Bunglers And Botchers

The new government of Zardari et al, if it is still new and if he still has anyone left with him, once again has succeeded in breaking its own previously set records of bunglings and botches. It hastily issued and promptly retracted, in record time, what may amount to be its worse gaffe yet. Two statements - one by Zardari himself, and the other by Press Information Department - accompanied the issuance and the retraction of orders, respectively.

The Prime Minister and Rehman Malik, the new beneficiary of the orders, had their heads in the air, literally, when the orders were issued. They both were flying over the Atlantic on their way to Washington. Zardari was in Dubai from where he issued a statement making it amply clear who was behind this goof up.

This is how the whole fiasco transpired.

First, the Cabinet Division issued a formal notification - a Memorandum - on Saturday saying that the all-powerful Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI) - had been administratively, financially and operationally removed from the hands of Defence Ministry and given in the clutched of Rehman Malik's Interior Ministry, as per Rule 3 if the Constitution 1973. Intelligence Bureau (IB)was thrown in the deal for good measure.

This notification was followed by a Zardari statement, from his desert den, claiming "that the decision to place the ISI under the Interior Ministry is a step towards the civilian rule and also to save the Army from controversies and a bad name", he told the News. He further said that after this "historic decision" nobody would be able to "say that this agency is not under the control of an elected government as the Interior Ministry will be responsible for responding to the allegations against the ISI."

Then came the statement from the Press Information Department (PID) in an effort to retrieve the government's foot from its mouth. It said that "the notification regarding Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) has been misunderstood." By who? The statement did not clarify. The PID statement further said "the ISI would remain under prime minister"....And "more details in this regard will be given in a detailed notification."

Which means another notification is on its way. A detailed one!

How America Turned Afghanistan into a Narco-State?

In the Magazine section of the New York Times, on July 27, 2008, Thomas Schweich, a senior counternarcotics official for two years - deputy at the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs under Anne Patterson, then assistant secretary of state for international narcotics and law-enforcement affairs - writes that he discovered that "the Afghan government was deeply involved in protecting the opium trade" and that many of Karzai's supporters including Sher Muhammad Akhundzada, a former member of Afghanistan’s Parliament and ex-governor of the heroin capital of the world — Helmand Province — "finance themselves from the drug trade" and "senior Afghan officials were deeply involved in the narcotics trade." NATO allies and America's own Defense Department have also "resisted the anti-opium offensive." In the fall of 2005 "Afghan farmers had planted almost 60 percent more poppy than the year before, for a total of 165,000 hectares (637 square miles). The 2006 harvest would be the biggest narco-crop in history".

In January 2007, Karzai appointed a convicted heroin dealer, Izzatulla Wasifi, to head his anticorruption commission. Karzai also appointed several corrupt local police chiefs. There were numerous diplomatic reports that his brother Ahmed Wali, who was running half of Kandahar, was involved in the drug trade.
Thomas Schweich went to the White House in the first quarter of 2006 to brief Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Condy Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others on the expanding opium problem and proposed a policy consisting of "public education about the evils of heroin and the illegality of cultivating poppies; alternative crops; eradication of poppy fields; interdiction of drug shipments and arrest of traffickers; and improvements to the judicial system." But Karzai "opposed "quick, fair and efficient " aerial eradication" in favor of "inefficient, costly, dangerous and more subject to corrupt dealings among local officials" ground-based eradication in which tractors and weed-whackers were used to destroy the poppy fields.

"Even before she got to the bureau of international narcotics, Anne Patterson knew that the Pentagon was hostile to the antidrug mission" writes Thomas Schweich, "A couple of weeks into the job", she was told by Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, who commanded all U.S. forces in Afghanistan that "drugs were not a priority of the U.S. military in Afghanistan" because of Pentagon's strategy of “sequencing” — defeat the Taliban, then have someone else clean up the drug business."

The Pentagon had promised the Drug Enforcement Administration Mi-17 helicopters and other equipment necessary for the training of the counternarcotics police of Afghanistan but its agents in Afghanistan "had seemingly unending difficulties" receiving them. "The Pentagon had reneged on a deal to allow the D.E.A. the use of precious ramp space at the Kabul airport" too. "Consequently, the effort to interdict drug shipments and arrest traffickers had stalled. Less than 1 percent of the opium produced in Afghanistan was being seized there. The effort became even more complicated later in 2006, when Benjamin Freakley, the two-star U.S. general who ran the eastern front, shut down all operations by the D.E.A. and Afghan counternarcotics police in Nangarhar — a key heroin-trafficking province. The general said that antidrug operations were an unnecessary obstacle to his military operations".

