Pakistan's Dangerous Days

I hesitate to disagree with Juan Cole, one of the few genuine experts posting regularly on Islam and the politics of the Middle East and South Asia.

However, I do take issue with his most recent post on the burgeoning crisis in Pakistan.

The lawyers are marching, Nawaz Sharif is piggybacking his political struggle with Asif Zardari on top of the movement, the government is arresting activists and mobilizing to block the march, and everything is building toward a confrontation if and when the marchers reach Islamabad.

A genuine crisis is burgeoning in Pakistan and responsibility for mismanaging Pakistan's transition to civilian rule can, in my opinion, be laid firmly at the feet of President (and co-chairman of the Pakistan People's Party or PPP), Asif Zardari.

Cole, while recounting some of Zardari’s sins, seems to reserve the bulk of his grumbling for Nawaz Sharif:

On the other hand, Pakistan Muslim League (N) leader Nawaz Sharif, who spent nearly a decade in exile in Saudi Arabia, seems to me to have gone round the bend. He has been threatening a rebellion and a revolution against the elected government, which which he had initially been allied. Now he is more or less accusing his PPP rivals of planning to whack him.

Sharif's incendiary rhetoric about a revolution and raising the standard of rebellion appears to have provoked the government to invoke section 144. If he had instead pledged a non-violent protest, perhaps it could have gone forward.

The ability to lose an election gracefully and to act as a loyal opposition is a key prerequisite for a party to participate in parliamentary democracy. The Muslim League is signally failing in that regard. Nawaz Sharif has long had dictatorial tendencies, and when he was last prime minister in the mid- to late-1990s, he started closing down newspapers, jailing journalists and editors, and stacking the decks against other parties.

As for the issue of the deposed supreme court, I don't understand why parliament could not simply pass legislation for a one-time measure to retire the justices appointed by the dictatorship and to appoint new ones, who would have legitimacy since they would be appointees of a popularly elected government. Iftikhar Chaudhury was brave to stand up to Musharraf in 2007, but he did validate Musharraf's coup, and Musharraf made him chief justice, in 2005. So you could argue that his original appointment was the fruit of a poisoned tree. It is odd that Sharif is so insistent on his return to the bench, since Chaudhury helped prolong Sharif's exile and justified the 1999 coup against him.

I would argue that the salient points of the current crisis are these.

Zardari is unpopular inside Pakistan, personally and because of his alliance with the United States.

He knows he’s unpopular. The ghost of Benazir Bhutto won the general election for the PPP, not Asif Zardari. And everything he’s done since the election has made him more unpopular. Zardari’s numbers are now somewhere in the teens, where Musharraf was just before he left office.

Instead of trying to adopt more popular policies, Zardari decided to leverage his position at the head of the PPP party and government to eliminate political rivals, while presenting himself to the United States as, if not the indispensable man, someone who is useful and tractable.

Soon after the general elections, Zardari moved against the PPP’s old guard, which never accepted him and considered him a corrupt and feckless interloper.

Then, by reneging on the agreement to reinstate the Supreme Court justices, he pushed Nawaz Sharif and the PML-N party out of the cabinet (until recently, the PML-N had agreed to vote with the PPP government) and worked to undercut the PML-N led government in the Sharif brothers’ political base of Punjab.

Zardari also made the distasteful and dangerous decision to ally, for the purposes of his government’s parliamentary majority, both with the PML-Q (the despised “king’s party” created by Musharraf out of the ruins of the PML after he deposed Sharif) and the MQM, the violent, thuggish party that controls Karachi and draws its power from its willingness (unmatched by any other mainstream party) to deploy goons for riot, mayhem, and murder against the enemies of the MQM and its allies.

Zardari mounted a concerted but largely unsuccessful campaign to blacken the reputation and undercut the political strength of the lawyer’s movement. In the midst of a fracas late last year that looks to have been a PPP provocation, MQM “lawyers” obligingly killed five genuine lawyers during a riot in Karachi.

Given Zardari’s unpopularity and the unpopularity of his alliance with the United States, his best hope for continued political ascendancy lay in neutralizing Sharif, which he apparently did through the mechanism of the Supreme Court ruling banning the Sharif brothers from elected office.

Nawaz Sharif, on the other hand, has played his political cards with a great deal more acumen.

Derided in the West as a dull and doughy opportunist on the strength of his undistinguished Prime Ministership in the 1990s, Sharif re-invented himself during his exile in Saudi Arabia. On the superficial level, he invested in hair plugs and honed his public style to compete with the charismatic politics of Benazir Bhutto. On the tactical level, he re-invented the PML-N as an issues-based popular party in contrast with the PPP, which traffics in the more traditional politics of Sindh chauvinism and ward-heeling.

The issues that Sharif has seized upon are the primacy of civil society over military rule, democracy, and restoration of the judiciary that Musharraf deposed. He has eschewed an overt alliance with the United States in favor of a more conciliatory attitude toward Islamicism.

As a result, Sharif is very popular.

Very, very popular.

The latest polling from the Institute for a Terror Free Tomorrow (despite its Orwellian name, TFT is the absolute gold standard for polling in Pakistan, far outperforming the high profile International Republican Institute) dates to the middle of last year, but I doubt things have changed significantly:

Mr. Sharif has also seen a steady rise in his popularity, from 57 percent favorable in our August 2007 poll, to 74 percent in January 2008 and 86 percent today. As significantly, those with a very favorable opinion have almost doubled since January 2008 to 43 percent now—a level no other political figure in Pakistancomes even close to. (By comparison, Mr. Zardari, leader of the PPP, just has a 13% very favorable rating.)

If national elections were held today, Mr. Sharif’s party, the PML-N, would emerge as the clear winner, garnering 42 percent of the vote to the PPP’s 32 percent.

In summary: Nawaz Sharif is dealing from strength. Zardari is floundering to stay afloat.

What this means for subsequent events in Pakistan:

Time is on Nawaz Sharif’s side.

Zardari’s approvals are in the teens and will only go lower as a result of the current crisis.

Sharif, aware of his strength, will play his cards extremely cannily, maintaining his high profile alliance with the popular lawyer’s movement. He will not precipitate a political collapse that would negate his stratospheric political standing by plunging Pakistan into chaos and perhaps bringing a return to military rule.

During the previous lawyer's march, in June 2008, Sharif endorsed the movement but apparently restrained the marchers from an open-ended sit-in in Islamabad that would have challenged the existence of Zardari's government. Instead of showing gratitude for Sharif's help in making the march fizzle, Zardari continued to try and undercut the Sharif brothers.

This time, Nawaz Sharif will be determined to emerge from the struggle with a clear political victory.

In my opinion, Sharif will keep up the pressure until Zardari is forced to make a humiliating concession and let the PML-N regain control of the Punjab government. Then Sharif will continue his maneuvering to ensure that the terminally-weakened Zardari and his unpopular PPP are trounced in the next general election.

I think that Juan Cole makes a mis-step when he dismisses Nawaz Sharif for having gone “around the bend” in accusing “his PPP rivals of trying to whack him”.

Murder is never far from the surface in Pakistani politics. Benazir Bhutto was murdered. Her father was hung. There are persistent rumors that Bhutto orchestrated the murder in 1996 of her brother, Mir Murtaza Bhutto, who was a Marxist extremist and an embarrassment.

In an LA Times op-ed in November 2007, Benazir Bhutto’s niece wrote:

My father was a member of Parliament and a vocal critic of his sister's politics. He was killed outside our home in 1996 in a carefully planned police assassination while she was prime minister. There were 70 to 100 policemen at the scene, all the streetlights had been shut off and the roads were cordoned off. Six men were killed with my father. They were shot at point-blank range, suffered multiple bullet wounds and were left to bleed on the streets.

My father was Benazir's younger brother. To this day, her role in his assassination has never been adequately answered, although the tribunal convened after his death under the leadership of three respected judges concluded that it could not have taken place without approval from a "much higher" political authority.

The Zardari government is threatening to charge Sharif with sedition—a capital crime.

And the fact that considerable advantages would accrue if Nawaz Sharif were to suddenly disappear from public life has doubtless crossed the mind of the embattled Asif Zardari.

Pakistan: The Final F*ck-Up

There will be plenty more screw-ups in Pakistan, but the Pakistan Supreme Court’s decision banning Nawaz Sharif and his brother Shahbaz from elected office will probably be remembered as the biggee, the reckless piece of political gamesmanship by Asif Zardari that sent Pakistan’s current experiment in democracy sliding into the abyss.

Briefly put, the Pakistani government led by Benazir Bhutto’s widower, Asif Zardari, is unpopular because of its pro-U.S. policy vis a vis the insurgency and Zardari’s personal reputation for corruption and feckless Machiavellianism.

