Day 351: This Unquiet Land

That evening in July 1999, the assault on Tiger Hill began from a Bofors gun position; individual guns had been ranged so as to directly fire at the three flanks of the mountain. An intricate fire plan prepared by the 41 Field Regiment provided covering fire to the soldiers of 8 Sikh and 18 Grenadiers who were stealthily moving up escarpments and sheer cliffs from three different directions. Usually, six guns were deployed to provide covering fire to every infantry unit. In Kargil this was increased to eighteen guns. Kargil has often been called a classic gunner’s war and the Bofors gun was its mainstay. The gun could fire three rounds in twelve seconds, and it had a range of thirty kilometres in high altitude terrain; 250 of them were deployed at the front line and 250,000 rounds were fired during the fifty-day war. During the Tiger Hill operation alone, 9,000 shells were used. The artillery points had become both the first tier of attack and defence in the war. Field gun positions were now veritable forward posts, inviting attack on themselves as soon as the Bofors gun fired the first round; 80 per cent of the casualties on both sides were from mortar fire.

Writing in Artillery: The Battle Winning Arm about the peak period of the war, when each artillery battery fired one round per minute for seventeen days continuously, senior military analyst Major General Jagjit Singh (who started his career in the Royal Indian Navy and saw anti-submarine action during World War II) said, ‘Such high rates of fire over long periods had not been witnessed anywhere since World War II… The men at the guns had blisters on their hands from carrying and loading shells and cartridges. Very few of them got more than a couple of hours of sleep in every 24-hour cycle.’

With the advantage of height, Pakistani observation posts had a clear line of vision on Indian gun points. So assault positions had to be shifted as soon as they became vulnerable to counter-attack. As they moved, so would we, jumping on to the back of a Jonga jeep or just darting across the smoke-saturated road, unsure of where it might be safe to halt even for a second, trying all the while to keep pace with the magnitude of what was unravelling before our camera’s gaze.

Two hours into what would end up being a thirteen-hour battle, an enemy artillery shell landed close to a 122 multi-barrelled ‘Grad’ rocket launcher right outside the headquarters of the 56 Mountain Brigade, which had just taken over the sector. With forty rockets stacked upon the back of a single carrier, the Grad was a fire-breathing dragon that spat flames into the sky. In Russian, its name meant ‘hailstorm’, a fitting appellation, as it hailed destruction down upon the intruders.

Suddenly an enemy shell landed within spitting distance of the launcher. It was time to move to a new vantage point; the commander of the Grad immediately halted the operation so that the MBRL could be shifted. Four soldiers had already been killed in a counter-attack on a gun position earlier and he wasn’t taking any chances. Over the next twenty minutes the battle escalated. The town of Drass was carpet-bombed by Pakistan. A curtain of grey closed over the highway as the final acts of the fight to take back Tiger Hill began.

‘Run, Run, Run, Now, Now, Now, Run,’ shouted out an anxious voice behind us, and so we did, our bodies bent over, our hands forming a useless protective cover over our heads, our camera shaking and jerky, but still switched on and filming, trying to get some of this across to the news centre, our hearts pumping with adrenalin—it offered a temporary antidote against paralysing fear. At this point in the battle I got separated from Ajmal Jami, my cameraman. As Pakistani shells began to pound the area right around the rocket launcher, I took shelter behind a broken wall, and frantically worked the satellite phone. Suddenly, a long arm lunged out and pulled me back, unfailingly polite even in that life and death moment. ‘Ma’am, you’re standing next to an ammunition dump,’ said the soldier. ‘If a shell hits the target, this place will explode and you will be finished.’ He waved me towards the shelter of his own underground bunker.

‘I need to call my office in Delhi,’ I insisted, ‘and I have lost my cameraman, I can’t go down leaving him out here.’

He offered to find Jami for me and urged me to hunker down immediately before I got injured in the shelling. I still had the call to make but there was no way the satellite phone would pick up any signal underground. I sat with my legs inside the dugout and the rest of me leaning out of it, holding the phone outwards. ‘I can’t talk long; I’m calling from a bunker,’ I said, ‘just tell everyone, the assault on Tiger Hill has begun.’ We would spend the next few hours here, trying to make sense of the latest war between India and Pakistan.
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‘I sincerely hope that they (relations between Indian and Pakistan) will be friendly and cordial. We have a great deal to do…and think that we can be of use to each other and the world.’

In August 1947, Pakistan’s founder, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, declared that Partition had resolved the antagonism between Hindus and Muslims and India and Pakistan could now live in harmony. Mahatma Gandhi echoed the sentiment. Both ‘fathers’ of their respective nations turned out to be grievously wrong.

The partition of India was a bloody and cataclysmic upheaval and the largest forced mass migration of people in the world. Between 1 and 2 million people were killed and an estimated 17 million were uprooted from their homes. The violent rupture proved impossible to heal.

In both countries, many families put locks on their doors but left most of their possessions inside as if they were going on a brief journey from which they would be coming back home very soon. My own family was among them. My grandfather, Krishan Gopal Dutt, a freedom fighter who went on to become Punjab’s finance minister in independent India, used to live in a palatial kothi called Pillar Palace in Sialkot, famous for its manufacture of sporting goods. My father was a child of eight when the mob violence spread like a forest fire across both sides of the Punjab province. My grandfather reached out to his friend Chet Ram, the then governor of Jammu, for help in crossing over to the newly demarcated territory of India. A truck with armed guards was sent into Sialkot on the pretext that the governor had to retrieve money from the Imperial Bank (which later became the State Bank of India) in Sialkot. On this truck, my grandfather, dressed only in his dhoti-kurta, left with his family. When he arrived in Delhi, he was penniless and homeless like millions of other refugees.

