A view of Namaz-e-Jinaza of Captain Umar Zaib Afzal who embraced Shahadat during the operation Rah-e-Rast at Tamergara held at Rawalpindi Race Course Ground on Friday. (22-5-2009)-Photo ISPR

Operation Rah-e-Rast launched in Malakand Division and Rah-e-Nijat in South Waziristan have full backing of the whole nation including political and religious parties, religious groups, ulemas and Mashaikhs. Complete harmony exist between the power troika of President, PM and GHQ and between service chiefs. Jamat-e-Islami (JI), Tehrik-e-Insaf and Jamiatul-Ulema-e-Islam (JUI-F) are opposing military operation in their own ways. Latter led by Fazlur Rahman wants to have the pudding and eat it too. He is playing his usual double game by neither quitting the government nor ending his opposition to military option.

Well meaning Imran Khan is not in favor of violence and has also disagreed with radical views of Maulana Sufi. In his view, barring a small segment who have gone astray, by and large Taliban from tribal areas are good and reliable people and should be won over through dialogue and pacification measures. JI chief Munawar Hasan sticks to his uncompromising stance and his denunciations revolve around Anti-Americanism, it is US war imposed on Pakistan, Islam in danger, and leadership sold to Americans. His ideas are fixed and unidirectional with no room for conciliation. Such people are causing more confusion than helping in tiding over the dangerous situation. It is disservice to the nation to sympathise with so-called Taliban going about slaughtering people like goats and having no concept of essence of Islam. Ironically, none of the Taliban apologists have any influence over Baitullah or Fazlullah or have an alternative solution. Process of dialogue and peace deals is in vogue since July 2005. Each deal led to temporary halt in infighting, but at the cost of losing more space and letting militants regain balance.

WASHINGTON – It seems better sense is beginning to prevail on a key adviser to U.S. Army leadership who just a couple of weeks ago was predicting the collapse of Pakistani state. David Kilcullen, an Australian who served in Iraq as one of the counter-insurgency warrior/theorists to Gen. David Petraeus’, the head of American Central Command, now says that that the U.S. drone attacks inside Pakistan’s territory were “cowardly” and should be called off as the strikes were creating more enemies than they eliminate.

President Barack Obama has embraced an escalation in the raids that was approved by his predecessor, George W. Bush, last summer. The CIA has carried out at least 16 Predator strikes in Pakistan in the first four months of this year, compared with 36 strikes in all of 2008, according to The Los Angeles Times. The missile strikes have killed about 161 people since Obama’s inauguration, it said, citing reports from Pakistan.
During a congressional hearing earlier this week, when a congressman asked Kilcullen what the U.S. government should do in Pakistan, he got an answer that surprised him. Kilcullen said the missile strikes are backfiring and should be stopped.
The LA Times said, “Kilcullen’s objection to the U.S. strategy isn’t moral (he doesn’t mind killing ‘bad guys’) or legal (most legal scholars consider ‘targeted killing’ acceptable under the law of war because Al Qaeda and the Taliban are at war with the United States). Kilcullen’s objection is practical. He says the strikes are creating more enemies than they eliminate”.

http://www.nation.com.pk/pakistan-news-newspaper-daily-english-online/International/04-May-2009/US-drone-attacks-in-Pakistan-backfiring-Congress-told/

Doyle McManus:

U.S. drone attacks in Pakistan ‘backfiring,’ Congress told

Predator missile strikes aimed at Al Qaeda often go astray, enraging the people and threatening the Islamabad government, top military advisor testifies. Doyle McManus
May 3, 2009 David Kilcullen is no soft-headed peacenik.

He’s a beefy, 41-year-old former Australian army officer who served in Iraq as a top advisor to U.S. Army Gen. David H. Petraeus. He’s one of the counter-insurgency warrior/theorists who designed Petraeus’ successful “surge” of troops into the streets of Baghdad.

But a few days ago, when a congressman asked Kilcullen what the U.S. government should do in Pakistan, the Australian guerrilla fighter sounded like an antiwar protester.

“We need to call off the drones,” Kilcullen said.

In the arid valleys of western Pakistan, the United States is fighting a strange, long-distance war against Al Qaeda, the Taliban and their Pakistani allies. Unmanned “drone” airplanes take off from secret runways, seek out suspected terrorists and, with CIA employees at the remote controls, fire missiles to blow them up.

Officially, this is a covert program, and the CIA won’t acknowledge that it’s going on at all. Unofficially, intelligence officials say the Predator strikes are the most effective weapon they have against Al Qaeda.

