To stem terror in Pakistan, US looks beyond military

Washington is seeking to build the Pakistani state and its economy as a way to wean the country from Islamic extremism.

By Howard LaFranchi | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the March 2, 2009 edition

• E-mail a friend
• Print this
• Letter to the Editor
• Republish
• ShareThis
• E-mail newsletters
• RSS

Reporter Howard LaFranchi discusses how the US might be able to leverage financial aid to Pakistan into better results on the ground in the war against the Taliban.

Washington - In an admission that its dependence on the Pakistani military has yielded few results against the Taliban, the United States is now seeking to change its relationship with Pakistan – the world's sole Muslim nuclear power and home of Al Qaeda's leadership.

President Barack Obama's first budget, released last week, proposes significant increases in nonmilitary aid to Pakistan and neighboring Afghanistan. In addition, two influential senators are expected to file legislation in the coming days that would triple nonmilitary US aid to Pakistan to $1.5 billion a year and include $5 billion to stave off an imminent economic crisis.

The shift is part of an increasing awareness within the Beltway of Pakistan's precarious position – beset by economic collapse, political weakness, and a spreading insurgency – and that more than military operations will be needed to build a stable state capable of beating back Islamic extremism in the long term.

"If we fail, we face a truly frightening prospect: terrorist sanctuary, economic meltdown, and spiraling radicalism, all in a nation with 170 million inhabitants and a full arsenal of nuclear weapons," said Sen. John Kerry (D) of Massachusetts last week, while releasing a report about Pakistan.

Along with Sen. Richard Lugar (R) of Indiana, Senator Kerry is a key supporter of the expected new legislation on Pakistan. It mirrors a plan that Vice President Joe Biden proposed last year when he was still a senator. Then, as now, it is a thinly veiled criticism of the Bush administration's Pakistan policy, which focused aid and relations on ousted military leader Gen. Pervez Musharraf.

Pentagon on board

Last week, Pentagon officials emerged from a meeting in Washington with Pakistan's Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ashfaq Kayani to say they supported a more "comprehensive" strategy for US relations with Pakistan – albeit one that encompassed smarter and more effective military assistance. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sounded a similar note when she met with Pakistani and Afghan officials last week.

She announced that trilateral US-Afghanistan-Pakistan talks will become a regular feature of the Obama administration's plan for region. It further points to the Obama administration's desire to look beyond the military alone for solutions to the conflict spanning the Afghan-Pakistan border – an area he and others consider the epicenter of global terrorism.

Transforming the US-Pakistani relationship from a personal relationship with a military leader to a long-term relationship with an elected Pakistani government will require patience, says James Dobbins, a South Asia analyst at RAND Corp., a security consultancy in Arlington, Va.

"This transformation won't change the relationship with [Pakistan] as quickly as we'd like," he says. "But both the increase in aid and a new direction are necessary for the stability of Afghanistan and critical for Pakistan itself."

The change in direction comes as the Obama administration gets its first taste of the complexities of Pakistan. The president's special envoy to Pakistan and Afghanistan, Richard Holbrooke, offered unvarnished words for Pakistan's recent decision to bow to Taliban demands and cede a strategically important swatch of the nation to Islamic law. Mr. Holbrooke said the accord leaves the Swat Valley – not far from the Pakistani capital of Islamabad – in the hands of "murderers, thugs, and militants."

The Swat Valley accord has been met with deep skepticism among analysts, who note that such attempts to win over a moderate part of the militancy by working with it have only given extremists time and space to regroup.

"The history of these deals does not lead to a great deal of optimism," says Shuja Nawaz, director of Atlantic Council's South Asia Center in Washington.

The accord does not mean the Pakistani leadership is giving up the fight, says Mr. Nawaz. It is part of General Kayani's mission to secure better equipment like helicopters, detection devices, and night-vision goggles to take on "the hard-core militants," he adds.

But it does reflect a desire to separate moderate Islamists from the hardened jihadists, Nawaz says.

Pakistan vs. Iraq

The design mirrors counterinsurgency strategy the US employed with the Sunni population as part of the "surge" of troops in Iraq. Despite that basic similarity, however, the differences in the two cases are stark, says Mr. Dobbins, the RAND analyst.

"We never agreed to the application of sharia [Islamic] law in Sunni areas," he says, "and we insisted those areas had to remain integrated into the Iraqi state and under Iraqi law."

