The Pakistan Policy Blog

Hina Rabbani Khar has come a long way.  Growing up as a farm girl, she was the first person in her nuclear family to graduate from college.  Her daddy is illiterate, so Hina had to run for office in his stead, when that good bad man, President Gen. Musharraf imposed a college degree requirement for parliamentarians.  She impressed many with her, uh, expertise in economics.  Hina is armed with a degree in hotel management, making her perfectly suited to be a senior finance ministry official back when she was in her mid-twenties and without any job experience.  After all, government in Pakistan is like a cheap motel — the same friendly faces check in and out regularly.  Hina’s story is the story of hope; a farm girl rising from her “agriculturalist” roots and going straight to the top of the ladder, surpassing men and women with PHDs and decades of experience in development and finance.  Back in her home constituency, Hina’s slaves supporters love her so much that she didn’t even have to campaign during the election.  Hina believes in hope; what she wishes and wants come true effortlessly.

And so here is an ironic bit from Dr. Khar’s budget speech (she received an honorary doctorate from the London School of Business Studies, President Asif Ali Zardari’s alma mater).  Dr. Khar criticizes the previous government, in which she rode to the top, for its economic policies (on which she, at the very least, masterfully gave PowerPoint presentations to alert and erect foreign dignitaries from 2003-7).

“While presenting last year’s budget the government had given a detailed account of the economy as was inherited by us from the previous government [in which I served and rose up despite being a twenty-something with a degree in hotel management]. We had highlighted that our economy could not sustain a high level of artificial growth. [So that's why we're aiming for a modest 2% this year!] We had presented that sustainable growth was only possible through investments in the real sectors of the economy that is, agriculture and industry [earnings on which my father won't pay taxes]. These, unfortunately, were neglected in the past [by me and Shaukat Uncle]. Instead growth was fuelled through high consumption and extensive luxury imports [such as the BMWs and Mercedes Benzes in my Lahore Polo Club parking lot] and those too financed through external borrowings.  [No, I never gave a PowerPoint presentation to any of these external donors.] No wonder the fiscal deficit mounted to 7.6% of GDP, the current account deficit became unmanageable, there was a run on foreign exchange reserves and the stock market crashed. [Yes, and now we again have an astronomically high fiscal deficit of $9 billion, which is why my president is going around the world begging for cash.] More importantly, inflation started to rise steeply and peaked at 25% in October 2008. [No, I don't know any affluent Pakistanis who took their cash out of the country or hoarded wheat as the poor man got screwed.] In the face of these developments the economy suffered but the poor of Pakistan suffered the most. [And though I feel for them as my armored S-class passes by their shitty homes, I hereby present another budget that will royally fuck them.]“

Departing Quetta today, on my flight was none other than Ali Ahmed Kurd, president of the Supreme Court Bar Association and firebrand lawyers’ movement leader.

He was sitting two seats ahead of me, but was later escorted to the cockpit, where he stayed till the end of the flight.  It was the pilot and flight staff’s way of honoring him.

After disembarking the plane, I managed to speak with him for a few minutes.  He spent most of the time denying that he’s anyone of significance.  He’s a very cool guy.  I got an upclose look at that wild mane of hair.

Sometimes when I read the writing of others, I feel as if the voice is my own.

This morning, when I read Amir Mir’s report in The News, I realized some of the words were my own.

Wednesday morning (Pakistan time), I wrote these words in my post, eighteen hours before Amir Mir’s report in the Thursday edition of The News became available online and in print:

“…the attack was a hybrid operation consisting of an armed attack by four gunmen and a subsequent detonation of a car bomb…”

And Amir Mir in Thursday’s The News wrote:

“Those investigating the assault say the attack was a hybrid operation, consisting of an armed attack by four gunmen and subsequent detonation of a car bomb…”

The difference?  A mere comma.  Mir prefaced his plagiarism with: “Those investigating the assault…”

I am not among those investigating the assault.

I thought Amir Mir was a more respectable journalist than his brother, Hamid Mir.  Unfortunately, I was wrong; he doesn’t possess basic journalistic ethics.

Buddy, you can quote me next time you copy and paste stuff from my blog.  It’s not the end of the world, but plagiarism is a major sin in the journalism community.

Terrorists struck an office of the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI) agency and a police station in central Lahore this morning, killing at least 22 persons and injuring over 200.  At least thirteen of the dead are police officers, reports GEO News.

