes enemies. That endangers the American people, precisely the opposite of what the Bush administration says it wants to do.

Sheldon Richman is senior fellow at The Future of Freedom Foundation.

BY: ABID ULLAH JAN
Frederick Kagan and Michael O’Hanlon presented their strategic plan for disarming Pakistan in the New York Time on November 19, 2007. Written with imperial arrogance and colonial mindset, this piece cannot be contemptuously dismissed because the duo is a respected pair of neocons. O’Hanlon is the cheerleader of surge in Iraq and with Brookings and New York Times standing behind them, there is good reason for Pakistanis and their corrupt leadership to wake up.

This back-of-an-envelope military planning from neocon analysts is part of the plan under which support is extended to dictatorial and corrupt regimes in Pakistan so that it could lead to chaos and anarchy, and the way is paved for an invasion and neutralization of the military power of Pakistan. The objective remains the same as it was in the case of a wars on Iraq and the plans for a war on Iran. Only the strategy for neutralizing the military power of Pakistan is different.

The plan is published in the NY Times with the intention to garner unwarranted attention. For one thing, since the White House regards the Surge as a stunning success, it’s natural that Kagan and O’Hanlon will receive a sympathetic ear.

And though their counsel is singularly lacking in rational approach and denies the right to self defense and self determination to yet another nation, a president with little interest in the rights and freedom is unlikely to notice its absence.

Kegan and O’Hanlon don’t have a plan other then the dream of American military salvation through collaborators and traitors referred to in the op-ed as pro-America moderates. In their rumination, presented a s a plan, the duo says: "Given the degree to which Pakistani nationalists cherish these assets, it is unlikely the United States would get permission to destroy them. Somehow, American forces would have to team with Pakistanis to secure critical sites and possibly to move the material to a safer place." What kind of Pakistanis are they expecting to team up with the invading armies?

In their wishful thinking the authors of the plan for invasion of Pakistan assume that Pakistan’s military will be totally in favor of the invasion and support the invading armies: "So, if we got a large number of troops into the country, what would they do? The most likely directive would be to help Pakistan’s military and security forces hold the country’s center — primarily the region around the capital, Islamabad, and the populous areas like Punjab Province to its south."

The plan is not sure how American forces will be welcomed by Pakistan army, but says "somehow" the invading armies "would have to team up with Pakistanis." Somehow is how in search of a plan. However, that is not a matter for concern for warlords in the US and other Western capitals who believe as long as the objective is clear (target Pakistan’s nuclear power), the how aspect will be taken care of somehow. However, we know from the Us experience of mass killings to the level of genocide in Iraq that it is not always as simple to invade a country as easily and these warmongers present.

Of course there are sellouts everywhere and the greedy and opportunist Pakistani generals may already have revealed the locations of critical sites to their overbearing American masters. Still the scenario of invasion and capturing the prized weapons would not be as simple as we read in the pages of the New York Times. No matter what the sold-out generals may have done at the top level, the idea that the Pakistani military as a whole will cooperate or any faction within it would in effect hand over the prize jewels of Pakistan’s national defense for American safekeeping — even if that was in "a remote redoubt within Pakistan" — is laughable.

The junior officers have no option but to obey their commanders at the top. However, when they realize that their top leadership is colluding with the United States for invading Pakistan and destroying of removing its nuclear weapons, the revolution/revolt in Pakistan army would be nothing less than hell for a few generals at the top. The US warmongers might see up in smoke all the military discipline we see now. They might see the traitors hanged in the streets in Pakistan. There can be little doubt that American officials have already been provided with multiple assurances that the Generals command is the last command and everyone else down the ranks will obey. However there is no guarantee that the thousands of juniors officers would remain loyal even when they see the writing on the wall.

As David Sanger and William Broad noted in the New York Times (Nov 18, 2007) a U.S. sponsored, post-9/11 plan to safeguard Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, "has been hindered by a deep suspicion among Pakistan’s military that the secret goal of the United States was to gather intelligence about how to locate and, if necessary, disable Pakistan’s arsenal, which is the pride of the country."

So, it would seem that while Washington indulges in hair brain schemes for safeguarding Pakistani nukes, Pakistan’s military is not as concerned about the myth of these weapons falling into the hands of militants as they are fearful of America using Pakistan’s engineered instability as a ruse for implementing a unilateral disarmament scheme.

Kagan and O’Hanlon, sensing that pro-American Pakistanis might be in short supply, have nevertheless devised a Plan B — sort of. This one requires, "a sizable combat force — not only from the United States, but ideally also other Western powers and moderate Muslim nations." The American warlords are confident that the "longstanding effectiveness of Pakistan’s security forces," will provide sufficient time for a U.S.-led coalition to be deployed. They must remember that no "moderate Muslim" state came to help the US in its war for chemical and biological weapons in Iraq. How and from where would they come to the rescue of the Islamophobic allies in the case of a new war on a nuclear armed Muslim state?

Now we get to the really interesting passage, indicating that the Iraq war supporters have made great progress on the Middle East plan in which Pakistan is also divided with parts of it going to Afghanistan and the emergence of an independent Baluchistan: "…if we got a large number of troops into the country, what would they do? The most likely directive would be to help Pakistan’s military [assuming it is working with the invaders] and security forces hold [just] the country’s center — primarily the region around the capital, Islamabad, [Pakistan’s Green Zone] and the populous areas like Punjab Province to its south. [Leaving Baluchistan, NWFP and Sindh alone for redrawing the new Middle East map, which interestingly included South Asia as well. See Ralph Peters, Armed Forces Journal - June 2006]

The war rhetoric surrounds the slogans that the "task of retaking any such regions and reclaiming custody of any nuclear weapons would be a priority for our troops." However, the reality conceded by the authors is telling. They are simply bringing the grand design for undermining Pakistan – of which supporting tyrannical rule in Pakistan was one of the key components for seeding crisis and chaos - to the forefront for discussion and consensus building. Now all those Democrats who said Iraq was a distraction from the war on terrorism will be forced on board. Who could guess a few years ago that an engineered, chaotic fall of Musharraf would provide such a golden opportunity to the warlords in Washington?

In the plans of American warlords, the time for Pakistan is up. It is up to Pakistan’s religious, military and political "leaders," who have facilitated the neocons plans thus far, to take a note of the impending war on Pakistan, make necessary course corrections, or get ready to be decimated with the rest of their countrymen or hanged in the streets in case they survive the shock and awe.

Abid Ullah Jan is the author of The Musharraf Factor: Leading Pakistan to its Inevitable Demise.