Grand Trunk Road

Remember back in class six when you had to spend hours writing précis of boring English passages that should never have been written in the first place? I felt like writing a précis of this op-ed by famous Israeli historian Benny Morris, in the NYT simply because the full impact of the craziness of his argument is best evident in 300 words or less.

1. The primary assumption defining Morris’ argument is hidden deep within page 2 of the article. He considers the regime in Iran to be so crazy, so devoid of the collective sense of self-preservation, that compared to it, the Kremlin of the Cold War was “moderate”. Thus, the concept of deterrence, which even my cat with a brain the size of a walnut can understand through my judicious threats of using a spray bottle on him, is useless when it comes to Iran¹

2. As a result of this premise, Morris states that there is a universal consensus in Israel that a conventional attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities is necessary within 4-7 months.

3. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee that Israel, which does not possess the weapons or intelligence capability of the US (which, Morris reproachfully states, is being too “ambivalent” about Iran), will actually be able to successfully wipe out Iran’s arsenal.

4. Therefore, the world should just hope that Israel is successful because otherwise, there is almost certainly going to be a nuclear conflict in the Middle East.

Conclusion: Israel is like a really, really bad chess player. You know the kind that gets checkmated while planning a really stupid attack based on the premise that his opponent is mentally retarded or seriously unhinged. But somehow you know it’s still going to be ok for the US and Israel, because they, the Pakistan army, and your annoying little cousin, are the only players who get to whine and “take back” all their moves and still win in the end.

¹This is a really interesting topic by itself and is related to the belief that modern Islamic societies are just a collective version of a suicide bomber.

I’ just watched this interview of American attorney Zachary Katz Nelson, who is currently visiting Pakistan to convince the government to lodge a protest with the US government and demand the return of its 7 citizens who are currently being held in Guantanamo Bay without charge and without trial. Talat Hussain asks some very good questions as usual and the story of Nelson’s Pakistani defendant Saifullah Paracha, who, along with his son, have been imprisoned since 2004, is an awful one. Apparently Paracha, who requires open heart surgery, asked the doctor assigned to him whether he considered Paracha a patient first or an enemy first. The doctor replied that he considered him to be an enemy first. After his surgery, if it were to take place, Paracha would be kept shackled to a hospital bed for 24 hours a day, despite the fact that open heart surgery requires some amount of mild exercise in order for the patient to make a full recovery. Paracha was captured by the CIA at the airport while he was on a business trip to Thailand. His family was never informed of his capture and for a long time he was simply another name in the ranks of Pakistan’s many missing persons.

There is a very good op-ed in The News by Rahimullah Yusufzai about the future of the peace process in FATA following the policy outlined in the summit meeting on the issue which was attended by the four major coalition parties: PPP, PML-N, ANP and JI (Rather tellingly the MQM was not invited). At this meeting it was re-iterated that the use of force would only be a last resort and instead, a multi-pronged strategy with dialogue as its central feature would be utilized. Like many, Yusufzai sees it as a very good sign that this policy has been outlined with the full input of parliament rather than unelected advisors or generals:

Three, there must be guarantors to ensure monitoring and implementation of peace accords that may be concluded as a result of the negotiations-based policy. There must be punitive measures for violations of the terms of the peace agreements. This could include imposing fine, handing over tribal supporters of the militants to the authorities and depositing guns, all usual measures in keeping with the riwaj, or tribal traditions in FATA. It is true the government would have to gain a position of strength to ensure that peace accords are implemented in letter and spirit and violators are punished. Past peace accords largely favoured the militants because the government’s weak writ in the tribal areas and some settled districts made it incapable to win a better deal or demand adherence to the terms of the agreement.

