Fatima & Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto Jr's loving tribute to their Joonam

Fatima & Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto Jr's loving tribute to their Joonam published in Paper Magazine

Source: http://styleonpaper.com/2012/11/23/fatima-and-zulfikar-ali-bhuttos-loving-tribute-to-their-joonam/ 

Pakistan on the Brink by Ahmed Rashid – review

Fatima Bhutto questions a study in which power has replaced the people and western narratives elbow out the real story

At the start of Pakistan on the Brink, Ahmed Rashid confesses that he didn't really want to write the book and that it was "forced" out of "a very reluctant author" by editors and publishers. To which one might uncharitably reply: we didn't want to read it either. The third book in a trilogy, following Taliban and Descent into Chaos, is a compendium of statistics, bomb counts and Wiki knowledge. If you've paid attention to the news during the past 12 years, you already know most of this.

It's also a little out of date. The killing of Burhanuddin Rabbani, the deadly attacks on Pakistan's naval and military bases over the past year, the rise of the Punjabi Taliban, and the murder of Afghan president Hamid Karzai's brother are only fleetingly described; the coming US elections are ignored and Osama bin Laden's death in Pakistan last spring is given only a cursory glance.

But the book's central fault is that Rashid's teleology is dedicatedly western. And it is precisely this sort of thinking that got us into the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq in the first place. There is no context that is not westernised for clarity (Bin Laden's retirement home of Abbottabad is like a "British country seat", a Pakistani military academy is a "West Point"). Rashid, whom his fellow Pakistani author Tariq Ali once called a "prize cock of the US defence establishment and videosphere", may have soured slightly in his views of the American government and its war in Afghanistan, but he still uses its language.

For Rashid the problem seems to be not that US and European troops are mired in a bloody, imperially designed and unwinnable war, but that there aren't enough of them to get the job done in good time. Only once is the conflict noticeably described in less than necessary terms, when Mullah Baradarof the Taliban is quoted as calling it a "game of colonisation". Rashid berates Obama for not "personalising" the war in Afghanistan and for not telling in any detail stories of Afghans and their plight. Yet he doesn't either. There's not one account of how people have suffered underOperation Enduring Freedom, merely statistics of doom.

Rashid made his name by bringing to light forgotten stories, but he has now become the story. The book's acknowledgments offer thanks to "all manner" of "bureaucrats, politicians and heads of state". Countless anecdotes begin with him advising the world's most powerful men on how to run their war (only for them to do the opposite). In his histories, power has replaced the people.

The chapter on the 2009 war in the Swat valley between the Pakistani army and Islamist militants is titled "A sliver of hope", but Rashid devotes hardly any space to the awful conditions 1.4 million internal refugees were held in after they had fled from the fighting. The UN called it "one of the world's worst displacement crises" and journalists, both international and local, were deliberately denied access. For Rashid, however, Pakistan gets an A grade for the war.

Pakistan and India are depicted one-dimensionally as paranoid powers unable to consider each other outside destructive paradigms – which indeed they might be, but their populations have long wanted peace, and are currently engaged in many hopeful people-to-people initiatives.

Sotto vocce, he tells us that anti-American sentiment in Pakistan is whipped up by the military and the nefarious Inter-Services Intelligence. According to Rashid, intelligence agencies manipulated the violent protests against Nato last November, following the airstrike that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers (and for which the Pentagon grudgingly expressed "deepest regret"). But the author fails to understand that after a 12-year war, diplomatic dealings that are a perpetual exercise in humiliation, and hundreds, if not thousands, of innocent civilian deaths at the hands of drones, the one thing the Pakistani army need not manipulate is anti-American sentiment. The US military, with its trigger-happy contractors and recent renegade shooters, Raymond Davis and Sgt Robert Bales, does a fine job of whipping that up all by itself.

At least, if belatedly, Rashid has cooled off in his affection for President Karzai. Gone are the days when he wrote articles entitled "How my friend outwitted the mullahs", as he did for the Daily Telegraph in 2001. Karzai, who has presided over gross corruption, factionalism and dashed hopes for Afghanistan for the past eight years, is finally described as he is: "increasingly paranoid" and "controversial". Rashid deserves credit, too, for going after Pakistan's villainous elite, often celebrated as the country's last hope.

Readers of his previous work will know that Rashid possesses a sophisticated understanding of Pakistan, Afghanistan and the US, but here he offers disappointingly bite-sized analyses of places one would expect him to delve deeper into. On the decades-long secessionist insurgency in Balochistan, he references only a Human Rights Watch director called Brad: he doesn't speak to any Baloch groups or survivors of the army's campaign of violence. Karachi, Rashid surmises in a hurry, could easily be taken over by the Taliban "when they feel the time is right". Such foggy analysis is a betrayal of centuries of the city's syncretic, tolerant history, during which it has offered space to Christians, Hindus, Jews, Parsis and Sufis. We need to know more, but no nuance is available when an author is being pressed to complete a trilogy.

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2012/apr/27/pakistan-brink-ahmed-rashid-review?CMP=twt_gu

The Diary: Fatima Bhutto

The Pakistani author talks about a visit to Jaipur and learning from a younger brother

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/8a4f45dc-50cb-11e1-ab40-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1m3ORn2fH

The Artist of Disappearance - reviewed by Fatima Bhutto

You can find the review at the following

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/2/a865aa7a-bcf6-11e0-bdb1-00144feabdc0.html#axzz1UFfk6nQO

Why Karachi's violence shouldn't define city by Fatima Bhutto

Author Fatima Bhutto's latest book is "Songs of Blood and Sword," a memoir of dynasty and politics in Pakistan. She is a member of the Bhutto family: her grandfather Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was Pakistan's first democratically elected head of state; her aunt is the late Pakistani premier, Benazir Bhutto. Fatima Bhutto lives and writes in Karachi, Pakistan. Visit her website and follow her on Twitter @fbhutto

Karachi, Pakistan (CNN) -- Karachi has long been the face Pakistan wished to show to the world. The port city, one of the largest cities in the world -- placed sixth or seventh, depending on whom you ask, with a population of more than 18 million -- once represented the ideal of what Pakistan ought to have been.

Karachi was and still is the nation's most ethnically diverse, carrying a reputation for being generously accepting and accommodating; a city that opened its doors to refugees, to migrants, to traders, artists and business communities who sought a harbor from which to connect to the outside shores. With communities as varied as Zoroastrians whose philanthropy built much of the city, Jews at one time, Baha'is and Hindus amongst many others, Karachi is undoubtedly the most religiously tolerant of its fellow cities. But this is no longer the face of Karachi that the world can see.

It is a city now plagued by internecine violence, targeted killings and lawlessness. Karachi has become the battleground, as it always has been, for the country's inept and corrupt political elements. Even though 70% of the total annual tax revenue collected by Pakistan's government comes from Karachi -- the country's stock exchange is here, and it is the commercial pulse of Pakistan -- the government has been content to let the carnage in Karachi fester.

While Karachi, like all big cities, has always had its fair share of crime, the violence here mutates and constantly changes form. At times it is gang-related as it is now, the bloodshed mercilessly fought out between powerful criminal mobs with high-level political patronage from the ruling parties. At other times it has been more outward looking, and embassies and foreign fast-food franchises have been the target of ire against the War on Terror, a war most Pakistanis see as unjust and illegal.

And then there have been brutal suppressions of democratic protests here -- movements against martial law, various dictators and politically oppressive dictates have been cruelly put down by state forces in the city.

