Bombing in Charsadda kills 34, exposes local rifts

Conflict within Waziristan is a reminder that not all Pashtuns are extremists

By Juan Cole

Police officials survey the site of a suicide bomb explosion in Charsadda, located about 20 km (12 miles) northeast of Peshawar November 10, 2009. Pakistani Taliban militants vowed to fight a tough, protracted guerrilla war against the army on Tuesday as a suicide car-bomber killed up to 20 people in a northwestern town, police said. A suicide bomber in a car set off explosives in a square in the centre of Charsadda killing up to 20 people and wounding at least 30, town police chief Riaz Khan said. REUTERS/K Parvez (PAKISTAN CONFLICT) (Credit: Reuters)

Topics:Pakistan, Afghanistan, Terrorism, Taliban

A suicide bomber detonated his payload in a market in Charsadda, a half hour drive northeast of Peshawar in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province. The Los Angeles Times quotes Prime Minister Yousuf Reza Gilani saying that the bombing was a desperate response to the success of the Pakistani army’s campaign against the Pakistani Taliban in South Waziristan.

Reuters has video.

The violence also has a local political significance. In the February 2008 parliamentary elections, the Awami National Party, a secular Pashtun party, became very popular and won the province. In the run-up to that victory, in January, 2008, hard line devotees of political Islam set off a bomb at an ANP rally in Charsadda that killed 20 persons. From 2003 until 2008, the North-West Frontier Province was ruled by the United Action Council (Urdu acronym MMA), a coalition of 6 small fundamentalist parties that included at least one party close to the Taliban, despite its willingness to sit on parliament under Gen. Pervez Musharraf.

: Salon contributor Juan Cole is a professor of modern Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan and the author of "Engaging the Muslim World." More Juan Cole

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In Washington, the Pakistan-bashers are having a field day avoiding U.S. responsibility

By Jordan Michael Smith

Protesters hold up a burning mock drone aircraft during a rally against drone attacks in Pakistan. (Credit: Reuters/K. Pervez)

Topics:Pakistan

If there is one thing Republican presidential candidates agree on, it’s the treachery of Pakistan. Rep. Michele Bachmann leads the pack. At last week’s GOP debate, she called Pakistan “violent” and “more than an existential threat” to the United States, because it is “a nation that lies, that does everything possible that you could imagine wrong.” Texas Gov. Rick Perry said Pakistan has “shown us time after time that they can’t be trusted.” He called for a cutoff of aid, a line that drew applause from the audience. Former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman said on Sunday that America might have to “look for a new partner in the region” and also suggested a cutoff in aid might be in order.

It is not only GOP leaders who are obsessed with Pakistan. “The Ally From Hell,” screams the cover of this month’s Atlantic. New York’s Democratic Rep. Gary Ackerman called Pakistan “perfidious” recently, saying the country was not an ally, a friend, a partner or a teammate. “Pakistan is on its own side, period,” Ackerman said at a House Subcommittee Hearing on Afghanistan and Pakistan.

One would think from all this talk that America’s behavior vis-à-vis Pakistan has been pure and good. But the reality could not be further from the self-righteous claims persistently emanating from Washington’s complainers. America has acted no better than Pakistan in the relationship, and may even have been the worse partner. Understanding the fury over NATO’s recent killing of 24 Pakistani soldiers requires a deeper look at the relationship.

Let’s begin near the beginning. Within days of the 9/11 attacks, then-Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage was deputized to meet with a Pakistani official. According to Pakistan’s then-President Pervez Musharraf, Armitage said that Pakistan, if it did not cooperate unconditionally with the United States, needed to be prepared to be “bombed backed to the stone age.”

Armitage was only reinforcing Secretary of State Colin Powell’s message to Musharraf, which included a list of demands, among them full use of Pakistani airspace, closure of its borders with Afghanistan, and use of its territory as a staging base. In return, Pakistan was granted loads of cash — and the pleasant experience of not being bombed back to the stone age.

