The Article was titled:
MEMO FROM ISLAMABAD
Ringed by Foes, Pakistanis Fear the U.S., Too.
By JANE PERLEZ
Published: November 22, 2008, The New York Times.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/23/world/…
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — A redrawn map of South Asia has been making the rounds among Pakistani elites. It shows their country truncated, reduced to an elongated sliver of land with the big bulk of India to the east, and an enlarged Afghanistan to the west.
Dar Yasin/Associated Press
The town of Srinagar, in Indian-controlled Kashmir. Some Pakistanis do not see the Americans as fair mediators in that conflict.
Multimedia
Graphic
A Controversial Imagining of Borders
That the map was first circulated as a theoretical exercise in some American neoconservative circles matters little here. It has fueled a belief among Pakistanis, including members of the armed forces, that what the United States really wants is the breakup of Pakistan, the only Muslim country with nuclear arms.
“One of the biggest fears of the Pakistani military planners is the collaboration between India and Afghanistan to destroy Pakistan,” said a senior Pakistani government official involved in strategic planning, who insisted on anonymity as per diplomatic custom. “Some people feel the United States is colluding in this.”
That notion may strike Americans as strange coming from an ally of 50 years. But as the incoming Obama administration tries to coax greater cooperation from Pakistan in the fight against militancy, it can hardly be ignored.
This is a country where years of weak governance have left ample room for conspiracy theories of every kind. But like much such thinking anywhere, what is said frequently reveals the tender spots of a nation’s psyche. Educated Pakistanis sometimes say that they are paranoid, but add that they believe they have good reason.
Pakistan, a 61-year-old country marbled by ethnic fault lines, is a collection of just four provinces, which often seem to have little in common. Virtually every one of its borders, drawn almost arbitrarily in the last gasps of the British Empire, is disputed with its neighbors, not least Pakistan’s bitter and much larger rival, India.
These facts and the insecurities that flow from them inform many of Pakistan’s disagreements with the United States, including differences over the need to rein in militancy in the form of Al Qaeda and the Taliban.
The new democratically elected president, Asif Ali Zardari, has visited the United States twice since assuming power three months ago. He has been generous in his praise of the Bush administration. But that stance is criticized at home as fawning and wins him little popularity among a steadfastly anti-American public.
So how will the promise by President-elect Barack Obama for a new start between the United States and Pakistan be received here? How can it be begun?
One possibility could be some effort to ease Pakistani anxieties, even as the United States demands more from Pakistan. That will probably mean a regional approach to what, it is increasingly apparent, are regional problems. There, Pakistani and American interests may coincide.
American military commanders, including Gen. David H. Petraeus, have started to argue forcefully that the solution to the conflict in Afghanistan, where the American war effort looks increasingly uncertain, must involve a wide array of neighbors.
Mr. Obama has said much the same. Several times in his campaign, he laid out the crux of his thinking. Reducing tensions between Pakistan and India would allow Pakistan to focus on the real threat — the Qaeda and Taliban militants who are tearing at the very fabric of the country.
“If Pakistan can look towards the east with confidence, it will be less likely to believe its interests are best advanced through cooperation with the Taliban,” Mr. Obama wrote in Foreign Affairs magazine last year.
But such an approach faces sizable obstacles, the biggest being the conflict over Kashmir. The Himalayan border area has been disputed since the partition of India and Pakistan in 1947, and remains divided between them.
Pakistan’s army and intelligence agencies have long fought a proxy war with India by sponsoring militant groups to terrorize the Indian-administered part of the territory.
After the 9/11 attacks, Pakistan reined in those militants for a time, but this year the militants have renewed their incursions. Talks between the sides made some progress in recent years but have petered out.
Pakistanis warn that the United States should not appear too eager to mediate. First, they caution, India has always regarded Kashmir as a bilateral question. India, they note, also faces a general election early next year, an inappropriate moment to push such an explosive issue.
Second, some Pakistanis are concerned about the reliability of the United States as a fair mediator. “Given the United States’ record on the Palestinian issue, where the Palestinians had to move 10 times backwards and the Israelis moved the goal posts, the same could happen here,” said Zubair Khan, a former commerce minister who has watched Kashmir closely.
It was discouraging, Mr. Khan said, that the United States ignored the importance of the huge nonviolent protests by Muslims in Kashmir against Indian rule this summer. “Anywhere else, and they would have been hailed as an Orange Revolution,” he said, referring to the wave of protests that led to a change in the Ukrainian government in 2004.
Such distrust has been exacerbated by what Pakistanis see as the Bush administration’s tilt toward India.
Exhibit A for the Pakistanis is India’s nuclear deal with the United States, which allows India to engage in nuclear trade even though it never joined the global Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. Pakistan, with its recent history of spreading nuclear technology, received no comparable bargain.