Decades later, as a college student, I travelled with my father to our ancestral home in Pakistan; its fifty rooms were too expensive to maintain for the family that now owned it—they occupied only one of its residential wings. We had arrived at the house without warning the new owners. Yet, although we were complete strangers, they welcomed us without any questions or suspicions—and having heard our story—handed over the keys of the kothi to us. As we wandered through empty rooms, past bare walls—‘the piano was in this corner, your grandmother slept here, that’s the fountain made from marble’—I understood for the first time, the anguish that my father, and millions like him, had felt at being displaced in a manner that was so violent, unforgiving and permanent. It was one of only two times I’d seen my father cry (the other time was when his wife died) and it came home to me, in that instant, standing in the abandoned old house in Sialkot, just how deep a wound Partition had carved into the psyche of both countries.

~~This Unquiet Land: Stories from India's Fault Lines -by- Barkha Dutt

Day 342: Pakistan’s Political Labyrinths

This essay seeks to reframe the policy debate surrounding the role of madaris in the production of militants in Pakistan and elsewhere. The main argument is that analysts must examine the human capital requirements of specific tanzeems, taking into consideration the objectives, tactics, theatres, and ‘quality of terror’ produced, as well as the preferred ‘target recruitment market’ of each particular group in question. Necessarily, this implies that some groups pose more risks than others, based on the scope of their operations, ties with other organizations (e.g. al Qaeda, Taliban), reach (local v. global), and lethality of operations pursued (suicide terrorism v. bazaar attacks). Such an analytical approach is more agile and affords more nuanced conclusions about the connections between education and militancy and about concomitant policy implications. Such an approach does not seek static answers to the madrasah question; rather, this approach permits analysis to evolve as groups develop their objectives, targets, theatres, and indeed, the quality of terror that they can perpetrate.

This approach permits the following conclusions. First, groups that operate in more challenging terrains, assail hard targets or attack targets that are either high-value or for which opportunity costs of failure are high are less likely to use militants that are exclusively madrasah trained than are groups that operate in easier areas of operation and engage either soft targets or targets with low opportunity costs of failure. Second, considering the prospect that madrasah education could confer some operational benefits – as in sectarian groups – madrasah graduates may be preferred in some operations. In other words, madrasah graduates may be suitable for some kinds of attacks but not for others. Third, even if madrasah students are more inclined towards jihad, madrasah students may not be selected by a given militant group if the group has other more desirable candidates to recruit. Militant groups could become more dependent upon madrasah students over time if militant recruitment standards change or if the militant recruitment market changes. Fourth, madaris produce religious entrepreneurs who justify violence and contribute to communities of support. Madrasah graduates also may build families that support some kinds of violence and may be the schools of choice for such families. In sum, this analytical framework suggests that madaris merit continual observation as they may contribute both to the demand for terrorism and to the limited supply of militants. For the same reasons, Pakistan’s public school sector deserves much more attention, however, than that sector currently enjoys.

The remainder of this chapter is organized as follows. The first section reviews the literature, laying out the various claims about madrasah enrolments, numbers of madaris, madrasah students’ socio-economic backgrounds, and – finally, and perhaps, most importantly – reviews the literature arguing for and against the connections between militancy and madaris. The second section looks very carefully at the various analyses of the presence (or lack thereof) of madaris products in militant groups. Drawing from this complex and multidisciplinary literature, the third section lays out a new analytical framework. The fourth section revisits the connections between madaris and militancy through this new analytical optic. The fifth and concluding section draws out the policy implications of this approach.

As noted above, despite the proliferation of studies of Pakistan’s madaris, many important questions persist. First, scholars have vigorously disagreed about the number of madaris and the penetration of madaris in the educational market. In the popular press, an array of reports suggested that anywhere from 500,000 to two million children are enrolled in Pakistan’s madaris, without any clarity about the level, intensity, or duration of madrasah attendance. The most influential – yet, still incorrect – account of the penetration of madaris in the educational market was offered by the International Crisis Group (ICG) in 2002. Relying upon interview data to obtain estimates of madrasah students, the ICG claimed that some one-third of all students in Pakistan attend madaris; however, those estimates were derived from an erroneous calculation that, when corrected, yields estimates that vary from 4 per cent to 7 per cent. This miscalculation is regrettable because the report is otherwise very illuminating.

In 2005, Tahir Andrabi, Jishnu Das, Asim Khwaja, and Tristan Zajonc published a study (hereafter referred to as the ‘Andrabi study’) that employed data both from household-based economic surveys (Pakistani Integrated Household Surveys, or PIHS, from 2001, 1997, and 1991) and from the 1998 Pakistani census as well as from household data collected in 2003 in three districts in the province of Punjab. The Andrabi study, without adjusting for bias in the data, calculated that madaris enjoyed a market share of less than 1 per cent. That is among all students enrolled in school full time, less than 1 per cent attend madaris. In contrast, the study found that public schools account for nearly 70 per cent of full-time enrolment and private schools account for nearly 30 per cent. It should be noted that the Andrabi study asked only about the kind of school attended not about the kind of education obtained. The Andrabi study did not adequately consider the fact that religious education is not the exclusive purview of madaris. Indeed, religious education takes place in public schools, under private tutors, in part-time mosque schools, and even in various kinds of private schools.

