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August 30, 2007

FP Failed States index

The Fund for Peace - Failed States Index Scores 2007

We are pleased to present the third annual Failed States Index - which has been expanded to include 177 countries. Hundreds of thousands of articles from global and regional sources were collected from May to December 2006 using Thomson Dialog. Utilizing our CAST software to do initial analysis of these voluminous documents and with a review by experts, we compiled the scores below.

August 30, 2007 at 03:03 PM in Current Terrorism | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

August 29, 2007

Pakistan | The nation's efforts to straddle the fault line between moderate and militant Islam offer a cautionary tale for the post-9/11 world

Pakistan - National Geographic Magazine

If there is an address, an exact location for the rift tearing Pakistan apart, and possibly the world, it is a spot 17 miles (28 kilometers) west of Islamabad called the Margalla Pass. Here, at a limestone cliff in the middle of Pakistan, the mountainous west meets the Indus River Valley, and two ancient, and very different, civilizations collide. To the southeast, unfurled to the horizon, lie the fertile lowlands of the Indian subcontinent, realm of peasant farmers on steamy plots of land, bright with colors and the splash of serendipitous gods. To the west and north stretch the harsh, windswept mountains of Central Asia, land of herders and raiders on horseback, where man fears one God and takes no prisoners.

This is
also where two conflicting forms of Islam meet: the relatively relaxed
and tolerant Islam of India, versus the rigid fundamentalism of the
Afghan frontier. Beneath the surface of Pakistan, these opposing forces
grind against each other like two vast geologic plates, rattling
teacups from Lahore to London, Karachi to New York. The clash between
moderates and extremists in Pakistan today reflects this rift, and can
be seen as a microcosm for a larger struggle among Muslims everywhere.
So when the earth trembles in Pakistan, the world pays attention.

Travel
8,000 miles (13,000 kilometers) across this troubled country, as I did
recently, and it becomes obvious that, 60 years after its founding,
Pakistan still occupies unsettled ground. Traumatized by multiple wars
with India, a parade of military strongmen (including the current
president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf), and infighting among ethnic
groups—Punjabi, Sindhi, Baluchi, Pashtun—Pakistan's 165 million people
have never fully united as one nation, despite being 97 percent Muslim.
To hold the country together, successive governments have spent
billions on the military, creating a pampered and self-serving monolith
of mostly Punjabi generals while neglecting the basic needs of the
people, for justice, health, education, security, and hope. Lately,
these grievances have spilled onto the streets, as lawyers and other
opponents challenge Pakistan's military government and demand a return
to civilian, democratic rule. Meanwhile, six years after 9/11, the
forces of Islamic radicalism are gaining strength and challenging
Pakistan's moderate majority for the soul of the country.

It's
not just the surging homegrown Taliban, which in one two-week period
this year scorched and bloodied the streets of half a dozen cities with
suicide bombs. Or the al Qaeda fighters who prowl the western mountains
of Waziristan, butchering anyone suspected of being an American spy.
Just as chilling are the "night letters" posted on public buildings,
warning that all girls, upon threat of death, must wear head-to-toe
burkas and stop attending school. Or, in a rising tide of intimidation,
the murders of teachers and doctors and human rights workers accused of
"crimes against Islam." But perhaps the most telling evidence of all
was my encounter with a 22-year-old woman named Umme Ayman, who seemed
all too eager to die.

I CANNOT
SEE HER FACE, or even her eyes, but I can tell you that Ayman is an
impressive young woman. She wears glasses under a black veil and speaks
in short, eruptive bursts of English that sound like well-rehearsed
lines in a school play. She and a group of 200 female religious
students have taken over a public children's library in Islamabad. They
are protesting the destruction of mosques run by radical clerics that
the government says were built without permits. Riot police, bristling
with sidearms and batons, have encircled the library and ordered the
students to leave. But Ayman is in no mood to listen.

"We are
not terrorists," she says. "We are students. We wish to spread Islam
over all the world. If America wants to end Islam, then we are prepared
to die defending our faith. We have said our goodbyes." Ayman and the
other women sit around the library's circular tables in tiny chairs
meant for children. Amid shelves lined with children's storybooks, they
have posted signs reading "Allah is for Muslims, not infidels." Across
the street, their parents have been holding an anxious vigil for weeks.


"Our fate is with Allah," Ayman says, as other protesters
gather around, "but if the government grants our demands, there will be
no problem." And what are those demands? "To rebuild the mosques and to
make Pakistan an Islamic state." Half a dozen veiled heads bob in
agreement.

From the start, the founders of Pakistan intended
their nation to be a refuge for Muslims, not an Islamic state. Pakistan
was created when India, a British colony for nearly a hundred years,
gained its independence and was partitioned into two countries along a
hastily drawn border. Pakistan's first leader, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, and
his brain trust of secular intellectuals created a fledgling democracy
that gave Islam a cultural, rather than political, role in national
life. Their Pakistan was to be a model of how Islam, merged with
democratic ideals, could embrace the modern world. "Muslims would cease
to be Muslims, not in the religious sense," Jinnah said in his
inaugural address, but "as citizens of the state."

Sixty years
later, having been educated in schools that teach mainly the Koran, the
young women in the library are stunned when I mention Jinnah's secular
vision for Pakistan. "That is a lie," Ayman says, her voice shaking
with fury. "Everyone knows Pakistan was created as an Islamic state,
according to the will of Allah. Where did you read this thing?" Such is
the certainty of Pakistan's Islamists, whose loud assertions give them
political influence far beyond their numbers.


The women
may be on the front lines of this protest, but it's clear the clerics
in the mosque next door are calling the shots. The children's library
is a few yards from one of the most radical mosques in Pakistan, Lal
Masjid, or Red Mosque, which has posted dozens of lean young jihadists
in black turbans around the library, brandishing swords, staffs, axes,
and AK-47s. The men from the mosque include pro-Taliban clerics and
Javed Ibrahim Paracha, a bearded, heavyset former member of parliament
who has been dubbed "al Qaeda's lawyer" for successfully representing
several hundred jihadists captured in Pakistan after 9/11. He explains
what emboldens these young women to risk their lives for Islam: "This
government has lost all credibility," he says. "People look at
Musharraf and they see a U.S. puppet who's willing to declare war on
fellow Muslims to satisfy America. They also see his generals getting
rich, while they're getting poorer every day. People are losing hope.
Pakistan and its government are becoming two different things. This
will have to change, and soon."

A week later, the standoff
comes to an apparent end after the government backs down and agrees to
start rebuilding the mosques. The children's library is stripped of all
books deemed un-Islamic, and the students take over. In the capital, a
mere ten minutes' drive from the presidential palace, the Islamists
have won. (Months later, as this story goes to press, the government
finally stormed the Red Mosque and killed scores of militants. Umme
Ayman survived.)

More than anyone, it was General Muhammad
Zia-ul-Haq who created Pakistan's current generation of Islamic
radicals, and the climate in which they thrive. A Punjabi general with
a pencil-thin mustache and raccoon circles under his eyes, Zia seized
power in a coup in 1977, had the democratically elected prime minister
tried and hanged, and promptly pressed for the Islamization of
Pakistan, calling for more religion in the classroom and the use of
punishments such as flogging and amputations for crimes against Islam.
To Zia, Pakistan's secular founders, with their emphasis on Muslim
culture, had it exactly backward. "We were created on the basis
of Islam," Zia said, and he set out to remake democratic Pakistan as a
strict Islamic state—despite the fact that a large majority of
Pakistanis were, and remain, moderates.

Whether by temperament
or tradition, most Pakistani Muslims are more comfortable with the
mystical and ecstatic rituals of Barelvi Islam, a colorful blend of
Indian Islamic practice and Sufism. For a Punjabi farmer whose crop has
just come in, it has always been more satisfying to hang out at a Sufi
shrine listening to qawwali music and watching dervishes whirl
than reciting the Koran in a fundamentalist mosque. Most Pakistanis,
though powerless to resist, were lukewarm to Zia's Islamization
program, as was much of the outside world.

That all
changed in December 1979, when the Soviet Union invaded neighboring
Afghanistan, driving hundreds of thousands of Afghan refugees—mainly
conservative Pashtun tribesmen—across the border into Pakistan. Within
months Zia's Islamist dream got a huge boost: The United States and
Saudi Arabia joined Pakistan in a covert alliance to supply arms,
training, and billions of dollars to an anti-Soviet insurgency in
Afghanistan. The motto of Zia's army—Jihad in the Service of
Allah—became a rallying cry for thousands of mujahideen training in
camps funded by the CIA in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province.
Over time, Zia's agenda, and that of the United States, became
indistinguishable: If Zia wanted to Islamize Pakistan while mobilizing
support for the anti-Soviet jihad, all the more power to him. Besides,
the fundamentalist madrassas of northwestern Pakistan made excellent
recruiting centers for mujahideen—young fighters who saw the struggle
against the Soviets as a holy war.