Nawaz warns that Pakistan could face economic collapse this year, and he says the kind of emergency financial aid Senator Kerry is proposing is needed fast. But he says that the longer-term need is for broader trade – in textiles, for example – among the US, Europe, and Pakistan. That will create jobs and stabilize Pakistani society, he says. Such a transformation in relations with Pakistan won't be easy, he adds, at a time of rising Western unemployment.

Was AR Antulay on payroll of Dawood Ibrahim ?

Pandering to morbid Muslim mindset
By Shyam Khosla

It is for Union Minister for Minority Affairs AR Antulay to clarify whether he was involved in this hate campaign or was he so influenced by the canards spread by Awami Bharat that he saw a “broader conspiracy” behind Hemant Karakare’s killing and demanded an independent enquiry into the circumstances leading to his death.

11 Muslim outfits formed a Coordination Committee of Indian Muslims against the “harassment of Muslims”. Since when killing terrorists has become an harassment of Muslims? The Committee launched a frontal attack on the police for its handling of Jamia encounter and announced a mosque-driven countrywide campaign against the Government.

The ‘secular-liberal’ brigade seems to have lost all sense of national security and social harmony in its mindless pandering to morbid Muslim mindset. A case in point is the hysterical email campaign across the country launched by Awami Bharat— a left-leaning outfit—within hours of the 26/11 that talked of RSS ‘complicity’ in the terror attack on Mumbai. The mail that stunned right thinking citizens said that in the outfit’s analysis the attack had been planned and orchestrated by the Sangh Parivar and its supporters within the security apparatus to counter the investigation by ATS into Malegaon bomb blast.

These patently false and pernicious text messages were forwarded to countless citizens to spread the canard all over the country and abroad. It so gladdened the hearts of self-styled liberals and jehadi supporters that they added their own hate-filled comments to the mail. The blatantly false conjecture also brought a slew of responses from people who condemned the Awami Bharat for its malicious attempt to divert attention from the real perpetrator of the crime— jehadis based in Pakistan. Some of them, said the outfit, had lost whatever credibility it had because it sounded like the “Indian wing of Al-Queda”.

However, Awami Bharat persisted with its malicious campaign. The next round of its text messages said terrorist who entered Kama hospital were heard talking in Marathi to certain persons hiding there and that these Marathi speaking persons (read RSS activists) were responsible for killing Hemant Karkare. A sober response to this hysterical mail from a level-headed journalist read, “Please remember Marathi need not be spoken only by Hindus”.

It is for Union Minister for Minority Affairs, A.R. Antulay, to clarify whether he was involved in this hate campaign or was he so influenced by the canards spread by Awami Bharat that he saw a “broader conspiracy” behind Hemant Karakare’s killing and demanded an independent enquiry into the circumstances leading to his death? The Minister raised ridiculous questions like who asked Karkare to proceed to Kama Hospital instead of the Taj or Oberio conveniently forgetting that it was the ATS chief who was issuing orders and not the one receiving. Further, the hotels came under attack after the ATS chief had left his home for CTS where he was told that terrorists had gone towards the hospital. The Minister’s mischievous statement and subsequent admission that he was satisfied by the Home Minister’s detailed account of the happenings suggest that his antics were part of the vote bank politics. He is neither clean nor secular. The late Prime Minister VP Singh had in a Parliamentary debate dubbed Antulay as the “cement” man of Indian politics—an illusion to the disgraced Maharashtra Chief Minister’s involvement in the fraud pertaining to the allotment of large quantities of cement to those who had donated huge sums to his private trusts. That the Muslim community should accept as its messiah this man who had to quit as Chief Minister because of exposure of his corrupt practices is a measure of the community’s unhealthy mindset. It is not surprising that the first to call on the communal Minister to congratulate him for “saying the unspeakable” was none else than party hopper Syed Shabuddin, formerly of the IFS, who recently jumped over from the Congress to the JD(U).

