The War Diaries

From left: Myself, host Malak Jaafar, and Safwat al-Zayat on Friday, June 4.

Los Angeles- On Friday evening (GMT), I appeared on BBC Arabic’s Newshour presented by Malak Jaafar to discuss reaction to that days Washington Post story entitled “U.S. ‘secret war’ expands globally as Special Operations forces take larger role” by Karen de Young and Greg Jaffe with Egyptian Brigadier General (retd.) Safwat al-Zayat. Thanks to my colleague Murad Batal al-Shishani for arranging this.

Los Angeles- The May issue of MLM is out. Worked hard on this one. Enjoy! If you’re not already enjoying, subscribe! 

New York- On Friday evening, I launched the first issue of my new publication with the Jamestown Foundation called Militant Leadership Monitor. I have the free teaser article about the death of a Moro militant in Waziristan a few weeks ago. It’s a subscription-based site that we are doing for $150 a year for twelve issues ($300 for institutions). Our inaugural issue has profiles of Qais al-Khazali by Rafid Fadhil Ali, Dr. Khalil Ibrahim by Dr. Andrew McGregor, and Ilyas Kashmiri by Arif Jamal plus briefs by yours truly on the surrender of an Oromo Liberation Front leaders in Addis Ababa and the shoot up of Mullah Krekar’s flat in Oslo. I think we’re off to a good start…2010 is shaping up to be an interesting year.

Pakistani English-language newspaper Dawn is reporting on the possible death of Baitullah Mehsud in Wednesday’s missile strike which is believed to have killed one of his wives. Mehsud’s demise would mean an uncertain fate for the future of the TTP in South Waziristan and it is not clear whether he would have a successor. Of course it has been rumoured that Mehsud has been dead before so we’ll have to wait and see on this one.

Here is the full text of the article: ”

ISLAMABAD: There is a strong likelihood that Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud was killed along with his wife and bodyguards in a missile attack two days ago, Interior Minister Rehman Malik told Reuters.

‘We suspect he was killed in the missile strike,’ Malik said on Friday. ‘We have some information, but we don’t have material evidence to confirm it.’ Meanwhile, Director General ISPR Maj. Gen. Athar Abbas cautioned that the reports of Mehsud’s death are still unconfirmed. ‘We are receiving reports and probing,’ he said. ABC News cited a senior US official as saying there was a 95 per cent chance that Mehsud was among those killed in the missile strike. US officials have visual and other indicators it was Mehsud and Pakistanis are now trying to collect physical evidence to be certain, ABC reported. A US official also told Reuters that there was reason to believe Mehsud was dead. ‘There is reason to believe that reports of his death may be true, but it can’t be confirmed at this time,’ said the official, providing the information on condition of anonymity. The official would not comment on the circumstances surrounding Mehsud’s possible death.

RUMOURS PERSISTED
A relative of Mehsud’s dead wife had initially said the Taliban leader wasn’t present when the missiles struck, but rumours that he had either been wounded or killed refused to die down. The stricken house is some two hours’ walk from Makeen, and Taliban fighters had cordoned off the area, refusing to let people enter, according to villagers. A senior Pakistani security official said that aside from Mehsud’s wife, one of Mehsud’s brothers and seven of his bodyguards perished in the attack. The official said intelligence services were trying to discover the identity of another victim, and there was a good chance it was Mehsud. Intelligence agents had also picked up signs that leaders of various Taliban factions planned to gather for a shura, or council meeting, somewhere in Waziristan later on Friday.—Reuters”

 

Yesterday another one of the Hashwani family’s hotels was demolished in a well-planned and executed suicide attack in Peshawar. The Pearl Continental (PC) Hotel chain is owned by perhaps Pakistan’s most prominent Ismaili family, the Hashwanis. Major cooperations in Pakistan, when not wholly owned subsidiaries of the Pakistani Army, are most often familial enterprises such as the Hashoo Group. The Hashwanis had been in talks with the U.S. government to sell it the PC Peshawar property to be used as its new consular offices in light of NWFP’s ever growing importance in U.S. foreign policy. There are rumors that they were or are considering getting out of the hospitality industry altogether. Last year’s Marriott bombing was devastating to the family’s investment portfolio though its patriarch Saddaruddin Hashwani issued a defiant statement to the press that he would rebuild the Islamabad Marriott and would not bow to terrorist intimidation. 