During the 1980s, as the
mujahideen prevailed against the Soviets in Afghanistan, the winds of
extremism blowing from the northwest began to chill all of Pakistan.
Millions of dollars from Saudi Arabia flowed into the hard-line Sunni
madrassas clustered along Pakistan's border with Afghanistan, which
eventually spread across Pakistan. Not all Pakistani madrassas today
are fundamentalist or radical. Some are shoestring operations run by
moderate clerics to meet the educational needs of the poor. But the
majority—more than 60 percent—are affiliated with the fundamentalist
Deobandi sect, an austere interpretation of Islam that calls for a
rejection of modernity and a return to the "pure," seventh-century
Islam of the Prophet Muhammad. Politically savvy and extremely well
funded, more than 10,000 of these schools operate across Pakistan
today, compared with fewer than 1,000 before General Zia took power.
Thousands more operate unofficially.

By the time Zia died in a
mysterious 1988 plane crash, the Islamization of Pakistan was well
under way. The following year, the Soviet Union, preoccupied with its
own implosion, pulled its demoralized troops from Afghanistan. The U.S.
promptly declared victory and returned home, leaving the Afghan people
to the chaotic rule of the mujahideen warlords. One crucial chapter in
the story of radical Islam's ascendancy had come to a close. The one we
are still living had just begun. Osama bin Laden and other leaders of
the Afghan jihad now moved freely in and out of northwestern Pakistan
and its Federally Administered Tribal Areas. The madrassas swelled with
the children of the Zia Generation. In the rugged mountainous land
shared by Afghanistan and Pakistan, the seeds of the Taliban, and al
Qaeda, had been sown.



"YES,
THERE ARE EXTREMISTS here," says Pakistani novelist Mohsin Hamid. "But
they are a small minority in a nation of 165 million people. Most of us
want nothing to do with violence." This is true. But like moderates
everywhere, those in Pakistan have a hard time being heard over the
racket rising up from their streets and television sets, a raucous
soundtrack of religious sermonizing, Indo-Pakistani saber rattling, and
a general gnashing of teeth that passes for public discourse. Ordinary
people are also stifled by a government and police force that are among
the most corrupt in the world, led by an army that answers to no one.
But it is a measure of the country's underlying goodness, and a sign of
hope, that 60 years after independence the most revered figure in
Pakistan is not a mullah or a sports hero, but a 79-year-old man who
routinely washes dried blood off dead bodies and fishes his clothes
from a donation barrel.

Abdul Sattar Edhi began serving his
fellow citizens a few years after the founding of Pakistan, when he
opened a free clinic in Karachi. Later he bought a dented Hillman
station wagon, its blue paint peeling, and turned it into Pakistan's
first private ambulance. He shuttled poor people to medical care and
collected the bodies of the city's homeless from the gutters, washed
them, and gave them a proper burial. "I felt it was my duty as a human
being," he says, recalling the revulsion he learned to overcome. "It
was obvious the government wasn't going to do it."

Decades
later, that hasn't changed. While the military accounts for a quarter
of the national budget, less than 3 percent is spent on education,
health, and public welfare. And so Edhi still tends to Pakistan's dirty
work, body by body. His one-man charity is now an acclaimed
international foundation. His single, beat-up old station wagon has
grown into a fleet of 1,380 little white ambulances positioned across
Pakistan, tended by thousands of volunteers. They are usually first to
arrive on the scene of any tragedy. In May 2002, when police found the
remains of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal reporter murdered in
Karachi, it was Edhi who gently collected the body parts, all ten, and
took Daniel Pearl to the morgue.

Edhi was born in the Indian
town of Bantva, 250 miles (400 kilometers) from Mumbai. As a teenager,
he'd gone with his father to hear Jinnah, the tall, gaunt, visionary
founder of Pakistan, deliver a speech urging local Muslims to join him
in the new country. At first his father hesitated. But during
partition, when Hindu mobs began marauding nearby, the family joined
the more than 14 million people from both countries—Muslims, Hindus,
and Sikhs—who fled their homes and crossed to the other side of the
line. As many as a million people died in sectarian riots, massacres,
and killings along the way.

Edhi's
family came by ship, landing on September 6, 1947, three weeks after
Pakistan came into being, amid throngs of people shouting "Pakistan zindabad—long
live Pakistan!" Within an hour, as he walked the streets of his new
home, he saw a Hindu man murdered by a mob of young Muslim boys. "They
stabbed him over and over with a knife, and I'll never forget watching
him writhe in pain on the ground. All over Karachi, Hindus were packing
up and running away, exactly as we'd done in India. Just like that, our
joy turned to horror and shame. That's what I remember about
partition."

Edhi's adopted city of Karachi has grown from a
population of 450,000 in 1947 to a surging metropolis of more than 15
million people. It may be the most cosmopolitan of Pakistan's cities,
but it is among the most dangerous as well—a place where Pakistan's
widening gap between rich and poor is on full display. Karachi is a
sprawling universe of ramshackle neighborhoods that radiate north,
west, and east from the glitzy seaside hotels, office towers, and
diplomatic fortresses downtown, where car bombs are an occupational
hazard and personal security a billion-dollar-a-year business. Al Qaeda
and other terrorist groups are known to operate in the squalid "no go"
neighborhoods of Karachi, beyond the reach of police and perhaps even
Inter-Services Intelligence, Pakistan's powerful military intelligence
agency.

In the middle of all this sits Edhi, a dignified man wearing a gray shalwar kameez
(Pakistan's national dress) and a furry black cap in the style Jinnah
wore—a fitting touch in a man who describes himself as a "super
patriot." In a neighborhood of litter-strewn streets, Edhi's
headquarters is a cluttered office that adjoins the two small rooms
where he lives with his wife, Bilquis, his partner in the foundation.
Edhi's operation relies on donations; he refuses to accept government
money or even a ride in someone else's car. He travels by ambulance, in
case someone needs help along the way. Outside Edhi's office, a metal
crib is stationed on the stairway beneath a sign reading, "Don't Kill
Your Baby." Every Edhi Foundation office in the country has such a
crib, where a mother can leave an unwanted baby, no questions asked.
Edhi's Karachi office alone receives 90 babies a month, half of them
alive.

Today a young nurse in a head scarf brings in a newborn
left in the crib overnight, a girl wrapped in a soft floral blanket,
perhaps four days old, her arms and legs shrunken and disfigured. The
nurse places her on Edhi's desk, like a gift. He picks up the infant
and gently strokes her malformed hands with his finger, whispering to
her in Gujarati, his native language, his long gray beard tickling her
nose. As this little girl grows, she'll be given medical care in one of
the foundation's clinics, sheltered in its orphanage, educated in one
of its schools, and sent forth into a carefully arranged marriage with
job skills and a dowry. Edhi has given away hundreds of brides at the
foundation's wedding facility, a cross between a Bollywood set and the
Elvis Suite at a Las Vegas hotel, with a bed in the shape of a heart. A
bulletin board in the lobby is filled with dozens of wedding pictures,
each happy bride a miracle child plucked from Edhi's rescue cradle.

Despite his
selfless deeds, Edhi is often attacked as "un-Islamic" by Pakistan's
hard-line mullahs, who cite his policy on infidels. He has none. Edhi
never asks whether an abandoned child, a psychiatric patient, a dead
person, or a battered woman is Sunni or Shiite, Hindu or Christian—or,
for that matter, Punjabi or Sindhi, Baluchi or Pashtun, Mohajir or
Kashmiri. "I'm a Muslim," says Edhi, "but my true religion is human
rights."

In modern Pakistan, that's an increasingly lonely
position. There are many thousands of dedicated doctors, lawyers,
teachers, social workers, and humanitarians—including some in
government—who, like Edhi, are working to move their country forward,
but the space in which they operate is shrinking. Recently, at
Musharraf's bidding, parliament passed a bill to restrict the
activities of NGOs and human rights groups. Even as he promotes
"enlightened moderation," Musharraf accuses such groups of humiliating
Pakistan by publicizing abuses, and declares them a threat to the
national interest.

Such rhetoric only emboldens the Islamists,
whose influence is growing across Pakistan. Edhi gets half a dozen
death threats a week, ranging from crank calls to serious warnings that
made him temporarily flee the country. Religious militants harass his
offices—a campaign orchestrated, Edhi believes, by Pakistan's Islamist
political parties, which compete with him for financial support. A few
years ago, a new Edhi Foundation hospital, which cost three million
dollars to build, was taken over by students from a radical madrassa
north of Karachi. Intimidated by the mullahs, the police refused to act
on Edhi's complaint, and his hospital is now a dormitory, with student
laundry—black turbans favored by the Taliban—flapping from the windows,
like flags over conquered territory.