Since household-based surveys exclude some potential madrasah students (e.g. orphans and homeless children) and are somewhat dated, Andrabi, Das, Khwaja, and Zajonc adjusted their estimates accordingly for excluded groups and population growth. Accounting for these biases, they estimated generously that 475,000 children might attend madaris full time, less than 3 per cent of all full-time enrolments. The Andrabi study’s upper estimates are on the same order of magnitude as the ICG’s corrected figures, suggesting that madaris do not enjoy the market penetration that is widely believed of them.

Another serious caveat to the Andrabi study is that the data the study employed excluded various important areas of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) and protected areas of the Northwest Frontier Province (NWFP), where madrasah enrolment could be much higher. The Andrabi study presented evidence that this may be the case: intensity of madrasah enrolment was highest along the Pakistan–Afghanistan border, reaching 7.5 per cent of enrolments in the district of Pishin. This raises the possibility that intensity of madrasah utilization could be just as high, if not higher, in all or parts of the FATA. For these reasons, the study could have underestimated madrasah enrolments, particularly in areas such as the FATA and restricted areas of the NWFP. The Andrabi study did not make any attempt to correct estimates for this exclusion, likely because there is little empirical base upon which such correction could be attempted.

A second area of empirical discord surrounds the number of madaris in Pakistan. In 2000, Jessica Stern claimed that there were 40,000–50,000 madaris in Pakistan; in 2001, Peter Singer estimated a number of 45,000, albeit with dubiety about this figure. The 9/11 Commission Report, citing Karachi’s police commander, claims that there are 859 madaris educating more than 200,000 youth in Karachi alone. In contrast, official Pakistani sources estimate that there were fewer than 7,000 madaris in Pakistan’s four provinces in 2000. Unfortunately, there are no definitive data sources in place to reconcile these different claims until Pakistan’s Ministry of Education completes its planned census of all educational institutions in Pakistan.

Yet a third area of empirical concern is the socio-economic backgrounds of madrasah students. Conventional wisdom holds that madaris are the resort of the poor students; yet, this claim rests uneasily upon the various robust studies of student socio-economic background that utilize 2001 PIHS data. [...] It is true that 43 per cent of madrasah students come from the poorest households (defined as those with annual incomes less than 50,000 Pakistani rupees [Rs], or U.S. $865 in 2001 dollars), compared to only 40.4 per cent for those in public schools; however, more madrasah students (11.7%) than public school students (3.4%) come from Pakistan’s wealthiest families (those with incomes of Rs 250,000 [$4,325] or greater). In fact, more than one-quarter of madrasah students come from Pakistan’s wealthier families (those with incomes of at least Rs 100,000 [$1,730]) compared to only 21 per cent of students in public schools.
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Against the vocal assertions that madaris are ‘instruments of mass instruction’ and comprise an essential element of militant production in Pakistan and elsewhere, several scholarly articles as well as editorial pieces have sought to add a corrective view to the madrasah policy fixation. At first blush, many of these studies can be called ‘supply side’ because of their purported focus on the characteristics of militants who supply labour to militant groups. One recent example is afforded by Peter Bergen and Swati Pandey, who examined the backgrounds of 79 terrorists involved in five of the worst anti-Western terrorist attacks (e.g. the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, the 1998 bombing of two US embassies in Africa, the September 11 attacks, the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings, and the London bombings in July 2005). Bergen and Pandey found madrasah involvement to be rare and further noted that the masterminds of the attacks all had university degrees.

~~Pakistan’s Political Labyrinths: Military, society and terror -ed- Edited by Ravi Kalia

Day 189: Pakistan:Between Mosque and Military

Within three months of taking power, General Zia coerced Pakistan’s judiciary into approving his extra-constitutional coup d’état and his decision to hold the constitution in abeyance. Basing its judgment on the doctrine of necessity, the court gave Zia broad powers to make new laws and even to amend the constitution. A military regime lacking a constitutional basis had succeeded in creating the legal fiction of constitutionality. Jamaat-e-Islami and others working with Zia ul-Haq could now argue that they were still operating under a constitutional framework.

During his first two years in power Zia ul-Haq publicly maintained the image of his regime as an interim arrangement pending elections. During his first weeks in power, however, Zia promulgated military rules for civil conduct “more thorough and comprehensive than those issued by previous martial law governments.” In September 1977, in the middle of the campaign for the election scheduled by Zia for October, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was arrested on the charge of conspiring to murder a political opponent. The charges stemmed from an assassination bid three years earlier that had resulted in the death of the father of a PPP dissident member of Parliament. Religious parties and the Muslim League celebrated Bhutto’s arrest and at their political rallies started demanding his execution.

Bhutto’s trial was dragged through the courts for more than eighteen months, but Zia ul-Haq had already decided to portray the man he had overthrown as an evil genius. Islamist media joined Zia in a propaganda campaign similar to that unleashed against Bhutto during the 1970 elections by Major General Sher Ali Khan. Zia ul-Haq’s friend, Abdul Qayyum, has since written that Zia asked him to start preparing a white paper on Bhutto’s “misdeeds” in October 1977, within days of Bhutto’s arrest and well before he had been convicted. Although Abdul Qayyum did not write the white paper, a four-volume white paper was published before Bhutto’s execution in April 1979. The volume on alleged election irregularities alone comprised 405 pages, with 1,044 pages of appendix. During the run-up to Bhutto’s execution, state-run radio and television ran a series titled Zulm ki Dastanein (Tales of Oppression). Islamist newspapers and magazines ran excerpts from the white paper, subsidized by generous advertisements from public sector enterprises.

Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was convicted of murder by the Lahore High Court in a trial of dubious legality. After confirmation of the conviction by the reconstituted Supreme Court, Bhutto was executed in April 1979. The Jamaat-e-Islami was part of Zia ul-Haq’s cabinet during the crucial period of Bhutto’s trial and execution, and the party’s nominee held the crucial portfolio of information minister. Jamaat-e-Islami joined Zia’s cabinet when Zia, claiming that political participation in the government was necessary to pave the way for general elections, included members of the PNA in government one year after the coup d’état. In fact, the inclusion of the PNA in the cabinet was designed to deflect the blame for Bhutto’s execution from the military and to share it with Bhutto’s opponents.

The PNA remained in government for almost a year. During this period, the Jamaat-e-Islami controlled ministries that allowed it to expand its influence through patronage and provide employment to its younger cadres. In addition to information and broadcasting, Jamaat-e-Islami ministers were in charge of the ministries for production, and water, power, and natural resources. Zia ul-Haq also appointed a Jamaat-e-Islami ideologue, Professor Khurshid Ahmad, to head Pakistan’s Planning Commission and draw up plans for Islamizing the economy.

At the end of their year-long association with the government, Jamaat-e-Islami ministers complained that the entrenched bureaucracy wielded greater influence than they did. Zia ul-Haq realized that he had overestimated the Jamaat-e-Islami’s ability to run a modern Islamic state. After that year, in an effort to create his own hybrid Islamic system for Pakistan, Zia decided to cast a wider net to find Islamists of different persuasions. This opened the way for many clerics and Islamic spiritual leaders from all over the world to advise Zia ul-Haq. The general held dozens of conferences and seminars of Islamic scholars and spiritualists (mashaikh). He issued numerous decrees, some as banal as prohibiting urinals in public places (because the Prophet Muhammad advised against urinating while standing) and others with significant consequences, such as liberalizing visas for Muslim ulema and students from all over the world. The liberalization of visas for Muslim activists enabled Islamists from several countries to set up headquarters in Pakistan, circumventing restrictions on Islamist political activities in their own countries.

In 1979, Jamaat-e-Islami’s support for Bhutto’s execution was central to Zia ul-Haq’s plan to suppress any resistance from PPP supporters to Bhutto’s elimination. Zia ul-Haq met the Jamaat-e-Islami chief, Mian Tufail Muhammad, for ninety minutes the night before Bhutto was hanged. Jamaat-e-Islami members took to the streets to celebrate Bhutto’s death, which countered international criticism and domestic disapproval of the ruthless execution of the ruling general’s main political rival.

The Jamaat-e-Islami’s founder and spiritual leader, Maulana Abul Ala Maududi, set the tone for his party’s relationship with Zia ul-Haq’s military regime by endorsing Zia’s initiatives for Islamization. Maulana Maududi described these steps as “the renewal of the covenant” between the government of Pakistan and Islam and also endorsed Zia’s demonization of Bhutto and the PPP by arguing if the PPP were allowed to run in a general election again, the country would face a debacle similar to the one witnessed when East Pakistan separated from West Pakistan. When Maulana Maududi died in September 1979, Zia ul-Haq expressed his admiration for him by attending his funeral.

Although Zia ul-Haq and the Jamaat-e-Islami clearly had a soft spot for each other and enjoyed a close relationship, their ambitions did not always converge. Zia recognized that the Jamaat-e-Islami’s base of support was relatively narrow, notwithstanding its impressive organization and its ability to mobilize its cadres. Moreover, the Jamaat-e-Islami was not the only religious political force in the country, and Zia ul-Haq wanted the support of other Islamic groups as well. Once the president declared his intention to Islamize Pakistan, he was confronted with several visions of what an Islamic state should look like. Zia ul-Haq also had to juggle the conflicts of interest between his parent institution, the military, and the various religious parties.

~~Pakistan:Between Mosque and Military -by- Husain Haqqani

Day 180: Book Excerpt: The Struggle for Pakistan

On october 16, 1999, The Economist’s cover story “Oh Pakistan” showed a shalwar kameez–clad Nawaz Sharif sitting next to a uniformed General Pervez Musharraf sharing a thought bubble: “You Are Fired!” Military coups had become a rarity in the world by the end of the twentieth century but, as the British weekly noted, for Pakistanis there was something familiar about General Musharraf’s coup. The takeover had followed the script for the state of martial rule pioneered by General Ayub Khan and fine-tuned by Generals Yahya Khan and Zia-ul-Haq. On October 12 soon after the announcement of Musharraf’s dismissal as chief of army staff on national television, the screens went black, then martial music erupted against the backdrop of soldiers marching in patriotic earnestness. As was standard, no tears were shed for the sacked prime minister and his corrupt government. No street demonstrations were held to protest the fourth bloodless coup by an army that had ruled the country for twenty-five years during the fifty-two years since independence. Without endorsing the military seizure of power, the Economist thought Nawaz Sharif’s departure from the scene might turn out to be for the better. Everything depended on General Musharraf, who had “the power to make his country a better place, or to destroy it.”

