Intelligence

Sarah Bryant was on secret mission in Afghanistan

Sarah Bryant was on secret mission in Afghanistan - Times Online

Michael Smith and Jerome Starkey in Kabul

The woman soldier killed in a bomb attack last week was an intelligence officer on a secret mission to meet an Afghan agent, a military source has revealed.

Corporal Sarah Bryant, of the Intelligence Corps, was meeting the agent for the second time deep inside Taliban territory on the border between Helmand and Kandahar provinces. “The agent had produced very good intelligence the first time around,” the source said.

She was accompanied by a four-man SAS close protection team, three of whom were also killed by the blast.

It was not clear whether the agent had been planted by the Taliban or had been unmasked and forced to reveal details of the meeting, the source said. “But it’s clear that the whole thing was compromised. There is no doubt this was an ambush.”

The team was alone on a remote desert track in an area British troops would
not normally patrol. They were in a lightly armoured snatch Land Rover
because it was less obtrusive than a heavily armoured vehicle but it offered
no protection against the 100lb bomb.

The Taliban confirmed they had planted the bomb on the track and were waiting
for Bryant and her close protection team as they approached.

Zabihullah Mujahed, the Taliban spokesman, said the bomb had been detonated by
remote control by an observer waiting for the Land Rover to pass by.

Bryant, 26, from Cotehill, Cumbria, and two of the SAS team died immediately.
One of the other two SAS soldiers managed to call in a medical emergency
response team. The commander survived but his colleague died shortly after
arriving at the British military hospital at Camp Bastion.

In official statements last week the MoD attempted to conceal Bryant’s role,
claiming that she and the SAS soldiers, from 23 SAS Regiment, were
“mentoring” Afghan police officers.

However, General Mohammed Hussein Andiwal, the Afghan police chief in the
region, denied they were working with his men. “There weren’t any police
there,” he said. “Otherwise I would know.”

The three dead SAS reservists have been named as Corporal Sean Reeve, 28, from
Staines, Surrey; Lance-Corporal Richard Larkin, 39, from Evesham,
Worcestershire; and Paul Stout, 31. They will be flown home tomorrow.

British special forces operations in Afghanistan are normally carried out by
the Special Boat Service but it is conducting cross-border operations into
Pakistan.

Bryant’s father, Des Feely, 55, said that his daughter was so good that MI6
had attempted to poach her but she had opted to stay in the army.

June 21, 2008 at 05:52 PM in Middle East, SAS, Terror groups | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Nuclear Ring Reportedly Had Advanced Weapon Design

Nuclear Ring Reportedly Had Advanced Weapon Design - NYTimes.com

By DAVID E. SANGER

WASHINGTON — American and international investigators say that they have found the electronic blueprints for an advanced nuclear weapon on computers that belonged to the nuclear smuggling network run by Abdul Qadeer Khan, the rogue Pakistani nuclear scientist, but that they have not been able to determine whether they were sold to Iran or the smuggling ring’s other customers.

The plans appear to closely resemble a nuclear weapon that was built by Pakistan and first tested exactly a decade ago. But when confronted with the design by officials of the International Atomic Energy Agency
last year, Pakistani officials insisted that Dr. Khan, who has been
lobbying in recent months to be released from the loose house arrest
that he has been under since 2004, did not have access to Pakistan’s
weapons designs.

In interviews in Vienna, Islamabad and Washington over the past
year, officials have said that the weapons design was far more
sophisticated than the blueprints discovered in Libya in 2003, when
Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi
gave up his country’s nuclear weapons program. Those blueprints were
for a Chinese nuclear weapon that dated to the mid-1960s, and
investigators found that Libya had obtained them from the Khan network.

But the latest design found on Khan network computers in
Switzerland, Bangkok and several other cities around the world is half
the size and twice the power of the Chinese weapon, with far more
modern electronics, the investigators say. The design is in electronic
form, they said, making it easy to copy — and they have no idea how
many copies of it are now in circulation.

Investigators said the evidence that the Khan network was
trafficking in a tested, compact and efficient bomb design was
particularly alarming, because if a country or group obtained the bomb
design, the technological information would significantly shorten the
time needed to build a weapon. Among the missiles that could carry the
smaller weapon, according to some weapons experts, is the Iranian
Shahab III, which is based on a North Korean design.

However, in recent days top American intelligence officials, who
declined to speak about the discovery on the record because the
information is classified, said that they had been unable to determine
whether Iran or other countries had obtained the weapons design.
Pakistan has refused to allow American investigators to directly
interview Dr. Khan, who is considered a hero there as the father of its
nuclear program. In recent weeks the only communications about him
between the United States and Pakistan’s new government have been
warnings from Washington not to allow him to be released.

Dr. Khan’s illicit nuclear network was broken up in early 2004;
President Bush declared that shattering the operation was a major
intelligence coup for the United States. Since then, evidence has
emerged that the network sold uranium enrichment technology to Iran,
North Korea and Libya, and investigators are still pursing leads that
he may have done business with other countries as well.

While Libya gave up its nuclear program, North Korea and Iran have
not, despite intense international pressure, sanctions, and repeated
offers of incentives to do so.

On Sunday, Mr. Bush’s national security adviser, Stephen J. Hadley,
said that the administration remained concerned about the possibility
that additional plans have been disseminated, but he did not address
any of the latest revelations about the Khan network.

