Frontier years give might to ex-guerrilla’s words

Ahmed Rashid is a prolific chronicler of Afghanistan, Central Asia and his homeland of Pakistan, places that Western writers have often found difficult to gain access to. Jane Perlez from Lahore in The New York Times:

Fresh out of Cambridge University in the late 1960s, and steeped in the era’s favorites - Marx, Mao and Che - Ahmed Rashid took off for the hills of Baluchistan, a dry, tough patch of western Pakistan. He stayed for 10 years.

He was a guerrilla fighter and political organizer, and with a couple of like-minded Pakistani pals, led peasants seeking autonomy against the Pakistani Army. He emerged, after bouts of hepatitis, malaria and lost teeth, not exactly disillusioned but defeated, he recalled recently from the comfort of his study overlooking a garden of palms.

Yet the experience became the launching pad for his real career as a prolific chronicler of Afghanistan, Central Asia and his homeland of Pakistan, places that Western writers have often found difficult to gain access to, let alone comprehend in their full depth and complexity.

[Photo: Ahmed Rashid at his residence in Lahore, Pakistan. / NYTimes]

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Amid policy disputes, Qaeda grows in Pakistan

U.S. accommodation to Pakistan’s government and a shift from counterterrorism efforts to preparations for the war in Iraq in 2002 helped make Pakistan a haven for Al Qaeda. From The New York Times:

Late last year, top Bush administration officials decided to take a step they had long resisted. They drafted a secret plan to make it easer for the Pentagon’s Special Operations forces to launch missions into the snow-capped mountains of Pakistan to capture or kill top leaders of Al Qaeda.

Intelligence reports for more than a year had been streaming in about Osama bin Laden’s terrorism network rebuilding in the Pakistani tribal areas, a problem that had been exacerbated by years of missteps in Washington and the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, sharp policy disagreements, and turf battles between American counterterrorism agencies.

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Three months as Taliban prisoner

The documentary maker Sean Langan tells Peter Beaumont about the three-month ordeal that saw him kidnapped and threatened with death in tribal Pakistan. From The Guardian:

It was the moment documentary film-maker Sean Langan believed he was about to die.

After being held captive on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border by a group allied to the Taliban for three months, he was travelling to the place where, he had been told, he would finally be released.

The driver pulled over in the darkness of early morning for what his captors said was a toilet stop.

As a door opened, Langan could see, in the side mirror, one of the men accompanying him walking around the car and removing a pistol from the waistband of his trousers.

Told that his fixer was already dead, he waited for the shot. “It is the way I thought it was going to happen,” he said. “Shot on a road like that. Somewhere remote.”

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Karachi calling

When novelist Mohammed Hanif told friends he was returning to Pakistan after 12 years in Britain, they were aghast. Why would he and his young family swap London for a city with daily power cuts and rampant gun crime? The answer proved surprisingly simple … From The Guardian:

Twelve years ago, I arrived in London from Karachi with eight suitcases, a new wife and a three-year job contract. Before leaving for London, we had put our books, furniture and even some of our kitchen utensils at our relatives’ houses. When I told my friends and family that we would be back after exactly three years, they gave us a knowing smile and encouraged us to sell that sofa instead of putting it in their store room.

Two months from now, we are planning to return to Karachi with a container full of furniture, more pots and pans than we left behind and a 10-year-old son. Friends and family in Pakistan are aghast. From London to Karachi? Why are you coming to Karachi? Do you know what happened to Sana’s friend the other day? Do you have any idea how you’ll live without electricity for 10 hours every day? And, by the way, have you discussed this with Channan? How does he feel about it?

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A British diplomat’s mission of rescue

Mary Jordan reports from Islamabad in The Washington Post:

Helen Rawlins climbed into her Toyota Land Cruiser at 7:30 in the morning, off to rescue another woman. The British diplomat settled into the back seat as she whizzed by the baking bustle of the Pakistani countryside: the women in colorful head scarves sitting in three-wheeled rickshaws, donkey carts piled high with mangoes, and elaborately painted buses where women sit apart from men.