But we are not a city that operates under religious extremism. Karachi's violence has nothing to do with Islam, with Islamic fundamentalism or the ugly manifestations of religious violence. In fact, it is a city that in recent years has largely managed to hold itself away from this growing trend. The Danish cartoon riots in the city were less enthusiastic than in other parts of the country. The recent violence against the blasphemy laws was almost totally confined to the Punjab province, and religious parties in Karachi have traditionally been viewed with a mixture of antipathy and disinterest.

It's not Islam. Our violence has to do with politics.

The ruling Pakistan People's Party -- under its current leadership nicknamed the Permanent Plunder Party or the Pakistan People's Problem by the more creatively frustrated -- have been fighting their coalition partners the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, an ethnic Muhajir party based largely in Karachi, almost since the start of their tenure in power.

Just this month, the PPP's senior provincial minister Zulfiqar Mirza fueled deadly protests in Karachi after he attacked the MQM, referring to it as being a party of "criminals, target killers and extortionists." The name-calling prompted the MQM to label the comments as hate speech, and Mirza apologized. A week later it was the MQM that accused Mirza of running "killing brigades," staging a walkout from the National Assembly with the Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) in protest. The prime minister has ordered an investigation --- one of the many he has ordered this year in the face of growing outrage over his government's mishandling of the law-and-order situation in Karachi.

Two weeks ago Karachi saw a death toll of some 100 people killed in just about five days, casualties in a turf war waged between activists from political parties. Perhaps one shouldn't be surprised. In the mid-1990s, when the PPP and the MQM last formed a coalition government the two also fought a war on Karachi's streets; some 3,000 people were killed during what's known as "Operation Clean Up."

Meanwhile, the MQM is attacking the Pushtoon-based Awami National Party for control over the city's transport routes, an economic turf war that has been increasingly bloody. When the violence becomes inflamed, as has happened this July, the MQM threatens to walk out of the government, sometimes does, and then duly returns a few days later. And so the cycle continues, although leaders of the three parties met this week and agreed to work toward peace in the city.

The violence, which reared its head in 2008, has seen bodies dumped on roadsides in gunnysacks, riots that paralyze the city, journalists killed, and hundreds upon hundreds of innocents killed and maimed. Political activists saw a high death toll last year; as many as 237 were killed as were 300 other civilians in the city, according to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan. The Human Rights Commission of Pakistan has calculated that 1,100 people have been murdered in the first half of this year, a murder rate that matches that of Cuidad Juarez, Mexico's infamously dangerous city caught in a brutal drug war. Juarez, however, has seen its homicides and violent crimes decline in recent months, while ours is escalating.

The Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies claims that overall violence in Karachi last year rose by 288% from the previous year, thanks to sectarian and political violence, crime and lawlessness. The government has responded to the violence by issuing orders for Karachi's paramilitary Ranger forces to shoot on sight armed men. But that's it for political solutions to our city's bloodshed: more bloodshed.

But Karachiites still hold on to a view of their city that is untarnished by this violence. Businesses open their shutters every day and run their trade without electricity -- cut for hours in the hot summer months and hours more in the winter. Couples still stand on Netty Jetty Bridge, built at the time of the Raj to connect the port to the rest of the city and make wishes into the salty sea.

We are aware of the many problems this city must face because we know that this violence doesn't define our city. It is imposed upon us, but it is not of us. Drive around the streets from Saddar to Korangi, and you'll see amongst the ubiquitous political sloganeering painted Urdu paeons to Karachi. This is a survivor's city.

Source: http://edition.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/07/28/bhutto.karachi/index.html?hpt=hp_c2

Pakistan v. Pakistan: On Anatol Lieven by Fatima Bhutto

To write a book about Pakistan and give it the subtitle “A Hard Country” is a bit like writing a book on Russia and calling it “Russia: A Cold Country,” or dubbing one on Australia “A Far Away Country.” As Anatol Lieven explains, the accidental author of his book’s subtitle is a landowner-politician in the Sindh province of southern Pakistan. “This is a hard country,” the man told Lieven, a place where anyone not in government needs protection from the police, the courts, the bandits, from practically every corner of society. As Lieven shows, while Pakistan may not be hard to understand, it is a dangerous, fearsome country, a hard place to live and harder still to govern. Besides, “A Hard Country” has a nice ring when you consider that the preliminary title of Lieven’s project was “How Pakistan Works.” That would have made for a very short book.

One could also say that Pakistan, despite having the sixth-largest population in the world, is the most familiar unfamiliar country. Everyone knows why they should be afraid of Pakistan—terrorism, Al Qaeda, the Taliban, Asif Zardari (the country’s current president). But good explanations of what any of these menaces mean in a Pakistani context, and how they came to be a part of the nation’s nightmarish social fabric—if indeed they are—are hard to come by. It is a relief that Lieven begins with a calming down, stressing that for all the country’s problems, and contrary to the sensationalism of headline editors in the West, Pakistan is not a failed state. Nor are its problems regional exceptions; insurgencies, rebellions, corruption, autocratic tendencies and inept elites, he reminds us, are rampant throughout southern Asia.

Lieven has written a sensible and thorough exploration of Pakistan’s political sphere—from its politicians, provinces and state structures to the burgeoning Taliban, which are unfairly coming to define the sixty-four-year-old country in Western minds. The terror inflicted on Pakistan by the Taliban, Lieven assures, is a sign not of the group’s strength but its weakness: the surest way to fail at building a mass movement is to kill the people most likely to offer support. Absent institution building, a revolt within military ranks and alliances with popular uprisings, the Taliban are a guerrilla movement operating in a blind alley. Pakistan is not, then, in danger of imploding—not unless the United States allows its disastrous war in Afghanistan to spill over into all of Pakistan, or dispatches the Navy SEALs to kill an Al Qaeda lieutenant living in the country.

Surveying four decades of politicians and their legacies, Lieven is neither exaggerating nor engaging in hyperbole when he says that all of Pakistan’s leaders, whether elected or installed by a military coup, have failed to change the country’s status quo: “Every single one of them found their regimes ingested by the elites they had hoped to displace, and engaged in the same patronage politics as the regimes they had overthrown.” No one is spared from this stinging assessment, and rightly so. When it comes to Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Lieven is for the most part fair, if not contradictory. He acknowledges that Bhutto, who founded the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) in 1967 and in 1971 became Pakistan’s first democratically elected head of state, “tried to rally the Pakistani masses behind him with a programme of anti-elitist economic populism, also mixed with Pakistani nationalism.” It was the only time a civilian administration sought to enact radical change. But in retrospect, Lieven explains that Bhutto’s government, which was in power for six years, was more dictatorial than the regimes of Gen. Ayub Khan (who ruled from 1958 to 1969) and Gen. Pervez Musharraf (whose nine-year reign began in 1999). Expanding his powers in defiance of the Constitution, certainly an authoritarian move, was one of many egregious mistakes made by Bhutto during his otherwise popular rule as president and prime minister. Still, Bhutto was no dictator. His mandate came directly from the people, and can’t plausibly be compared to that of Khan or Musharraf, generals who ruled Pakistan according to the pulse of the army barracks and the many defense agreements with the United States.

There are certain errors in Lieven’s discussion of Bhutto’s career that demand clarification, and the fault for them lies perhaps not with Lieven alone. Zulfikar Ali Bhutto was an overwhelming figure in Pakistan’s political landscape, and great myths, both laudatory and vengeful, have clustered around his name (Zulfikar was my grandfather). The first of Lieven’s foggy claims is that for some time after Bhutto’s execution in 1979, the PPP was headed by Gen. Tikka Khan, who led the army’s notorious campaign of violence in East Pakistan during the 1971 war of secession, and soon thereafter directed the bloody suppression of separatists in Baluchistan. Unfortunately, there is no denying that Tikka Khan belonged to the PPP, which should have sought his trial for war crimes rather than admit him to its ranks; nevertheless, it was during Benazir Bhutto’s leadership of the PPP in the mid-’80s, not during Zulfikar’s, that Tikka Khan held the position of secretary general.

