Peace messengers from across border
5 Mar 2009, 0136 hrs IST, Avinash Kalla, TNN
JAIPUR: At a time when Pakistan is desperately trying to come to terms with Monday's Lahore attack, that happened days after Taliban took over the
Swat valley, a 10- member delegation crossed the border into India to spread the message of peace.
The delegation ran a signature campaign in unison with their Indian counterparts condemning the 26/11 Mumbai carnage. Carrying the signatures of more than 35,000 Pakistani citizens who condemned the attack, the delegates want to hand it over to the Indian authorities. "We understand that Indian officials have been busy in New Delhi, but we will hand over the document and will be joined by our Indian counterparts who also want to hand over their document," said Saeeda Diep, head, Institute of Secular Studies, Lahore.
The group feels this is a right time to travel with the peace message because people should understand that the mode of operation of those involved in the Lahore attack was similar to the 26/11 attack in Mumbai and hence they too are victims.
"Pakistan shouldn't be seen in a negative light, people should understand that because democracy isn't strong in our country, the administration is helpless in dealing with terrorists and giving the charge of Swat to Taliban was an indication of this," said Diep.
The members were of the view that the perception towards their country isn't right and people still think they live in medieval times. They maintained peace can prevail between the two neighbors if governments, instead of thinking emotionally, take a positive approach. According to Punhal Khan, a delegation member, terrorism isn't a Pakistani phenomenon ---- it's rather a problem in South-east Asia, he said, "Illiteracy is the breeding ground of terrorism and wherever in the region we have illiteracy there is some form of terror activities taking place."
According to the delegation members, if India relaxes the strict visa guidelines for travelling to Pakistan and more people are allowed to mingle things will improve between the neighbours. However, a member had a word of caution for India's proximity to the USA, "We have suffered for our proximity to the US and want to get away from it at the earliest. You on the other hand want to embrace them. As neighbours we would say look how dearly has such friendship cost us."
Our perpetual denial mode
Thursday, March 05, 2009
Apparently, the security reservations by the Australian and Indian cricket teams were not all unfounded regarding playing cricket in Pakistan. After their refusal to play, to save Pakistan cricket the valiant Sri Lankans volunteered and agreed to play despite the known and hostile presence of all kinds of Kasabs (a derivative of Ajmal Kasab of Mumbai fame) in Pakistan. And this is how they are rewarded. Cricket is like a second religion in South Asia. The people of South Asia get hypnotised when a cricket series is played there. For the Pakistani nation cricket is the one thing that doesn’t create divisions -- in fact it unites us all. And now this has been taken away from us.
Over the past twenty odd years, Pakistan has become a country living in a state of denial. The most handy scapegoat is India’s RAW. Our ruling class (read the military) wants us to believe that everything that goes wrong in the country is because of either RAW or -- the next preferred scapegoat -- the Jewish lobby. Now as the investigations are launched into this incident, we are sure to see a finger pointed at an Indian hand in the incident -- this in fact has already begun. And this will be taken well in public, of course, so as to settle the score for Mumbai.
If we could come out of our perpetual denial mode, we would see why it is people from among us who go around beheading others and burning girls’ schools. We should also realise that the targeting of the country’s most popular sport is going to benefit the jihadis in a big way because the youth can then be more easily recruited by militant outfits. So the attack on a foreign cricket team may have had this sinister purpose as well.
The people of Pakistan need to realise that the enemy is from within and if they don’t then they will be behaving like ostriches and such an attitude which ignores the clear extremist and militant tendencies found inside Pakistan will not help at all. We see rallies taken out against US drone attacks but when will we ever see large public rallies against such attacks? There is only so much that the government can do -- people also need to play a part, and the most important is to understand who the real enemy is.
Bahadar Ali Khan
Markham, ON, Canada
http://www.thenews.com.pk/daily_detail.asp?id=165774
Pakistan a greater threat to world than Afghanistan
5/03/2009 1:00:00 AM
Despite Pakistani promises to foreign cricketers of presidential-level security, we should remember there were four assassination attempts against former president Pervez Musharraf, and he will count himself lucky to have survived his period in office.
So far there has only been one attempt against President Asif Ali Zardari, but his days are probably numbered. Terrorist attacks on sporting teams globally have been a rare occurrence, but the danger arises from a team's identification with their country of origin and, in contemporary cases, that country's perceived ''anti-Muslim'' policies.
Islamist extremists regard all nationals of a target country as responsible for its policies because, in their view, they were the ones who voted in the Government.
