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Bush fails reporter's pop quiz on international leaders - November 5, 1999

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Pakistan (05/07)

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Pakistan's Peace Deal with Taliban Militants

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it struck a deal with the Taliban in South Waziristan and left them alone. The Taliban have since renamed the region the Islamic Emirate of Waziristan
The growing hostility toward Islamabad in its tribal areas has further opened up hospitable space for the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
"The truces between Pakistan's military and the separatists," the UN says, "have coincided with rising violence and increased attacks in four Afghan provinces along the Pakistan border."
The deal is likely to embolden the Taliban to launch even more lethal attacks in Afghanistan. It is pertinent to note that the Taliban on both sides of the Durand Line, which separates Pakistan from Afghanistan, pledge their allegiance to Mullah Omar. As the Taliban do not recognize the Durand Line as an "international border," they assert their identity as Taliban, not as Afghan Taliban or Pakistani Taliban.
Contrary to Musharraf's assurances, however, Afghanistan has seen a three-fold increase in "Taliban activity" since September 5, according to NATO.
Many Pakistanis of different persuasions—members of civil society, activists for democracy, liberals, leftists, nationalists and seculars—are not persuaded of the deal's intended objective, which is "peace." Rather, they see it as an instrument for converting North Waziristan into "a safe haven for al-Qaeda and the Taliban,"
It binds the government to cease ground and air assaults against the Taliban and resolve all future disputes according to the Rivaaj (tribal customs). It further obligates the government to redeploy its troops from North Waziristan to their designated camps and forts, and dismantle all 12 checkpoints that were set up to hunt al-Qaeda and Taliban militants (Dawn, September 6).
The deal offers amnesty to Taliban militants and "foreigners" (a reference to Afghan-Arabs who are members of al-Qaeda) in North Waziristan for a pledge that they would desist from mounting cross-border attacks into Afghanistan; assaulting Pakistani security forces, public servants, state property, tribal leaders and journalists; and carrying heavy weapons (Dawn, September 6).

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The War of the Worlds: Book 1, Chapter 13, How I Fell in with the Curate

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Can Pakistan's Military Be Trusted? - TIME

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Strategic Insights -- U.S.-Pakistan Cooperation: The War on Terrorism and Beyond

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While a crackdown against the Taliban suits Pakistan’s immediate interests, it is not clear how Pakistan will be able to sever its ties completely with Kashmiri separatists.
The additional challenge of managing sectarian groups, which continue to serve as a buffer against New Delhi and allow Islamabad to yield some influence over Kabul’s political future, may stall reform and distract Pakistan from increasing its goodwill efforts to improve relations with neighboring states to mitigate terrorism in the region.
In both urban and rural areas of Pakistan, al-Qaeda and its supporters, the Taliban, and local militants—who call themselves the mujahidin—have proven to conceal their identities, whereabouts, and activities in densely populated cities like Karachi as well as the sleepy hillsides of Khyber. Urban centers such as Rawalpindi and Mardan have offered temporary residence to key al-Qaeda leaders, such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Abu Zubaida.[20] And the tribal belt that includes the Northwest Frontier Province and the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) have been coined ‘safe havens’ for terrorists and religious extremists as well as offer safe passage to the Taliban to and from the Afghan-Pakistan border.[21] It is these regions of Pakistan and the presence of jihadi groups in all the three bustling metropolitan cities of Karachi, Lahore, and Islamabad that some U.S. policymakers are “hinting” at the need for rule of law, free and fair elections, and a working judicial system in Pakistan.
According to a senior Pakistani official, the answer to U.S. expectations and demands of increased Pakistani counter-terrorism cooperation is “what is the limit?” How much more Pakistan can do given its internal security threats from “extremism, obscurantism, and religious bigotry” and external challenges from neighboring countries remains to be seen.
Disabling al-Qaeda through the country’s “capture and kill” policy includes the arrest and death of more than 700 al-Qaeda militants and dozens of Taliban activists operating inside Pakistan.[11] While this policy has permitted Pakistan to score a few successes on the war on terrorism, the President noted that “military action is never a solution. Eliminating terror networks in the long-term depended not on the military’s prowess but sustained development, education, and economic growth—all of which the government takes credit for within the past six years. According to Musharraf, “Military action against extremism and terrorism buys time for a long-term strategy to be executed, it busy time for other instruments to be used to get to the root. It is not the solution.”[12]
By offering support, U.S. officials in New Delhi acknowledged that “Musharraf was sticking his neck out dangerously.”[5] Another senior U.S. policy analyst described the U.S.–Pakistan relationship as “alternating engagement and withdrawal,” but a retired Pakistani diplomat indicates the historic on-off U.S.–Pakistan partnership is in part due to neither country having “shared perspectives.”[6] He indicated that neither country has “continuity, a larger conceptual framework, and a shared vision” beyond issue-specific problems and solutions.[7] Observers have said that U.S.–Pakistan cooperation is tied to one core issue: the global war on terrorism.