HIGHWAYS IN PAKISTAN are
a kind of national theater, in which throngs of people, nearly all men,
hunker down on the roadside like spectators at a cockfight, keenly
observing all that passes with an air of amused expectation. Stop along
the roadway for a cup of tea, and you hear things. You hear people talk
about chronic injustice. They tell stories of people losing their land,
their lives, their honor, with no recourse. It is easy to think they
exaggerate. And then you meet someone else who changes your mind.

A
girl called Najma, who is 16, speaks in a cautious monotone, and it is
difficult to know, after what happened, whether she will ever speak
naturally again. She still wears the delicate ring in her nose that
signifies her virginity. On this day she also wears a pink head scarf
wrapped around her face, pretty and round with high cheekbones and
wide-set eyes, though now they are dull and without expression, like a
captive. She sits next to her mother on the bed where the incident
occurred and tries to talk without crying.

Two weeks
ago, at one in the morning, five men, maybe six, burst through the door
of the family's mud-brick home, which sits on a tiny plot of land in
the village of Nizampur in southern Punjab. They identified themselves
as police and said they were searching for weapons. One held a pistol
to her mother's chest while another pinned her nine-year-old brother,
Rizwan, to the floor. And then two men held Najma down on the bed while
a third raped her.

The leader masked his face with a scarf,
her mother says, but she recognized the raspy voice of their neighbor,
a police constable, who lives 200 yards (180 meters) away and wants the
plot of wheat that Najma's family moved here to farm as tenants 40
years ago. According to the complaint Najma's father filed with the
police, the attack resulted from his refusal to vacate the land. After
the rape, the men spent a few minutes ransacking the house. As they
left, they delivered a warning: Leave this place, or we'll be back for
your other daughter.

Rashid Rehman is a veteran human rights
lawyer who volunteered to represent Najma for the Human Rights
Commission of Pakistan. Rape is epidemic in parts of the country,
Rehman says, where it is used as a barbaric instrument of tribal
justice; a village might punish a husband's adultery, for example, by
gang-raping his wife. Najma's case is typical in southern Punjab, he
says, where the British rewarded their local allies with grants of land
and autonomy; after partition, these feudal landlords became a law unto
themselves. In their world, rape is a tool of intimidation wielded by
powerful, politically connected landowners to terrorize peasants, to
scare them off their land. If a family doesn't comply, Rehman says,
they are often killed. "Who's going to stop them?" he asks.

In
this case, he says, the family did everything right. They went to the
police the next morning and sought medical help for Najma. She was
examined by a doctor, who submitted a medical report confirming the
rape. But the local police, who are of the same clan as the constable,
refused to file charges. Incensed, Rehman appealed to officials in the
nearby town of Khanewal.

Najma shows great dignity for a
brutalized teenager. Today, as Rehman heads off to hear the outcome of
the appeal, she asks for one last word. "I don't know what my life will
be in the future," she tells him quietly, "but I'm ready to face my
attackers in public and demand justice for what they did." Of the
rapist, she says, "He must be hanged. He must."

At the police
station in Khanewal, Rehman meets first with the acting superintendent,
a stocky man in aviator glasses with a black baton in his hand and a
portrait of Jinnah hanging behind his desk. As Rehman briefs him, the
superintendent glances nervously at the six large men in plainclothes,
intelligence types, who sit against the far wall, sipping tea. The
superintendent takes a few notes, makes a phone call, hangs up. He
turns his baton over and over. Finally, the phone rings. Long
conversation. He hangs up and says that the forensic evidence in
Najma's case has been, unfortunately, misplaced. Rehman asks to see the
supervisor.


The
afternoon light fades from gold to gray as Rehman waits in another
empty office. The electricity is out—yet another rolling blackout.
Finally, the police inspector, a Mr. Khan, arrives and pulls up a
battered chair. Wearing a shalwar kameez the color of old mustard, Khan
is a rangy, loose-limbed speed-talker with a cigarette-scorched voice.
He has studied Najma's case in detail, he says, and he's sure what he's
about to say will please Rehman, since it will resolve the legal issues
once and for all. He pauses, as if waiting for a drumroll.

Najma
is lying, he announces, to protect her father from a previous charge of
having assaulted the police constable. (Her father is a small, defeated
man pushing 70, who can barely walk.) The medical evidence, Khan
continues, reveals Najma to be a "habitual fornicator," based on
certain measurements he is not at liberty to divulge. To conduct his
investigation, he says, he personally traveled to the village and
interviewed "60 or 90 people in the village mosque." All declared the
police constable incapable of committing such a crime. The case, he
says, is closed. It is dark by the time Rehman pulls away from the
police station, musing on what will happen to Najma's family. "If they
don't leave immediately, they will be in danger," he says. "The
constable could send men to rape the other sister, or to rape Najma
again. Or he might kill them all, to make an example of them or to
punish them for going to the police."

It was a similar
lawlessness that drove the people of Afghanistan into the arms of the
Taliban in the mid-1990s. The country was then in the midst of a civil
war and run by warlords, who grew rich on the opium trade, terrorized
the countryside, and seized the lands and daughters of any poor farmer
they chose. One day near Kandahar, a mullah and former mujahideen
commander named Mohammad Omar said enough was enough. With the Koran in
one hand and a Kalashnikov in the other, he rallied his students, or
taliban, and launched a new jihad: to cleanse Afghanistan of
lawlessness and corruption. Backed by Pakistan, the Taliban triumphed
in 1996, took Kabul, and imposed their own extreme vision of Islamic
law. Ordinary Afghans, at first, regarded the Taliban's dictates as a
small price to pay for an end to civil war.

Rashid Rehman
hears stories such as Najma's and fears what lies ahead for Pakistan.
In the car on his way back to his office in the Punjabi city of Multan,
he sits in the dark, looking out the window at the feeble lights of
passing villages. When he speaks, he is calm and clear. "When
government fails them, people get angry," he says. "They lose faith in
the system and look for alternatives. Think how easy it would be for
the Islamists—or Taliban or al Qaeda—to go to the brothers of this girl
now and say, 'What happened to your family is not justice. This man
dishonored your sister, he dishonored your father and your family name.
Join us and we will help you get justice. We will make him pay.' When
citizens are denied their basic human rights, they become radicalized.
When people are powerless, they are easily manipulated. This is what
worries me the most."

MY NEW
FRIENDS want to know why Americans think they are terrorists. It's a
good question, and an innocent one, judging by the young and open faces
of the dozen or so students sharing their evening meal with me. They
don't look like terrorists as they sit in a semicircle on green mats in
the courtyard of Jamia Uloom-ul-Quran, a small Deobandi madrassa
located in a historic downtown mosque in Peshawar. This provincial
capital served as headquarters for the Afghan resistance against the
Soviets, and jihad is still a going concern here. A block away from the
madrassa, at shops selling shoes and used clothes, I'd bought a 50-cent
al Qaeda DVD of a suicide bomber preparing for a mission. At the end of
the disc, over religious music, the bomber is shown in his car at a
distant crossroads, blowing up a convoy. "We know that shop," the
students say. "But we're not terrorists."

A few of the
students appear to be ten or younger, but most are in their late teens
or early 20s. They say their dream for Pakistan is "a peaceful nation,
in which justice prevails, in keeping with Islamic law." But they
believe, as many here do, that Islam is under attack. By America, by
the West, by India, by their own government. Under these circumstances,
they say, jihad is justified. What about suicide bombing? Is it
sanctioned by Islam? "You must think we have classes here in making
bombs or AK-47s!" exclaims one boy, and they all laugh.

"In
any Muslim land that's occupied, suicide bombing is allowed," says a
personable older boy named Rafiullah, who has bright brown eyes and the
beginnings of a beard. A few mention Iraq and Palestine as places where
such bombings are justified. Another boy mentions Afghanistan. "But
it's not allowed in Pakistan," Rafiullah says, "since we're not an
occupied country." ("Not yet!" somebody else interjects, to laughter.)
"Nobody has a right to blow you up, even if you're a non-Muslim, or an
infidel. If you are here as a guest, you are welcome." He reaches to
shake my hand, as if to reassure me.

