Three men and a conflict

IF George W. Bush has his troubles, so does Pervez Musharraf. The US president has lately been seeking to control the damage from a leaked intelligence report that states the obvious: namely that the war in Iraq has exacerbated tendencies towards violent militancy among Muslims.

Before he could quite accomplish that, he was faced with State of Denial, the latest book by Bob Woodward, which offers a grim view of politics in the White House. Pakistan’s military leader, on the other hand, felt obliged to take time out from publicising his recently published memoirs in order to mount a stout defence of the ISI after a British ministry of defence research paper repeated allegations that the intelligence agency is in cahoots with jihadi terrorists.

In what could be a sign of desperation, he opted for threatening language. “You’ll be brought down to your knees if Pakistan doesn’t cooperate with you,” Musharraf told the BBC last week. “If we were not with you, you won’t manage anything ... And if the ISI is not with you, you will fail.” In an interview with The Independent, he wanted to know: “What right does anyone have to tell us to disband our ISI, which was the main organ which assisted in the defeat of the Soviet Union?” And he told The Times: “ISI is a disciplined force; for 27 years they have been doing what the government has been telling them; they won the Cold War for the world. Breaking the back of Al Qaeda would not have been possible if ISI was not doing an excellent job.”

If the ISI won the Cold War, one can only wonder why such a crucial accomplishment has been kept secret for so long. It must have caused Musharraf a certain amount of consternation to discover that his revelation more or less coincided with a statement by Mumbai’s police commissioner, A.N. Roy, who claimed that the train blasts that killed 186 innocents in the Indian metropolis in July were planned by the ISI and carried out by Lashkar-i-Taiba with the assistance of the Students’ Islamic Movement. Islamabad predictably responded with a vociferous denial. But would a senior Indian police official have taken it upon himself to go public with such a serious charge were it entirely without substance?

Given that the process of mending Indo-Pakistan relations has supposedly been resuscitated after last month’s encounter in Havana between Musharraf and Manmohan Singh, it is just as well that Islamabad has, albeit grudgingly, offered to investigate the allegation and India has promised to share the evidence on which it is based. Should it turn out that that charge isn’t altogether frivolous, Musharraf might feel obliged to retract his comment that the ISI only follows the instructions of the government of the day. Or not, as the case may be.

One can discern a hint of backtracking in the presidential admission that retired ISI personnel may indeed be contributing to the militant cause. This belated and perfunctory (but nonetheless welcome) nod to reality incorporates the implicit acknowledgement that the menace posed by so many international alumni of the Afghan jihad also encompasses Pakistani intelligence officers and agents. The question is, can Musharraf categorically state that all those who participated in that phase of the Great Game with such passion and gusto are now indeed retired?

In the Line of Fire concedes: “We helped to create the mujahideen, fired them with religious zeal in seminaries, armed them, paid them, fed them, and sent them in a jihad against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. We did not stop to think how we would divert them to a productive life after the jihad was won.” It admits that “we — the United States, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia — created our own Frankenstein’s monster”. One gets the impression, however, that Musharraf’s reservations are restricted to the consequences of the US/Pakistani/Saudi role in Afghanistan during the 1980s: he appears to have no problems with the motivations behind that axis (which, incidentally, included Israel as a surreptitious honorary member) or the methods it employed to achieve its objectives.

This isn’t particularly surprising, of course, and were Musharraf and Hamid Karzai searching for common ground, chances are they might locate it in a broadly shared view of the pre-Taliban period. As far as the present is concerned, their inability to see eye to eye apparently remains undiminished following a much-publicised counselling session with that renowned conciliator, Dr Dubya. (Woodward’s book, incidentally, contains several reminders that the US president’s skills in this department may be overrated, given that for much of his tenure senior Bush aides have been at loggerheads with one another; evidently it often takes a presidential directive for Donald Rumsfeld to return Condoleezza Rice’s calls.)

At least one American analyst compared Bush’s role at the dinner he hosted last week for his Afghan and Pakistani counterparts with that of a marriage counsellor. An intimate conference aimed at converting a love triangle into a menage a trois would, perhaps, be a more accurate analogy. Although the gathering was graced by Rice, Dick Cheney, Stephen Hadley and the Afghan and Pakistani ambassadors to Washington, apparently no one other than Bush, Musharraf and Karzai said a word. And, unfortunately, the words that passed between this illustrious trio have not been made public. One can only hope that Bob Woodward’s next book on the Bush White House will contain revealing extracts from the three-way conversation, which, according to the two ambassadors, alternated between moments of tension and relative calm.

The source of the animosity between the presidents of Afghanistan and Pakistan is Karzai’s insistence that Musharraf hasn’t been doing enough to curb the cross-border flow of weapons and militants, and has been reluctant to act against the Taliban in Pakistan, including the ‘Quetta-based’ Mullah Omar. As for Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts, Karzai told the American press: “If I said he was in Pakistan, President Musharraf would be mad at me. And if I said he was in Afghanistan, it wouldn’t be true.”

Musharraf is of the opinion that Karzai doesn’t know what he is talking about, and the general has been a lot less reticent about publicly slagging off the Afghan leader, describing him as “an ostrich with his head buried in the sand” and as someone who “can’t even get out of his office”, while at the same time claiming: “He knows everything, but he’s purposely ... turning a blind eye [to it].”

Bush’s intercession appears to have made little difference, although the two presidents did reportedly agree in principle on Karzai’s proposal for parallel jirgas on both sides of the Pak-Afghan border. The US president has, on the face of it, been even-handed in dealing with the pair of recalcitrant allies, but circumstances seem to have conspired against Musharraf. Last week the US military claimed that Taliban activity on Afghanistan’s south-eastern border had increased “twofold, in some cases threefold” in the weeks since Islamabad’s accord with tribal elders in North Waziristan, thereby substantiating Kabul’s suspicions about the deal. Add to that the Indian charge and the British research paper — which was based on a field trip rather than hearsay — and Pakistan’s position begins to seem distinctly awkward.

And that’s not all. No one could have been particularly surprised by Amnesty International’s charge that abductions and torture are routine in Pakistan, as is the practice of handing over suspects to the US in exchange for a bounty. Such accusations cannot easily be twisted into a badge of honour, although Musharraf’s book exhibits misplaced pride in the phenomenon. “We have earned bounties totalling millions of dollars,” he writes. “Those who habitually accuse us of ‘not doing enough’ in the war on terror should simply ask the CIA how much prize money it has paid to the government of Pakistan.”

In his interview with The Times, he recalibrated the narrative by claiming the bounty went to individuals. The suspicion persists, meanwhile, that along with “high-value” captives, relative innocents end up in the shadowy US prison system, some of them turned in chiefly on account of the tidy sum the US is willing to pay for them: a free-market operation in which demand creates its own supply.

Simon & Schuster (which also happens to be Woodward’s publisher) is likely to consider Musharraf’s book tour something of a success; a British wag has described him as an author who moonlights as the leader of Pakistan. The opus was always bound to be widely perused: on account of what it says, as well as what it leaves out. One thing the general cannot credibly claim, however, is the moral high ground. Which puts him in the same boat as Karzai and Bush.

The growing frequency of counter-insurgency operations and suicide bombings increases with each passing day Afghanistan’s resemblance to Iraq. Barring Bush and a shrinking bunch of acolytes, hardly anyone suggests any more that the war in Iraq has reduced the international terrorist threat. The US president has said that he will not withdraw troops from Iraq even if his support dwindles down to his wife and his terrier (and, he might have added, his poodles). The US electorate will have an opportunity, in next month’s congressional elections, to show the world where it stands on the matter.

State of Denial points out, among other things, that the White House increasingly values the advice of Henry Kissinger — who, Woodward says, is still fighting the Vietnam war and hell-bent on “staying the course”. One can only wonder whether Dr Death still remembers the circumstances in which a line was drawn under that particular bout of American aggression

- By Mahir Ali
 

Corrupting practices

THE appointment of Paul Wolfowitz as president of the World Bank was greeted with dismay because of his cheerleading for the invasion of Iraq while a member of the Bush administration. If fears that Mr Wolfowitz would turn the bank into an arm of the White House have proven unfounded, he has nevertheless set the bank on a course that has run into opposition.

Most recently, the UK has withheld 50 million pounds from the bank to push it to focus on accountability and human rights, rather than reforms linked to privatisation and liberalisation, a process known as conditionality. Hilary Benn, the international development secretary, is right to try to hurry the bank along.

The main controversy stirred up has been Mr Wolfowitz’s decision to concentrate on tackling corruption, through halting loans and aid to countries that the bank deems to have unacceptable records. Some of the world’s poorest countries, including Chad, Bangladesh and Congo, have since suffered the effects. Mr Wolfowitz argues that in most cases the funds have been paid after safeguards were put in place, and that fighting corruption and fraud is an important part of development in that it rewards countries with good governance.

—The Guardian Service