Sharif--who was Prime Minister until Musharraf removed him in 1999-- leads the other democratic party, the PML-N. He’s probably the most popular politician in Pakistan because of his conciliatory attitude toward the border militants, his distance from the United States, and an ostentatious regard for Islam. His political base is the economic and electoral powerhouse of Punjab, which—until yesterday—was run by his brother Shahbaz.

Zardari and Sharif have been jockeying for advantage but the handwriting was on the wall: come the next general election, Sharif’s PML-N would probably dominate and his party would gain the prime ministership.

So the Supreme Court, whose chief justice is close to Zardari, made its move on February 25 to bar the Sharif brothers from elected office for life because of criminal convictions related to the coup by Pervez Musharraf that removed Nawaz from office in 1999.

The strict legal merits of the convoluted case are open to debate, but any question as to whether this was a power grab by Zardari was dispelled when the central government suspended the Punjab provincial assembly—which had a PML-N plurality and would not have had much difficulty in selecting a successor to Shabaz from Sharif’s party to take over—and instituted “governor’s law” for two months. The governor is a central government appointee hailing from Zardari’s PPP party and Zardari now has two months for bribery and armtwisting to try and cobble together a new governing coalition that will exclude the PML-N from Punjab’s provincial government.

Sharif is now considering whether his popular support is broad and deep enough to bring down the government in a mass demonstration and sit-in already scheduled for March 16 to protest the composition of the judiciary (see this AP story for a rundown of why the judiciary issue is at the heart of Pakistan’s political struggles).

Alternately, Sharif can try to round up allies in parliament to bring down the government and force new elections.

However, the key question will be whether the army will do something first.

It’s now pretty obvious that the cease-fire with the Pakistan Taliban and agreement to allow the imposition of sharia law in the valley of Swat was part of Zardari’s effort to keep a lid on things in the border regions so he could concentrate on the threat of unrest in Punjab and Islamabad from Sharif’s supporters after the Supreme Court decision.

Of course, giving the Pakistani Taliban a free hand to prepare and participate in the massive offensive against U.S. and NATO troops in Afghanistan scheduled for this spring under Mullah Omar’s direction is not exactly prudent, wise, or morally defensible.

It’s quite possible that Zardari will renege on the deal with the Taliban if and when he feels he has the Sharif situation under control and resume his designated role as America’s willing if not particularly able and honorable client.

However, if Zardari can’t quiet things in Punjab and resume military activities in the Pashtun areas and everything turns to ordure, the United States might decide that there’s no alternative to another round of military rule.

Asia Times’ Syed Saleem Shahzad lays it out:

The situation in Pakistan impacts heavily on Afghanistan. The Taliban-led insurgency relies to a large degree on its bases inside Pakistan and the latest ceasefires in the tribal areas will allow the Taliban uninterrupted preparations for its spring offensive.

The Taliban, therefore, want the political uncertainty to continue as the central government will continue to leave them in peace.

Washington, on the other hand, will view the political turmoil in horror and will possibly back the military to take some form of initiative, at the least in dealing with the militants.

In this regard, the visit by Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Parvez Kiani to Washington on February 20 could turn out to be crucial as to date he has advocated neutrality in political matters. The US might have tried to convince him otherwise.

China is also never far from the thoughts of Pakistani politicians.

China doesn’t like Zardari because of his pro-American stance and his support for the U.S. strategy that would create an alliance of Afghan, Pakistani, and Indian democracies blocking China from South Asia.

Nevertheless, Zardari does his inimitable best to try and convince the public of his closeness to Beijing.

He has vowed to visit China every quarter and, indeed, just returned from China.

However, Zardari only toured the Three Gorges Dam and visited Wuhan. Significantly, he didn’t meet with any high Chinese officials. The excuse was that everybody in Beijing was tied up with Hillary Clinton.

In a Chinese context, Zardari visiting China when he couldn’t secure a meeting with his opposite number, PRC President Hu Jintao, or any other important central government official, was a major, self-inflicted loss of face that will further diminish him in the eyes of the Chinese.

I expect Zardari did not give the Chinese head’s up that he was going to move against Sharif, and the Chinese will remember that instead he used China for a photo op to show he was on board with Pakistan’s most important ally while he was scheming against Sharif.

Until now, the Chinese government hasn’t officially weighed in on the unfolding political drama and the media is just translating western press reports—another sign that Beijing was blindsided.

Zardari, whose personal popularity was at 19% before the crisis, might be able to use his control of central government institutions to wriggle his way out this jam.

But Pakistan elite opinion is appalled--The News turned over its editorial and op-ed pages to six scathing denunciations of Zardari--the number of his enemies has only increased, and it's difficult to escape the feeling his days are numbered.

New Article Up at Japan Focus

I have a article up at Japan Focus entitled Mumbai Aftermath: U.S. Tilt Toward India Alienates Pakistan and Undermines War Prospects in Afghanistan.

The "Made in Pakistan" label is by now pretty firmly affixed to the Mumbai outrage.

The most significant development in the story, however, has been the determined efforts by the United States, grudgingly supported by India and enthusiastically echoed by Pakistan, to divert any attention from the possibility that state actors e.g. the notorious Inter Services Intelligence directorate or ISI and its supporters in the government and inside Pakistan's elites were implicated in the attack.

The United States has openly stated its fear that an understandable escalation in hostilities between India and Pakistan could provide Pakistan's army the excuse to abandon the unpopular anti-Taliban adventure in the west in exchange for a more traditional and much less destabilizing eyeball-to-eyeball confrontation with the Indian military to the east.

Therefore, the line has been drawn, clearly if somewhat arbitrarily, to limit international condemnation to "non-state actors" such as Lashkar-e-Taibi (which supplied the manpower for the Mumbai attacks), while not scrutinizing potential ISI involvement in an attack which was meticulously and expensively planned inside Pakistan and did nothing to try to advance LeT's stated goals in Kashmir.

In case India and the United States thought that the pro-U.S. Zardari administration could be employed as an effective tool to remove the pro-Taliban/pro-al Qaeda rot inside Pakistan's ruling elite, they were quickly disabused of the notion.

The fallout of the Mumbai siege inside Pakistan was not a wave of sympathy. Instead, there was a series of manufactured outrages blamed on India but apparently generated inside Pakistan that allowed Pakistan to play the victim card (at least in its own eyes) while India was still reeling from the bloody attacks.

Chief among these "incidents" was the apparently groundless rumor propagated by the Pakistani media and its sources that Hamid Gul, the retired head of the ISI who plays the Darth Vader role in the U.S.-Pakistan saga, had been targeted for arrests or sanctions at the behest of the American and/or Indian governments in the aftermath of the attacks.

The story found its way into the Washington Post before being denied in its various forms by Secretary Rice and Pakistan Prime Minister Gilani.

To me, the primary motive of the Gul story and other rumors appears to be a shot across the bow of the Zardari administration, which had made precipitously conciliatory statements and offers of cooperation with India at the behest of the American government.

Apparently any attempts to treat the Mumbai attacks as a watershed moment in the Pakistani-Indian relationship and Pakistan's role as an anti-terror democracy that might a) infringe Pakistani sovereignty and b) challenge the policy and prerogatives (and deniability) of the ISI would excite powerful popular and institutional opposition within Pakistan.

When I read the stories in the Pakistani media about Gul, accounts that morphed Indian requests into unacceptable "demands", the supposedly threatening phone call to President Zardari from Indian foreign minister Pranab Mukherjee, etc. etc., I recalled the Gary Larson cartoon, "How Nature Says, 'Do Not Touch'".

To the warning rattle of a rattlesnake, the distended display of a pufferfish, the hiss of an angry cat with its fur on end, and a guy on a street corner dressed in an overcoat, a horsehead swim tube, a shoe on his head, and a bazooka, add the enthusiastic and uncritical fulminations of the Pakistan media concerning affronts to national sovereignty, dignity, and security that haven't even occured.

The Zardari government played along with the anti-Indian agitation sweeping the media.

I expect it made its own calculation that it could not afford (or survive) a confrontation with its security apparatus on behalf of the Indian government and U.S. policy and, even if it did think about standing up to the ISI, the likely outcome would be a protracted and traumatic process that would, among other things, enmesh Pakistan in the web of U.N. and U.S. sanctions and blacklists reserved for terror states.

For now, at least, the scope of rhetoric and action has been carefully circumscribed to encompass Lashkar-e-Taiba and a Muslim charity. India has publicly applauded Pakistan's actions, while grumbling about President Zardari's weakness.

Before we condemn the Zardari administration's spinelessness and the inexplicable pro-terrorist sympathies of Pakistan's security apparatus, we should remember that the U.S. security policy for Afghanistan has been a catastrophe for Pakistan, corrupting its government, foreclosing its most viable options for dealing with Pashtun unrest, exposing its citizens to terrorist attacks, and contributing to the collapse of its economy.

