Unwelcome foreign interventions
Sadaf Yunus

FORMER Pakistan Ambassador to the US General (retired) Jehangir Karamat has said that he foresees a sustained long-term strategic relationship between Islamabad and Washington, but opposed the idea of American countering terrorism from Pakistan soil.
Accordingly he stated that, in fact, the Al -Qaeda and the Taliban may welcome that kind of an action, nobody else will, and of course, it will also strengthen the Islamist connection that militants are very keen on and weaken the secular and liberal elements. He emphasised to look at the whole situation within the US-Pakistan strategic relationship as not to go into areas which will not help us combat this threat, but which will undermine the institutions on which we rely on to tackle this threat. Pakistan needs to go into a very comprehensive strategy over a long-term, because it is going to be there for several years and will not go away in a hurry. A Pakistan news agency quoted him, as saying “there is no doubt in my mind that it (US-Pakistan) is a strategic relationship that we have moved into an era where if the US could walk away from the regions in the past, it cannot do so now because if it does so, it risks seriously undermining, destabilizing areas which are very important for US”. Pakistan must do everything to make sure that it keeps progressing in the direction that it wants to move in. Jehangir Karamat also suggested a holistic strategy - having military, political and development prongs to curb the extremism and terrorism threat.
There are very solid reasons as to why the American involvement in our current situation will be a repeat of the disastrous results of similar such foreign interventions elsewhere, and that would be humiliating. These days everybody comes out with an alibi, when it is complained that Pakistan has become submissive to America, that it has been the same for the last sixty years. There is nothing unusual about it. For those of us who have witnessed the course of Pakistan’s foreign policy from the earliest days to date, it is an intolerable falsification of history.
American senior national security advisers are debating whether to expand the authority of the Central Intelligence Agency and the military to conduct far more aggressive covert operations in the tribal areas of Pakistan. The debate is a response to intelligence reports that Al-Qaeda and the Taliban are intensifying efforts there to destabilize the Pakistani government. They also discussed how to handle the period from after the assassination of opposition leader Benazir Bhutto to the elections of February 18th, and the aftermath of those elections. According to them, the threat to the government of Pakistan is so grave that both the President and the new military leadership were likely to give the United States more latitude. After years of focusing on Afghanistan, the West feels that the extremists now see a chance for creating chaos in Pakistan itself. Therefore, they see an opportunity to advocate for the expansion authority in Pakistan.
Critics argue that American-led military operations on the Pakistani side of the border with Afghanistan could result in a tremendous backlash and ultimately do more harm than good. That is particularly true, they say if Americans were captured or killed in the territory. Critics also state that direct military action by the West would be in effective and would anger the Pakistani Army and hence increase support for the militants.
In the wake of the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, many Pakistanis suspect that the United States is trying to dominate Pakistan as well. This could weaken the government even though the West has remained steadfast in their support. The Bush administration is itching to take more positive action - including inside Pakistan - against Taliban and Al-Qaeda militants increasingly active in the area and bolstering the insurgency in Afghanistan. Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf has officially rejected US proposals to expand the US presence in Pakistan, either through unilateral covert Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) operations or by joint operations with Pakistani security forces. According to an interview, by General (retired) Hamid Gul who said that ‘get America out of the way and we’ll be okay’. It is felt that the Americans have designs for Pakistan because this is the way they deal with countries like Pakistan, that they either use or subdue them, and in case of Pakistan, it is both. The West seems to be a very important player in Pakistan’s domestic politics. There are two things which the Americans earnestly want. One is the handing over of A Q Khan and the other is the permit to strike Al - Qaeda targets. One is a pre-emptive doctrine which has not yet been consummated and the other has been resisted as a direct ingress, howsoever pro-American President Musharraf may be.
The US Secretary of Defense has announced that the US is ready to send troops to Pakistan to fight the Taliban. Gates’s suggestion would anger most Pakistanis. The Pakistani people strongly believe that it is only their armed forces that are able to handle the continued violence in the tribal region. President Musharraf himself has said that if foreign intervention is applied, it would be construed as an act of war. The recent situation reflects this most clearly. In the aftermath of the national trauma over the assassination of Ms Bhutto, and the physical ravages suffered by the pillaging and looting, we are confronted with absurd diatribes from American politicians. Perhaps Ms Clinton has shown the most irrationality in her efforts to show off her understanding of international issues! In the process she has shown a frightening ignorance, revealing once again why the world will always be unsafe as long as ignorant and imperial US mindsets come to rest in the White House - thereby putting their irresponsibly ignorant fingers on the nuclear button.
One should hardly take Ms Clinton’s remarks on Pakistan’s nuclear assets seriously when she suggested a joint US-UK control of our nuclear assets, but the trouble is that many imperial minds in the US do just that and herein lies our problem. Not many in the West are even aware of their own national issues like when nuclear weapons that went missing on 29 August 2007 or the 2.8 metric tons of plutonium in 1994. But being properly informed has never been a trait found in US presidents - which is why the world has had to, and still continues to suffer so much bloodshed and chaos as a result of US military adventurism.
It is high time we took a substantive action to put some distance between the US and ourselves in order to send an unambiguous message to them that we have reached the limits of our tolerance of abuse at their hands. Let us hold back on our logistical and other support to the US, even as we fight our own war against terrorism in our country keeping in view our ground realities. As part of our distancing from the US perhaps we can reduce the number of unexplained Americans in Pakistan which makes one wonder if these mysterious Americans are the part of the ‘foreign hand’ we hear of who are trying to destabilize Pakistan.
Apparently all this talk of unleashing the CIA and launching raids in Pakistan is not well received by Pakistanis. Pakistan won’t allow the US or any nation to conduct covert military operations in its tribal areas. As the President of Pakistan has said time and again that there have never been any operations other than our own security forces and there will never be any operations other than our own security forces. One of the basic arguments legitimizing the role of the army in the politics and economy of Pakistan is that it defends the territorial integrity of Pakistan. If the US can just come in and do whatever it likes, the army is failing to do that. It is also implicitly insulting to the Pakistan army. The Pakistan army will not accept this and will become aware that the top echelons of the US respect neither the territorial integrity of Pakistan nor its army. This is likely to create unrest and insecurity within our country which we do not want. Hence, the West should make sure that they do not meddle where they are not wanted and are unwelcome.



