2013-05-25T18:58:12-04:00 C. Christine Fair http://www.huffingtonpost.com/author/index.php?author=c-christine-fair Copyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc. HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for C. Christine Fair Good old fashioned elbow grease. tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1649843 2012-07-05T10:45:31-04:00 2012-07-05T10:45:12-04:00

C. Christine Fair http://www.huffingtonpost.com/c-christine-fair/
On November 25, 2011, US forces waged a two-hour attack against Pakistani military outpost in Salala in Pakistan's Mohmand Agency. Twenty-four Pakistani soldiers died. Washington steadfastly refused to apologize even though it was mostly at fault. Americans retorted that the tragedy happened because of Pakistan's long-standing support for Afghan insurgents attacking US and allied troops in Afghanistan. This precluded US forces from following standing operating procedures established to prevent such mishaps.

For many Americans, the Pakistanis got what they had long deserved. This decreased any appetite for contrition. Americans are exhausted with Pakistan's continued support for insurgent elements in Afghanistan such as the Haqqani Network, the Afghan Taliban and groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba, all of which are responsible for killing thousands of US, NATO and Afghan troops and many more civilians. A few months prior to Salala, Osama bin Laden had been killed in a unilateral US military raid in Abbottabad, a short distance from the Pakistan Military Academy, the equivalent of the US Army's West Point. Pakistan has shown no interest in discerning who helped bin Laden remain in Pakistan undetected for years where he built a massive family with many wives and numerous children. Instead, Pakistan has focused singularly upon a hapless physician who helped bring down bin Laden.

For many Americans, it is Pakistan that owes some apologies. After all, even after taking more than $22 billion in US taxpayers' money since 9/11, Pakistan seems to be more intent on helping our enemies than helping us to defeat them.

The US position outraged Pakistan's military and civilian leadership and fueled ever more anti-American sentiment among Pakistan's polity. Many Pakistanis outright discount the claims that their government supports militants. Other Pakistanis concede that their government does so, but rationalize it on various grounds that are incomprehensible to most Americans. For example, many Pakistanis blame the deaths of 35,000 Pakistanis since 9/11 on the American war in Afghanistan. Some even believe that Americans are behind the deaths, perhaps working with Indian or even Israeli intelligence agencies. Few Pakistanis will admit that the so-called Pakistan Taliban are derived from the very Islamist terror groups that its state has long supported and used in India and Afghanistan. Many do not even know to hold their own government to account for the appalling bloodshed.

To coerce an apology from Washington, Pakistan closed down the ground supply routes to Afghanistan. The Americans had prepared for this eventuality by establishing a northern route through Central Asia. The route was politically fraught, logistically more challenging than the Pakistani alternative and more expensive. What the Americans could not ship through the north, they flew in over Pakistani air space. All told, this new route cost the Americans about $100 million per month over and beyond the previous arrangement, according to which they paid a meager $250 for each sea container that moved from Pakistan's port in Karachi through Pakistani territory and into Afghanistan either through Chaman in Balochistan or Torkham at the Khyber Pass.

Many feared that while this alternate route worked to get supplies into Afghanistan, it could not sustain the traffic and operations tempo needed to get the massive amounts of war material out of Afghanistan as the United States and NATO draw down their military footprints. Consequently, the US government hoped that Pakistan would reopen the ground routes.

After numerous discussions between Pakistan's Army Chief Ashfaq Parvez Kayani and NATO Chief US General John Allen, the script for this political drama was drafted: Secretary Clinton, at long last, would niggardly utter the parsimonious apology and the supply routes would re-open. This is not the bargain it appears to be principally because it resolves none of the problems that precipitated the crisis in the first place.

First, the apology should never have been linked to the ground routes' status. Rather, it should have been tied to serious and consequential discussion of Pakistan's continued support for the various militant elements in Afghanistan that the United States seeks to defeat. Without progress on this issue, any degree of long-term success in Afghanistan is impossible and spent life and treasure will be squandered. Once the US military presence declines, the Afghan forces' capabilities will inevitably suffer. Pakistan's proxies will increase their activities flush with cash from Pakistan's intelligence agencies as it did in the 1990s. Pakistan will do as it has always done: support Islamist elements in Afghanistan in effort to constrain the Indians. Should the west stop paying Kabul's bills, this will happen sooner than later.

Second, the agreement on the ground logistical routes should have gone forward only if Pakistan agreed to end support for insurgent elements. Critics of this position will say that Afghanistan's future can only be solved with Pakistan at the table. Unfortunately, so far, Pakistan has only tried to chop up the table and use it for firewood.

The United States would have been better served to continue excluding Pakistan in light of its continued commitment to fighting a proxy war with the Americans in Afghanistan. After all, if Pakistan remains dedicated to an Afghanistan that the Americans and Afghans oppose, the Americans need to learn to sustain an Afghan presence without Pakistan indefinitely. Moreover, the higher cost of moving supplies via the alternative routes could have been compensated by denying Pakistan arrearage of Coalition Support Funds that range between $1.3 and $3 billion- -- depending upon whose math you trust -- and foregoing other assistance.

Only by reducing its dependence upon Pakistan can the United States muster the political will to compel Pakistan to abandon Islamist militancy as tools of foreign policy. While this deal may save Washington money in the short term, it will pay grievously in the long term as Afghanistan again reverts to being Pakistan's terror field.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.1289061 2012-02-22T18:27:41-05:00 2012-04-23T05:12:01-04:00

C. Christine Fair http://www.huffingtonpost.com/c-christine-fair/
When I agreed to participate, I was told that the hearing was intended to be a general introduction to the various crises in Balochistan, their causes and the impact of these issues on U.S. interests. However, as the date of the hearing neared, I learned that the event would serve other purposes.

When I sought guidance about the precise issues I should discuss in my testimony, the committee staff member told me, in some exasperation, that "we want to stick it to the Pakistanis." He continued that for a decade the Pakistanis have been killing us in Afghanistan. While I fully agreed with the sentiment behind his remarks, I grew concerned that the hearing was not genuinely motivated by concern over the human rights challenges confronting the residents of Balochistan. Instead, this was an opportunity to interfere in the administration's ongoing efforts to develop a policy towards Pakistan, as well as Afghanistan.