All this misery has been in the service of a single-track counter-insurgency strategy that hasn't worked in Afghanistan, and the U.S. government is on the brink of abandoning there--but insists on escalating inside Pakistan.

Given this context, we should be saddened but not too surprised that there is a dearth of sympathy inside Pakistan for the United States' Global War on Terror, or for the victims of Mumbai.

America's Raw Deal for Pakistan

One might wonder why the world community seems intent on torturing Pakistan’s civilian government over the terms of a bailout to cover its current account deficit.

Musharraf got blank checks.

Asif Zardari gets a brusque push into the unwelcome embrace of the International Monetary Fund.

The answer seems to be that the PPP-led government’s bargaining position is so weak there’s only one kind of deal it can make—a raw deal.

A little background.

For years, Pakistan, exporting food products and textiles and importing petroleum products and equipment for its industry and military, has run a chronic current account deficit of about S$4 billion per annum.

A combination of worker’s remittances, foreign investment, foreign aid, and foreign loans has made up the shortfall.

Last year, before the subprime meltdown was even a gleam in Wall Street’s eye, Standard & Poor’s downgraded Pakistan’s sovereign foreign currency debt to CCC+ with a negative long-term outlook because of the unrest and uncertainty surrounding Musharraf’s divisive and ultimately unsuccessful efforts to short-circuit civilian rule and give himself a third term as president.

S&P considered Pakistan especially vulnerable because “the political turmoil exposes the sovereign to external pressures if foreign direct investments and other equity inflows, which have funded about two-thirds of the country’s large current account deficit (estimated at just under 20% of current account receipts in fiscal 2006-2007), diminish significantly.”

Things did not get better in 2008.

Asif Zardari’s PPP government squandered the goodwill of the parliamentary elections that returned Pakistan to civilian rule by leaning on the United States for political backing, playing footsie with Musharraf, and alienating the lawyers and PML-N party leaders who were the PPP’s electoral allies. As a result, virtually all of Pakistan’s political players are happy to watch a not-particularly-capable Zardari flounder ineffectually as the country’s political and economic rot intensifies.

Participation in the aggressive US strategy against Taliban on both sides of the Afghan border exposed Pakistan to a harrowing series of terrorist attacks and discouraged foreign investment.

Then the oil and food bubbles ruinously increased the cost of Pakistan’s imports and added high inflation to the economic mix.

Finally, the world financial crisis guaranteed that there would be no excess supply of foolishly optimistic capital for the Karachi Stock Exchange, which slumped 35%.

So Pakistan has a simple but pressing problem.

With imports chugging along and its sources of capital inflows dwindling, the central bank has only enough cash on hand to finance imports for about six weeks.

Pakistan has declared it needs about $4-$6 billion to make it through the next two years while it gets its house in better order and waits for an improvement in the world economy that should boost exports and increase capital inflows.

US$6 billion is not an awful lot of money.

It’s about the cost of two weeks’ operations in Iraq.

It’s about 1/3 of 1% of China’s forex reserves.

It’s about 4% of Saudi Arabia’s annual net oil export revenues.

But nobody has stepped up to the plate.

Saudi Arabia has so far declined to provide a deferral of payments on oil sales—a facility it had extended to Pakistan in the past.

Zardari went hat in hand to China, Pakistan’s close ally and “all weather friend” who had deposited $500 million into Pakistan’s central bank last year at President Musharraf’s request to help with a similar problem.

But all he came back with was a rather opportunistic proposal that the Chinese would send a team to research the purchase of a 26% share in the National Bank of Pakistan, Pakistan’s biggest commercial bank. Back of the envelope guesstimating indicates that the Chinese are talking about putting in less than $300 million for a stake that would have been valued at about $1 billion back in 2005. Ouch!

As for the West, the U.S. and Great Britain corralled the world community into an ad hoc “Friends of Pakistan” talking shop, with the pressing objective of…well, not doing very much, apparently, except to keep Pakistan twisting in the wind.

At a press conference in Islamabad on October 20, Richard Boucher, Assistant Secretary of State for South Asia, squelched any idea that Pakistan would be seeing a quick and easy answer to its forex problems (emphasis added):

The Friends of Pakistan group -- how can I say it? It’s a group that’s a strategic group. It’s a way of combining the Pakistani Government efforts and the Western -- not Western -- and the Friends efforts: government like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, the United States, China, the United Kingdom. And you saw, you know, in New York there were at least a dozen countries there and we’re always hearing from more who would like to be part of this.

So the goal is not…I mean, it’s not to throw money on the table. The goal is to put money where it belongs to support really concrete and positive goals. So it’s going to be a systematic process. It’s going to be a strategic process that looks at problems, looks at what the Pakistani Government is doing, looks at their approach and what effort that they’re making, and then looks at how we need to support and supplement those efforts, so that we really cover some of these problems comprehensively and we don’t leave things undone or leave holes.

You know, is that going to produce more money? Yes, it probably will in the long run. But it’s not a…it’s not a cash advance. There are other steps being taken, you might say, somewhat parallel on the fiscal and monetary problems. Those things are coordinated with treasuries, finance ministries, international institutions. And…but Friends is more devoted to making sure that on the strategic level that we understand Pakistan’s plans and that we’re putting our programs to support them.

With “Friends” like this, one might say…

The unmistakable intention of the United States and its allies is to force the Pakistan government to endure the shame of “Plan C”—the humiliating and politically dangerous recourse of turning to the International Monetary Fund.

Today, the IMF, according to accounts leaked to the Pakistan media (H/T to Reuters' Pakistan blog) is insisting on some astounding conditions:

Pakistan’s The News, citing an internal document, sets out what it said were extremely tough conditions.

1) a 30 percent cut in the defence budget between 2009 and 2020
2) reduce government pensionable jobs from 350,000 to 120,000
3) a new taxation structure to raise revenues including tax on wheat production and other crops
4) Revenue collection reports/analyses to be submitted each quarter to the IMF down to the provincial level
5) Six IMF directors and two from the World Bank to monitor preparation of the federal budget

One might wonder why, with Pakistan tottering on the brink of collapse, the IMF is adding onerous terms that will a) antagonize the military by slashing its budget and b) infuriate its hardpressed citizens—especially in the PPP’s political base, the agri-intensive province of Sindh--by increasing taxes while the economy is flat on its back and c) increase political unrest and make the PPP government even more unpopular by throwing tens of thousands of bureaucrats out of work.

Actually, it is quite possible that the IMF never made these extreme demands, and the Zardari government—which has never been shy or particularly subtle in shading the truth—prepared this monstrous list to demonstrate its fearsome negotiating prowess to the Pakistani public and lessen the shock when it reveals the actual, lesser concessions that the IMF has demanded in return for granting the loan.

Nevertheless, it’s puzzling that the United States is pushing the IMF on Pakistan at this particular juncture.

Pakistan’s economy, though not an exemplar of transparency or efficiency, is in this case the victim of many unfavorable external events and a worldwide financial crisis precipitated by the same kind of overpaid, overreaching financial bureaucrats that oversee the IMF.

So it seems rather unfair that the IMF is taking advantage of Pakistan’s difficulties to impose some of that notorious IMF meddling medicine that has made it despised throughout the developing world.

And, considering that the U.S.-led adventure in Afghanistan is tottering despite uncounted and unaccountable billions of dollars of expenditures and thousands of lives, and Pakistan is standing on the abyss of anarchy, now is an odd time for the U.S. to insist that the IMF be allowed to peddle its deeply unpopular and destabilizing free-market nostrums to Zardari’s government in return for a bridge loan.

Not surprisingly, the Pakistanis see the IMF working as a tool of the U.S. government and Western security priorities for Pakistan.

Quoting unnamed analysts, Syed Fazl-e-Haider wrote in Asia Times:

The United States is using the Washington-based and largely US-financed IMF as a tool to impose its own terms and conditions related to the "war on terror", in which Pakistan has been declared by the US as a major theater of war, the analysts said.

Much to its chagrin, Pakistan has been negotiating with the IMF in Dubai and, according to an October 31 report in Pakistan’s The Nation has apparently reached agreement on a $9 billion loan.

The first disbursement of money from the IMF, which is likely to be for $3 billion to $4 billion, will only come after Pakistan has filed a formal request and the IMF has approved the aid. Shaukat Tarin, Adviser to the Prime Minister on Finance, told Daily Telegraph that the money was needed urgently as confidence levels in Pakistan’s nosediving economy was ‘fast deteriorating’.

Tarin said that first payment was needed in 20 days. He added that the IMF should finalise the agreement by November 15 ahead of a fund raising conference to be held two days later by the Friends of Pakistan, a forum which includes the US, UK, China and Saudi Arabia, in Abu Dhabi.