The New York Times editorial “Dangerous Coup in Pakistan” was more forthright in denouncing the intervention, calling it a “cause for alarm in South Asia and the rest of the world.” A newly armed nuclear power with a history of wars and internal upheavals, Pakistan’s relapse into military rule under General Musharraf, who had so recently shown an inclination to be confrontational with India, had again made the subcontinent “one of the most dangerous places in the world.” Whatever the faults of the sacked civilian government, the coup had no justification. Democracy had to be restored in Pakistan at once. The United States needed to work with China and Saudi Arabia to ensure that Musharraf and his top generals did not embark on another military misadventure against India. There were simply “no military solutions to Pakistan’s problems.” The editorial line mirrored the Clinton administration’s adverse reaction to a coup it had tried preventing. On September 20, 1999, officials of the State Department, the Pentagon, and the National Security Council had issued four separate statements warning the army against taking any extraconstitutional step. Such unprecedented backing by Washington for a civilian government in Islamabad was not without its quid pro quo. Committed to capturing Osama bin Laden before leaving the Oval Office, Clinton wanted Nawaz Sharif’s help in getting the Pakistani Army to stop supporting the Taliban and instead use its intelligence networks to locate bin Laden.

Fearing a military coup, the Pakistani prime minister was only too willing to oblige. A week before the drama that led to the overthrow of the PML-N government, both the Sharif brothers publicly condemned the Taliban, leading to speculation that “the government was pushing an American agenda in the region.” This fueled resentments in GHQ and was one of the less well-publicized reasons for the coup. As a liberal-minded columnist of an English daily put it, the Sharifs responded to their mounting internal problems by becoming “the greatest lackeys of the Americans that we have ever had.” They had beaten Benazir Bhutto “hollow” in this shameful race and “bartered national self-respect in a bid to seek American support.” With even prodemocracy liberals applauding Sharif’s fall, the coup was a major setback for the American drive to find the Al Qaeda leader. Anticipating the problems ahead, a State Department spokesman tartly said that the United States wanted the immediate restitution of democracy in Pakistan and would not “carry on business as usual” with the military regime.

International disdain greeted the army coup. Even China reacted cautiously, veiling its concern about the specter of “Talibanization” by noting that the two countries were “friendly neighbors” and the situation in Pakistan was being watched carefully. The Chinese had been annoyed to discover links between the ISI and Islamic Uighur militants in Xinjiang. “We need a Khomeini-style or Taliban-style campaign to cleanse society,” a Pakistani shopkeeper was quoted as saying in the economic daily Zhongguo Jingji Shibao brought out by the Chinese State Council’s Development Research Center. More worrying, the paper noted, was the growing influence of “fundamentalism” in the Pakistan military. Russia feared that closer military cooperation between Pakistan and the Taliban would increase tensions in its southern regions, including the Caucasus. Moscow had intelligence reports about Chechen envoys visiting Afghanistan to buy Stinger anti-aircraft missiles and receiving four of them “as a gift.” Voicing its own unique concerns, Iran instead rebuked the West for backing Pakistan and the Taliban regime. One Iranian newspaper asked rhetorically whether the military regime would end Pakistan’s international isolation by suspending support for the usurpers of power in Afghanistan. Taliban-ruled Kabul described the coup as Pakistan’s internal affair and expressed a desire for good and friendly relations with each successive government in Islamabad.

Of the regional neighbors, India had most reason to be alarmed. The main architect of the Kargil operation had taken control of Pakistan. Deeply suspicious of Musharraf and unwilling to take any risks, the government of India set the ball rolling for military exercises to test the combat fitness of its army along the western border with Pakistan. At the same time, New Delhi mounted an effective diplomatic offensive to force Musharraf to back off. It did not have to work too hard. At UN headquarters in New York, there was deep consternation. A few weeks before the change of government in Pakistan, the United Nations Drug Control Program had reported that Afghanistan produced 4,600 metric tons of opium, a figure that was three times higher than the combined world production of the drug. As far as the UN was concerned, Afghanistan under the Taliban was the “biggest narco-power in the world.” With the Pakistani military high command now in a position to back the Taliban without any hindrance from a civilian setup, there was nothing to stop the export of opium from Afghanistan.

Amid grave misgivings in the neighborhood and the world at large, Pakistan slipped into another phase of military rule. If the script was familiar, the geostrategic context had dramatically changed. The Cold War was over for the rest of the world, but its enduring legacies were only too visible in Pakistan. Past military interventions and misgovernance by unstable and short-lived civilian governments had deeply polarized politics and damaged the economy, with perilous effects on the exercise of state authority. Decades of centralization had fragmented state institutions that were now more susceptible to political influences and outright capture at the regional and local levels by interweaving networks of sectarian and criminal militias. The implications of these existential threats were largely lost on the military high command, the main stakeholder of Pakistan’s increasingly dysfunctional centralized state system. Wedded to an India-centered national security paradigm, the military high command was single-mindedly committed to pursuing their strategic objectives in Afghanistan. The United States had assisted Pakistan in attaining a viable defense against its premier enemy and in the process strengthened the army and its intelligence services, which now posed the biggest obstacle to American objectives in the region. Instead of propping up military dictatorships around the world to contain communism as they had during the Cold War, the Americans were now more interested in forging a strategic and economic partnership with the rising regional giant India.