Barely a week later, Congressman Rohrabacher introduced a Resolution "Expressing the sense of Congress that the people of Baluchistan, currently divided between Pakistan, Iran, and Afghanistan, have the right to self-determination and to their own sovereign country." Needless to say, this non-binding resolution does not reflect the sense of Congress and no Congressmen have embraced the measure. However, this resolution and the preceding hearing did much to rankle Pakistan and render any rapprochement between Washington and Islamabad (not to mention Rawalpindi) even more difficult.

Many members of the Baloch diaspora who support an independent Balochistan have been extremely excited by these developments. Unfortunately, there are reasons to suspect that Congressman Rohrabacher's actions are not inspired by any genuine concern over ongoing human rights violations perpetrated against, as well as by, the Baloch inhabitants of the province.

There are multiple reasons for my skepticism. First, prior to the hearing, Congressmen Rohrabacher--with Congressman Louie Gohmert (R-TX)--had already penned an opinion piece in which he suggested that the United States should lend its"....support for a Balochistan carved out of Pakistan to diminish [Pakistan's] radical power". Second, the integrity of the hearing was immediately undermined by the inclusion of Mr. Ralph Peters, who in 2006 argued for the dissolution of Pakistan in a buffoonish essay, "Blood Borders," in the Armed Forces Journal. Specifically, he called in that piece for a "Free Baluchistan." How could an independent observer conclude that the hearing was anything but an attempt to promote the belief in Pakistan that the world's most powerful parliament was seeking to undermine its territorial integrity?

Unfortunately, this is not the first geopolitical exploit Mr. Rohrabacher has orchestrated. In January of 2012, he and Mr. Gohmert, among other Congresspersons, held a controversial meeting in Berlin with several representatives of the now defunct Northern Alliance. The goal of the meeting was to undermine the administration's current, if difficult and tentative, negotiations with the Taliban. In the Op-Ed already mentioned, Rohrabacher and Gohmert called for a new "Constitutional Loya Jirga, or convention, that will draft a new constitution enshrining federalism as the new form of government. This would break the Taliban's ability to dominate Afghanistan by strengthening those communities opposed to the return of the Taliban and their Al-Qaeda allies."

This author agrees that the current Afghan constitution, which reflects the interests of the United States and was written as the U.S. was hastily forging its shambolic policies towards Afghanistan, is inappropriate for Afghanistan today and even agrees that the suggestion makes much sense. However, this initiative by a select number of Congressmen, who do not represent the American Congress, harmed the administration's policy towards Afghanistan and its efforts to extract the U.S. from a deadly and flawed counterinsurgency policy that has borne few fruits. Worse, it inflamed the Afghan government, which saw this move as a deliberate effort to usurp its own primary place in negotiating Afghanistan's future. Needless to say, the fixation with the warlords of the Northern Alliance belies an astonishing ignorance about these men's involvement in war crimes and appalling human rights violations (such as the shocking practices of child rape and child concubinage (bacchebazi). While the Taliban are widely seen as violent and illegitimate actors who have killed tens of thousands, for some reason the militias of the former Northern Alliance have managed to distance themselves in the American mind from their own violent and repugnant pasts.

The Obama administration has been busy trying to limit the repercussions of Rohrabacher and Gohmert's machinations. The State Department has had to bear the brunt of Pakistan's considerable and justified anger over Congressional meddling in what is clearly an internal affair-even if that internal affair is appalling. (Can anyone imagine a comparable hearing on the Indian counterinsurgency campaigns in Kashmir? In each case the actions of the state involved raise uncomfortable questions for the United States.) Given that the duo has limited support in Congress for their efforts to change policy towards Afghanistan or Pakistan, and given also that such efforts have been repudiated by the administration, it remains to ask why they continue to pursue this folly.

The most facile reading is that Rohrabacher and Gohmert are genuinely frustrated, both with failed U.S. policy in Afghanistan and with the fact that Pakistan, while continuing to benefit from a variety of U.S. assistance programs, provides support for a wide array of terrorist groups opposed to U.S. interests. (Both Pakistan and the United States disagree on what the amounts transferred are, where they go and how they are used.) If this is indeed their motivation, I share their vexation. But seeking to force U.S.-Pakistan relations to a breaking point does not serve U.S. interests, or Pakistan's for that matter. After all, no matter how much Pakistanis resent the United States, U.S. support at the IMF is critical to keeping Pakistan afloat despite its severe fiscal problems.

A more cynical interpretation of Rohrabacher and Gohmert's actions might involve the desire for access to natural resources in both Afghanistan and Balochistan. In light of this suspicion, one must ask who paid for the Berlin conference? What private sector entities may have a vested interest in pushing this strange, orphaned agenda?

There are no ready answers to these questions. However, I can say with some certainty that the hearing and the Resolution that followed it have much more to do with partisan politics, and possibly resource-grabbing, than with any interest in the ongoing human rights crises in Balochistan.

C. Christine Fair is assistant professor in the Peace and Security Studies Program in Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. Follow her on Twitter at CChristineFair. Her testimony can be found here.
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C. Christine Fair http://www.huffingtonpost.com/c-christine-fair/
To Washington, military and intelligence cooperation has dominated the relationship. The Kerry-Lugar-Berman legislation aimed to rebalance U.S. engagement towards civilian institutions but is moribund. As U.S. legislators increasingly view Pakistan skeptically, funding for that program is doubtful. Washington's cupidity for Pakistan's men on horseback has vitiated Washington's creativity to develop a sustainable relationship with Pakistan to secure U.S. interests.

Worse, Washington's khaki addiction undermines its own interests. Many Pakistanis see their army as a "rental army." Pakistanis believe the Pakistan Taliban insurgency is due to their army's cooperation with the United States rather than blowback from decades of using Islamist militants to secure Pakistan's interests in India and Afghanistan. Pakistan's support to the U.S. global war on terror has motivated some of Pakistan's erstwhile proxies to rebel against the state and under the banner of the Pakistani Taliban. Pakistan's military alliance with the United States has dissuaded it from acting against these militants due to the perception that it is "fighting America's war." Finally, in unflinchingly supporting Pakistan's military, Washington has buttressed authoritarianism and left civilian institutions less able to fend against the military's praetorian tendencies.