When discussing the pre-1971 division of Pakistan into east and west wings separated by thousands of kilometers of hostile Indian territory, Lieven is too quick to excuse the army for its role in the impasse that broke the country. Pakistan was led by one military dictator, Gen. Ayub Khan, when Sheikh Mujibur Rahman of the Awami League presented his six points for the secession of the east, and by another, Gen. Yahya Khan, when the country was divided. Lieven softens the military’s role in Pakistan’s breakup by blaming Bhutto, the winner of the elections in the west (Rahman swept the east), for the deadlock that led to the creation of Bangladesh. He does not note that the Hamoodur Rehman Commission’s report on the breakup of Pakistan, commissioned in 1971 and completed in 1974, has never been released in an uncensored form. Western historians tend to place the blame on Bhutto and Rehman without recognizing that when it comes to Bangladesh, the state’s role in the violence, both political and military, was ultimately and ferociously determined by the armed forces.

The third foggy claim is that Bhutto’s radical measures in the field of nationalization were not fully implemented. Lieven states that Bhutto’s “socialist finance minister Mubashir Hasan had wanted the nationalization of urban land, and the collectivization of agriculture—something that would have led to counter-revolution and bloody civil war across the country.” (More generally, Lieven calls Bhutto’s economic policy “disastrous.”) I put the claim to Hasan, a founding member of the PPP who lives in Lahore and remains active in politics. “The question of nationalizing urban land never passed through the mind of the party,” Hasan told me in an e-mail. Lieven misunderstands a “Punjab law, not a Pakistan law, which permitted acquisition of land in urban areas for the purpose of housing and also for the acquisition of slum land which could then be handed over in ownership to the occupants. The whole thing arose because there were 120 slums in Lahore with a population of over a million. Urban landlords owning the slums were exacting high rent under duress. They also owned large areas of Lahore lying vacant in the midst of very high population density. In both cases, compensation was paid, though the rate of compensation was less than market price.”

Post-Bhutto, Lieven leads the reader through a lineup of the usual suspects: the military; Benazir Bhutto, who became the head of her father’s PPP in 1984, presided over two governments and was assassinated in 2007; and Nawaz Sharif, twice prime minister and the leader of the Punjabi-based Pakistan Muslim League (Nawaz), or PML(N), the second-largest national party in the country. Nawaz Sharif and his younger brother Shahbaz own the Ittefaq group, one of Pakistan’s largest and most prominent business conglomerates, whose large industrial portfolio includes steel and textile mills. Lieven is circumspect in his accounts of them all. He is not seduced by the glamour and “like us”–ness of Benazir Bhutto, who was educated at Harvard and Oxford and spoke English with a cut-glass accent. Correctly, he criticizes Benazir for making vain concessions to Islamists in a desperate attempt to mollify Islamic parties, which at the time—in the mid-1990s (and, as Lieven notes, until 9/11)—were woefully unpopular. Bhutto set in motion the appeasement process with Islamist groups by granting the administration of the Malakand region the right to incorporate Sharia law into its justice process; she also recognized the Taliban government in Afghanistan. Lieven suggests that she was carrying on a family tradition. Her father, a secular politician, banned alcohol and gambling in Pakistan to appease Islamists.

When it comes to the ethnic Muhajir Muttahida Quami Mahaz (MQM) party, whose hypervigilant cadres, tireless press offices and technological expertise arguably have made it Pakistan’s best-organized party, Lieven is careful to contrast its well-groomed image of being Pakistan’s only so-called secular party with its violent and thuggish past. Based in Karachi, the party “built up a powerful armed wing” in the 1980s that targeted militants from other parties and “journalists and others who dared to criticize the MQM in public,” Lieven writes. “Torture chambers were established for the interrogation of captured enemies.” Nor does he mince his words when it comes to Pakistan’s current president, Benazir Bhutto’s merry widower, Asif Zardari, under whose leadership the PPP has enjoyed many new sobriquets, the Permanent Plunder Party being the best of them.

The PPP’s assertion that it is a party of the poor and powerless is contradicted not only by evidence of its orgiastic corruption over the past twenty years (John Burns of the New York Times wrote the seminal condemnation of the first couple’s venality in 1998) but also by the high-level federal ministers and politicians from its ranks whose hands have been dirtied in honor-killing cases. The cases Lieven describes are infamous in Pakistan but rarely discussed outside the country, which is perhaps understandable considering how deeply the United States and Britain are invested in maintaining the power and stability of the ruling party.

In a case from 2008, three teenage girls from Baluchistan were sentenced to death by a tribal jirga for trying to marry men of their own choosing. Two female relatives of the girls tried to intercede and were shot. The three girls were shot and buried while still alive. Sardar Israrullah Zehri, a local chieftain and senator with the PPP, sided with the girls’ killers: “These are centuries-old traditions, and I will continue to defend them.” As a reward for his candor, Zehri was appointed minister of posts. In another case, Abid Husain Jatoi, also a local chieftain, presided over a jirga that condemned to death a girl from the Jatoi tribe who had eloped with a boy from another tribe. For this verdict Jatoi was appointed provincial minister of fisheries and livestock. (The regional high court ended up interceding to protect the couple.) In a third case, the PPP’s federal education minister, Mir Hazar Khan Bijrani, was charged by the country’s Supreme Court for his role in settling a dispute between two families by ordering a marriage swap—the guilty family had to hand over five girls to the aggrieved family. The eldest of the girls was 6; the youngest was 2. None of these politicians, all of whom hold senior government posts, have been expelled from the PPP or reprimanded in any way.

Lieven criticizes the Sharif clan and its PML(N) for their Punjabi chauvinism, a criticism much made in Pakistan but less so in the West, where the main worry about the Sharifs is their affection for the Saudis. In March 2010, Shahbaz Sharif, the province’s chief minister and the brains behind the Sharif operations, publicly beseeched the Taliban not to attack Punjab. The rest of Pakistan was fair game, he offered, but because the PML(N) opposed many of General Musharraf’s policies (while remaining schtum on the “war on terror”), and could therefore be seen as “fighting for the same cause” as the Taliban, Punjab should be treated as an ally of the Taliban. (When Senator John Kerry came to Pakistan in February to lobby for the release of Raymond Davis, the CIA operative who shot two Pakistanis in the middle of Lahore, he met Shahbaz Sharif’s brother. Nawaz Sharif greeted his guest as “Senator Kerry Lugar,” confusing the senator with the bill passed in 2009 that directs billions of dollars in nonmilitary aid to Pakistan. Sharif did not call him “Senator Kerry Lugar Bill.” One should be thankful for small graces, I suppose.) The charge sheet that Lieven compiles on the Sharifs, who came to prominence under the mentorship of Pakistan’s fundamentalist dictator Gen. Zia ul-Haq, who ruled from 1977 to 1988, resembles the one he pins on Benazir Bhutto: encouraging monumental graft, presiding over killings carried out by the state’s security agencies, packing courts and sacking judges who don’t toe the party line, and acquiescing to Islamist parties and their demands.

The only public figure who impressed Lieven during the eight years he spent reporting and researching his book is the police surgeon of Baluchistan, a 58-year-old Pathan grandmother named Shamim Gul. Gul travels around Baluchistan at night without a police escort, exhuming rotting corpses from ditches and examining them in ad hoc morgues. In a province like Baluchistan, where extrajudicial killings are common, the dead are left unreported, their missing corpses warnings to the living. (It was Gul who discovered the bodies of the three girls sentenced to death by tribal jirga in 2008.) That Lieven does not focus more on Pakistanis like Gul, a citizen who manages to survive with a pronounced sense of dignity and justice, suggests that he is interested only in looking at Pakistan as a hard country.

