No way to win a war – still

The more closely one looks at the attacks by US drones in Pakistan, Afghanistan and elsewhere the more ghastly and counterproductive they become.  One of the latest reports in the mainstream media is a Mail Online piece for Sunday 20 October which, under the headline CIA chiefs face arrest over horrific evidence of bloody ‘video game’ sorties by drone pilots, begins:

The Mail on Sunday today reveals shocking new evidence of the full horrific impact of US drone attacks in Pakistan.

A damning dossier assembled from exhaustive research into the strikes’ targets sets out in heartbreaking detail the deaths of teachers, students and Pakistani policemen. It also describes how bereaved relatives are forced to gather their loved ones’ dismembered body parts in the aftermath of strikes.

The dossier has been assembled by human rights lawyer Shahzad Akbar, who works for Pakistan’s Foundation for Fundamental Rights and the British human rights charity Reprieve.

Filed in two separate court cases, it is set to trigger a formal murder investigation by police into the roles of two US officials said to have ordered the strikes. They are Jonathan Banks, former head of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Islamabad station, and John A. Rizzo, the CIA’s former chief lawyer. Mr Akbar and his staff have already gathered further testimony which has yet to be filed.

The paper goes on to say

According to a report last month by academics at Stanford and New York universities, between 2,562 and 3,325 people have been killed since the strikes in Pakistan began in 2004.

The report said of those, up to 881 were civilians, including 176 children. Only 41 people who had died had been confirmed as ‘high-value’ terrorist targets.

Read the full report here.

  
The US certainly doesn’t learn fast how easily the capability of its drones can be misused and how counterproductive it can be. In No way to win a war (May 2011) I reported on the tragic tale of how an American Predator drone crew working out of an air force base in Nevada managed to convince itself that a convoy of three Afghan vehicles and a pickup truck heading along a dirt road in a remote region 200 miles southwest of Kabul was a group of insurgents, deploy Kiowa helicopters onto the convoy, and carry out a lethal assault on the vehicles.

It was a tale of a disastrous lack of cultural awareness: when the convoy stopped at dawn for the participants to disembark for prayer, this was taken as a key indicator that the members were Taliban. It was also, to my mind, a tale of a desperate desire for this to be a Taliban convoy, born perhaps of the sheer boredom of driving a surveillance drone day after day, looking for something out of the ordinary that might be a legitimate target.

That episode ended with General Stanley McChrystal, then the top US commander in Afghanistan, apologizing to President Hamid Karzai and issuing letters of reprimand to four senior and two junior officers in Afghanistan, and the Air Force visiting undisclosed punishment on the Predator crew, but none of that brings the dead back to life and it does not seem that the basic problem of over-reliance on technology, accompanied by an attendant capacity to shrug off “collateral damage” in the form of loss of non-American life, has ever been or will ever be addressed.

Unfortunately the legal process in contemplation depends upon an international arrest warrant being issued against the two Americans through Interpol, based upon a judgment in a Pakistani court.  I find it hard to imagine them ever facing a day of reckoning; they will be regarded in their own country as patriots doing their duty, and I am sure their Commander-in-Chief, who says he personally approves all the targets, will find a way to protect them. It seems inevitable that the “War on Terror” will blunder on in its bloody, hyper-technical, counterproductive way.

More on the US-Pakistan relationship

Elizabeth Rubin, a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine who has ben reporting from Pakistan and Afghanistan for the past decade, has a must-read essay on the US-Pakistan relationship, dated 6 May, in the Blog section of the New York Review of Books (see here).

Osama bin Laden’s death in a mansion in exclusive club house territory of retired Pakistani officers has exposed the terrible paradox at the heart of our war in Afghanistan—Pakistan’s hypocrisy and our acquiescence.

...

We give billions in aid to Pakistan’s military and civilian government. Yet Pakistan is harboring our enemies and even the enemies, one could argue, of its own healthy survival. Portions of our money are being funneled into the variety of insurgent networks whose fighters are killing American soldiers, Afghan soldiers, American civilians, Afghan civilians, European civilians, Pakistani civilians—mothers, fathers, children on multiple continents.

She gives first hand evidence of Taliban who would like to make a deal with the Afghan Government to get back to a life without fighting, and describes the interests that Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence Agency (ISI) and the Pakistan Army have in perpetuation of the conflict.