“If the signals America gave Pakistan had been subtle, they would have been ignored,” says Anthony Cordesman, who frequently advises the U.S. government on the South Asia/Middle East region. Maybe so, but the ultimatum delivered to Pakistan established unrealistic expectations on what could be delivered. No understanding was made of Pakistan’s own interests. No attempt was made to consider Pakistani public opinion. Pakistan was not treated as an ally. It was treated as a vassal.

Had those endeavors been undertaken, Pakistan’s subsequent actions and double-talk might have been foreseen. For, while America might demand subservience and unqualified support for its campaign against al-Qaida and the Taliban, Pakistan has its own concerns. These include staying strong in a mortal struggle with India; reckoning with climate change (and the possibly related massive flooding); managing the uneasy tension between scores of different ethnic groups; and maintaining the difficult relationship between the powerful military and the civilian government.

Any arguments about Pakistan’s behavior that do not take these needs into consideration are incomplete at best. “To judge an ally by how it serves another nation’s interest at the expense of its own” is simply foolish, says Cordesman, a strategist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

And yet that is what consistently happens in the U.S. chattering classes. Pakistan is spoken about as if it is simply an empty land devoid of independent needs. Remarkably, Huntsman’s comments about Pakistan — he called it “merely a transactional relationship” — came the day after news of the NATO airstrikes. Something is deeply wrong with the foreign-policy conversation in Washington when Pakistan is reprimanded as a poor ally after 24 of its soldiers are killed by an American-led coalition.

Not that the deaths were unprecedented. The New America Foundation reports that 283 drone strikes in Northwest Pakistan from 2004 have killed somewhere between 1,717 and 2,680 individuals. It estimates a civilian fatality rate of 17 percent, even relying on the dubious press accounts that often describe almost anyone as a “militant.” While these deaths usually get short shrift in the American media, that is not the case in Pakistan.

“American foreign policy has created a fragile situation in Pakistan,” reads a recent blog post by a contributor to Dawn, a Pakistani daily. “Pakistan’s participation in this so called ‘War on Terror’ has shaken its foundations to the core.” On the website of the News International, the largest English paper in Pakistan, all five of the most-commented articles deal with NATO’s attack on the Pakistan soldiers.

Most commenters support the words of Pakistan’s prime minister, who warned after the attack that it would be “no more business as usual” in Pakistan’s dealings with the United States. NATO’s most recent mistake has magnified the problem, but America’s territorial incursions into Pakistan resulting in civilian deaths routinely dominate the media. In Pakistan, America is the ally from hell.

Now it should make more sense why members of the Pakistani military might not have informed Americans of Osama bin Laden’s presence: They did not want U.S. incursions on their territory.

Violating Pakistan’s sovereignty is only part of the problem. Pakistan is so deeply divided that forcing it to kowtow to American wishes naturally stirs up nationalist resentments that undermine the country’s stability. In his new book, “Pakistan: A Hard Country,” the journalist Anatol Lieven writes that U.S. pressure is one of the few things that can actually jeopardize Pakistan’s stability. Pakistan is not the failed state media commentators make it out to be, Lieven writes, but U.S. pressure threatens to make it so.

“No conceivable short-term gains in the Western campaign in Afghanistan or the ‘war on terror’ could compensate for the vastly increased threats to the region and the world that would stem from Pakistan’s collapse,” Leiven writes. And yet short-term gains are the focus of almost all of American commentary on Pakistan, and much of American policy.

Much, but not all. There is reason to believe that a good chunk of U.S. official fulminations against Pakistan’s perfidy are for show. “In my experience, they are all too well aware” of Pakistan’s limited ability to act as we want it to, “even if they are not going to state it publicly,” says Cordesman, who has worked for the Departments of Defense and State, and on NATO’s international staff.