He said that Pakistan’s allies were “looking for an endorsement from the IMF” of the country’s economic plan before they committed to offering more money.


Pakistan is loathe to confirm that it has struck a deal with the IMF and is still holding out hope that a face-saving offer of assistance from Saudi Arabia and/or China will emerge.

Zardari is making a swing to Saudi Arabia for oil aid, the AP reported:

Economist Muzammil Aslam predicted Zardari would ask for $3 billion in deferred oil payments from the Saudis, but warned that Pakistan should prepare for IMF assistance.

"If you miss the IMF now, you will need it again some months later, and that time you will have to accept more tough conditions," he said.

Pakistan hopes that its front-line role in the war on terrorism will nudge its allies to prevent its economic downfall. But Saudi Arabia, the U.S. and other nations may condition any aid they give on Pakistan submitting to an IMF package, which would come with strict spending rules, said Shahid Hasan Siddiqui, a top economist.

Pakistan Finance Ministry chief Shaukat Tareen has said that if he does not get indications of a forthcoming bailout from allies by Nov. 10 "there is no other option but to go to the IMF."

A meeting of the “Friends of Pakistan” is scheduled for November 17 in Abu Dhabi. That’s a little late for a rescue mission for a government that’s running on fumes, financially--though the timing is just right to force Pakistan to deal with the IMF. In fact, it’s assumed that the Zardari government will have already knuckled under to the IMF come November 17.

"I assume that by the date of the (Friends of Pakistan) conference the negotiations with the IMF will have been concluded," [German Foreign Minister] Steinmeier said. "This assumes that there is agreement on the conditions. We are both confident that this will happen in the next few days."

Even if Saudi Arabia and China show up at the “Friends of Pakistan” conference with public announcements of funding, the damage, as far as the PPP is concerned, is already done.

Being forced to resort to the IMF is a conspicuous failure for the Zardari government. Three years ago, when Pakistan got out from under the IMF’s thumb, Pervez Musharraf triumphantly announced, “We have broken the begging bowl.” Now Zardari, the man who drove him from office, has to highlight his growing political isolation inside and outside the country and his reliance on the United States by playing the role of mendicant to the West.

With understandable frustration, Pakistan’s Prime Minister Gilani is wondering why Pakistan’s deep-pocketed foreign friends are unwilling to come up with the money to help his country, ostensibly the keystone of the world struggle against Islamic extremism.

It’s a rather telling fact that India is more enthusiastic about the IMF bailout (see the Times of India report India may help Pakistan get bailout) than Pakistan, especially since the United States would make sure that any defense cuts (which Pakistan’s defense minister has already defiantly declared to be off the table) would come at the expense of Pakistani forces on the Pakistan-India border, while maintaining or increasing military efforts against America’s bete noire, the Pakistani Taliban, on the Afghan border.

Mr. Gilani, I would characterize your situation as a perfect storm of unfavorable events.

First, it’s quite likely that the U.S. government is trying to control the provision of financial aid to Pakistan in order to exert pressure on your government to support and implement pro-U.S. policies more enthusiastically. And don’t be surprised if the United States is close to giving up on Pakistan’s civilian government and wouldn’t mind fomenting a national crisis that forces Army Chief of Staff Kiyani or some other military savior to step up and take over for the good of the nation.

At the very least, by ostentatiously distancing itself from financial aid to Pakistan through the dual cut-outs of the “Friends of Pakistan” and the IMF, the United States is publicly declaring that, post-Musharraf, the special relationship with the civilian government is not really all that special—especially if Nawaz Sharif takes over-- and is taking this opportunity to yank the leash of a wayward and not particularly capable client.

Second, the reason that neither China nor Saudi Arabia have stepped up to help out is because they feel that the Zardari government’s policy of acting as a U.S. client and signing on to the whole counter-insurgency package in Pashtun areas of Pakistan is catastrophically wrong-headed and contrary to their best interests and they wouldn’t mind your government falling either, to be replaced either by a new government headed by Nawaz Sharif and the PML-N, or some general.

I suspect that the Saudis and the Chinese will hold the winning hand here.

Zardari’s government is tottering because his pro-U.S./aggressive anti-Taliban policies are extremely unpopular within Pakistan. Propping him up with an IMF loan is going to accelerate the political rot.

If the PPP government falls—especially if it collapses because of U.S. manipulation of its current account deficit crisis—any new civilian government will be headed by Nawaz Sharif and the PML-N, a prospect that gives Washington the collywobbles because of Sharif’s extremely popular pro-Saudi/Taliban-accommodating stance.

But even if a general can be found to rescue Pakistan from the catastrophe of Nawaz Sharif and a civilian government attuned to the popular will, America’s problems will be far from over.

The Pakistani populace is now politically energized, and any new military regime will have to take into account its vocal desire for a security policy decoupled from U.S. strategy and emphasizing negotiation and reconciliation with the Pakistani Taliban.

Furthermore, the United States has terminally fouled up its relations with Pakistan’s armed forces by its overt tilt toward India as its preferred South Asian partner and counterweight to emerging superpower (and Pakistan best buddy) China—both by concluding a concessionary bilateral nuclear agreement with New Delhi and shepherding it through the international non-proliferation process, and by providing cover for India to establish a strategic alliance with the Karzai government in Afghanistan, Pakistan’s traditional back yard.

Pakistan’s PPP government is caught in the middle. It can’t deliver unstinting support to the United States in its struggle in Afghanistan, and it can’t deliver a non-aligned policy that reduces U.S. influence and boosts Saudi and Chinese presence in the region.

That’s why nobody is willing to offer Pakistan anything—except a raw deal.

Will Military Rule Return to Pakistan—and Afghanistan—in a Year?

A funny thing happened while everybody in the United States, from President Bush to John McCain to Barack Obama swore to muster the will, money, and troops to crush the Taliban in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, wherever, in order to preserve the victories of Operation Enduring Freedom.

Almost everybody else gave up on the war.

From the Pakistan media outlet Dawn:

KABUL: Afghan President Hamid Karzai advised the Taliban leader in Afghanistan, Mullah Omar to return to Afghanistan and guaranteed his safety.

In an exclusive interview to Geo television channel, Karzai said, ìThrough Pakistan television channel Geo I propose Mullah Omar to get back to Afghanistan as I will be wholly and solely responsible for his security and I shall be answerable to the whole of the world on his behalf.î

Karzai also invited Mullah Omar to join him in the political process of Afghanistan by being hopeful for the next presidential election as Karzai reckoned Omarís return in the best interest of the prosperity and safety of the country.[emph. added]

That’s right. Our guy in Kabul issued an invite to the Taliban’s psychotic cyclops, that Buddha-blowing-up, red-enameled-fingernail-tearing-out, bin-Laden harboring no-goodnik, to come in for a chat. And run for President! What’s Zalmay Khalilzad (who apparently regards the presidency of Afghanistan as his birthright) gonna say?

Is Mullah Omar prepared to make nice? Let’s see:

KABUL: Taliban supremo Mulla Mohammad Omar offered international forces a safe retreat from Afghanistan if they agree to withdraw from the war-torn country, a statement from the militant leader said on Tuesday.

"I say to the invaders: if you leave our country, we will provide you the safe context to do so," Omar, who has a 25-million-dollar US bounty on his head, said in the statement marking the Muslim festival of Eidul Fitr.

"If you insist on your invasion, you will be defeated like the Russians before you."

Yeah, he’s on board.

And, courtesy of Saudi Arabia, which has its doubts about an American strategy that includes killing thousands of Muslims in Afghanistan who also happen to be the favored clients of the Saudi government, Saudi millionaires, and Sunnis everywhere, Karzai has a nice place where he could hold discussions with the Taliban. In fact, he already has:

In an article entitled Source: Saudi hosts peace talks with Afghan, Taliban reps , CNN reported on September 28:

LONDON, England (CNN) -- In a groundbreaking meeting, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia recently hosted talks between the Afghan government and the Taliban militant group, according to a source familiar with the talks.

King Abdullah of Saudia Arabia hosted meetings between the Afghan government and the Taliban, a source says.

The historic four-day meeting took place during the last week of September in the Saudi city of Mecca, according to the source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the negotiations.

King Abdullah broke fast during the Eid al-Fitr holiday with the 17-member Afghan delegation -- an act intended to show his commitment to ending the conflict.

…

The current round of talks is anticipated to be a first step in a long process. According to the source close to the talks, it has taken two years of behind-the-scenes meetings to get to this point.

…

During the talks, all parties agreed that the only solution to Afghanistan's conflict is through dialogue, not fighting.

No more fighting? For real? Any of the other stakeholders on board with this? How about NATO?

