A Smart Coup: Why One Last Military Intervention In Pakistan Remains A Possibility

A Smart Coup: Why One Last Military Intervention In Pakistan Remains A Possibility

 

 

 

… But we are nowhere near that right now. Gen. Kayani certainly has no such thing in mind according to people who have met him.

 

 

By AHMED QURAISHI

Monday, 15 February 2010.

WWW.PAKNATIONALISTS.COM

 

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan—"This was my first interaction with the soldier who commands the seventh largest military force on the face of the planet.”

 

With this catchy line, Dr. Farrukh Saleem began his brief and fascinating account of a meeting with General Ashfaq Parvez Kayani.

 

On Feb. 10, 2010, Gen. Kayani met a group of Pakistani commentators and security analysts. The briefing was the third since the military began asserting Pakistan's legitimate security and strategic interests in Afghanistan and the region.

 

On January 28 and 29, Gen. Kayani told NATO commanders in Brussels that Pakistan’s legitimate security interests will have to be respected.

 

Earlier, he told Adm. Mike Mullen, Gen. David Petraeus, and Gen. Stanley McChrystal that instead of worrying about appeasing India, Washington better start paying attention to Pakistan.

 

This is a major development in the eight-year US-led war in Afghanistan.

 

At one point, Mr. Saleem makes an interesting observation about Gen. Kayani’s cool demeanor.

 

“Yes, he has the capacity for abstract thought, cold rationality and coarse creativity - all in one,” he says. “And yet he inhales reconstituted tobacco. Yes, he uses a filter and a cigarette holder. Yes, he never takes deep puffs and, yes, he only consumes half a cigarette at a time.”

 

At another point, Mr. Saleem makes an interesting use of pun. Talking about the general’s smoking habits, he says the following: ‘He knows that some of the things that he is doing are wrong, but still won't give them up.’

 

Probably it’s a polite reference to the conspiracy theories that fill the US and British media, or the Am-Brit media, about Pakistan, its military and its intelligence agencies. So some skepticism is natural.

 

But the best part of his column in The News International was this concluding paragraph:

 

“I can tell you that I came back both proud but with a painful realisation; proud knowing that our legions are being led by strategic minds and sad to have discovered the much too visible an intellectual gap between our top political brains in Islamabad and our strategic minds at work in Rawalpindi. And what does he think about our politicians? When it's breezy, hit it easy.

Could it be that the army rules not through the barrel of a gun but because of their intellectual superiority? Could it be that the army rules because our politicians have failed to institutionalize politics? Could it be that the army rules because our political parties do not transcend individual human intentions? Could it be that the army rules because it has structures, mechanisms of social order along with strategic thinking?”

 

In essence, Mr. Saleem hit at the core reason why the Pakistani military intervenes every time politicians lead the nation to a dead end.

 

Most importantly, the above reasoning answers even a more important question: Why the military mounts successful interventions and why the politicians can’t muster the moral authority to resist them.

 

Pakistani politicians remain a chaotic, undisciplined and shortsighted bunch. Their parties are messy and loose groupings of special interests in their crudest form. Almost all of them have lifetime leaders who never give way to fresh blood. And they are not public institutions but private, family-owned affairs.

 

Since the return to democracy in Pakistan in February 2008, hardly any of the parties in government or opposition devoted any high-level party meetings to education, health, culture and sports. None of them has plans in place for running the country. Worse, none has any vision.

 

The best place in Islamabad these days to see this mess in action is the National Defense University. Since 2002, the NDU has been holding the annual National Security Workshop. This is a unique 6-week course. It brings together politicians, military officers, businessmen, lawyers, social activists and journalists. The group is taken through a virtual tour into the corridors of strategic decision making in Pakistan. The course ends with a weeklong exercise that sees the class divided into a Pakistani government and a shadow government, complete with their own secretariat and staff. On the last day, the two governments frame and deliver a policy plan to deal with a hypothetical strategic crisis confronting Pakistan. The plan has domestic, military and foreign policy components. Often, senior commanders from Pakistani military’s General Headquarters attend the last day’s presentations.