A December 2009 cable from WikiLeaks supports Cordesman’s view. Sent by then-Ambassador to Pakistan Anne Patterson to the State Department in 2009, the cable argues that drones are effective in killing al-Qaida henchmen, but will not succeed in entirely eliminating the terrorist group’s leadership. In the meantime, “Increased unilateral operations in these areas risk destabilizing the Pakistan state, alienating both the civilian government and military leadership, and provoking a broader governance crisis within Pakistan without finally achieving the goal [of eliminating the al-Qaida and Taliban leadership].”

Destabilizing Pakistan is the worst option of all. It is a large nation with nuclear weapons, situated between Afghanistan, China, India and Iran, with a sizable contingent of anti-American sentiment. Few things should be more disturbing to American minds than the prospect of Pakistani disintegration.

And yet that is exactly what the hawks who so loudly denounced Pakistan’s perfidy risk achieving. Remember that the next time you hear about the country’s halfhearted support for American operations in the region. Better to be halfhearted than half-brained.

: Jordan Michael Smith writes about U.S. foreign policy for Salon. He has written for the New York Times, Boston Globe and Washington Post. More Jordan Michael Smith

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After a young man sets himself on fire to protest living conditions, the nation's response is muted

By Suzanna Koster, GlobalPost

Pakistan's opposition lawmakers rally outside the parliament in Islamabad, Pakistan, Thursday, Oct, 6. 2011 (Credit: AP)

Topics:GlobalPost, Pakistan, Arab Spring

This article originally appeared on GlobalPost.

HAJI SAINDAD RIND, Pakistan — It could have been an Arab Spring moment. Taking an apparent cue from the young Tunisian who, tired of the poverty in which he lived, set himself on fire and launched a protest movement around the world, Raja Khan, 23, went to Pakistan’s parliament late last month and did the same.

But in a country where poverty and unemployment is more a norm than an exception, the reaction has been muted.

Police in Islamabad said Khan left a note to say he couldn’t bear to live in such condition anymore. On the day of his burial, his 20-year-old wife, Najma, gave birth to their third son.

“He said, ‘I am taking fuel with me and I’m going to set myself on fire.’ I said, ‘please, don’t do this, for the sake of your children.’ I begged him, ‘don’t do this for the sake of God. Think of me. Who will take care of me if you are gone?’ But he didn’t listen,” Najma said, sitting outside her simple brick house, while her brothers wiped away her tears.

The number of Pakistanis that commit suicide because of poverty is on the rise, said I.A. Rehman, director of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, though exact figures are not available.

Rehman received 1,580 reports of suicides in the first nine months of this year, compared to 1,668 cases in all of 2009. Human rights activists said that Pakistanis often avoid reporting suicide because under Pakistani law, survivors can face a jail sentence and fine. It is also considered a sin in Islam.

“There is an increase because more and more people are falling below the poverty line. Secondly, we also know that the unemployment rate is increasing,” he said.

Poverty can also fuel militancy, according to Feriha Peracha, the director of Sabaoon, a boarding school that aims to de-radicalize former Taliban members.

“Your needs are not met. You don’t want to go to school because you have to earn a living. Otherwise, how do you feed yourself that day? So they drop out and they’re picked up [by the Taliban],” she said.

But Rehman warns that the link between poverty and militancy is often exaggerated.

“It’s not poverty only. Not all militants are very poor. This view is supported by a survey conducted in 2009 among 6,000 Pakistanis. They found that poor Pakistanis disliked militants about two times more than middle class Pakistanis.

According to government figures, unemployment in July this year was 6 percent, compared to 5.6 percent last year. But the study counts anyone who worked at least one hour in the week before the survey was taken as employed; so many think the number could actually be much higher.

Same goes for the number of Pakistanis that live below the poverty line. Officially it is one third of the population, but in reality it is much higher, said Zaffar Moeen Nasir, chief of research at the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics.

Pakistan suffers from inflation and foreign investors stay away because of an unstable political, security and infrastructural environment. The energy crisis is the most striking example. At least three days a week Pakistan’s main industry, the textile sector, comes to a standstill, because gas cannot be supplied, according to industry officials.