On a related note, here is Pakistan’s foreign minister Mahmoud Qureshi being interviewed on Al-Jazeera. The interviewer repeatedly asks him some tough questions about whether Pakistan is enabling the terrorists by conducting peace talks with them. His first response is the rather technical one that the government is actually conducting peace talks with the tribal leaders (which isn’t strictly true, tribal leaders are being used as intermediaries to negotiate with terrorist groups); his second response is that experience has shown the Pakistani government that the use of military force cannot be the only strategy and that the new government is engaged in a more comprehensive policy:

I found this perfect little quote from a New York Times article via IOZ:

“For me it doesn’t matter that he’s black or his name is Hussein,” said Ahmed Amin, 34, as he drank a beer in a downtown Cairo bar. “He’s an American, and so I disagree with most of what he says about the Arab world. I mean, Condoleezza Rice was black and poor, and she still invaded Iraq.”

I’m not putting it up here to show how much I hate American politicians. I’m putting it up because it stresses something that I’ve been thinking about for the last two months the importance of which Pakistani liberals are forgetting at an alarming rate: The US and Pakistan do not have common interests. Somewhere, deep beneath the bullshit of the Pakistan Army’s crazy geopolitical ambitions which have been riding on the back of US ambitions since 1947, there is a set of interests that belong to the Pakistani people. And fighting the US-led, going-nowhere war on terror goes directly against them. We cannot afford to treat the people of the tribal areas as global terrorists. They are a part of our country that, as a direct result of our army and army-led government’s policies, has collapsed and they should be treated as such, not co-opted into an amorphous brigade of global enemies of freedom.

History is written by the winners. That’s why the Criminal Tribes Act of 1871 (restricted to parts of North India) and subsequently 1911 (covering the whole of India) passed by the British doesn’t even have a Wikipedia entry about it.

The Hurs of Sindh were the last tribe declared to be a criminal tribe by the British in 1943-4. This Dawn article[1] describes a recent talk given by former IG Sindh Aftab about Sibghatullah Shah — the current Pir Pagara’s father — and his insurgency against the British.

“The British, through repressive legislation, labelled the Hurs a ‘criminal tribe.’ This was a common practice that existed throughout India. The British labelled numerous tribes ‘criminal’ for not toeing their line. However, the Hur rebellion was crushed with an iron hand,” said Mr Nabi.”

He said the first anti-British insurgency was of Bachu Badshah and Peeru Wazir. Peeru had challenged British dominance and fell in a fight to the death with the colonialists. Thereafter the Criminal Tribes Act was passed. This draconian law forced the Hurs to remain in concentration camp-like settlements where the men could go out and work in the fields, but the women and children were forbidden to leave. “The conditions were horrible. They were denied even the most basic of necessities,” Aftab Nabi said.

Here’s an article from Time magazine written in 1942 called Pir’s Hurs[2]. It’s worth reading for its tone. An example:

“The Hurs do not believe in passive resistance. So last week the British clamped down martial law in the Hurs’ part of the frontier province of Sind.

All the Hurs had asked was the release of their hero and chief, Pir of Pagaro, from a British jail. They had asked it as well as they knew how, couching their demands in terms of 1) robbery, 2) murder, 3) assorted violence, including the derailing of several express trains.

Pir is only 34, a little pock-marked and addicted to sadism, but a man after the Hurs’ hearts. They are a cattle-grazing tribe of some 100,000, whose poor homeland of sand, scrub jungles and marshes has made them perverse.”

Ultimately, the Pir was hanged by the British and was buried in the remote Astola Island, off the coast of Balochistan.

Here’s another article from Time, entitled 4,500,000 Criminals[3] this time from 1952 on the occasion of the state of UP repealing the Criminal Tribes Act. They still haven’t abandoned that tone. An illustration:

“In ancient India, every small potentate had his private army of spies and muscle men. When the Grand Moguls conquered the country in the 16th century, they gradually dethroned these minor rulers. Their henchmen, out of jobs, turned into gangsters and racketeers whose franchise on India’s crime has lasted to the present day. Their estimated number: 4,500,000.”

and

“Later, criminal tribesmen were given a chance to reform. Many settlements were placed in the care of the Salvation Army, various missions and philanthropic organizations. Children were sent to school, taught useful trades. This work was carried on after India became independent. Last week the state of Uttar Pradesh, following the example of Bombay and Madras, repealed the Criminal Tribes Act, thus freeing all but a small percentage of India’s criminal tribesmen from their semi-prison existence.”