Towards the end of the piece:

Or as an advisor to Ambassador Holbrooke told me not long before Holbrooke died: “We see Pakistan as a flawed ally and the Afghan Taliban as our enemy. The truth is the reverse.” It is the Taliban, the advisor suggested, who can be worked with; they who distrust—and in many cases despise—the ISI overlords they depend on for safe havens and support. All along they’ve let it be known through different channels that they want to talk directly to the Americans. The question is how?

Read Rubin’s report in full here.

US funding of Pakistan: the double game

The latest online edition of The New Yorker, datelined 16 May, contains an analysis of American funding of Pakistan since it began in 1954, and its unintended consequences – see The Double Game: The unintended consequences of American funding in Pakistan by Lawrence Wright, who has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1992, and whose previous work includes The Man Behind Bin Laden,  about Ayman al-Zawahiri.

Wright observes that in the 1950s the United States made a strategic choice – India having “tilted” toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War, Pakistan became America’s protégé – its ally in the fight against Commmunism. He continues that fifty years after the start of this social experiment:

India has become the state that we tried to create in Pakistan. It is a rising economic star, militarily powerful and democratic, and it shares American interests. Pakistan, however, is one of the most anti-American countries in the world, and a covert sponsor of terrorism. Politically and economically, it verges on being a failed state. And, despite Pakistani avowals to the contrary, America’s worst enemy, Osama bin Laden, had been hiding there for years—in strikingly comfortable circumstances—before U.S. commandos finally tracked him down and killed him, on May 2nd.

American aid is hardly the only factor that led these two countries to such disparate outcomes. But, at this pivotal moment, it would be a mistake not to examine the degree to which U.S. dollars have undermined our strategic relationship with Pakistan—and created monstrous contradictions within Pakistan itself.

The article is worth reading in full; access it here.

Pakistan’s policy on apprehending Osama bin Laden, 1998

The following text is taken from an email bulletin from George Washington University’s National Security Archive:

National Security Archive Update, May 5, 2011

PAKISTAN'S BIN LADEN POLICY

Declassified Documents Show Pakistani Refusal to Help Apprehend Terrorist before 9/11

For more information contact:
Barbara Elias - 202/994-7000
belias@gwu.edu

http://www.nsarchive.org

Washington, D.C., May 5, 2011 - As the discovery of Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan, raises fresh questions about U.S.-Pakistan relations, newly released documents show that as early as 1998 U.S. officials concluded the Government of Pakistan "is not disposed to be especially helpful on the matter of terrorist Usama bin Ladin." According to previously secret U.S. documents, Pakistani officials repeatedly refused to act on the Bin Laden problem, despite mounting pressure from American authorities. Instead, in the words of a U.S. Embassy cable, Pakistani sources "all took the line that the issue of bin Ladin is a problem the U.S. has with the Taliban, not with Pakistan."

The documents in this compilation -- part of the National Security Archive's developing Osama Bin Laden File -- were obtained by the Archive through the Freedom of Information Act. They reveal a history of "disappointment that Pakistan ... a good friend of the U.S., was not taking steps to help with Usama bin Ladin (UBL)."

As an ally to both the Taliban and the United States, Pakistan was balancing conflicting policies towards the Bin Laden question. Islamabad continued to support the Taliban regime in Afghanistan, an organization protecting the al-Qaeda leader, while simultaneously promising U.S. leaders it was "taking the bin Laden matter very seriously" and would cooperate with U.S. counterterrorism efforts. Portending momentous events to come, U.S. officials in 1998 lamented that getting Pakistani help in apprehending bin Laden would be "an uphill slog."

See the complete posting on the Archive's web site http://www.nsarchive.org

The direct link to the post and six declassified US Embassy cables is

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB344/index.htm

How different history might have been if bin Laden had been apprehended in 1998.

Why U.S.-Pakistan ties are disintegrating

The above is the title of a 5 October newswrap by The Atlantic Wire, which may be accessed here.

It says that the rapidly deteriorating situation in Pakistan has many re-evaluating basic U.S. assumptions, including the U.S. relationship with that country, and summarises what key opinion makers are saying:

-  The Afghan War is not making Pakistan safer (Time’s Robert Baer)

-  The U.S. should consider the possibility that Pakistan is a rogue state (Foreign Policy’s Simon Henderson)

-  The U.S. Military is moving off fossil fuel dependence (The New York Times’ Elizabeth Rosenthal)

-  The U.S. counter-terrorism strategy is making things worse (Salon’s Glenn Greenwald)

-  Many Pakistanis increasingly hate America (Foreign Policy’s Mosharraf Zaidi).

I would add another overarching problem. As is so often the case (Vietnam, Iraq) many of the key U.S. decision makers seem neither to know nor to care about the history of the country or region they are dealing with. The United States, over two Administrations (Bush and Obama) has been telling the Pakistanis that they must sort out what is going on in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), and becoming exasperated to the point of incandescence that the Pakistanis fail to do so (not, it should be noted, that they haven’t carried out a number of major military operations, with great loss of life amongst their soldiers as well as great dislocation and loss of life amongst the tribals).

I would be one of the first to say that Pakistan has been and is an unreliable ally in Afghanistan because it has always had its own agenda and, thanks largely to the steadfast refusal of the Americans to concern themselves with how the Pakistani Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate spent U.S. taxpayer’s money during the insurgency against the Soviet Union, and subsequently, many Pakistani actions in Afghanistan have been seriously counterproductive.

But I have a lot of sympathy for the Pakistan Government in relation to their problems in the FATA, and for those who argue that American actions in and in relation to the FATA are a major problem.  The Federally Administered Tribal Areas are designated thus because, to the extent that they are administered at all by any external agency, they are administered direct from Islamabad.  They are neither states nor parts of states. Anyone who lives in a Federal structure ought to understand that.

An important part of the history of the FATA is that they are within Pakistan as a result in the first instance of an 1893 agreement between Henry Mortimer Durand, the Foreign Secretary of British India at the time, and the Afghan Amir Abdur Rahman Khan. The border marked out in the 1890s runs for 2,640 kilometres, is poorly marked, and cuts right through the Pashtun tribal areas. Pashtun tribespeople work, trade, marry and move across the border pretty much at will. Afghanistan and many Pashtuns reject it as an arbitrary division of the Pashtun heartland, and do not consider it to be a validated international boundary – so much so that Afghanistan opposed Pakistan’s application to join the United Nations upon independence in 1947.

In 1901 the tribal agencies on the British side of the Durand Line were first formally designated as such under British rule, as part of the arrangements for the administrative separation of the Pashtun region from the Province of Punjab.  The Pashtun region itself was divided into (initially) five tribal agencies and the “settled region” of the Pashtun belt, which latter became the North West Frontier Province (NWFP). The tribal agencies did not come under the administrative purview of the NWFP, but were administered by political agents under the orders of the Governor of NWFP, who was directly responsible to the Viceroy of India. The Governor was expressly instructed not to interfere in the internal affairs of the tribes, but to maintain friendly relations with them and to disburse tribal allowances that had been agreed in a series of treaties with tribal leaders.  If, in spite of the agreements and the financial inducements, the tribes caused trouble, the British would mount punitive expeditions and impose collective fines or other retribution, and withdraw speedily.

On partition in 1947 the fledgling state of Pakistan induced all of the tribes to become part of Pakistan, rather than India, but the status of the region remained somewhat ambiguous. All Pakistan’s regular army units were withdrawn from the region in December 1947, and in 1949 Pakistan negotiated an Instrument of Accession under which the FATA would maintain the semi-autonomous status and administrative arrangements established by the British in 1901.

Under Pakistan’s 1973 Constitution, the Pakistan Parliament has no power to legislate for the FATA – the President extends laws to the FATA through Presidential Regulations. The FATA have no police or law courts, and the Supreme Court does not have jurisdiction to safeguard and enforce constitutional rights there.

Today, the FATA consist of seven semi-autonomous agencies and the six frontier regions, which are situated within the NWFP.  The FATA cover an area of 27,000 sq. km. inhabited by 3.5 million people, and have a 600 km (Durand Line) border with Afghanistan.

It is into this delicate situation that the U.S. has thrust itself as part of its war in Afghanistan, with demands that the Pakistan Government get the tribals under control (something no-one has ever done since the Pashtuns first appeared in the historical record in about 500 B.C.) and its autonomously initiated cross-border drone strikes against people it considers to be its enemies.

This leaves the weak civilian Government of Pakistan in an impossible situation, and the resulting mess means that the Afghan War is destroying Pakistan as well as Afghanistan.

Note:

Principal source for the above background: Hilary Synnott, Transforming Pakistan: Ways out of instability, published by Routledge for the International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2009.

Hilary Synnott was British High Commissioner in Islamabad from 2001 to 2003, and the Coalition Provisional Authority’s Regional Coordinator for South Iraq in 2003-4. Before joining the diplomatic service he was a submariner in the Royal Navy.

His account of Pakistan’s current problems in their historical setting is a very readable one, and quite succinct (181 pages of text). I would recommend it as very good place to start for anyone who wants to acquire an understanding of contemporary Pakistan without dedicating a huge amount of time to doing so.