Yet another manifestation of the negative Muslim mindset is that 90 per cent of the respondents – most of them presumably Muslims – agreed to Antulay’s allegation of a “broader conspiracy” behind ATS chief’s death in a poll conducted by Siasat, a leading Hyderabad-based Urdu newspaper. The respondents must have read reports that ATS chief and his colleagues were gunned down by terrorist in full public view and that the said terrorist was later over-powered by policemen and had confessed of having killed the three police officers. It is disgusting to note that not only ordinary Muslims but also most opinion leaders of the community and Urdu media raised similar questions. BJP’s demand to sack the Minister who had acutely embarrassed the Government and the country was stonewalled by the Prime Minister and Sonia Gandhi precisely because they didn’t want to annoy the Muslim community.

Similar questions were also raised about the genuineness of the shoot out in the Batla House in Delhi. Blatant lies that Atif alias Bashir and other suspected terrorists were dumped there the previous night to stage a “fake encounter” and that the firing was only one sided were floated in the face of the stark reality that one of the valiant Delhi police officer, MC Sharma, lost his life in the encounter. No sane person can believe that Sharma committed suicide to “tarnish” the image of the Muslim community. While the Samajwadi Party launched an agitation in the issue, Vice Chancellor of Jamia Milia Islamia offered public funds to defend the suspected terrorists on the premise that they were students of the University. He relented only after public outcry against his pro-terrorist stance and persistent demands for his resignation. As if that was not enough, 11 Muslim outfits formed a Coordination Committee of Indian Muslims against the “harassment of Muslims”. Since when killing terrorists has become an harassment of Muslims? The Committee launched a frontal attack on the police for its handling of Jamia encounter and announced a mosque-driven countrywide campaign against the Government. In a spirited defence of members of the Indian Mujahideen (IM) and SIMI activists arrested for their involvement in Ahmedabad and Delhi serial blasts, the Committee demanded a judicial probe into the “fake encounter” and death of Inspector M C Sharma. A hurriedly compiled “fact-finding” report produced by a team of journalists and academicians (belonging to the “secular-liberal” brigade) that raised doubts about the genuineness of the encounter came handy for the Muslim community’s campaign of vilification against the police to save the IM and SIMI activists involved in heinous crimes.

Congress general secretary Digvijay Singh and Union MoS for Home Shakeel Ahmed, publicly supported the pro-terrorist line of the Coordination Committee saying there was nothing wrong in asking for an independent enquiry into the incident particularly because of certain doubts in the minds of the minority community. Countless Muslim outfits took to the street condemning what they alleged was a “fake encounter”. Police investigation later brought to light the fact that Atif, who along with another terrorist was killed in the encounter, was the one who had meticulously planned serial bomb blasts in Delhi and Ahmedabad and was an activist of the Indian Mujahadeen and SIMI. These startling revelations came as a set-back to this motivated campaign but no one—neither Digvijay Singh nor Amar Singh nor Shakeel Ahmed—apologised for insulting the sacrifice of MC Sharma and putting hurdles in the police investigations into the terrorist attacks in the national capital.

Antics by Antulay, Shakeel Ahmed and Digvijay Singh can’t be dismissed as individual aberrations, as the ruling party would like us to believe. There is credible circumstantial evidence to show that these were calculated moves orchestrated by the party in pursuance of its vote bank politics. The fact that the party didn’t take any action against these gentlemen, two of whom are Cabinet Ministers and one is a general secretary, though it feigned it was embarrassed by their “unfortunate utterances”, has sent across the message that they did what they did – though in their own curious ways – under the directions or at least approval of the high command (read 10, Janpath). Contrast it with the alacrity with which poor Margret Alva, who was perceived to be close to Sonia Gandhi, was forced to resign and marganlised for her well founded charge that party tickets were sold in Karnataka.

Dawood directly involved in Mumbai attacks, says Russia

Agencies
Posted: Dec 18, 2008 at 1738 hrs IST

Moscow Underworld don Dawood Ibrahim was directly involved in the deadly 26/11 attacks in Mumbai as his clandestine drug trafficking network was used to finance the terror strikes in India's financial hub, according to a top Russian crime buster.
"The gathered inputs testify that infamous regional drug baron Dawood Ibrahim had provided his logistics network for preparing and carrying out the Mumbai terror attacks by the militants," Director of Russia's Federal Anti-narcotics Service, Viktor Ivanov, said.

The Mumbai mayhem is a ‘burning example’ of the use of illegal drug trafficking network for perpetrating terrorism, he said in an interview to the government daily 'Rossiskaya Gazeta'.