“We’re very concerned about the A.Q. Khan network, both in terms of
what they were doing by purveying enrichment technology and also the
possibility that there would be weapons-related technology associated
with it,” he told reporters traveling with Mr. Bush from Paris to
London on Sunday.

“That was a concern. That’s one of the reasons we rolled up the
network here three years or so ago, and fairly successfully. And part
of that rolling up was to roll up the network and part of it was to
pursue what kind of relationship the A.Q. Khan network had to
individual countries with which they are dealing.”

The existence of the compact bomb design began to become public in
recent weeks after Switzerland announced that it had destroyed a huge
stockpile of documents, including a weapons design, that were found in
the computers of a family in Switzerland, the Tinners, who over the
years played critical roles in Khan’s operation.

In May, Switzerland’s president, Pascal Couchepin, announced that
more than 30,000 documents had been shredded, saying the government
acted to keep them from “getting into the hands of a terrorist
organization or an unauthorized state,” according to Swiss news
accounts.

But American and I.A.E.A. officials say that destroying one copy of
an electronic file was more satisfying to the Swiss than it was
reassuring to them. It is unclear whether the Swiss knew that some of
the same material had been found in other countries by I.A.E.A.
investigators.

Some details of the Swiss action and the bomb design have appeared
recently in Swiss newspapers and The Guardian of London and in The
Washington Post on Sunday.

The Swiss have provided little information about exactly what they
destroyed, but I.A.E.A. inspectors watched the destruction and American
intelligence officials were deeply involved. “We were very happy they
were destroyed,” one senior intelligence official said Friday. But he
added that “what else is out there” remains a mystery. The Swiss
destruction of the equipment came in response in the case of Urs
Tinner, who has been in custody for more than four years but has not
yet stood trial.

Two former Bush administration officials said they believed Mr. Tinner had provided information to the Central Intelligence Agency
while he was still working for Dr. Khan, including some of the
information that helped American and British officials intercept
shipments of centrifuges on their way to Libya in 2003.

When news of that interception became public and Libya turned its
$100 million program over to American and I.A.E.A. officials, President
Pervez Musharraf
of Pakistan forced Dr. Khan to issue a vague confession and then placed
him under house arrest. Dr. Khan has since renounced that confession in
Pakistani and Western media, saying he made it only to save Pakistan
greater embarrassment.

It was not until 2005 that officials of the I.A.E.A., which is based
in Vienna, finally cracked the hard drives on the Khan computers
recovered around the world. And as they sifted through files and images
on the hard drives, investigators found tons of material — orders for
equipment, names and places where the Khan network operated, even old
love letters. In all, they found several terabytes of data, a huge
amount to sift through.

“There was stuff about dealing with Iranians in 2003, about how to
avoid intelligence agents,” said one official who had reviewed it. But
the most important document was a digitized design for a nuclear bomb,
one that investigators quickly recognized as Pakistani. “It was plain
where this came from,” one senior official of the I.A.E.A. said. “But
the Pakistanis want to argue that the Khan case is closed, and so they
have said very little.”

In public statements, Pakistani officials have insisted that the
Khan “incident,” as the call it, is now history, and they publicly
declared nearly two years ago that their investigations are over.

A senior Pakistani official, interviewed in Islamabad in April, said
that the information provided by the I.A.E.A. was “vague and
incomplete,” and he insisted that because Dr. Khan’s laboratories
specialized in the manufacture of the equipment needed to enrich
uranium, “he was not involved in weapons designs.”

But investigators have no doubt that he was the source of the
digitized bomb design. “Clearly, someone had tried to modernize it, to
improve the electronics,” one said. “There were handwritten references
to the electronics, and the question is, who was working on this?”

The officials said that parts of the design were coded so that they
could be transferred quickly to an automated manufacturing system for
the production of parts.

June 15, 2008 at 12:18 PM in Middle East | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Fall back, men, Afghanistan is a nasty war we can never win

Fall back, men, Afghanistan is a nasty war we can never win | Simon Jenkins - Times Online

Britain’s commanders ignored every warning that the Taliban were the toughest fighters on earth Simon Jenkins The American secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice, flies to Britain this week to meet a crisis entirely of London and Washington’s creation. They have no strategy for the continuing occupation of Afghanistan. They are hanging on for dear life and praying for something to turn up. Britain is repeating the experience of Gordon in Khartoum, of the Dardanelles, Singapore and Crete, of politicians who no longer read history expecting others to die for their dreams of glory.

Every independent report on the Nato-led operation in Afghanistan cries the
same message: watch out, disaster beckons. Last week America’s Afghanistan
Study Group, led by generals and diplomats of impeccable credentials,
reported on “a weakening international resolve and a growing lack of
confidence”. An Atlantic Council report was more curt: “Make no mistake,
Nato is not winning in Afghanistan.” The country was in imminent danger of
becoming a failed state.

A clearly exasperated Robert Gates, the American defence secretary, has broken
ranks with the official optimism and committed an extra 3,000 marines to the
field, while sending an “unusually stern” note to Germany demanding that its
3,200 troops meet enemy fire. Germany, like France, has rejected that plea.
Yet it is urgent since the Canadians have threatened to withdraw from the
south if not relieved. An equally desperate Britain is proposing to send
half-trained territorials to the front, after its commanders ignored every
warning that the Taliban were the toughest fighters on earth.