Via Dawn:

LONDON, Oct 5: The UK’s commander in Helmand has dampened Britain’s hopes of a “decisive military victory” in Afghanistan saying that the aim of the mission was to ensure the Afghan army was able to manage the country on its own.

Brig Mark Carleton-Smith told the Sunday Times that this could involve discussing security with the Taliban.

…
…

Brig Carleton-Smith is the Commander of 16 Air Assault Brigade which has just completed its second tour of Afghanistan.

He paid tribute to his forces and told the newspaper they had “taken the sting out of the Taliban for 2008”.

But he stated: “We’re not going to win this war.”

…

He said: “If the Taliban were prepared to sit on the other side of the table and talk about a political settlement, then that’s precisely the sort of progress that concludes insurgencies like this.”

“That shouldn’t make people uncomfortable.”

Well, it doesn’t make the Financial Times uncomfortable:

LONDON, Oct 11: Britain’s Financial Times newspaper has advised the US and Nato to review their present policies in Afghanistan and come to some kind of a peaceful settlement with the Taliban.

“It may be shocking that the military might of the West cannot defeat the Taliban, but it is true,” said the daily in an editorial: “The unwinnable war in Afghanistan”.

The French did their piece by leaking a cable from France’s top diplomat in Kabul, reporting that the British ambassador, the magnificently yclept Sherard Cowper-Coles, believed that a) Afghanistan was going all to hell b) the Karzai regime was doomed and c) the presence of foreign forces only made things worse.

From the IHT:

"The presence of the coalition, in particular its military presence, is part of the problem, not part of its solution," Cowper-Coles was quoted as saying. "Foreign forces are the lifeline of a regime that would rapidly collapse without them. As such, they slow down and complicate a possible emergence from the crisis."

And more from the Danes—who have 700 troops in Afghanistan--complete with cultural and diplomatic tin ear, via AFP:

Danish Foreign Minister Per Stig Moeller said in an interview published Wednesday he supported the idea of the Afghan government holding talks with the Taliban, albeit with some conditions.

…

The rights women have regained since the Taliban were driven from power in 2001 should also not be negotiable, he said.

"We should civilise the Taliban so Afghanistan is not 'Talibanised' again, otherwise we'll have to leave the country," said the Danish foreign minister.

Huh? Anyway, count the Scands on board for talks.

It seems pretty plain that, faced with the choice of pumping more troops and money into Afghanistan or negotiating, our friends are more interested in the jaw-jaw than the war-war, as Winston Churchill would put it. Key allies Germany, Australia, and Canada are under intense domestic pressure not to expand their military involvement in the Afghan war.

Via GreenLeft, the UN’s envoy to Afghanistan, Kai Eide, pitched in with:

“We all know that we cannot win it militarily. It has to be won through political means.”

On the UN website, Mr. Eide also gave a cringing shout-out to the Taliban to help the UN deliver humanitarian aid in significant swaths of the country in which the Karzai writ apparently runs not:

“I will take this opportunity to appeal to the Taliban and to appeal to its leaders to ensure access for food distribution and to expand the humanitarian agenda that we should share,” he said. “There are disagreements on so many things – but let us demonstrate that we can share this humanitarian agenda.”

Seems the world’s reality-based community has decided that a negotiated settlement between the Karzai regime and the Taliban mediated by the Saudis should be one of the first milestones of the post-Bush era.

Good times, huh?

Not so fast. It takes more than the joint determination of the defeatocrats running Afghanistan and their sympathizers—apparently most of the rest of the world--to overcome America’s love of a good fist-pumping, flag-waving, extremist-stomping war in somebody else’s country.

I think it’s more likely that a year from now Afghanistan and Pakistan will abandon their democracies, return to military rule, and continue in their doomed roles as hapless US clients, destroying their own societies as they pursue a bloody, expensive, and futile campaign to suppress powerful domestic insurgencies at Washington’s behest.

Sad fact is, no political force in the United States wants to wimp out on Afghanistan, regardless of what the locals think, want, or do.

And American dreams still trump global realities, let alone the needs of two South Asian regimes tottering on the brink of collapse, the Saudis, or Europe.

Even SecDef Robert Gates, the designated voice of reason in the Bush administration—who gingerly tried to keep in step with our allies by endorsing talks in the long-term never-ever land,--had to cover his right flank by criticizing “defeatists”.

And negotiations with that Mullah Omar guy? Which, by the way, are already going on, courtesy of Mr. Karzai? No way! As Bloomberg reports:

Gates said he drew the line at talks with Taliban leader Mullah Mohammad Omar. ``I, in my wildest imagination, would not consider Mullah Omar a reconcilable,'' he said.

American prestige is invested in Afghanistan. The Republicans are determined to prove that US money and might can reliably crush a third-world insurgency. And the Democrats and portions of the American left have adopted Afghanistan as their “Good War” (in contrast to the “Bad War” in Iraq) to show that liberals have the intestinal fortitude to wield America’ s military might in the service of goodness.

General David McKiernan’s recent remarks did nothing to dispel the gloom about Afghanistan, but also did nothing to indicate the United States is prepared to change course:

KABUL — The top NATO general in Afghanistan Sunday rejected the idea that NATO is losing the Afghan war to an increasingly bloody Taliban insurgency.

But U.S. General David McKiernan also said he needs more military forces to tamp down the militants, and he depicted a chaotic Afghan countryside where insurgents hold more power than the Afghan government seven years after the U.S.-led invasion. He said better governance and economic progress were vital.

“It is true that in many places of this country we don't have an acceptable level of security. We don't have good governance. We don't have socio-economic progress. We don't have people that are able to grow their produce and get it to market. We don't have freedom of movement,” he told a news conference in Kabul.

“We don't have progress as evenly or as fast as many of us would like, but we are not losing Afghanistan,” he said.

…

Echoing calls that other U.S. and NATO leaders have made for months, Gen. McKiernan said he needs more military forces but also more helicopters, transport planes and civil affairs teams.

Fatally, the Afghan issue is also bound up in bin Laden and presidential politics.

In the presidential debates we were treated to the unlikely spectacle of Obama not only championing escalation in Afghanistan; he acted as the fire-breathing military adventurer vowing to send our troops charging into Pakistan in pursuit of bin Laden, while McCain was the unaccustomed voice of moderation.

McCain has problems of his own, as typified by his oft-derided claim that he knows how to get bin Laden—that for some reason he appears unwilling to share with the White House.

That’s rather sad, because it seems that the White House is doing everything it can to help McCain on the bin Laden front in Pakistan, hopelessly muddling the Afghan and GWOT agenda as a result.

One of the many unreported stories on Afghanistan and Pakistan is the massive military operation in Pakistan’s border region of Bajaur.

Veteran South Asia watcher Sayed Saleem Shazad reports in Asia Times the suspicion that Pakistan conducted this massive sweep at America’s behest in order to yield an “October surprise”—the capture of bin Laden, a triumph that would boost the fortunes of McCain’s presidential bid and salve President Bush’s ego by demonstrating both to America and his party that he is still relevant and master of events.

Supposedly, the frenzied US military preparations have an aspect of "October Surprise" - a longstanding term for unexpected twists that can help or hinder candidates in the month before US presidential elections.

For example, there is now an increased focus on attacks in areas where al-Qaeda leaders could potentially be spotted, arrested or killed. Rather than destroying Taliban sanctuaries or attacking the Pakistan Tehrik-i-Taliban center in South Waziristan, all focus has been on Bajaur - where a huge battle continues, causing the displacement of 500,000 residents.

Although the Pakistani military has failed to control the ground in Bajaur, preparations are now being made to assault North Waziristan, where most high-profile al-Qaeda leaders are believed to have shifted. Any al-Qaeda "successes" by US or Western forces would likely be used to the advantage of Republican candidate McCain.

…

Now, with American elections scheduled next month, the Pakistan Army will go to North Waziristan for the battle of "October Surprise". Fresh contingents of the army have been mobilized and action appears to be expected next week.

Sources said that the main target of the operation is Dr Ayman Al-Zawahiri.

It’s a rather amazing comment on American affairs that our electoral necessities can not only move armies across continents—they can also evict 500,000 people in the mountains of west Pakistan from their homes.

I’m sure the Pakistanis are shaking their heads ruefully and thinking the same thing.

McCain’s actual plans for Pakistan—and, by extension, Afghanistan—can be divined by a look at the Pakistan Policy Working Group paper.

Jim Lobe of INS is to be thanked for bringing this report to public attention. He described it as “the latest in a growing avalanche of "bipartisan" reports being churned out by Washington-based think-tanks that are designed to influence the policies of the administration that takes power on January 20”.

Indeed, a key feature is the rather gauche-looking endorsement that’s meant to highlight the report’s both side of the aisle wisemen credentials but makes it look like a clumsily autographed high school yearbook instead.

