Tales from shadowy wars
Tanvir Ahmad Khan


ON September 11, 2001, President Musharraf recalls in his book, he was in Karachi attending to his professional duties unaware of the fact that Pakistan was “about to be thrust into the front line of yet another war — a war against shadows”. He now describes 9/11, like others, as the “day that changed the world”. Opinions all over the world greatly differ on how to define the monumental change that took place as the twin towers collapsed.

But there is consensus on the important operational role played by him in the unfolding drama. No other ally of George Bush took such grave risks as he in implementing his faraway project.

Commitment to the new task is one of the main themes of his memoir; it is the magnet that pulls in the western reader. Amongst the lesser narratives is another shadowy Indo-Pakistan war bitterly fought in the summer of 1999 in the Kargil-Draz mountains of Kashmir. It is one of the ironies of recent history that the general who rightly praises the great valour of his irregular allies in that battle also stakes his claim to international attention as a ruthless hunter of thousands of other Mujahideen who once helped loosen the Soviet grip on Afghanistan.

Musharraf must have recognised that it would not be easy to reconcile these two roles either in terms of national interest or political morality. The strain is writ large on the autobiography and is mostly overcome through dogma rather than reason. He has obviously accepted the risk that his readers, especially in his own country, would either embrace his ex cathedra pronouncements or use the data, even when carefully selected, to reach altogether unintended and even contrary conclusions.

Soon after the fateful Bangladesh crisis, I went to my alma mater, Oxford, to meet Hugh Trevor-Roper, who was then the Regius professor of modern history there. He had been invited by late Zulfikar Ali Bhutto to visit Pakistan and our conversation turned to the question if Mr Bhutto should provide an authentic account of politics, war and secession in the lost half of the country. Professor Trevor-Roper believed that history should not be treated just as an esoteric subject but should become a part of people’s living experience.

Contemporary history needed contemporary witnesses but their problems, especially if they are politicians in power, should not be under-estimated. One should weigh the present cons against the future pros of writing history when time provides perspective and loss of office brings unsuspected freedom to tell the truth.

Considered as authentic history, Musharraf’s memoir poses the problems that the distinguished Oxford historian — author of The Last Days of Hitler — had in mind. Most of the major events that he addresses are not only controversial but also shrouded in a mystery that would take decades to unravel. He excludes a large number of questions from his ambit and seeks to apply a closure to the few that he has selected. He discards the dialectical process of arriving at the truth in favour of a unilateralist and assertive narration. It is a composition without a counterpoint. The faithful applaud while others just reject it.

Metaphorically, Afghanistan continues to be the Achilles’ heel of the Pakistani story. An engagement spanning 30 years cannot but leave a legacy of contradictions. The war against shadows that Musharraf joined with extraordinary verve in September 2001 presented a basic dilemma of demolishing the Taliban first to get at Al Qaeda. Pakistan’s ambivalence towards the Taliban does not get resolved even in President Musharraf’s retrospective harshness. The Taliban still cloud his relations with the Karzai government and its western backers.

Musharraf’s account would have resonated better with the reader if he had devoted a few paragraphs to how the military establishment suppressed the growing discontent with the Taliban in the civilian component of the governments of Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif, the two prime ministers who had the form but not the substance of power on the major strategic issues confronting the country.

I remember vividly how in early 1996, Dr Maleeha Lodhi from her post in Washington and I from Moscow argued in a high level Islamabad meeting, presided over by President Leghari and Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto, that unless the Taliban acquired a “human face”, their regime would never win international recognition and legitimacy. I do not even now know what to make of President Musharraf’s belief that if “70 or 80 countries had established embassies in Kabul, we might have been able to exert some influence on them (the Taliban)”, perhaps specifically in the context of the outrageous destruction of the ancient Buddha statues in Bamiyan.

How did Pakistan ever entertain hopes of such universal recognition of the Taliban regime in the zeitgeist of the era and why did it take Musharraf so long to realise that they could not ensure Pakistan’s national interest?

Thomas Pickering was the United States’ ambassador to Moscow when I served there. He maintained a sharp focus on Central Asia and Afghanistan from that vantage point. Visiting Islamabad as US under-secretary of state in May 2000, he made a concerted, if polite, effort in talks with Pakistani leaders and also with the deputy foreign minister of the Taliban regime to break the Osama-Taliban connection.

He relied heavily on evidence linking Al Qaeda with attacks on US embassies in East Africa. Apparently, Musharraf assured him rightly that though Pakistan’s leverage with Mullah Omar was limited, it was doing its utmost to wean the Taliban from Osama Bin Laden. Meanwhile, Musharraf counselled that the Taliban should not be isolated further or subjected to harsher UN sanctions.

Islamabad seems to have had a genuine difficulty in reading US priorities. It was also reflected in the disproportionate zeal with which Musharraf’s foreign minister was trying to arrange Pakistan’s signatures on the comprehensive test ban treaty (CTBT). There was a touch of naivete in the thinking that CTBT would provide an easier route to winning American support for the Musharraf regime. For Washington, Islamic militancy and not the CTBT had already become the overriding concern. Pakistani diplomats were dissatisfied with the Taliban but lacked an effective policy towards them in the prevailing ambience of ambivalence.

No wonder then that the dramatic reversal of policy on September 12 is still seen by many as a panicky reaction to extreme intimidation by the United States. President Musharraf’s self-image as the uniquely privileged supreme leader, rather than reasons of state, seems to have made him assume total responsibility for the decision to accept the American demands before going to the cabinet or the corps commanders. Most rulers would have preferred to diffuse responsibility for such a momentous decision, a ploy that might even have given Pakistan better terms of engagement and also an enlarged public support.

Admittedly, President Musharraf faced no political crisis of any serious magnitude even as Pakistan got increasingly sucked into the American invasion plans that were to decimate the Taliban soon. A closer analysis, however, reveals serious damage to the national psyche and self-esteem which may get aggravated with disclosures, such as the one on page 237 of the president’s memoir, of 369 out of the 689 Al-Qaeda members captured by Pakistan being handed over to the United States. In case the point was missed, the book tells us that “we have received bounties totalling millions of dollars”.

A greater danger to Pakistan, however, lurks in what may be yet another misreading of history. It would probably not be fair to think that this slim 352-page autobiography exhausts, as it were, President Musharraf’s understanding of the world situation. One certainly hopes that it does not do so even if the book itself is constructed around a linear view of events. It draws much of its power from the mythology of a global war on terrorism. It is not sufficiently cognisant of the fact that this great myth is fast losing its lustre and that other counter-narratives are emerging all over the world. They look well beyond what for few years was the unquestioned gospel according to Bush, and now confirm with little inhibition, even in the United States, that it was only a convenient and transient metaphor for deeper objectives such as the reconstitution of the Middle East and, on a larger canvas, the perpetuation of American global hegemony.

The fiasco in Iraq, a creeping failure in Afghanistan, the increasing salience of non-state actors like Hamas in Palestine and Hezbollah in Lebanon, the growing leftist resistance to US economic and political hegemony in Latin America, and last but not the least, the time-honoured reaction to unilateral empire-building in the shape of countervailing alliances are all signs and symbols of a new world in the making. It will not be what the ideologues of George Bush had conspired to achieve. Afghanistan may end up as a bloody, vengeful prologue to an imperial drama of the reconquest of the region that met a tragic denouement.

This is an inexorable process which can easily rob President Musharraf of an honourable place in history unless he can reinvent himself fast. His account of the shadowy wars does not encourage one to think that he can do it. Bush will simply not give him room to manoeuvre. At home, he is, like other wielders of absolute power, unable to break the magic circle of sycophancy. He often gets irritated that nobody offers him useful advice. Since I have mentioned Hugh Trevor-Roper, let me end on one of his remarks. “The function of a genius,” he once wrote, “is not to give new answers, but to pose new questions which time and mediocrity can resolve.” Musharraf should either ask new questions or give us the freedom to do it for him.

The writer is a former foreign secretary.

Iran’s uranium glitch
By David Ignatius

INTELLIGENCE analysts believe that Iran is encountering technical difficulties in mastering the complex process of uranium enrichment. That means the West may have a bit more time than previously expected to pursue a diplomatic solution to the Iranian nuclear standoff.

The problem, according to intelligence officials, is that the centrifuges that are supposed to enrich uranium are overheating. Some are breaking down and must be replaced. As a result, Iran has not ramped up its enrichment effort as quickly as analysts had expected.

This assessment is based on recent conversations with analysts from several western nations that are watching the Iranian programme closely and on an unpublished report by the International Atomic Energy Agency that was completed Aug. 31. To me, it’s the equivalent of adding some extra time to the clock in a tense football game. The urgency remains, but there is an opportunity for a few additional plays before the game is over. “There’s time, purely from the point of view of the technical development of the threat, to let diplomacy play out in the case of Iran,” says Harvard professor Ashton B. Carter, who closely follows the issue.

The technical difficulties involve the uranium enrichment facility in Natanz, north of Isfahan in central Iran. The Iranians broke IAEA seals at Natanz in January and began enriching uranium. It’s a highly complex process, in which uranium gas is injected into the linked array of centrifuges that spin at roughly the speed of sound. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced April 11 that the Iranians had succeeded in enriching uranium to an initial level of 3.5 per cent, and in June Iran told the IAEA it had achieved 5 per cent enrichment. That’s far below the 90 percent level needed for a nuclear weapon, but it suggested the Iranians were on their way to mastering the technology.

Western analysts had expected that the Iranians would move quickly to expand the enrichment effort to meet their near-term goal of having six cascades of 164 centrifuges each, or a total of nearly 1,000 centrifuges. The danger here was technological mastery rather than raw output of uranium. Even with 3,000 centrifuges operating, intelligence analysts estimate that it would take two to three years to produce enough highly enriched uranium for one bomb. Iran’s eventual goal is a massive array of more than 50,000 centrifuges at Natanz.

But problems surfaced this summer. The Aug. 31 IAEA report, marked “Restricted Distribution,” noted that since June, Iran had been feeding uranium into a small 20-centrifuge test cascade “for short periods of time,” and that it had conducted various tests in June, July and August of the initial 164-centrifuge cascade. “The installation of a second 164-machine cascade is proceeding,” the report noted, but it added that Iran planned to test the second cascade in September without injecting uranium.

What happened to slow the expected pace? IAEA analysts have told US and European officials that it appears the centrifuges are overheating when uranium gas is injected. “The Iranians are unable to control higher temperatures, and after a short period they must stop because of higher temperatures. So far they haven’t been able to solve this,” says one western intelligence official who has been briefed on the IAEA findings. In addition, this official said, some centrifuges “are simply crashing — 10 or so have broken down and must be replaced.”

There’s a lively debate among intelligence analysts about what may be causing these problems. One theory holds that Iran’s home-produced uranium, mixed with foreign ore, isn’t sufficiently pure for the delicate centrifuges, but other analysts reject that argument. Several analysts I talked to agreed, however, that if Iranian scientists continue with enrichment, they are likely to solve the technical problems eventually through trial and error. That’s why US and European officials are still calling for Iran to suspend enrichment, before they have cracked the puzzles they are encountering.

Iran continues to insist that its nuclear programme is peaceful. And although it’s taken for granted in many western countries that these statements mask a secret plan to build nuclear weapons, intelligence analysts from several nations told me they lack decisive evidence of an Iranian bomb effort. So far, there is no “smoking gun,” said an intelligence analyst from one western nation. Nevertheless, the United States, Israel and some European countries remain convinced that a covert weapons programme exists.

The clock is still ticking. That’s the real import of these new intelligence findings. Iran and the West still have time to find a diplomatic solution to the nuclear showdown. This genie isn’t quite out of the bottle.

Washington Post

Strengthening ties with Central Asian Republics
Kashmala Khan

With the opening up of the Central Asian Republics (CARs), the whole geo-political scenario has changed. The Central Asian Republics have become more important in the world community. Although Central Asian States are land-locked and dependent on other regional partners for export purposes but still these states are attractive to the world because of its rich natural resources. The Caspian Sea in Central Asia contains one of the world's largest untapped oil and gas resources. Countries such as India, Pakistan and Afghanistan welcomed new millennium with redefined goals and objectives and all these countries are trying to get closer to Central Asian States to boost up their trade.
Pakistan's ties with CARs have gained strength since their independence and it was among the first few countries to recognize these states. The historical ties of people between Central Asia and South Asia have contributed to Pakistan's ethnic and cultural outlook. The centuries old ties of shared culture, growing potential for a multi-dimensional cooperation and geographic proximity give Central Asia a distinctive place in Pakistan's foreign policy. This finds ample reflection in our exchanges of high level visits with these brotherly countries.
Pakistan and CARs have signed number of agreements to promote bilateral trade, tourism, cultural and economic cooperation. Pakistan has also developed institutionalized arrangement to promote cooperation in the economic and commercial fields. Moreover, Joint Economic Commissions (JECs) have been established with all the Central Asian States. Under a Special Technical Assistance Programme (STAP) initiated in 1992, Pakistan provided training facilities, which are fully funded. The Program includes courses ranging from English language, banking and accountancy to diplomacy. Exchange of high-level visits has been an important aspect of relations between Pakistan and the Central Asian Republics. These have contributed to better understanding and closer cooperation. Pakistan wishes to keep up the momentum.
Pakistan's relations with the Central Asian Republics made good progress during the past few years. With improved regional security after the fall of the Taliban, Afghanistan, Turkmenistan and Pakistan have decided to push ahead with plans for the ambitious 1,500-kilometre-long gas pipeline. The leaders of the three countries have signed a framework agreement to implement the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline project. The Trans-Afghanistan pipeline would export Turkmen gas (from Daulatabad gas field) via Afghanistan to Pakistan, from where it could reach world markets. Proponents of the project perceive it as a modern continuation of the Silk Road. The Asian Development Bank is the leading coordinating partner. It has, in addition to financial and technical assistance, played an important role in integrating efforts to realize the project. It is also expected that TAP would boost regional economic ties and pave the way for further foreign investment.
Pakistan is also offering Central Asian Republic's access to sea through Gwadar Port. Priority is also given to road and rail links and related facilities for a more effective and mutually beneficial access to Central Asia. Development of transport and communications network linking Pakistan to Central Asia is still in progress. The laying of railway tracks from Turkmenistan to Pakistan via Afghanistan is an important part of it. Another quadrilateral agreement between Pakistan, China, Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan provided transit trade facility through Karakoram Highway. Murghab Kulma Road from Tajikistan to China linking by Karakoram Highway to Pakistan is also a good step. It will boost the transit trade between Pakistan and the Central Asia.
Pakistan and Central Asian States are also the members of Economic Cooperation Organization (ECO); it provides a good opportunity for the Heads of State and Government to meet. Bilateral meetings on the sidelines offer a closer focus on bilateral relations. In the early 1990's the Pakistani dream of a common market through ECO did not materialize due to continued instability in Afghanistan. On the other hand Pakistan's overall trade with the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is around $2 billion. Pakistan's combined trade with the rest of the Central Asian States is merely $26m. Now it is expected that Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) will promote the free flow of trade merchandise. Central Asian Republics such as Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan played a useful role in helping Pakistan's entry into the SCO as an observer.