Meanwhile Nato is doing what it does best, squabbling. Gates has criticised
Britain for not taking the war against the insurgents with sufficient
vigour. Britain is furious at America’s obsession with spraying the Helmand
poppy crop and thus destroying all hope of winning hearts and minds. Most of
the 37,000 soldiers wandering round Kabul were sent on the understanding
that they would do no fighting. No army was ever assembled on so daft a
premise.

Nato’s much-vaunted 2006 strategy has not worked. It boasted that its forces
would only be guarding reconstruction and training the Afghan police. There
would be no more counterproductive airstrikes against Pashtun villages. The
Taliban would be countered by American special forces, with the Pakistan
army attacking their rear. Two years ago anyone expressing scepticism
towards this rosy scenario was greeted at Nato headquarters in Kabul with
guffaws of laughter. Today that laughter must be music in Taliban ears.

Kabul is like Saigon at the end of the Vietnam war. It swarms with refugees
and corruption while an upper crust of well-heeled contractors, consultants
and NGO groupies careers from party to party in bullet-proof Land Cruisers.
Spin doctors fighting a daily battle with the truth have resorted to enemy
kill-rates to imply victory, General Westmoreland’s ploy in Vietnam.

This is a far cry from Britain’s 2001 pledges of opium eradication,
gender-awareness and civic-governance classes. After 87 deaths and two years
of operations in Helmand, the British Army cannot even secure one dam. Aid
successes such as a few new schools and roads in the north look ever more
tenuous as the country detaches itself from Kabul and tribal elders struggle
to make terms with Taliban commanders.

There is plainly no way 6,000 British troops are ever going to secure, let
alone pacify, the south. More soldiers will simply evince more insurgency.
More American raids across the Pakistan border merely offer propaganda to
Al-Qaeda in its radicalisation of the tribal areas. It was just such
brutalism that preceded the Soviet escalation of the counterinsurgency war
in the 1980s, and the rise of the (American-backed) precursors of the
Taliban.

The best news out of Kabul is the increased disenchantment of the wily Afghan
president, Hamid Karzai. Last week he vetoed the West’s offering of a former
leader of Britain’s Liberal Democrats, Lord Ashdown, to co-ordinate
operations in Kabul, whatever that might mean. Liberal democracy is not high
on Karzai’s priority list.

He attacked the British for drawing the Taliban into his unregulated domain.
When outside agents were thought to be negotiating with Taliban elements
behind his back, he instantly expelled them from the country.

Meanwhile he has taken to making his own choice of provincial governors and
commanders, often warlords enmeshed in the booming drugs trade. That trade
offers Afghanistan its one staple income.

While the international community in Kabul wails that Karzai is too close to
the druglords, the warlords and various sinister Taliban go-betweens, they
are at least his warlords and his go-betweens. When Britain sacked the
ruthless tribal chief, Sher Mohammed Akhundzada, as governor of Helmand,
Karzai was furious and rightly predicted it would lead to a surge in Taliban
aggression.

For all his faults, Karzai is both an elected leader and a canny one. He is a
virtual prisoner of the Nato garrison in Kabul but Afghanistan remains his
country and if he thinks he can cut deals across its political heartlands,
let him. If he wants Nato to stop bombing Taliban bases in Pashtun villages
and killing Pashtun tribal leaders, then it should stop.

Withdraw the opium eradication teams from Helmand. Let Karzai barter money for
power and power for peace. The foreign “governance” pundits in Kabul might
dream of Afghanistan as a latterday Sweden, but they are never going to
bring Pashtuns, Baluchis, Tajiks, Hazaras and Uzbeks into a stable
federation.

Only an Afghan stands any chance of doing that, and the one Afghan on offer is
Karzai.

Common sense advocates a demilitarisation of the occupation, with a withdrawal
of western troops to Kabul where they can try to protect the capital and the
northern trade routes. In provinces to the south and east, Karzai’s money,
weapons and negotiating skills must deliver what results they can. The West
cannot possibly police Afghanistan with anything remotely like the resources
it has available.

Behind such a policy shift should lie an even more crucial one. For the past
two decades intelligence lore has held that nothing happens along the
Afghan/Pakistan frontier without agencies of the Pakistan army being
involved. The latter’s pro-Taliban strategy through the 1990s was based on
its obsession with “defence in depth” against India. Pakistan wanted
Afghanistan stable, friendly and medieval. The security of the Punjab rested
on the containment of the Pashtun tribal lands straddling the Pakistan/
Afghanistan border.

George W Bush’s reckless elevation of Al-Qaeda after 2001 promoted a small
group of alien Arab guests into global warriors for Islam. It also destroyed
Islamabad’s hold over the Taliban. America bribed the Pakistan president
Pervez Musharraf with $1 billion a year to declare a U-turn and fight his
former allies.

Musharraf duly broke his non-intervention treaty with the Pashtun and sent his
army against them. The Taliban’s influence increases with every attack and
with every American bombing of villages. The Pakistan army is suffering
greater losses in this war than either the British or the Americans.

Wise heads in Islamabad know that they must withdraw from the border and
restore respect for tribal autonomy. Nothing else will incline the Pashtun
and other tribes to reject Al-Qaeda and its Taliban allies. The alternative
is a growing insurgency that must destabilise whatever democratic regime
might emerge from this month’s Pakistan elections. That prospect is far
worse than whatever fate might befall Afghanistan.