"The Afghan anti-narcotics court" system set up by the Department of Justice was so corrupt that "dozens of reports" were received that "in the rare cases in which drug traffickers were convicted, they often walked in the front door of a prison, paid a bribe and walked out the back door." The Pentagon-trained Afghan Army was so poorly trained that it used German-and-American-trained Afghan Police "to fill holes in the army mission" and "thrust" it "into a military role" and left them to lose "their lives trying to hold territory in dangerous areas."

As big as these challenges were, there were even bigger ones. "A lot of intelligence", write Schweich, "indicated that senior Afghan officials were deeply involved in the narcotics trade. Narco-traffickers were buying off hundreds of police chiefs, judges and other officials. Narco-corruption went to the top of the Afghan government. The attorney general, Abdul Jabbar Sabit, a fiery Pashtun who had begun a self-described “jihad against corruption,” told me and other American officials that he had a list of more than 20 senior Afghan officials who were deeply corrupt — some tied to the narcotics trade. He added that President Karzai — also a Pashtun — had directed him, for political reasons, not to prosecute any of these people. (On July 16 of this year, Karzai dismissed Sabit after Sabit announced his candidacy for president. Karzai’s office said Sabit’s candidacy violated laws against political activity by officials...”)

Americans and Afghans were not the only ones who opposed antinarcotic efforts. "The British military were even more hostile to the antidrug mission than the U.S. military" says Schweich. "British forces — centered in Helmand — actually issued leaflets and bought radio advertisements telling the local criminals that the British military was not part of the anti-poppy effort."

The result: By late 2006 poppy cultivation was increasingly concentrated and was becoming limited to the south of the country, where the Taliban insurgency was and remains the strongest and the Taliban are financing the insurgency there with drug money. In 2007, "the United States released photos of industrial-size poppy farms — many owned by pro-government opportunists, others owned by Taliban sympathizers. Most of these narco-farms were near major southern cities. Farmers were digging wells, surveying new land for poppy cultivation, diverting U.S.-built irrigation canals to poppy fields and starting expensive reclamation projects." Schweich says claims that "at a lunch in Brussels in September 2006 attended by Habibullah Qaderi, who was then Afghanistan’s minister for counternarcotics. He gave a speech in which he said that poor Afghan farmers have no choice but to grow poppies, and asked for more money. A top European diplomat challenged him, holding up a U.N. map showing the recent trend: poppy growth decreasing in the poorest areas and growing in the wealthier areas. The minister, taken aback, simply reiterated his earlier point that Afghanistan needed more money for its destitute farmers. After the lunch, however, Qaderi approached me and whispered: “I know what you say is right. Poverty is not the main reason people are growing poppy. But this is what the president of Afghanistan tells me to tell others.”

When in July 2007, Schweich says, he breifed President Karzai on the drive for a new strategy and proposed a balance between "incentives with new disincentives" and discussed the need for "arrests of high-level traffickers and eradication of poppy fields in the wealthier areas of the Pashtun south, where Karzai had his roots and power base" Karzai "became sullen and unresponsive." Many of European countries, who had only one- or two-year legislative mandates to be in Afghanistan, "wanted to avoid any uptick in violence that would most likely result from an aggressive strategy, even if the strategy would result in long-term success. The myth gave military officers a reason to stay out of the drug war."

Schweich quotes from the Kabul Weekly editorial and the first vice president of Afghanistan, Ahmad Zia Massoud, who wrote an op-ed article in The Sunday Telegraph in London that how Afghan government is involved in drug business. The editorial said: “It is obvious that the Afghan government is more than kind to poppy growers." And Massoud wrote: “Millions of pounds have been committed in provinces including Helmand Province for irrigation projects and road building to help farmers get their produce to market. But for now this has simply made it easier for them to grow and transport opium. . . . Deep-rooted corruption . . . exists in our state institutions.”

In frustration Schweich concludes that Karzai has played Americans "like a fiddle" and "the U.S. would spend billions of dollars on infrastructure improvement; the U.S. and its allies would fight the Taliban; Karzai’s friends could get rich off the drug trade; he could blame the West for his problems; and in 2009 he would be elected to a new term."

This is how Americans turned Afghanistan into a narco-state.

Next Target: It Is Pakistan, Stupid!

I have been dormant for months. No time or mind for blogging. But the situation in Pakistan has deteriorated so fast in my dormant months that I feel compelled to say something about it.

How a bunch of idiots and imbeciles - those who took over as the new administration as well as those left-overs who still lurk in power centers - have behaved is so pathetic and obvious that it deosn't need any rehashing.

These so called leaders of this benighted country called Pakistan are so deep in the pathetic stupor of their own blissful ignorance and petty interests that they are quite oblivious and unmindful to the gathering storm that could very well threaten Pakistan's very existence as a country as we know it.

