Archive for the 'Afghanistan' Category

The goddess of Taliban country

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on March 18, 2010
in Af-Pak, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Terrorism and Travel
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H.M. Naqvi at GlobalPost:

The southern swath of Baluchistan is anything but godforsaken. It is, I learn, hallowed land: When Kali, the Dark Mother of the Hindu religion, the Goddess of Death, shattered millennia ago, her torso landed in the mountains.

Baluchistan, then, is not simply hallowed; it is one of the holiest tracts in Hindu mythology. Several years ago, L.K. Adavni, then-leader of the Hindu fundamentalist party in India, was stirred when he visited Nani Mandir. (On his return, he was temporarily dismissed from the party because of “pro-Pakistan” statements he made to the press.) Asphalt roads were paved in anticipation of his advent.

The approach to the temple is unremarkable: An iron gate opens into a narrow esplanade nestled in a valley, presumably a riverbed in the rainy season. Simple single-story cement rooms stand on either side. A makeshift cupboard-sized shrine houses a statuette of Kali, arms perpendicularly extended, tongue rolled out like Gene Simmons. Burnt incense sticks are pitched in the surrounding earth and empty coconut husks litter the periphery. In April, thousands of Hindu pilgrims, both local and from across the border, make the journey on foot. They shave their hair and shed their clothes. We follow in their tracks, passing mossy pools littered with Frooto boxes and floating locks. There is graffiti in Sanskrit on the boulders, and a pair of vertiginous eyes.

Unlike the temples in and around Karachi — Sri Swami Narayan on Bandar Road, Ratneshwar Mahadev in Clifton — Nani Mandir is not grand; there are no spires, arches, no detailed stonework. More:

Forgotten victims Of great games

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on March 14, 2010
in Afghanistan, Books and Travel
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Also see here and here

They would have called themselves Katis, but the Muslims surrounding them had for centuries called them Kafirs -- infidels -- and their land, thus came to be known as Kafiristan. C.M. Naim in Outlook:

My Heartrendingly Tragic Story By Shaikh Muhammad Abdullah Khan ‘Azar’. Edited By Alberto M. Cacopardo and Ruth Laila Schmidt. Oslo: Novus Press, 2006

One day in 1897, near the village Brumotul not far from Chitral, then a semi-independent Muslim state high in the Himalayas, a bunch of boys went walking. They were not Chitralis, but refugees from another place that lay west of the newly demarcated Durand Line. They were not Muslims, either. The boys would have described themselves as Katis, but the Muslims surrounding them had for centuries used “Kafir” to describe the boys’ ancestors, and “Kafiristan” for their original land. The British had retained that nomenclature for the portion of that land they now controlled, while the Afghan Amir, Abdur Rahman, whose invasion had made the boys refugees, had named his portion “Nuristan” (“The Land of Light”).

The boys stopped on a bridge to watch two “Sahibs” fishing in the stream below, not having seen their likes before. One of the sportsmen came over to them and said something in Khowar, one of the several languages spoken among the Kafirs. One Kati boy understood what was said; he asked his friends to find earthworms for the Sahib. Later, he and another boy carried the day’s catch to the Sahibs’ camp. The man who spoke to the boys was an army doctor named Capt; the Kati boy who understood him was named Azar. Something about the boy struck Harris as exceptional. He sent for him the following day and almost obsessively insisted that Azar—barely ten or eleven at the time—should join his service. Azar offered excuses, his mother cried, but his father, Kashmir, the leader of the clan, gave his permission. Azar became Harris’s servant—first for 18 months at Chitral, and then for two years at Peshawar. Meanwhile, Kashmir was killed by some relatives when he was on his way to Kabul—after converting to Islam—to meet the Amir and seek from him his previous high status. More:

See Kafiristan in Wikipedia:

Prof. Georg Morgenstierne travelled extensively throughout South Asia, but the most unique were his visits to the inaccessible areas of The Hindu Kush Mountains. Read his account here.

Former Pakistani officer embodies a policy puzzle

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on March 5, 2010
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Carlotta Gall from Rawalpindi in The New York Times:

With his white turban, untrimmed beard and worn army jacket, the man known uniformly here by his nom de guerre, Col. Imam, is a particular Pakistani enigma.

A United States-trained former colonel in Pakistan’s spy agency, he spent 20 years running insurgents in and out of Afghanistan, first to fight the Soviet Army, and later to support the Taliban, as Pakistani allies, in their push to conquer Afghanistan in the 1990s.

Today those Taliban forces are battling his onetime mentor, the United States, and Western officials say Colonel Imam has continued to train, recruit and finance the insurgents. Along with a number of other retired Pakistani intelligence officials, they say, he has helped the Taliban stage a remarkable comeback since 2006.

