Rassegna della stampa internazionale sull’India
15 - 30 Agosto 2010
A cura di Giulio Carminati
Political and current affairs
Pakistan: flood relief
After The Deluge...
The swell of militant groups engaged in flood relief has everyone jittery
Amir Mir
Sep 06, 2010OUTLOOKINDIA
When the mighty Indus swelled and spilled over its banks, gradually inundating nearly 20 per cent of Pakistan, teeming millions from decrepit towns and remote hamlets scampered away to safety. There were some, though, who were seen trekking in the opposite direction, wading into the watery graves to rescue those marooned. These civilians, often sporting lush, unkempt beards and dressed in pathan suits, were activists of militant organisations who had spontaneously come to the assistance of beleaguered people reeling under a crisis unprecedented in Pakistan’s history. Nor did their initial enthusiasm ebb in subsequent days—they remain in the forefront of non-government endeavour to provide hot meals, clothes and medicine to the affected, collecting funds to finance relief operations likely to last for months.
They have been hailed in some quarters as saviours who rushed to assist the hapless at a time when government officials had scurried away. Yet, this samaritan act has stoked fears, here as well abroad, about the agenda underlying the flood relief work. Wouldn’t they exploit popular sympathy to widen their recruitment base? Even President Asif Ali Zardari said recently, “We are giving them (victims) everything we’ve got. But there is a possibility that some negative forces will exploit this situation. For example, extremist militants can take orphaned babies and put them in their terrorist training camps.” In its August 17 editorial, the New York Times wrote, “In some areas, radical Islamic charities have provided shelter and hot meals well before the beleaguered Pakistani authorities could bring in food supplies. This is a battle for hearts and minds. It is one that Pakistan’s government, and the United States, must not lose.”
Zardari and America’s worry arises from the sheer number of militant groups operating in the flood-hit areas. Most of these groups were banned, but they have now emerged under new names in those areas facing the wrath of the Indus most. From Jamaat-ud-Daawa (JuD) to Jaish-e-Mohammed to Harkatul Mujahideen to Sipah-e-Sahaba Pakistan to Lashkar-e-Jhangvi to Harkatul Jehadul Islami, they have organised relief camps in flood-affected parts of Punjab, Sindh, Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa and Balochistan provinces. In addition, they are said to have collected millions of rupees for relief operations.
The goodwill these militant groups have generated locally through this philanthropic turn is likely to make it impossible for Islamabad to curtail the activities of Hafiz Saeed, whose JuD, the parent body of Lashkar-e-Toiba, has harnessed its experience gained from years of charity work to organise relief operations. Its efforts during the devastating quake of 2005 had helped it acquire a humanitarian halo—and relief work for the thousands who fled the SwatValley during the army’s operation against the Taliban last year did its image no harm. In his recent Friday sermon, Saeed urged philanthropists to support the JuD, “The nation needs to stand up and help the flood victims through donations and relief work, as has been the case in the past.”
JuD’s Yahya Mujahid says 2,200 members are volunteering in the flood-hit northwest region, south Punjab.
The JuD has been cautious in providing assistance—now under the adopted name of Tanzeem-e-Falah-e-Insaniyat (Human Welfare Organisation)—but its volunteers haven’t tried too hard to conceal their links to the parent organisation. They wear the badges of both organisations as they bustle around in camps. JuD spokesperson Yahya Mujahid says over 2,200 members of the group are working day and night in the flood relief efforts in the northwest region and south Punjab. As Mujahid told Outlook, “Hundreds more have been dispatched to the flood-stricken areas of Sindh and Balochistan along with dozens of trucks carrying medicines, camps, clothes, ration and clean water.” As for the badges worn by volunteers, Mujahid says the JuD and the Tanzeem-e-Falah-e-Insaniyat are two separate entities working in unison. But this explanation doesn’t have too many takers.
Ataur Rehman, who heads the JuD’s relief operations in Punjab, denies that the group has any ulterior motive in assisting the flood-ravaged people. As he puts it, “To work for humanity is the true spirit of Islam, we don’t expect any reward. Had the government been sincere towards the poor, it would have been the first to reach to the affected. When the floods came, it was we who carried people on our shoulders to the boats and ambulances.”
Analyst Dr Hasan Askari Rizvi says the JuD has adopted a model that the Hezbollah perfected in Lebanon, combining militancy with charity work. “The JuD too is doing this to create goodwill and gain sympathy for its fighters active in India’s Kashmir. There is currently no law to stop volunteers from doing humanitarian work.”
There are others, though, who feel the international media has been needlessly alarmist about the involvement of militant groups in relief work. Among them is former foreign secretary Najmuddin Sheikh, who feels there’s little evidence to suggest that the assistance provided by militant groups constitutes a substantial proportion of the overall flood relief work. The bulk of the relief and rehabilitation efforts, even though falling short of the country’s requirements, can be ascribed to the state and international aid agencies. It consequently follows, he says, that the benefits accruing to the jehadists too would be limited.
But this won’t deter the jehadists from exploiting the natural calamity to their ideological advantage. As Najmuddin says, “The jehadis can make the case that had they been in charge of things, they would have done much better than the present government. They will also argue that this is God’s wrath upon a nation that has chosen an inept government. But the fact is that the magnitude of the devastation is simply unprecedented in Pakistan’s history.”
International outcry prompted the government to announce that it would disallow banned groups to work in flood-affected areas. But Mujahid says no action has yet been taken nor is likely to be taken considering the difficult times the country is passing through. As he argues, “Poor people just want help, that’s it. The people in the flood-stricken areas, living in misery, can hardly have second thoughts about taking help from us. Anyway, the government hasn’t banned us.” The group, indeed, is only on Pakistan’s terror watch list even though the United Nations has banned it.
Interior ministry sources in Islamabad, however, say that directives were issued to all the four provincial governments to prevent jehadi outfits from organising relief activities. They particularly bemoan the reluctance of the Pakistan Muslim League (N) government of Punjab to counter the jehadi groups. One source says Islamabad has already conveyed its displeasure to the Punjab government over its failure to circumscribe Hafiz Saeed’s activities.
The role of militant organisations in the flood relief operations may have been a bit exaggerated, but there still remains the larger question: hasn’t Pakistan learned from the cumulative effect of allowing jehadi outfits free space?
EXCLUSIVE
Souter Takes The Call
As the Great Game repeats itself, India must wake up to Karzai’s new moves
William Dalrymple
August 30, 2010 OUTLOOKINDIA
In 1843, shortly after his return from Afghanistan, an army chaplain named Rev G.H. Gleig wrote a memoir of the disastrous First Anglo-Afghan War of which he was one of the very few survivors. It was, he wrote, “a war begun for no wise purpose, carried on with a strange mixture of rashness and timidity, brought to a close after suffering and disaster, without much glory attached either to the government which directed, or the great body of troops which waged it. Not one benefit, political or military, was acquired with this war. Our eventual evacuation of the country resembled the retreat of an army defeated”.
It would be difficult to imagine any military adventure today going quite as badly as the First Anglo-Afghan War, an abortive experiment in Great Game colonialism that ended with an entire East India Company army utterly routed by poorly equipped tribesmen, at the cost of Rs 80 billion and over 40,000 lives. But this month, almost 10 years on from NATO’s invasion of Afghanistan, there were increasing signs that the current Afghan war, like so many before them, could still end in another embarrassing withdrawal after a humiliating defeat, with Afghanistan yet again left in tribal chaos, possibly partitioned and ruled by the same government which the war was originally fought to overthrow.
Certainly it is becoming clearer than ever that the once-hated Taliban, far from being defeated by the surge, are instead beginning to converge on, and effectively besiege, Kabul in what is beginning to look like the final act in the history of Karzai’s western-installed puppet government. For the Taliban have now reorganised, and advanced out of their borderland safe havens. They are now massing at the gates of Kabul, surrounding the capital, much as the US-backed mujahideen once did to the Soviet-installed regime in the late ’80s. The Taliban controls over 70 per cent of the country, where it collects taxes, enforces the sharia and dispenses its usual rough justice. Every month their sphere of influence increases. According to a recent Pentagon report, Karzai’s government only controls 29 out of 121 key strategic districts.
Last month marked a new low with the Taliban inflicting higher levels of casualties on both civilians and NATO forces than ever before and regaining control of the opium-growing centre of Marja in Helmand, only three months after being driven out by American forces amid much gung-ho cheerleading in the US media.
The Taliban are massing at the gates of Kabul, much as the US-backed mujahideen once did in the late ’80s.
Worse still, there are unsettling and persistent rumours that Karzai is trying to reach some sort of accommodation with elements in Pakistan that aid and assist the Taliban: the ISI head, Lt General Ahmad Shuja Pasha, has secretly been shuttling to and from Islamabad to meet Karzai, and last month, General Kayani, head of the Pakistani army, visited Kabul.
This followed the sacking of Amrullah Saleh, Karzai’s very pro-Indian security chief. Saleh is a tough, burly and intimidating Tajik with a piercing, unblinking stare, who rose to prominence as a mujahideen protege of Ahmed Shah Masood, the legendary, India-backed Lion of the Panjshir. Saleh brought these impeccable credentials to his job after the American conquest, ruthlessly hunting down and interrogating any Taliban he could find, with little regard for notions of human rights.
The Taliban, and their backers in the ISI, regarded him as their fiercest enemy, something he was enormously proud of. When I had dinner with him in Kabul in May, he spoke at length of his frustration with the Karzai government’s ineffectiveness in taking the fight to the Taliban, and the degree to which the ISI was still managing to aid, arm and train their pocket insurgents in Waziristan, Sindh and Balochistan.
Saleh’s sacking in early June merited much less newsprint than last month’s sacking of General Stanley McChrystal. Yet in reality, McChrystal’s departure reflects only a minor personnel change, no important alteration in strategy. The sacking of Saleh, however, gave notice of a major and ominous change of direction by President Karzai.
Bruce Riedel, Obama’s Afpak advisor, said when the news broke: “Karzai’s decision to sack Saleh and (Hanif) Atmar (head of the interior ministry) has worried me more than any other development, because it means Karzai is already planning for a post-American Afghanistan.”
The implication is that Pakistan is encouraging some sort of accommodation between Karzai and the ISI-sponsored jehadi network of Sirajuddin Haqqani, which could give over much of the Pashtun south to Haqqani, but preserve Karzai in power in Kabul. The Americans have been party to none of this, and administration officials have been quoted as being alarmed by the news.
India’s expulsion from Afghanistan, or at least a severe rolling back of its presence, can be presumed to be a demand on the ISI shopping list in return for a deal. Under Karzai, India had increasing political and economic influence in Afghanistan—it opened four regional consulates, and provided around $662 million of reconstruction assistance. Pakistan’s military establishment has always believed it would be suicide to accept an Indian presence in what they regard as their strategic backyard, and is completely paranoid about the still small Indian presence—rather as the British used to be about Russians in Afghanistan during the days of the Great Game.
MEA sources say there are less than 3,600 Indians in Afghanistan, almost all of them businessmen and contract workers; there are only 10 Indian diplomatic officers as opposed to nearly 150 in the UK embassy. Yet the horror of being squeezed in an Indian nutcracker has led the ISI to risk Pakistan’s own internal security and coherence, as well as its strategic relationship with the US, in order to keep the Taliban in play, and its leadership under watch and ISI patronage in Quetta, something the Wikileaks documents amply confirmed.
The horror of being squeezed in an Indian nutcracker forces Pakistan to risk all to keep the Taliban in play.
If it is true that Karzai is tilting away from NATO and India, and towards Pakistan, it would represent a strategic victory for the Pakistani military, and a diplomatic defeat for India—though the ISI will have to first deliver the Taliban, who still say they are unwilling to negotiate with Karzai. It also remains to be seen whether Pakistan can be defended from the jehadi Frankenstein’s monster its military has created: the recent bomb blasts in Lahore at the shrine of Datta Sahib would seem further evidence to indicate not. The other question is whether India can succeed in its reported attempts to resuscitate the Northern Alliance as a contingency against the Taliban’s takeover of the south, possibly in conjunction with Russia, Iran and the Central Asian ‘stans’.
Either way, within Afghanistan, it’s a grim picture. Already, it’s now impossible—or at least extremely foolhardy—for any foreigner to walk even in Kabul without armed guards; it is even more inadvisable to head out of town in any direction except north: the strongly anti-Taliban Panjshir Valley, and the towns of Mazar and Herat, are really the only safe havens left for non-Afghans in the entire country, despite the massive troops levels all over. In all other directions, travel is only possible in an armed convoy. This is especially so around the Khoord Kabul and TezeenPasses, immediately to the south of Kabul, where around 18,000 East India Company troops, many of them Indian sepoys, were lost in 1842, and which is today again a centre of resistance against foreign troops.
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The trajectory of the current war is in fact beginning to feel unsettlingly familiar to students of the Great Game. In 1839, the British invaded Afghanistan on the basis of sexed-up intelligence about a non-existent threat: information about a single Russian envoy to Kabul was manipulated by a group of ambitious, ideologically-driven hawks to create a scare—in this case, about a phantom Russian invasion—thus bringing about an unnecessary, expensive and entirely avoidable war.
Initially, the hawks were triumphant: the British conquest proved remarkably easy and bloodless. Kabul was captured in a few weeks, the Afghan army melted into the hills, and a pliable monarch, Shah Shuja, was placed on the throne. For months the British played cricket, went skating and put on amateur theatricals as if on summer leave in Simla; there were even discussions about making Kabul the summer capital of the Raj. Then an insurgency began which slowly unravelled that first heady success, first among the Pashtuns of Kandahar and Helmand, and slowly moving northwards until it reached Kabul, making the occupation impossible to sustain.
“In the ’80s when we were killing Russians for them, we were freedom fighters. Now we’re just warlords.”
What happened next is a warning of how bad things could yet become: a full-scale rebellion broke out in Kabul; the two most senior British envoys were killed, one hacked to death by a mob in the streets, the other stabbed by resistance leader Wazir Akbar Khan during negotiations. It was on the retreat that followed, on January 6, 1842, that the 18,000 East India Company troops, and maybe half that many Indian camp followers, were slaughtered by marksmen waiting in ambush amid the scree of the high passes, shot down as they trudged through the icy depths of the Afghan winter. After eight days on the death march, the last 50 survivors made their final stand at the village of Gandamak. As late as the 1970s, fragments of Victorian weaponry and military equipment could be found lying in the screes above the village. Even today, the hill is said to be covered with bleached bones.