 

NDU officials, both civilian and military, have one observation that has been constant during the past eight years of national security workshops: Military officers, businessmen, social activists and journalists often show the best performance. Politicians come last. Most can’t even draft a single-page policy brief, or work with a PowerPoint presentation.

 

In essence, middle class Pakistanis – military officers, businessmen, social activists and journalists – fair better than the politicians, mostly a feudal landowning elite.

 

This gets blurry sometimes, but you get the general idea.

 

And middle class Pakistanis can’t make it to political parties, let alone to the federal and regional parliaments and governments.

 

Elections might change this, but certainly not in the foreseeable future. And Pakistan may not have the luxury of time.

 

If the national deadlock continues with mounting domestic instability due to massive corruption and mismanagement by our politicians, the military may have to contend with one last intervention. It would be the last because if the military failed this time to help set Pakistan on the right track, it could be a free fall after that because Pakistanis are getting increasingly restless with the existing decay. Social turmoil simmers just beneath the surface.

 

If it comes to a military-led intervention, both military officers and politicians will have to stay out of actual power. The army chief may not become a chief executive. The military might have to look into a new concept called the ‘Smart Coup’, where the military can bring capable Pakistanis to power with a firm executable plan of reform over five years, or more, fully backed by the military.  There may not be time to put the plan to vote. It will have to be implemented.

 

This would be the absolute last option. But we are nowhere near that right now. Gen. Kayani certainly has no such thing in mind according to people who have met him. He wants democracy to work for the time being and he has proven this by resisting several opportunities to intervene over the past two years.

 

Pakistan is full of resources and opportunities, but it lacks good leadership and clean management. Even the bare minimum of these two commodities is not available in today’s Pakistan.

 

Books on political science and theory in Washington and London can’t help with this. Pakistanis will have to do what’s best for their homeland.

 

Good Americans Waking Up To Their Govt's Mess In Pakistan

Good Americans Waking Up To Their Govt's Mess In Pakistan

A Dangerous Secret

How a Chico writer stumbled on a clandestine black-ops program in Pakistan operated by the notorious private militia Blackwater

By Robert Speer
roberts@newsreview.com roberts@newsreview.com
More stories by this author...

This article was published on 02.18.10.

Gayle Kimball is shown here with many of the dozen books she has authored. She had no idea her latest book, a survey of the insights and questions of teens around the world (inset), would lead her to discover—long before it became public knowledge, that the infamous Blackwater private militia was carrying out special operations in Pakistan.

PHOTO COURTESY OF GAYLE KIMBALL
About Gayle Kimball, Ph.D.:
A woman who wears many hats, this former Chico State sociology professor is a personal coach, writes the “Ask Dr. Gayle” advice column for the Lotus Guide, and is director of Earthhaven: Center for Spiritual Enrichment. She is the author or editor of a dozen books, including 50/50 Parenting, 50/50 Marriage and How to Survive Your Parents’ Divorce. As a way of gathering material for her upcoming book, she hosts the Web site globalyouthspeakout.ning.com. She can be reached at gkimball@csuchico.edu gkimball@csuchico.edu.

       
On Oct. 17, 2009, Chico author Gayle Kimball got an e-mail from her friend Saeed, a 17-year-old Pakistani boy with whom she’d been corresponding for some time. He is one of the nearly 4,000 teenagers from around the world she’s contacted via e-mail for her next book, Wired & Green: Global Youth Insights & Questions, a survey of teens worldwide.

Something ominous was occurring in his country, Saeed said. American troops and Blackwater mercenaries were starting to make their presence known.

“There is a badge of blackwater army in my city,” wrote Saeed, who lives in Peshawar, in the frontier region adjoining the largely lawless Federally Administered Tribal Areas and the Afghanistan border. “They have bought a specific land and that area is sealed securely. They live there. But I have no idea what’s their mission. A few days earlier, my friend texted me that 700 U.S. army soldiers have landed in Pakistan at 3 in the morning and 1,000 will come after that. We have never experienced U.S. soldiers entering the soil of our country like that. This definitely is a sign of danger for us.”