In two recent interviews with The New York Times, Colonel Imam denied that. But he remains a vocal advocate of the Taliban, and his views reveal the sympathies that have long run deep in the ranks of Pakistan’s military and intelligence services. More:

Taking on the Taliban

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on March 3, 2010
in Af-Pak, Afghanistan, Books, Pakistan and Terrorism
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Steve Coll in The New Yorker:

The Taliban’s jihad, like rock and roll, has passed from youthful vigor into a maturity marked by the appearance of nostalgic memoirs. Back in the day, Abdul Salam Zaeef belonged to the search committee that recruited Mullah Omar as the movement’s commander; after the rebels took power in Kabul, he served as ambassador to Pakistan. “My Life with the Taliban,” published this winter, announces Zaeef’s début in militant letters. The volume contains many sources of fascination, but none are more timely than the author’s account of his high-level relations with Pakistani intelligence.

While in office, Zaeef found that he “couldn’t entirely avoid” the influence of Pakistan’s powerful intelligence agency, Inter-Services Intelligence. Its officers volunteered money and political support. Late in 2001, as the United States prepared to attack Taliban-ruled Afghanistan, the I.S.I.’s then commanding general, Mahmud Ahmad, visited Zaeef’s home in Islamabad, wept in solidarity, and promised, “We want to assure you that you will not be alone in this jihad against America. We will be with you.” And yet Zaeef never trusted his I.S.I. patrons. He sought to protect the Taliban’s independence: “I tried to be not so sweet that I would be eaten whole, and not so bitter that I would be spat out.” More:

In Pakistan raid, Taliban chief was an extra prize

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on February 19, 2010
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From The New York Times:

Only after a careful process of identification did Pakistani and American officials realize they had captured Mullah Baradar himself, the man who had long overseen the Taliban insurgency against American, NATO and Afghan troops in Afghanistan.

New details of the raid indicate that the arrest of the No. 2 Taliban leader was not necessarily the result of a new determination by Pakistan to go after the Taliban, or a bid to improve its strategic position in the region. Rather, it may be something more prosaic: “a lucky accident,” as one American official called it. “No one knew what they were getting,” he said.

Now the full impact of Mullah Baradar’s arrest will play out only in the weeks to come. More:

Kabul makeover

Published
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on February 11, 2010
in Af-Pak, Afghanistan, Fashion, Society, Terrorism and Women
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Reality-TV shows like Afghan Model are rewiring Afghan culture—for better and for worse. Kim Barker in The Atlantic:

Anita Khalwat wears heavy makeup, fake eyelashes, and a green spangly head scarf, loose dress, and pants fit for an Afghan wedding. But she’s no bride. She’s a warrior in heels and metallic nail polish, preparing to appear on Afghan Model, a new TV show that aims to find the top fashion star in a war-torn nation where neither of the two main languages has a word for “model,” and where threats by the TV-hating, women-loathing Taliban have turned an appearance before the cameras on a rickety, rainbow-lit white stage into a political statement.

“Hide your hair today,” one judge, Hozair Amiri, tells Khalwat before a recent taping. “Please.”

Khalwat, her green head scarf showing off a good part of her highlighted brown hair, looks at Amiri almost fiercely. With less than perfectly white teeth, a generous nose, an average body, and a hip thrust more fitting for a hockey rink than for a runway, the 23-year-old Khalwat would never make the tryouts for America’s Next Top Model, the Tyra Banks vehicle that Afghan Model tries to emulate. More:

Charlie Wilson: 1933-2010

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on February 11, 2010
in Af-Pak, Afghanistan and Obituaries
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The man who masterminded covert US support for the mujahideen during the Soviet-Afghan war. From the Guardian:

His accomplishment in launching and sustaining America’s largest clandestine war – supplying arms to Afghan rebels fighting the Soviets in the 1980s – might have been more understandable had he been one of those discreet figures who slide greyly through the corridors of power. In reality, he was a loud-voiced, 6ft 4in Texan, addicted to outlandish clothes and notorious for his womanising. He staffed his congressional office with beautiful female assistants (dubbed Charlie’s Angels on Capitol Hill) and had well-publicised brushes with the law, including allegations of cocaine-sniffing and drunk driving.

Yet he somehow managed to persuade the Bible belt of rural east Texas to return him for 11 successive congressional terms and to attract huge financial support from American Jews and from the strict Wahhabi Muslims of Saudi Arabia. His inexhaustible capacity to be all things to all men brought him enormous influence in American governance, allowing him to spend the Reagan years virtually running his own foreign policy. More:

Also read All Things Pakistan:

In many ways Charlie Wilson was as much an architect of today’s Pakistan as General Zia-ul-Haq. Only a lot more colorful, and maybe a little more well-meaning; even if equally misguided.