When it comes to assessing the legacy of those lacking any sense of justice, Pakistan’s pantheon of dictators, Lieven weaves through the assortment deftly, though perhaps a little generously. He finds it striking “how mild” Pakistan’s dictators have been by historical standards. Lieven credits Gen. Ayub Khan with removing “the ‘Islamic’ label from the official name of the Republic of Pakistan.” However, he was not as steadfast a secular reformer as Lieven suggests. While he did omit “Islamic” from the name of the republic under the 1962 “Constitution,” to use the word very loosely, he had it begin in the name of Allah and affirm that “sovereignty over the entire Universe belongs to Almighty Allah.” It goes on to say that “Pakistan would be a democratic State based on Islamic principles of social justice,” and that “the principles of democracy…as enunciated by Islam, shall be fully observed in Pakistan.” Most bizarre, Lieven says that the Islamicization undertaken by Gen. Zia ul-Haq “proved generally superficial.” Yet it was under the Wahhabi-inspired dictator that the country’s bloody blasphemy laws were enacted, along with the Hudood ordinances, violent laws against women that treat adultery and premarital intercourse as crimes punishable by death. The ordinances were “revised” once, in 2006, with the passage of General Musharraf’s Women’s Protection Bill, which struck the clause stipulating that for rape to be considered a crime before a court of law, four good male Muslims must have witnessed the alleged act. The 2006 bill was an eye-wash of the draconian laws because it has been virtually impossible to implement in police stations across the country.

Lieven is impartial when discussing Musharraf, who painstakingly cultivated an image of himself as a “dictator-lite.” He points to Musharraf’s oddly munificent opening of the media through the granting of television licenses (by 2009 there were more than eighty privately run TV channels, twelve of which were devoted exclusively to the news, and only five of which were devoted to evangelical-style religious programming). He notes the political devolution Musharraf undertook by granting more power to local elected bodies, an arrangement the Zardari government was quick to dismantle. But Lieven makes little mention of how under Musharraf some 10,000 people were disappeared in Baluchistan, according to the estimates of human rights groups, and in the same manner that people were disappeared in Latin America during the dirty wars. Covetous of the province’s rich gas fields (copper mines are now its prized resource) and wary of its secessionist politics and fervently anti-military history, the Musharraf dictatorship struck at Baluchistan with brute force, its most daring act being the army’s alleged assassination of the renowned Baluch tribal leader Akbar Bugti in 2006. In the last eight months, the bullet-ridden and mutilated bodies of 150 missing Baluch activists have been found around the province. This too is perhaps a part of the legacy of what Musharraf touted as his program of “enlightened moderation.”

Though his study of Pakistan’s military despots is at times forgiving, Lieven shines an unsparing light on the workings of Pakistan’s military, one of the largest in the world. He analyzes the institution not simply as an army or as a gang of power brokers but as a corporation. Through its Fauji Foundation the army has a hand in many profitable enterprises, including cement, cereal, banking and real estate. Lieven collates astounding figures—for example, in the 1980s, at the height of the US adventure against the Soviets in Afghanistan, Pakistan allocated 60 percent of its federal budget to military spending—and transposes them onto historical complexities, easily explaining context that is otherwise murky. Those who wonder how the army and nefarious Inter-Services Intelligence became so powerful need to look only as far back as the 1980s and the first American escapade in Afghanistan. Unlike so many foreign pundits, Lieven does not appear confused by the military’s inability to fight its own people as required by the dictates of the US “war on terror.” “We are being ordered to launch a Pakistani civil war for the sake of America,” a Pakistani officer told Lieven in 2002. “Why on earth should we? Why should we commit suicide for you?” While it’s true that the United States has enthusiastically propped up every one of Pakistan’s four military dictators, Lieven points out that “US administrations have no preference for military government or indeed any kind of government in Pakistan as long as that government does what the US wants.” Lieven is possibly the first non-Pakistani I’ve read who connects these glaring dots.

Although parts of Lieven’s work are reminiscent of textbooks that offer instructive though dull education, those about the structures of the Pakistani state and the Taliban are cogent, clear and illuminating. From the outset, Lieven stresses that for all its problems, Pakistan is not on the verge of collapse. It is beleaguered by many problems, but “Islamist extremism in Pakistan presents little danger of overthrowing the state unless US pressure has already split and crippled that state.” The Taliban were not formed in a day, and some of the underlying causes of their emergence in Pakistan include corruption, political vacuums, incompetent politicians and capitulation to a war that most Pakistanis see as unjust and tailored to the national security prerogatives of the United States.

Before discussing the Taliban and broaching the matter of their increasing popularity, Lieven tackles the question of the inaccessibility of justice in Pakistan. He raised the subject with Imran Aslam, the president of Geo TV and an excellent guide to the country; Aslam is someone more pundits and hacks should seek out instead of the usual assortment of politicians with foreign passports well versed in singing for their supper (the Washington Post has a direct line to this crew). “Ask ordinary people here about democracy,” Aslam told Lieven, “and they can’t really explain it; but ask them about justice, and they understand it well, because unlike democracy issues of justice are a part of their daily lives. Also, a sense of justice comes from Islam—a third of the names of God have something to do with justice, fairness, harmony or balance. Issues of electoral democracy have no necessary relation to this, because in Pakistan electoral democracy has little to do with the will of ordinary workers.” As an example, Lieven reports that as of spring 2009, there were more than 100,000 cases pending before the 110 judges of the Karachi city courts alone. Theoretically, some courts are supposed to hear 100 cases a day.

The scarcity of civilian justice makes the Taliban an attractive and viable legal option. They police towns, enforcing their own harsh version of law and order and providing legal mediation that, though often brutal, is seen as quick and fair. Lieven quotes a farmer in the northern region of the country who proclaims, “Taleban justice is better than that of the Pakistani state. If you have any problem, you can go to the Taleban and they will solve it without you having to pay anything—not like the courts and police, who will take your money and do nothing.” Even if the state courts did rule on cases, the difference between their verdicts and those of the Taliban would in certain cases be slight. For the past three decades Pakistan has had federal laws on the books that would put to death a woman who commits adultery. So would the Taliban, but they would execute the law faster. The Taliban also run madrassas in regions where there are no government schools (there are thousands of such voids) and operate mobile medical vans during times of urgent need, such as the devastating 2010 floods. State hospitals lack the funds, equipment and capability to provide adequate medical care.

Lieven’s account of this newly indigenous Taliban is sturdy and insightful. He explores the history of the Taliban and the army, which supported and propped up the Afghan Taliban during their infancy. In a particularly strong section, he describes the revolt in the Swat Valley in 2007, when a local autonomous group of Islamists marching under the banner of the Taliban took control of the region. Lieven explains that the state initially turned a blind eye to the valley’s Islamist elements; it decided to oppose them only when advantage could be gained by condemning the very situation it had let fester for so long. He talks with those Pakistanis, mostly poor, who have benefited from Taliban rule and therefore support and perpetuate it; and he talks with the lower-middle-class traders, farmers and merchants caught in the middle of a failed establishment and the Taliban. He does not speak to nervy Lahori socialites or businessmen in Islamabad who live in bubbles that have kept them from encountering Islamists in the flesh, though they are eager to sound the alarm over political Islam’s imminent takeover.