Rawlins knew a tense confrontation awaited. Lately, she had been making a trip such as this once a week — to help British women of Pakistani descent lured to this country and forced, sometimes at gunpoint, into marriage.

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The AQ Khan ring: new revelations, more worries

Four years after Abdul Qadeer Khan’s atomic black market operation was declared over, inspectors are wondering who may have received the blueprints for a nuclear weapon found on his computer network. From The New York Times:

Four years after Abdul Qadeer Khan, the leader of the world’s largest black market in nuclear technology, was put under house arrest and his operation declared shattered, international inspectors and Western officials are confronting a new mystery, this time over who may have received blueprints for a sophisticated and compact nuclear weapon found on his network’s computers.

Working in secret for two years, investigators have tracked the digitized blueprints to Khan computers in Switzerland, Dubai, Malaysia and Thailand. The blueprints are rapidly reproducible for creating a weapon that is relatively small and easy to hide, making it potentially attractive to terrorists.

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Related story: Nuclear Ring Reportedly Had Advanced Design

Giggly Bhutto girl joins the ‘family business’

From The Times, UK:

The eldest daughter of Benazir Bhutto, the assassinated former prime minister of Pakistan, took her first steps on the political ladder last week with her appointment to a high-profile post in the party her mother once led.

Bakhtawar Bhutto, 17, has been made head of the Pakistan Peoples party’s (PPP) women’s wing. In her first television interview since her mother was killed last December, she pledged to carry on Benazir’s work.

In a pronounced American accent, Bakhtawar promised to play a prominent role in the campaign for women’s equality and said that she had not ruled out a career in politics.

“I definitely want to help people in Pakistan. I want to continue my mom’s mission in any way I can, whether it’s politics or something else - I haven’t decided yet,” she said.

[Photo: Bakhtawar Bhutto and her sister Asifa pray at their mother Benazir’s grave. The Times]

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Time to say, ‘alvida’?

Is Pervez Musharraf looking at a retirement plan? Declan Walsh has the story in The Guardian

Nobody knows how or when, but according to a growing consensus inside Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf’s days as president are slowing coming to an end.

A flurry of political tirades, aggressive news reports and changes to sensitive army positions have fuelled speculation that Musharraf is considering retirement.

The talk has hit the streets, where rumours are rife of frenetic bag-packing and a newly arrived jet to whisk Musharraf into foreign retirement. Stock prices dived last week as a result of the rumours.

Musharraf aides, meanwhile, insist their boss is going nowhere. “This is absolute lies. He’s not packed even his golf bag,” said his spokesman Rashid Qureshi.

Qureshi, a long-time loyalist, said Musharraf was being smeared by the Jang group, a media conglomerate whose television stations were temporarily shut by Musharraf last year.

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The urban frontier - Karachi

From NPR’s All Things Considered [via 3quarksdaily]:

By the end of this year, half the world’s population will live in cities, according to the United Nations, and the proportion will only increase. The way we develop our cities may determine our collective future, living standards, culture, politics, freedom - even our survival.

This is also the year that Morning Edition begins a series called “The Urban Frontier,” an occasional examination of the world’s cities.

We begin in Karachi, Pakistan. This week, host Steve Inskeep will introduce people who are trying to reinvent one of Pakistan’s historic cities. It is a place where so many people live that population estimates run anywhere from 12 million to 18 million - all of them working for their piece of real estate in this seaport city.

We meet an ambulance driver, navigating Karachi’s streets.

We meet the mayor, who’s eager to show us every new overpass he’s had built in the city.

We meet newcomers, struggling to make it in Karachi’s worst illegal housing.