The call for jihad is
rising across Pakistan, but it is here, in the northwest, that the
Islamists are taking control. Ever since 9/11, thousands of Taliban
fighters have found refuge among their fellow Pashtun tribesmen in
Peshawar, Quetta, and the mountainous tribal areas along the Afghan
border, especially North and South Waziristan. A year ago this month,
the government agreed to a cease-fire with the tribes and abandoned
most of North Waziristan to the militants. It's a sign of the local
Taliban's strength that the agreement was signed not by tribal elders
but by Taliban commanders.

Pakistan's turnabout on the
Taliban, which it had strongly supported since 1994, came shortly after
9/11. When Afghanistan's Taliban government, which had sheltered Osama
bin Laden, disintegrated under the firestorm meted out by the United
States and its coalition partners, President Musharraf confronted a
stark choice: Cooperate or suffer the consequences. He immediately
sided with the U.S. against the Taliban. It was not a popular decision.
Today, Pakistan is under pressure to contain the Taliban and al Qaeda
to the tribal areas along the Afghan border, although it's clear that
they're gaining in other parts of Pakistan. Many Deobandi madrassas are
believed to have an al Qaeda recruiter on the premises. But Muhammad
Hanif Jalandhry, who runs a madrassa in Multan, says the reputation of
Pakistan's madrassas as factories for terrorists is "propaganda. I tell
you, it's the oppressive system we live under that's bringing people to
these seminaries. People are seeking refuge and security—and dignity.
They are seeking a future."

About a third of the students at
the Deobandi madrassa in Peshawar, for instance, are poor kids from
far-flung regions of the North-West Frontier Province or the tribal
areas. They are like Mir Rahman, 16, a sweet-faced boy from a family of
poor herders in the Mohmand Tribal Area. The family lives miles from
the nearest public school, which is so badly run that few kids attend.
It's not unusual in Pakistan to hear of public schools that receive no
books, no supplies, and no subsidies from the government. Thousands
more are "ghost schools" that exist only on paper, to line the pockets
of phantom teachers and administrators. Faced with choosing between bad
public schools and expensive private ones, many poor parents send their
children to the madrassas, where they get a roof over their heads,
three meals a day, and a Koran-based education—for free.

Pervez
Hoodbhoy lives every day with the consequences of the lack of public
education in Pakistan. An MIT-trained professor of nuclear physics at
Quaid-i-Azam University in Islamabad, he was speaking to a
graduate-level class in physics a few days after the huge earthquake
that devastated Kashmir in 2005, describing the geophysical forces that
produced the disaster. "When I finished, hands shot up all over the
room," he recalls. "'Professor, you are wrong,' my students said. 'That
earthquake was the wrath of God.' "

This, he says, is the
legacy of General Zia-ul-Haq, whose education ministry issued
guidelines on bringing an Islamic perspective to science and other
subjects in the public schools. "The Zia Generation has come of age,"
he says. "It isn't Islamic to teach that earthquakes are caused by the
movement of tectonic plates. Instead, you are supposed to say, by the
will of Allah, an earthquake happens." Today a government commission is
working to modernize education, but "it goes deeper than updating
textbooks," he says. "It's a matter of changing society."

A
few miles from Hoodbhoy's classroom, I come upon a crowd of children in
a vacant lot. It turns out to be another school—this one a free school
for hundreds of street children run by a fireman named Muhammad Ayub,
who founded the school 25 years ago because he felt sorry for the kids
running wild in the neighborhoods nearby, dropouts who seemed destined
for a jail cell, or a slab at Edhi's morgue. Ayub hands me his business
card. It bears the name of the school: Second Time Civil Defense
Educational Institution on Self Help Basis. "All my teachers are former
students," he says proudly, gesturing to two men and a young woman with
freckles, standing before the kids, who are laughing and carrying on.
"See the looks on their faces?" he says. "This is the future I want for
our country."

On a small hill nearby, a group of three or four
students from a nearby madrassa, stern young men in their early 20s,
are watching Ayub's class. Perhaps they are drawn to the laughing girl
with the freckles, who isn't wearing a veil, or perhaps it is something
more sinister. They are looking across the divide that runs down the
middle of Pakistan, and it's not clear what they are thinking.

August 29, 2007 at 06:45 PM in Jamaat-ud-Dawa, Lashkar-e-Taiba, Middle East, Muslim background | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

August 26, 2007

Islamic Army and Sunni alliances in Iraq

New US ‘allies’ in hostages threat - Times Online

Ali Rifat and Sarah Baxter “JUST walk down the street. Don’t turn back or look around,” said a huge man who was talking on a mobile phone as he approached. He neither paused nor turned his head, but carried on walking.

Two cars cruised slowly down the road. Fifteen minutes later, the same man
reappeared. “Turn left,” he said. Soon afterwards an Audi A6 with tinted
windows drew up. In the car was an elegant man in his thirties wearing an
Italian suit. “We are very sorry for these complications, but we have to
follow security procedures,” he said.

Arranging an appointment with Ibrahim al-Shammari, a representative of the
Islamic Army, a leading Sunni insurgent group, had been fraught with
tension, even though the meeting was in an Arab capital far from Baghdad.
What began as a proposed rendezvous at a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant
turned into a James Bond adventure.

The journey took a further hour and a half in two cars. Every now and then,
new directions would be issued by phone. At last the car stopped outside a
villa. A side door opened and a tall, lithe man with a light grey beard
appeared. It was Shammari.

The Islamic Army is one of Iraq’s best known resistance groups, made up
largely of former members of Saddam Hussein’s army and security forces. In a
turnaround that heartened proponents of the US troop surge, it has lately
been firing its weapons at Al-Qaeda in Iraq instead of American soldiers.
The US military has been discreetly putting out feelers to the Islamic Army
in the hope of winning it over permanently.

But Shammari had an uncompromising message for the Americans. The Islamic Army
and other armed factions would agree to talks only if they accepted that the
“Islamic resistance” was the legitimate representative of the Iraqi people
and agreed to set a clear timetable for withdrawal from Iraq.

The government of Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister, was finished, he
boasted. “The final countdown has started. It has lost the support of Iraqis
and the American people.”

It was hard to disagree when Senator Hillary Clinton, the front-runner for the
Democratic presidential nomination, had just joined a chorus of US
politicians demanding Maliki’s removal. She said she hoped the Iraqi
parliament would replace him with a “less divisive and more unifying figure”.

Ryan Crocker, the US ambassador in Baghdad, told Time magazine, “the fall of
the Maliki government, when it happens, might be a good thing”.

Yet many opponents of the US troop build-up, including Clinton, are coming
round to the view that the surge is partially working – at least to the west
of Baghdad in Anbar province, where Sunni tribesmen have been aiding Iraqi
security forces and the Americans.

According to Shammari, however, the gains in Anbar will be shortlived. He said
the Islamic Army had signed a ceasefire with Al-Qaeda in Iraq. The country
was to be carved into spheres of influence where the Islamic Army and
Al-Qaeda in Iraq could operate independently of each other. It would
represent an enormous setback for the surge.

Shammari admitted Al-Qaeda in Iraq was unpopular. “Local people consider them
enemy number one. They tyrannised people and killed and assaulted tribal
leaders. They lost their bases and supporters and provoked the clans into
rising up against them,” he said.

But the Islamic Army resents the way the Americans have tried to turn the
infighting in Anbar to their advantage. “We’ve had big problems with
Al-Qaeda ever since they began targeting and killing our men,” he said.
“Eventually we had to fight back, but we found American troops were
exploiting the situation by spreading rumours that exacerbated the conflict.”

The Islamic Army has also noted President George Bush’s comments about the
success of the surge. “Bush foolishly announced to the world that all the
Sunnis in Iraq were fighting Al-Qaeda so he could claim to have achieved a
great victory,” Shammari said. “It’s nonsense.”

The Islamic Army is considering resuming the kidnapping of foreigners as a
sign of renewed militancy, Shammari said. In the past, it was responsible
for murdering Enzo Baldoni, an Italian journalist, and a number of foreign
workers. It also kidnapped two French journalists who were later released.

“Every foreigner in Iraq is a potential target for us no matter what his
nationality or religion,” Shammari said. “If he is proven to be a spy, he
will be punished and an Islamic court will determine his fate.”

The purpose of taking hostages would not be to kill them, he added. “We want
western governments to listen to the Iraqi people and stop supporting the
occupation by sending their citizens to Iraq.”

The Islamic Army’s defiance sharpens the dilemma for American forces. Could
progress in Anbar quickly unravel? If the US draws down its forces, will the
Sunnis take the fight, not to Al-Qaeda, but to the Shi’ite government in
Baghdad? And if so, will the US military have helped to build up a brutal
sectarian force?

In Baghdad, Colonel Rick Welch, head of reconciliation for the US military
command, told The Washington Post earlier this month that Sunni groups had
recently provided 5,000 fighters for policing efforts in the capital.