The authorities were under no illusion that they had abolished the tribes’ preference for ancestral occupations; but with the stigma of hereditary crime removed, they hoped to convince the tribes eventually that crime does not pay.

So we learn that these people were rounded up into some of the modern world’s first concentration camps so that they could be convinced that crime doesn’t pay!

Dr. Meena Radhakrishna, a social anthropologist from Delhi has done research on the Criminal Tribes act and has written a book “Dishonoured by History” which is available in limited preview form on Google Books[4]. The book contains a study of the case of the Yerukala tribe of South India. You might have noticed the Salvation Army mentioned in the paragraph from the Time magazine article. According to Dr. Radhakrishna, the Salvation Army was instrumental in helping to forcibly settle the Yerukala tribe, soon after they were declared a criminal tribe in 1911, in a settlement known as Stuartpuram to work land that was too infertile to provide them with a livelihood. Here, the children were separated from the parents and only allowed to see them on Sundays since the Salvation Army deemed that the “rising generation” would do better without the wicked influence of their parents. Ultimately, they began to work in a nearby tobacco factory where their descendants work to this day.

The saddest part of Radhakrishna’s book was her account of her visit to Stuartpuram settlement ten years prior to writing her book. The Yerukala were still working in the tobacco factory and the Salvation Army was still around, running a hospital and schools. She noticed that the members of the tribe would sing in their spare time but their songs were all about how the Salvation Army had saved them from a life of criminality. They all vehemently denied that they had ever been a nomadic tribe. It seems that she later traced the origin of their songs to songs that had appeared in the newsletter of the Salvation Army. She reproduced one such song called “The Crim as We Find Him in the Telegu (sic) Community” and it started something like this:

Come listen to me for a moment or more
For I am a ‘crim’, yes I am a ‘crim’
There are records against me, yes more than a score,
I belong to the criminal kind.

[1] Qasim A. Moini. The turbulent life and times of Sibghatullah Shah. Dawn. June 17, 2008.
[2] Pir’s Hurs. TIME Magazine. June 15, 1942.
[3] 4,500,000 Criminals. TIME Magazine. Sept. 15, 1952.
[4] Meena Radhakrishna. Dishonoured by History: “criminal Tribes” and British Colonial Policy. Chapter 5-6. Orient Longman. 2001.

One of the most alarming things to have come out of the public response to the Bara Operation is the unwillingness of the non-Pashtun Pakistani public to attempt to understand the root causes of the FATA insurgency. In her column “Durand Line & geopolitics” Zeenia Satti makes the point that the US’s lumping together of the Taliban on either side of the border has been an attempt to “isolate the population from the insurgents by identifying them with a discredited group.” This has been especially effective among the more secular Pakistanis who are already frightened, to the point of irrationality, by the Taliban threat. They are unable to separate their fear of Talibanization from an instinctive desire to react to this threat militarily. In their haste for a military solution to the problem to simply make it “go away” they have failed to consider the complexities of the relationship between Pakistan’s military/ISI and the militant groups in the region. Logical thinking can only show that the Pakistan Army, given its long and twisted history with the Taliban, is the group that should be trusted the least when it comes to dealing with the tribal areas. Instead, the federal government has given the army carte blanche for handling the situation and the local NWFP government is completely silent on the issue, thereby permanently damaging its credibility in the eyes of the NWFP population.

In this column in The Post, Arif Yousafzai says this:

PESHAWAR: Taliban at the gate, Taliban are taking over Peshawar, militants have tightened noose around provincial capital, Peshawar could fall to followers of Mulla Umer and Osama and Islamists could establish its rule in NWFP by taking control of Peshawar.