“People cannot work in the factories full time anymore or are laid off. So there is a decline in production, which means a decline in the earnings of workers,” Rehman said.

Even with normal working hours, however, many Pakistanis are unable to earn enough to support their families, and are driven to suicide as a result, said Khalid Mehmood, director of the Labor Education Foundation.

Khan desperately hunted for jobs for years, his relatives said. He left school when he was 15-years old. As the eldest son he became responsible for the income of his family. His father no longer works, one brother is sick and the other is unemployed. When he married Najma and had two sons, now 5- and 3-years old, the pressure to provide a proper income increased. The only work he found was as a day laborer on the agricultural fields for about 20 cents a day, when there was work to be had.

When in 2008 national elections brought the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) to power, Khan, whose family is an avid supporter of the party, was convinced he would finally land a job. He asked provincial lawmakers and party officials in Islamabad for a job and even went on a hunger strike. Last February, a PPP-leader in the capital gave him a letter requesting a provincial minister to induct Khan’s wife into the police force. It all resulted in nothing.

And so, at the end of October, Khan went to Pakistan’s national parliament, the only place where he knew people would be more influential than those he had already contacted. Before he left he asked Ali Jan, a 24-year-old cousin, for advice.

“I told him, ‘don’t go to Islamabad because your efforts will be in vain.’ But Khan said, ‘no, I’m poor, I’m worried and I have to go.’” Khan didn’t meet any lawmakers, Jan said. “He only met with security officials at the gate of the parliament.”

Khan is from a dusty village, a 7-hour drive from Pakistan’s financial capital, Karachi. Villagers here say most people can read and write, but they work in the fields on the land of a feudal landlord. Many of Khan’s cousins have finished at least part of their high school education.

Khan’s mother, father, brothers, wife and children stay in a room in a compound shared by other relatives. In the courtyard are goats and buffalo the family says are rented against half the milk they produce. Water pumps in the houses provide for clean drinking water, which Khan’s family calls “the only gift from God.” There is a television, washing machine and fans on the ceiling. Some of the residents carry mobile phones. Electricity runs for about 12 hours a day.

In Pakistan, Khan’s family is considered lower middle class. And it is among this group of people where the most suicides occur, Rehman said.

“Poverty is a matter of feeling also. One may be poor and conscious of it. This consciousness comes from a certain level of education and exposure to urban life. Raja Khan knew of the parliament. An ordinary villager would not even know of Islamabad nor have the means to travel there. For him, the state is the local police and the economic benefactor is the landlord.”

Najma finds it hard to reconcile the idea that just one job could have saved her husband.

“If the government had given him a job, even in the lowest grade possible, I would not have become a widow,” she said.

: More Suzanna Koster

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The Atlantic Magazine's celebration of Washington's power elite culminates in a pleasant father-daughter chat

By Alex Pareene

Former Vice President Dick Cheney, accompanied by his daughter Liz, addresses the Washington Ideas Forum on Thursday. (Credit: AP/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

Topics:Dick Cheney, Foreign policy, Pakistan, Interviews, War Room, International relations, Liz Cheney, Atlantic Media Company, Henry Kissinger, Cheney

This week, the Atlantic Media Co. held its “Washington Ideas Forum,” one of many regular events held for Washington’s political elite to gather and congratulate themselves for having so many ideas. The Atlantic — which also publishes a monthly magazine, I’m told — throws these pricey orgies of self-regard each year, in Washington and Aspen. One of the big “ideas” presented at this year’s forum was actually a pretty old one: that no matter how awful and criminal certain people’s behavior is in office, they will never, ever be kicked out of the Washington elite.

: Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene

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President Obama's former National Intelligence Director makes the case that drones are counter-productive

By Glenn Greenwald

Pakistani belief about drones: perceptive or paranoid?

