Grand Jirga factor — A dangerous trap being set for Pakistan by US/Karzai/India
Dr Shahid Qureshi

US and Kabul government have invited Pakistan to a Grand Jirga of tribals from both countries, either in Kabul or in Pakistan. This idea is sinister and a trap being set for Pakistan for reasons below. There are grave security and political implications for Pakistan here and we warn against any such exercise. Basic questions which need to be addressed are:
1. Would this Jirga improve security in Afghanistan and in Pakistani tribal areas?
2. What would Pakistan gain if this Jirga happens?
3. What are the risks for Pakistan if that happens?
4. What would Afghanistan gain out of this exercise?
First we need to understand the historical complexities before and after 9/11.
Background:
• Since 1947 to 1979, there was no problem of militancy and rebellion in the tribal areas despite their martial and semi-autonomous status. Despite presence of strong pockets of pro-Afghan communists like ANP who constantly demanded “Pashtunistan”, the tribals never saw any cause to rise in an uprising against Pakistan. Durand Line was always a major issue between Kabul and Islamabad which Kabul do not recognize.
• Even during the Afghan war between 1979 to 1992, there was no rebellion against Islamabad in the tribal areas despite presence of millions of Afghans and thousands of armed Mujahideen using these regions as base area. During this era, the status quo of Maliks and Elders was broken in Afghanistan and all Mujahideen leaders challenged the traditional hold of tribal elders in their society. It is interesting to note that even during this era, there was no mass call of Jihad within Pakistani tribal areas and the war was basically fought by Afghans or Arabs who came from outside. Pakistani tribals were few in the war. Issue of Pashtuniatsn was dead and buried in those times and local pro-India Pashtuns like ANP were most disappointed and docile. Mujahideen never raised the issue of Durand Line.
• During civil war between Mujahideen in from 1992 to 1996, still there was no problem of armed uprising or rebellion against Pakistan in these regions. Pakistani tribal areas remained totally indifferent towards developments in Afghanistan and there was absolutely no participation of Pakistani tribals during this era. Nor there was any problem of Durand line during this period.
• During Taliban era – 1996 to 2001, still there was no military uprising in any of the tribal pockets of Pakistan and the tribals were peaceful in all agencies. Local tribals never supported Taliban and no tribe or tribal elements ever went in to fight alongside Taliban against Masood or northern alliance. Pakistan government had maintained the policy of engagement with Taliban and there was no hostility amongst Taliban, global Islamists or local tribals against Islamabad. All pro-India elements within Afghanistan and within Pakistani tribal pockets like ANP were sidelined and marginalized. The issue of Durand Line and Pashtunistan were dead and buried during this era also.
Then, 9/11 happened…..
The Problem:
• The US invasion of Afghanistan had outraged Muslims all over the world. Not because of love for Taliban but because of hate for the Americans. Also, the advance of the northern alliance and the betrayal, massacre and persecution of Taliban at the hands of the Americans and northern alliance had created a sense of extreme hatred and anger in Pakistani Pashtuns and Islamists whose emotions were fully exploited at the time by anti-US socialist Mullahs like Fazal ur Rehman, myopic radicals like Sufi Muhemmed. Thousands of Pakistanis from all over the country, not just Pashtun tribals, went into Afghanistan but were massacred or captured. The stories of their massacre in sealed containers, in Qilai Jangi and in Konduz reached Pakistani tribal areas where a sense of tribal revenge and rage took over. The prime anger was against Pakistan for suddenly reversing its policy against Taliban and assisting US in “Pashtun” slaughter. The remnants of Taliban, escaping Arabs and local Pashtuns who had lost brothers to America and had sworn revenge got united in a holy war. There were three enemies – US, Northern alliance and Pakistan. Pakistani tribal areas had become the re-grouping areas for these militants with general sympathy of the local population with them. Islamabad still had no assets within militants and no powerful political elder or tribal Malik who could control this new breed of angry young militants. A policy disaster had already taken place.
On the Issue of strategy:
• The greatest mistake done by Pakistan when it decided to side with Americans in war on terror that it did not define the limits and terms of its cooperation with US. There is no anti-terror policy in Islamabad till date. As a result, Pakistan kept on obeying US beyond all limits of decency, morality, international and human laws.
• Sending in the army without creating a favorable political and religious environment was the second biggest blunder of Pakistan. In the absence of any anti-terror policy of its own, Pakistan had only acted under US duress and went into tribal regions and made aggressive intrusions into local culture, traditions and customs which infuriated further the entire population of those regions.
• As a general rule, Taliban, Arabs and these local militants never wanted to fight Pakistan army.
• It should be kept in mind that revolt in tribal regions is a religious uprising but also has strong Pashtun tribal and cultural influence as well. Religion combined with local honor and customs created this dangerous mix which simply cannot be contained with brute military force. This is critical.
• Another factor which was never taken into account was the fact that installation of northern alliance government in Kabul had given India an incredible opportunity to set traps for Pakistan army in tribal regions. Also, US never wanted Pakistan to disengage and try to find political solutions of the crisis. Both US and Indian assets were highly active within these regions. For example: Pro-Kabul and pro-India Pashtun sub-nationalist group ANP is highly against Taliban but visits Bajaur recently to side with the killed militants and to inflame their emotions against Pakistan!!!. Similarly is the case of Abdullah Mehsud dozens of other Pashtun militants sent by Kabul posing as Taliban who fought Pakistan army and set traps for the federal forces. As a general policy local militants avoid fighting Pakistan army and only do so under desperate situation.
• Now when Islamabad has started dialogue with militants, US is extremely unhappy. Kabul is worried and India wants to create misunderstandings. Bajaur should be enough of an example of the same.
• Indian and Afghan assets would continue to exploit the local Pashtun unrest to create security issues for Pakistan and to create confusions between parties. Pakistan will have to be harsh on such elements and be on guard.
• US military release map of dividing the ME into new regions in which Pakistan is also re-shaped and geographically reduced on “blood lines” with Pashtun regions going to Afghanistan and Baluchistan becoming an independent State. The work on this map is aggressively visible on ground.
Under these circumstances and above background, Kabul comes with an idea of a Grand Jirga between Pashtuns of both sides of Durand Line!
• It is important that Pakistan should not do irrevocable damage to its relations with Taliban as there is a very strong possibility that in future, Taliban will be controlling large parts of Afghanistan if not all of it.
• Once these major policy declarations are done, immediately there would be goodwill between Islamabad and all pro-Taliban elements in Afghanistan, Pakistani tribal areas and in rest of the country which would remove all possibility of any future violence or terrorism by these elements against Islamabad. Taliban are NOT spreading extremism within Pakistan, it is US policies which are making extremists out of normal Muslims. Pakistan should come out of this twisted notion of blaming Taliban and not US policies.
• Shakai type agreement should be done with tribals and military should be either be withdrawn or brought in lower profile with massive development projects launched to open up the areas economically and politically. The damage of Bajaur is severe but can be brought under control if above recommendations are implemented.
• It must be clearly understood that there can be no independent tribal region policy of Pakistan without having an independent and moral Afghan policy. Whatever is happening in tribal areas is only fallout of Pakistan’s twisted, weak and flawed Afghan engagement under US duress. It is time that Pakistan stand on its own two feet, else forget about lasting peace in tribal regions. All other measures would otherwise only be temporary stop gap arrangements not proper long term strategic moves guaranteeing national internal and external security.
• All national Think Tanks should be tasked to learn deeper lessons from history and Pakistan’s Afghan experience in the last 50 years especially since 1979. There must be detailed writing and analysis of history from archives of ISI and memory of those who had participated in Afghan war, to draw invaluable lessons. Our biggest problem is that we do not learn from history, ever.