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Daylight saving time introduced in Pakistan

Adil Najam in All Things Pakistan

As of the stroke of midnight Saturday-Sunday (May 31-June 1, 200 Pakistan officially advanced its clocks by one hour. This “daylight savings” move is a bid to conserve energy in an increasingly energy strapped economy in conditions where everyone agrees that the energy situation is going to get worse well before it gets any better. The change puts Pakistan six hours ahead of the GMT. This change will last for three months; June-August.

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The lawyer’s crusade

James Traub in the New York Times Magazine

In April, on the highway outside the little Punjabi town of Renala Khurd, Aitzaz Ahsan was waylaid by a crowd of seemingly deranged lawyers. The advocates, who wore black suits, white shirts and black ties, were not actually insane; they just seemed that way because they were so overcome with excitement at greeting the mastermind of Pakistan’s lawyers’ movement, perhaps the most consequential outpouring of liberal, democratic energy in the Islamic world in recent years. The 62-year-old Ahsan was on his way to address the bar association of Okara, 10 miles away, but the lawyers, and the farmers and shopkeepers gathered with them, were not about to let him leave. They boiled around the car, shouting slogans. “Who should our leaders be like?” they cried. “Like Aitzaz!” And, “How many are prepared to die for you?” “Countless! Countless!”

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In the name of the father

In Tehelka, William Dalrymple writes that Fatima Bhutto’s journey to unmask her father Murtaza Bhutto’s killers has her standing between PM-in-waiting Asif Ali Zardari and his ‘clean’ record

AS THE CONVOY neared home, the street lights were abruptly turned off. The police snipers were ready in position; some had climbed up the trees lining the avenue to get clear shots. Their guns were loaded, the roadblocks had been erected, the surrounding lanes sealed off. The guards outside the different embassies nearby had been told to retreat within their compounds in expectation of trouble. By nine o’clock, all 80 police were in position, commanded by four senior officers. There was complete silence, but for the occasional buzz of static on the police radios.

It was September 20, 1996, and Murtaza Bhutto, Benazir’s younger brother, was returning late from campaigning in a distant part of Karachi. He had come home to Pakistan the previous year after a long period in exile to challenge his more famous sister for a role in the leadership of the family party, the Pakistan People’s Party, or PPP. Benazir was then the prime minister, and Murtaza’s decision to take her on had put him into direct conflict not only with his sister, but also with her ambitious and powerful husband, Asif Ali Zardari.

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Ten years later

Pervez Hoodbhoy on the tenth anniversary of Pakistan’s testing of the nuclear bomb in Dawn [via 3QuarksDaily]

IT’S May 1998 and Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif congratulates wildly cheering citizens as the Chagai mountain trembles and goes white from multiple nuclear explosions. He declares that Pakistan is now safe and sound forever.

Bomb makers become national heroes. Schoolchildren are handed free badges with mushroom clouds. Bomb and missile replicas are planted in cities up and down the land. Welcome to nuclear Pakistan.

Fast-forward the video 10 years. Pakistan turns into a different country, deeply insecure and afraid for its future. Grim-faced citizens see machine-gun bunkers, soldiers crouched behind sandbags, barbed wire and barricaded streets. In Balochistan and Fata, helicopter gunships and fighter jets swarm the skies.

Today, we are at war on multiple fronts. But the bomb provides no defence. Rather, it has helped bring us to this grievously troubled situation and offers no way out. On this awful anniversary, it is important that we relate the present to the past.

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Why Pakistan plays ‘let’s make a deal’

Islamabad is about to cut another deal with the country’s tribal leaders. These agreements rarely last long and appear to have helped no one besides terrorists and hardened militants. But Washington should support the deal-making — at least for a little while longer, writes Daniel Markey in Foreign Policy

The Pakistanis are making deals with tribal leaders again. Islamabad now appears to be in the final stages of protracted negotiations with leaders of the Mehsud tribe in South Waziristan, one of seven semiautonomous areas along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan. The recent history of these negotiations has not been a happy one. By nearly all accounts, Taliban and al Qaeda have taken full advantage of the breathing space in Pakistan’s tribal areas to execute attacks in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and beyond. American critics have every reason to ask whether Islamabad’s latest deal is precisely the sort of appeasement that might reduce violence in Pakistan in the short term, but which in time promises an even more dangerous insurgency and terrorist menace.