If Saeed was correct, Kimball thought, she inadvertently had come to know a hugely important secret about U.S. involvement in Pakistan that virtually nobody in America—outside of government and military circles, presumably—was aware of: The United States had sent troops and private mercenary contractors into a sovereign and supposedly friendly nation.

This was unprecedented—and disturbing.

It’s now known, following the Feb. 3 roadside bombing that killed three U.S. special-operations soldiers (along with three schoolgirls) in Peshawar, that U.S. troops have been operating in Pakistan for some time. But four months earlier, when Kimball first heard about them from her young friends, top military and governmental officials staunchly denied they were in country.

Right or wrong, there was reason for the subterfuge. Pakistanis in general dislike and distrust the American government, and confirmation that the U.S. military was operating in their country would have provoked outrage against the already weak pro-U.S. government of President Asif Ali Zardari.

At the same time, Zardari is under tremendous pressure from the United States to respond to the growing insurgency in his country. He deployed the Army to drive Taliban soldiers from the Swat Valley, and he’s quietly allowed the United States to use his country as a staging area for the drone bombing attacks on Taliban hideouts in the FATA.

Kimball knew none of this when her teen reporters in Pakistan began telling her about the presence of U.S. military personnel and Blackwater mercenaries in their country.

“I had no idea,” she said during a recent interview. “I thought Blackwater had been completely discredited in Iraq and kicked out.” So she was especially surprised to discover the company, now known as Xe Services, was in Pakistan at the behest of the Obama administration, especially since the president, in March, had stoutly insisted no armed forces would be sent to the country.

She went to the Internet to find out more, but was able to locate only one relevant article. The report had appeared in The Intelligence Daily, an online journal of geopolitical and economic news, on Sept. 2. Written by Pakistani journalist Ahmed Quraishi, it’s headlined “US Hummers Enter Pakistan, Undercover American Soldiers in Islamabad,” and begins as follows:

“ISLAMABAD, Pakistan—Undercover armed Americans are swarming the Pakistani capital in the latest sign that the elected government has allowed Washington to dispatch what is believed to be a large number of American special operations agents and contractual security guards, including the infamous Blackwater private militia.”

Kimball’s teen reporters subsequently directed her to other reports indicating the presence of American personnel, including Blackwater and DynCorp mercenaries, in both Islamabad and Peshawar. The Blackwater employees stood out, according to the articles, for their arrogant and disrespectful treatment of locals.

Kimball was furious—and frightened. She wrote up her experiences, gave it the title “A Dangerous Secret,” and distributed it widely, including to Sen. Barbara Boxer. She wanted others to know what was going on, but the story was largely blacked out in this country. She felt alone, like the only person in this area who knew what her country was secretly doing to the people of Pakistan.

Then, on Nov. 23, The Nation magazine published a lengthy article by Jeremy Scahill, author of Blackwater: The Rise of the Word’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army, titled “The Secret US War in Pakistan.” This was the first significant account of U.S. armed involvement in Pakistan, and it confirmed everything Kimball had learned.

“[M]embers of an elite division of Blackwater are at the center of a secret program in which they plan targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives, ‘snatch and grabs’ of high-value targets and other sensitive action inside and outside Pakistan,” Scahill writes.

The Blackwater operatives, working in conjunction with the U.S. Joint Special Operations Command, “also assist in gathering intelligence and help direct a secret US military drone bombing campaign that runs parallel to the well-documented CIA predator strikes,” he adds.

The JSOC assassination program is distinct from the CIA assassination program that the agency’s director, Leon Panetta, announced he had cancelled in June 2009. The JSOC, which was commanded by Gen. Stanley McChrystal before he was put in charge of NATO operations in Afghanistan, is the special-operations branch (read: counterterrorism and covert services) of the U.S. military.

Scahill’s efforts to get official confirmation of Blackwater’s presence in Pakistan all hit a blank wall. The Defense Department, Blackwater, the Pakistani government and the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad denied it.

Indeed, two days after Scahill’s article appeared, on Nov. 25, the American ambassador to Pakistan, Anne W. Patterson, issued a press release rejecting The Nation’s assertions about Blackwater as “completely false.”