The page reads This report has was reviewed and endorsed by Richard Armitage and Lee Hamilton, followed by the enlarged signatures of the two worthies.

Lee Hamilton is, of course, one of the organizers of the Iraq Study Group report that debuted to hopeful hosannas only to be Bushed and Petraeused into irrelevancy.

Richard Armitage is ex Deputy Secretary of State, can-do realist hardhead from the Colin Powell quadrant, reviled by neocons, distrusted by liberals--and a key foreign policy advisor to John McCain.

The report, available at the Council on Foreign Relations website, makes it clear why John McCain refrained from promising high-profile insults to Pakistani sovereignty in the pursuit of al Qaeda and Taliban targets.

The general drift of the report is that Pakistan’s fragile democracy must be coddled, spared the embarrassment of appearing as America’s lap dog, and showered with financial goodies to get Pakistan hearts, minds, and other useful organs on board the democracy-loving anti-extremist express. Add public diplomacy, NGOs, textile exports etc. etc.

In general, one must say that joint operations are better than unilateral incursions.

And it’s possible that McCain is trying to telegraph a reasonable message to the Pakistanis: that their sovereignty will be safe if they deliver bin Laden but, since the logical corollary of that position is that the Taliban would be allowed to keep their safe havens inside Pakistan and Afghanistan would go to hell in a handbasket, we’re unlikely to see an explicit statement to that effect.

But the Pakistan Policy Working Group explicitly links all these feel-good initiatives to a much broader and dangerously unrealistic goal: Pakistan’s enthusiastic participation in a massive, counter-insurgency-based anti-Taliban/anti al-Qaeda strategy in its west when this same strategy excites a visceral anger throughout Pakistan.

As the report states in its Executive Summary, the US must:

…emphasize to the Pakistan government that U.S. patience is not unlimited, and that the U.S. government is prepared to be patient only so long as the Pakistan government is achieving visible results in its efforts against the extremists in the tribal areas.

There are several problems with single-mindedly twisting Pakistan’s arm and lining its pockets to escalate its border headache into a civil war.

The first is Asif Zardari, Benazir Bhutto’s widower, leader of the governing PPP and now president of Pakistan.

Zardari is—unfortunately, there is no nice way to say this—a sleazy, scheming creep unsure of his power and standing and therefore terminally addicted to non-stop political manipulation in order to weaken Pakistan’s democracy and divide and diminish the forces that might combine to remove him.

He is also America’s chosen client in Pakistan.

Zardari eagerly inherited Bhutto’s deal with the United States, by which she would become Pakistan’s civilian leader and take the burden of supporting anti-Taliban and anti-al Qaeda operations off the unpopular Musharraf’s shoulders and in return obtain America’s active financial and military backing.

And, for the time being, America is playing along with Zardari as Bhutto’s heir.

But for how long?

That brings us the second problem.

Pakistan is on the verge of political and economic free-fall. Zardari is unpopular, he’s lost the support of the second-most powerful political grouping in Pakistan, the PML-N, suicide bombers have moved out of the border areas and are ripping the heartland to pieces, and the economy is in tatters.

Bangladesh used to set the standard for South Asian dysfunction and a common insult in Pakistan used to be “not worth a takka”, the takka being the Bengalis’ hangdog currency.

Now the Karachi stock market has crashed, the currency has lost one third of its value, Pakistan is mentioned in the same breath as Iceland as a potential bankrupt state, the US is now of all times holding back on aid and demanding transparency and accountability, and All Things Pakistan tells us the Pakistani rupee has dropped below one takka, just as our proud eagle-dollar now lies supine beneath the webbed talons of the much-mocked Canadian loon.

Viewed through one lens, of course, Zardari’s dilemma is not a bug—it’s a feature. An impoverished, unpopular ruler who needs a billion dollars a month to keep his country going makes for an abjectly eager client disproportionately reliant on US support.

But memories of Musharraf’s fall are still fresh enough in the United States to make US policymakers leery of Zardari—who doesn’t even measure up to Musharraf levels of intellect and fortitude—as the vessel for American hopes in Pakistan.

And Zardari may have signed his political death warrant by temporarily closing the Torkham border crossing in September into Afghanistan to NATO fuel truck traffic, reportedly as a protest to placate Pakistani military and popular opinion infuriated by the flagrant and repeated US ground and drone incursions into Pakistan.

The Torkham border crossing is at the Khyber Pass and, for you Kipling fans, the terminus of the fabled Grand Trunk Road, the immense and ancient artery of travel and trade that crossed British India all the way from Calcutta to the border of Afghanistan.

Torkham's on the only road to Kabul from Pakistan (the only other high volume border crossing, at Chaman, far south in Baluchistan, feeds into the Taliban heartland of Kandahar) and serves as the conduit for fully 70% of NATO’s supplies, which travel by ship to Karachi, are trucked up the Indus Valley, climb a long, winding, and perilous route through the frontier territories to Torkham, and then roll down a heavily protected corridor to Kabul.

Closing Torkham is a big deal. I don’t think Musharraf ever did it, because he understood that America’s massive financial subvention to Pakistan wasn’t meant to buy the mobilization of his indifferent army or his equivocal intelligence services—it was to obtain a reliable, protected conduit for NATO materiel through Pakistan.

When, after 9/11, Richard Armitage—yes, that Richard Armitage—allegedly threatened to bomb Pakistan back into the Stone Age if it didn’t cooperate in the GWOT and help destroy its clients in Kabul—he was probably thinking about getting Pakistan to facilitate the massive flow of fuel and equipment through Torkham.

I’m sure that when the Zardari closed the border crossing, calculators rattled in officers throughout the Pentagon as spooks and logistics officers ran the numbers to decide if the immense cost of airlifting NATO supplies to Afghanistan would be a better deal than pumping $1.2 billion per year in subsidies into the pockets of a feckless and unreliable client like Zardari.

Which brings us to the third problem.

As one can see from the quotes at the beginning of this article, the regional and international consensus that we should slug it out with the Taliban is evaporating.

It seems the only interest groups eager to continue the military campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan are the United States and its client, Asif Zardari.

Inside Pakistan, unfairly or not, a majority of Pakistanis believe all the troubles they are experiencing are blowback from NATO’s aggressive, excessively militarized campaign to subjugate the Taliban’s Pashtun tribal homelands on both the Afghan and Pakistani side of the border in order to secure the Karzai regime.

Apparently that outlook has been reinforced, not undermined, by the series of devastating suicide blasts that have shaken Pakistan’s heartland.

Syed Saleem Shazad reported on the message that the Taliban sent the Pakistani elites with its latest outrage, a bomb hidden in a basket of sweets that destroyed the headquarters of Pakistan’s Anti-Terrorist Force in the capital of Islamabad:

A letter recovered from gift basket read, "If Pakistan does not separate itself from the American crusade on Muslims, these sort of attacks shall continue."

Yes, I think the message got through.

To put it bluntly, there are very few if any people in Pakistan’s military, government, press, or general population who are willing to die for Hamid Karzai.

Within Pakistan, public opinion is firmly behind Nawaz Sharif, the canny politician at the head of the PML-N.

Sharif has staked his political fortunes on serving as the voice of Pakistan civil society, calling for decoupling from US security goals in Afghanistan and negotiation with the Pakistani Taliban.

His patron is Saudi Arabia, which injected him back into Pakistani politics last November (Sharif had been deposed by Musharraf and sent into exile) with the idea that he would offer an alternative to the GWOT Muslim-on-Muslim bloodbath promoted by the United States.

And, according to his favored English-language outlet, Pakistan’s The News, Sharif showed up at the Taliban-Karzai talks in Saudi Arabia (though one might take the “key role” boasting with a fist-sized grain of salt):

PML-N Quaid Nawaz Sharif is playing a key role in conjunction with Saudi Arabia in bringing about a negotiated settlement between the Taliban and the Karzai regime to pave the way for withdrawal of the US and Nato forces from Afghanistan.

“It was for this precise reason that the PML-N chief has put off his departure from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan for another two days,” an informed source told The News. According to his new programme, the PML-N chief will return home on Tuesday.

“Nawaz Sharif was invited by Saudi King Abdullah and he undertook the present visit to stay in Saudi Arabia for nearly two weeks to talk about the nitty-gritty of the peace process,” the source said.

The News’ report continues:

While PML-N leaders, closely working with Nawaz Sharif, were aware of Nawaz Sharif’s objective behind his extended stay in Saudi Arabia, sources close to President Asif Zardari were oblivious of the PML-N chief’s “role” and “efforts” in bringing the warring sides on the negotiating table.

It’s hard to decide which fact was more remarkable: the fact that Sharif, an opposition politician, was invited, or the fact that Zardari found it necessary to assert that it didn’t know about the talks, let alone the fact that Sharif was there.