President Obama has embraced an escalation in the raids that was approved by his predecessor, George W. Bush, last summer. The CIA has carried out at least 16 Predator strikes in Pakistan in the first four months of this year, compared with 36 strikes in all of 2008. The missile strikes have killed about 161 people since Obama’s inauguration, according to news reports from Pakistan; there’s no way of knowing how many of those were civilians.

Only one problem: Kilcullen says the missile strikes are backfiring.

Kilcullen’s objection to the U.S. strategy isn’t moral (he doesn’t mind killing “bad guys”) or legal (most legal scholars consider “targeted killing” acceptable under the law of war because Al Qaeda and the Taliban are at war with the United States). Kilcullen’s objection is practical. He says the strikes are creating more enemies than they eliminate.

“I realize that they do damage to the Al Qaeda leadership,” he told the House Armed Services Committee. But that, he said, was not enough to justify the program. “Since 2006, we’ve killed 14 senior Al Qaeda leaders using drone strikes; in the same time period, we’ve killed 700 Pakistani civilians in the same area. The drone strikes are highly unpopular. They are deeply aggravating to the population. And they’ve given rise to a feeling of anger that coalesces the population around the extremists and leads to spikes of extremism. … The current path that we are on is leading us to loss of Pakistani government control over its own population.”

Another problem, Kilcullen says, is that “using robots from the air … looks both cowardly and weak.”

In the Pashtun tribal culture of honor and revenge, face-to-face combat is seen as brave; shooting people with missiles from 20,000 feet is not. And besides, Kilcullen says, “There are other ways to do it.”

Kilcullen didn’t elaborate on those “other ways,” but intelligence experts say they could include deploying covert teams of hit men on the ground (risky) and training Pakistani special operations units to do the job (time-consuming).

There’s no sign yet that the Obama administration is taking his advice. The CIA, like any organization, is glad to take credit for a well-run operation that’s fulfilling its mission: eliminating Al Qaeda leaders. Some even claim that the missile strikes have pushed Al Qaeda to the brink of extinction.

“Al Qaeda is on the ropes,” the Bush administration’s last terrorism czar, Juan Carlos Zarate, told me recently. “We are at the point where we can imagine an end to Al Qaeda as we know it.”

There’s an echo here of the debate over another CIA program, the “enhanced interrogation” of terrorist detainees. The agency declared the interrogations a success because they produced useful information. But that narrow accounting ignored the damage to other U.S. interests, such as diplomacy and the rule of law.

One legal scholar, Kenneth Anderson of American University, says there’s another connection between the two issues: The controversy over how to detain, interrogate and try suspected terrorists has made it simpler just to shoot them. “The most powerful institutional incentive today is to kill rather than capture them,” he wrote recently. From a legal perspective, he suggested, warfare is easier than “lawfare.”

The problem in western Pakistan is that two U.S. interests are in conflict. We want to kill the leaders of Al Qaeda, but we also want to strengthen the government of Pakistan, which is under serious pressure from Islamist insurgents. At the moment, as Kilcullen points out, we are doing the first at the expense of the second.

The drone strikes play into the hands of insurgents, who cite them to stir up anti-Western and anti-government sentiment. And, according to some reports, the missile strikes have driven Al Qaeda and Taliban forces deeper into Pakistan.

So what happens next? The Obama administration is unlikely to abandon one of the few strategies that has produced results against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Instead, it has requested a new $400-million fund to train and equip counterinsurgency forces in Pakistan’s police and Frontier Corps, which are more enthusiastic about this fight than the regular army.

Counterinsurgency is neither sanitary nor bloodless. It may end up a measure of success if we can stop killing people with air-to-ground missiles and go back to killing them the old-fashioned way.

doyle.mcmanus@latimes.com

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-mcmanus3-2009may03,0,7133284.column

US drone attack claims 80 lives in Pakistan

AP

For all the talk of “smart power,” President Obama is pressing down the same path of failure in Pakistan marked out by George Bush. The realities suggest need for drastic revision of U.S. strategic thinking.

— Military force will not win the day in either Afghanistan or Pakistan; crises have only grown worse under the U.S. military footprint.

The Taliban represent zealous and largely ignorant mountain Islamists. They are also all ethnic Pashtuns. Most Pashtuns see the Taliban — like them or not — as the primary vehicle for restoration of Pashtun power in Afghanistan, lost in 2001. Pashtuns are also among the most fiercely nationalist, tribalized and xenophobic peoples of the world, united only against the foreign invader. In the end, the Taliban are probably more Pashtun than they are Islamist.

— It is a fantasy to think of ever sealing the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. The “Durand Line” is an arbitrary imperial line drawn through Pashtun tribes on both sides of the border. And there are twice as many Pashtuns in Pakistan as there are in Afghanistan. The struggle of 13 million Afghan Pashtuns has already inflamed Pakistan’s 28 million Pashtuns.