Washington should try to engage with Pakistan's military; however, military relations should be normalized to high-level exchanges, consultation on issues like the war in Afghanistan, continued training and foreign military sales -- preferably channeled to support Pakistan's ability to counter terrorism and insurgency. Increasingly, America should engage Pakistan's emerging civilian centers of power.

Pakistan's parliament needs assistance. Parliamentarians -- while improving through the simple fact that democracy has survived -- lack fundamental legislative skills. They cannot exercise parliamentary powers which could slowly bring the military and intelligence agencies to account, even though there are standing defense committees in both houses, which are constitutionally empowered to do so. Many politicians claim that they cannot scrutinize military affairs because of the "classified nature" of Pakistan's defense programs -- including its secretive nuclear program.

The United States, working with parliamentary countries and multi-lateral institutions like the UNDP, can help. Rather than congressional delegations rotating through Pakistan to pander to their constituents, Congressional delegations should be purpose-driven. For example, the Senate intelligence committee -- and its professional staff -- could offer Pakistanis key insights into how this organization functions, including processing for providing civilians with security clearances to review intelligence affairs.

Washington should focus resources upon expanding Pakistan's parliamentary capacities at provincial levels, too. With devolution, the provinces have new found resources and power with even less capable cohorts of legislators. America has a diverse array of state assemblies which could offer important insights into local governance under constrained resources.

Washington should work to fortify Pakistan's institutions of rule of law by providing coherent police training assistance. However, it cannot provide Pakistan's police with a forensics capability without a human capital base to support such an effort. Establishing educational institutions dedicated to building basic science and forensic training is a necessary component. Even if police could be trained (a big if) to collect forensic evidence, without proper labs and evidence storage such efforts are absolutely useless.

Pakistan's judiciary is shambolic. There are too few judges who are poorly paid and lacking security. Prosecutors are loath to take on high profile cases involving organized crime or terrorism. Witnesses are wary of testifying and judges are often too terrified to convict. Police inability to build a forensics case means that confessions and witness testimony are often the only evidence. Judges can easily dismiss a case if there is evidence of coercion and/or if witnesses are unwilling to come forward. And Pakistan's prisons are overcrowded, decrepit institutions of learning for criminals and terrorists alike.

The most successful investment the United States has ever made in Pakistan is Lahore's University of Management Sciences (LUMS), the premier institution of higher learning. It offers scholarships to poorer students ensuring that is not a school only for Pakistan's elites. Pakistan needs more of these institutions.

Pakistan also needs trade, not aid, to generate job growth. Notably, American lobbies have resisted giving Pakistan access to U.S. textile markets. Helping Pakistan's economy should be an urgent U.S. national security interest that trumps parochial lobbies concerns.

The United States should seize this opportunity. The most likely path to a stable Pakistan involves empowering civilians to exert control over its security and foreign policies.

C. Christine Fair is an assistant professor in the Security Studies Program at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.881256 2011-06-21T17:30:02-04:00 2011-08-21T05:12:02-04:00

C. Christine Fair http://www.huffingtonpost.com/c-christine-fair/
While the Pakistani press is rife with caricatures of U.S. policy, distorted versions of history, and outright falsehoods, American journalists are capable of equal chicanery. Mr. Christopher Hitchens' latest offering in Vanity Fair, "From Abbottabad to Worse," is an appalling example of American commentary that undermines the efforts of saner voices in this critical debate.

His piece commences with a dramatic reference to rape -- not as a crime but as a punishment -- and honor killing. The former refers to the rare, horrific instances where women and girls are subject to sexual assault by, in the words of the author, "tribal and religious kangaroo courts." The latter refers to killing women (and sometimes men) in the name of honor. In this paragraph a complex polity of 180 million -- most of whom condemn both practices -- are essentialized as a barbarous people who embrace the notion that "moral courage consists of the willingness to butcher your own daughter." This literary amuse bouche foretells the absurdities, fallacies and dubious assertions in the rest of his troubling account of Pakistan's malaise.

He next characterizes President Asif Zardari as a man who "cringes daily in front of the forces who[sic] openly murdered his wife... A man so lacking in pride -- indeed lacking in manliness -- will seek desperately to compensate in other ways. Swelling his puny chest even more, he promises to resist the mighty United States, and to defend Pakistan's holy "sovereignty." This offensive passage reveals more about the psychology of the author than it does about that of President Zardari.

What are these "forces" that killed Benazir Bhutto? Mr. Hitchens wants the bravado of casting aspersions upon the Pakistani government. After all, only the government would have the authority to "contemptuously" order the crime scene to be "cleansed with fire hoses, as if to spit even on the pretense of an investigation." (Regrettably, all crime scenes -- big and small --are handled in this way in Pakistan.) However, there is no evidence that the government of Pakistan -- then under President Musharraf -- ordered her death. However, Mr. Hitchens here and throughout takes refuge in the pusillanimity of the passive tense by which he can intimate all the outlandish claims he wants without the responsibility of employing the active tense which requires him to name the agent of the action suggested. In fact, the U.S. government has consistently claimed that elements of the Pakistan Taliban ordered her death.

President Musharraf suffered considerably from her murder. Those with even a 4-year recollection of politics in Pakistan would remember that the United States had brokered a bizarre condominium by which Pervez Musharraf would remain president while Ms. Bhutto would become the Prime Minister following elections which were scheduled for late 2007. Musharraf had become politically isolated following a series of horrendous missteps and abuses of power. However, Washington was unwilling to let Musharraf slink into oblivion. So it devised a compact by which Mr. Musharraf could be laundered through the electoral legitimacy of Ms. Bhutto. With her demise -- and even public suspicion that he or his government had her killed -- Mr. Musharraf's political life in Pakistan was finished. He now lives in London with various legal woes awaiting him in Pakistan.