But he admitted that Maliki’s government was “worried that the Sunni tribes
may be using mechanisms to build their strength and power and eventually to
challenge this government. This is a risk for us all”.

The National Intelligence Estimate, drawn up by US intelligence agencies and
published last week, spelt out similar dangers. “Sunni Arab resistance to
Al-Qaeda in Iraq has expanded in the last six to nine months but has not yet
translated into broad Sunni Arab support for the Iraqi government or
widespread willingness to work with the Shia,” it noted.

Back in the villa, Shammari said Maliki’s government would soon be gone. “The
daily contradictions in the statements by American leaders about Iraq prove
that the Iraqi resistance is going in the right direction.”

He added: “The next president should take prompt action to withdraw all US
troops from Iraq.” And Gordon Brown should follow suit, he said, though he
could hardly fail to be aware that plans for British withdrawal in the
coming months are already advanced.

“The new prime minister should save Britain from the humiliating stupidity of
Tony Blair and Bush and start withdrawing troops from Iraq now,” he said.

August 26, 2007 at 11:22 AM in Iraq | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

August 25, 2007

'They fire first and think later,' say British soldiers

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Tim Albone in Kabul The friendly-fire deaths in Helmand have reopened a schism between American and British troops over how to fight the Taleban in Afghanistan.

Although publicly British commanders insist the Americans are still a vital
ally in the fight against insurgents, privately British soldiers expressed
concern and anger at their "gung-ho" approach.

Squadron Leader John Gunther, a British spokesman in Helmand, told The Times:
“The Americans have helped us out on many occasions. The cause of the
accident is under investigation, what I will say is that although tragic,
friendly fire incidents are rare and are part of armed conflict.

“We have methods in place to stop this, but they are not fail-safe.”

However, news that an investigation was being launched did little to appease
the British soldiers on the ground.

“I just can’t figure out how this has happened. How do you tell the families
they were killed by supposed allies?” one British soldier asked.

“Whenever I hear we have American jets overhead I get f***ing worried,”
another serviceman said. “They just don’t seem to know what they are doing a
lot of the time.”

“They have a different approach to us, they fire first and think later,” said
another.

“Here we are fighting the Taleban and they (US warplanes) are dropping bombs
on us," said a British soldier. "They are meant to have the best
equipment, yet this still happens time and time again. You have to wonder
what they are doing.”

Earlier this month an unnamed senior British officer told The New York Times
that differences in tactics were such that he had asked American Special
Forces teams to pull out of the town of Sangin, in Helmand, because they
were causing so many casualties and undermining support for reconstruction
projects.

The US forces also planned to build a patrol base near a religious shrine and
a graveyard — a proposal only abandoned after British troops intervened.

Des Browne, the Defence Secretary, was forced to issue a statement after the
report, in which he said the views were those of a single officer. "It
is not the view of the alliance. These things can be said in the heat of
battle," he said.

But when The Times visited Sangin last month, other soldiers were willing to
describe the difficulties of working with their allies. “They just seem to
have no idea how to fight a counterinsurgency, we have a history but they
have no reference points” said one soldier.

“They have a different approach to us, if we get in an ambush we pull back and
assess the situation," said another. "They try and shoot their way
through it and kill as many people as possible.”

August 25, 2007 at 03:39 PM in UK, US | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

August 20, 2007

Spain pulls in its horns - and forfeits its influence

Spain pulls in its horns - and forfeits its influence - International Herald Tribune

By Victoria Burnett Published: August 17, 2007

MADRID: As the international media followed every
detail of Nicolas Sarkozy's American vacation last week, it was
difficult, from Madrid, not to marvel at the very different scenario in
Andalusia, where José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero was taking his holiday.

Unlike the French president, for Zapatero there was no hobnobbing
with other world leaders, no pack of foreign paparazzi clicking in his
wake and certainly no public appearances in his swimming trunks. He
walked on the beach, fully dressed, and was snapped kissing a young
immigrant boy.

That's about as international as the summer vacation is likely to
get for Spain's stay-at-home leader, who, both at work and at play,
shows little interest in globetrotting.

A decade of soaring economic growth and corporate expansion overseas
has put Spain in the big leagues, but the country's political profile
is shrinking under the leadership of a man deeply preoccupied with
domestic reform and lacking in international experience.

"He is not there. It's as if he were not interested," says José
María de Areilza, a former foreign-policy adviser to Zapatero's
predecessor José María Aznar.

"This is a media-driven world, and you have to stay in the picture."

Zapatero leaves it to other heads of state to clock up the air
miles, receiving far more official visits than he makes. Though broadly
liked, diplomats say, he has annoyed a handful of foreign capitals -
most recently Tokyo - by repeatedly postponing visits or cutting them
short.

In the first seven months of the year, he was visited by nearly 20
foreign leaders, plus Ban Ki-Moon, the United Nations secretary
general; Condoleezza Rice, the U.S. secretary of state; and Tony Blair,
the former British prime minister, who had just become Middle East
envoy. For Zapatero's part, he traveled a few times to Brussels and
Berlin, and visited Poland, Mexico and Panama.

Charles Grant, head of the Center for European Reform, a think tank
based in London, says the decline in Spain's influence on Zapatero's
watch has been "astonishing."

During the governments of the Socialist prime minister Felipe
González and the conservative Aznar, who followed him, Spain punched
above its weight, he says. But despite a team of respected diplomats,
like Miguel Ángel Moratinos, Spain's current foreign minister, and
Alberto Navarro, the secretary of state for European affairs, "Spain is
not one of the key players who decides what happens" in Europe.

"The way the EU works, the prime minister is very important," Grant says.

Zapatero's limited language skills and a career in domestic politics
go some way to explaining his low international profile. The
47-year-old prime minister won his first seat as a Socialist deputy in
1986 and is fluent only in Spanish.

But it is also a question of priorities. Since he came to power in
April 2004, Zapatero has been consumed by domestic politics: his
attempts to broker peace with the violent Basque separatist group ETA,
and a series of social and political reforms.

Some of Zapatero's supporters say he pulled in Spain's horns partly
to correct what they see as Aznar's missteps. Aznar cultivated a close
alliance with the United States at the expense of Spain's relations
with some European allies. He took Spain into the deeply unpopular war
in Iraq, for which the country was punished by an Islamist bomb attack
in March 2004 that cost 191 lives. Icarus-like, Spain flew too close to
the sun of international influence and burned its wings.

Where Zapatero has put energy into foreign policy initiatives, he
has chalked up some successes. The government's commitment to engaging
sub-Saharan Africa - where Spain has opened half a dozen new embassies
in the past three years - has won plaudits from international officials
and African leaders.

Zapatero deftly negotiated a generous allotment of EU development
funds for Spain between 2007 and 2012, despite the country's rising
economic status. The government also won help from other European
countries for Spain's efforts to intercept migrant boats from Africa.

But Spain's reluctance to allow its troops to deploy in the
dangerous southwest of Afghanistan, where NATO forces are fighting the
Taliban, has frustrated other members of the alliance. Spain has about
700 troops under NATO's command in Afghanistan's relatively stable
western corner and some 1,100 in the United Nations peacekeeping force
in Lebanon.

The fact the government sells its overseas deployments as
peacekeeping missions, rather than combat operations, has done little
to strengthen the Spanish public's weak stomach for military casualties.

Meanwhile, well-intentioned but nebulous initiatives like the
Alliance of Civilizations are unlikely to yield concrete results in the
short term, while Spain's proposal last year for a new Middle East
peace plan - announced as a joint initiative with France and Italy -
seems to have been stillborn.

José Ignacio Torreblanca, an expert in foreign policy at the Royal
Elcano Institute, a Madrid-based think tank, says Zapatero's domestic
efforts are diplomacy of a kind in that they are converting Spain into
a reference for other countries. The ease with which Spain has absorbed
Europe's fastest-growing immigrant population, and laws that extend the
rights of women and gays, have caught the eye of other European policy
makers.

Some diplomats and analysts think Zapatero will start flapping his
diplomatic wings in the run-up to the March general election, and
concentrate more on the outside world if he is re-elected.

For Spain to make its mark, says Areilza, the former foreign-policy
adviser, it needs a bigger, more effective foreign-affairs apparatus
and a larger military budget so it can contribute meaningfully to
overseas military and peacekeeping operations.

Zapatero will have to get stuck into some of the strategic debates
that keep other European leaders awake at night, like Iran's nuclear
ambitions or how to handle Russia, says Grant of the Center for
European Reform.

But Zapatero is not a Great Game diplomat.