[Image: All Things Pakistan]

On Afghan road, scenes of beauty and death

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on February 8, 2010
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A road that runs through a mountain gorge between Kabul and Jalalabad holds its own terrors. From the New York Times:

Sarobi, Afghanistan — Even in a nation beset by war and suicide bombings, you would be hard-pressed to find anything as reliably terrifying as the national highway through the Kabul Gorge.

The 40-mile stretch, a breathtaking chasm of mountains and cliffs between Kabul and Jalalabad, claims so many lives so regularly that most people stopped counting long ago. Cars flip and flatten. Trucks soar to the valley floor. Buses play chicken; buses collide.

The mayhem unfolds on one of the most bewitching stretches of scenery on all the earth. The gorge, in some places no more than a few hundred yards wide, is framed by vertical rock cliffs that soar more than 2,000 feet above the Kabul River below. Most people die, and most cars crash, while zooming around one of the impossible turns that offer impossible views of the crevasses and buttes. More:

Understanding Afghan tribes

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on February 1, 2010
in Af-Pak, Afghanistan, Culture, Society and Terrorism
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From The New York Times:

The Afghan leader’s hat

Published
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on January 27, 2010
in Af-Pak, Afghanistan, Culture, Design, Fashion, Leaders and Politics
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From the New York Times:

Known as a karakul hat, and made of the pelt of fetal or newborn lambs of the karakul breed of sheep, traditionally it was something worn by Tajiks and Uzbeks from northern Afghanistan. When Mr. Karzai, a Pashtun from the turban-wearing south, took office in 2002, the karakul hat was part of his attempt to devise a wardrobe that was Afghan rather than ethnic or regional.

It was a move widely praised at the time, in Afghanistan and abroad. The American designer Tom Ford called the Afghan president “the chicest man on the planet.” Afghans looking for national symbols after decades of ethnic strife inspired a brisk trade in the hats, made of lambskins from Mazar-i-Sharif in the north and fashioned by Kabul’s hatters, whose shops lined both sides of Shah-e-do Shamshera Wali Road.

Now, a tainted presidential election later, and with efforts to make a truly multiethnic government foundering, the sheen is off the shimmery fur headwear.

Young men no longer wear it; Mr. Karzai’s opponent in the aborted election runoff, Abdullah Abdullah, a northerner, preferred a hatless suit-and-tie ensemble. All but 12 of the hatters shops have closed on Shamshera Road, also famous for its shrine covered in pigeons. Those remaining say they are lucky to sell a hat a day. More:

The next generation of jihadi pundits

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on January 23, 2010
in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Terrorism
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Jarret Brachman, a senior consultant to the U.S. government on al Qaeda issues, at Foreign Policy:

When Humam Khalil al-Balawi exploded himself at a CIA base in Khost, Afghanistan, last month, killing seven CIA officers, his suicide attack did not just have repercussions for the NATO effort in Afghanistan — it also represented a giant leap forward for al Qaeda’s global Internet movement. In the minds of Web jihadists, Balawi was more than just another suicide operative. He was one of them, someone whose thinking they trusted, knew intimately, and had been reading for years.

Before he became a Jordanian “triple agent,” Balawi was the jihadi online pundit Abu Dujana al-Khorasani. Under that moniker, Balawi had been anonymously feeding his online readers a steady stream of jihadi missives since early 2007. His climb from eager chat-room participant to elite jihadi Web forum administrator to revered Internet pundit to triumphant suicide bomber helped forge a path that Web jihadists could finally hope to emulate.

The number of Web jihadists who make the transition to real-world terrorists is growing. Terrorists who have been radicalized online include Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, Badr al-Harbi — the Kuwaiti who posted more than 1,000 times on an al Qaeda Internet forum before blowing himself up in Iraq — and now Balawi. In doing so, they have taught other Web jihadists how to upgrade their keyboards into suicide vests. With his many screeds posted to forums lionizing those who carry al Qaeda’s torch, Balawi helped narrow the distance separating the global jihadi movement’s fighters and its online sympathizers. More:

Also read The worst of the worst: Some of the jihadi pundits who are making waves on al Qaeda’s Web forums.

Taliban — a risky ally in the war on polio

Published
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on January 10, 2010
in Af-Pak, Afghanistan, Conflict, Health and Terrorism
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From the Wall Street Journal:

Mehtar Lam, Afghanistan — Knocking on door after door, thousands of volunteers fan out every month across southern and eastern Afghanistan, vaccinating children against polio, a disease eradicated almost everywhere else in the world.

Usually, the volunteers — sent by the government and sponsored by United Nations agencies — bring a single-page letter requesting people to cooperate, “for the benefit of our next generations.” The letter’s signatory: Mullah Mohammad Omar, the one-eyed supreme leader of the Taliban.

“We always carry a copy,” says Dr. Attar Wafa, the chief of polio vaccinations in the insurgent-infested province of Laghman, much of which is a no-go area for government workers and foreigners.