Reports of the attacks’ details are conflicting.  Several officials have described the attack as a suicide bombing.  But according to Dawn, the attack was a hybrid operation consisting of an armed attack by four gunmen and a subsequent detonation of a car bomb, which GEO News reports was 100 kilograms.  The terrorists seem to have been unable to penetrate the ISI facility, but managed to level a nearby building.

According to GEO News, Punjab police have seized at least two grenades and a suicide jacket, which suggests the four attackers sought to inflict maximum damage and then kill themselves to avoid capture.

Punjab police have arrested four suspects, presumably the aforementioned armed attackers.  Television broadcasts showed the faces of two of the suspects, both of whom were struck by bystanders as they were brought by security officers to police vehicles.  One suspect was hit in the head repeatedly by an onlooker using a motorcycle helmet.  Police had to push back several bystanders from attacking the arrested terrorists.

One of the attackers resembled the scruffy Afghan arrested in the March attack on the Manawan police training center.  The other apprehended attacker appeared to be a middle class person, possibly an Arab or an Afghan.  He was speaking while police rushed him to a vehicle and exuded a striking level of confidence, except for when he was being beaten by angered Lahoris.

Several Pakistani commentators — including Mehmood Shah, the former chief secretary of the North-West Frontier Province, Lt. Gen. (Retd.) Abdul Qayyum, and Munawar Hassan, amir of Jamaat-i Islami – have blamed India for playing some role in the attacks.

But a more likely suspect is Baitullah Mehsud in South Waziristan, against whom military operations have begun.  Mehsud has spearheaded a series of increasingly complex terrorist attacks in Lahore this year, consisting of hybrid teams and tactics.  Teams consist of Pashtuns from Pakistan and Afghanistan, as well as the so-called Punjabi Taliban from Pakistan’s Seraiki belt.

Book Review:

Seeds of Terror: How Heroin is Bankrolling the Taliban and al Qaeda
By Gretchen Peters
Thomas Dunne Books, 2009 (320 pages)

Earlier this month, President Asif Ali Zardari asked where is the Taliban getting its funding from. For a partial answer, he need not look further than in the bloodshot eyes of one of Pakistan’s six and a half million heroin addicts.

The Pakistani Taliban gets its funding from a variety of sources: ‘taxes’ on the timber and gems trade, extorting small businessmen, kidnapping, and bank robberies. But drugs are undoubtedly a major component of finances.

Gretchen Peters, a journalist formerly with ABC News, has written an excellent book on what’s generally described as the Afghan drug trade. But, as she demonstrates quite effectively, defining the industry as Afghan is inaccurate—it is a regional phenomenon. Drug profiteers have achieved a level of integration between actors across multiple Central and Southwest Asian states that regional economic pacts have failed to. Linked together are Afghan peasants, security officials, leading politicians (e.g. Hamid Karzai’s brother), and insurgents, as well as border guards, smugglers, politicians, and intelligence services in Iran and Pakistan, and a variety of actors in Gulf Arab emirates.

In one of the best displays of how drugs brings together disparate actors, Peters reveals that Abdur Rashid Dostum, an Afghan Uzbek warlord (secular and anti-Taliban, albeit barbaric), has been “in cahoots” with terrorist groups such as Tahir Yuldashev’s Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU) and (prior to his death) renegade Afghan Taliban Mullah Dadullah.  Interestingly, both Yuldashev and Dadullah give Dostum only one degree of separation from Baitullah Mehsud.  [And Abdullah Mehsud surrended to Dostum's militia in December 2001.]

What brings all these actors together is cash.  Peters writes: “Across Afghanistan, traditional enemies are working together wherever there’s a chance to make money.”  Drugs are also, in a sense, a form of currency used by militants to barter for vehicles and weapons.

In Pakistan, the drug trade has linkages to Afghan militants based there, Baloch leaders, tangential politicians affiliated with the PPP and PML-N (and I’d add — probably the ANP or PkMAP as well), the military-intelligence establishment (though this peaked in the 1980s), and possibly even the Karachi Stock Exchange (used for money laundering).  The problem in Pakistan at times has been that one arm of the state has been working to root out the drug trade, while the other hand has used the trade to fund its clandestine activities.  

Pakistan has effectively eliminated poppy growth inside its territory, but it is the major transit point for Afghan drugs.  The deletrious impact of the drug trade comes in the form of the syringes that wash up on the Karachi shores, the subsuming illicit trade via Afghanistan that denies Pakistan over a billion dollars in annual duties revenue, and the terrorists that have been murdering innocent Pakistanis in recent years.