"He's not a Winston Churchill. He doesn't feel comfortable in these
strategic debates about that hard world out there," says Torreblanca.
Zapatero is most at ease in the role of listener and conciliator, who
builds up his interlocutors' support before convincing them they can
give him what he needs and get what they need in the process.

Torreblanca says Zapatero sees international politics as a
"non-zero-sum game," one in which everyone can come out ahead:
"Zapatero says, 'Let's make the cake bigger for everyone, and then I'll
get my piece at the end of it all.' "

August 20, 2007 at 09:37 AM in Europe | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

August 12, 2007

Big business will pacify the clash of cultures

Big business will pacify the clash of cultures - Times Online

The world will move together as it builds the bodies through which we can all trust each other more

Francis Fukuyama

Professor Samuel Huntington argued in his 1996 book The Clash of Civilisations that, after the cold war, world politics would be dominated not by conflicts between rival ideologies but by conflicts between civilisations and cultures. He wrote that the power of culture would trump the integrating forces of globalisation, and that people’s loyalties would ultimately be defined communally – based on ties of religion, ethnicity and shared history.

Huntington characterised the values of the western Enlightenment, democracy and individual rights prominent among them, as projections of the values of western Christianity, reasoning that other cultures with other values would create different types of institutions.

In the decade since it was published, many have argued that the clash of civilisations hypothesis has been proved right by events. There has been a broad rise in religious energies and identity, particularly notable in the Muslim world with the emergence of radical Islamism, but also evident in south Asia, Latin America, the United States and Russia.

The issues raised by the clash of civilisations thesis are clearly relevant because they raise a key question: Are natural political spaces of trust created by culture, or can we integrate on a more global, perhaps even universal, basis?

I both agree and disagree with the “clash of civilisations” thesis. I agree that cultural factors have become the prism through which many people see international affairs today. On the other hand, I believe that this point of view underestimates the integrating forces driving global development, and the way in which the modernisation process is forcing a convergence of institutions and approaches to governance on an increasingly world-wide scale.

Huntington is right that political identity based on shared culture is not going to disappear in the foreseeable future. It would be profoundly undemocratic if global economic forces stripped local communities of their ability to decide how to structure their common political life.

It is certainly true, too, that different countries must find their own routes to modernity. The specific paths that western Europe, the United States, Japan, Russia and other countries have taken are all different.

Modernisation and development arise from the efforts of the people who live in a given society, not from those of outsiders. Countries can learn from one another, but their ability to shape outcomes in foreign lands is usually very limited. This is something that the United States has painfully learnt over the past four years in Iraq.

The question we need to address, however, is whether we are taking different paths to the same endpoint – an endpoint of a single world civilisation – or whether different human cultures are heading to fundamentally different places.

My view, contrary to Professor Huntington’s, is that modernisation itself in the long run requires the convergence of many types of institutions, regardless of cultural starting points. And economic integration between states is most productive, and results in the most durable forms of trust, when it is based on transparent rule-bound institutions rather than the looser ties of cultural affinity.

The starting point of any country’s development is the state, which Max Weber, the German sociologist, defined as a monopoly of legitimate force over a defined territory. But while the state begins with coercion, the miracle of the modern state is its ability to solve the paradox of power – namely, that a state has to be strong enough to enforce laws and provide order, yet it must constrain its own exercise of power if there is to be long-term economic growth.

It is state weakness that explains anaemic economic growth in many parts of the developing world. All societies need order, rule of law, a government that provides basic public goods and a reasonably fair distribution of resources. If rulers cannot govern effectively, if they are highly corrupt and divert public resources to private ends, if they behave arbitrarily, then they will undercut the savings and investment needed for long-term growth. It is therefore no surprise that by the end of the 1990s, better governance and more competent states became the order of the day.

How does a modern state achieve good governance? Good governance is not a gift given by rulers to the ruled. It ultimately has to be based on accountability mechanisms which ensure that rulers truly serve the interests of the ruled, not just their own interests or those of their friends and families.

Governments can be held accountable in a number of ways. The most familiar are those vertical accountability mechanisms known as elections. But there are also mechanisms of horizontal accountability that work when different parts of a government monitor each other’s performance.

Parliaments and courts, independent of the executive, are of course crucial. Furthermore, there are mechanisms outside the formal political system. Accountability requires transparency regarding the behaviour of rulers, for bad governments seldom report on their own failures and transgressions. That is why good governance requires an independent media and the institutions of civil society to monitor the behaviour of the state.

Thus, effective modern states are as notable for the constraints they put on themselves as they are for their ability to concentrate power.

Whether within or among states, trust can arise from one of two sources. The first is cultural, where trust derives from shared values, traditions and history. In all societies, trust begins with family and kinship and then slowly radiates out to a broader range of social groups. The second form of trust is based on shared interests.

This kind of trust can exist between complete strangers with nothing in common culturally and who may operate in different parts of the world. This kind of trust is based on institutions.

Of the two forms of trust, the cultural version is clearly the most natural and widespread, but it is also more primitive. All human beings organise themselves into primary social groups or cultural communities and nearly all people fall back on such groups in times of trouble or crisis.

The second form of trust expands the potential radius of trust indefinitely. It is more durable because it is based on self-interest and it is the basis of modern economic interdependence. Trust becomes increasingly anchored in reciprocal self-inter-est rather than culture as countries modernise. Globalisation provides the opportunity to expand markets far beyond the limits of one’s own community, requiring development of an impersonal, structured institutional framework by which trust can emerge between complete strangers.

A case in point: businesses in China and in Chinese-speaking societies were traditionally structured around the family. It was difficult to trust strangers or enter into business relationships with someone to whom you were not related.

While this kinship-based form of social capital worked to a degree and for a while, it was limiting. It meant that family-owned businesses could not grow into large, professionally managed companies.

There are many political reasons for countries to decide to align with one another on grounds of cultural, ethnic or historical commonality. But economic rationality demands that trust be based on more impersonal criteria and here the degree to which a country’s institutions are law-governed and transparent takes pride of place.

Integration in the global economy will be more durable and productive of shared prosperity to the extent that it can be based on interests rather than passions, on institutions rather than culture. This is not a western perspective; it is a global one.

© American Interest/ Global Viewpoint 2007

August 12, 2007 at 11:14 AM in Cold War, Middle East, Muslim background, Political | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

August 08, 2007

Sixty bitter years after Partition

BBC NEWS | South Asia | Sixty bitter years after Partition

As the 60th anniversary of Indian Partition approaches, the BBC's Andrew Whitehead looks back at how and why independence from Britain meant the creation of two separate countries, India and Pakistan.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah (right) emerges with Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Pandit Nehru after talks
Poor relations between Nehru (left) and Jinnah boded ill

"There can be no question of coercing any large areas in which one community has a majority to live against their will under a government in which another community has a majority. And the only alternative to coercion is partition."

With those words, the last Viceroy of British India, Lord Mountbatten, announced that Britain would be granting independence not to one nation, but to two. All Britain's attempts to devise a constitutional formula which preserved India's unity while offering safeguards for the large Muslim minority had failed.

Mountbatten's speech was made on 3 June 1947. Just 10 weeks later, he was presiding at twin independence ceremonies.

In Karachi on 14 August, he witnessed the birth of a nation with an explicit Muslim identity, Pakistan. The following day, he was in Delhi for India's independence ceremonies - a country more than three times the population of Pakistan and with a large Hindu majority.

In those hectic weeks between the announcement of partition and the transfer of power, a British judge, Cyril Radcliffe, was brought in to devise the border between India and Pakistan. It meant cutting in half two of India's most powerful and populous provinces, Punjab and Bengal.

Radcliffe had never been to India before and never came again. Whatever line he had devised, tens of millions would have felt aggrieved. The hasty partition of these provinces triggered one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th Century.

Independence dream

Tens of millions of Muslims on one side, and Hindus and Sikhs on the other, found themselves on what they regarded as the wrong side of the boundary line. Amid the tension, the communal clashes and the panicked mass migration, there was huge loss of life. No one knows the exact number.

Muslims surround a Hindu corpse in Calcutta
Partition saw as many as half a million people killed

Historians believe that upwards of half a million people were killed, tens of thousands of women were raped or abducted and more than 10 million people became refugees in a catastrophe which still haunts South Asian politics and diplomacy.

India's demands for self-rule dated back to the previous century, and gained particular force in the 1920s and 1930s under the leadership of the Hindu ascetic and campaigning genius, Mahatma Gandhi.

By 1945, and the end of World War II, it was clear that self-rule for India was imminent. The landslide victory of a radical-minded Labour party in Britain's 1945 elections hastened the process.

The complicating factor was that many in India's large Muslim minority felt they would be at a disadvantage in a mainly Hindu nation.