The antipolio campaign brings together the Taliban, President Hamid Karzai’s central government, Unicef and the World Health Organization in an uneasy but functioning partnership — one that recognizes the reality of the insurgents’ stranglehold over large chunks of the country. More:

Waziristan: The last frontier

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on January 8, 2010
in Af-Pak, Afghanistan, Conflict, Culture, Pakistan, Politics and Terrorism
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From The Economist:

“YOU should enjoy this,” said a Pushtun from Waziristan, the most remote and radicalised of the tribal areas in North-West Pakistan that border Afghanistan, as he proffered a bottle of Scottish whisky. It was an excellent Sutherland single-malt; but the man was referring to the bottle’s more recent provenance, not its pedigree.

He had been given it by a fellow Waziristani working for Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency. This spy had received the illegal grog from an American CIA officer. Your correspondent’s friend returned homewards, Scotch in hand, driven by another Waziristani, who is also employed as a fixer by al-Qaeda.

Waziristan, home to 800,000 tribal Pushtuns, is a complicated place. It is the hinge that joins Pakistan and Afghanistan, geographically and strategically. Split into two administrative units, North and South Waziristan, it is largely run by the Taliban, with foreign jihadists among them. If Islamist terror has a headquarters, it is probably Waziristan.

For terrorists, its attraction is its fierce independence. More:

Decoding the New Taliban

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on December 22, 2009
in Af-Pak, Afghanistan, Books and Pakistan
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Steve Coll reviews “Decoding the New Taliban: Insights from the Afghan Field” and “Empires of Mud: Wars and Warlords in Afghanistan” by Antonio Giustozzi. In The National:

If the American-led war in Afghanistan fails to contain the Taliban, it will not be for lack of resources or military talent; it will be because American leaders have failed to see and analyse the conflict’s diverse human terrain. Afghanistan may be known as a graveyard of empires but it is also a graveyard of generalisations. As the US Commanding General in Afghanistan, Stanley McChrystal, pointed out in his pessimistic assessment of the war last summer, international forces operating in Afghanistan have “not sufficiently studied Afghanistan’s peoples, whose needs, identities and grievances vary from province to province and from valley to valley”.

The present American approach, derived from counterinsurgency doctrine, now presumes that political and economic tactics to pacify the Taliban will prove more effective than military force. But such a politics-first strategy, premised on forging a path toward negotiations with at least some Taliban elements, will require sharp eyesight about the Taliban’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as its place in Afghanistan’s social, tribal and cultural topography. More:

Gurkha soldiers in Afghanistan

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on December 13, 2009
in Af-Pak, Afghanistan, Nepal and Terrorism
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From The Atlantic: The Gurkhas, who come mostly from the rugged hills of rural Nepal, have fought for the British in almost every war since 1815. Today, members of the Royal Gurkha Rifles are fighting in Afghanistan’s Helmand province. Video by Anup Khaple.

Tycoon, contractor, soldier, spy

Published
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on December 13, 2009
in Af-Pak, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Terrorism
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blackwater1

Photo from “U.S. Training Center.” If you do a Google search for Blackwater and click on blackwaterusa, it directs you to the “U.S. Training Center.”

Blackwater, renamed Xe (pronounced zi) earlier this year, is a private military company and claims to operate the world’s largest tactical training facility. According to its Wiki profile, it is currently the largest of the US State Department’s three private security contractors.

Erik Prince, the founder of the company, has been called “America’s best-known mercenary” by the London Times: He “packed a mobile phone on one hip and a handgun on the other as he flew in and out of the world’s troublespots.”

Erik Prince, CEO of Blackwater, and the company's old and new logos. Photos: Wiki

Erik Prince, CEO of Blackwater, and the company's old and new logos. Photos: Wiki

In a long profile of Prince, Vanity Fair reveals that the CIA had asked Blackwater to kill Pakistani nuclear scientist AQ Khan but the authorities in Washington chose not to pull the trigger.

From Vanity Fair:

In Hollywood, meanwhile, a town that loves nothing so much as a good villain, Prince, with his blond crop and Daniel Craig mien, has become the screenwriters’ darling. In the film State of Play, a Blackwater clone (PointCorp.) uses its network of mercenaries for illegal surveillance and murder. On the Fox series 24, Jon Voight has played Jonas Hodges, a thinly veiled version of Prince, whose company (Starkwood) helps an African warlord procure nerve gas for use against U.S. targets.