Topics:Pakistan

Two weeks ago, President Obama’s former Director of National Intelligence, Adm. Dennis Blair, excoriated the White House for its reliance on drones in multiple Muslim nations, pointing out, as Politico put it, that those attacks “are fueling anti-American sentiment and undercutting reform efforts in those countries.” Blair said: ”we’re alienating the countries concerned, because we’re treating countries just as places where we go attack groups that threaten us.” Blair has an Op-Ed today in The New York Times making a similar argument with a focus on Pakistan, though he uses a conspicuously strange point to make his case:

Qaeda officials who are killed by drones will be replaced. The group’s structure will survive and it will still be able to inspire, finance and train individuals and teams to kill Americans. Drone strikes hinder Qaeda fighters while they move and hide, but they can endure the attacks and continue to function.

Moreover, as the drone campaign wears on, hatred of America is increasing in Pakistan. American officials may praise the precision of the drone attacks. But in Pakistan, news media accounts of heavy civilian casualties are widely believed. Our reliance on high-tech strikes that pose no risk to our soldiers is bitterly resented in a country that cannot duplicate such feats of warfare without cost to its own troops.

Though he obviously knows the answer, Blair does not say whether this widespread Pakistani perception about civilian casualties is based in fact; if anything, he insinuates that this “belief” is grounded in the much-discussed affection which Pakistanis allegedly harbor for fabricated anti-American conspiracy theories. While the Pakistani perception is significant unto itself regardless of whether it’s accurate — the belief about drones is what fuels anti-American hatred — it’s nonetheless bizarre to mount an anti-drone argument while relegating the impact of civilian deaths to mere “belief,” all while avoiding informing readers what the actual reality is. Discussions of the innocent victims of American military violence is one of the great taboos in establishment circles; that Blair goes so far out of his way to avoid discussing it highlights how potent that taboo is.

Last month, I interviewed Chris Woods of the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which had just published a report conclusively documenting the falsity of John Brennan’s public claim that “in the last year, ‘there hasn’t been a single collateral death‘” from U.S. drone attacks. Last week, the Bureau published an even more detailed report focusing on the number of Pakistani children killed by American drone attacks:

The Bureau has identified credible reports of 168 children killed in seven years of CIA drone strikes in Pakistan’s tribal areas. These children would account for 44% of the minimum figure of 385 civilians reported killed by the attacks. . . .

The highest number of child deaths occurred during the Bush presidency, with 112 children reportedly killed. More than a third of all Bush drone strikes appear to have resulted in the deaths of children. . . . President Obama, too, has been as Commander-in-Chief responsible for many child deaths in Pakistan. The Bureau has identified 56 children reported killed in drone strikes during his presidency . . . .

The report indicates that the number of Pakistani children dying from drone attacks has decreased substantially over the past several months — since September, 2010, when one man’s son, two daughters and nephew were all killed by a single U.S. strike — but such deaths nonetheless continue (including one in April of this year, in which a 12-year-old boy, Atif, was killed). These facts make John Brennan’s blatant lie particularly disgusting: it’s one thing to kill children using remote-controlled weaponized air robots in a country in which we’re not formally at war, but it’s another thing entirely to stand up in public and deny that it is happening.

In several ways, the Bureau’s study significantly understates the extent of U.S.-caused civilian deaths in the region. As Woods told me, the Bureau uses such a rigorous methodology — counting civilian deaths only when they can be definitively confirmed up to and including the victims’ names — that some deaths almost certainly go uncounted in the notoriously inaccessible Waziristan region. Other credible reports provide an even starker assessment of the number of innocents killed. Moreover, this latest report from the Bureau counts only child deaths, not those of innocent adult men and women in Pakistan, nor does it discuss the large number of civilian deaths from drones outside of Pakistan (Yemen, Libya, Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq), nor the U.S.-caused deaths of civilians from means other than drones (such as the “amazing number” of innocents killed at checkpoints in Afghanistan).

Adm. Blair’s Op-Ed may have had a much greater impact had it included a discussion of these facts, rather than implying that the problem with American drone attacks is Pakistani paranoia. That’s precisely why the Op-Ed — like most discussions in establishment venues of this topic — didn’t include those facts.