Pakistan is a large subject, and an unforgivingly complicated one at that, yet Lieven manages to tackle some of its most obscure problems without losing his cool. Aside from a few stray moments—including an ill-advised confession of wishing he possessed the powers of Gen. Sir Charles Napier, the Raj commander in chief in India (Karachi remembers Sir Charles Napier in its red-light district, helpfully located on the street that bears his name)—he doesn’t treat Pakistanis like curios. Lieven has written a very measured book, no easy task when writing about such a hard country.

Source: http://www.thenation.com/article/161723/pakistan-v-pakistan-anatol-lieven?page=0,0

JOINING THE DOTS

Faiza Butt fuses ancient art and modern mores

By Fatima Bhutto

Faiza Butt came of age during Pakistan’s most barbarous period of military dictatorship, when General Zia-ul-Haq’s hyper-fundamentalist junta deemed women, minorities and artists to be threats to the nation. But rather than bow to his newly imposed norms of “decency”, the Lahore National College of Arts and Slade-trained artist decided to make her living fighting back, through what dictators would consider decidedly indecent images. Butt trains her critical eye on subjects as diverse as the global capitalist economy, Afghan jihadis, Eminem, ex-mayor of New York City Rudy Giuliani, homoerotically oiled-to-the-gills pehlwan wrestlers, despots, Guantánamo Bay innocents and John Travolta, to create intricate portraits full of depths and shadows using the purdukht style – the infinitesimal dots of Indian miniatures of centuries past. Now based in Britain, a place she sees as not so dissimilar to Saudi Arabia – “They’re both kingdoms” – Butt draws much of her inspiration and ire from the country of her birth. When, not long ago, it was reported that the new, indigenous branch of the Taliban was targeting Pakistani barbershops to scare men away from shaving off holy-looking facial hair, Butt connected the dots to create a portrait of two turbanned Talib, face to face and lip to lip. It was an attack on the cloned image of the self they were promoting, she explained. Was it a Talib kissing his reflection in the mirror, then, or two bearded men locked in a passionate snog? “It’s strange how Freud associated homosexuality with narcissism,” Butt reflects. “It’s questionable, I suppose.” Another pair of Talib, effeminately handsome with their kohl-lined eyes and burly physiques, hold hands in the middle of a framework of pistols, flags, hairdryers and the cosmos. Faiza Butt makes me proud to be Pakistani. There, I said it.

Source: http://www.tankmagazine.com/magazine/culture/joining-the-dots-2189

The Diary: Fatima Bhutto

After an epic journey I reach Auckland airport – and find I have arrived ahead of my luggage. The carousel, which has a sign advising us to take care while “uplifting” our cases, seems to mock those of us who have nothing to uplift at all. Luggage-less, I go shopping for emergency clothing and find merino wool isn’t the only local fashion export. Possum fur and possum wool is just as popular. I examine possum socks, hats, and shawls and consider whether possum gloves would be an appropriate gift for my environmentally conscious brother, but decide against.

I have come to New Zealand to take part in the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival. Seven authors have been asked to talk unscripted for seven minutes on anything to do with “the alphabet”. I speak about illiteracy in Pakistan and an Afghan refugee school on the outskirts of Karachi. A friend and I have raised some money to buy second-hand computers for the children. Several people from the audience ask how they might get in touch with the school – unsurprising, as I found New Zealanders to be among the warmest people in the world.

Reunited with my luggage, the rest of my five days in Auckland are a pleasant whirlwind. My greatest accomplishment is honing a Kiwi accent. I pick it up enthusiastically and start to say “Yis” to everything. My other favourites include “idge” (edge) and “bid” (bed) and I’m convinced I could soon be mistaken for a local. By a foreigner, it goes without saying.

. . .

Travelling so soon after Osama bin Laden’s killing in Pakistan means that I am asked on an hourly basis – by airport officials, taxi drivers, and complete strangers – just what Pakistan knew about the world’s (formerly) most wanted man’s decision to choose our country for his retirement. As a Pakistani, they suggest, I must have known something, surely? No, I counter wearily, we were not all sent a memo. We are not all bin Laden aficionados. Some of us are more concerned with the unrecorded number of civilian deaths in Pakistan from unmanned US drone strikes than with the conspiracy-laden killing of one man.

Pakistan is at present pleading ignorance – the military acknowledged intelligence shortcomings regarding bin Laden and in a statement put out in the week after the killing reminded everyone that it was their unparalleled “cooperation” that has led to more al-Qaeda captures in Pakistan than any other country – which sounds like an incriminating thing to be bragging about. Meanwhile, apart from an article in the Washington Post (unsurprisingly, a paper which doesn’t have many subscribers in Pakistan), president Asif Ali Zardari has been quiet on the subject.

Writing in the US magazine The Nation, Jeremy Scahill mentioned a so-called “hot pursuit” agreement signed between Pakistan’s former president Pervez Musharraf and General Stanley McChrystal, American’s former commander in Afganistan, which allows US Special Operations Forces to conduct targeted assassinations and capture operations on Pakistani soil with the stipulation that Pakistan reserves the right to deny that they opened up their country to allow the Americans to do so. A sort of hear no evil, see no evil policy, if you will. This seems to me an issue worth focusing on, though unsurprisingly no one appears that keen. Though Pakistan has denied such an agreement exists it might make some sense of the government’s Mr Magoo-like response to bin Laden’s killing and also the fact that a month on, America – purportedly very angry that Obama was found holed up in Abbottabad – has yet to issue sanctions against Pakistan, freeze assets or cut aid (not even a dollar so far) and why President Obama and Hillary Clinton continue to issue reassuring statements about the “important” relationship between the two countries.

. . .

Enveloped by a cloud of jet lag, I press on to the Sydney Writers’ Festival, where the organisers have asked me to speak about “Pakistan: Nation on the verge of a Nervous Breakdown”. It is, I argue, a universal condition. Which country isn’t having a nervous breakdown? France, for example, deserves a special award for having a president who takes advice on Libya from Bernard-Henri Lévy.

It is a great honour to be asked to deliver an opening address but I really came to Sydney because the festival people told me AA Gill would be here, too. I’m the self-appointed number one fan of his travel writing. As well as Gill, I meet chef and writer Anthony Bourdain, Booker prize-winning novelist Howard Jacobson, biographer Carolyn Burke, and Izzeldin Abuelaish, the Gazan doctor who lost three of his daughters in an Israeli attack in 2009 and now works to promote peace. The opportunity to meet such wonderful and interesting people reminds me, through the jet lag, why I love literary festivals.

. . .

At a panel about 9/11 – I am there as the Pakistani terror expert, obviously – the audience erupts with the resounding voices of “truthers”, those excitable types who believe that the war on terror, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and everything else that shapes politics today was cooked up with the help of fake film footage. A granny wearing a delightful salmon cardigan and neatly ironed pink trousers informs us that a “Hollywood director who is a close personal friend” of hers had been hired to direct Osama bin Laden’s videos, while a gentleman wearing tracksuit bottoms – who becomes something of a cult figure during the festival by disrupting almost every talk – films himself on his camera phone while screaming “9/11 WAS AN INSIDE JOB!” It takes a petite festival volunteer five minutes to wrest a microphone from him.

The highlight of the trip (aside from AA Gill, of course) is a panel I am on with Ingrid Betancourt, the former Colombian presidential candidate who spent six years as a hostage of the guerrilla organisation Farc – and the writer Aminatta Forna, whose politician father was executed in Sierra Leone. These are two incredible women whose countries mirror mine in the sadness of their modern histories, and whose experiences are profoundly inspiring.

r my environmentally conscious brother, but decide against.

I have come to New Zealand to take part in the Auckland Writers & Readers Festival. Seven authors have been asked to talk unscripted for seven minutes on anything to do with “the alphabet”. I speak about illiteracy in Pakistan and an Afghan refugee school on the outskirts of Karachi. A friend and I have raised some money to buy second-hand computers for the children. Several people from the audience ask how they might get in touch with the school – unsurprising, as I found New Zealanders to be among the warmest people in the world.