There are no innocent bystanders for extremists. It is unclear why the Sri Lankans were attacked Sri Lankans are not an Islamist target. The attack seems to have been intended mainly to embarrass and destabilise the Pakistan Government.
The way it was conducted suggests the aim may have been to take hostages, rather than kill cricketers which could have been achieved by using a bomb against the team bus.
Hostage-taking could have caused the incident to be prolonged and the Government forced to make concessions. Fortunately that outcome was avoided. A long shot is the Tamil Tigers were in some way involved in the attack. The Tamil Tigers have not previously had any operational relationship with Pakistani groups other than for weapons procurement and drug trafficking. Even so, perhaps that angle should not be dismissed until we know more.
Australians particularly are at risk in Pakistan because of our foreign policies and military involvement against the Taliban in Afghanistan.
The Afghan Taliban are mainly Pashtun but there are more Pashtuns in Pakistan than there are in Afghanistan. It is little wonder the deteriorating security situation in Pakistan is largely related to the steadily increasing power of the Taliban in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Taliban in Pakistan have strengthened their hold over the Federally Administered Tribal Areas and the North-West Frontier Province since Zardari became president.
They are responsible for a rise in violence in urban areas. Attacks attributed to the Taliban include Benazir Bhutto's murder in 2007 and the 2008 Marriott Hotel bombing in Islamabad. Often their attacks are characterised by young suicide bombers from Pakistani madrassas.
The Pakistan Government has no effective answer to the deteriorating security situation. Zardari seems to be trying appeasement, obviously ineffectively, while the military seems to be overwhelmed by the scale of the insurgent problem. Pakistan's governments are largely to blame for the resurgence of the Taliban, which it has supported covertly through the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, both pre- and post-September 11, as a counterbalance to Indian influence in Afghanistan.
This was facilitated after September 11, 2001, by the Bush administration failing to see the significance of the Taliban resurgence because it was too preoccupied with Iraq. Pakistan has supported a range of Pakistani Islamist extremist groups covertly through the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, to keep pressure on India over the Kashmir issue. The Government seems to have little control over some of them as well.
The major militant group, Lashkar e-Taiba (Army of the Pure) was responsible for the 2008 Mumbai attacks, and has a reach extending beyond South Asia into the Middle East. Lashkar e-Taiba has been implicated in providing terrorism training to Australians in Pakistan. Not one of the post-September 11 terrorists who have concerned Western countries, including Australia, have come from Afghanistan.
They have all been radicalised and trained in Pakistan. While the West has been focused on Afghanistan, it seems to have overlooked the fact that Pakistan is far more important to regional security. This is not only because of its pivotal location in South Asia, but also because it is a nuclear weapon state. The Lahore attack underlines the continuing deterioration of security in Pakistan.
Action is needed now to try and turn the situation around not with financial handouts that would disappear in one of the world's most corrupt countries but with hands-on economic development, counter-radicalisation programs, more resources to border areas, closing the Inter-Services Intelligence agency, ending air attacks, improving the public schooling system, and more resources for the military and police. Pakistan should be a higher Australian priority than Afghanistan which historically tends to be preoccupied with internal disputes that do not have external implications.
Clive Williams is a Visiting Fellow with the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre
at the ANU.
About 100 Days
As Barack Obama readies to take the office of president, which of his predecessors offers the best model for getting off on the right foot? The 100 Days blog seeks to answer just that question during Mr. Obama's first three months in office. Five presidential biographers will discuss the early days of five 20th-century presidents – Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan – shedding new light on the struggles faced by those men entering the Oval Office and comparing their experiences with those Mr. Obama will face in his first 100 days.
Nixon was going to pull out of Vietnam, then decided to win it. Now Obama faces similar decisions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Nixon walked in, tanned and smiling after a weekend in Florida, though typically ill at ease as he moved through quick handshake introductions. He began brief remarks with self-conscious ingratiation, commiserating with the staff for having to deal with what he called “all those impossible fags” in the State Department, oblivious that most in the room were Foreign Service officers on temporary assignment. “Ignore the bureaucrats,” he told them after a swift, fluent run-down of international trouble spots. “I want you to handle the rest of the world.” Turning to Kissinger, he added softly, in what seemed as much an intimacy as a boast, “And you and I will end the war.”
For a moment there was guarded silence, as if we had overheard a private confidence. Then the staff broke into warm applause, and Nixon, visibly surprised yet pleased, abruptly left. Many of the men there that day prided themselves on their worldliness. None could have guessed the irony of what they had seen.