The Muslim League, led by austere lawyer Mohammed Ali Jinnah, took up this issue.

Religious split

It was as late as 1940 that the Muslim League started demanding a separate nation for the region's Muslims. But the League's strong showing in post-war provincial elections meant that their demand for a separate Pakistan could not be ignored.


THE PARTITION IN VERSE
Muslims at Lahore fleeing from Hindu India, August 1947
...In seven weeks it was done, the frontiers decided, A continent for better or worse divided
from Partition by WH Auden
Corpses lie strewn in your [the Punjab's] pastures and the Chenab [river] has turned crimson
from An Ode to Waris Shah by Amrita Pritam
Somewhere the wave of the slow night will meet the shore and somewhere will anchor the boat of the heart's grief
from Freedom's Dawn by Faiz Ahmad Faiz

The terrible violence between communities which so tarnished independence began in Calcutta (now Kolkata) a year before the British transferred power and slowly spread.

But it was only after the independence ceremonies - and then, two days later, the announcement of where the boundary would run - that Punjab became engulfed in the worst of the Partition bloodletting.

Punjab was home to a large and influential Sikh population, who dominated much of the region's agriculture but there was hardly anywhere where Sikhs were in a majority and their lands and most important places of worship straddled the new Partition line.

Almost all Sikhs felt more comfortable in India than in Pakistan - hundreds of thousands moved in endless caravans, some 70 miles long, in the monsoon months of 1947. So did many Hindus. Roughly equal numbers of Muslims made their way to Pakistan.

There was little pattern to the violence. All communities suffered, all harboured perpetrators. It was vicious - almost unbelievably so. Columns of refugees were attacked, harried and sometimes slaughtered.

Trainloads of migrants were put to death, their bodies sometimes horribly butchered and disfigured. On both sides, women were particular targets for violence and impregnation.

Bad neighbours

The debate about whether Partition was right or wrong, whether it was inevitable or avoidable, has receded over the years.

The national flag of India is hoisted in Delhi, 15 August 1949
Britain handed back its Indian territory to a divided people

But historians in South Asia by and large agree that if Britain had sought a less hasty and better prepared transfer of power, much of the bloodshed could have been avoided.

Pakistan's founder, Jinnah, and India's first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, never got on well. The tension and appalling violence which overshadowed their nations' births made matters much worse. Countries which could have been good neighbours turned out to be enemies right from the start.

The Kashmir issue intensified the sense of conflict. Kashmir lay between India and Pakistan. It had a Muslim majority but a Hindu princely ruler had to make the decision about which country to join.

Pakistan tried to force the issue, encouraging first a local uprising and then an invasion by Pakistani tribesmen. The maharaja pleaded to India for help, and Indian troops airlifted into the Kashmir Valley succeeded in blocking the tribal army's advance.

Within months of independence, India and Pakistan were at war in Kashmir. The dispute has never been resolved. Kashmir has endured its own informal partition with the Muslim-majority Kashmir Valley, the heartland of Kashmiri culture, under Indian control but still claimed by Pakistan.

Pakistan had the acute problem of geography. It consisted of two wings, Bengali-speaking East Pakistan, and Punjabi-dominated West Pakistan, with 1,000 miles of Indian territory in between.

The East had just the larger population - but power and influence lay with the West. In 1971, Indian troops supported Bengali nationalists in prising East Pakistan free of West Pakistan's control, and the new nation of Bangladesh was born.

Defined by the differences

The wars and rivalry between India and Pakistan have encouraged both countries to build strong armies (in Pakistan, the army has repeatedly overthrown civilian governments) and to develop nuclear arsenals.

Sirdan Abdur Rab Nishter signs the document creating Pakistan, 18 August 1947
Pakistan went on to challenge India as a regional power

Regional co-operation in South Asia has been perpetually frustrated by this rivalry. India still has a large Muslim minority, about one in seven of the population, but the tension with Pakistan has put strain on the Indian tradition of secularism in public life and religious tolerance.

The start of a separatist insurgency in Kashmir from the end of the 1980s further worsened relations between the two countries.

Pakistan insisted it was only giving moral support to the separatists - India was convinced that Pakistan was arming, training and at times organising these Muslim militants.

Some were advocates of jihad who had been supported by Pakistan in fighting Soviet rule in Afghanistan and then turned their attention to Kashmir - and have also trained and encouraged Islamic radicals who have sought targets further afield.

Both India and Pakistan have struggled to escape the shadow of the violence amid which they gained nationhood. Kashmir is only one aspect of the unfinished business of Partition. Both national identities are defined in large part by contrast with the other.

Yet India and Pakistan have - hesitatingly, and sometimes painfully - been struggling towards building better links. If that happens, South Asia will finally have managed to supersede the bitter legacy of 1947.

August 8, 2007 at 09:47 PM in | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

August 06, 2007

Radical Islamic party convenes in London

Radical Islamic party convenes in London - International Herald Tribune

By Jane Perlez Published: August 5, 2007

LONDON: A radical Islamic party that has become a
focus of attention in Britain, with calls in Parliament for its
prohibition, began a frontal attack on its critics this weekend at a
carefully stage-managed conference in London that attracted several
thousands of well-dressed, mostly professional Muslims.

Calls of "Allahu Akbar," or God is great, punctuated the leaders'
speeches at the conference held by Hizb ut-Tahrir, or Party of
Liberation, a group that calls for a caliphate in Muslim countries, the
end of Israel and the withdrawal of all Western interests in the Middle
East.

"There is no Islam as a way of life without a Khilafah," said Kamal
Abuzahra, an Islamic academic of Bangladeshi origin, using the Arabic
work for caliphate and earning a roar of approval from the crowd
segregated into his and hers sections.

The conference was titled, "Khilafah, The Need and the Method."

The chairman of the party, Abdul Wahid, a medical doctor in Harrow,
England, took on Britain's political leadership: "They say: 'You preach
hate.' I preach a hatred of the lies of people in this country that
send soldiers to Iraq. I preach a hatred of torture."

Other speakers assailed the British government for linking the group
to terrorism and for too often treating British Muslims as terror
suspects.

Hizb ut-Tahrir, founded in the early 1950s by a Palestinian judge
dissatisfied with the Muslim Brotherhood, has existed in Britain for a
number of years, and remains legal in other Western countries,
including the United States, where it has less appeal than here.

In the aftermath of the botched terror attacks in London and
Glasgow, there were renewed calls for the prohibition of Hizb
ut-Tahrir, on the grounds that although the group proclaims advocating
peaceful means for winning the Caliphate, its rhetoric can encourage
Muslims onto a path toward terrorism.

Some analysts describe Hizb ut-Tahrir as "soft jihadists"; others contend that it veers beyond that.

"The only difference between Islamists from Hizb ut-Tahrir and
jihadists is that the former are waiting for their state and caliph
before they commend jihad, while the latter believes the time for jihad
is now," said Ed Husain, a former member of Hizb ut-Tahrir who has
criticized the group in a recent book, "The Islamist."

Hizb ut-Tahrir is banned in a number of Muslim countries,
particularly those that feel vulnerable to its calls for the overthrow
of their governments - including Egypt, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

The group was proscribed by the German Interior Ministry in 2003 for
"spreading hate and violence," under a chapter in the Constitution that
is often used to clamp down on anti-Semitism. Hizb ut-Tahrir is
appealing that ban.

In Britain, Hizb ut-Tahrir has waxed and waned, enjoying
considerable strength in the mid-1990s, when members recalled that it
attracted a crowd of many thousands to a meeting at Wembley Stadium.

The party, which does not announce membership numbers, remains
potent on British university campuses, frequently fields speakers on
television talk shows, and runs a slick Web site that falls short of
running into problems with British law.

During Prime Minister Gordon Brown's first question time in the
House of Commons last month, the leader of the Conservative Party,
David Cameron, asked the new Labour leader why Hizb ut-Tahrir had not
been banned.

Cameron said the group was "poisoning the minds of young people and
has said that Jews should be killed wherever they are found."

Brown replied that he had only been in office a short while and would look into it.

But John Reid, the former home secretary, jumped in, saying there
was not sufficient evidence under British laws to ban the organization.

That, say British officials, is the nub of the problem. Even under
the new 2006 anti-terrorism law that prohibits the glorification of
terrorism, Hizb ut-Tahrir cannot be prosecuted, a British government
official said.

"They are very savvy, very sophisticated, they know how far they can push," the official said.

Former Prime Minister Tony Blair was urged last year by the
Pakistani president, Pervez Musharraf, to ban the group on the grounds
that it "brainwashes people and that leads to violent acts," a senior
Pakistani official said. The British Foreign Office received a similar
message from Pakistani officials last month.