"The super profits of the narco-mafia through Afghan heroin trafficking have become a powerful source of financing organised crime and terrorist networks destabilising the political systems, including in Central Asia and Caucasus," Ivanov said.

Dawood is sought by India for 1993 Mumbai serial blasts and figures in the most wanted persons list sent to Islamabad by New Delhi in the wake of last month's Mumbai terror attacks blamed on the Pakistan-based Lashkar-e-Toiba, 'Rossiskaya Gazeta' noted.

A PERFECT LETTER TO PM MANMOHAN SINGH FROM A RESIDENT OF MUMBAI

LETTER TO PRIME MINISTER MANMOHAN SINGH

Dear Mr. Prime minister
I am a typical mouse from Mumbai. In the local train compartment which has capacity of 100 persons, I travel with 500 more mouse. Mouse at least squeak but we don't even do that.
Today I heard your speech. In which you said 'NO BODY WOULD BE SPARED'. I would like to remind you that fourteen years has passed since serial bomb blast in Mumbai took place. Dawood was the main conspirator. Till today he is not caught. All our bolywood actors, our builders, our Gutka king meets him but your Government can not catch him. Reason is simple; all your ministers are hand in glove with him. If any attempt is made to catch him everybody will be exposed. Your statement 'NOBODY WOULD BE SPARED' is nothing but a cruel joke on this unfortunate people of India .
Enough is enough. As such after seeing terrorist attack carried out by about a dozen young boys I realize that if same thing continues days are not away when terrorist will attack by air, destroy our nuclear reactor and there will be one more Hiroshima .
We the people are left with only one mantra. Womb to Bomb to Tomb. You promised Mumbaikar Shanghai what you have given us is Jalianwala Baug.
Today only your home minister resigned. What took you so long to kick out this joker? Only reason was that he was loyal to Gandhi family. Loyalty to Gandhi family is more important than blood of innocent people, isn't it?
I am born and bought up in Mumbai for last fifty eight years. Believe me corruption in Maharashtra is worse than that in Bihar Look at all the politician, Sharad Pawar, Chagan Bhujbal, Narayan Rane, Bal Thackray , Gopinath Munde, Raj Thackray, Vilasrao Deshmukh all are rolling in money. Vilasrao Deshmukh is one of the worst Chief minister I have seen. His only business is to increase the FSI every other day, make money and send it to Delhi so Congress can fight next election. Now the clown has found new way and will increase FSI for fisherman so they can build concrete house right on sea shore. Next time terrorist can comfortably live in those house , enjoy the beauty of sea and then attack the Mumbai at their will.
Recently I had to purchase house in Mumbai. I met about two dozen builders. Everybody wanted about 30% in black. A common person like me knows this and with all your intelligent agency & CBI you and your finance minister are not aware of it.. Where all the black money goes? To the underworld isn't it? Our politicians take help of these goondas to vacate people by force. I myself was victim of it. If you have time please come to me, I will tell you everything.
If this has been land of fools, idiots then I would not have ever cared to write you this letter. Just see the tragedy, on one side we are reaching moon, people are so intelligent and on other side you politician has converted nectar into deadly poison. I am everything Hindu, Muslim, Christian, Schedule caste, OBC, Muslim OBC, Christian Schedule caste, Creamy Schedule caste only what I am not is INDIAN. You politician have raped every part of mother India by your policy of divide and rule.
Take example of former president Abdul Kalam. Such a intelligent person, such a fine human being. You politician didn't even spare him. Your party along with opposition joined the hands, because politician feels they are supreme and there is no place for good person.
Dear Mr Prime minister you are one of the most intelligent person, most learned person. Just wake up, be a real SARDAR. First and foremost expose all selfish politician. Ask Swiss bank to give name of all Indian account holder. Give reins of CBI to independent agency. Let them find wolf among us.. There will be political upheaval but that will better than dance of death which we are witnessing every day. Just give us ambient where we can work honestly and without fear. Let there be rule of law. Everything else will be taken care of.
Choice is yours Mr. Prime Minister. Do you want to be lead by one person or you want to lead the nation of 100 Crore people?
Prakash B. Bajaj
Chandralok 'A" Wing, Flat No 104 97 Nepean Sea Road
Mumbai 400 036
Phone 98210-71194

PLEASE READ N FORWARD AS MANY PEOPLE IN YOUR CONTACT LIST