On the eve of the twenty-first century, authoritarian Pakistan was an international pariah for supporting the Taliban regime and initiating the Kargil incursion. A nearly moribund economy and widespread corruption and insecurity of life and property had demoralized the citizenry. The blowback of the Afghan war had reared a thriving arms and drugs economy run by criminal mafias protected by state officials and politicians. Pakistan’s growing urban landscape was dotted with mosques and madrasas. The products of religious seminaries offering extreme and militant versions of Islam were either recruited to fight “jihad” in Afghanistan and Kashmir or turned into killing machines by would-be religious ideologues battling rival sectarian communities. Confronted with intense internal and external pressures, Pakistan needed deft and swift handling on several contradictory fronts. By placing himself in the line of fire, had General Musharraf bitten off far more than he could chew? As before, the fate of a military dictator would be shaped by developments beyond Pakistan’s borders. In Musharraf’s case, September 11, 2001, would prove to be the decisive turning point in determining the longevity of his regime.

~~The Struggle for Pakistan -by- Ayesha Jalal

Day 164: Book Excerpt: On The Grand Trunk Road

On South Asian roads, where the chance of being accidentally blind-sided is high, horn-honking is an act of courtesy. Should it ever become an Olympic event, the Indians would have a leg up for technical prowess, but the Pakistanis, who like to wire snippets from Western popular songs into their steering columns, would score well for creativity. Once, stuck at the Khyber Pass, I listened to a Pakistani truck driver push his way through a traffic jam leading into Afghanistan by using a horn that played at deafening volume the refrain from Never on Sunday. Cars and trucks peeled out of his way just so they wouldn’t have to listen to the damned tune anymore.

Inside our spacious Tata cab, Singh kept his distance and projected a hard, lonely demeanor. He deferred to Vinod and myself and worried about our comfort. At the same time he bullied his assistant driver, a poor Bihari named Santosh, unmercifully. This seemed to reflect the unspoken hierarchy of our traveling party, with myself at the top by virtue of being a foreign guest, Vinod next by virtue of his Brahmin birth, which he advertised at every opportunity, then Singh, and at the bottom Santosh, who was of a caste similar to his boss’s but earned one tenth his salary and suffered in apprenticeship. Whether one chose to see this hierarchy in terms of old identities such as caste or new identities such as economic status, there was no denying its palpable presence inside our truck. Among my three companions, groveling deference from below and spiteful bullying from above seemed to be the guiding principles.

Hunched with hooded eyes over the steering wheel, Singh spoke laconically about his past. He said he was born as a Jat Sikh, an unruly subset of India’s minority Sikh religious group, whose male members traditionally wear turbans and never cut their hair. (Jats are a peasant farming caste group that can be either Sikh or Hindu.) On the small farm in rural Punjab where Singh grew up, his status was ordained by tradition but his opportunities were defined by modernity. His ancestors had been farmers and soldiers, but after dropping out of high school, he took to trucking because the money was good. Now he was independent, even upwardly mobile. He wore a shiny gold watch and said he sent one hundred rupees a month home to Punjab to his wife, whom he wed in an arranged marriage in 1984. Those he left behind in the village were trapped now in the Sikh separatist insurgency, in which more than five thousand people, mostly Sikhs, die in shootouts, bomb explosions, and police killings each year. In any event, apart from the war, farming bored him, Singh said. He preferred to be on the move. “I’ll drive until my body quits.”

Or until the road kills him. Daring and reckless behind the wheels of their massive vehicles, India’s truck drivers are modem heirs to the traders, conquerors, robbers, and religious seers who have traveled the Grand Trunk Road for centuries. Several hundred years before the birth of Christ, Mauryan emperors laid the first tombstone-shaped mileage markers between Kabul and Calcutta. In some ways, not much has changed on the highway since then. As ever, the road is vividly dangerous. More than one thousand truck drivers, passengers, and pedestrians die in accidents along the highway each year. Its shoulders reveal an almost surreal display of wreckage: trucks lying smashed and upside down in ditches every thirty to thirty-five miles, buses wrapped around trees, vans hanging from bridges, cars squashed like bugs. Sections of the road are controlled by bandits who hijack trucks several times a month, sometimes killing the drivers. Corrupt policemen demand bribes at every checkpoint and throw drivers in jail if they don’t oblige. And in rural areas, if a cow or pedestrian is run over, mobs of villagers attack, burn trucks, and lynch drivers in revenge—a peril of which Bhajan Singh would twice be reminded on the road ahead.

In some ways, the Grand Trunk depicts what is unsettled and unfinished in South Asia. The road is the backbone of commerce in the northern subcontinent, and commerce is perhaps the most powerful force churning up change in the region these days—raising expectations, dashing expectations, rearranging old caste, class, political, and religious orders. V. S. Naipaul traveled around India recently and described what he saw and heard as “a million mutinies now.” At least half a million of them concern money.

We paid our first bribe almost immediately. An inspector waved us down and demanded tax papers. In India’s Nehruvian, “mixed socialist” economy, taxes on commercial goods are supposed to be paid by truckers at every state and city border. The system is partly a legacy of the old European feudal idea, carried abroad by the European colonialists, that whoever controls the road—bandit, prince, thug, foreign imperialist—takes his tribute. In India, the tax goes back to the nineteenth century. More recently, the Nehruvian state has claimed authority but has shared its booty with the bandits and thugs, some of whom are in its employ, others of whom just rush in where the state has left a void. Modem truckers, like the traders of old, have adapted nicely to the system, foraging inexorably toward profit wherever it can be found. Since following the official rules and paying all the official taxes would bankrupt most transporters and bring commerce to a halt, the trucking companies have developed an intricate, shifting system of bribes paid to bureaucrats and police to keep the wheels turning. Private tribute has been substituted for public tribute. The Nehruvian state may be going broke as a consequence, but its employees and their allies are doing rather well.