There is no sensible alternative to ending military operations against the
Pashtun, flying under whatever flag. Like Iraq’s Kurdistan, Pashtunistan is
a country without a state. It has been cursed by history, but it returns
that curse with interest when attacked. Fate has now handed it a starring
role in Britain’s nastiest war in decades, and offered it the power to wreck
an emergent democracy of vital interest to the West.

To have set one of the world’s most ancient and ferocious people on the
warpath against both Kabul and Islamabad takes some doing. But western
diplomacy has done it. Now must begin the agonising process of escaping that
appalling mistake.

February 3, 2008 at 01:46 AM in Middle East | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Two senior diplomats expelled from Afghanistan

Two senior diplomats expelled from Afghanistan | csmonitor.com

The UN is working for their return, after the government accused the men of talking with the Taliban. By Vaishnavi Chandrashekhar

Technorati Tags: afghanistan

December 28, 2007 at 04:14 PM in Middle East, Muslim background | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Bhutto's death rocks Pakistan

Bhutto's death rocks Pakistan | csmonitor.com

The assassination of the former prime minister raises questions about the Musharraf government's security measures. By Shahan Mufti | Contributor to The Christian Science Monitor and Mark Sappenfield | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN; AND NEW DELHI The assassination of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto by a suicide bomber Thursday threatens to bring to a halt Pakistan's stuttering steps toward democracy.

It is the starkest evidence yet that the forces aligned against law and order, once contained to the remote border region
with Afghanistan, are now spilling into the heart of Pakistan, disrupting the country's ability to function.

The
death of Ms. Bhutto, one of Pakistan's most beloved leaders and head of
its largest political party, is an emotional event for many. Rioting
broke out in several cities late Thursday night. The unrest could lead
to the declaration of martial law, experts say, and the postponement of
parliamentary elections scheduled for Jan. 8, 2008.

It is the sort of instability that Western
nations had sought to avoid by persuading President Pervez Musharraf to
allow Bhutto back into the country – hoping her vows to tackle
terrorism would help in the fight against Taliban militants and put
Pakistan on a more moderate path. Now, they appear to have made her a
target. Her death marks a moment of decision for Pakistan's leaders and
lays bare the terrorists' capabilities.

"Her death in such a manner – when the
government had taken responsibility for her security – tells a lot
about the situation in Pakistan," says Hassan Abbas, a Pakistan expert
at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. "What is evident is a
complete lack of command and control."

It brings a close to a year drawn in
persistent, violent turmoil. Details of Bhutto's death – the Muslim
world's first female prime minister – were not yet confirmed at press
time, but reports suggest she was shot before a suicide bomber blew
himself up. The attack took place minutes after she had finished her
address at a large rally in the garrison city of Rawalpindi, near the
capital, Islamabad.

The killing of Bhutto leaves a question
mark over whether elections can go forward. A political field without
her will profoundly affect the larger political dynamic that Mr.
Musharraf has been carefully crafting to remain in power. But more
immediately, the death of one of Pakistan's most prominent political
leaders has shaken the country. "The country has been pushed into
another dark period of uncertainty," says Rasul Baksh Rais, a political
scientist at the Lahore University of Management Sciences.

Riots erupted in Rawalpindi soon after the
news of her death was confirmed. The city has been the site of several
suicide bombings in past months, though most have targeted security
forces. Private television channels also reported riots in major towns
across the country, especially in Sindh, Bhutto's home province.

The magnitude of Bhutto's death obscured another act of political violence Thursday. Four supporters of Bhutto's opposition,
the Pakistan Muslim League–Nawaz (PML-N), were shot dead at a political rally in Islamabad.

"I
think the elections will be canceled," says Ahmed Rashid, a Pakistani
security analyst and author of "Taliban." "We can't have elections when
the country is in this state of violence. We may see the imposition ...
of extraordinary measures like martial law or a state of emergency."

In an interview with the BBC, PML-N leader Nawaz Sharif also hinted that elections could be postponed: "None of us is inclined
to think about the election."

It is unclear who was responsible for the attack, but initial anger turned against Musharraf's government.

Supporters outside the hospital where Bhutto's body was taken chanted "dog, Musharraf, dog," the Associated Press reported.

It
is an instinctive reaction born of generations of mutual mistrust
between Bhutto and the Army, which Musharraf led until last month.
Bhutto's father, also a prime minister, was hanged after being deposed
by one of Pakistan's previous military rulers, Zia ul-Haq.

Certainly, the threat was not unforeseen.
When Bhutto returned from exile in October in a triumphant procession
through Karachi, she narrowly escaped a suicide bombing that left 150
dead. Moreover, Baitullah Mesud, a Taliban commander in Waziristan, had
several times openly threatened her life.

The circumstances of Bhutto's death, and
the failure of security, will be a subject of immense scrutiny. "There
are going to be very big questions asked," says Najmuddin Shaikh, who
served as foreign minister during one of Bhutto's terms as prime
minister.

Bhutto was the only major political figure
whose campaign included a strong stance against extremism. "Benazir
Bhutto may have been killed by terrorists, but the terrorists must not
be allowed to kill democracy in Pakistan," British Prime Minister
Gordon Brown said Thursday. But Dr. Abbas at Harvard predicts "fewer
people will challenge extremism openly."

Bhutto's life and career followed a trail
of tragedy in her political family comparable to that of the Kennedys,
or Gandhis of India. Bhutto died just a few miles from where her father
was hanged. One brother died from poisoning, and another was killed in
a police shootout. Her two tenures as prime minister (1988 and 1993),
neither of which she could complete, were marred by charges of
corruption and fraud. She went into exile after Musharraf came into
power in 1999 before returning in October.