These are some of the phrases appearing in both print and electronic media these days aimed at paving way for another full-fledged military operation on the bleeding Pakhtoon soil

I might as well warn you in advance that Yousafzai would be instantly discredited by a more secular Pakistani by the following statement in his column (”No one could dispute the fact that Taliban established complete peace in the war-shattered Afghanistan during their five-year in rule.”), but I think his point of view and choice of words — bleeding Pakhtoon soil — are well worth emphasizing whether or not one sympathizes with the Afghan Taliban. How much longer can the rest of Pakistan afford to continue ignoring the security concerns of the residents of FATA and the rest of the NWFP resulting from the US/NATO occupation of Afghanistan; NATO’s incursions on FATA soil in search of high value targets; and the Pakistan army’s own operations in the region? The fact remains that despite the fear that the term “Taliban” inspires, the region is populated by Pakistanis and their concerns must be understood and dealt with realistically. Unless that is done, no amount of military operations are going to make the problem go away and it is becoming increasingly clear to all but the most rigid of ideologues that the military operations are only going to exacerbate the situation.

Nasim Zehra, in The News The Bara operation: anatomy of the response:

If the PML-N has announced its distance from, and perhaps differences over, the operation, the near-silence over the operation of the ANP, the lead party of the NWFP government, is intriguing. Despite the ANP chief minister’s participation in the June 25 pre-operation Islamabad meeting chaired by the prime minister, consistent coordination seems to be lacking between the ANP leadership and the federal government. For example, the prime minister’s brief airport chat in Peshawar on June 29, after the operation began, cannot substitute for sustained coordination. Even meetings between the ANP leadership and the representative of the federation, including NWFP governor Owais Ghani, advisor Rehman Malik and even the corps commander, does not translate into a common political message on the operation. With the recently set security-specific provincial coordination committee chaired by the governor and members, including the chief minister, the chief secretary and the corps commander, the federation and the province can speak with one voice.

Meanwhile, there is the media’s skepticism regarding the operation. While a popular television anchor concluded in his recent programme that 5,000 Taliban are delivering to the 20 million people in FATA and the NWFP what the people need, hence making it impossible for the entire world plus Pakistan, one of the world’s best armies, to defeat the Taliban. Another newspaper questioned the seriousness of the current operation, given that key militants like the chief of the Lashkar-e-Islami, Mangal Bagh, have been let off. In private conversations even key NWFP politicians question the efficacy of an operation which has been announced by the federal government as only a five-day operation. “Will they not disappear peacefully four, five days, and reappear after the operation end,” queried one of them.

The operation is also being criticised for undermining the Swat peace deal, although according to media reports peace in Swat is still missing. The political complexity of the current situation is illustrated by the ANP’s keenness to salvage the peace deal. The ANP insists this too must be given a chance.

This Dawn report is saying that Mangal Bagh is ready to negotiate with the authorities:

Meanwhile, Lashkar-i-Islam chief Mangal Bagh is reported to have contacted the political authorities and expressed willingness to resolve the issue through dialogue. Sources said that the administration was likely to initiate a political process at any stage.

Some more interesting quotes from today’s Dawn regarding the operation. From this story, detailing statements made by the interior ministry:

The ministry said that extensive consultations had been held at various levels and among the federal government, Fata secretariat and the NWFP government before launching the action in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas.

It said that the basic objective of the operation was to restore normalcy in Fata with minimum damage and without any collateral losses, adding that it would continue until all the objectives were achieved.

The ministry said the security forces advanced in accordance with their plan and no casualties took place on the third day of the operation.

and from this story about Kabul’s reponse:

“Afghanistan’s government welcomes in principle the military operation there,” US-installed Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s spokesman Homayun Hamidzada told journalists in Kabul.

“But we know this is not enough,” Hamidzada said, calling for an “expanded, serious and broad action against terrorist hideouts inside Pakistani soil.” The spokesman reiterated accusations that militants based in Pakistani tribal regions were crossing the border to launch attacks on Afghan and international forces

^*I believe there’s some ambiguity regarding the name of this military operation

This story by Iqbal Chaudhry in The Post claims that 124 security personnel have been kidnapped by Baitullah Mehsud’s men and 16 have been kidnapped by Mangal Bagh’s group. Major General Athar Abbas, the Army spokesperson, denies these reports (but that doesn’t mean much since he denies everything until it is undeniable).