The Vietnam war. No hope so followed Richard Nixon into office as the national yearning to end it. No issue would so haunt and consume his presidency from the first hundred days through the next four years. Though the he enjoyed that winter of 1969, a political honeymoon with the press, public and Congress, the war that drove Lyndon Johnson from office raged on, killing 1,200 Americans and untold Vietnamese every month.
Nixon’s 1968 election victory owed much to his ringing if vague promise to stop the war, as well as to the divisions over Vietnam that split the camp of his Democratic opponent, Hubert Humphrey, and the country at large. “We will end this one and win the peace,” Nixon pledged in a constant campaign line, avoiding specifics on grounds of not interfering with a sitting president, but giving the clear impression he had a plan. He seemed under no illusion about his political stakes. “If the war goes on six months after I become president,” he told The Times’s Harrison Salisbury, “it will be my war.” He was determined “not to end up like L.B.J., holed up in the White House, afraid to show my face in the street. I’m going to stop the war — fast.”
After two decades on the national scene, including eight years as vice president and extensive travel abroad, foreign policy was seen as the new president’s forte as well as first priority. His press conference after a February 1969 trip to Europe The Times pronounced a “tour de force” — part of a chorus of national media acclaim, including one editorial headlined “Mission Accomplished.” It was understood from Kissinger background briefings that the European talks dealt with ending the war and the administration was working intensively on “Vietnam withdrawal scenarios.” At a March 4 press conference, the president hinted broadly at United States troop reductions. Asked about reawakened public protest if the war wore on “for months or even years,” he replied offhandedly, “Well, I trust that I am not confronted with that problem, when you speak of years.”
As with most of Richard Nixon’s first hundred days, the reality of Vietnam policy behind the public façade was starkly different. Even as he was treating questions about a prompt peace as if it were a foregone conclusion, Nixon’s private resolve was to win the war — or at least to avoid the appearance of losing it — even if it took as long as the remainder of his term. Soon after they arrived in office, White House Chief of Staff Bob Haldeman scribbled one of the president’s frequent and typical ruminations:
VN [Vietnam] enemy
Misjudges two things
—the time—has 3 years + 3 mo
—the man—won’t be first P to lose war
“Once Nixon was installed in the presidency, the promised stopping of the war was stood on its head to become one of prolonging it,” wrote Barbara Tuchman in “The March of Folly.” “The new president was as unwilling as his predecessor to accept non-success in the war aim and as fixed in the belief that additional force could bring the enemy to terms.”
Strategy took shape in the first secret “policy reviews” of a National Security Council dominated by Nixon and Kissinger, whose foreign policy dictates were absolute from the outset. To blunt domestic protest, they would begin American troop withdrawals. To coerce and subdue North Vietnam, something Johnson had not accomplished with 500,000 American troops, they would intensify bombing and vastly expand the forces of South Vietnam, a process known as “Vietnamization.”
Early visitors to his basement office in the White House that winter often advised Henry Kissinger not to fall into past errors in Vietnam. “We won’t repeat the old mistakes,” he would reply. “We’ll make new ones.” Typically clever, the quip proved tragically both true and false as they pursued the war for four more years in Vietnam with American forces on the ground, and for years beyond with bombing and billions in aid in conflicts open and covert across Southeast Asia.
As for new mistakes, Nixon and Kissinger would leave their own legacy with the unprecedented bombing in Cambodia as well as Vietnam, the fitful negotiations with North and South Vietnam involving treachery on all sides, an American invasion of Cambodia, a disastrous South Vietnamese invasion of Laos, and at home a bitter reaction to dissent that ultimately led to the ruin of the Nixon presidency.
At the same time, sure that their two-man rule was superior to the conventional foreign policy regime of politicians and bureaucracy they both deplored, they repeated the blunders of America’s past quarter century in Asia. Like their predecessors, they made policy in cultural-historical ignorance of Vietnam, mistaking its place in the geopolitics of the cold war and underestimating North Vietnam’s stake and will in uniting the divided country. Like officials before them, they took a corrupt regime in the South, spawned by war and American money, for a vital interest of the United States, and pursued manifestly failed policies on contrived grounds of strategic necessity, national honor and partisan compulsion.
The inner effects of the war policy were virulent. The administration was scarcely 50 days old when the President ordered the first secret bombing of Cambodia, with successive waves in April and May. There were soon dark hints to Russia and other powers that the United States exit would involve some brutal escalation of the war if North Vietnam were not forced to settle. “The train has left the station,” Kissinger, on Nixon’s instructions, warned Soviet Ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin in one early off-the-record meeting, “and is roaring down the tracks.”