Nor should Pakistanis or Americans kid themselves: In a few months, perhaps sooner, this deal will fall apart. Even if the tribal leaders intended to live up to their obligations—a doubtful proposition—they aren’t up to the task of expelling well-armed, battle-hardened militants.

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Pakistan’s rivalrous coalition

The fissures in Pakistan’s new government are allowing the country’s dangerous problems to fester, writes Irfan Husain in Open Democracy

Pakistan’s newly minted coalition government, in office only since 25 March 2008, is presently lurching from one crisis to another. Its political core, the partnership between the Pakistan Peoples’ Party (PPP) and Nawaz Sharif’s faction of the Pakistan Muslim League (PML-N) ended - for the moment at least - on 13 May 2008 when Sharif withdrew his quota of ministers from the federal cabinet over the ostensibly arcane issue of how to restore to office the senior judges sacked under President Pervez Musharraf’s declaration of emergency on 3 November 2007.

But the real problem between the PML-N and the PPP (the party led until her assassination on 27 December by Benazir Bhutto, and now effectively headed by her widower, Asif Ali Zardari) goes far deeper than the high-profile “judges’ issue”. Its root is the longstanding rivalry for power between the two formations, symbolised by the personal contest for power between Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif themselves. These figures long alternated in office as Pakistan’s prime minister, sharing the spoils of what became - until Musharraf’s first seizure of power in October 1999 - a virtual two-party state.

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After the honeymoon

Former Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif is pulling his party out of the new government. The BBC’s Syed Shoaib Hasan in Islamabad looks at why, and what happens next.

The Pakistan Muslim League-N decision to quit the cabinet has been on the cards for a while.

So when the party’s nine ministers handed in their resignations on Tuesday it did not come as a surprise. The biggest party in the cabinet is the Pakistan People’s Party (PPP). Its leader is Asif Ali Zardari, widower of Benazir Bhutto. Since the PPP and the PML-N trounced President Pervez Musharraf’s allies in February’s general elections, Mr Zardari and Mr Sharif have appeared to enjoy an excellent relationship.

And Tuesday’s cabinet split may not be as dramatic as it appears.

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How Islamicised is the Pakistan army?

Myra MacDonald on Reuters Blogs:

While living in Delhi after 9/11, and in particular after India and Pakistan nearly went to war over an attack on the Indian parliament on December 13, 2001, one of the questions that cropped up frequently was about how much the Pakistan army had been permeated by hardline Islamists. In other words, how much sympathy did the army feel for al Qaeda and Taliban militants that then General Pervez Musharraf had pledged to fight?

Several years later, while researching a book on the Siachen war, I had occasion to travel with the Pakistan army and assess the Islamist question up close. My impression was that the Pakistan army was not driven by religious fanaticism. Yes, it exhorted its soldiers to embrace “shaheed”, or martyrdom, in the name of Allah. But it was otherwise remarkably similar to the Indian army.

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‘Quietly triumphant’ Sharif turns screw on Musharraf

After more than seven years in exile, Pakistan’s former PM is back in power and doing his best to depose the president. In The Guardian, Julian Borger goes to visit him at the family home outside Lahore:

The road to Nawaz Sharif’s house performs some radical zigzags along the way. This is presumably for security purposes - forcing would be suicide-bombers to slow down enough for the guards to take a shot. But the winding drive must also serve as a daily reminder for Sharif of the precarious route to power in Pakistan.

He has twice been prime minister. His last term was cut short in 1999 by a coup by his army chief, Pervez Musharraf. Nine years on, Musharraf is still president but has been haemorrhaging authority for months in the face of public disdain.

Sharif is back from exile and back in power, this time as part of a new democratically elected coalition, and working hard to sideline the president with the aim of eventually forcing him out.