Source: http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/e615e3ea-8d52-11e0-bf23-00144feab49a.html#axzz1OFGV5Ci7

Pakistan Is Playing Dumb

The Islamabad establishment has been feigning ignorance for years. Fatima Bhutto on the price ordinary Pakistanis pay as their leaders allow the country to fall apart.

For twenty four hours after Osama bin Laden was (or was he?) shot dead with two bullets to the face by Navy SEALs from the Joint Special Operations Command—“sort of like Murder Incorporated,” a former colonel explained to author Jeremy Scahill—no one heard a peep out of Pakistan’s president. Normally ensconced so securely within the president’s house in Islamabad, venturing out only for foreign junkets and dealing with domestic bothers from behind his fortified walls, President Asif Ali Zardari had met the news that the world’s most wanted man was killed two hours away from his nation’s capital with catatonic silence.

Instead of a televised address to the nation or a press release, he did what all hapless leaders do when in trouble—Zardari wrote an op-ed for The Washington Post. Claiming that his government had no role in the killing, he waxed lyrical about his personal travails. He applauded Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, seconded President Obama’s morally ambiguous speech, and resurrected nothing short of a stump speech for why his government should please be left in power because they really are very democratic even though Zardari himself was never elected to office.

It is not surprising that Pakistan’s president would insist he had no idea bin Laden was living comfortably in one of the country’s most famous garrison towns—the Pakistani establishment has been feigning ignorance for years.

It takes a certain aplomb to insist that you didn’t know Public Enemy No. 1 was living in your country—and in a leafy city, not in a South Waziristani cave; that American helicopters entered your airspace, perhaps using one of your air bases at Tarbela Ghazi; and that the Americans had been planning to take out said Public Enemy No. 1 for the past nine months. The modus operandi of recent years has been to look the other way while keeping their purse at the open.

This is not unique to Zardari—when asked on local television about this business of Osama really having chosen Pakistan as his home away from home, former President General Pervez Musharraf responded vaguely that it wasn’t sensible for people to have harped on and on without the facts all those years ago. When asked, he always went with the same safe answer: I don’t know. For this sort of clarity and “cooperation,” Pakistan has taken just about $1 billion in American aid a year since 2001. But the money doesn’t only keep Zardari or Musharraf and their flunkies in power, it comes with a very serious price for Pakistanis.

If everyone was so clever and the U.S. had been privy to bin Laden's not-so-secret location (Pakistan claims to be, as ever, the last to find out) since August 2010, how does one explain the ferocious drone campaign that took place from September to December of that year? In the span of 102 days, an unprecedented 52 drone strikes were launched against Pakistan, none targeting Abbottabad or its environs. President Obama ratcheted up the drone war almost immediately upon entering the White House—ordering his first strike against Pakistan 72 hours after assuming the presidency. Some 2,000 Pakistanis (largely civilians) have been killed, none of whom happened to be bin Laden or any of his dastardly lieutenants like Mullah Omar or Ayman al Zawahri, and yet the U.S. defense budget has called for a 75 percent increase in funds to continue and enhance drone operations. This is a frightening development.

Pakistan’s trials don’t start and end with Osama bin Laden. On May 2, the commercial capital city of Karachi was on fire. Dozens of vehicles were torched and gunfire broke out in the busy Malir neighborhood—across the city, people were told to stay at home. The violence had nothing to do with bin Laden, but with the murder of a former member of parliament.

The country is gripped by bloodletting—Baloch dissidents have disappeared in the thousands, a sinister byproduct of our government’s engagement in the war on terror. The price of basic foodstuffs skyrockets as government industrialists and feudal landowners hoard basics like sugar and set the price of wheat far above international prices, all the while presiding over sectarian and ethnic violence not seen since the mid-1990s.

Maybe it’s not peculiar that the government claims to have known nothing about bin Laden's killing. They never seem to have any idea what’s happening in their country at all.

Source: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-05-05/fatima-bhutto-pakistan-is-playing-dumb-in-bin-laden-death/?fb_ref=article&fb_source=home_oneline#

HuffPost Review: The Imperialists Are Still Alive!

The news of Faisal's rendition, a Saudi national disappeared off an airplane, are first heard in a ballroom bathroom. His fiancée sobs in a stall, "We were supposed to get married in Beirut. Oscar de la Renta made my dress." Her friend commiserates with her loss -- "Oscar makes beautiful dresses."

The Imperialists Are Still Alive!, Bosnian-Palestinian-Jordanian-Lebanese-British (try getting that through an airport) director and writer Zeina Durra's feature-length directorial debut, is a political comedy on identity, the Middle East, occupation and violence, and will be opening in New York on April 15. The film opens with Asya, a conceptual artist with an axis-of-evil pedigree similar to the director, posing nude for a self-portrait, wrapped only in a Palestinian keffiyeh and holding a cigarette. How she will manage to smoke with her face shrouded by fabric is a dilemma. As is the question of whether, as a Palestinian liberation fighter, she would have had the time or the inclination to have a bikini wax or not. When Asya's brother gets caught in Beirut while the Israelis bomb it to smithereens -- as happened as far back as 2006 -- and her cousin is rendered by CIA spooks, Asya finds herself caught between the petty glamorous world of the New York art scene and the very shadowy world where conspiracy theories are only the start of the story. There's a lot of truth in conspiracy theories, Asya says, lying in bed with her Mexican boyfriend who she's just had a bout of post-coital anxiety over (Are you CIA? No, he replies. Asya thinks for a second. Mossad?); it's the really crazy theories that destroy the real ones.

Durra weaves through her protagonist's schizophrenic life deftly and with a sense of humor that I had thought trademarked by Elia Suleiman among Arab filmmakers until I met Durrah -- absurd and darkly funny. Sitting in a limousine with an Old Dowager aunt to discuss the missing Faisal, Asya is placed between a serious looking civil-rights consultant, a poodle and a Filipino maid. "Habibti," her aunt warns her, "Remove the battery from your mobile, they can hear you while it's still in. Remember that. Linda, did you bring the petite four? Please offer them to our guests." Remarkably, for a multi-culti work -- there are Chinese, Arabs, Latin Americans, all subalterns -- no one is a caricature of themselves or their ethnicities. Perhaps a subtlety only a Bosnian-Palestinian-Jordanian-Lebanese-British filmmaker can pull off. No one approves of the Mexican boyfriend, though.

There's no question that the film is an indie treasure, stylistically shot on super 16mm film in 23 days. The Imperialists Are Still Alive! avoids the pitfalls of taking itself too seriously in that particular alternative, self-congratulatory way, instead making fun of those that do. Asya attends an environmental dance theater staged by modern artists from Chiapas where men leap about the stage covered in leaves -- "I am a tree," they bellow, "A NAKED TREE!"

The question underpinning The Imperialists Are Still Alive! isn't about Islam, terror or even conflict -- it's about resistance. And resistance can take the shape of many narratives -- the personal, the political, the artistic. In the backdrop of the Arab Spring, nowhere near the horizon when Durra wrote and shot this film, can a work of cinema like this one lend itself to the catalogue of insurgent ideas? Why not? If cinema is valuable to society as well as entertaining, then there are moments of lucidity that we carry forth from this film. There's the practicality of espionage: If they are watching us, does that mean that they watch our friends, our family, our communities (the storming of the notorious Amn Dawla State Security offices in Egypt would answer yes, rooms full of tapes and documents and files of yes answers)? There's the ennui of survival and displacement -- what do those who belong do when they find themselves outside the momentum of change? What role does an exile play?