So how can the drug trade be neutralized?  Peters recommends a nine-pronged program to combat the regional drug trade.  Contrary to what one might expect, eradiction of poppy crops is proposed only as a last ditch option.  Peters’ solution is smart — the toughest action is reserved for the drug smugglers, not the impoverished farmers.  Starting with eradication would likely only serve to boost the price of heroin, benefitting drug smugglers while enraging rural Afghans.  The Afghan Taliban, as Peters shows, is quite adept at market manipulation.  Its remarkable success in eradication in its last two years in power was not combined with eliminating the enormous heroin stockpiles; this only resulted in a massive increase in heroin prices, hurting farmers while increasing Afghan drug dealers’ and Taliban profits.   

Peters’ reporting depends heavily on U.S. intelligence reports provided to her. It seems as if the worst wrongdoing the U.S. can commit is apathy. That could be true, but Peters’ readers would be better served by a more direct engagement with questions surrounding the historic and present U.S. connection to the drug trade in Afghanistan and nearby.

Seeds of Terror is a quick and engaging primer on the drug trade emanating from Afghanistan — a primary cause for regional instability and state weakness.

Why do old white men have a fetish for drawing and redrawing the maps of countries in which they do not live?

Perhaps — and I’m being facetious and ironic — it stems from their radicalization as youths when they play boardgames, such as Risk, and are indoctrinated with a sense of God-like mastery and dreams of world domination.

Outside of South Asia, I think of the proposals by Les Gelb and Peter Galbraith to carve up Iraq into three separate states (ignoring the country’s fairly developed sense of nationalism).  Then there’s Ralph Peters’ haphazard redrawing of the greater Middle East.  The kicker from his article: “Ethnic cleansing works.” Fortunately, he’s a columnist for the New York Post, which no one of consequence reads.

As for Pakistan, good old Selig Harrison — as he has for the past 30 years — has come out today with his biannual op-ed arguing for redrawing Pakistan’s provincial boundaries and rewriting its constitution.

After all, he has a great vantage point for understanding Pakistan’s demographic and power politics.  He speaks none of the local languages, last reported from the region about half a century ago, and lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland (a wealthy DC suburb).

My guess is that he has trouble finding Pashtuns at Harris Teeter (a local yuppie supermarket).  And I’m sorry, but holding monthly meetings with predominantly Afghan Pashtun organizations that receive funding from right-wing Indian Americans (some of whom belong to radical Hindutva organizations) do not count as interaction with Pakistani Pashtuns.  Besides, diaspora organizations are a poor reflection of the population back home.  They are usually more strident and well-off, lacking the pragmatism of those on the ground.

So what pearls of wisdom has Harrison given us this time?  He writes:

For centuries, Pashtuns living in the mountainous borderlands of Pakistan and Afghanistan have fought to keep out invading Punjabi plainsmen.

Wrong.  It’s actually the opposite.  The Pashtuns have, over the centuries, invaded the plains of Punjab.   Even little children in South Asia know this.  How does this joker still get published?

Historically, the plains of northern India and Delhi were raided by outsiders, especially tribesmen from predominantly Pashtun areas in what’s now Afghanistan and Pakistan.  The traffic of violence has been into the Punjabi plains, not out from it.  The anomaly, of course, was the empire of Ranjit Singh, which reached Peshawar.  And the supposedly-Punjabi dominated Pakistani state has actually promoted a culture (e.g. textbooks and naming of missiles) that reveres these Pashtun invaders.

Anyway, it’s obvious that those who occupy heights have an ability (and perhaps even a material need in premodern society) to descend from the mountains into the fertile plains.  This occurred, for example, centuries ago, as Pashtun Yousufzai tribesmen migrated into areas such as Swat and supplanted the local Gujjar population.  [Should we call for Gujjar self-determination now?]

But what Harrison is trying to do is take the present day disproportionate influence of Punjabis and falsely give it a broader historical basis.

Harrison goes on:

Historically, the Pashtuns were politically unified before the British Raj. The Pashtun kings who founded Afghanistan ruled over 40,000 square miles of what is now Pakistan, an area containing more than half of the Pashtun population, until British forces defeated them in 1847, pushed up to the Khyber Pass and imposed a disputed boundary, the Durand Line, that Afghanistan has never accepted. Over Pashtun nationalist protests, the British gave these conquered areas to the new, Punjabi-dominated government of Pakistan created in the 1947 partition of India.