~~On The Grand Trunk Road -by- Steve Coll

Day 118: Book Excerpt: The Longest August

The performance of the Congress ministries provided examples of insensitivity toward Muslims’ beliefs and feelings. Congregational singing of “Vande Mataram” (Sanskrit: I bow to Mother) as part of the official protocol in schools, colleges, and elsewhere was one. According to Rabindranath Tagore, a nationalist poet and philosopher, the core of “Vande Mataram” was a hymn to the goddess Durga. In Islam, deifying or worshiping anyone or anything other than the One and Only (unseen) God constitutes idolatry and is forbidden.

The two-year-plus rule of the Congress gave Muslims a foretaste of what to expect in an independent India. Support for the Muslim League grew rapidly. In the 1945–1946 elections, it garnered all 30 Muslim places in the Central Legislative Assembly, securing 87 percent of the Muslim vote. In the provincial legislatures its size quadrupled to 425 out of 485 Muslim seats.

By then the League’s resolution asserting that Muslims were “a nation by any definition,” and that the Muslim-majority areas in the northwestern and eastern zones of India, “should be grouped to constitute Independent States in which the constituent units will be autonomous and sovereign,” was six years old.

More significantly, the term “Pakistan” had become irresistibly attractive to Muslims of all classes and persuasions. Orthodox Muslims envisaged a Muslim state run according to the Sharia. Muslim landlords felt assured of the continuation of the zamindari (landlord) system, which the Congress had vowed to abolish. Muslim businessmen savored the prospect of fresh markets in Pakistan free from Hindu competition. Civil servants foresaw rapid promotion in the fledgling state. These perceptions among Muslims grew in an environment in which Hindus were much better off economically than Muslims.

Astonishingly, there was a singular lack of perception among Congress leaders of the economic factors bolstering the League’s appeal. Jawaharlal Nehru made passing remarks about peasants, whether Muslim or Hindu, suffering at the hands of landlords. Mahatma Mohandas Gandhi failed to grasp that it was that section of the Muslim population that felt it could not compete with Hindus in getting government jobs and in commerce and industry that backed the League.

On the political front, what made partition inevitable was Nehru’s boastful declaration on July 8, 1947, about Britain’s Constitutional Award of May 16. It envisaged united India with a constituent assembly, elected by existing provincial legislatures, convening briefly in Delhi, and then dividing into Sections A (Hindu majority), B (Muslim-majority, northwestern region), and C (Muslim-majority, Bengal-Assam) to frame a constitution for three subfederations into which federal, independent India was to be divided. Nehru announced that the Congress had agreed to participate in the Constituent Assembly and, once convened, the Assembly would have the power to change the Constitutional Award’s provisions, if it so wished, and that the grouping scheme would most likely not survive. This led Jinnah to withdraw the League’s acceptance of the Constitutional Award.

The savage butchery that Muslims and non-Muslims—Hindus and Sikhs—perpetrated on one another in Punjab left five hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand people dead and caused the largest mass exodus in history. When communal frenzy gripped Delhi, with Muslims bearing the brunt, Nehru stuck firmly to his secular beliefs, while Patel and Rajendra Prasad disapproved of the Indian army protecting Muslim citizens.

Moreover Patel and his cohorts in Nehru’s government were hell-bent on strangling Pakistan at birth. Jinnah complained about this to British prime minister Clement Attlee and vowed that the Dominion of Pakistan would “never surrender.” Despite his failing health, he helped the incipient Pakistan, composed of two wings separated by a thousand miles, to find its infant feet.

JINNAH FAILS TO WOO THE MAHARAJA

While acting as the chief executive of Pakistan, Jinnah dealt directly with the tribal areas adjoining Afghanistan and the princely states. He realized that failure to persuade the Hindu Maharaja Sir Hari Singh of the predominantly Muslim Jammu and Kashmir to accede to Pakistan would be a severe blow to his two-nation theory. An opponent of Jinnah’s thesis, the maharaja rebuffed his friendly approaches.

Jinnah then assigned the Kashmir portfolio to Prime Minister Liaquat Ali Khan. He complemented his strategy of taking charge of the Azad Army formed independently by Kashmiri Muslims with a plan to secure Srinagar by deploying armed irregulars from the tribal areas. He informed Jinnah of the first track but not the second.

When the invasion of the tribal irregulars led to the airlifting of Indian troops to Srinagar in October 1947, following the maharaja’s accession to India, Jinnah was distraught. His unease increased when Pakistan’s commander in chief General Sir Frank Messervy refused to obey his order to deploy Pakistani troops. Sir Frank argued that implementing Governor-General Jinnah’s order would result in British officers commanding their respective Indian and Pakistani contingents in a fight against each other.

Jinnah’s dream of incorporating all of Jammu and Kashmir into Pakistan withered, accelerating his physical decline. He died in harness only a year after the birth of Pakistan.