The nuclear deal was devised in Washington to position India as a strategic counterbalance to China. That is how it is seen in Pakistan, too, but with no enthusiasm.
“The United States has changed the whole nuclear order by this deal, and in doing so is containing China, the only friend Pakistan has in the region,” said Talat Masood, a retired Pakistani Army general.
Further, Pakistan is upset about the advances India is making in Afghanistan, with no checks from the United States, Mr. Masood said.
India has recently made big investments in Afghanistan, where Pakistan has been competing for influence. These include a road to the Iranian border that will eventually give India access to the Iranian port of Chabahar, circumventing Pakistan.
India has offered training for Afghanistan’s military, given assistance for a new Parliament building in Kabul and has re-opened consulates along the border with Pakistan.
The consulates, the Pakistanis charge, are used by India as cover to lend support to a long-running separatist movement in Baluchistan Province. (Baluchistan was even made an independent state on the theoretical map, which accompanied an article by Ralph Peters titled “Blood Borders: How a Better Middle East Would Look,” originally published in Armed Forces Journal.)
Both India and Pakistan in fact have a long and destructive history of, gently or not, putting in the knife. Exhibit A for the Indians is the bombing in July of its embassy in Afghanistan, which American and Indian officials say can be traced to groups linked to Pakistan’s spy agency.
If the Obama administration is indeed to convince Pakistanis that militancy, not the Indian Army, presents the gravest threat, it will not be easy.
The commander of American forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David D. McKiernan, got a taste of the challenge this month, when he visited Islamabad and sat down with a group of about 70 members of Pakistan’s Parliament at the residence of the United States ambassador, Anne W. Patterson. Their attitude showed an almost total incomprehension of the reasons for American behavior in the region after Sept. 11, 2001.
“A couple of the questions I got were, ‘Why did you Americans come to Afghanistan when it was so peaceful, before you got there?’ ” General McKiernan recalled during an appearance at the Atlantic Council in Washington last week.
“Another one,” he said, “was, ‘We understand that you’ve invited a thousand Indian soldiers to serve in Afghanistan by Christmas.’ ”
There was no truth to the claim, he told the Pakistanis. “We have a lot of work to do,” he told his audience in Washington.
Indeed, among ordinary Pakistanis, many still regard Al Qaeda more positively than the United States, polls find. Talk shows here often include arguments that the suicide bombings in Pakistan are payback for the Pakistani Army fighting an American war.
Some commentators suggest that the United States is actually financing the Taliban. The point is to tie down the Pakistani Army, they say, leaving the way open for the Americans to grab Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.
Recently, in the officer’s mess in Bajaur, the northern tribal region where the Pakistani Army is tied down fighting the militants, one officer offered his own theory: Osama bin Laden did not exist, he told a visiting journalist.
Rather, he was a creation of the Americans, who needed an excuse to invade Afghanistan and encroach on Pakistan.
————————————
actually - The Full Section of the Armed Forces Journal Map that looked at the India - Pakistan- Afghanistan - Iran part of the extended Middle East is as follows, with “BEFORE” meaning the map as it is today, and the “AFTER” meaning the resultant map if you do this in terms of “BLOOD BORDERS” that have higher promise for stability.
Obviously - going from the BEFORE to the AFTER - you end up also stepping on the toes of many self-serving rulers.
Ralph Peters, Armed Forces Journal
November 23, 2008
What we see in above academic study is the creation of:
(a) a Baluchistan carved out of Iran and Pakistan that would unite people that history, and colonial powers, did not give them their national rights - this like the clear need of a Kurdistan at the other side of Iran - on its borders with Iraq and Turkey.
(b) On the Western border of Afghanistan with Iran - the whole area of Herat could be returned to Iran. This is now a quiet area in Afghanistan as the Iranians rule there anyway
(c) The India - Pakistan border stays as it was settled in the cease-fire of the war of 1948 that followed the partition of 1947.
(d) The most interesting changes are between Afghanistan and Pakistan in the tribal areas where the Taliban and the Al-Qaeda seem to be ruling at this time, they seem to be rather part of the Afghanistan battleground then of a Pakistan that has no control in those areas. Our website dealt with this last area in:
A Cancer, Seeded By the Saudi & US CIA Taliban Creation, has spread in the Paki-Afghani-Stan World Liver. This Diseased Body is Armed With Nucs.
Posted on Sustainabilitank.info on August 29th, 2008
by Pincas Jawetz ( PJ at SustainabiliTank.com)
This suggestion is clearly unappetizing, so we see why Ralph Peters thinks that changes are advisable and the objection to these changes by the Pakistani version of the CIA may indeed be nothing more then their wish to continue running Pakistan as a failed state. On the other hand, it might be here also something that found friends in Beijing. But why do they have also to kill Jews in this declaration of - “over our dead bodies?” Sure they can do a lot of harm, and guerilla war can be a long war - but unnerving a 1.3 billion peopled India - does not bode well for Pakistan either.