American “personnel and programs in Pakistan have only one purpose—to assist the government and people of Pakistan as they face the complex challenges confronting their nation,” she said.

And so it remained, until Jan. 21, 2010, when Defense Secretary Robert Gates confirmed, in an interview for Pakistani television, that Blackwater was indeed operating in Pakistan.

The acknowledgement was huge news in Pakistan, made larger two weeks later when the three American troops were killed.

Department of Defense officials quickly tried to backtrack, saying Blackwater didn’t actually work for the Pentagon. As Scahill reports in The Nation, that’s because it’s actually contracted to Kestral, a Pakistani security and logistics firm. “That contract, say my sources,” Scahill writes, “is technically with the Pakistani government, which helps cloak Blackwater’s presence.”

Now the world sees what Gayle Kimball saw back in October, when the whole thing was terribly hush-hush. Had it not been for her teen reporters in Pakistan, she too would have known nothing then.

Right now, her biggest concern is for them, especially the three she is in closest contact with. She gets frequent e-mails from them, in which they talk about their fears of terrorists as well as of the American mercenaries, of the chaos that seems to lurk just below the surface of Pakistani society, and of the secret deals their government has made with an American government they don’t trust.

All have studied previously in the United States, and they like Americans as people very much, but they don’t understand why this country is meddling in their internal affairs.

Nor does Kimball, who is convinced fighting terrorism with violence is not the answer. Three Cups of Tea author Greg Mortenson’s visit to Chico last year convinced her that education, not violence, is the way to combat the religious extremism that fosters terrorism.

In the meantime, she is trying to raise funds to bring her Pakistani friends to this country to attend college. She is also collecting more teen participants and preparing to gather their insights on a wide range of topics into her book.

This column was originally posted at NewsReview.com

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SEE THIS

US Security Firm Bribes Pakistani Officials, Top Interior Ministry Officer Arrested

This Ambassador Is A Sore For US-Pakistani Relationship

Govt urged not to create hurdles for Kashmir freedom fighters

By Tariq Naqash


Friday, 05 Feb, 2010 Sacrifices rendered by Kashmiris were not meant for internal autonomy, division or trans-LoC trade, but for freedom of the occupied state, said Syed Salahuddin. — File Photo Media Gallery

Love is in the air Love is in the air MUZAFFARABAD: Speakers at a conference on Kashmir held here on Thursday called for continuing the jihad in occupied Kashmir till attaining freedom from India and asked the government of Pakistan not to create hurdles for Kashmiri fighters who wanted to achieve this goal on their own.



“As long as Jammu and Kashmir is under Indian subjugation, jihad must continue… Pakistan should continue political, diplomatic and moral support for the Kashmiris seeking freedom.







If Pakistani rulers cannot help Kashmiris, they should let the field open for the Kashmiri militants, instead of creating any obstacles in their way,” said a declaration adopted at the “Solidarity with Kashmir” conference.



The conference was addressed by United Jihad Council chairman Syed Salahuddin, former ISI chief Lt-Gen (retd) Hamid Gul, AJK assembly Speaker Shah Ghulam Qadir and Jamaatud Dawa leader Abdur Rehman Makki.



Although the event was organised by the little known Tehrik Azadi-i-Jammu Kashmir, it was in effect a show of Jamaatud Dawa which has been maintaining a low profile in the region since the 2008 Mumbai attacks.



The declaration stressed that practical steps were needed to bring an end to Indian repression in Kashmir, instead of observing one-minute silence on the Kashmir Solidarity Day on Feb 5. It said that the ban on all Kashmiri militant groups should be lifted and the role of Azad Jammu Kashmir as the base camp of freedom struggle should be revived.



It said that proposals like “self-governance and demilitarisation” were not a substitute for the UN Security Council resolutions on Kashmir and Pakistan should not budge from its principled demand of implementation of these resolutions.



Mr Salahuddin said that sacrifices rendered by Kashmiris were not meant for internal autonomy, division or trans-LoC trade, but for freedom of the occupied state.



He asserted that Kashmiris were not opposed to dialogue with India, but 131 rounds of talks held over the past six decades had produced nothing.