But the truth about Prince may be orders of magnitude stranger than fiction. For the past six years, he appears to have led an astonishing double life. Publicly, he has served as Blackwater’s C.E.O. and chairman. Privately, and secretly, he has been doing the C.I.A.’s bidding, helping to craft, fund, and execute operations ranging from inserting personnel into “denied areas”—places U.S. intelligence has trouble penetrating—to assembling hit teams targeting al-Qaeda members and their allies. Prince, according to sources with knowledge of his activities, has been working as a C.I.A. asset: in a word, as a spy. While his company was busy gleaning more than $1.5 billion in government contracts between 2001 and 2009—by acting, among other things, as an overseas Praetorian guard for C.I.A. and State Department officials—Prince became a Mr. Fix-It in the war on terror. His access to paramilitary forces, weapons, and aircraft, and his indefatigable ambition—the very attributes that have galvanized his critics—also made him extremely valuable, some say, to U.S. intelligence.

Click here to read the full article.

The US political weekly The Nation had earlier carried an article titled “Bush’s Shadow Army” adapted from a book by Jeremy Scahill,  ”Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army.” Below, an excerpt:

Blackwater was founded in 1996 by conservative Christian multimillionaire and ex-Navy SEAL Erik Prince–the scion of a wealthy Michigan family whose generous political donations helped fuel the rise of the religious right and the Republican revolution of 1994. At its founding, the company largely consisted of Prince’s private fortune and a vast 5,000-acre plot of land located near the Great Dismal Swamp in Moyock, North Carolina. Its vision was “to fulfill the anticipated demand for government outsourcing of firearms and related security training.” In the following years, Prince, his family and his political allies poured money into Republican campaign coffers, supporting the party’s takeover of Congress and the ascension of George W. Bush to the presidency.

While Blackwater won government contracts during the Clinton era, which was friendly to privatization, it was not until the “war on terror” that the company’s glory moment arrived. Almost overnight, following September 11, the company would become a central player in a global war. “I’ve been operating in the training business now for four years and was starting to get a little cynical on how seriously people took security,” Prince told Fox News host Bill O’Reilly shortly after 9/11. “The phone is ringing off the hook now.” More here in The Nation.

Khyber Cafe

Published
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on December 12, 2009
in Afghanistan and Books
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In the  Hindustan Times, Samrat reviews French cartoonist Nicolas Wild’s grahic novel on his days in Afghanistan, “Kabil Disco” (HarperCollins):

kabul_discoIn the December of 2005, Nicolas Wild, an out-of-work illustrator from Paris, lands up in Kabul to work on a comic book explaining the Afghan Constitution to children. He’s not a war junkie; this is not his dream job. But it’s better than no job and no flat, and it’s only for two months. So Wild decides to take it.

His first impression of Kabul is recorded in a series of frames that show the drive into the city from the airport. Wild, who is sitting in a van with other passengers, finds everyone else — including the driver — talking on their cell phones. His reaction: “First report from Kabul. They have cell phones in this country.” He looks out of the window and sees a series of cell phone hoardings.

He spends his first night in Kabul reading the Afghan Constitution by lantern light in his freezing room. There’s no electricity and the temperature drops to about -15 °C. So he gets the bokhari (stove) going by burning the Constitution.

The book is a diary of sorts of his stay in Kabul. It is an autobiographical graphic travelogue of the kind made famous by Guy Delisle, a French-Canadian illustrator, who produced similar accounts of his stays in Pyongyang and Shenzhen. Joe Sacco, a Maltese-American comic book artist and journalist, had done one from Palestine, but that was more a work of reportage than autobiographical observations. More:

How to mend fences with Pakistan

Published
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on December 10, 2009
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Asif Ali Zardari, the president of Pakistan, in the New York Times:

asif_ali_zardari4Now that President Obama has recommitted the United States to stand with Pakistan and Afghanistan in our common fight against terrorism, extremism and fanaticism, it would be useful for Americans and Pakistanis to consider what has brought us to this point — and what the conflict’s true endgame must be.

Despite the noise created by an often hyperactive press in Pakistan (an essential and preferable alternative to the censorship that prevailed during my country’s military dictatorships), and the doubts expressed in America, Pakistan’s democratically elected government is unambiguously on the right path toward establishing a moderate and modern nation.

Prime Minister Syed Yousuf Raza Gilani and I are working closely with our national assembly and our military and intelligence agencies to defeat the Taliban insurgency and the Qaeda-backed campaign of terrorism. Simultaneously, we are pursuing policies that will re-establish Pakistan as a vibrant economic market and finally address the long-neglected weaknesses in our education, health, agriculture and energy sectors. This isn’t just rhetoric — it is an active policy with new budget priorities and a reoriented national mindset. More:

Also read in NYT: ‘Obama needs a ‘Plan B‘ by Anatol Lieven, a professor in the War Studies Department at King’s College London and a senior fellow of the New America Foundation, and Maleeha Lodhi, senior fellow of the Woodrow Wilson Center and a former Pakistani ambassador to Washington and London.