While covering the Pakistani elections last year, I often worked out of the PC Lahore’s business centre and devoured some incredible international fare at the hotel’s restaurant after long days trudging up and down Mall Road looking for stories. Even if I could have afforded to stay there, I wouldn’t have because of its obviousness as a high-value target in the wave of jihadist violence that had already engulfed the country by mid-2007. Partly for my safety, I stayed at a low profile guest house down the road. It probably doesn’t help that the 5-star hotels in Pakistan are owned by a group of Ismailis, who are a branch of Shi’ism that holds the Aga Khan in highest esteem as living imam, when considering the militants takfiri ideology. The Sunni extremists that claim to adhere to takfirism believe that individuals may declare those who follow different strains of Islam apostates and can therefore justify acts of previously imaginable terror throughout South Asia and the Middle East. Takfirism is essential in creating a sense of the “Other” in the militant mind which is used to justify attacks against those praying in mosques and eating in hotel dining rooms. Undoubtedly, the reasoning behind the attack will be attributed to either the PC’s international clientele or its possible sale to the Americans. The Ismailis as a cultural subset are extraordinarily successful business people with Shah Karim al-Hussayni, the Aga Khan, chief among them. The Aga Khan and the Hashwanis represent immense wealth in a region wracked by poverty and illiteracy-related militancy.

When I was in the country last year, the Afghan Taleban targeted the telecom company Roshan’s mobile phone transmission towers in southern Afghanistan after having previously attacked the Serena hotel in Kabul. The Taleban issued a communique stating they wanted the towers shut down at night because they believed their movements could be tracked by coalition forces and the mobile signals were being used to target them. Ismaili business interests seemed to be under sustained assault. Now again, the Taleban’s attacks on the Roshan towers and the Serena were very likely of a purely strategic nature but the fact that the towers are owned by the Aga Khan (and his European consortium partners) doesn’t exactly help. A major segment of the Aga Khan’s charitable work is aiding remote Ismaili communities in Central and South Asia who the Taleban consider to be apostates similar to the Twelver Shi’i Hazara they attempted to annihilate in the 1990′s.

I had some of the same thoughts regarding Benazir Bhutto. Not only was she Shi’i, like her father Zufliqar and the country’s father Mohammed Ali Jinnah, but she came from the rich and resented zamindar feudal structure in Sindh province that is another post-colonial relict of British divide et impera strategy. As I’ve written previously regarding Sri Lanka, the Crown’s modus operandi was to favor ethnic and religious minorities over the unwashed masses in order to maintain control over the populace and extract their colonies natural wealth with as little disruption as possible. I’m sure the Pakistani Taleban didn’t need Benazir to be a land owning Twelver to declare her an apostate but I doubt her lineage and status helped her case. Benzair spent the last morning of her life meeting with Hamid Karzai at the Islamabad Serena (which a friend of mine photographed hours before her assassination).People across the region who depend on the Ismaili establishment for employment, sustenance and remittances have suffered enormously from the Taleban’s unforgiving insurgency and reconciliation cannot begin soon enough should the kinetic war-fighting cease anytime soon. Inshallah!

UPDATE: The death toll from the PC attack now stands at 17. 

Link to the HuffingtonPost version.

Lawyer Shaukat Aziz Siddiqui and his client Khalid Khawaja in the warrens of the Rawalpindi bar association last year. ©2008 Derek Henry Flood

I participated in a contentious debate on the BBC at the last minute today with Owen Bennett-Jones, author of Eye of the Storm, who was hosting a show from Islamabad. Initially, I didn’t realize I was on with a perennially controversial figure in Islamic politics in Pakistan Khalid Khawaja whom I met at his lawyer’s office in Rawalpindi last year. Pakistan is convulsing in the largest humanitarian crisis since the catastrophic Partition of British India in 1947.

The Pakistani army is waging a difficult battle against those it terms “Miscreants” which the Western media knows collectively as the Taleban. Meanwhile millions of civilians, much like those in Sri Lanka, are caught dangerously in the middle. If Islamabad treats its own citizens as badly as Colombo, there will be plenty of trouble ahead. The rifts within Pakistani society have become so deep that solutions, rather than traditional exchanges of blame and conspiracy theories, are desperately in order. The United States is attempting to partner with Asif Ali Zardari who many Pakistanis see as an integral part of the problem much the way Afghans now view Hamid Karzai. Siding with inept and inherently corrupt leadership further perpetuates insurgency in these two vital and very fragile state structures. Taleban ideologues proclaim foremost that theirs is a war against a fraudulent leadership and a vacant justice system marketed through a prism of rigid Islamic doctrine. The Taleban’s two-front war is not terribly differing from the massive Maoist insurrection being waged against the state in central India. Pakistan has yet to adopt a viable counterinsurgency strategy and huge parts of NWFP are being displaced as a result. Fighting a conventional war against furious Pashtun religious nationalists will fail unless Pashtunistan’s legitimate issues are addressed in the long term which, so far, Islamabad does not appear inclined to do. 

Podcast link here…

I have a piece this week on the Huffington Post on where Pakistan was and where it is or could be going. Read it here…

On April 15th, Jamestown hosted and exhaustive conference on the subject of Pakistan’s Northwest Frontier Province and its Federally Administered Tribal Areas. There’s too much else to include for the number of people gathered and the all the topics covered under the umbrella of the larger concept of Pakistan’s tribal wars but here are  some of the highlights.