* * * * *

Thanks so much to Yves Smith, Maz Hussain, and Mark Adomanis for providing such stimulating and enlightening discussions during my absence last week. Filling in for a writer is not easy, as I learned when I did it for Digby way back in early 2006, very soon after I began writing about politics. You try to maintain your own voice and focus while realizing that you’re writing for someone else’s readership with its own pre-existing set of interests and expectations. All three did a superb job of balancing those considerations and it made my week off more enjoyable knowing that excellent content was being provided. You can continue reading Yves at her Naked Capitalism blog, Maz on his blog and on Twitter, and Mark on his Forbes blog and on Twitter.

: Follow Glenn Greenwald on Twitter: @ggreenwald. More Glenn Greenwald

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The Obama administration says a year of drone strikes in Pakistan killed zero civilians; outside experts disagree

By Justin Elliott

In this Aug. 23, 2010 photo provided by photographer Noor Behram, a man holds debris from a missile strike in North Waziristan, Pakistan. A gallery in London is staging an exhibit of photographs taken by a Pakistani photographer allegedly showing innocent civilians killed by U.S. drone missile strikes in Pakistan's tribal region along the Afghan border, the organizers said Monday. Noor Behram, a 39-year-old photographer who has worked with several international news agencies, has spent the last three years photographing the aftermath of drone strikes in North and South Waziristan, important sanctuaries for al-Qaida and Taliban militants in Pakistan. He said he has managed to reach around 60 attack sites, and the exhibit that opens Tuesday at the Beaconsfield gallery in London features photographs from 28 of those strikes. (AP Photo/Noor Behram,HO) (Credit: AP)

Topics:Pakistan, War Room

Based on international and Pakistani news reports and research on the ground, the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism has issued a new study on civilians killed by American drones, concluding that at least 385 civilians have been killed in the past seven years, including at least 168 children.

Here’s a taste of the report, which can be read in full here (warning: graphic images):

Pakistani father Din Mohammad had the misfortune to live next door to militants in Danda Darpakhel, North Waziristan. His neighbours were reportedly part of the Haqqani Network, a group fighting US forces in nearby Afghanistan.

On September 8 2010, the CIA’s Reaper drones paid a visit. Hellfire missiles tore into the compound killing six alleged militants.

One of the Hellfires missed its target, and Din Mohammad’s house was hit. He survived. But his son, his two daughters and his nephew all died. His eldest boy had been a student at a Waziristan military cadet college. The other three children were all below school age.

An Obama administration official told ABC that these numbers are “way off the mark” — but, tellingly, did so on the condition of anonymity, meaning he or she will be protected from any accountability.

Meanwhile, the New York Times’ Scott Shane has an important article reviewing the same issue and in particular Obama counterterrorism adviser John Brennan’s claim in June that for the previous year CIA drone strikes hadn’t caused “a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop.” Shane finds that basically every outside observer — including those of all ideological stripes — finds this claim to be preposterous:

Others who question the C.I.A. claim include strong supporters of the drone program like Bill Roggio, editor of The Long War Journal, who closely tracks the strikes.

“The Taliban don’t go to a military base to build bombs or do training,” Mr. Roggio said. “There are families and neighbors around. I believe the people conducting the strikes work hard to reduce civilian casualties. They could be 20 percent. They could be 5 percent. But I think the C.I.A.’s claim of zero civilian casualties in a year is absurd.”

Brennan issued a new statement to the Times suggesting that the CIA has merely “not found credible evidence of collateral deaths” from the drone strikes:

“Fortunately, for more than a year, due to our discretion and precision, the U.S. government has not found credible evidence of collateral deaths resulting from U.S. counterterrorism operations outside of Afghanistan or Iraq, and we will continue to do our best to keep it that way,” Mr. Brennan said.

Given that the drones are operated remotely, it’s far from clear how the CIA even knows who is being killed in many of these strikes.