One might look to Libya for answers where ad hoc newsrooms have been set up by Libyan exiles in America and Britain to relay the news of what is happening on the ground in Benghazi or Misurata to the rest of non-Libyan public. There are the suspicions they plant in all of us (who are they? They're usually the same in all our imaginations) that perpetuate inaction, indecision, doubt. There is the more practical side to having our faces obscured by cloth -- not oppression, but protection. Explaining her nude keffiyeh portrait to a group of movers, Asya explains that invisibility is necessitated, not by fundamentalism, but rather when you don't want the police or military to identify you. Like Subcomandante Marcos one of the men asks. Yes, exactly like that.

The Diary: Fatima Bhutto

The diary post can be read at:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/69f2a05c-5664-11e0-84e9-00144feab49a.html#axzz1HelcRVJA

Off the Grid by Fatima Bhutto

Fatima Bhutto's latest piece on the Afghan refugees in Karachi:

http://www.caravanmagazine.in/Story.aspx?Storyid=718&StoryStyle=FullStory

A Pakistan in mourning will not be silenced

Fatima Bhutto's article in FT:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/602cb62e-1cef-11e0-8c86-00144feab49a.html#axzz1Aehd4T9a

Tomgram: Fatima Bhutto, The War Against Pakistan

I mean, you couldn’t make this stuff up. In fact, if I were to offer a conspiracy theory to explain it, I might suggest that the U.S. government now exists mainly to feed material to The Daily Show. I’m referring to an article in the New York Times reporting that “the Obama administration and the Department of Defense have ordered the hundreds of thousands of federal employees and contractors not to view the secret cables and other classified documents published by Wikileaks and news organizations around the world unless the workers have the required security clearance or authorization.”

Don’t laugh. No, really, stop it!

Honestly, it’s perfectly sensible. Secrecy being such an all-encompassing value for our government, why shouldn’t its employees work in the dark, even when the rest of us, the rest of the world, knows what’s going on. Fortunately, I’m not an employee of the U.S. government or its military-industrial contractors; so, though Raytheon, the Library of Congress, and other places have been thoughtful enough to try to minimize the pain of the ongoing Wikileaks dump of State Department documents by blocking people from reading them, and the Obama administration and assorted Internet crews, including Amazon and PayPal, are trying to ensure that there won’t be a fourth, fifth, or sixth round of dumps, I’ve been wandering the Web like any 12-year-old reading around.

You want to know what struck me? Something small. And it happened in Yemen, that anything-goes country whose president Ali Abdullah Saleh gave Washington almost carte blanche to act militarily -- “an open door on terrorism,” as he put it to Obama’s Deputy National Security Adviser John Brennan in September 2009 (according to one of the State Department documents Wikileaks released). More like an open bomb bay, actually. And Saleh was even eager to take credit for those bombs we were dropping. “We'll continue saying the bombs are ours, not yours," he told then-Centcom commander General David Petraeus last January.

In return for the right to drop bombs and launch missiles, the Yemeni president got his own “open door” -- directly into the U.S. Treasury: tons of money (it’s euphemistically called “aid”) shoveled his way, U.S. trainers and training for his troops, and lots of fancy military equipment because, let’s face it, Washington is still laboring in a coalition-of-the-billing, not a coalition-of-the-willing world. Still, even for Saleh, there were limits and -- it’s so Washington 2010 of us -- we nonetheless tried to exceed them. According to that State Department document, Petraeus evidently wanted to get U.S. troops -- probably Special Operations forces -- on the ground in combat areas with Yemeni units. According to a State Department observer, “Saleh reacted coolly, however, to the General's proposal to place USG [U.S. Government] personnel inside the area of operations armed with real-time, direct feed intelligence from U.S. ISR [Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance] platforms overhead.”

In other words, anywhere we have a foot in the door of war, the next thing you know we’re trying to slip a (uniformed) body through it as well. That catches the American way of war these days and helps explain why we always seem to end up more, not less involved, in conflict in distant lands. Among the places where the U.S. offers big dollars for the right to blast the hell out of things, Yemen is actually a Johnny-come-lately. Only recently have American officials made Sana’a, its capital, a Club Med for recreational bombing.

On the other hand, ever since Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage marched into the office of Pakistani autocrat General Pervez Musharraf soon after the 9/11 attacks and reportedlytold him that the U.S. would bomb his country “back to the Stone Age” unless he joined the fight against al-Qaeda, that country has been a magnet for Washington’s top brass, military and civilian. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Admiral Mike Mullen had visited 16 times by early 2010 and sometimes there seems to be a greater density of American officials, wheedling, bribing, threatening, cajoling, and maneuvering in Islamabad, the Pakistani capital, than in Washington itself. Meanwhile, the CIA’s drones have been attacking Pakistani territory, its helicopters crossing the border shooting, its Special Operations troops on the ground, and the CIA swarming, as Washington acts with relative impunity in that land.

A Flood of Drone Strikes
What the Wikileaks Revelations Tell Us About How Washington Runs Pakistan
By Fatima Bhutto

With governments like Pakistan’s current regime, who needs the strong arm of the CIA? According to Bob Woodward's latest bestseller Obama’s Wars, when Pakistan’s President Asif Ali Zardari, an obsequiously dangerous man, was notified that the CIA would be launching missile strikes from drones over his country’s sovereign territory, he replied, “Kill the seniors. Collateral damage worries you Americans. It doesn’t worry me.”

Why would he worry? When his wife Benazir Bhutto returned to Pakistan in 2007 to run for prime minister after years of self-imposed exile, she was already pledged to a campaign of pro-American engagement. She promised to hand over nuclear scientist and international bogeyman Dr. A.Q. Khan, the “father” of the Pakistani atomic bomb, to the International Atomic Energy Agency. She also made clear that, once back in power, she would allow the Americans to bomb Pakistan proper, so that George W. Bush’s Global War on Terror might triumph. Of course, the Americans had been involved in covert strikes and other activities in Pakistan since at least 2001, but we didn’t know that then.

This has been the promise that has kept Zardari, too, in power.

According to the recent cache of State Department cables released by Wikileaks, his position and those of his colleagues in government haven’t wavered. In 2008, for example, Prime Minister Yousef Raza Gilani enthusiastically told American Ambassador Anne Paterson that he “didn’t care” if drone strikes were launched against his country as long as the “right people” were targeted. (They weren’t.) “We’ll protest in the National Assembly,” Gilani added cynically, “and then ignore it.”

In fact, protests by the National Assembly have been few and far between and yet, by the end of November, Pakistani territory had been targeted by American unmanned Predator and Reaper missile strikes more than 100 times this year alone. CIA drone strikes have, in fact, been a feature of the American war in Pakistan since 2004. In 2008, after Barack Obama won the presidency in the U.S. and Zardari ascended to Pakistan's highest office, the strikes escalated and soon began occurring almost weekly, later nearly daily, and so became a permanent feature of life for those living in the tribal borderlands of northern Pakistan.

Barack Obama ordered his first drone strike against Pakistan just 72 hours after being sworn in as president. It seems a suitably macabre fact that, according to a U.N. report on “targeted killings” (that is, assassinations) published in 2010, George W. Bush employed drone strikes 45 times in his eight years as President. In Obama’s first year in office, the drones were sent in 53 times. In the six years that drone strikes have been used in the fight against Pakistan, researchers at the New America Foundation estimate that between 1,283 and 1,971 people have been killed.