Mr. Hitchens' answer to "Why do they hate us" is no less preposterous and misleading. He contends that Pakistanis dislike the United States because they "owe us, and are dependent upon us." This is simply a mathematical canard. According to the USAID Green Book, in 2009, total economic assistance to Pakistan came to $1.35 billion and military assistance totaled $0.429 (for a grand sum of $1.78 billion). In 2009, Pakistan's gross domestic product was $162 billion. Calling this is a dependency is an obvious stretch. (In fairness, I too have been guilty of lapsing into this idiom until I crunched the numbers.)

By way of contrast, the United States gave Israel $2.43 billion in total economic and military assistance in 2009. Israel's GDP was $204 billion. As a percentage of GDP, U.S. total assistance to both countries are nearly the same (around 1 percent). Between 1962 and 2009, total economic and military assistance to Israel totaled $178 billion in constant 2009 U.S. dollars. In the same period, U.S. military and economic aid to Pakistan comes to $37 billion in constant 2009 U.S. dollars. But would Mr. Hitchens describe Israel as being dependent upon Washington? By his own argumentation, he would have to answer in the affirmative.

However, from the optic of the American legislator and citizen alike, U.S. assistance to Pakistan appears to be a relatively large sum that should prompt positive feelings for America, or at least dampen raging anti-U.S. sentiment, among Pakistanis. And Americans do expect their funds will be used to a good end rather than be gobbled up by corruption in the host nation and by their own national contractors who are often first-tier executors of U.S. projects. Americans also expect their economic assistance to buy them some sway with Pakistan due to other larger economic factors such as the U.S. role in the International Monetary Fund and other multi-lateral actors which has helped Pakistan considerably. Other forms of assistance such as debt relief are also important beyond the sum it totals. And the United States has been the biggest investor in Pakistan's human development, trumping Saudi Arabia and China long embraced as Pakistan's enduring friends. Mr. Hitchens characterization of Pakistan as "our goddam [sic] lapdog" is out of line.

However, the circus of inaccuracy is far from over. Mr. Hitchens then proceeds to announce that "Everybody knew that al-Qaeda forces were being sheltered in the Pakistani frontier town of Quetta..." Mr. Hitchens of course takes refuge again in the passive voice to avoid saying precisely who sheltered al Qaeda. It would appear that the author has confused al Qaeda (an international terrorist organization) and the Afghan Taliban (a regressive Pashtun-dominated Deobandi insurgent organization presently focused upon the international occupation of Afghanistan). The former has not been harbored by the Pakistani state while the latter has been a long-standing client.

He continues to distort the entire record of Pakistan when it comes to al Qaeda. Pakistan has been a critical partner in capturing al Qaeda leadership in Pakistan. In fact, had it not been for this baseline cooperation, the United States would not have even been a position to kill bin Laden in the first instance.

There is at least one practical reason for Pakistan's cooperation: al Qaeda has targeted Pakistan's military and civilian leadership for years. In 2009, al Zawahiri denounced Pakistan's constitution as un-Islamic. Al Qaeda's sectarian allies such as Lashkar-e-Jhangvi and Sipha-e-Sahaba-e-Pakistan has killed or maimed tens of thousands of Pakistanis since 2004. Al Qaeda is not an asset for Pakistan as the author suggests.

Pakistan's record on al Qaeda has been evident and positive even while Pakistan sustains ties with the Afghan Taliban and groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba. While these groups are foes of the United States, neither the Afghan Taliban nor Lashkar-e-Taiba has targeted Pakistan nor have they embraced the Pakistani Taliban. This has been an invariant truth since the onset of the Global War on Terror in 2001. The United States and Pakistan have an ever-more restricted overlap of foes which makes future cooperation seem increasingly unproductive if not counterproductive to both nations' aims.

Hitchens next describes his own shock that "Osama bin Laden himself would be given a villa in a Pakistani garrison town on Islamabad's periphery." Dodging again behind the passive tense, he offers no evidence for this reckless and dangerous assertion. In contrast to Mr. Hitchens, U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has said that he had seen evidence that suggested Pakistan's senior officials were unaware of bin Laden's whereabouts. Hitchens' claim that the state sheltered Pakistan is feckless journalism that encourages further ignorant speculation among publics who have no real understanding of the other and their governments.

And, for the record, Abbottabad is not on the periphery of Islamabad unless one redefines the word periphery. The word is defined as "the edge or outskirts, as of a city or urban area." While the distance between the two cities, as a crow would fly, is about 67 miles, because Abbottabad is "hill station" resort town, the road is windy, indirect and covers an altitude climb of about 2,500 feet. Periphery implies a jaunt to the suburbs. But the drive is about 2.5 hours depending upon conditions and the quality of your car. Describing Abbottabad as in the periphery of Islamabad is either geographically obtuse or a deliberate attempt to make it sound as if bin Laden was pacing back and forth in a suburb of the nation's capital. Someone should introduce Mr. Hitchens to Google Earth and if not him, then Vanity Fair's fact checker --should there be one.

Hitchens is correct in noting that Pakistanis of all strata are deeply outraged that U.S. Navy SEALS came into Abbottabad -- a garrison-town -- to catch bin Laden without hindrance and with impunity. However, his outrage at Pakistani outrage is misplaced. Of course, Pakistanis should feel so violated because they were. As an American, I support the raid that eliminated this terrorist. However, from the optic of many Pakistanis, they first had to contend with the notion that bin Laden was in their country and second that the United States stormed their airspace, conducted a firefight for 40 minutes in a garrison town and then escaped with its dead quarry all before the Pakistanis could even scramble their F-16s.

Pakistanis themselves began wondering whether their military could protect them from India and whether the United States could act with equal ease to eliminate their nuclear program. Needless to say, all of this came on the back of years of drone attacks against terrorists in Pakistan's tribal areas. While the facts about the drone program in Pakistan are grotesquely distorted and obscured by Pakistani and American officials, ultimately perception matters more than reality. Pakistanis, especially beyond FATA, loathe them as weekly assaults upon their nation's sovereignty. The bin Laden raid was just the latest and most brazen of assaults on the country and demonstrated the incapacity or will of the military or intelligence agencies to stop the United States. Who would not be demoralized and outraged by these events?