Desperate to live
Feng Jianhua

Hu An (not his real name ) saw his world collapsing when told he had been infected with HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. Hu had only vague knowledge about this infection that weakens the body’s immune system, as something widely prevalent in Africa and some Western countries, and hardly expected it to hit home so close. “I should have tried to know more about the disease earlier,” sighed Hu An.
The 31-year-old was born into a farmer’s family in central Hubei Province. After graduating from a vocational school, he joined the sales and marketing group of a telecom company in Hubei’s capital city of Wuhan, drawing a more-than-modest monthly salary in the city of 3,000 yuan. Shortly after getting a job, he got married and the couple soon had a daughter. Hu An was seen as a capable and lucky young man by his townspeople.
Hu caught a terrible cold last June that he could not seem to shake off for months, accompanied by cough and rapid weight loss. On a Sunday in August, Hu An happened to see a poster on AIDS in a park, and this reminded him of his own symptoms.
The scared young man went to a local hospital for an HIV test under a fake name. Fifteen days later, the doctor gave him the terrible news-Hu was HIV positive.
The next evening, a dejected Hu An walked to the banks of the Yangtze River, which runs through the city, to end his life. But thoughts of his aged parents stopped him in his tracks. Suddenly, Hu An realized with growing fear that his wife and daughter, who lived in the countryside with his parents, may also be infected. He immediately called his wife and asked the two of them to come down to Wuhan for a test.
To his great relief, they both tested negative. Hu An advised his wife to divorce him and get remarried. However, she refused, saying she would stick to him to the very end.
Under her questioning, Hu An revealed his long-kept secret. He is gay and first had unprotected sex with a man in 2003. Since the couple lived apart, Hu had indulged in a series of one-night stands with many strangers. While he is unable to pinpoint which encounter may have led to the HIV infection, he suspects a business trip. Hu An soon developed full-blown AIDS and was hospitalized for free under an arrangement with the Wuhan Center for Disease Control and Prevention.
A week after taking the free medication, Hu An developed a serious drug reaction, prompting him to contemplate suicide once again. In a last-ditch attempt, he then warded at the Beijing Ditan Hospital, one of China’s leading HIV/AIDS research and treatment institutions, where he received warm-hearted treatment from the doctors and volunteers.
One of the volunteers Cao Zhijun, once invited Hu to dinner. As they sat opposite each other, Cao found Hu talking with his mouth covered for fear of transmitting the virus. Cao put Hu’s hands away, a small gesture that Hu remembers with gratitude.
Repeated blows
Hu An returned to his hometown in November 2005 and took to providing taxi services in a nearby town, after purchasing a car on loan. He decided to spend the rest of his life close to his loved ones. In January of 2006, Hu An became friendly with someone online and told him his story. The man sympathized with him and expressed a desire to help him. Hu trusted his intentions and invited him to be his partner in the taxi business.
“It is a luxury to have a friend to talk to for a person in despair,” explained Hu An. However, after meeting this “friend” in real life and partnering with him, Hu found him to be a gambler and liar. When Hu told his “friend” that he did not want to continue the partnership, he beat Hu and threatened to spread words about his disease. Afraid of letting others know about his condition, Hu An succumbed to the blackmail and handed over all his savings.
However, many of Hu’s friends came to know of his disease anyway, leaving him with no choice but to leave his hometown. Hu An arrived in Beijing this September, hoping to find a new life. He landed a job in a company and lived in the company’s dorms with his colleagues. He managed to keep his disease from his friends by changing the name tags on his AIDS medication. However, one day, when Hu was reading a book on AIDS treatment, one of his colleagues playfully snatched it away from him. Hu An was forced to come out with the truth. Soon after, the company manager, who had praised Hu An many times before as a model worker, fired him.
To save money, Hu An now rents a basement for 400 yuan a month and cooks his own food. Since he cannot afford nutritional supplements, he drinks honey and eats more meat to strengthen his immune system. He also exercises regularly. “I have the desire to exercise, something unthinkable for me in the past,” Hu said. His biggest worry now is to find a job quickly. Every day, he attends free courses on AIDS and works as a volunteer.
“I am in good physical condition and able to work. A job will also lift me from despair.’’ Now Hu An confines his friends’ circle to HIV positive people. “Discrimination against infected people poses a grave danger in society,” said Hu. All he wants, he said, was a job as a driver, a normal life, medical treatment and the ability to take care of his parents and family.

(The Daily Mail-Beijing Review Articles Exchange Item)


Russia marching back toward totalitarianism
Johann Hari

The best sound-track to the slow-motion murder of Alexander Litvinenko — leaving a corpse so radioactive there may never be a post-mortem — comes from the Beatles: “We’re back in the USSR. Been away so long I hardly knew the place.”
To those who stopped following the news from Russia when the Cold War thawed out, the thought of a Russian Bond being dispatched to London to take out a dissident in a Mayfair Hotel seems like an inexplicably retro moment. But for those who have cared to see, it has been clear for some time that under Vladimir Putin, Russia is marching back toward totalitarianism.
The Russian journalist Anna Politkovskaya wrote three years ago, “The shroud of darkness from which we spent several Soviet decades trying to free ourselves is enveloping us again.” For talking this way, she was swiftly poisoned, and when that didn’t kill her, she was found last month with three bullets in her skull in a Moscow lift-shaft.
Politkovskaya, Litvinenko, Victor Yushenko — one poisoning of your enemies could be a misfortune, but three begins to look like carelessness.
Or, rather, a deliberate strategy, and the list of victims goes on. But at first glance, this latest attack seems an extraordinarily inefficient way for the FSB — the successor to the KGB — to murder a dissident. They had to smuggle radioactive poison into Britain, and within 130 days administer it so carefully that they killed Litvinenko and nobody else. Wouldn’t an anonymous bullet in an alleyway have been smarter? But like the previous attacks, this is a way of saying to all critics of Putin: Wherever you are, we can get you, and you will die in agony, and you will know you are dying, and you will know it was us.
In case this sounds too presumptuous — do we really know Putin is responsible for murdering a British citizen on British soil? — it is worth looking at the origins of Putin’s power, as documented by his dispatched critics. In 1999, he was appointed prime minister by the semi-conscious President Boris Yeltsin. It was assumed he was merely the latest in a string of bland functionaries who passed through the premiership. But then there was a slew of explosions in apartment blocks across Russia, killing more than 300 people. Putin established himself as the president-designate with response, immediately blaming Chechen fundamentalists and restarting the uniquely vicious Chechen War which has, according to some human rights organizations, killed a third of the civilian population since 1991.
But there is considerable evidence these bombs were not planted by Chechens at all. On the day of the apartment explosions, in a town called Ryazan 100 miles south of Moscow, a local engineer spotted another huge bomb, and three suspicious men nearby. They were quickly arrested by the police and revealed to be FSB agents. They claimed that, while the country was under attack, they were planting real bombs in yet another apartment block as part of a “training exercise.”
A slew of highly respected journalists, from my colleague Patrick Cockburn to Channel Four’s Dispatches team, have suggested that the bombings were Putin’s Reichstag fire.
Yet the British government has a vested interest in not acknowledging these bleak realities about Russia, and in doing anything they can to avoid the conclusion that Litvinenko was killed on the orders of the Kremlin.