A wolf in the sheep herd
Neha Ahmed

THE Nepalese Prime Minister, Girija Parasad Koirala, has of late been revealing his years of political adventurism. He has been doing a weekly interview with a local channel “Kantipur Television” for long and to everyone’s surprise he has made some shocking revelations in front of the camera in early January this year. Surprisingly, despite having much substance, the revelations got no media coverage at all. The frank admission made by Prime Minister Koirala of his involvement in counterfeiting Indian currency, gold and uranium smuggling and the hijacking of a Royal Nepal Aircraft, during his political exile in India in 1970’s under the tutelage of his brother and the first elected Prime Minister of Nepal, Mr. B.P. Koirala, has been taken as if there has nothing unusual happened.
Koirala said that the fake currency was printed with the support of a Bengali, when the Nepali Congress Party ran out of funding for its activities while struggling against the one-party rule of late King Mahendra in Nepal. It happened in Bihar, at the house of the former vice chancellor of Bhagalpur University. The fake currency was tested by depositing it in a bank, where after some time it was withdrawn without the bank detecting it. Simply, he duped an Indian bank. In the same interview he revealed that in the year 1973 he had masterminded the hijack of the twin otter plane belonging to the Royal Nepal Airlines, along with a team of Nepali Congress Party cadres. The plane was carrying several million rupees of Nepal Rashtra Bank. Interestingly, it was done after R. N. Rao, the then Chief of Indian Intelligence Agency, gave him the green signal with a promise that no action would be taken against the hijackers. Although the interviewee has taken the blame for the content saying, “it was wrong translation of what GP Koirala had said in Hindi”, there are repeated references of the event in Nepali. Peoples’ Review had published this in its January edition that GP Koirala himself made confession regarding RAW’s involvement in the plane hijacking. It implies that the head of RAW was complicit in a serious crime. Worse, it entails that the Indian government and state was also a part to such an abysmal crime. There are reports that senior officials from the Indian embassy approached the PM, saying that his confessions could cause damage to the image of RAW as an outfit that encouraged terrorist activities like plane hijacking. RAW has been active in Nepal since 1969, after the Sino-India war ended and this was not the first time when Koirala indicated about Indian interference in Nepalese politics. During panchayat days to initiate armed struggle, RAW had provided one truck of arms to BP Koirala, he himself revealed it in his biography.
This wasn’t the end, the revelations went further. The Nepalese Prime Minister also said that whilst in India, a certain Mr. Sharma from Bombay attempted to entice him into a clandestine uranium business worth millions. Sharma gave him a packet of uranium and claimed to have sacks-full more. The remarkable thing is that Koirala had the specimen tested publicly in the Banaras Hindu University lab, which confirmed that it was genuine. He considered selling it to Israel but was advised not to do so and hence he took Sharma’s offer no further.
The intimations of this third revelation are potentially the most disturbing of all, not only to the South Asian region but to the whole world. It shows that there is a clandestine market in illegal uranium operating in India. Worse, the stuff can be tested publicly anywhere, without any one being intrusive about it. At this instance, when the Indian government is having her toughest time to make her nuclear deals work, such disclosures can get very costly to India. The wider nuclear deal has already been opposed by the international non-proliferation lobby and the negotiations with IAEA are still flinging in the air. With such chaos in the air, the revelations can prove fatal to Indo-US nuclear deal.
As ever, the ‘big brother’ influence has been fully exercised by India to block the wider dissemination of Koirala’s fatal revelations detrimental to its nuclear deal. The press virtually ignored it and to be on the safer side, the “Kantipur TV” has been bunged to telecast the autobiographical series of the Nepalese Prime Minister, GP Koirala. Despite all these precautionary measures, the cat is out of the bag now. The rectification of Indo-US nuclear deal seems frenzied and leaves no doubt to risk the regional peace and tranquility.