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Protecting Pakistan’s Hindus

The cultural and institutional marginalisation of Hindus in Pakistan is a travesty of human dignity and freedom. Ali Eteraz in The Guardian, UK:

Hindus in Pakistan have suffered grievously since the founding of the nation in 1947. Recently, in the southern province of Sindh, a Hindu man was accused of blasphemy and beaten to death by his co-workers. This comes at the heels of the abduction and dismemberment of a Hindu engineer.

A little while earlier, the military removed 70 Hindu families from lands where they had been living since the 19th century. To this day the temples that Pakistanis destroyed in 1992 in response to the destruction of the Babri mosque in India have not been restored.

Pakistan, according to many accounts, was founded as a way to protect the rights and existence of the minority Muslim population of Colonial India in the face of the larger Hindu majority. Pakistan’s founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, is reported to have said in 1947: “In due course of time Hindus will cease to be Hindus and Muslims will cease to be Muslims - not in a religious sense for that is the personal faith of an individual- but in a political sense as citizens of one state.” It is therefore a travesty of Pakistan’s own founding principles that its Hindus - and not to exclude Christians and Ahmadis - have suffered so grossly.

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[via 3quarksdaily]

Ali Eteraz’s personal blog is here:

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Where billions vanish

Pervez Hoodbhoy, chairman of the physics department at Quaid-i-Azam University, in Dawn:

Gen. (retd) Pervez Musharraf, aided by his trusted lieutenant and chairman of the Higher Education Commission, Dr Atta-ur-Rahman, lays claim to a ‘revolutionary programme’ that has reversed the decades-old decline of Pakistan’s universities.

The higher education budget shot up from Rs3.9bn in 2001-02 to an astounding Rs33.7bn in 2006-07. But, in fact, much of this has been consumed by futile projects and mega wastage. Fantastically expensive scientific equipment, bought for research, often ends up locked away in campuses.

An example: a Pelletron accelerator worth Rs400m was ordered in 2005 with HEC funds. It eventually landed up at Quaid-i-Azam University, and was installed last month by a team of Americans from the National Electrostatics Corporation that flew in from Wisconsin. But now that it is there and fully operational, nobody - including the current director - has the slightest idea of what research to do with it. Its original proponents are curiously lacking in enthusiasm and are quietly seeking to distance themselves from the project.

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Sherry Rehman: a veteran woman politician

A profile of Pakistan’s new information minister from The Post, Pakistan:

Studied art history and politics from Smith College, USA, and University of Sussex, UK, Federal Information Minister Sherry Rahman has a strong family background and belongs to an educated family of Sindh.

Her mother Sabiha Hasan was the first woman director of the State Bank of Pakistan (1980). She was recalled after her retirement to serve as the media advisor to the SBP governor in 1995-96. She recently served as consultant of the SBP.

Sherry Rehman’s father Hassanally A Rahman (1909-1986), a barrister-at-law, was the founder, architect and the first principal of the Sindh Muslim Government Law College, Karachi. Known as a social and community leader, Mr Rahman was the first vice chancellor of Sindh University, Jamshoro, where he served twice as the VC.

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And on Wiki:

A look inside Al Qaeda

From Los Angeles Times:

If Al Qaeda strikes the West in the coming months, it’s likely the mastermind will be a stocky Egyptian explosives expert with two missing fingers.

His alias is Abu Ubaida al Masri. Hardly anyone has heard of him outside a select circle of anti-terrorism officials and Islamic militants. But as chief of external operations for Al Qaeda, investigators say, he has one of the most dangerous — and endangered — jobs in international terrorism.

He has overseen the major plots that the network needs to stay viable, investigators say: the London transportation bombings in 2005, a foiled transatlantic “spectacular” aimed at U.S.-bound planes in 2006, and an aborted plot in this serene Scandinavian capital last fall.