The first panel consisted of Ahmed Rashid  and Shuja Nawaz. Rashid sadly described the “surrender of the state” in the Swat valley to Sufi Muhammed and said that the Swati Taleban had taken over the instruments of the state in spreading their own version of Sharia law, which, Rashid said, differed markedly from historical Sharia that had been practiced in the area in previous decades. Rashid told the audience that that the Pakistani Taleban, the TTP, had an agenda of Islamizing all of Pakistan and challenging the army. Shuja Nawaz spoke pessimistically of a “battle for Pakistan” and described an army that was able to clear but not build and hold (one can think of the example of the Bajaur operations) which is critical in a COIN strategy (which every speaker described as non-existent in Pakistan’s military doctrine).

Mariam Abou Zahab, an expert on Sunni-Shia internecine conflict in Pakistan and co-author of Islamist Networks: The Afghan-Pakistan Connection presented a fascinatingly detailed background on this conflict within the broader turmoil occurring throughout Pakistan. Though it may be hard for outsiders to differentiate between the various contexts of carnage coming out of the country on a daily basis, Mme. Zahab told of the fitna, or sectarian Islamic warfare that has been shredding the fabric of Pakistani society since the 1980′s which was part of a proxy struggle between Iran and the al-Saud family. This sectarian warfare is relevant to the conflict in FATA and the historical context of the Afghan war for several reasons. Two of the seven tribal agencies, Kurram and Orakzai, have significant  Shia populations and hence inherent conflict. Zahab states that the influx of large numbers of Sunni Afghan refugees during the Soviet era skewed the Sunni demographic in FATA well out of its historical balance. According to Zahab, this suited General Zia ul-Haq just fine. Zia was greatly annoyed by particular Shia tribes in crucial border areas refusal to let mujahideen cross their territory during the anti-Soviet war. For Zia these Pashtun Shia presented both a tactical and ideological issue. Zia’s “Islamization” of Pakistan was also a defacto Sunnization of the country as well. Skewing the tribal areas in favor of Pashtun Sunni clients was necessary to prosecute the war in Afghanistan. Outside of an historical Islamic context, the violent schism harks back to the British Raj when colonial officers divide et impera by favoring wealthy minority Shia landholders against the unwashed Sunni masses tilling the land. Within Pakistan’s unannounced civil war, mosques are detonated, captured Shia soldiers are beheaded and imams are assassinated. Sectarian outfits in Pakistan are, in the words of David Kicullen, “Fighting Smalls Wars in the Midst of a Big One.”

Stephen P. Cohen of Brookings spoke to Pakistan’s lack of a counterinsurgency strategy which most of the experts throughout the day agreed the country so desperately needs. Cohen described Pakistan’s enemy-centric war fighting strategy as self-defeating because it further alienated local populations which remains fervently counterintuitive to COIN doctrine. The army’s “ethnic mismatch” fails to represent the makeup of of the society at large being a heavily Punjabi dominated institution which leads to a deadly cultural gap when fighting Pashtun (or Balochi) militants. Cohen also criticized Pakistan’s civilian leadership for its “knowledge deficit” in the country’s military affairs which may be a product of the natural tension in the swinging pendulum between democracy and dictatorship for the past six decades. The Army, Cohen said, has no discernible interest in taken lessons from other campaigns from the Pakistanis could implement in their internal land war. Cohen mentioned various Indian COIN operations of yore that Pakistan’s army could seek to learn from. Not bloody likely…

Jamestown’s Andrew MacGregor, describing recent attacks on Peshawar’s freight terminals, gave an interesting presentation on NATO’s baffling choices for logistical supply routes presenting a region wide context. The cycle of supplying Western forces in Afghanistan has built-in instability with bribes being paid regularly to the Taleban. In order to let equipment pass through their jurisdiction, the Taleban exact payments from  trucking syndicates which are used to fund a widening insurgency. Internally Displaced Person’s (IDP) camps sprouting up on the outskirts of Karachi as a result of the Pakistan Army’s operations  have given cover  to militants from FATA and NWFP now operating in Sindh where they threaten the formerly safe port for NATO supplies. While trucking military supplies through Pakistan are threatened (not to mention taking away legitimate income from the Pakistani trucking industry), other much more costly sounding and arduous supply routes are being considered like a South Caucasus-TransCaspian-Kakakh route, an old Soviet supply route beginning in the Baltics in Riga and continuing on to Central Asia through the Russian Federation. MacGregor spoke of the “Iranian Route” which would make the most sense logistically, especially considered Iran’s relative stability and wealth of infrastructure. Such a move would be highly improbable, at least for the United States, without a major overture from the Americans but may be doable for some EU militaries. Central Asian routes may give Moscow a degree of leverage over the authoritarian states it is trying to hold within its orbit and could likely be a great odds with NATO’s objectives in both Afghanistan and possible membership candidate states.