If one could only pay attention to the amount and nature of the ruminations churning up in the American media and think tanks it would not be difficult to to fathom what could be simmering behind the closed doors of the White House and the Pentagon as the policy makers in these two latter places take their cues from two former sources.

To have a glimpse of what the Dark Vaders of American Empire could be brewing for Pakistan and in which way things are heading for Pakistanis, just read the follong op-ed piece that appeared way back, November 18, 2007, in the New York Times: The writers of the piece are Frederick W. Kagan, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and Michael O’Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution.



Pakistan’s Collapse, Our Problem

AS the government of Pakistan totters, we must face a fact: the United States simply could not stand by as a nuclear-armed Pakistan descended into the abyss. Nor would it be strategically prudent to withdraw our forces from an improving situation in Iraq to cope with a deteriorating one in Pakistan. We need to think — now — about our feasible military options in Pakistan, should it really come to that.

We do not intend to be fear mongers. Pakistan’s officer corps and ruling elites remain largely moderate and more interested in building a strong, modern state than in exporting terrorism or nuclear weapons to the highest bidder. But then again, Americans felt similarly about the shah’s regime in Iran until it was too late.

Moreover, Pakistan’s intelligence services contain enough sympathizers and supporters of the Afghan Taliban, and enough nationalists bent on seizing the disputed province of Kashmir from India, that there are grounds for real worries.

The most likely possible dangers are these: a complete collapse of Pakistani government rule that allows an extreme Islamist movement to fill the vacuum; a total loss of federal control over outlying provinces, which splinter along ethnic and tribal lines; or a struggle within the Pakistani military in which the minority sympathetic to the Taliban and Al Qaeda try to establish Pakistan as a state sponsor of terrorism.

All possible military initiatives to avoid those possibilities are daunting. With 160 million people, Pakistan is more than five times the size of Iraq. It would take a long time to move large numbers of American forces halfway across the world. And unless we had precise information about the location of all of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons and materials, we could not rely on bombing or using Special Forces to destroy them.

The task of stabilizing a collapsed Pakistan is beyond the means of the United States and its allies. Rule-of-thumb estimates suggest that a force of more than a million troops would be required for a country of this size. Thus, if we have any hope of success, we would have to act before a complete government collapse, and we would need the cooperation of moderate Pakistani forces.

One possible plan would be a Special Forces operation with the limited goal of preventing Pakistan’s nuclear materials and warheads from getting into the wrong hands. Given the degree to which Pakistani nationalists cherish these assets, it is unlikely the United States would get permission to destroy them. Somehow, American forces would have to team with Pakistanis to secure critical sites and possibly to move the material to a safer place.

For the United States, the safest bet would be shipping the material to someplace like New Mexico; but even pro-American Pakistanis would be unlikely to cooperate. More likely, we would have to settle for establishing a remote redoubt within Pakistan, with the nuclear technology guarded by elite Pakistani forces backed up (and watched over) by crack international troops. It is realistic to think that such a mission might be undertaken within days of a decision to act. The price for rapid action and secrecy, however, would probably be a very small international coalition.

A second, broader option would involve supporting the core of the Pakistani armed forces as they sought to hold the country together in the face of an ineffective government, seceding border regions and Al Qaeda and Taliban assassination attempts against the leadership. This would require a sizable combat force — not only from the United States, but ideally also other Western powers and moderate Muslim nations.

Even if we were not so committed in Iraq and Afghanistan, Western powers would need months to get the troops there. Fortunately, given the longstanding effectiveness of Pakistan’s security forces, any process of state decline probably would be gradual, giving us the time to act.

So, if we got a large number of troops into the country, what would they do? The most likely directive would be to help Pakistan’s military and security forces hold the country’s center — primarily the region around the capital, Islamabad, and the populous areas like Punjab Province to its south.

We would also have to be wary of internecine warfare within the Pakistani security forces. Pro-American moderates could well win a fight against extremist sympathizers on their own. But they might need help if splinter forces or radical Islamists took control of parts of the country containing crucial nuclear materials. The task of retaking any such regions and reclaiming custody of any nuclear weapons would be a priority for our troops.

If a holding operation in the nation’s center was successful, we would probably then seek to establish order in the parts of Pakistan where extremists operate. Beyond propping up the state, this would benefit American efforts in Afghanistan by depriving terrorists of the sanctuaries they have long enjoyed in Pakistan’s tribal and frontier regions.

The great paradox of the post-cold war world is that we are both safer, day to day, and in greater peril than before. There was a time when volatility in places like Pakistan was mostly a humanitarian worry; today it is as much a threat to our basic security as Soviet tanks once were. We must be militarily and diplomatically prepared to keep ourselves safe in such a world. Pakistan may be the next big test.