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Karachi’s winter days

Sehba Sarwar, the author of a novel, “Black Wings,” and founding director of Voices Breaking Boundaries, a nonprofit arts organization, in The New York Times Magazine:

I’ve been living in Houston for some time, but I often return to Pakistan to visit my parents. In December, when I arrived in Karachi with my 3-year-old daughter, Minal, the city was spinning with more than the usual winter weddings, parties and reunions. President Musharraf had issued emergency rule to hold back a possible Supreme Court ruling against him, and Benazir Bhutto had returned to Pakistan at her own risk. There had been suicide bombings, the lawyers were battling for restoration of an independent judiciary and parliamentary elections were a few weeks away. My husband, René, wanted me to postpone our trip, but my father wasn’t well, and it was important to go. I assured René I’d do my best to stay away from the political action.

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In Pakistan, U.S. swallows a bitter pill

The U.S. deputy secretary of state bore the brunt of a range of complaints that Pakistanis now feel freer to air with the end of military rule. Jane Perlez from Islamabad in The New York Times:

If it was not yet clear to Washington that a new political order prevailed here, the three-day visit this week by America’s chief diplomat dealing with Pakistan should put any doubt to rest.

The visit by Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte turned out to be series of indignities and chilly, almost hostile, receptions as he bore the brunt of the full range of complaints that Pakistanis now feel freer to air with the end of military rule by Washington’s favored ally, President Pervez Musharraf.

Faced with a new democratic lineup that is demanding talks, not force, in the fight against terrorism, Mr. Negroponte publicly swallowed a bitter pill at his final news conference on Thursday, acknowledging that there would now be some real differences in strategy between the United States and Pakistan.

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Pakistan tells US: There’s ‘a new sheriff in town’

Pakistani leaders delivered a strong message to American diplomats. Jane Perlez from Islamabad in The New York Times:

The top State Department officials responsible for the alliance with Pakistan met leaders of the new government on Tuesday, and received what amounted to a public dressing-down from one of them, as well as the first direct indication that the United States relationship with Pakistan would have to change.

On the day that the new prime minister, Yousaf Raza Gillani, was sworn in, Deputy Secretary of State John D. Negroponte and the assistant secretary of state for South Asian affairs, Richard A. Boucher, also met with the Pakistani president, Pervez Musharraf, whom they had embraced as their partner in the campaign against terrorism over the past seven years but whose power is quickly ebbing.

The leader of the second biggest party in the new Parliament, Nawaz Sharif, said after meeting the two American diplomats that it was unacceptable that Pakistan had become a “killing field.”

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Moderates hold key in Pakistan

Also in NYT, a report from Peshawar:

One of the most significant results of Pakistan’s elections in February was the defeat of the religious parties that ran this critical border province for the last five years. In their place, voters elected moderates from a small regional party that may now wield big influence over Pakistan’s changing strategy toward its militants.

The victory of the Awami National Party, or A.N.P., was welcomed by Western officials and Pakistanis as a clear rejection of the Taliban and the religious parties that backed them here in North-West Frontier Province. The party will now be part of the governing coalition in the national Parliament, and sees itself as critically placed to begin a dialogue with the militants, something the Bush administration has regarded warily.

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Defending dictatorship: Another view on Pakistan

S. Abbas Raza in n+1

A military dictatorship is a military dictatorship, and a democracy is a democracy. And the latter is always automatically better than the former. It is safer to agree with this statement and to look at every particular complex political situation through the lens of this cliché than to risk having one’s liberal-democratic credentials questioned. But as a friend of mine once remarked, “All arguments for democracy in Pakistan are theoretical. For dictatorships, the greatest argument is the actual experience of Pakistani democracies.” Very similarly, another friend recently commented that “There are of course no theoretical arguments for a dictatorship, only practical ones.” In the case of Pakistan, the last two civilian democratic governments were sham democracies, and while I by no means support everything Pervez Musharraf has done, especially recently, there are various things for which his government deserves praise. Moreover, while George W. Bush may have gotten almost everything else wrong, his Pakistan policy has been basically sound.