“Instead of begging the UN and world powers for Kashmir settlement, we should flex our muscles and revive the spirit of jihad which is bound to get the issue resolved,” he said.



Mr Salahuddin claimed that the armed struggle in Kashmir was nearing success in 2001 when Pervez Musharraf “stabbed the freedom movement in the back”.



The UJC chief rejected Indian allegations about involvement of Jamaatud Dawa and Lashkar-e-Taiba in the Mumbai attacks and urged the Pakistan government to end the ban on JuD and release its leader Zakiur Rehman Lakhvi.



“He (Lakhvi) is our aide and an active member of the UJC. He has been behind bars for long, although no charges have been established against him,” he said.



Hamid Gul warned India that the jihad would not stop till it granted freedom to Kashmiris.



The AJK assembly speaker assured the gathering that the AJK government would neither accept nor become part of any “sell-out of Kashmir”.

Why Pay Afghanistan When You Can Help This Girl, Mr. Gandhi?

Why Pay Afghanistan When You Can Help This Girl, Mr. Gandhi?

Daniel Berehulak/Getty Images

India's capital city has been flooded with a new wave of migrant workers -- children.

Posted at ForeignPolicy.com

BY KAYVAN FARZANEH, ANDREW SWIFT

Bring Your Child to Work Day: In New Delhi there are upwards of 100 construction projects underway in preparation for the 2010 Commonwealth Games scheduled to take place from Oct. 4 to 13. These projects -- ranging from several new stadiums to a new international airport terminal -- are drawing vast numbers of migrant workers from all over India to provide the extra labor needed. Contractors, already behind schedule, are taking advantage of lax labor laws and coercing their employees to bring their children to work alongside them, promising payments of bread and milk. Above an Indian girl carries a brick at a construction site in front of the Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium on Feb. 3.

MY COMMENT:

India is spending billions on weapons and has given one billion dollars to Afghanistan in order to create an anti-Pakistan base there. But here's the real India, the world's largest concentration of poverty and health problems. But you won't see this on CNN because US needs cheap Indian soldiers to die in Afghanistan instead of Americans.

Posted at The Lounge

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Can’t Pakistan Take A Stand on A Dying Woman Abused By US?