There’s an excellent column in today’s News Durand Line & geopolitics by Zeenia Satti. Her recommendations hinge on Pakistan’s ability to enforce the border with Afghanistan which is a rather optimistic premise but the points she makes are excellent, especially these two:

The US intelligence seeks to shape political realities through political articulation. It seeks to isolate the population from the insurgents by identifying them as a discredited group. It also seeks the international community’s acquiescence in the insurgents’ massacre. Further, it triggers the resurgence of the Northern Alliance, which crystallised in 2006 as the “United Afghan National Front Opposition Group.” The northern warlords’ partnership with Karzai is insincere. He is considered a US puppet, just as the Taliban were considered Pakistani puppets. Karzai’s appeasement of the moderate Taliban makes the northerners dread a government dominated by undesirable Pakhtun elements, motivating the northerners’ reorganisation. Karzai’s presence and the hoax of Taliban resurgence create fissiparous fissures in Afghanistan, straining its nationalism. If Iraq is any example to go by, this tendency will intensify under US occupation.

and

There are no economic and political boundaries in FATA. Once such boundaries are established, ethnic identities will cease to exist as “autonomous” and will become “relational” instead. The politico-economic boundaries will define the Afghan and Pakistani Pakhtuns vis-à-vis each other. With the advent of rapid development through mining, the border citizens of Arizona began to identify themselves as Mexican Indians and American Indians vis-à-vis each other, whereas in the pre-development stage they looked upon each other as one. There is a consensus among anthropologists and sociologists that ethnic identities are not static but dynamic and are socially constructed and politically contingent.

Here is a really alarming article in the Nation about the fall in the production capacity of the public sector thermal power plants to 59 percent:

LAHORE - As the country is plunging deeper and deeper into energy crisis, the power generation capacity of public sector thermal power plants (Generation Companies) has been reduced to 59 per cent due to a number of factors, the most important being the aging aspect, as they are 23 to 33 years old.
Scores of technical issues including their poor maintenance are also contributing in their minimal performance, which has also led to increased fuel consumption. Experts believe that a time would come in the near future that they would not remain cost-effective, meaning thereby that they would be consuming more fuel and generating less electricity.
Sources said that on the average, the WAPDA’s thermal plants were generating a maximum of 1, 432 MW electricity by June 2008 as compared to 3588 MW in June 2006.

If you were wondering whether the Pakistan government had completely lost it yesterday with its announcement of a 31 percent increase in gas tariff yesterday, worry no more. Today, Dawn has this:

A ‘calculation/conversion error’ admitted by the federal government in announcing a Rs13 increase in price of compressed natural gas (CNG) could have earned gas stations windfall gains overnight, but consumers lost millions of rupees.

Officials woke up to the error some 20 hours late, issuing a ‘clarification’ late on Tuesday evening claiming that the “actual/intended” increase was Rs5.58 a kilogram.

UPDATE
This article in The Post goes into much more detail about the increase in gas tariffs. Gas users have been divided into 5 categories:

he first three categories are exempted from the rise in gas tariff while the fourth and fifth categories will pay 31 percent more on gas usage. The rates have been increased by 121 percent on the last two luxury categories. Rates for Tandoors (chapatti bakers) have been reduced to fit them into domestic categories, while the CNG filling stations will pay 33 percent higher rates, according to the notification.
[...]
OGRA (Oil and Gas Regulatory Authority) has also issued directives to the CNG filling station owners across the country to take back the decision regarding 13 rupees price hike per Kg, reported a private TV channel, adding that a strict action would be taken against those CNG filling station owners who violated the order.

So a point of confusion for me is: the filling stations are going to have to pay 33% higher taxes but will only pass on about 10% of those on to the consumers? Wow, that must make them pretty angry!