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[via 3quarksdaily]

Pakistan’s new PM: Not a ‘yes man’

Eminent Pakistani journalist Hamid Mir in The News:

The new prime minister of Pakistan has the distinction of saying a big no to both President Pervez Musharraf and late Benazir Bhutto many times. Yousuf Raza Gilani (photo) has always been loyal to his party but he is not a “yes man” and that is the quality which impressed PPP Co-chairperson Asif Ali Zardari a lot.

Zardari nominated Gilani for the post of prime minister because he is sure that his nominee will not take any dictation either from the president or from any powerful diplomat. Only Zardari can take the risk of bringing a defiant person to the office of prime minister who may one day say no even to him.

Zardari remembers that Gilani said no to his leader Benazir Bhutto twice when he was Speaker of the National Assembly from 1993 to 1996. Gillani issued the production orders of some opposition MPs in 1994 who were in jail. Prime Minister Benazir was not ready to implement the orders of her own Speaker. She wanted to punish Sheikh Rashid Ahmad who used filthy language against her many times. Gilani took a stand. He argued that his orders must be implemented, otherwise he will resign from the post. Finally his orders were implemented.

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And from BBC: By his own admission, Pakistan’s Prime Minister-designate Yusuf Raza Gillani, has not been one of the “good boys” of President Pervez Musharraf’s regime. The regime tried to coerce him into joining many of his Pakistan People’s Party (PPP) colleagues in switching sides. But Mr Gillani refused to do a deal with Mr Musharraf and his loyalty is much admired within his party. More:

Why Musharraf must go

Aasim Sajjad Akhtar, who teaches colonial history and political economy at the Lahore University of Management Sciences, in The Times of India:

Over the past few weeks, Pakistanis have been suffering from prolonged power outages, a major reduction in the supply of gas, and a dramatic shortage of wheat flour. The situation reached crisis-like proportions about two weeks before February 18 and while things have not deteriorated further, they have not got much better either.

This is ironic given that the regime’s most celebrated success has been the ‘economic revival’ that it has engineered. Since October 1999 the government has initiated a series of economic ‘reform’ measures, which have met with the approval of the IMF and World Bank. The regime has been rewarded, particularly after the September 11 attacks in America, with massive inflows of financial assistance.

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A new deal in Pakistan

William Dalrymple in the New York Review of Books:

You can see the results of a system dominated by landowners in a town like Khairpur, a short distance from Sukkur in the northern part of Sindh. As you drive along, the turban-clad head of the local feudal lord, Sadruddin Shah, with a curling black mustache, sneers down from billboards placed every fifty yards along the road. Shah, who was standing, as usual, for no less than three different seats, is often held up in the liberal Pakistani press as the epitome of all that is worst about Pakistani electoral feudalism. After all, this is a man who goes electioneering not with leaflets setting out his program, but with five pickup trucks full of his men armed with pump-action shotguns and Kalashnikovs.

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The war of drones

Pervez Hoodbhoy, professor of nuclear physics at the Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad, in The Times of India:

A drone is a semi-autonomous, self-propelled system controlled by an external intelligence. Suitably equipped handlers guide it towards an assigned target. The MQ-1B General Dynamics Predator, connected to high-flying US military surveillance satellites, differs from the low-tech mullah-trained human drone produced in Pakistani madrassas. But they share a common characteristic. Neither asks why they must kill.

Drones, machine and human, have drenched Pakistan with the blood of innocents. In 2006, a bevy of MQ-1Bs hovering over Damadola launched a barrage of 10 Hellfire missiles, costing $60,000 apiece, at the village below. They blew up 18 local people, including five women and five children. The blame was put on faulty local intelligence. The same year, a Hellfire missile hit a madrassa in Bajaur killing between 80 and 85 people, mostly students. Pervez Musharraf’s credibility stood so low that few believed his claim that those killed were training to become Al-Qaida militants. Indeed, while these space-age weapons have occasionally eliminated a few Al-Qaida men, such as Abu Laith al-Libi in January 2008, the more usual outcome has been flattened houses, dead and maimed children, and a growing tribal population that seeks revenge against Pakistan and the US.