Published : February 04, 2010 | Author : Ahmed Quraishi Total Visits: 666               Print | Email to friend 4 reviews | Write a review Can't Pakistan Take A Stand on A Dying Woman Abused By US?   Surrendered by Musharraf and almost abandoned by Zardari and Nawaz and a long list of US apologists in a nation seething with anger, isn't it time for Pakistan's rulers to take a stand?  US, Britain and India top the list of countries where Pakistani citizens are abused as a state policy. Imagine 60 Indians or Americans or Brits burned alive on Pakistani soil? It happened to us but our failed rulers have hushed it because they can't stand up for national honor. War on terror or not, the policy of humiliating Pakistanis must come to an end.   By AHMED QURAISHI Thursday, 4 February 2010. WWW.PAKNATIONALISTS.COM   ISLAMABAD, Pakistan—If Americans and the Brits show little respect for Pakistani citizens today, it is because Pakistani rulers refuse to take a stand on national pride. Pakistanis have been rotting in Indian and Afghan jails, but Pakistan's incumbent president honors Karzai by inviting him for his inauguration party. Indians send dead bodies of Pakistani prisoners and all we do is release Indian terrorists convicted of killing Pakistani citizens under Indian-sponsored terrorism, instead of sending them to the gallows.   The governments of the United States and the United Kingdom have been deliberately humiliating Pakistan by targeting Pakistani students at will, in some cases framing Pakistanis in fake cases. It's one way of giving Pakistan more bad press and putting pressure for more Pakistani concessions.   But with the case of this dying Pakistani woman, Pakistan has a chance to correct one more wrong that we have accepted in this so-called war on terror.   Just as the Pakistani military has forced the United States to review its wrong policy of trampling on Pakistani interests in the region and paying lip service to us while empowering India, it is time that the Americans – and also the Brits and the Indians, as I explain below – be firmly warned that humiliating Pakistan and Pakistanis as part of United States' post-9/11 policy will not be tolerated.   I mention the military because Pakistanis have little faith that their politicians, who often play the role of apologists for the US and UK, will ever take a stand for Pakistan's interest. Those politicians who do are not in power.   Dr. Aafia Siddiqui's case reeks of anti-Pakistanism that Washington has practiced for the past eight years while courting Pakistan as an ally in the war for the occupation of Afghanistan.   Dr. Aafia's latest pictures show a dying woman ruthlessly tortured by Americans in US custody. Two of her three children, kidnapped with her from Pakistan's streets, are missing.   It shames most Pakistanis to think that, while she was tortured and possibly raped by Americans in Afghanistan for years, the government of former President Pervez Musharraf did little to raise a voice for her and other Pakistanis who probably continue to rot in various US-run jails and dungeons in Afghanistan.  President Zardari, opposition leader Nawaz Sharif, and a long list of Pakistani politicians have barely raised her case in their interactions with US officials.   We understand the constraints of our politicians. Their money and properties are in London and New York. In fact, they count on US support to remain in power and not be removed by the military or by the people of Pakistan. That's why instead of boycotting US diplomats in solidarity with Dr. Aafia, US Ambassador Anne Patterson and other US diplomats continue to receive generous treatment in Pakistani circles. Last week Pakistani websites circulated pictures of known Pakistani journalists dancing away at a private party at the US Embassy, in a country where US drones have killed close to 1,000 Pakistani women and children while 'successfully' targeting some 20 low-level terrorists.   Betrayed and abandoned by her own, Dr. Aafia was saved not by Pakistan but by Yvonne Ridly, a British journalist.   Yet the official Pakistani reaction remains lazy and apologetic. The government of Asif Zardari is now funding Dr. Aafia's lawyers. But how complacent the government has been can be judged from the fact that Prime Minister Yusaf Raza Gilani had to personally telephone Pakistan's ambassador in Washington Husain Haqqani last week to ask him to expedite the effort to secure Dr. Aafia's release and provide 'daily updates' on her case.   A QUESTION OF HONOR   For eight years, Washington deceived Pakistan as it consolidated the position of India and other anti-Pakistan warlords in Afghanistan. The Americans showed insensitivity bordering on disdain as they trampled on legitimate Pakistani strategic and security interests. The US media single-handedly demonized Pakistan and created a false global alarm over Pakistan's nuclear assets.   During the same period, Pakistanis have been abused as a state policy in the United States and Britain. No other countries in the world abuse Pakistanis like US and UK.    Adnan Mirza is a Pakistani student in Houston who is in jail for the past several years, without evidence, in a case where undercover FBI agents pretending to be Muslims joined him in a hiking trip and planted evidence to arrest him as a potential terrorist. US refuses to release the kid depite the lack of any credible evidence. In the UK, Prime Minister Gordon Brown lied to his own people last year about an alleged 'big terrorist plot'. His government rounded up innocent Pakistani students and ruined their lives just to build British public's support for sending more troops to Afghanistan.   In 2006, Indian intelligence officers and Hindu fundamentalists burned 60 Pakistanis alive on Indian soil. The victims believed the peace talks between Pakistan and India and boarded the so-called 'friendship train' to visit that country, which was later attacked and burned. Pakistani government and politicians have failed to pursue that case. Can you believe this? Sixty Pakistanis burned alive and there's no one to talk about it? Imagine if 60 Indians or Americans or Brits were burned alive in Pakistan aboard a train?   Pakistani inmates routinely return from Indian jails with severe mental disorders. All this abuse against Pakistanis and there isn't as much as a squeak from Pakistan's failed and inept rulers.   Pakistani government can change this. It can start with Dr. Aafia's case and take a stand and demand US release her. We can retaliate. Let's stop US military supply routes that run through Pakistan for a week.   It is time Pakistan warned the United States that Pakistanis will hold the US government responsible if Dr. Aafia dies as a result American torture.   The American policy if creating hostility against Pakistanis must come to an end.   © 2007-2009. All rights reserved. AhmedQuraishi.com & PakNationalists Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium without royalty provided this notice is preserved.