Bhutto declared herself lifetime chairman of the party she inherited from her father. Observers are unsure who might take
over the reins of the party now.

"It may take months for the party to decide their new leader," says Hassan Aksari Rizvi, an independent political scientist
in Lahore. "I don't see how they can contest an election scheduled in a few days without a coherent leadership."

December 28, 2007 at 04:12 PM in Middle East | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Musharraf’s Martial Plan | Bhutto | NY Times

Musharraf’s Martial Plan - New York Times

By BENAZIR BHUTTO Published: November 7, 2007 Islamabad, Pakistan NOV. 3, 2007, will be remembered as the blackest day in the history of Pakistan. Let us be perfectly clear: Pakistan is a military dictatorship. Last Saturday, Gen. Pervez Musharraf removed all pretense of a transition to democracy by conducting what was in effect yet another extraconstitutional coup.

In doing so he endangered the viability of Pakistan as an
independent state. He presented the country’s democratic forces with a
tough decision — acquiesce to the brutality of the dictatorship or take
over the streets and show the world where the people of Pakistan really
stand.

General Musharraf also presented the democratic world —
and especially the countries of the West — with a question. Will they
back up their democratic rhetoric with concrete action, or will they
once again back down in the face of his bluff?

In my view,
General Musharraf’s ruling party understood that it would be trounced
in any free elections and, together with its allies within the
intelligence services, contrived to have the Constitution suspended and
elections indefinitely postponed. Very conveniently, the assassination
attempt against me last month that resulted in the deaths of at least
140 people is being used as the rationale to stop the democratic
process by which my party would most likely have swept parliamentary
elections. Maybe this explains why the government refuses to allow the F.B.I. and Scotland Yard to assist in a forensic investigation of the bombings.

As
I write, demonstrations are taking place across Pakistan. Opposition
party members, lawyers, judges, human rights advocates and journalists
have been rounded up by the police without charge. The press has been
seriously constrained. The chief justice of the Supreme Court and many
other judges are believed to be under house arrest.

The United
States, Britain and much of the West have always said the right things
about democracy in Pakistan and around the world. I recall the words of
President Bush in his second inaugural address when he said: “All who
live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not
ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for
your liberty, we will stand with you.”

The United States alone
has given the Musharraf government more than $10 billion in aid since
2001. We do not know exactly where or how this money has been spent,
but it is clear that it has not brought about the defeat of the Taliban and Al Qaeda, nor succeeded in capturing Osama bin Laden,
nor has it broken the opium trade. It certainly has not succeeded in
improving the quality of life of the children and families of Pakistan.

The United States can promote democracy — which is the only way
to truly contain extremism and terrorism — by telling General Musharraf
that it does not accept martial law, and that it expects him to conduct
free, fair, impartial and internationally monitored elections within 60
days under a reconstituted election commission. He should be given that
choice: democracy or dictatorship with isolation.

While the world
must do its part to confront tyranny, the primary responsibility rests
in the hands of the people of Pakistan. It is incumbent on Pakistanis
to tell General Musharraf that martial law will not stand. The
overwhelming majority of Pakistanis are moderate; it is my hope that
they will unite in a coalition of moderation to marginalize both the
dictators and the extremists, to restore civilian rule to the
presidency and to shut down political madrassas, the Islamic schools
that stock weapons and preach violence.

It is dangerous to
stand up to a military dictatorship, but more dangerous not to. The
moment has come for the Western democracies to show us in their
actions, and not just in their rhetoric, which side they are on.

November 7, 2007 at 05:54 PM in Middle East | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

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

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

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

Sunni Muslim sheikhs join US in fighting Al Qaeda | csmonitor.com

Iraqi tribal support is linked to drop in violence in Anbar Province. By Sam Dagher | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor Ramadi, Iraq Amid fields of wheat and barley, dozens of armed men emerged along a dirt road leading to the fiefdom of the Bu-Fahed tribe in Hamdhiyah, an idyllic corner of restive Anbar Province, just north of Ramadi. "Welcome to our proud sheikhs. Down with terror," read banners on the road.

Source: Sunni Muslim sheikhs join US in fighting Al Qaeda | csmonitor.com

Dozens of sheikhs and tribal elders in flowing gold-trimmed camel-hair cloaks, many clutching colorful worry beads, streamed into a conference hall. Each was frisked by tribesmen to guard against suicide bombs.

The meeting looked to be a typical gathering, but its true purpose was for top sheikhs to issue an ultimatum: quit supporting Al Qaeda and turn in relatives belonging to the group.

Like dominoes, tribes reeling from a campaign of killing and intimidation by Al Qaeda have been joining, one by one, the US-led fight against Al Qaeda in Iraq in this Sunni Arab province. Last month, US Gen. David Petraeus told Congress that violence was down significantly here and that the tribes were key to the transformation.

On Tuesday, the tribes claimed a major victory: the death of Abu Ayub al-Masri, also known as Abu Hamza al-Muhajer, the leader of Al Qaeda in Iraq. While many are skeptical about the claim, the episode underscores the Iraqi government's eagerness to bank on the success of turning tribes away from Al Qaeda and the Sunni insurgency. But whether these new allegiances from tribes that once backed Al Qaeda will stick remains to be seen, say analysts.