During a lunch break in the sunny courtyard of the Alexandra Palace,
a 19th-century brick pile in northern London, conference-goers -
information technology managers, bankers and teachers - told of the
appeal of the ideology of a Caliphate in the Muslim world.

"If you look at the political structure in the Muslim world, it's a
police state," said Mohammed Baig, 28, a second-generation British
Indian who is an asset manager specializing in corporate governance.
"You have the public opinion underground, and then staged public
opinion in the media."

Most people in the Muslim world want the introduction of Sharia, or
Islamic law, said Baig, who said he had been a member of the group for
seven years.

"Our feeling is: What gives Western governments the right to impose
a set of values on a people who don't believe in them?" he said,
referring to the United States and Britain pushing for democratic
values in the Middle East.

Asked about Hizb ut-Tahrir as a conveyor belt to terrorism, Baig
said: "I'm not going to say Hizb ut-Tahrir has been a perfect
organization for 20 years. There are people who have come and gone in
the organization. An atmosphere was created in the youth in the mid
'90s, mistakes were made."

Some of the most ardent adherence to the party's ideas about a Caliphate was expressed by women members at the conference.

Rubina Ahmed, 33, a mother of four who came on a charter bus from
Manchester, said, "It's the in-depthness of the caliphate that I like."
Hizb ut-Tahrir "doesn't compromise on the values of Islam and it's not
afraid to speak out for what it wants."

Why did Hizb ut-Tahrir not work for the goal of the Caliphate in
Britain, asked someone in the audience during a question-and-answer
session.

"We focus our work where we can get the quickest results," Abuzahra said.

August 6, 2007 at 09:38 AM in Middle East, Muslim background | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Sinn Fein has hijacked the history of Ulster

Sinn Fein has hijacked the history of Ulster - Times Online

Last week British troops withdrew from Northern Ireland. Behind them the story of the Troubles is being traduced

Peter Taylor

Driving up west Belfast’s Divis Street last week, the scene of the fierce
sectarian rioting that triggered the deployment of British troops 38 years
ago, I noticed a gap in the murals that have adorned its walls for so many
years, a visual barometer of the changing climate of the times.

I wondered if the creative talents of Sinn Fein’s art department were already
preparing to fill the space with a fresh mural depicting the withdrawal of
British forces. At midnight last Tuesday the army brought down the final
curtain on the longest campaign in its history. There was no great ceremony,
no Last Post, no rolling up of the Union Jack as in Aden 40 years earlier.
The army slipped out of the province in carpet slippers.

Driving on up the Falls Road I passed the narrow streets around the Clon-ard
monastery where Catholics had come under Protestant attack in that hot
August of 1969. I remember talking to soldiers about their experiences when
they first arrived to keep the two sides apart and prevent a feared Catholic
pogrom. Many of the troops barely knew where Northern Ireland was or
understood the bitter sectarian divisions that had flared into violent civil
conflict in this far corner of the United Kingdom. They were welcomed like
heroes. “I felt like a knight in shining armour,” one of them told me. “Tea
and an endless supply of buns were the order of the day.”

Within months the honeymoon was over and tea and buns were replaced with
rocks, petrol bombs and bullets. Soon the army became the enemy, as a result
of a series of misjudgments and catastrophic errors, largely through
ignorance and blind reliance on the unionist government at Stormont against
whom the civil rights campaign had been initially directed.

A disastrous curfew was placed on the Falls Road, alienating the very people
who had welcomed the soldiers with open arms. Internment was introduced in
1971, carried out by the army as young and old were dragged from their beds
and carted off in the early hours of the morning.

To make matters worse, a handful of suspects were subjected to controversial
interrogation techniques previously used by the army in colonial situations
in Malaya, Kenya and Aden, including hooding, wall standing and exposure to
an incessant high-pitched “white” noise. The techniques were subsequently
deemed to be illegal. But worse was still to come.

On January 30, 1972, paratroopers shot dead 13 unarmed civil rights marchers
in Londonderry on what became known as “Bloody Sunday”.

It was undoubtedly the darkest day in the army’s 38 years in the province, and
in the eyes of many nationalists it completed the transformation of the
troops from knights in shining armour to a murderous army of occupation.

In the bitter and bloody years that followed, army commanders emphasised the
need to win “hearts and minds” in order to win the war, but the message fell
on many deaf ears out on the ground as squaddies saw their mates shot, blown
up and maimed by an ever more effective IRA.

No love was lost on either side. “Grab ’em by the balls and hearts and minds
will follow” was a sentiment I heard from soldiers on the streets. “Chris”
gave me a graphic description of what that meant after he had intercepted a
gunman who had tried to kill him: “I did give him a good thumping. His
genitals were black and blue for a while. I think I must have cracked a
couple of his ribs. But that was the way you treat terrorists.”

Many of these early mistakes and abuses the army now recognises and puts down
to a long and difficult learning process.

This is only one side of the story. The problem is that it’s the side on which
Sinn Fein concentrates as it air-brushes the IRA’s own history. What about
“Bloody Friday” in 1972, when IRA car bombs in Belfast killed nine? The
Kingsmill massacre in 1976 when an IRA unit in south Armagh gunned down 10
Protestant workers returning home in a minibus? The La Mon restaurant
bombing in 1978 when an IRA incendiary bomb killed 12 Protestants?
Enniskillen in 1987 when an IRA bomb killed 11 Protestants during the
Remembrance Day ceremony? And these are but a few.

I ended my drive up the Falls Road at the Whiterock community centre on the
fringe of the once notorious Ballymurphy estate where soldiers used to
patrol at their peril. I had come to take part in a BBC Radio Ulster Talk
Back discussion on the final withdrawal of British troops. The new normality
hits you between the eyes. Unarmed officers of the RUC’s replacement, the
Police Service of Northern Ireland, stood at the door, smiling in the
sunshine. Inside was Gerry Kelly, Old Bailey bomber from 1973 and Maze
escapee 10 years later, sandwiched between two former British soldiers. All
were chatting without animosity as they reminisced about the “war”.

Although republicans would vehemently deny it, the army did play its part in
helping us to reach this year’s historic political settlement. At its most
basic, the army prevented the IRA achieving its original goal of driving the
“Brits” into the sea and reunifying Ireland. This was its agenda when Martin
McGuinness and Gerry Adams were part of the IRA delegation that met William
Whitelaw, the Northern Ireland secretary, in 1972 for secret talks in
London. Then there was no hint of compromise in the air.

The critical point in the army’s campaign were the years that followed the IRA
hunger strike of 1981 when 10 prisoners died. Sinn Fein was on the political
rise and the IRA had more arms than it could handle – 130 tons courtesy of
Colonel Gadaffi of Libya. That was when the SAS and other undercover units
made it clear that the Brits were not prepared to let the IRA win. In 1987
the SAS ambush at Loughgall wiped out eight members of one of the IRA’s most
experienced units. I remember Sir Robert Andrew, permanent undersecretary at
the Northern Ireland Office at the time, telling me of his satisfaction that
“we had won one”.

The SAS killing of three members of another IRA unit in Gibraltar the
following year drove home the message. Both operations were the result of
vastly improved intelligence from penetration of the IRA. Overall the army’s
special forces kept the IRA at bay, with the result that both sides
privately accepted that there was a military stalemate. Such were the
necessary conditions that preceded the long and tortuous peace process that
culminated in the historic agreement at Stormont earlier this year.

What of the cost? More than 3,500 people lost their lives in the conflict and
Britain put civil liberties on hold in the name of defeating terrorism. All
sides suffered horrendously before peace finally came.

What of the lessons? It’s easy to say they have been learnt and applied in the
very different theatres where the army is now involved: Iraq and
Afghanistan. But Basra is not Belfast. Initially the army patrolled its
dusty streets without helmets but these were soon put back on again as the
local militias turned against them, their support boosted by allegations of
abuses by the army during interrogation and elsewhere.

It seems like déjà vu: soldiers don’t make good policemen. In Afghanistan it’s
difficult for soldiers to win hearts and minds when they’re trying to
eradicate the heroin poppies from which local farmers and their families
make their living. In fighting terrorism and political violence, “hearts and
minds” needs to be more than a well meaning slogan, not least when it comes
to countering Islamist extrem-ism on the streets of Britain.

The government knows that gaining the support of communities, be they
nationalists in Northern Ireland or Muslims in Britain, is the key to
countering terrorism and isolating the enemy, real and potential. But as the
army’s 38 years in Northern Ireland have shown, it’s easier said than done.

Peter Taylor has reported the Irish conflict for 35 years for ITV and the
BBC and is the author of Provos, Loyalists and Brits

August 6, 2007 at 08:32 AM in IRA | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home