While the dead are regularly identified as “militants” or “suspected militants” in newspaper stories and on the TV news, they almost never have names, nor are their identities confirmed or faces shown. Their histories are always vague. The Campaign for Innocent Victims in Conflict (CIVIC) took a careful look at nine drone strikes from the last two years and concluded that they had resulted in the deaths of 30 civilians, including 14 women and children. (Perhaps, of course, superior American military intelligence classified them as “militants in training.”) Based on this study, an average rate of error can be calculated: 3.33 civilians mistakenly killed in each drone attack. The dead, Pakistanis will assure you, are largely unnamed, faceless, unindicted, and un-convicted civilians.

Pakistanis are considered irrelevant, however, and collateral damage, as it turns out, doesn’t seem to worry anyone in the governing elite.

Think of it this way: this summer, monsoon rains and floods submerged one-fifth of Pakistan, affecting 20 million people. It was the country’s worst natural disaster in its history. Although the body count, under the circumstances, was considered comparatively low -- 2,000 killed -- the United Nations concluded that the destruction caused by the floods surpassed the devastating Asian tsunami of 2004, the Pakistan earthquake of 2005, and the recent earthquake in Haiti combined. Two million homes were destroyed and the crucial food belt in the key agricultural provinces of Punjab and Sindh was ravaged. Millions of children were left homeless or at risk of contracting cholera, dysentery, and other water-borne diseases. According to the World Heath Organization, 1.5 million potentially fatal cases of diarrhea and another two million cases of malaria are still expected.

During what U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon termed the worst disaster he’d ever seen, with the country desperate and prostrate, the CIA launched its most extensive drone campaign yet. Over the 30 days of September, as Islamabad rushed to assure Washington that it would not divert too many troops from the war effort to help with flood relief, 20-odd drone strikes were called in. They would produce the highest number of drone fatalities for a single month in the last six years.

In 2009, in one of the many State Department cables Wikileaks loosed on the world, U.S. Ambassador Anne Paterson confirmed that key player and Chief of Army Staff General Ashfaq Kayani directed his forces to aid those American drone strikes. Various U.S. operations in the country’s northern and tribal regions were, the ambassadorwrote, “almost certainly [conducted] with the personal consent of… General Kayani.”

The Pakistani media has welcomed the release of the State Department documents because much that reporters and pundits have long claimed (and which Washington has long denied) has now been confirmed: that, for instance, themercenary private contractor Blackwater (now known as Xe Services) has been operating in Pakistan at the behest of the Americans, that the country’s military high command has given the green light for drone strikes on its own people, and that the infamously corrupt government of President Zardari has turned the country over to the Americans in exchange for money.

Pakistan already receives approximately two billion dollars in military aid a year, and that’s just for the army. Under the Kerry Lugar Bill passed by the U.S. Congress, if Pakistan plays nice, opens up its nuclear secrets, and the Army’s internal documentation on how it selects the Chief of Army staff and other matters, the country will get $7.5 billion dollars of “civilian aid” over five years -- and this is just the tip of the financial iceberg, which, of course, offers the present leadership the chance to extend their incompetent rule just a little longer.

One newspaper baron and government chamcha -- apple polisher in Urdu -- became the laughing stock of the country’s new media when he went on television to suggest that revelations about how Pakistan’s government had lied to its people, subverted its national sovereignty, and coordinated foreign attacks didn’t faintly measure up to those about leaders in other countries. Look at Berlusconi!

The Pakistani political establishment has always believed that the West is best. It has, after all, been the ultimate source of their power and so, on December 3rd, Prime Minister Gilani called a meeting of the Joint Chiefs, the Defense Minister, and various cabinet ministers, including the Finance Minister, to discuss the Wikileaks scandal and strategies for dealing with any potential embarrassments in yet-to-be-released cables. (Lie, undoubtedly. It worked so well before.)

Tariq Ali, the Pakistani writer and historian, reacted to the Wikileaks revelations swiftly and with a frustration and anger felt by many Pakistanis. “The Wikileaks,” he wrote, “confirm what we already know: Pakistan is a U.S. satrapy. Its military and political leaders constitute a venal elite happy to kill and maim its own people at the behest of a foreign power. The U.S. proconsul in Islamabad, Anne Patterson, emerges as a shrewd diplomat warning her country of the consequences if they carry on as before. Amusing, but hardly a surprise, is that Zardari reassures the U.S. that if he were assassinated, his sister would replace him and all would continue as before. Always nice to know that the country is regarded by its ruler as a personal fiefdom.”

Still, that elite carries on with little sense of the grim absurdity of recent events. As the Wikileaks documents pour out, various members of parliament are queuing up to have their names put forward as possible replacements for the prime minister. Since the only person capable of replacing the president is his sister, there’s no need for debate there.

Like many military chiefs in the past, General Kayani is putting forward his own set of favored names, overstepping the official limits of his office with impunity, while the unelected dark overlord of the government, Interior Minister Rehman Malik, has been offering himself for another unelected posting.

Malik came to public notoriety as Benazir Bhutto’s security adviser -- until her assassination. The job of policing the nation was always a peculiar reward to offer a man who couldn’t keep his one charge safe. Malik, for whom President Zardari issued a presidential pardon and who had all corruption charges against him dropped under the National Reconciliation Ordinance (an odious law pardoning 20 years worth of graft carried out by politicians, bankers and bureaucrats) was also given a senate seat by his friend the president.

Zardari, it is worth noting, did not stand for elections either, has no constituency, and was made president in the very same manner as Pakistan’s previous ruler General Pervez Musharraf: he was selected by his own parliament.

What will Pakistan’s elite learn from Wikileaks? Undoubtedly nothing. And if we’re going by the White House’s response so far, nor will Washington feel more constrained than it ever has when it comes to choosing its allies and running the South Asian arm of its informal global empire.

The Zardari government makes no secret of its gratitude for American support. They have, after all, watched as a foreign power bombs its land, illegally detains or renders its citizens, and turns a blind eye to Pakistan’s flagrant censorship and abuse of human rights.

This obeisance to power is the key to Zardari’s American engagement. And so it will remain. While we wait for Wikileaks to reveal the rest of the cables, which are unlikely to have any bearing on Washington’s future dealings with the corrupt governments of Zardari in Pakistan or President Hamid Karzai in Afghanistan (or anywhere else for that matter), we watch as American officials argue for expanding their drone attacks southwards into the natural-gas-rich province of Balochistan. That it shares a border with Iran hardly seems a coincidence.

The Zardari regime’s essential acquiescence has recently been acknowledged via a multi-year “no strings attached” offer of a military aid package by Washington. At the height of the devastation wreaked by the summer floods, the Health Secretary of Balochistan and the Deputy Chairman of the Pakistani Senate both alleged that aid could not be airlifted out of an air base in the city of Jacobabad on the border between Sindh and Balochistan, two flood ravaged provinces, because it was being used by the Americans for their drone strikes in Pakistan. The American embassy issued a swift and suitably hurt-sounding denial, but the damage was done -- and the message was clear: the war against Pakistan continues unabated, with its own government at the helm.

Fatima Bhutto, an Afghan-born Pakistani poet and writer, is most recently the author of Songs of Blood and Sword: A Daughter’s Memoir (Nation Books, 2010). Her work has appeared in the New Statesman, the Daily Beast, and the Guardian, among other places. Her father, Murtaza Bhutto, son of Pakistan's former President and Prime Minister, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, and an elected member of parliament, was killed by the police in 1996 in Karachi during the premiership of his sister, Benazir Bhutto. Fatima lives and writes in Karachi, Pakistan. To listen to a Timothy MacBain TomCast audio interview in which Fatima Bhutto discusses the unequal U.S.-Pakistani relationship, click here or, to download it to your iPod, here.

Copyright 2010 Fatima Bhutto

Source: http://www.tomdispatch.com/archive/175329/