"I do not think it [the council of tribes against Al Qaeda] goes far enough to weaken other elements of the insurgency," says Zaki Chehab, political editor at the London-based Al Hayat newspaper. "There is also no clear commitment yet from influential tribes on how to deal with the Americans."

But winning over the Bu-Fahed tribe was a coup. It had been one of Al Qaeda's staunchest supporters, and traces its lineage to the birthplace of the puritan form of Sunni Islam known as Wahhabism in the Saudi Arabian province of Najd. It formally threw its lot behind Sheikh Abdel-Sattar Abu Risha.

Sheikh Abu Risha

Sheikh Abu Risha is the force behind the so-called Al Anbar Salvation Council of tribes against Al Qaeda, which is now strongly backed by both the US military and Iraqi government, and it includes 17 tribes.

It was Abu Risha who boasted on state TV Tuesday that his kinsmen killed the Al Qaeda in Iraq commander and seven of his cohorts – two Saudis and five Iraqis.

"Our kinsmen in Taji clashed with Abu Hamza, and he has been killed.... There are witnesses, he has been killed," he said, referring to a town northwest of Baghdad. His announcement was then followed by songs praising the "glories of Anbar's tribes."

The US military and the Iraqi government were unable to confirm Mr. Masri's death with the Interior Ministry, which said that it was working on retrieving Masri's body from the Taji tribes. A posting on a fundamentalist website denied it..

Abu Risha's movement emerged last fall in what one sheikh described as the "Anbar Intifada," a reference to the Palestinian uprising against Israeli forces. In posters prepared by the US military in Ramadi, Abu Risha is shown with his rifle slung on his shoulder and looming large over small masked men (meant to represent Al Qaeda) fleeing in fear.

Anbar's provincial seat, Ramadi, which Al Qaeda declared in October to be the capital of its so-called Islamic state in Iraq, is now firmly in the grips of US and Iraqi forces.

US Capt. Jay McGee, intelligence officer with the 3rd Battalion, 69th Armor Regiment from Fort Worth, Texas, says that the motivation for the tribes to join the council is largely self-serving.

"Everyone is convinced Coalition forces are going to leave and they are saying, 'We do not want Al Qaeda to take control of the area when that happens.' For them, Al Qaeda is a greater threat long term."

Captain McGee's battalion is in charge of the area where the Bu-Fahed is located, and says that many of the tribesmen now joining Iraqi government security forces once fought with insurgent groups like the 1920 Revolution Brigades, Islamic Army, Mohammad's Army, and the Fatiheen Army.

New fight for Bu-Faheds

At the gathering in Hamdhiyah last week, tribal leaders took their place in rows of white plastic chairs in the presence of a handful US military officers.

"The tribe has gone through its most difficult period. We have lost many dear sons. What complicates matters is that some of our same sons have embraced terrorists and carried out their orders," Sheikh Haqi Ismail al-Fahdawi told his fellow tribesmen.

He told them that they must now encourage young men to join the Army and police and write to sheikhs from other tribes in Anbar to pressure them to hand over fugitives from the Bu-Fahed who were Al-Qaeda members and also use their families who remained behind as leverage.

"The days of writs of forgiveness are over," he said.

Another tribal notable, Hussein Zbeir, grabbed the microphone from Sheikh Haqi and spoke more bluntly about Al Qaeda's role: "If it was not for the coyotes among us, no one would have been killed, kidnapped, or bombed. You know who among you brought the Yemeni with the suicide vest."

Sheikh Jabbar al-Fahdawi, a 30-something civil engineer, who is being groomed to assume the tribe's leadership, said in an interview that his brother and hundreds of his kinsmen were killed by Al Qaeda. He said 20 percent of his tribe had, over the years, been recruited by Al Qaeda, while an equal amount joined insurgent groups.

"We have frozen the true resistance, and I told my followers to stop attacking the Americans. We consider the Americans to be our friends at the moment so that we can get rid of the extremists," he said adding that tribe fugitives guilty of killing must be tracked down and executed and their families banished from the tribe.

He rolls up his sleeves to show deep scars from gunshot wounds he sustained in recent battles against Al Qaeda. "I left my work in Baghdad to come and free my tribe," he said.

Soon thereafter, Abu Risha appears. He arrives in a motorcade of SUVs and police pick-up trucks bristling with machine guns.

The door of one of the vehicles is flung open. Abu Risha emerges wearing dark wrap-around sunglasses and dressed in the finest tribal attire.

He hugs Sheikh Jabbar who leads him by hand into the meeting. "Anbar is one tribe and our awakening will sweep through all of Iraq, God willing," he tells the Bu-Faheds.

In an interview later, he proudly pulls out a pistol from a holster tied around his waist. He says it was given to him by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. His father and four of his brothers, he says, were killed by Al-Qaeda.

Al Qaeda ties linger

But throughout Anbar, the ties are still strong to Al Qaeda. Sheikh Hareth al-Dhari, who hails from one of Anbar's most prestigious tribes and heads the antigovernment Association of Muslim Scholars of Iraq, called on Osama bin Laden to intervene to stop the rift between Al Qaeda in Iraq and the local insurgency.

He described men like Abu Risha as "agents and conduits of the [US] occupation."

"I call on Sheikh Osama bin Laden in the name of the Islam for which he fights to intervene and to instruct Al Qaeda to adhere to the rules of proper jihad and to respect the people who had previously opened their arms to Al Qaeda," Mr. Dhari said in an interview Sunday with Bahrain's Akhbar al-Khaleej newspaper. Dhari's remarks indicated that the US and Iraqis still have much work ahead to fully dislodge Al Qaeda from all the Anbar tribes.