Nawaz Sharif—despite being the most popular politician in Pakistan, the former prime minister who presided over Pakistan’s emergence as a nuclear power, the man who controls Pakistan’s most important province of Punjab, the man who leads the democratic party, the PML-N, which is poised to rout Zaradari’s PPP if fresh parliamentary elections are held soon, and is the trusted interlocutor of the Saudis, who could make a real difference in Afghanistan--is the invisible man in US reporting on Pakistan.

I think that’s because Sharif represents an anti-US consensus that is so democratic, broad-based, and politically and strategically viable that reporting on him would provide an embarrassing contrast to the Zardari train wreck that we pretend will somehow save our adventure in Afghanistan, pacify the Pashtuns, and bring civil peace in Pakistan.

So let’s review the problems with taking the military fight to the Taliban in Afghanistan and western Pakistan:

First, the consensus outside the United States is that our military policy is a failure.

Second, the consensus inside the democratic but terminally ineffectual Afghan government is that our military policy is a failure.

Third, the only significant political force in South Asia that supports our policy is an unpopular and incapable client, Asif Zardari.

Fourth, our policy is wildly unpopular inside Pakistan and Zardari faces a powerful political challenge from a viable democratic alternative: the experienced, popular, and savvy Nawaz Sharif, whose patron is Saudi Arabia and not the United States, and whose policies favor negotiation and accommodation over military support for US and NATO operations.

The logical inference one can draw from these circumstances is that democracy, regardless of its popularity inside Afghanistan and Pakistan, has not delivered the right leaders or the necessary resolve, and is not a friend to US policy.

And, even under the best of circumstances, the exigencies of a war policy in Afghanistan and western Pakistan demand clients who are responsive, effective, and in control of their military and intelligence apparatus.

Pakistan’s army, despite its apparent inability to win a war anywhere against anyone, is still recognized as occupying its traditional place at the heart of Pakistan’s society and power structure.

Therefore, I would not be surprised if the United States is currently assiduously cultivating a clique of generals and colonels (since our optimistic attempts to co-opt Musharraf’s heir, Chief of Staff Kiyani have apparently failed) ready to frame Pakistan’s Taliban problem as a national emergency beyond the capability of the feckless civilian government, and steer the country back into the rut of military rule.

As the Pakistan Policy Working Group report noted with gloomy relish, if the Pakistan government can’t get its act together “political parties may be doomed to repeat the familiar cycle of de-legitimization, incomplete terms of office, and prolonged military intervention.”

An indication that some people in the Anglo-Saxon world are ready to grease the skids for Zardari is the re-emergence of reports about his mental stability.

I’m a Zardari basher from way back, but even I don’t give credence to these rumors. In a successful effort to squirm out of a corruption trial in the UK, it looks like Zardari obtained a bespoke medical opinion stating that his years of imprisonment had left him prone to fits of depression and dementia and unable to stand trial.

Same for Afghanistan, by the way.

I cannot believe that Karzai’s attempts to wriggle out of his predicament through negotiations with the Taliban mediated by Saudi Arabia were appreciated by the United States.

And I don’t think it is any coincidence that Karzai’s brother, Ahmed Wali Karzai, who rules Kandahar province, was promptly smeared as an opium-trafficking dirtbag thanks to a leak from the White House to the New York Times.

Just a friendly warning to a couple wayward clients that they better toe the line..

If our peripatetic viceroy, Zalmay Khalizad, decides the time is not ripe to assume his throne as the democratically-elected ruler of Afghanistan in the next presidential election, it would not be surprising if the United States decided that our desire for a favorable order of battle would be better served is a genuine Taliban-killing warlord with a real army—perhaps even the notorious Gulbuddin Hekmatayr of death by shipping container fame—took over Kabul.

Indeed, Karzai himself is already in negotiations to bring Hekmatyar out of the cold, according to The Independent:

According to diplomatic sources the Karzai government opened channels to Hekmatyar through members of his family who visited Kabul. Three months ago the warlord's son-in-law, Dr Ghairat Baheer, was released after spending six years in an Afghan prison and is said to be playing a part in ongoing negotiations.

Although his forces are engaged in fighting inside Afghanistan, Hekmatyar has remained independent from the Taliban and is said to be at odds with its religious leader Mullah Omar. Some of President Karzai's advisors believe that a truce, in which he will be rewarded by being given a government post, may encourage other militant leaders to consider negotiations.

If I were the lamblike Karzai, I would think twice about inviting that particular wolf into my sheepfold.

I’d like to see the Afghan war and the Pakistan insurgency descend into a less bloody muddle of negotiation, coalition, and serial betrayal financed by the United States and the Saudis. But, given the considerations that bin Laden is still out there and the general US need to protect its prestige, I doubt that the new president can resist the calls to meddle aggressively and militarily in the Afghan mess instead.

So, here’s my hypothetical timeline.

Four months for a new US administration to take power.

Three months for the foreign policy planners and war wonks to convince the president that NATO fortunes in Afghanistan and Pakistan need something other than two or three brigades (Obama) or adept insider nut-twisting (McCain) to succeed--a change in governments is needed.

Three months to pull the strings, remit the money, neutralize targets, and yank the most yankable chains of the western press. Frederick Kagan, call your office. Hamid Karzai, Asif Zardari, and Nawaz Sharif—watch your backs.

Then two months for the endgame, the announcements from the presidential palaces, and expressions of US government support, more in sorrow than in anger, with hope that this marks a turning point in the struggle.

Britain’s acerbic ambassador to Kabul, Sherard Cowper-Coles, is apparently thinking along the same lines, according to the leaked French cable reported in the IHT:

Within 5 to 10 years, the only "realistic" way to unite [Afghanistan] is for it to be "governed by an acceptable dictator," the cable said, adding that "we should think of preparing our public opinion" about such an outcome.

It should take the United States about a year to kill two democracies. That’s my guess.

America Drinks the COIN Kool-aid...

and prepares for a new surge in Afghanistan that may doom Pakistan

American ignorance concerning Pakistani politics and society is profound. And, in the matter of the “surge” scheduled for Afghanistan for year-end 2008, it may be fatal.

U.S. observers, both on the left and right, view Pakistan primarily through the lens of the war on terror, in terms of Pakistan’s role in pumping military forces into its western frontier in order to help George W. Bush burnish his meager presidential legacy by getting Osama bin Laden’s head on a pike before he leaves office in January 2009; and to assist the West in rescuing its tottering political project in Afghanistan, the Karzai government.

As any responsible observer of Pakistan politics would tell you—all the Pakistani media majors all have English-language outlets—the Pakistanis view things completely differently.

They believe that unremitting American pressure on Pakistan is turning a serious but manageable problem—ethnic and Islamist extremism in the border regions—into an existential crisis that is ripping Pakistan apart.

In the days since Musharraf’s departure, Pakistan has been torn by a series of terrorist attacks, including a coordinated assault on Pakistan’s main armory near Islamabad, which left nearly 100 dead.

The attacks represent a highly persuasive demonstration by Taliban extremists that peace inside Pakistan’s central, urbanized core requires accommodation with the Taliban, and not participation in America’s escalating counter-inurgency campaign in Afghanistan’s east and Pakistan’s frontier provinces.

It is a message that Pakistan’s civilian, military, and intelligence leadership are ready to heed.

But it is a warning that America—including both its political and defense establishment and its two presidential candidates—are determined to disregard in the search for geopolitical advantage, multi-national military support, and votes.

Fatally, the supposed success of the troop surge in Iraq –and the desperate optimism and opportunism an apparent military panacea excites in American politics—is fueling calls for applying the same formula to the intractable Taliban insurgency in Afghanistan.

However, Afghanistan isn’t Iraq. And, more importantly, Pakistan ain’t Iran.

For Americans infatuated with the apparent success of the surge in Iraq—and its implied vindication of the comforting notion that the scientific application of American military might, brains, and money can succeed in even the most profoundly hostile environment—it is anathema to consider that the relative quiet in Iraq is not attributable to our astounding subtlety in paying off Sunni tribal leaders and malcontents who otherwise would be engaged in a doomed insurgency against U.S. rule and Shi’a domination.

Nope.

What’s probably standing between us and the continuation of our bloody debacle in Iraq is the fact that Iran has eschewed a strategy of political violence through its Iraqi proxies. Instead, it has decided to outwait the United State and secure its gains through the political ascendancy of the Shi’a.

The Dawa party, obedient clients of the Iranians, have downplayed their military struggle and instead form the backbone of Prime Minister Maliki’s government.

The normally nationalistic and anti-Iranian Shi’a cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr has, thanks to the threats of legal and personal jeopardy deployed by the American occupation, taken up residence in the Iranian holy city of Qom. Under the influence of Iran’s persuasion and perhaps onerous hospitality, al Sadr has apparently decided to discard armed struggle and endorse the political route to power.