— India is the primary geopolitical threat to Pakistan, not Afghanistan. Pakistan must therefore always maintain Afghanistan as a friendly state. India furthermore is intent upon gaining a serious foothold in Afghanistan — in the intelligence, economic and political arenas — that chills Islamabad.

— Pakistan will therefore never rupture ties or abandon the Pashtuns, in either country, whether radical Islamist or not. Pakistan can never afford to have Pashtuns hostile to Islamabad in control of Kabul, or at home.

— Occupation everywhere creates hatred, as the U.S. is learning. Yet Pashtuns remarkably have not been part of the jihadi movement at the international level, although many are indeed quick to ally themselves at home with al-Qaida against the U.S. military.

— The U.S. had every reason to strike back at the al-Qaida presence in Afghanistan after the outrage of 9/11. The Taliban were furthermore poster children for an incompetent and harsh regime. But the Taliban retreated from, rather than lost, the war in 2001, in order to fight another day. Indeed, one can debate whether it might have been possible — with sustained pressure from Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia and almost all other Muslim countries that viewed the Taliban as primitives — to force the Taliban to yield up al-Qaida over time without war. That debate is in any case now moot. But the consequences of that war are baleful, debilitating and still spreading.

— The situation in Pakistan has gone from bad to worse as a direct consequence of the U.S. war raging on the Afghan border. U.S. policy has now carried the Afghan war over the border into Pakistan with its incursions, drone bombings and assassinations — the classic response to a failure to deal with insurgency in one country. Remember the invasion of Cambodia to save Vietnam?

— The deeply entrenched Islamic and tribal character of Pashtun rule in the Northwest Frontier Province in Pakistan will not be transformed by invasion or war. The task requires probably several generations to start to change the deeply embedded social and psychological character of the area. War induces visceral and atavistic response.

— Pakistan is indeed now beginning to crack under the relentless pressure directly exerted by the U.S. Anti-American impulses in Pakistan are at high pitch, strengthening Islamic radicalism and forcing reluctant acquiescence to it even by non-Islamists.

Only the withdrawal of American and NATO boots on the ground will begin to allow the process of near-frantic emotions to subside within Pakistan, and for the region to start to cool down. Pakistan is experienced in governance and is well able to deal with its own Islamists and tribalists under normal circumstances; until recently, Pakistani Islamists had one of the lowest rates of electoral success in the Muslim world.

But U.S. policies have now driven local nationalism, xenophobia and Islamism to combined fever pitch. As Washington demands that Pakistan redeem failed American policies in Afghanistan, Islamabad can no longer manage its domestic crisis.

The Pakistani army is more than capable of maintaining state power against tribal militias and to defend its own nukes. Only a convulsive nationalist revolutionary spirit could change that — something most Pakistanis do not want. But Washington can still succeed in destabilizing Pakistan if it perpetuates its present hard-line strategies. A new chapter of military rule — not what Pakistan needs — will be the likely result, and even then Islamabad’s basic policies will not change, except at the cosmetic level.

In the end, only moderate Islamists themselves can prevail over the radicals whose main source of legitimacy comes from inciting popular resistance against the external invader. Sadly, U.S. forces and Islamist radicals are now approaching a state of co-dependency.

It would be heartening to see a solid working democracy established in Afghanistan. Or widespread female rights and education — areas where Soviet occupation ironically did rather well. But these changes are not going to happen even within one generation, given the history of social and economic devastation of the country over 30 years.

Al-Qaida’s threat no longer emanates from the caves of the borderlands, but from its symbolism that has long since metastasized to other activists of the Muslim world. Meanwhile, the Pashtuns will fight on for a major national voice in Afghanistan. But few Pashtuns on either side of the border will long maintain a radical and international jihadi perspective once the incitement of the U.S. presence is gone. Nobody on either side of the border really wants it.

What can be done must be consonant with the political culture. Let non-military and neutral international organizations, free of geopolitical taint, take over the binding of Afghan wounds and the building of state structures.

If the past eight years had shown ongoing success, perhaps an alternative case for U.S. policies could be made. But the evidence on the ground demonstrates only continued deterioration and darkening of the prognosis. Will we have more of the same? Or will there be a U.S. recognition that the American presence has now become more the problem than the solution? We do not hear that debate.

(C) 2009 GLOBAL VIEWPOINT NETWORK; (TM) TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

Graham E. Fuller is a former CIA station chief in Kabul and a former vice-chair of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council. He is author of numerous books on the Middle East, including The Future of Political Islam.

20 Jun 2009