Pakistanis -- more than Mr. Hitchens -- understand the limits of their country's ability to extend rule of law throughout the land, to protect them from the ravages of terrorists and proxies gone wild alike, to grow the economy fast enough to accommodate Pakistan's burgeoning population, among other challenges.

Similarly the American hysteria over Pakistan's capture and detention of Pakistanis who collaborated on the raid -- while understandable -- is unfair. Pakistan's intelligence agency, the ISI, knows full well that the CIA is operating against the organization perhaps as much if not more than it cooperates with it. The Pakistanis who assisted the raid were traitors to Pakistan by law because they aided and abetted a foreign intelligence agency. This is what domestic law enforcement and intelligence agencies do: ferret out and capture traitors. The United States does the same thing when their citizens help foreign spy organizations. Americans and Pakistanis alike hope that Pakistan will show equal diligence to determining who knew about bin Laden and who was involved in giving the mass murderer succor. Time will tell if this is the case.

Navigating this strained relationship under the pressures of reality is hard enough. However, accounts like that of Hitchens and others here and in Pakistan, dims the prospects for salvaging a relationship that is extremely important for the United States if not for Pakistan. And one has to wonder if that's not the very goal of such fact-free musings.

C. Christine Fair is an assistant professor at Georgetown University, Center for Peace and Security Studies and the author of the political cookbook, Cuisines of the Axis of Evil and Other Irritating States and Pakistan's Madrassah Challenge: Militancy and Religious Education in Pakistan. She can be followed on Twitter cchristinefair.
]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.872218 2011-06-07T12:13:24-04:00 2011-08-07T05:12:02-04:00

C. Christine Fair http://www.huffingtonpost.com/c-christine-fair/ The Taliban Shuffle with the hopes of understanding the myriad security challenges spanning and indeed linking Afghanistan, Pakistan and the wider South Asian region, she should move on. This is unfortunate. Ms. Barker, who was a correspondent in South Asia with the Chicago Tribune between 2002 and 2009, could have been well positioned to explain a tough region with ironic insights and imminently readable humor.

To this reader's dismay, in Taliban Shuffle, Ms. Barker is less interested in recounting the evolution of the war on terror over the arc of her tenure than she is in telling her own story with the "Af-Pak" theater as a wild prop. Her kitschy book is organized in chapters named after popular songs that ostensibly provide the sound track to her highly personalized accounts of her own outrageous escapades. While the book purports to be a journalist's account of the Afghan war's evolution from a strategic backwater to a strategic breakwater, it succeeds only in meager measure.

Despite the author's appealing, quirky sense of humor, her tale disconcerts with tasteless rodomontade more than it describes the fraught challenges in the complex geography of her portfolio. Ms. Barker entered the volatile region of South Asia as a complete ingénue, with no preparation for her tasking, and being unable to discern an artillery shell from a slingshot. She bumbled along nonetheless cutting a swathe of havoc in her path. In one of her first embeds with the US military, she encountered American soldiers who were bored with the inaction as the real war migrated to Iraq. Having grown lackadaisical about their mission, one of the soldiers conceded to her that he was often "not locked and loaded," referring to the lack of readiness of his weapon. Ms. Barker diligently reported the ennui of the soldiers by name without regard to the cardinal rule of source protection. One of the soldiers was subsequently transferred to an area with greater engagement and lost a leg in a roadside bomb blast. Ms. Barker, in a recurrent moment of fetishized self-reflection, ponders whether she had exercised better judgment, would he still have his leg?

These soldiers are not her only collateral damage. Ms. Barker's other quarry includes Pakistan's former Prime Minister, Mr. Nawaz Sharif. In at least three chapters, Ms. Barker recounts various encounters with "Nawaz," referring to him with excessive familiarity. In each instance, Mr. Sharif requests after some time that she turn off her tape recorder. This is widely accepted as the common code signaling to journalists with integrity everywhere that the conversation has now veered into the area of non-attribution. Ms. Barker barges right past such norms of professionalism and reveals to her exhausted reader that Mr. Sharif pursued her amorously, foisting himself forward as a potential "friend." Mr. Sharif is a married, former head of government who likely had no expectation that these personal musings -- howsoever accurate or inaccurate they may be -- would be published in Ms. Barker's pithy memoir.

While Ms. Barker attempts to describe all that is wrong with the war and the international community's persistent failure to win over the locals' "hearts and minds," she is part of the very problems she claims to exposit. She confesses to bouts of absurd drunkenness, frolicking with mercenaries in Kabul bordellos, running around with inappropriate clothing in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and frequenting the grown-up frat parties that pass as social-life in Islamabad. Virtually every encounter with a local results in her screaming at them for failing to meet her expectations. How can one purge the memory of her shrieking at an Afghan employee at a local guesthouse for ruining her $70 shirt. The author muses that the outrageous episode resulted in her being -- temporarily -- banned from the happening locale.

Similarly, as a long time visitor to South Asia, it is hard to wrap my inflexible brain around the image of the author traipsing about Pakistan's capital in a "short black dress that probably qualified more as a shirt, tights, and high-heeled black boots with silver buckles up the side" for an evening of "amateur drinking." Given that the reader cannot wade through five pages without an account of some miscreant grabbing her presumably callipygous posterior, one has wonder if appropriate clothing may have protected her rear flank. However, as the author herself notes wryly, she had "amassed [her] own ridiculous wardrobe for an Islamic country."

When Ms. Barker is not busy over-sharing sordid details of her desultory searches for romances that resulted in a string of Mr. Right-Nows strewn across Afghanistan, Pakistan and India, she turns her attention to rehearsing well-known accounts of the varied peccadilloes of the political leadership of Afghanistan and Pakistan be it President Karzai, Benazir Bhutto or Nawaz Sharif. There is not much new terrain to cover here and, no surprisingly, she offers no new insights in the political landscape of South Asia.

As noted above, an undercurrent of her narrative is the inability of the United States and its NATO partners to prevail over the Taliban. She justifiably scoffs at the U.S. military's failed efforts to win over local sentiment. However, she is insouciant to the fact that she is part of this failure. What did the countless Afghans and Pakistanis think when they encountered her in various states of sobriety and impropriety? What did they conclude from her countless temper tantrums, about which she muses with excessive braggadocio? The journalist corps is replete with such ill-tempered correspondents "winning hearts and minds" for the wrong team.

I was deeply bothered by one account in particular. Late one evening, Ms. Barker was again drunk at a Chinese brothel in Kabul when her fixer called. She impatiently demanded that he quickly provide an important translation for a story. Her fixer, trying to get her to focus, explained that the next day was Eid, which is an extremely important Muslim holiday. He wanted to finish his work with her that night such that he could spend the day with his family, free of her demands. Only then did she appreciate her unreasonable expectations of her hard-working underpaid Afghan colleague who tolerated her adolescent antics.

While this review will no doubt strike some as "self-righteous," I do have a serious bone to pick with this account and its author. First, journalists come and go in this region. Scholars of the region stay. We spend our entire careers in this region and we have to swim in the waters in which they micturate. Second, I too have had the experience of journalist taking advantage of my forthrightness only to see comments that were meant for personal consumption splattered across a webpage or news print. Given the obvious way in which she has mishandled her sources, who could ever trust her in any context? Thus my objections to this volume are based both upon principles and personal experience with journalists who are more interested in the re-tweets to their bylines than the protection of their sources.

While the author admits these flaws in varying measure, at some point, her self-deprecating accounts of her romps seem more like gimmicky braggadocio rather than self-reflective criticism much less exculpation for region-wide offenses. This is unfortunate. The author has an innately appealing voice and a good eye for human comedy. Nonetheless, while the volume is nominally set to the tune of the Taliban, in fact it's set to the tune of the author's own narcissism. ]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.784325 2010-11-16T14:12:06-05:00 2011-05-25T18:15:22-04:00

C. Christine Fair http://www.huffingtonpost.com/c-christine-fair/ combined, it has elicited anemic international donor response. Within 10 days of the onset of the crisis, the international community pledged $495.00 per person to the victims of the Haiti earthquake. In contrast, only $3.20 were committed per flood-affected person in Pakistan. Miraculously, fewer than 2,000 persons died and most victims perished in the early days of the deluge before the government could act to prevent further loss of lives.

Media Fixations and Fictions

Despite the math of the travesty, Pakistan's devastating monsoon-related floods have been curiously under-covered even while the international media continues to sweep its flashlights through Pakistan's various closeted ties to the Haqqqani network, Lashkar-e-Taiba and the Afghan Taliban. When the media have broached the topic, they have done so to elaborate upon well-worn and hackneyed story-lines. One ever-popular story line is that the Islamist militant groups like Lashkar-e-Taiba (under its various noms de aid provision) will help if the world does not just like it did in the 2005 earthquake. Needless to say, these groups may have been first in and first to hold press conferences but they were a minuscule part of the efforts to relieve Pakistanis' suffering during the earthquake. Despite the media hype in the earthquake, recent robust work by Tahir Andrabi and Jishnu Das exposes the simple truth: their contributions were negligible. Their contributions to the current crisis are more hype than reality. During a recent presentation on Pakistan's floods at Georgetown University, Ambassador Husain Haqqani noted that a mere 29 camps are run by militant groups compared to more than 5,000 camps run by the government.

A second story line examines the floods through the lens of Pakistan's historically fraught civilian-military ties. Indeed, the Pakistani army has been at the front of flood relief and the military is viewed within and without Pakistan as an entity distinct from and unbridled by civilian governance structures. This stems from the fact that the army has run the country for more than half of the country's history and indirectly for much of the remainder. This legacy is inescapable. And indeed, ordinary Pakistanis -- much less international observers -- may see the army as a government unto itself. But here is the reality: NO government could have handled this crisis. Hurricane Katrina was barely managed by the U.S. government. (Many countries -- including India and Sri Lanka -- offered disaster assistance to the United States to manage that natural disaster). Moreover, the United States employed the U.S. National Guard as well as private security firms such as Blackwater to manage the crisis. No country could manage a disaster on the scale of this earthquake without employing their national militaries. Those who have criticized the government's slow response to the tragedy should note that the Pakistan army is currently a part of the government, not the government.

A third story tends to focus upon the impact of the floods upon Pakistan's domestic political fabric. President Zardari did little to mitigate the predictable feeding frenzy while he was ferrying around to his family home in Normandy France among other foreign venues while his citizenry suffered. That said, the various doomsayers who predicted the collapse of the government, a military coup, much less an "Islamic revolution" have been proven wrong. While many observers debate whether Pakistan is or is not a failed or failing state, history has shown that Pakistan and Pakistanis have an amazing ability to keep on keeping on. Inelegantly put, it is a stable instability.

Donor Fatigue or Crude Cynicism?

Despite the enormity of the challenge, the international community has been niggardly in offering assistance. (That said, the United States has been the biggest donor.) But this reticence to give is not difficult to understand.

The international community has had to repeatedly bail Pakistan out of various compounding crises. Pakistani elites have shamefully refused to implement tax reform preferring to raise revenue through regressive sales taxes that most punish the poor while demurring from implementing taxes on agricultural land or business, the financial redoubts of Pakistan's wealthy elites. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton vexed observers in Pakistan and beyond when she stated a simple truth "It's absolutely unacceptable for those with means in Pakistan not to be doing their fair share to help their own people while taxpayers in Europe, the United States and other contributing countries are all chipping in."

When Pakistan was hit by a devastating earthquake in 2005 that killed more than 70,000, it was governed by the international darling President Musharraf who dazzled Washington with his alleged "moderated jihad" and "enlightened moderation" philosophies. By 2010, most Americans have come to see Pakistan as part of the problem in the war on terror rather than any part of its solution. The near constant involvement of Pakistan's territory in proliferating international terror plots has left the global publics apprehensive about Pakistan. Images of the smiling and even jocular Mr. Faisal Shahzad, a Pakistani-American, who failed to detonate his bomb New York City's Times Square have done little to ameliorate public concerns about Pakistan.

And unlike Haiti, Pakistan has one of the world's largest militaries (with more than 550,000 active troops in the army alone) and a growing nuclear weapons program. The army's demands that it gets the biggest slice of a pie that is inflated in considerable measure by the international community have done little to increase international philanthropic enthusiasm.

To make matters worse, the international community has been hesitant to give to flood relief efforts because of alleged rampant corruption across the government and fears that moneys sent will be diverted into the pockets of Pakistan's corrupt minions rather than the displaced, homeless, food-deprived millions. Civilians are alleged to be more corrupt than army rulers, even the though the latter have provided no better governance than the former. That said, U.S. efforts to provide relief to victims of Hurricane Katrina have recently under scrutiny for corruption as well.

The regrettable truth is that all of these things are likely to be true in some measure and unlikely to change in any time frame relevant to the current humanitarian, social and economic disaster. The international community is exhausted with Pakistan's chronic inability to transform itself into a responsible state that can exert its sovereignty by paying its bills. Pakistanis will unlikely expand the tax net to include the wealthy. The army will continue to cut the resource pie as it likes. Corruption will remain either civilian or military governance. Pakistan is likely to remain a key supporter of groups that the United States and the international community view as extreme dangers to collective security interests such as Lashkar-e-Taiba, Jaish-e-Mohammad and the Afghan Taliban.

But the indifference to the plight of ordinary Pakistanis is a deep cause for international shame.

Changing the Narrative

Even though no country -- howsoever rich or developed -- could manage a disaster the size of this flood, the simple fact is that fewer than 2,000 people died. This indicates that something went very, very right. The government of Pakistan and its domestic and international partners deserve credit for this. The lack of initial lethality should not be a cause for insouciance. The flood will likely to continue claiming victims due to water-borne disease, lack of clean drinking water and sanitation, food scarcity, lack of shelter and the like. Children who are being born and nursed under these conditions may have different -- and less positive -- immediate and long-term health outcomes than cohorts born before the onset of this calamity.

Many of Pakistan's worst hit by the flood were already hit by the same terrorists that the entire world fears and reviles. Pakistan's northern territories of Swat had been ravaged by Pakistan Taliban since 2007. After several brief military approaches, the Pakistan army went in seriously in the summer of 2009 and after more than a year of combat, restored security in Swat. The interregnum was short lived. Within weeks of the Swat Peace Fair in July, the floods came through wiping away a century of infrastructure -- such as it was. Southern Punjab was also hit hard. Southern Punjab has also endured the brunt of terrorism. To deny Pakistan's flood victims assistance is to doubly punish them.

In short, the international community may have its legitimate concerns about the Pakistan government. But Pakistan's people are in dire need of help. We should not shut our eyes to their plight due to these political concerns howsoever valid as even the most effective and transparent government would tremble under the weight of this disaster.

Continued failure to help Pakistan's most vulnerable is indeed a cause for shame.]]> tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2010:/theblog//3.666721 2010-08-02T09:56:23-04:00 2011-05-25T17:15:21-04:00

C. Christine Fair http://www.huffingtonpost.com/c-christine-fair/ has had significant innocent casualties -- from the CIA-led program in Pakistan -- which is covert and therefore not the subject of voyeuristic spectacles posted on YouTube.com.

David Kicullen, a former counterinsurgency advisor to CENTCOM commander Gen. David Petraeus, has been the most influential foe of drones. In May of 2009, he testified before the U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee that the United States should "call off the drones." Later that month, Kilcullen and Andrew M. Exum, who served as an Army Ranger in Iraq and Afghanistan from 2002 to 2004, published a provocative editorial in the New York Times, titled "Death From Above: Outrage from Below."

As I have argued elsewhere, Kilcullen and Exum employed data which Pakistani analysts outright debunk as fabricated to buttress their claim that in the past three years drones assassinated only 14 "terrorist leaders" compared to 700 civilian lives. This is 50 civilians for every militant killed, resulting in a hit rate of 2 percent.

Over the last year, a chorus of U.S.-based analysts has joined Kilcullen in their effort to undermine the most successful tool that the United States and Pakistan have to eliminate dangerous militants that threaten the security of both states on the basis of their purported civilian casualties.

While these maximalist claims are flatly wrong, it has become an article of truth among many Pakistanis and Americans alike that drones are an unaccountable killing machine that both slaughters numerous innocents and tramples Pakistani sovereignty. That Pakistan's own government allows these drones to be based at Pakistani airfields in Shamsi and Jacobabad and provides intelligence for precise targeting does little to attenuate this ill-founded outrage.

Having spent two months in Pakistan where I have made several trips to Peshawar, Swat and even South Waziristan, I continue to collect data which bolster my claims in support of the efficacy of the drone program.


Don't Just Believe the Generals, Police Chiefs, and Diplomats

Earlier in June, I met with a senior army officer in the Pakistan army's 11th Corps in Peshawar who categorically rubbished the claims that drones result in civilian casualties and further offered that those persons killed with the "terrorists" are unlikely to be purely innocent. At a minimum they are aware of the militants in most cases and do nothing but enable them by not providing information to the authorities. In extremis, they are active supporters and collaborators. He cited the example of Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban (Tehreek-e-Taliban-e-Pakistan or TTP) until he was killed in a drone strike in August 2009 along with his second wife while the latter was giving him a leg massage. While she was his wife, she was nonetheless aiding and abetting the mass murderer. Curiously, her own father provided the intelligence that resulted in the death of both his daughter and her ruthless husband likely for remunerative allurements.

This senior officer himself attested to Pakistan's own inability to eliminate key threats and the necessity of the drones to eliminate terrorists in a way that most effectively minimizes the loss of innocent lives. His account accords with that of the police chief of the Northwest Frontier Province (recently renamed Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa) as well with senior officials whom I have met in Pakistan's Foreign Ministry and in various U.S. government agencies.

But don't just believe the word of well-informed military officers overseeing the actual area of operations and other Pakistani officials, listen to the locals of the areas of themselves.

While sitting in a meeting in a Peshawar sitting parlor with several Pakistanis from South Waziristan and other agencies in FATA, one of my hosts articulated what he called a "criminal conspiracy" among the politicians, the intelligence agencies, the media and even the military to sustain a public narrative undermining the drone program while benefiting from the same.

These FATA residents are strong proponents of the drones. They report that the drones are so precise that the local non-militants do not fear them when they hear the drones above as they are confident that they will hit their target. Locals attribute this precision in part to the placement of "targeting chips" which direct the ordinance to the exact location of the militants in their redoubts. The accurate placement of these chips requires local cooperation to provide the whereabouts of these militants. This has driven an important wedge between the locals and militants with the former shunning the latter.

Another interlocutor explained that when children hear the buzz of the drones, they go their roofs to watch the spectacle of precision rather than cowering in fear of random "death from above."

These observers are not alone. Professor Ijaz Khattak, in the Department of International Relations at University of Peshawar explained to a popular television host Skaukat Khattak, that "The drone attacks have proved effective and have targeted the terrorists and there had been little collateral damage in the US drone attacks."

While many locals seem to appreciate the value of the armed drones and are ostensibly aware of who the militants are that are killed, the outrage of the Pakistani public intensifies as one moves farther away from the place where the missiles land. Within the main provinces of Pakistan, there is staunch popular outrage to the drones.

This antipathy towards the program is due in large measure to the collaboration of Pakistan's media to sustain tenacious criticism of the program by spreading suspect civilian casualty reports planted by the militants themselves or various "agencies." It makes no difference that none of these reports can be independently verified because FATA's legal status precludes independent media from traveling there. Nor does it matter that such high figures of civilian loss of life would certainly lead to funerals in large numbers which have not been reported.

Moreover, because the program is technically covert, the U.S. government makes no effort to combat this onslaught of misinformation. The U.S. embassy in Islamabad is in the unenviable position of neither "confirming nor disconfirming" the same drone attacks which President Obama has in numerous fora hailed and even joked about and which White House lawyers defend as legal.


The Changed Debate...At Least in Pakistan

While American opponents of the policy cling to empirically specious claims about the drones and their purported "civilian casualties," within Pakistan itself the debate is far more sophisticated. Since April 2009, many changes have occurred across the Pakistani social landscape albeit with variation across the expanse of its territory.

First, the Pakistani Taliban (Tehreek-e-Taliban-e-Pakistan, TTP) made an enormous strategic blunder. Throughout the early months of 2009, the provincial officials of Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa as well as the central government were negotiating a so-called peace deal with the militants associated with the TTP operating in the settled area of Swat. By most accounts, Pakistanis as well as Swatis themselves embraced this as a viable option to diminish the violence and restore peace to this territory that had been riven by TTP violence. As the ink on the deal was drying, the TTP breached the agreement in April 2009 and overran the town of Buner, sitting to the immediate west of the Indus River.

This had two effects. First, it persuaded those in Swat and elsewhere, who had previously supported the Taliban's self-proclaimed campaign to restore good governance and provide access to justice, that the Taliban were not interested in peaceful coexistence and were in fact committed to violence and expansion of power.

Second, the onslaught against Buner had a powerful impact upon Pakistani opinion about the intentions of the TTP militant. Pakistanis have long viewed the Indus as an important barrier dividing the Pakistani heartland, comprised primarily of the Punjab and which lies to the east of the Indus, and the "uncontrollable" land of the Pashtuns lying to the east of the Indus. For Pakistanis the unruliness of this area increases as you move from the so-called "settled" Pashtun areas of Khyber-Pakhtoonkhwa towards the west where the "unsettled" tribal belt abuts Afghanistan. When the TTP militants came to the border of the Indus, many Pakistanis who were confident that the TTP only wanted the "Pashtun areas," came to believed the TTP militants want of all of Pakistan.

These apprehensions were confirmed and even intensified when Sufi Mohammad -- a local leader of the TTP in Swat -- convened a congregation in the Swat city of Mingora and denounced the Pakistani constitution, declaring that Islam cannot accommodate democracy and that western democracy in particular was a system of infidels that has divided Pakistani society.

Robust military operations began thereafter, this time with the significant degree of support of the public and diminished opposition to the same. Some four million persons were displaced from Swat once the operation began. (The army encouraged this displacement to permit it freedom of action against the militants; although the exodus was ill-planned with only a few days notice.)

During my recent two trips to Swat, the Swatis I met from the Mingora area are generally pleased with the army's operation and are -- for now -- glad the army is in place. These Swatis see the army as the one organization that gets things done in contrast to the civil administration which has yet to re-establish itself after the militants drove out civil authorities.

Amidst allegations that the army was indiscriminate in its use of force, some Pakistanis began arguing that Pakistan should have its own drones to allow Pakistani forces to have the same accuracy as US forces. Increasingly Pakistani officials are requesting that the United States provide drones or at least let them have a role in pulling the trigger. Advocates of Pakistani drones or increased command and control over U.S. drones note that armed drones have neither displaced millions of Pakistanis nor resulted in the destruction of homes on a large scale.


Killing Whose Enemies? Killing Our Enemies

The August 2009 killing of Baitullah Mehsud catalyzed another shift in the Pakistani discourse. This was the first drone strike that killed a Pakistani militant who was exclusively an enemy of Pakistan. As Baitullah Mehsud had no operational import for the U.S. mission in Afghanistan, Pakistan understood that the United States was finally employing its use of force to contend with Pakistan's own internal foes.

This shift in the drone debate is an important shift that few American interlocutors appreciate as they sustain a baseless narrative that is deaf to the realities across Pakistan. Drones went from being universally dismissed among Pakistanis as a horrific menace to an instrument of significantly and comparatively humane lethality relative to other options.

American analysts would be better served by appreciating the developing nuances in the drone debate in Pakistan before seeking to undermine the best program that the United States and Pakistan have in their mutual war on terror. Both American and Pakistani governments can help foster a more constructive debate by owning the program and disclosing Pakistan's ever-increasing cooperation to shape the debate by providing empirical data about the drones' victims and their operational significance. Few Pakistanis in the FATA, Khyber Pakhtoonkhwa or elsewhere in Pakistan would disagree that the world is a better place without Baitullah Mehsud in it.]]>