Iranian pressure on Iraqi Shi’a forces to stand down is, in my opinion, why the surge has worked. (And it’s also the reason why, despite martial chest-thumping from the Right, an armed attack on Iran by the U.S. or even scorched earth economic sanctions targeting Teheran are unlikely).

American politicians look at the Iraqi surge and, by a flawed analogy, expect that an escalation of three or so brigades into Afghanistan by years’ end will tip the scales in our favor.

Barack Obama, eager to burnish his CINC qualifications by boosting our “good war” in Afghanistan, talks about pouring in troops. John McCain explictly links a troop increase in Afghanistan with the apparent success of the surge.

The analogies, however, founder, when it comes to the issue of the key western neighbor.

Compare and contrast Pakistan’s attitudes toward Afghanistan with Iran’s desire to stabilize Iraq on its currently favorable terms.

According to the U.S. think tank Terror Free Tomorrow (TFT), favorable opinions of Afghanistan are at an anemic 48% level.

Hamid Karzai and his U.S. backed regime simply aren’t very popular in Pakistan. Pakistani distaste for Karzai is eagerly reciprocated by the Afghan government and relations are pretty much in a deep freeze. The Karzai government will always be closer the United States and India, not Pakistan. The route to increased Pakistani influence in Kabul lies through the violent overthrow of the Afghani government by the Taliban, not by ensuring the Karzai regime’s continued survival and success.

The U.S. is responding to Pakistan’s lack of enthusiasm for saving Karzai’s bacon by unilateral military incursions into western Pakistan in order to root out the Taliban havens (and possible bin Laden hidey-holes) that Pakistan’s army and intelligence services have pursued so unenthusiastically.

However, escalating the violence in Pakistan’s border regions looks like a recipe for disaster.

American planners originally hoped that Musharraf’s armies would be the anvil upon which Western forces crushed the Taliban in eastern Afghanistan.

Pakistan is more like a rotten melon that will fly apart under the hammer blows of a U.S. counter-insurgency campaign in west Pakistan.

The political will inside Pakistan to support the U.S. adventure in Afghanistan is virtually non-existent. According to TFT, opposition to the GWOT clocked in at a thumping 72% in June, with “strongly opposed” at 60.4%. At that time, admittedly before the recent wave of Taliban attacks, over 50% of Pakistanis blamed the US for violence inside Pakistan; the Pakistani Taliban were blamed by only 4.2%--behind India and Pakistan’s own ISI!

The salient development in Pakistani politics in the last three months has not been the democratization of Pakistan and an increased or even sustained determination to combat terrorism; it has been the collapse of the political fortunes of two would-be American clients--Pervez Musharraf and the leader of Benazir Bhutto’s PPP, her widower Asif Zardari—and the political ascendancy of Nawaz Sharif of the opposition PML-N, whose conservative, non-aligned policies have resonated with Pakistani voters since his return from exile last November.

The general elections in Pakistan in February delivered a clear mandate for removal of Musharraf and the restoration of the judiciary that Musharraf had dismissed in a clumsy attempt to secure his illegal re-election as president last November.

Asif Zardari, head of the main opposition force, the PPP, hopelessly bungled the political endgame and squandered his political capital because he was more interested in executing the political deal that Benazir Bhutto had made with Washington—by which the PPP would act as a political fig-leaf for the terminally unpopular Musharraf and make active Pakistan participation in the anti-Taliban campaign more palatable to the general populace—than he was in following the unambiguous mandate to remove Musharraf.

Six months of ignoble gyrations by the PPP with American connivance on behalf of Musharraf followed, leaving the field of principled opposition leader completely clear for Nawaz Sharif, who unequivocally called for Musharraf’s removal and the restoration of the judiciary (and, in a popular move, withdrew his people from the cabinet while continuing to support the PPP government in parliamentary votes).

As a result, Sharif is now by far the most popular political figure in Pakistan, clocking in at a favorability rating of 86%—a fact that is apparently unreported in the West (though not unknown to readers of China Matters) because Sharif also represents the majority strain in Pakistani popular opinion opposed to Pakistan’s participation in the U.S. led War on Terror.

Zardari’s increasingly risible attempts to straddle the roles of U.S. client and popular leader came to head with the disastrous visit to the United States of his hand-picked prime minister, Yusuf Raza Gillani.

In order to demonstrate that Pakistan’s newly-minted civilian government was eager and able to do Washington’s bidding in the War on Terror, Gillani announced that the notoriously independent (and pro-Taliban) Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) agency was now subject to control by the cabinet—an assertion he was forced to retract within hours.

Observing the collapse of the credibility of his government, Zardari apparently decided to get in step with popular opinion and neutralize Sharif’s appeal by jumping on the dump-Musharraf bandwagon. In contrast to his previous dilatory behavior, Zardari was able to orchestrate the departure of Musharraf in little more than a week.

U.S. political meddling has yielded the usual unimpressive results. As planned, the civilian Pakistani government was split and discredited thanks to Zardari’s maneuvering. But instead of insuring Musharraf’s survival by allowing him to score political points off of a weakened civilian government, the policy led to Musharraf’s political demise.

When the PPP decided to recover its lost political ground by ousting Musharraf, it left Washington with the worst of both worlds: Musharraf gone and the civilian government too divided and unpopular to act as an effective client.

Since Musharraf’s departure, the pressures on Zardari have only intensified.

Nawaz Sharif has threatened a de jure withdrawal from the ruling coalition if Zardari does not reinstate the judiciary; and the bloody Taliban attacks have served notice that the survival of Pakistan’s civilian government, indeed its civil society, may depend on decoupling its tribal policy from the military campaign the U.S. is escalating in eastern Afghanistan and western Pakistan.


According to Taliban-watcher Syed Saleem Shahzad , the PPP-led civilian government is attempting to remain in Washington’s good graces—and establish itself, post-Musharraf, as America’s indispensable man in Islamabad—by declaring all-out war on militants (despite the TFT finding in June that 58% of Pakistanis wanted the government to negotiate with the Pakistan Taliban) and agreeing to a planned NATO center in Peshawar, capital of the North West Frontier Provinces, that will direct Pakistan’s anti-Taliban operations inside Pakistan.

It remains to be seen whether the Pakistan’s government and Pakistani public opinion will support escalated anti-Taliban operations—under US direction!—in the face of unrelenting Taliban attacks against Pakistani assets inside the heartland, the fundamental unpopularity of the U.S.-led GWOT, and Nawaz Sharif standing in the wings ready to assume the mantle of Pakistan’s leader and provide an alternative to the close U.S.-Pakistan relationship that a majority of Pakistanis regard as catastrophic.

As Western forces surge into Afghanistan in an effort to defeat the burgeoning Taliban insurgency by assaulting its havens in Pakistan, expect the Pakistani Taliban to retaliate—against Pakistan, in the Pakistani heartland—in order to demonstrate to Pakistani opinion the unacceptably high costs of providing material support to an unpopular American strategy.

Inside the Pakistan elite, the case for disengaging from the U.S. war on terror will be made forcefully by the ISI, which has never abandoned its support for the Taliban—or its desire for a pro-Pakistan regime in Kabul.

There has been one piece of disturbing news that implies that the ISI might be ready to take matters into its own hands and assist the Taliban in to redirecting Pakistani security policy—the ISI’s alleged complicity in the terror bombing of the Indian embassy in Kabul on July 8, 2008.

The U.S. government has been in the forefront in providing intelligence linking the ISI to the attack, no doubt a sobering reminder to Islamabad that the Bush administration has a pronounced pro-Indian tilt that no amount of enthusiastic water-carrying by Pakistan on Afghan security is likely to reverse.

Karzai’s ties to India as a counterweight to Pakistan have been a source of irritation to the ISI. But orchestrating the bombing of India’s embassy might not have been a reckless act of brinksmanship; it may have been a deliberate provocation.

If Karzai indignantly broke off relations with Pakistan, and India responded to the bombing with understandable anger, then Pakistan’s army would be free to abandon the thankless project of cooperating with NATO forces in the bloody, border-straddling counter-insurgency campaign in the Pashtun areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan.

Instead, while Karzai floundered to his doom, the Pakistani army could do what it does best: deploying its divisions in a conventional order of battle in Pakistan’s east facing India and engage in the crowd-pleasing ritualized hostility that has secured the army’s place in the center of national esteem—and fattened its budget—for the last sixty years.

So, a surge into Afghanistan, instead of adding an emollient sheen to waters already smoothed by an interested regional power, might instead apply a highly flammable coating of gasoline to all of South Asia—with the Taliban and the ISI both eager to throw a match.