The war in Pashtunistan

Published
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on December 6, 2009
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An intensifying war: NYT graphic

An intensifying war: NYT graphic

Scott Shane in the New York Times:

That land is not on any map, but it’s where leaders of Al Qaeda and the Taliban both hide. It straddles 1,000 miles of the 1,600-mile Afghan-Pakistani border. It is inhabited by the ethnic Pashtuns, a fiercely independent people that number 12 million on the Afghan side and 27 million on the Pakistani side. They have a language (Pashto), an elaborate traditional code of legal and moral conduct (Pashtunwali), a habit of crossing the largely unmarked border at will, and a centuries-long history of foreign interventions that ended badly for the foreigners.

Whether Mr. Obama will have better luck there than President George W. Bush, the Soviet Politburo and British prime ministers back to the early 19th century remains to be seen. But it is there that the war will be fought, because it is there that the Taliban were spawned and where they now regroup, attack and find shelter, for themselves and their Qaeda guests. More:


Obama’s Afghanistan timeline and India: His Af, our Pak

Published
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on December 5, 2009
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Shekhar Gupta in the Indian Express:

Our biggest worry will be if he returns a loser, or in haste by claiming a partial success as victory. The situation we would then be left with will be like that of a patient who the surgeon has left unstitched on the operation table. Our policy has to work to ensure that does not happen, and if it does, to build the strength to deal with not one, but two debris states next door. Until then, we also have to accept living in our region with our preeminence deeply curtailed.

If Obama wins, we win. If he loses, we have to be strong enough to look after ourselves — because unlike him, we have no escape. More:


The mystery of Dr Aafia Siddiqui

Published
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on November 24, 2009
in Afghanistan, Crime, Pakistan, Terrorism and human rights
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Dr Aafia Siddiqui is an MIT-educated, Pakistani neuroscientist and mother of three. Once dubbed “the most wanted woman,” she is to stand trial in New York for attempted murder and alleged links to al-Qaida. Declan Walsh in the Guradian:

Aafia-SiddiquiOn a hot summer morning 18 months ago a team of four Americans – two FBI agents and two army officers – rolled into Ghazni, a dusty town 50 miles south of Kabul. They had come to interview two unusual prisoners: a woman in a burka and her 11-year-old son, arrested the day before.

Afghan police accused the mysterious pair of being suicide bombers. What interested the Americans, though, was what they were carrying: notes about a “mass casualty attack” in the US on targets including the Statue of Liberty and a collection of jars and bottles containing “chemical and gel substances”.

At the town police station the Americans were directed into a room where, unknown to them, the woman was waiting behind a long yellow curtain. One soldier sat down, laying his M-4 rifle by his foot, next to the curtain. Moments later it twitched back.

The woman was standing there, pointing the officer’s gun at his head. A translator lunged at her, but too late. She fired twice, shouting “Get the fuck out of here!” and “Allahu Akbar!” Nobody was hit. As the translator wrestled with the woman, the second soldier drew his pistol and fired, hitting her in the abdomen. She went down, still kicking and shouting that she wanted “to kill Americans”. Then she passed out. More:

Also read All Things Pakistan:

And it was on July 6, 2008, when a British journalist, Yvonne Ridley, called for help for a Pakistani woman she believes has been held in isolation by the Americans in their Bagram detention centre in Afghanistan, for over four years. “I call her the ‘grey lady’ because she is almost a ghost, a spectre whose cries and screams continues to haunt those who heard her. This would never happen to a Western Woman,” Ms Ridley said at a press conference.

The Karzai I Know

Published
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on November 19, 2009
in Afghanistan
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As Afghanistan’s president is inaugurated for his second term, author Christina Lamb (photo), his former neighbour, on his transformation from an affable bon vivant to a paranoid shut-in. From The Daily Beast:

christina-lambWhen Hamid Karzai is re-inaugurated as president today after one of the world’s dodgiest elections, everyone from Washington to Whitehall will be watching for some sign that he will clean up his act. If he doesn’t, many—including U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry—believe it will be well nigh impossible to defeat the Taliban, however many troops President Obama might ultimately decide to send.

Britain’s Prime Minister Gordon Brown has described the Karzai government as a “byword for corruption” and warned he will “forfeit” international support if he doesn’t improve. The Obama administration has given the same message and suggested a list of clean names they would like to see in the cabinet. More:

The hidden beauty parlour of Helmand

Published
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on November 16, 2009
in Afghanistan and Women
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Make-up and fashion have become a form of resistance for many women in Afghanistan. Katrina Manson reports from Lashkar Gah in The Independent:

Pamela Anderson and Afghanistan’s most dangerous, conservative province might not at first glance seem to have much in common. But step into a busy, cramped room in Lashkar Gah, capital of Helmand province, and there she is: blonde locks, wide darkly made-up eyes, and petulant pink lips smiling down from a large mirror.