On May 9, The Times’s William Beecher broke the story of the Cambodian bombing, arousing relatively little public reaction but fresh tirades in a White House already enraged at leaks of classified information. As early as April 25, Kissinger had been summoned to the Oval Office to discuss how to stop the leaks with Nixon and F.B.I. Director J. Edgar Hoover — “two maniacs trying to outdo each other,” as Kissinger once described the frequent Nixon-Hoover meetings. Ahead lay the infamous wiretaps on journalists and officials, including Kissinger’s own staff, and a twisting sequence leading to the White House “plumbers” and the crimes of Watergate.
Meanwhile, the inherent inconsistencies in the war policy spiraled out in blood and betrayal. Troop reductions, first announced in June, did not long stay domestic protest, further hardening of the self-destructive siege mentality in the White House. Withdrawal from ground combat did work to reinforce the North’s grim determination to outlast the Americans, despite more punishing bombing. Just as predictably, the drawdown ate at the already infirm morale of South Vietnam, and the political-diplomatic intractability of the Saigon regime grew as its position worsened. By the first anniversary of the Nixon Inaugural, 150,000 American troops would be scheduled to leave over the course of 1970, with more to follow. The war had become, wrote one historian, “a race between Vietnamization and the withdrawals.”
The Associated Press President Nixon conferred with Henry A. Kissinger in 1972, after the presidential adviser returned from secret negotiations in Paris with North Vietnam’s Le Duc Tho. The White House announced later that the president was “confident that we will achieve the right kind of settlement” in Vietnam. Over the winter of 1969-’70, there would be the first of the ultra-secret Paris talks between Kissinger and the North Vietnamese, negotiations that got far nearer a settlement than any account has ever indicated. Yet they were shattered by a military junta overthrowing King Norodom Sihanouk in Cambodia. It was that coup, along with the United States bombings and May 1970 invasion of Cambodia, that fired the rise of the once-minor Khmer Rouge, ending in the holocaust of the killing fields.
Military escalation, whether in bombing or a quick punitive invasion of Cambodia (what a later era might call a “surge”), was the paradoxical urge of the combined coercion and exit. “Tulips in Arlington,” was what N.S.C. staff members called the Pentagon’s perennial proposals for a military solution to the problem at hand. When Kissinger assembled his own planners in the autumn of 1969 to consider an all-out punishing blow against North Vietnam —“I can’t believe a little fourth-rate power like North Vietnam doesn’t have a breaking point,” he told aides — attack scenarios, including use of a nuclear weapon to close the main supply route from China, were at hand in the files of the N.S.C.’s military liaison officers. It was a reminder that the Nixon-Kissinger policy was never simply the product of two men, however powerful, but of a broader culture in government that either acquiesced in or actively supported their policy.
It was all to climax in a flurry of savage B-52 bombing and serpentine Kissinger diplomacy in the winter of 1972-1973; and then, with Congressional prohibitions on American bombing and aid, the defeat of a collapsing South in 1975, an end far worse than might have been had by negotiation in 1969.
In the meantime, of course, Nixon had been overwhelmingly reelected, his troop withdrawals conquering protest in the end, but then only to suffer his own fall in Watergate, a besieged president holed up in the White House after all. Among his legacies would be more than 20,000 of the 58,195 names on the long black wall of Washington’s Vietnam Memorial. In 1995, Vietnam finally announced casualty figures of four million civilians dead, North and South, and more than a million military, the toll of their own share of wantonness and folly.
For all the obvious differences in men and moment, how Richard Nixon dealt with Vietnam leaves haunting questions for the Obama administration as the new president has announced his own exit from Iraq and a policy review in Afghanistan. Are the policy makers of 2009 in the Middle East and South Asia free of the cultural-historical ignorance that haunted their forerunners in Southeast Asia? Is the new presidency free of the old Washington demons at last — the mistaking of national interest, habits of overreaction, the illusions of omnipotence, the cognitive dissonance at evidence of failure or futility, the military’s preference for the military solution, the absence of reflective thought, the failure to reach out beyond the supposed experts of bureaucracy or establishment for another sensibility and perspective?
Exorcised or not, ghosts of Vietnam hover over the Obama foreign policy, not least in key officials like former National Security Adviser James L. Jones Jr. and the special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, Richard Holbrooke — men whose formative career experiences were in Vietnam, and who have not yet told us what they think of the chilling relevance of that history to what they now face.
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