Why NATO should get out of Afghanistan
Jonathan Power

THE first law of holes is when you are in one stop digging. If the NATO nations are honest they have as much idea about what to do next in Afghanistan as the Soviet generals did in 1988 — the year in which the relatively new secretary-general of the Soviet Communist Party, Mikhail Gorbachev, decided that the Red Army should cut its horrific losses and pull out and leave the Afghans to fight each other. The Afghan tribes have an uninterrupted record of success in resisting the foreign invader — Genghis Khan, the Persians, the British in Winston Churchill’s day as a subaltern, the Soviets and now NATO. Time, they know, is on their side. Their rifles, explosives and suicide bombers are a match for the most modern weapons in NATO’s armory. The only thing that could possibly subdue them would be a massive number of NATO boots on the ground, prepared to engage in close-up fighting, but to find numbers of this order would mean switching the full force of America’s military might from Iraq to Afghanistan and persuading America’s allies to beef up their contributions to levels that would triple or quadruple present deployments.
While the politicians are finding it hard to come to terms with leading a retreat, given the constant pressure form Washington, they are — as Chancellor Angela Merkel has made clear — slowly but clearly turning tail. It is no use that the so-called opinion leaders in the strategic think-tanks and newspaper editorial pages are warning of disaster if there is a pullout. They are not the ones getting killed for a hopeless cause. Moreover, even the most informed of them do not seem able to map out a convincing scenario for turning the tables on the Taleban. A few thousand more troops, a better coordinated aid program, an imposed Western czar, a beefed-up local police force — none of these will work as long as Afghanistan has its poppies and mountains and corruption continues to seep into almost every pore of society. If this were doable it would have been done by now.
The stakes, we all know, are high because the Taleban with their tribal network spanning across a ridiculously placed border dividing Afghanistan and Pakistan give refuge to Al-Qaeda. Getting rid of Al-Qaeda must be a priority on the world’s common agenda. But this is not the way to do it. And economically and socially developing Afghanistan can only be done when the populace face down their local persecutors and oppressors and demand it. So how to deal with Al-Qaeda? The mistakes date from the immediate reaction to 9/11. Afghanistan should never have been bombed. That immediately marked America and Britain as the enemy in the minds of a good proportion of the Afghans.
But that mistake was part of a larger mistake — the determination to go to war with modern military means against Al-Qaeda — a grouping of a few hundred at that time — even if it meant putting at mortal risk the populations of whole countries, Afghanistan, Iraq and, if Barack Obama continues his threat, perhaps Pakistan. The Anglo-American onslaught, accompanied in Afghanistan by a 37-nation coalition, has created more Al-Qaeda militants than it has killed. It has alienated most of the Muslim world and has provided reason for tens of thousands of preachers, hundreds of thousands of enraged young men and millions of ordinary folk to talk of hitting back. The mild majority does it by thought and word. A few thousand are now determined to do it by deed. As the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the situation in Pakistan deteriorate these numbers will grow geometrically. Osama bin Laden and his intimates should have been run down by careful international police work, just as the Israelis ran down so many hiding Nazi leaders and Interpol and the French successfully hunted down the (then) world´s worst terrorist, Carlos “the Jackal” aka Illich Ramirez Sanchez. The best Persian-speaking Pakistani detectives should have been drafted into a special Interpol task force manned by the best (and darkest complexioned) of the FBI and Scotland Yard.

—Arab News