The crinkly laminated poster of the Playboy model’s face is not the only surprise in a room filled with hairspray, fake eyelashes and lipsticks. For this is a hidden beauty parlour in a land where women appear in public only when shrouded in full-length burkhas that obscure even their eyes. Tucked into a private home down a dusty dead-end alley, women are indulging in playing at dressing-up in the province in which the fight against the Taliban rages and where more than 90 British troops have lost their lives since the start of the Afghan war in 2001.

It’s the night before Roya’s wedding, a white dress hangs on the wall, and she is leaning back. Wearing light, flowing fabrics of red, blue, gold and purple dotted with sequins, three more giggling women pack into the parlour. More:

Obama’s quest for a Pakistan policy

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on November 6, 2009
in Afghanistan and Pakistan
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Mushahid Hussain in the News, Pakistan:

Hillary Clinton’s visit with a difference was probably the most significant event in Pakistan-American relations since the advent of President Barack Hussein Obama. She came, she saw, but while she did not quite conquer the “hearts and minds” of Pakistanis, Hillary at least earned their grudging admiration. She showed more guts than the bunkered-up Pakistan rulers, who refuse to leave the comfort and safety of their “5-star prisons” in Islamabad.

Unlike the aloof and abrasive Holbrooke, Hillary reached out to the “real” Pakistan. She got a peep into the emerging Pakistani society — dynamic, vibrant, outspoken and self-confident. She seemed taken aback, used as visiting high-level Americans are to a sanitised Islamabad, where the officially-certified truth of the fawning ruling elite links sycophancy and servility to their self-perpetuation.

A profile of this “new” Pakistan is instructive, with three key ingredients. First, while the “old” Pakistan was politically a “one-window operation” — monolithic and centrally-guided — today’s multiple power centres go beyond the military-security Establishment or the traditional political elite, and these now include the fiercely-independent media, an assertive civil society, confident young men and women with faith in their country’s future, and a free judiciary that for the first time is truly an autonomous player. More:

Victory (for a crooked, corrupt and discredited government)

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on November 3, 2009
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Patrick Cockburn in the Independent:

hamid_karzaiThe election in Afghanistan has turned into a disaster for all who promoted it. Hamid Karzai has been declared re-elected as President of the country for the next five years though his allies inside and outside Afghanistan know that he owes his success to open fraud. Instead of increasing his government’s legitimacy, the poll has further de-legitimised it.

From Mr Karzai’s point of view he won through at the end and showed that nobody is strong enough to get rid of him. For the US President, Barack Obama, the election has no silver lining. It has left him poised to send tens of thousands more US troops to fight a war in defence of one of the world’s most crooked, corrupt and discredited governments. “It is not that the Taliban is so strong, but the government is so weak,” was a common saying among Afghans before the election. This will be even truer in future.

The US and its allies may now push for a national unity government between Mr Karzai and Abdullah Abdullah, his main rival for the presidency. This might look good on paper, or at least better than the alternative of Mr Karzai ruling alone. But enforced unity between men who detest each other will institutionalise divisions. Its value will largely be in terms of propaganda for external consumption. More:

Outline of the republic

Published
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on October 29, 2009
in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Terrorism
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Basharat Peer, the author of Curfewed Night, a memoir of the Kashmir conflict, and a fellow at the Open Society Institute in New York, uncovers lessons from last spring’s Swat valley campaign. From the National:

On the morning of May 27, Tariq Ali, a 42-year-old clerk at Rescue 15, a police helpline centre in Lahore, reported to work after a weekend visit to his family a few hours outside the city. He shared an office with two other clerks and a police officer. The building faced a shopping complex with a Toyota dealership and an immigration consultancy. Next door to Rescue 15 was an unmarked residence, known to locals as the Lahore office of Inter Services Intelligence (ISI), Pakistan’s dreaded spy agency. Half an hour after Ali arrived, shots rang out over the noise of passing traffic. Police sirens sounded, and Ali rose from his desk. Some of his colleagues ran to fetch weapons. Ali was still unsure what to do when an enormous blast threw him onto the floor. A suicide bomber had exploded a car inside the office compound.

“I saw a black wind filled with shards of glass tear into my office. Then the ceiling and the walls came crashing on us,” Ali told me, a week later, lying on his bed in the intensive care ward of Gangaram Hospital, surrounded by fellow policemen, his brother and his teenage son. Ali’s face was burnt, and the glass had cut most of his back, his lips, and both his eyes, one of which the doctors had sewed up – the other one was bandaged. The attack killed 23 people, including the officer who shared Ali’s office, and injured 150. More:

Karzai’s brother on CIA payroll

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on October 28, 2009
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From the New York Times:

Ahmed Wali Karzai, the brother of the Afghan president and a suspected player in the country’s booming illegal opium trade, gets regular payments from the Central Intelligence Agency, and has for much of the past eight years, according to current and former American officials.