Who cares?  That was 162 years ago.  Back then, James Polk was president, blacks were still enslaved in the U.S., Mexico and the U.S. were at war over Texas (America’s FATA), Germany had not been founded, the Ottoman Empire ruled Palestine, and there was also a nominal Mughal Emperor in Delhi.

If one goes that far back into history, then it becomes a battle of who gets to restore their historic pan-ethnic empire.  Why not restore the ‘Punjabi’ empire of Ranjit Singh, who controlled Peshawar till the British conquered in the mid-19th century?

The central issue is how much the past matters to the locals, not Selig Harrison of Chevy Chase, MD.  While Pashtuns, especially those who belong to tribes split along the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, have a sense of common identity, there is little indication of a push for a greater Pakhtunkhwa.

There are several million Pakistani Pashtuns in the southern port city of Karachi.  If Pashtuns were so tied to territory, they wouldn’t move.  If they saw themselves as the victims of Punjabi domination, they would not constitute the second largest ethnic group in the army, and they would not choose to live in non-Pashtun cities such as Karachi and Lahore.

Harrison then ventures into cartography:

The United States should support Pashtun demands to merge the NWFP and FATA, followed by the consolidation of those areas and Pashtun enclaves in Baluchistan and the Punjab into a single unified “Pashtunkhwa” province that enjoys the autonomy envisaged in the inoperative 1973 Pakistan constitution.

Where to start?

One, the idea of merging FATA into the NWFP is not a bad idea.  But it comes with its share of risks.  It could further sideline tribal leaders and strengthen the Taliban.

The local maliks are against integrating FATA into the NWFP.  Why?  Because they lose out.  Pashtun nationalists support a merger — mainly because they (specifically the Awami National Party) stand to gain.  But resolving the problems in FATA requires working with the local maliks.  And so any change in FATA’s constitutional status would have to meaningfully integrate them into the new setup.  The ANP stands to gain from an NWFP-FATA merger.  But it is not the sole spokesman for Pashtuns.

Two, merging Pashtun areas in Balochistan and Punjab does nothing to contain the Taliban spread.  Regardless, the ANP is calling for the two things: renaming the NWFP Pakhtunkhwa and merging NWFP and FATA.  Despite heading the NWFP government and being part of the center coalition, the ANP hasn’t called for shifting Pashtun areas in other provinces into the NWFP.  If they are not doing it, then there is no reason for Selig Harrison.  He need not be more Catholic than the pope.  Pakistan has a free media and functioning parliament in which these issues can be discussed.

Three, many of these Pashtun areas are mixed.  They contain Baloch, Seraikis, Punjabis, and Hindko speakers.  Areas such as Mianwali are inhabited by Punjabized Pashtuns, such as the Niazis.  There is also a sizable presence of non-Pashtuns in the NWFP, namely the Hindko speakers in Peshawar and the Hazara Division.  It’s convenient for Harrison to leave all these people out.  And what happened to Harrison’s Baloch fetish?   Will the Baloch be happy with losing Quetta and many districts to the NWFP?  And if population is what matters, what do you do with Karachi, which is effectively the largest Pashtun city?  Continuing with the same logic, why not give Hindko-speakers their own province?

Yes, provincial autonomy must be advanced in Pakistan  The concurrent list should be eliminated.  The National Finance Commission’s award distribution should be more equitable.  But provincial autonomy is not a panacea.  There are also intra-provincial issues and divisions that serve as a roadblock for good governance.  For example, the Karachi city government has issues with the Sindh provincial government.  Anyway, provincial autonomy by itself will simply make corruption more evenly distributed.

Rather than remaking the map of Pakistan, Harrison should look closer to home.  Why doesn’t predominantly black Washington, DC have statehood?  Why doesn’t it have representation in the U.S. Congress?  Don’t African Americans of Anacostia and those pushed out along the Green Line by gentrification deserve a little ‘provincial autonomy’ of their own?

Compare Selig Harrison’s Chevy Chase, Maryland (92.4% White, 0.9% Black, Median Household Income $205,783, Mean Home Value $1,222,239) to Anacostia, thirteen miles away in Washington, DC (92% Black, 5% White, Average Household Income $29,745, Average Home Value $189,900, 62 Homicides in 2005).

If Harrison is so concerned about issues of political representation and socio-economic justice, there’s nothing stopping him from moving to Anacostia and advocating on behalf of the locals there.