MQM and Zardari

Wednesday, September 17, 2008
By Adrian Levy & Cathy Scott-Clark

LONDON: After claiming to have spent nine years nurturing democracy in Pakistan and festooning the country's military dictatorship with $ 11 billion in aid, the Bush administration's policy is careering out of control, as US soldiers trade bullets with the forces of what was once a most-favored ally in the "war on terror".
On Sunday night, Pakistan border troops fired on a raiding party of American commandos emerging from two Chinooks in an attempt to cross on foot from Afghanistan into the Pakistan village of Angoor Adda. They had no permission to be there. This was the latest in a series of forays into Pakistan sovereign territory taken by the US Special Forces at the behest of President Bush.
In July he signed an executive order to sidestep Pakistan's freely elected government in the rush to claim al-Qaida scalps -- especially Osama bin Laden's.
In the past six weeks, US missiles have rained down on Pakistani villages with Predator drones lighting up the country's tribal belt and hunter-killer teams dropping into Pakistan's villages in the dead of night. All good timing for the Republicans: these red-blooded offensives play well in America's heartlands; the ailing Bush and his party have been re-branded, Rambo-style, as sidestepping an untrustworthy ally to take the fight directly to the terrorists.
However, it is spectacularly bad timing for Pakistan, the raids commencing just three days before Asif Ali Zardari was sworn in as president. During his inaugural speech in Islamabad on September 6, more than 30 civilians were killed by a suicide bombing in Peshawar as the local population vented its anger at the incursions. Zardari has used a family trip to Britain to gain an urgent sit-down with Gordon Brown. Yesterday, he flew in to see off his oldest daughter, Bakhtawar, 18, who is studying English literature at the Edinburgh University.
Today, in Downing Street, Zardari will warn the prime minister that the latest twist in the war on terror will "only lead to greater disaster, more hatred, more alienation, more ghettos, more recruits, and more violence".
Without Britain's help in holding back the US, buying the new Pakistan government breathing space, anti-American sentiment will wash over the country; Zardari and his Pakistan People's Party coalition will be unable to stop it spiraling out of control. If it sounds like blackmail, with Zardari bargaining by placing a gun to his own head -- an age-old diplomatic tactic of Pakistan leaders -- consider the evidence.
Pakistan is in the grip of Islamist-driven chaos with the white pennants of the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP), the country's home-grown medievalists, flying from government offices across North and South Waziristan. The North-West Frontier Province, its once cosmopolitan capital of Peshawar and its former ski resorts in the Swat valley, have been encircled by the movement's Vice and Virtue Brigades. The strategically vital province of Balochistan is simmering; and the economic engine of Karachi is witnessing an explosion of violence.
Zardari does not convince everyone, given the welter of corruption charges that once circled him, but he is not the only one worried. The fears of the normally silent Pakistan armed forces were reflected this weekend in an extraordinary article by Lieutenant General Shahid Aziz, who served as the chief of general staff under Zardari's predecessor, Pervez Musharraf. Gen Aziz accused Musharraf of inviting the Americans to fight their war on Pakistani territory, without consulting the Army: "Militants will multiply by the thousands," he warned.
"The Pakistani Army will not be able to support US operations. Financial crisis and street unrest will create chaos in the country and war will spread."
Today, Gordon Brown will be asked to put his faith in Zardari, an acquisitive man once reviled in this country and his own as "Mr. 10%."
Days after the assassination of his wife, Benazir Bhutto, Zardari produced a handwritten will; and now he has resurrected a series of radical measures drafted by Benazir shortly before her death. The documents make for compelling reading: "The enemy the West has identified [a handful of al-Qaida and Taliban leaders] is the wrong target. The concern of the developed world is motivated entirely by a single consideration -- its own safety. You cannot wage wars against ideas. Fight them with different means."
One of these -- already shown to the foreign secretary, David Miliband -- is the formation of an intergovernmental counter-terrorist body. Its happy-clappy working title, United Against Terrorism, belies a serious ambition. Zardari will call for all of Pakistan's regional neighbors or mentors -- Russia, China, Afghanistan, Iran and India among them -- to sit together and think through the crises. The US and the UK would also be present but in the background. "A consensus is necessary so the war on terror is not considered an American war but is owned by all countries," the paper concludes.
Not only would such a move distance Washington from Islamabad, it would also feed into the counter-insurgency strategy for Pakistan's border areas that Zardari will also be revealing today in Downing Street. Referred to by his aides as a new Marshall Plan, it calls for an international consortium led by the UK to reconstruct Pakistan's tribal areas, unraveling extremist infrastructure that grew massively during the Musharraf years -- when more than a dozen proscribed terrorist organizations were allowed to regroup under new names, and pro-Jihad Madrasas trebled to 13,000.
Zardari proposes a reconstruction budget to revitalize everything from local transport to water supplies. His aides have drawn up employment schemes and proposed wholesale reforms of partisan local police and local government. The families of those who die in the struggle against extremism are to be paid compensation, and those who are injured will have their medical costs covered.
Finally, Zardari is offering to establish a special intelligence cell at the Pakistan High Commission in London, which will act as a storehouse for information about Islamists and terror threats, tracking British Pakistanis as they make their way from the UK to Pakistan -- a concrete boon to British counter-terrorism officials, who recently revealed that eight out of 10 current investigations in the UK have a close connection to Pakistan. Given the spectacular collapse of the airline bomb plot trial this month, this cell might tip the balance in Zardari's favor.
"We all want fewer blunders," Wajid Shamsul Hasan, Pakistan's high commissioner in London, said. In a notoriously difficult foreign policy arena, injected with precious few new ideas, there are signs that Brown is ready to take Zardari seriously. The Foreign Office has already played a vigorous and little known role in getting Zardari elected president: Sir Mark Lyall Grant, the FCO political director, used his offices to elegantly strong-arm Pakistani political factions exiled to the UK into voting for the PPP's presidential candidate. In a daring move, the MQM, which has offices in north London -- and was set against the PPP -- was talkeed into becoming temporary champion of a PPP machine it had previously only bombed and shot at.
—Courtesy The Guardian