The agency pays Mr. Karzai for a variety of services, including helping to recruit an Afghan paramilitary force that operates at the C.I.A.’s direction in and around the southern city of Kandahar, Mr. Karzai’s home.

The financial ties and close working relationship between the intelligence agency and Mr. Karzai raise significant questions about America’s war strategy, which is currently under review at the White House.

The ties to Mr. Karzai have created deep divisions within the Obama administration. The critics say the ties complicate America’s increasingly tense relationship with President Hamid Karzai, who has struggled to build sustained popularity among Afghans and has long been portrayed by the Taliban as an American puppet. The C.I.A.’s practices also suggest that the United States is not doing everything in its power to stamp out the lucrative Afghan drug trade, a major source of revenue for the Taliban. More:

Al-Qaida and the Taliban

Published
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on October 25, 2009
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A look at the insurgent groups on Afghan-Pakistan border. From AP:

Afghan Taliban: A hard-line Pakistani-sponsored movement that began forming during the 1970s as part of the mujahadeen, or freedom fighters, who battled the Soviet Union’s occupation of Afghanistan until the Russians were ousted in 1989.

Pakistan Taliban: Formed more recently, the group is known as the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or Pakistani Taliban Movement. It initially was led by Baitullah Mehsud. Largely a loose federation of various tribal and regional faction united by Mehsud, the group is located mainly in strongholds along the northwestern tribal belt, where the militants are also believed to be providing safe havens for senior al-Qaida leaders, including bin laden.

Al-Qaida: Established by bin Laden in 1988 with the stated goal of uniting Muslims to defeat the West and form an Islamic caliphate.

Full story here:

Also from AP: Know your enemy:

For eight years since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. has focused mostly on Afghanistan’s Taliban as an unabashed ally of al-Qaida.

Now, however, forced to choose between sending more troops in an intensified counterinsurgency campaign against Afghanistan’s Taliban or largely maintaining troop levels and using more drone strikes to take out al-Qaida along the border, U.S. officials must first determine which enemy is the greater priority. More

Stanley McChrystal’s long war

Published
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on October 22, 2009
in Afghanistan and Terrorism
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A profile in the New York Times:

Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal stepped off the whirring Black Hawk and headed straight into town. He had come to Garmsir, a dusty outpost along the Helmand River in southern Afghanistan, to size up the war that President Obama has asked him to save. McChrystal pulled off his flak jacket and helmet. His face, skeletal and austere, seemed a piece of the desert itself.

He was surrounded by a clutch of bodyguards, normal for a four-star general, and an array of the Marine officers charged with overseeing the town. Garmsir had been under Taliban control until May 2008, when a force of American Marines swept in and cleared it. Since then, the British, then the Americans, have been holding it and trying, ever so slowly, to build something in Garmsir – a government, an army, a police force – for the first time since the war began more than eight years ago.

The Marines around McChrystal, including the local battalion commander, Lt. Col. Christian Cabaniss, looked surprised, even alarmed, when McChrystal removed his protective gear. But as the group walked the rutted streets into Garmsir’s bazaar, they began taking off their helmets, too.

“Who owns the land here?” McChrystal asked, peering up the street and into the shops. “Is it owned by the farmers or by landlords?”

It was the sort of question a sociologist, or an economist, would ask. No one offered an answer.

“If you owned 200 acres here, would you live on it, or would you live somewhere else?” McChrystal asked. More:

Kabul’s riskiest business

Published
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on October 22, 2009
in Afghanistan and Terrorism
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From The Daily Beast:

Habiba’s kindergarten at the end of a narrow and dusty alley is still open, but only barely. A year ago, laughter and the sounds of children playing floated from the new two-story white house with rows of little red and yellow chairs filling its freshly painted living rooms. Then Habiba’s son was kidnapped by men demanding more than $25,000 from his mother, an outrageous sum for an entrepreneur saddled by startup debt and struggling to keep capital flowing through her young business. Fearing for her own safety and that of her other children, she shuttered her classrooms and moved her family to Pakistan while she awaited word from the men who took her son. The family’s life savings vanished as Habiba spent what cash she had to cover travel and living expenses in Peshawar. By the time she returned to Afghanistan months later, her customers were gone, her business was hobbled and her debts had mounted.

While the United States debates the fate of Afghanistan and the foreign forces now stationed in it, a small but significant network of Afghan businesswomen faces a threat far more immediate than Taliban resurgence: unchecked criminal thuggery crushing their fledgling ventures and robbing them of their livelihoods. Targeted by criminal gangs seeking to profit from their success-sometimes with the help of jealous neighbors-these entrepreneurs now find their safety at increasing risk in a poor and battered country. Afghanistan’s growth depends on the economic contributions of business owners like themselves. More: