Death of the ‘Imam’

By Shemrez Nauman Afzal
ZoneAsia-Pk

Amir Sultan Tarar AKA Colonel Imam

Brigadier Retired Amir Sultan Tarar is suspected to have died in Taliban captivity, presumably because of cardiac arrest, but suspicions and conspiracy theories indicate that his captors, the Taliban, may have murdered him because of non-payment of ransom by his family. However, the official quarters including Military sources as well as the Frontier Corps are finding it hard to verify the reports saying they have no confirmed information in this regard.

“We have been told that his dead body has been seen near Danday Darpa Khel area in North Waziristan Agency, but the news could not be confirmed nor could we get any picture of the dead body of Colonel Imam”, a senior Army official told this scribe when contacted. Similar remarks were offered by the FC sources.

Read Complete Article Here: Death of the ‘Imam’

The wrong target: air strike, legal limit, human voice

John Wooding

Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Lebanon, Gaza…all have witnessed a cycle of deadly air-strikes that inflict civilian casualties but are surrounded by evasion, confusion and dispute. To break the pattern requires a cultural shift, says John Wooding.

The military commander of the United States’s efforts in Afghanistan, General David H Petraeus, announced on 10 May 2009 that he was appointing a senior colleague to conduct an investigation into the conduct of US air-strikes in Afghanistan. This follows a week when as many as 150 Afghan civilians may have been killed in such strikes in the west of the country, an outcome that has provoked demonstrations by Afghan students and protest from the country’s president, Hamid Karzai.

The phenomenon of non-combatants being killed and wounded accidentally in the course of air-assaults intended to hit military targets has been a consistent feature of the wars of the 2000s in (for example) Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Gaza, and Lebanon. The details of each incident are as varied as these locations, yet the media reporting-cycle tends to settle into a familiar, constantly repeated pattern:

* the military’s initial press-release describes a precision-strike on a group of militants

* a claim emerges that non-combatants have died in the relevant attack

* the military responds by arguing that the civilians’ non-combatant status had been compromised, either by participation of some of them in (for example) guerrilla action or by the use of civilian locations for military purposes

* a series of claims and counter-claims are made about the numbers and identity of those killed and injured

* the media caravan loses interest and moves on, leaving the competing accounts to be investigated (if they are) by those with the resources to do so – with little expectation of high-level publicity being attached to their findings.

These incidents and their brief media trail form part of the background noise of international politics. They are always “there”, but so rarely followed up. In particular, the voices of the victims and their relatives are almost never heard.

This is, as implied above, in part a problem for the media: of access, attention-span, independence and responsibility (see Eric V Larson & Bogdan Savych, Misfortunes of War: Press and Public Reactions to Civilian Deaths in Wartime [Rand Corporation, 2006]). But it is also, I would argue, one for international humanitarian law. For the law itself as it stands has allowed a “culture of impunity” to envelop such incidents. This brief article poses the question: how can the protection afforded to non-combatants against “accidental” air-strikes and other military attacks be improved?

An ethical dimension

The principle in international law known as jus cogens – which “compels” universal and non-derogable observation on fundamental matters such as genocide or slavery – requires that states engaged in military action take precautions to avoid confusing non-combatants and combatants across a range of activities: weapons-selection, timing, and intelligence verification among them.

The problem arises that in the latter set of cases this duty is in practice highly contextual, and may be hard to observe in absolute terms. The legal scholar and former director of legal services of the British army, APV Rogers, has argued that the circumstances in which a state acts in matters such as targeting are crucial, and that it is not possible to lay down general exemptions.

Does this subjectivity make the law on (for example) targeting a sham? No, because the lack of an absolute requirement to take precautions in particular cases is not in itself fatal to the law. Rather, the subjective approach is designed to reflect the delicate balance inherent in international humanitarian law between the waging of war and the obligation always to reflect common humanity. If the law works as intended, planners and troops will be inculcated with a deeply ingrained sense of what is right and wrong in the heat of battle, while keeping the discretion to respond to military necessity as required.

This implies the important point that humanitarian law demands more of states than merely formal or token (even if highly visible) efforts to comply with its strictures; instead, it requires that states absorb the laws underlying principles on a deeper, moral level. When a state defends a targeting decision purely by arguing that its actions were “legal”, this is not necessarily saying very much.

True, most militaries do make highly visible efforts to comply with international law on targeting – by, for example, issuing comprehensive manuals that go into considerable detail on the legalities of target selection. But these efforts are not enough by themselves. It is partly that these details allow for “technical” adjustments that suggest less a concern for civilian lives than a wish visibly to comply with the law for public-relations purposes. More fundamentally, well rehearsed efforts to show compliance with the law can divert public attention from the deeper question of whether practitioners are asking themselves the moral questions that they should be confronting.

The law on precautions over matters such as targeting is meaningful only when accompanied by a certain moral ethos (as Tom Porteous, London director of Human Rights Watch, has said, you can kill a lot of civilians without breaking international law). In combat-zone conditions in particular, adherence to the letter of the law without reference to its ethical foundations can lead to disastrous results on every level – moral, strategic and political. In these situations, mere compliance with the law is not enough.

In these circumstances, states that justify accidental attacks on non-combatants solely by reference to the law run the risk of eroding the law’s normative foundations. This problem is longstanding and wide-ranging: it applies to Nato operations in Kosovo in March-June 1999 and the Israel Defence Forces (IDF’s) assaults on Gaza in December 2008-January 2009 as well as to the lengthier campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq.

A human voice

Moreover, the sheer density of legal arguments that often follow an air-strike involving civilian deaths may act as a convenient diversion for the perpetrating state, insofar as this can replace any apparent sense of connection between the act and its human consequences. This situation creates an opportunity for states and their representatives to engage in what David Kennedy terms a “collaborative denial” by military lawyers of their participation in the machinery of war. The result is to stoke an underlying ethos of irresponsibility and detachment, which in part explains why public disputes over targeting errors tend to acquire a repetitive and sterile quality.

The starting-point of progress here may be to acknowledge that the existing legal paradigm is no longer able to protect non-combatants caught in conflict-zones. An over-reliance on this paradigm has fostered the creation of an expert consensus between military and humanitarian actors like the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), wherein the two share the same vocabulary and pride themselves on their pragmatic relationship. In consequence, these actors have come to negotiate the balances inherent in humanitarian law in an insular way, thus reducing the law to a mere language by which states communicate their preconceived policy-goals (see Eyal Weizman, “Lawfare in Gaza: legislative attack”, 1 March 2009).

In this situation, what is needed is an attitudinal and cultural shift that can break the evasions, the confusions and the cycle of unresolved claims that surround incidents. The only groups capable of initiating this are non-governmental organisations, for they alone collate and disseminate the actual experiences of non-combatants caught in conflict-zones.

This was evident during Israel’s three-week assault on the Gaza strip in 2008-09, when monitors from Human Rights Watch overcame the refusal of access to the territory to compile detailed reports on the munitions being used by observing the bombardment from a nearby hill. In addition, monitors from the B’Tselem group helped Palestinians to influence the terms of debate by providing them with digital cameras on which to record human-rights abuses. Such projects upset the calculus whereby states make targeting decisions, and shift the dominant narrative away from the bombers and back to the bombed.

The United States military leaders in Afghanistan may (if General Petraeus’s briefing is a guide) belatedly be understanding that attending to the needs of civilian populations in conflict-zones makes strategic sense as well as being a humanitarian imperative. The classic dichotomy in humanitarian law between military necessity and protecting non-combatants cannot apply in cases where counterinsurgency operations depend on winning political battles at a highly local level – for in these circumstances, securing non-combatants’ support is the most important military objective of all.

The military commanders’ political overlords have yet to grasp this point. Until they do, the only way of mitigating the recurring pattern of “tragic-accident” air-strikes is to nurture a milieu in which it is politically unacceptable for states to block investigations of questionable targeting decisions. This must involve the entry of new voices (including those directly affected by the air-strikes) into the public sphere, as part of the formation of a fresh humanitarian consensus.

John Wooding is a researcher working in London

Geopolitical Diary: U.S. Limitations in Afghanistan

The United States on Sunday rejected Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s demands to halt air strikes in his country. The previous day, the Pentagon acknowledged that U.S. airstrikes killed civilians (reportedly as many as 130 the largest number to die in a single operation since the U.S. invasion in 2001) in western Afghanistan. U.S. President Barack Obama’s national security adviser, James Jones, said that U.S. forces would be extra cautious to avoid such incidents in the future but that Washington cannot tie the hands of its commanders and expect them to fight the Taliban insurgency.

Sunday’s development highlights the extreme difficulty of the situation the United States faces in Afghanistan. Given the limited military capabilities at its disposal and the geopolitical realities on the ground, Washington has said that it is seeking a political solution to the problem. Such a solution entails building up its allies to try and weaken the insurgents a goal that becomes increasingly unattainable in the face of mounting collateral damage, which works to the insurgents advantage.

Before they can create an environment conducive to the pursuit of a political settlement, the United States and its allies must use military power to bring the insurgents to the negotiating table. But Washington has made it clear that it will not have more than a 100,000 troops (counting both U.S. and NATO forces) for this purpose. This deployment is not enough to make a difference on the battlefield, which means that the United States has to rely more heavily on air power to try and degrade Taliban capabilities and confidence.

But there are many challenges that come with this strategy. For starters, intelligence on Taliban facilities is very thin. The Taliban do not gather in large numbers on the battlefield, as they are well aware of the dangers of such a tactic. Instead, the Pashtun jihadists mostly use the classic guerrilla-style insurgent tactic of hit-and-run attacks. In the areas where the Taliban do hold territory, they are indistinguishable from the local population in villages and towns, which also serve as their bases of support and supply.

If air power is going to be the mainstay of the Western military strategy then it is only inevitable that there will be civilian casualties. Such collateral damage undermines the overall counter-insurgency strategy that involves winning hearts and minds. On the contrary, civilian casualties both strengthen the Taliban claims that they are fighting against foreign forces occupying their country and further erode whatever legitimacy Karzai’s regime enjoys.

In other words, the United States does not have any good options for leveling the battlefield to persuade the Taliban to come to the table. Add to this U.S. Central Command chief Gen. David Petraeus recent comments that the United States lacks the intelligence to distinguish between reconcilable and irreconcilable Taliban, and it becomes unlikely that the Obama administration will be able to turn things around in Afghanistan as the Bush administration did in Iraq.

Ominous signals

When there are ominous signals from government functionaries, think tanks and army generals of our so-called allies that Pakistan could collapse within six months then it is the time that our political leaders forget about their power-sharing equation and focus on meeting the challenges confronting the nation. They have to realise that Pakistan is on the horns of dilemma. If our government and the armed forces try to quell the violence by the use of force there are voices that they are killing their own people.

On the other hand, if they show laxity the extremists and terrorists are emboldened and tend to expand their area of operations. In the face of threats to our internal and external security, the elected and military leadership should put their act together and use their collective wisdom to meet those threats. They should not listen to the propaganda of the US and the West that army is still powerful or government is weak because they want to divide them so that they could not focus on ensuring integrity, solidarity and sovereignty of the country. It was not a reaction to Pakistan’s foreign minister Shah Mehmood Qureshi’s resolve not to give a ‘blank cheque’ to US regarding drone attacks, that US envoy Holbrooke visited India and talked of India being an important power in the region and visualized its bigger role in Afghanistan.

It was in fact reflective of a clearly-defined US policy, which is articulated by US Generals, think tanks, former members of US administration to prove that Pakistan government and the army cannot control the militants and terrorists. Then they express their concern that terrorists could lay their hands on nukes, which will be dangerous for the region and the world at large. Whatever is happening in FATA and Balochistan and who could be behind the tragic events demand focused attention of government and the opposition, as enemies of Pakistan wish to implement their sinister agenda. And the goals of the US, India and Israel converge so far as denuclearization of Pakistan is concerned. If one carefully analyses the very recent statements of two former top American officials – former national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski and former secretary of state Henry Kissinger – visualizing a situation beyond Pakistan’s existence read with US Generals’ conjectures, it is not difficult to understand the US intentions. Instead of addressing Pakistan’s security concerns, the US wants to involve India militarily.

The time has come that our leadership should establish the writ of the state by defeating extremists and terrorists otherwise Pakistan could implode from within. Of course, it is also the time to take measures to address the grievances of the federating units and unite the people of Pakistan. Having done so, no power on earth can dismember Pakistan. Anyhow, giving India yet a bigger role in Afghanistan is a sure recipe for losing a war on terror. But in case anything happens to Pakistan, India rather the entire region is bound to suffer from the fallout. Brzeznski said: “We fear that the US may face defeat in Pakistan and Afghanistan. There is a strong possibility of defeat which is a real threat.” He said that if the US failed in Pakistan, then “we will have to choose unsuitable things,” which, he added, would be very painful. There is veiled threat that Pakistan could disintegrate. Interestingly, Kissinger said, “ours and Iran interests are similar, not to let Afghanistan become the land of guerrilla fighters.” Similarly, he added, Russia had also interests like the US. “It’s a combination of military and political strategy”. He admitted that Pakistan faces threat from India but does not suggest addressing Pakistan’s concerns.

Pakistan’s political and military leaders should decide whether they want to live in trepidation and fear or want to live as sovereign and independent nation. Of course there would be difficulties, and the nation would have to make sacrifices; but once they opt for living without grant and aid and making Pakistan a self-reliant economy, no harm could be done to Pakistan. After having taken this decision, Pakistan can then ask the US to go ahead and give bigger role to India and face the consequences.

Talking to the Taliban

by Robert D. Kaplan

Why the Pakistan intelligence agency’s close ties with the Taliban should not be condemned

No matter how much leverage you hold over a country, it is rare that you can get it to act against its core self-interest. The United States has struggled with this dilemma for decades in regards to its relations with Israel and South Korea. Self-interest based on the facts of geography is what makes America’s relations with these two close allies particularly fractious. Israel has long refused to scale back settlements in the occupied territories, frustrating U.S. efforts at peacemaking, even as American soldiers die in Iraq and Afghanistan. Conversely, South Korea has, in certain periods, extended an olive branch to the North Korean communists, frustrating U.S. efforts to erect a strong, united front against the Pyongyang regime. Now the U.S. faces the same problem with another of its ostensible allies, Pakistan.

The U.S. demands that Pakistan’s Directorate of Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), its spy agency, sever relations with the Taliban. Based on Pakistan’s own geography, this makes no sense from a Pakistani point of view. First of all, maintaining lines of communications and back channels with the enemy is what intelligence agencies do. What kind of a spy service would ISI be if it had no contacts with one of the key players that will help determine its neighbor’s future?

This is particularly the case when one considers the long and unruly land border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, and how both countries form one organic region. Indeed, Sugata Bose, a history professor at Harvard, in 2003 described the Pakistan-Afghanistan frontier area as “historically no frontier at all,” but the very “heart” of an “Indo-Persian and Indo-Islamic economic, cultural, and political domain that had straddled Afghanistan and Punjab for two millennia.” The fact, which we all keep repeating, that there is no solution for Afghanistan without a solution for Pakistan, is itself an indication of the extent to which both countries are joined. This makes it even more crucial for the ISI to maintain contacts and highly developed networks with all principle Afghani political and guerrilla groups.

We’ve done the same thing ourselves. In 1976, U.S. special envoy Talcott Seelye was able to effect the evacuation of American diplomats and their families from war-torn Beirut only because of contacts with the Palestine Liberation Organization, a group that we weren’t supposed to be talking to at the time. And all agree it was a grave mistake on our part to have abruptly left the Pakistan-Afghanistan border region after the fall of the Berlin Wall, letting our own carefully constructed networks there wither on the vine.

Remember, it wasn’t radicals burrowed deep within the ISI who made the decision to help bring the Taliban to power in the mid-1990s: it was the democratically elected government of the western-educated Benazir Bhutto who did that, on the theory that the Taliban would help bring stability to Afghanistan. This history indicates the degree to which talking to the Taliban has broad support within the Pakistani political establishment.

The Pakistani military and political establishment both view Afghanistan through the lens of their conflict with India. When they look to the west they envision an “Islamistan” of Afghanistan and other Central Asian countries with which to face off against Hindu-dominated India to Pakistan’s east. Afghan President Hamid Karzai, with his pro-western and pro-Indian tendencies, gets in the way of this Pakistani vision. But even if Pakistan were to come to terms with Karzai, it would still need to have lines of contact with all Afghan groups, including the Taliban.

Of course, we can and should demand that Pakistan cease helping the Taliban to plan and carry out operations. But cutting links to the Taliban altogether is something the Pakistanis simply cannot do, and trying to insist upon it only worsens tensions between our two countries.

So what do we do? There are those who say we should abandon the Afghanistan enterprise altogether, with the exception of direct strikes against al-Qaeda. But President Barack Obama has already decided against that, and is adding both troops and civilian experts to the campaign, which amounts to Afghan nation-building in all but name. The hope is that by turning the tide of the war in our favor, the Pakistanis will, for the sake of their own self-interest, cut a better deal with the pro-western Karzai, even as they continue to maintain less-harmful, low-level links with the Taliban. That is the best we can expect.

As in Iraq, we may find that in order to make progress and find an exit strategy, we will have to engage in negotiations with some of the very people we’ve been fighting. At some point we may even end up negotiating with elements of the Taliban ourselves. The one thing that we cannot afford in this messy situation is to issue very public, cut-and-dried ultimatums to our purported friends.

Robert D. Kaplan is a national correspondent for The Atlantic and a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security.

Terrorists on the rampage

Mohammad Jamil

Before 1980s, sacrilege of or targeting mosque or Imambargah was unheard of in Pakistan but for the last two years attacks in FATA, Hangu, Quetta, Lahore, Charsadda, Peshawar, Dir and Jamrud are reflective of degeneration of society. It is unimaginable as how the human beings can descend to such depravity and barbarism. After terrorist attack in Islamabad, suicide bomber hit Imbarbagah in Chakwal, 100 kilometre from the capital, killing 25 people and injuring more than 100.

According to an eye witness’ account a young man about 17 years old dressed in black got out of a car, entered the Imambargah where a gathering of about two hundred to three hundred people were present and detonated himself. It appears that two groups are simultaneously working – one attacking security personnel and check posts and the other one attacking the places of worship. One would agree with Interior advisor Rehman Malik that it is not possible to completely stop the suicide bombers, but incidence can indeed be reduced to a very large extent by eliminating clandestine training centres that exist in FATA, NWFP, Balochistan or even southern Punjab.

The problem is that for the last one, and to be precise after February 18 elections, major political parties – the PPP and the PML-N remained preoccupied with internecine conflicts. The prime objective of the PML-N was to get the judiciary reinstated and the focus of the government was to fail the movement. Secondly, there are some political and religious parties who wittingly or unwittingly support the extremists and militants. They suggest that the government should not use force against them and should sit across the table to negotiate with them. The fact of the matter is that religious zealots and fanatics believe in the righteousness of their cause, as they have been brainwashed and indoctrinated to the extent that they insist on enforcing their version of Islam. They are not inclined to wean away from the habit of crossing over to Afghanistan to help Afghan brethren. In fact, there is need to unite and send the message to the terrorists and the enemies of Pakistan loud and clear that they will not be allowed to carry out their pernicious plans.

In view of international conspiracy to make Pakistan’s premier security agency ineffective and to weaken Pakistan’s defence, Pakistani leadership should understand the game plan and should not be taken in by the contrivances of the US and the West, who blame the ISI for having links with the Taliban and terrorists. Prime Minister has declared in unequivocal terms that the ISI is under his control, hence the concern expressed by the US administration and slogan of bringing it under civilian control is irrelevant. In fact, they want to create conditions to prove their point that the government and the army are incapable of establishing the writ of the state. And then they would suggest that Pakistan army and the ISI should work under the US and NATO forces effectively fight the war on terror. The government should, therefore, give full support to the security forces to eliminate the menace of terrorism otherwise the extremists will dictate their terms. It has to be mentioned that people of Swat had voted for Awami National Party and not the religious parties, but its government buckled under pressure from the extremists and had to sign an agreement on their terms. Pakistan is in the vortex of violence having different dimensions. In November and December 2007, after loss of precious lives there was ceasefire in Parachinar where two rival sects were fighting. Differences between Shia and Sunni could be traced back to 1400 years, but both sects have been living peacefully throughout the world. Pakistan does have the history of contradictions between Shia and Sunni Muslims, but the element of violence was introduced in 1980s, and many people belonging to both sects have been killed since then. It had all started on Yaum-e-Ashur, when 35 people were killed and more than 100 wounded in District Hangu of North Western Frontier Province in suicide bombings on the Ashura procession and subsequent violence. In January 2008, at least 23 militants and 7 soldiers were killed in a major battle near the Afghan border in Mohmand Agency when gunmen had ambushed a paramilitary convoy and Pakistan forces responded with the help of local people. In FATA and elsewhere, the militants had the audacity to attack military check posts, training camps and military convoys, which showed gravity of the situation. Extremism has many forms and manifestations. In a society afflicted with extreme poverty and extreme opulence, there is always a disaffected and discontent mass of people, disenchanted and disillusioned. Some of the unemployed youth and impoverished people are lured by the criminals and are conditioned by the religious zealots to perpetrate acts of terrorism. There is yet another form of ‘extremism’ but in fact it is a war for liberation. When people are subjected to foreign domination through invasion and they fight back the invaders, and the examples in the recent history are Afghanistan and Iraq. In this case the people resort to guerrilla tactics to fight the foreign forces, but there is collateral damage when innocent civilians are killed in the process. But the menace of extremism started in 1980s when the then Pakistan government perhaps to curry favour with the US and the West played the role of frontline state, and with the collapse of the Soviet Union Pakistan’ so-called allies left Pakistan and Afghanistan in the lurch. Pakistan suffered because of Klashnikov culture and drug trafficking. After 9/11, Pakistan was coerced into joining the war on terror, and since then has faced a surge in extremism and terrorism. There is a perception that had Pakistan in the first instance not been involved in the defence pacts with the West in 1950s, Pakistan would not have gone through the ordeal and pressures from the US for not doing enough to fight Al Qaeda operatives and Taliban. Now the question arises as to how to get rid of extremism and terrorism?

The government has taken measures that include diplomatic as well as administrative, but this twin-menace of extremism and terrorism will have to be fought on a long-term basis. Of course, the causes that have led to the spread of extremism will have to be addressed. But the problem is that unless there is peace how infrastructure can be built and development can take place to improve the living conditions of the people. Therefore, writ of the government has to be established and Pakistan will have to ensure that its soil is not used by the terrorists to conduct terror attacks in Afghanistan.

Leaders of political and religious parties have to understand the simple fact that if we want others to respect our sovereignty we will have to respect their sovereignty. They should also understand the reality that whosoever is in the government he will have to use force to establish the writ of the state.

Fictions and facts

Whether as a build-up to President Barack Obama’s upcoming new strategy in Afghanistan or whether for creating conducive environment for its announcement, the American media has launched a massive campaign to malign Pakistan, its army and the ISI. Not that there is anything new about this vilification campaign of the American media as also to the country’s think tanks, lobbies and pressure groups inveterately hostile to Pakistan. But lately there has been great spurt in their motivated campaign, irrefutably inspired by the American officialdom.

The latest is a leading American daily’s longish report, based on interviews with unidentified American officials, though it also quotes some Pakistani officials, without identifying them too, leaving one in serious doubt if this isn’t mere concoction for the sort of statements attributed to them. The report’s crux is that an ISI’s full-fledged wing comprising mid-level officers is working with Afghan Taliban, secretly, independently, even without their bosses’ knowledge. We leave it to our esteemed readers’ credulity to believe it or not. But what is of concern to us is its patent speciousness and sinister design.

It says this ISI’s wing is supporting the Afghan Taliban with money, military supplies and strategic planning guidance. But do they stand in need of money when, according to American and NATO commanders’ and diplomats’ own admissions, the flourishing goldmine of Afghanistan’s poppy and drugs trafficking is putting mounds of cash in the Taliban’s hands to buy recruits and guns? And why should they be requiring military supplies from anybody else when they can press into service international drugs mafia to procure all they need through world gun-runners and when, according to America’s own accounting hounds, some 200,000 weapons, including deadly guns, rocket-launchers and night-vision goggles, have intriguingly disappeared from coalition forces’ armouries and Afghan Defence Ministry’s stores? And why should they need any strategic guidance from foreigners when being the sons of soil they know their land’s topography and terrain like the backs of their hands and have imbibed by inheritance skills and trades of guerrilla warfare with which the Afghans have throughout their history humbled alien conquerors and trounced invading armies? And surely it isn’t Pakistani agencies playing a double game, as surmises the report.

It is the aliens who are playing a double game on Pakistan. Who is giving deadly weapons and cash to Baitullahs, Fazlullahs and the likes? Certainly, it can’t be Pakistani agencies to kill and maim our own people. These thugs are running no mint mills and arms factories of their own. So who is arming and bankrolling them, if not the CIA and its collusion with Indian RAW, Israeli Mossad and Afghan intelligence, all inimically disposed to Pakistan? Isn’t it America propping up its Jundullah proxy in our mineral-rich and strategically-located Balochistan province, drawing us so much ire of our brotherly Iranians for this outfit’s subversive activities in their Sistan-Balochistan region? And who masterminded the killing and injuring of Chinese engineers while constructing our crucially-placed Gwadar port on the Arabian Sea? And who is funding and arming the terrorist outfit operating clandestinely from our tribal region to spread terrorism in Xingjian province of our all-weather friend, China? Who else could so infest this region that sits critically on China’s neck, if not someone intolerant of this global economic giant emerging as a rival superpower to America as well?

The American officialdom’s puerile posturing of righteousness indeed stinks unbearably. Their new viceroy for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke blares if another 9/11 happens to America or another Madrid terrorism to Spain or another London mayhem to Britain, it will originate from our tribal region. His very premise is deceptively fallacious. 9/11 was planned not even in Afghanistan, leave aside our tribal areas; it was planned in Europe. Its perpetrators were not even Taliban or madrassas’ pupils; they were graduates of western universities and American aviation academies. And they were no Afghans or Pakistanis; they were Saudis, Egyptians and other Arabs. And if our tribal region has become international terrorism’s haven, as surmises Holbrooke, then why has there been no another 9/11 or Madrid or London while not a day goes by without Pakistan suffering a lethal suicide bombing, bomb blast or a terrorist strike? Then who is bolstering and buttressing this terrorist haven, and for it? It has to be somebody else; it can’t be us. Why then is our establishment keeping its mouth shut, and not speaking out home truths? Is it waiting for a storm to erupt and blow us away for no sin or crime of ours?