The outbreak of war with India in Kashmir within months of Pakistan’s inception gave its military a primacy it has maintained since then, monopolizing the drafting and implementation of national security policies after the assassination of Ali Khan in October 1951. With his death the nation lost the remaining cofounder of Pakistan. The Muslim League started to unravel, while differences between the eastern and western wings sharpened on the status of Bengali, the mother tongue of the majority of Pakistani citizens. Urdu remained the sole official language. The ongoing squabbling between politicians led to the seizure of power by General Muhammad Ayub Khan in 1958.

~~The Longest August: The Unflinching Rivalry Between India and Pakistan -by- Dilip Hiro

Day 45 : Book Excerpt : Intel Wars

Interviews with a dozen American and Pakistani intelligence officials have revealed that since 9/11, the CIA and the rest of the U.S. intelligence community have had what can only be described as a tempestuous, love-hate relationship with Pakistan’s powerful intelligence service, the Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate, which virtually everyone refers to by its initials, ISI.

It is not an exaggeration to say that many of the CIA’s greatest intelligence successes and failures since 9/11 stem directly from its inordinately convoluted relationship with the ISI. Even in the best of times, the U.S.-Pakistani intelligence relationship has been dogged by mutual suspicion and even open animosity, fueled to a certain degree by the strong undercurrent of anti-Americanism that pervades the ranks of the Pakistani military and intelligence services. This should come as no surprise, since the U.S. government and its policies in the Muslim world are extremely unpopular in Pakistan, with recent State Department polling data showing that 68 percent of all Pakistanis have a decidedly unfavorable view of the United States.

This has meant that every CIA chief of station in Pakistan since 9/11 has worked hard to improve their personal relationships with the director of ISI and his senior staff. The CIA chief of station spends much of his time during the workweek commuting back and forth between the fortresslike U.S. embassy in Islamabad’s diplomatic enclave (one former CIA staff officer sarcastically referred to the heavily protected area as the “ghetto of the damned”) to ISI’s headquarters, located just four miles away at the intersection of Khayaban-e-Suhrawardy Road and Service Road East.

In keeping with its penchant for secrecy, everything about the ISI is hidden from public view. The ISI’s 40-acre headquarters complex is surrounded by a ten-foot-high wall and guarded twenty-four hours a day by a contingent of elite Pakistani Army troops who not only shoo away unwanted visitors but have orders to shoot anyone foolish enough to try to enter the compound without authorization. Beyond the main gate is a circular driveway, which leads to a white multistory office building where most of ISI’s senior officials have their offices. Most of ISI’s staff work in a series of drab multistory office buildings that extend back several hundred yards from the ISI headquarters building.

But according to a Western European intelligence source, most of the ISI’s really sensitive intelligence-gathering and covert action activities, including all activities relating to Afghanistan, are run from two military bases eight miles to the south called the Hamza Camp and the Ojri Camp, both of which are hidden away behind high walls and guard towers in the city of Rawalpindi. “We’ve been trying to find out what goes on in those camps for years,” a former CIA case officer revealed in a 2010 interview, “but without much success. Everything they [the ISI] did not want us to see or hear about they hid in ’Pindi.”

The chief of ISI on 9/11, Lt. General Mahmood Ahmed, had been the bête noire of the U.S. intelligence community for years because of his overtly pro-Taliban views. At the request of the U.S. government, after 9/11 Ahmed went to Afghanistan and met with Taliban leader Mullah Mohammed Omar in Kandahar to try to stave off the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. But evidence suggests that Ahmed instead urged the Taliban to fight. After his return from Afghanistan, CIA officials privately told Pakistani president Pervez Musharaf in no uncertain terms that they did not trust Ahmed, and that the general had to go as part of the price tag for Pakistan joining the U.S.-led war on terror. It came as no surprise to intelligence insiders when General Ahmed was abruptly and unceremoniously forced to take early retirement on October 7, 2001, only three weeks before the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan began.

His replacement, Lt. General Ehsan ul Haq, ran the ISI for three years from October 2001 until he was promoted to the position of chief of staff of the Pakistani armed forces in October 2004. General ul Haq was handpicked for the post not because he was an intelligence professional but rather because he was a close personal friend and confidant of President Musharaf.

During General ul Huq’s tenure, the top task for the CIA and ISI was to hunt down and capture or kill the remnants of al Qaeda that had fled into the wilds of northern Pakistan after the Battle of Tora Bora in December 2001. According to a half-dozen retired and current-serving CIA officials, the ISI aggressively collaborated with the CIA in going after the remnants of al Qaeda. Almost all of the senior al Qaeda officials captured since 9/11 and now biding their time behind bars at the military-run Guantánamo Bay detention facility in Cuba were captured in Pakistan during General ul Haq’s tenure in office, including Abu Zubaydah (captured March 28, 2002), Sheikh Ahmed Salim Swedan (July 11, 2002), Ramzi Bin al-Shibh (September 11, 2002), Abu Umar and Abu Hamza (January 9, 2003), and the biggest capture of them all, al Qaeda’s operations chief, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, on March 1, 2003. “We would not have gotten any of these guys without the help of ISI,” a former senior CIA official said in an interview.

As a reward for this assistance, the CIA has secretly funneled hundreds of millions of dollars every year since 2002 to the ISI, with senior American intelligence officials confirming media reports that until 2009 the agency was directly subsidizing about one third of ISI’s annual budget, which did not include the tens of millions of dollars of training, equipment, and logistical support that the agency also provided to Pakistan. According to author Bob Woodward, in 2008 the annual CIA subsidy to the ISI amounted to a staggering $2 billion.

~~Intel Wars -by- Matthew M. Aid