From our visits to the region, we clearly believe that the partition of India in 1947 was a big mistake for the people of Pakistan. The best they could do now would be to agree to a secular confederation back into the fold of Greater India. India’s President is a Moslem - there is no reason why they could not coexist if they are ready to honor the “other.”
Sunday, Nov. 30, 2008
EDITORIAL, The Japan Times online.
More horror in Mumbai
Terrorists launched a multipronged siege of the Indian city of Mumbai last week, which left at least 195 people dead and more than 300 wounded. The attacks are an offense against all civilized people and must be roundly condemned. But words alone are not enough. Those responsible for this outrage, and their supporters, must be caught and punished. There can be no sanctuaries in this fight. These horrific attacks are a reminder that the threat of terrorism is ever present and is a problem for all of us.
The assault on Mumbai, a city of 18 million people, one of India’s economic centers and home of the “Bollywood” film industry, began Wednesday night when at least two dozen men armed with explosives and automatic weapons attacked 10 sites popular among tourists and the city’s business elite. They fired at random at the train station, a Jewish center, hospitals and restaurants, and took hostages at the Jewish center and at two of the city’s most famous hotels. Police said Saturday all of the gunmen had been killed or taken into custody.
An unknown group calling itself Deccan Mujahideen claimed responsibility for the attacks. “Deccan” refers to the Deccan Plateau, an area that covers much of the central and southern part of India. “Mujahedeen” are holy warriors. A militant group called Indian Mujahedeen launched a bombing spree this year that has claimed more than 130 lives, striking New Delhi in September in a series of attacks that killed 21 people.
The reference to holy warriors suggests the attackers are Muslims venting grievances against the Hindu majority or hoping to increase sectarian tensions. India is the world’s second-largest Muslim state; its 150 million Muslim citizens make up 15 percent of the population. They have been the target of Hindu nationalists, who have launched bloody attacks of their own. There are suspicions that radicals in Pakistan support militant Islamic groups in India to pressure the Delhi government to change its position on Kashmir — territory held by India and claimed by Pakistan since the 1947 partition.
The latest attacks, which ended Saturday after Indian commandos killed three holdout gunmen at the Taj Mahal hotel before moving in to search each room, was significantly different from previous ones, prompting suspicion of foreign involvement. Most terror attacks in India are bombings in public places that focus on local targets. This carefully planned and coordinated siege — some of the attackers arrived by boat before fanning out across the city — targeted foreigners. At least 22 foreigners were killed; most of the dead were Indians, however.
Heavily armed and well-trained, the terrorists sought out American, British and Israeli nationals. This suggests that the goal of the attacks was to scare foreign investors and the Indian elite: Hitting Mumbai is the equivalent of striking New York.
There is a view that al-Qaida provided assistance to the attackers. Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh blamed militant groups based in India’s neighbors — usually a reference to Pakistan — and warned of “a cost” to these neighbors if they did not stop their territory being used to launch such attacks.
Reportedly, three of the captured attackers were from the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Taiba group, which has been fighting for control of Kashmir with aid from Pakistani intelligence. Lashkar-e-Taiba has denied any involvement. During the siege, a militant, speaking Urdu, the main language spoken in Pakistan, called a television station to complain about abuses in Kashmir and demanded the return of Muslim lands.
A confrontation between India and Pakistan, both of which are nuclear-armed, could be catastrophic. Some suggest that the attacks were designed to derail a rapprochement that had been in the making recently between the two.
It is too early to blame Pakistan. There is another possible culprit: the Muslim underworld in Mumbai. In March 1993, organized crime groups in the city bombed Mumbai’s stock exchange, trains, hotels and other sites, killing 257 people and wounding more than 1,100 others. A decade later, another series of attacks killed 52 people, and in July 2006, bombings on trains and commuter rail stations killed at least 187 people. Those attacks were allegedly in retaliation for Hindu assaults on Muslims elsewhere in the country.
Since May, there has been a wave of bombings across Indian cities, claiming more than 200 lives. Most look like the work of Islamic extremists, but there are also indications of retaliation — or provocations — by Hindu extremists as well.
The scale of violence suggests that India faces profound and fundamental problems. Sectarian tensions are said to be responsible, but ethnic controversies, caste issues, and vast income disparities contribute as well.
All nations must condemn this violence, do their utmost to help India through this trauma, and do more to fight the terrorists who have done this terrible thing. Most important, Indians must have faith in their state, to see it as impartial and capable of providing justice for all.
Printer Friendly