"If he [bin Laden] has no influence over Al Qaeda in Iraq, then he must say it so that we can decide how to deal with those who have hurt our main cause, which is liberating Iraq," he said

• Tomorrow: Can the US preserve success in Ramadi? Doing so means getting more tribes on board and spreading the formula to other parts of Anbar Province.

Full HTML version of this story which may include photos, graphics, and related links

May 2, 2007 at 11:30 PM in Iraq, Middle East, Muslim background | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Eye on Iran, Rivals Pursuing Nuclear Power - New York Times

By WILLIAM J. BROAD and DAVID E. SANGER Two years ago, the leaders of Saudi Arabia told international atomic regulators that they could foresee no need for the kingdom to develop nuclear power. Today, they are scrambling to hire atomic contractors, buy nuclear hardware and build support for a regional system of reactors.

Source: Eye on Iran, Rivals Pursuing Nuclear Power - New York Times

So, too, Turkey is preparing for its first atomic plant. And Egypt has announced plans to build one on its Mediterranean coast. In all, roughly a dozen states in the region have recently turned to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna for help in starting their own nuclear programs. While interest in nuclear energy is rising globally, it is unusually strong in the Middle East.

“The rules have changed,” King Abdullah II of Jordan recently told the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. “Everybody’s going for nuclear programs.”

The Middle East states say they only want atomic power. Some probably do. But United States government and private analysts say they believe that the rush of activity is also intended to counter the threat of a nuclear Iran.

By nature, the underlying technologies of nuclear power can make electricity or, with more effort, warheads, as nations have demonstrated over the decades by turning ostensibly civilian programs into sources of bomb fuel. Iran’s uneasy neighbors, analysts say, may be positioning themselves to do the same.

“One danger of Iran going nuclear has always been that it might provoke others,” said Mark Fitzpatrick, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, an arms analysis group in London. “So when you see the development of nuclear power elsewhere in the region, it’s a cause for some concern.”

Some analysts ask why Arab states in the Persian Gulf, which hold nearly half the world’s oil reserves, would want to shoulder the high costs and obligations of a temperamental form of energy. They reply that they must invest in the future, for the day when the flow of oil dries up.

But with Shiite Iran increasingly ascendant in the region, Sunni countries have alluded to other motives. Officials from 21 governments in and around the Middle East warned at an Arab summit meeting in March that Iran’s drive for atomic technology could result in the beginning of “a grave and destructive nuclear arms race in the region.”

In Washington, officials are seizing on such developments to build their case for stepping up pressure on Iran. President Bush has talked privately to experts on the Middle East about his fears of a “Sunni bomb,” and his concerns that countries in the Middle East may turn to the only nuclear-armed Sunni state, Pakistan, for help.

“It’s a constant source of discussion,” a senior administration official said recently. “But it’s not something the president thinks he can discuss publicly” after the imbroglio over faulty weapons intelligence on Iraq.

The Middle East has seen hints of a regional nuclear-arms race before. After Israel obtained its first weapon four decades ago, several countries took steps down the nuclear road. But many analysts say it is Iran’s atomic intransigence that has now prodded the Sunni powers into getting serious about hedging their bets and, like Iran, financing them with $65-a-barrel oil.

“Now’s the time to worry,” said Geoffrey Kemp, a Middle East expert at the Nixon Center, a Washington policy institute. “The Iranians have to worry, too. The idea that they’ll emerge as the regional hegemon is silly. There will be a very serious counterreaction, certainly in conventional military buildups but also in examining the nuclear option.”

No Arab country now has a power reactor, whose spent fuel can be mined for plutonium, one of the two favored materials — along with uranium — for making the cores of atom bombs. Some Arab states do, however, engage in civilian atomic research.

Analysts caution that a chain reaction of nuclear emulation is not foreordained. States in the Middle East appear to be waiting to see which way Tehran’s nuclear standoff with the United Nations Security Council goes before committing themselves wholeheartedly to costly programs of atomic development.

Even if Middle Eastern nations do obtain nuclear power, political alliances and arms-control agreements could still make individual states hesitate before crossing the line to obtain warheads. Many may eventually decide that the costs and risks outweigh the benefits — as South Korea, Taiwan, South Africa and Libya did after investing heavily in arms programs.

But many diplomats and analysts say that the Sunni Arab governments are so anxious about Iran’s nuclear progress that they would even, grudgingly, support a United States military strike against Iran.

“If push comes to shove, if the choice is between an Iranian nuclear bomb and a U.S. military strike, then the Arab gulf states have no choice but to quietly support the U.S.,” said Christian Koch, director of international studies at the Gulf Research Center, a private group in Dubai.

Decades ago, it was Israel’s drive for nuclear arms that brought about the region’s first atomic jitters. Even some Israeli leaders found themselves “preaching caution because of the reaction,” said Avner Cohen, a senior fellow at the University of Maryland and the author of “Israel and the Bomb.”

Egypt responded first. In 1960, after the disclosure of Israel’s work on a nuclear reactor, Cairo threatened to acquire atomic arms and sought its own reactor. Years of technical and political hurdles ultimately ended that plan.

Iraq came next. But in June 1981, Israeli fighter jets bombed its reactor just days before engineers planned to install the radioactive core. The bombing ignited a global debate over how close Iraq had come to nuclear arms. It also prompted Iran, then fighting a war with Iraq, to embark on a covert response.