Pakistan - Historical Setting

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Pakistan Politics

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How Bush and Rice made a mess of Pakistan. - By Fred Kaplan - Slate Magazine

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Bush spun an appealing but specious syllogism: Tyranny breeds discontent; discontent breeds hatred and terrorism; terrorism threatens U.S. security; therefore, promoting democracy enhances U.S. security. Or, as he put it, "America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one."
If the United States were to respond to this power grab by cutting off aid to the Pakistani army, the army would turn elsewhere—and the Islamist factions would be strengthened.
The problem is that there's some truth to Musharraf's official reason for his crackdown. He has been going after al-Qaida jihadists, especially those inside his own country, though not so much Taliban fighters on the border of Afghanistan. And he is in a genuinely tight spot. On the one hand, he fears what some Western officials call the "Talibanization of Pakistan." On the other hand, he can't go after them too avidly, for fear of sparking a backlash from some of his own officers who have Islamist sympathies and who don't want to be seen as fighting America's war.
In exchange for his promises to root out Taliban terrorists on the Afghan border and within Pakistan's own intelligence service, Bush has supplied Musharraf with at least $10 billion in aid. Yet while Musharraf has rendered considerable assistance in the war on terrorism, the Taliban—and possibly Osama Bin Laden himself—retain their sanctuary in Pakistan's northwest territories.

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Urban Pakistanis split on militants | csmonitor.com

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"The people in these regions have never really developed faith in the system," says Asha Amirali, a political activist with
the People's Rights Movement of Pakistan, an Islamabad-based social justice advocacy group. "They have lost faith in the politicians,
and the judicial system at the grass roots is still impotent and disconnected from the rest of the country."
An army of some 5,000 militants, led by Maulana Fazlullah, a local cleric notorious for his illegal radio channel on which
he preaches jihad against the American-backed state, have also taken security officials hostage. Some were decapitated and
their heads paraded through the streets. Pakistanis had heard of such gruesome violence in the far-flung, autonomous tribal
regions, but never in "settled areas" like Swat, which are under state jurisdiction.
"People are viewing the Army's fight against terrorism as an extension of America's agenda in the region," says Khalid Rahman
of the Institute for Policy Studies in Islamabad. "And the government also seems to be using this as a chance to secure its
own place" at a time when its own popularity is plummeting.
A poll released Wednesday by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland found that less than
half of urban Pakistanis favor sending the Pakistani Army to the Northwestern tribal areas to "pursue and capture Al-Qaeda
fighters." Only 48 percent want the Pakistani Army to act against "Taliban insurgents who have crossed over from Afghanistan."

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Foreign Policy: Why We’d Miss Musharraf

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Neither Bhutto nor Sharif will crack down on the tribal regions, whatever promises they are privately making these days. Nor will Bhutto or Sharif challenge the military’s strategic calculus, which is to hedge against Indian encirclement via Afghanistan and U.S. abandonment of Pakistan, as occurred in the early 1990s. Like it or not, the military is the player that matters when it comes to such vital U.S. interests as fighting al Qaeda, stabilizing Afghanistan, and stemming nuclear proliferation—but military leaders are increasingly nervous that the United States will desert them again.
Some in Washington believe that civilian leaders would do more to crack down on Islamist militants and better cooperate with U.S. counterterrorism efforts on the Afghan-Pakistani border. That’s a false hope: Civil-military relations and national-security decision-making cannot change overnight. In the past, civilian governments have deferred to the Army to manage civil unrest, especially in the frontier provinces. And as it did with nuclear weapons development, the military often acts without the full knowledge of civilian leaders.
Bhutto was run out of the country for skimming millions off the top of government contracts; Sharif orchestrated the storming of the Supreme Court by street thugs as he was being tried for contempt.
Moreover, as foreign-policy analyst Anatol Lieven has noted, “All civilian governments have been guilty of corruption, election rigging and the imprisonment or murder of political opponents, in some cases to a worse degree than the military administrations that followed.”
The Musharraf government has presided over Pakistan’s most successful economy, averaging 7 percent annual growth over the past five years. Compare this with the anemic 3 percent average in the 1990s under civilian rule.
When India and Pakistan parted ways in 1947, most of the British Indian Army’s Muslim officers—who constituted the bulk of the officer corps—went to Pakistan, while the bulk of civilian expertise went to India. This set the course for the military to dominate not only decisions of national security, but also domestic policy.

Charles Krauthammer - Marcos . . . Pinochet . . . Musharraf? - washingtonpost.com

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Bush fails reporter's pop quiz on international leaders - November 5, 1999

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Foreign Policy: Why We’d Miss Musharraf

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