Alireza Assar, a nuclear adviser to Iran’s Ministry of Defense who later defected, said he attended a secret meeting in 1987 at which the commander in chief of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps said Iran had to do whatever was necessary to achieve victory. “We need to have all the technical requirements in our possession,” Dr. Assar recalled the commander as saying, even the means to “build a nuclear bomb.”

In all, Iran toiled in secret for 18 years before its nuclear efforts were disclosed in 2003. Intelligence agencies and nuclear experts now estimate that the Iranians are 2 to 10 years away from having the means to make a uranium-based bomb. It says its uranium enrichment work is entirely peaceful and meant only to fuel reactors.

The International Atomic Energy Agency’s concerns peaked when inspectors found evidence of still-unexplained ties between Iran’s ostensibly peaceful program and its military, including work on high explosives, missiles and warheads. That combination, the inspectors said in early 2006, suggested a “military nuclear dimension.”

Before such disclosures, few if any states in the Middle East attended the atomic agency’s meetings on nuclear power development. Now, roughly a dozen are doing so and drawing up atomic plans.

The newly interested states include Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, Yemen and the seven sheikdoms of the United Arab Emirates — Abu Dhabi, Ajman, Dubai, Al Fujayrah, Ras al Khaymah, Sharjah, and Umm al Qaywayn.

“They generally ask what they need to do for the introduction of power,” said R. Ian Facer, a nuclear power engineer who works for the I.A.E.A. at its headquarters in Vienna. The agency teaches the basics of nuclear energy. In exchange, states must undergo periodic inspections to make sure their civilian programs have no military spinoffs.

Saudi Arabia, since reversing itself on reactors, has become a whirlwind of atomic interest. It recently invited President Vladimir V. Putin to become the first Russian head of state to visit the desert kingdom. He did so in February, offering a range of nuclear aid.

Diplomats and analysts say Saudi Arabia leads the drive for nuclear power within the Gulf Cooperation Council, based in Riyadh. In addition to the Saudis, the council includes Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates — Washington’s closest Arab allies. Its member states hug the western shores of the Persian Gulf and control about 45 percent of the world’s oil reserves.

Late last year, the council announced that it would embark on a nuclear energy program. Its officials have said they want to get it under way by 2009.

“We will develop it openly,” Prince Saud al-Faisal, the Saudi foreign minister, said of the council’s effort. “We want no bombs. All we want is a whole Middle East that is free from weapons of mass destruction,” an Arab reference to both Israel’s and Iran’s nuclear programs.

In February, the council and the I.A.E.A. struck a deal to work together on a nuclear power plan for the Arab gulf states. Abdul Rahman ibn Hamad al-Attiya, the council’s secretary general, told reporters in March that the agency would provide technical expertise and that the council would hire a consulting firm to speed its nuclear deliberations.

Already, Saudi officials are traveling regularly to Vienna, and I.A.E.A. officials to Riyadh, the Saudi capital. “It’s a natural right,” Mohamed ElBaradei, the atomic agency’s director general, said recently of the council’s energy plan, estimating that carrying it out might take up to 15 years.

In all, 85 percent of the gulf states — all but Iraq — have declared their interest in nuclear power. By comparison, 15 percent of South American nations and 20 percent of African ones have done so.

One factor in that exceptional level of interest is that the Persian Gulf states have the means. Typically, a large commercial reactor costs up to $4 billion. The six countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council are estimated to be investing in nonnuclear projects valued at more than $1 trillion.

Another factor is Iran. Its shores at some points are visible across the waters of the gulf — the Arabian Gulf to Arabs, the Persian Gulf to Iranians.

The council wants “its own regional initiative to counter the possible threat from an aggressive neighbor armed with nuclear weapons,” said Nicole Stracke, an analyst at the Gulf Research Center. Its members, she added, “felt they could no longer lag behind Iran.”

A similar technology push is under way in Turkey, where long-simmering plans for nuclear power have caught fire. Last year, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called for three plants. “We want to benefit from nuclear energy as soon as possible,” he said. Turkey plans to put its first reactor near the Black Sea port of Sinop, and to start construction this year.

Egypt, too, is moving forward. Last year, it announced plans for a reactor at El-Dabaa, about 60 miles west of Alexandria. “We do not start from a vacuum,” President Hosni Mubarak told the governing National Democracy Party’s annual conference. His remark was understated given Cairo’s decades of atomic research.

Robert Joseph, a former under secretary of state for arms control and international security who is now Mr. Bush’s envoy on nuclear nonproliferation, visited Egypt earlier this year. According to officials briefed on the conversations, officials from the Ministry of Electricity indicated that if Egypt was confident that it could have a reliable supply of reactor fuel, it would have little desire to invest in the costly process of manufacturing its own nuclear fuel — the enterprise that experts fear could let Iran build a bomb.

Other officials, especially those responsible for Egypt’s security, focused more on the possibility of further proliferation in the region if Iran succeeded in its effort to achieve a nuclear weapons capability.

“I don’t know how much of it is real,” Mr. Joseph said of a potential arms race. “But it is becoming urgent for us to shape the future expansion of nuclear energy in a way that reduces the risks of proliferation, while meeting our energy and environmental goals.”

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April 14, 2007 at 04:10 PM in Iran, Iraq, Israel, Middle East | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home

Detente Is the Talk of Town In Damascus - Forward.com