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Asif Ali Zardari: From prison to zenith of politics in Pakistan

The widower of Benazir Bhutto now sits at the pinnacle of Pakistani politics, a startling comeback for a man was once one of Pakistan’s most ostracized figures. Jane Perlez reports from Islamabad in The New York Times:

Asif Ali Zardari, the widower of the slain opposition leader Benazir Bhutto, now sits at the pinnacle of Pakistani politics. It is a startling comeback for a man who, though never convicted here, spent 11 years in jail here on corruption and murder charges as one of Pakistan’s most ostracized figures.

The election victory last month of Ms. Bhutto’s party, which he now leads, has left Mr. Zardari, 51, Pakistan’s kingmaker. He came closer than ever to official rehabilitation last week, when a court here dropped many of the corruption cases against him.

The last two cases in Pakistan are scheduled to be dismissed this week. These days, Mr. Zardari’s most pressing concern is whom to choose as prime minister, a decision he is expected to make any day now.

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No country for old men

Anjum Niaz in Dawn, Karachi, on the Zardari makeover:

Forgive me Coen brothers for borrowing the title of your film that fetched four Oscars last Sunday. This column is not about Academy Awards, but the vanity of man. It’s about the makeover of men who can’t make up their minds whether to let their hair and moustaches look grey, white or black.

If they were ordinary people, they would not have cared. But they are our stellar material, who hit the mini-screen day and night and are in-and-out of our living rooms. Put under the glaring lights of cameras, these guys come across as a confused bunch when it comes to personal grooming. They, I’m sure, have enough money to pay super image-makers and pricey consultants to advise them on what colour conforms to the needs of the time.

This VVIP hair-colour-confusion is a tale as old as the hills. In America, a wrinkled Ronald Reagan showed off his boot polish black puff until the last day in office at the White House. Even though the aging president had begun to show signs of Alzheimer’s and quite easily forgot names of dignitaries, once addressing Prince Charles as Princess of Wales at a glittering gala, his unmistakable Hollywood-style hairdo never floundered. It seemed stuck to his head like glue.

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On the long road to freedom, finally

In Tehelka William Dalrymple writes of the role of Pakistan’s emerging middle class in shaping a democratic future

Two events in the last three months have radically changed the course of Indo-Pak relations, and have the potential to radically alter the future direction of South Asian history.

The first of these events took place on November 24, 2007. On this day, a suicide bomber detonated himself beside a bus at the entrance of Camp Hamza, the ISI’s Islamabad headquarters. Around twenty people died in what is the first known attack by an Islamist cell against the Pakistan intelligence services. Many of the dead were ISI staffers. This event, coming as it did after three assassination attempts on General Musharraf, several other bomb attacks on army barracks, and the murder of many captured army personnel in Waziristan, is credited with persuading even the most pro-Islamist elements in the Pakistan army, and the agencies, that the jehadi Frankenstein’s monster they have created now has to be dispatched with a stake in its heart, and as soon possible.

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U.S. embrace of Musharraf irks Pakistanis

The Bush administration’s continued backing of the Pakistani president is perceived as American meddling. David Rhode reports from Islamabad in The New York Times:

The Bush administration’s continued backing of President Pervez Musharraf, despite the overwhelming rejection of his party by voters this month, is fueling a new level of frustration in Pakistan with the United States.

That support has rankled the public, politicians and journalists here, inciting deep anger at what is perceived as American meddling and the refusal of Washington to embrace the new, democratically elected government. John D. Negroponte, the deputy secretary of state, said Thursday during a Senate panel hearing that the United States would maintain its close ties to Mr. Musharraf.

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Masjid Mahabat Khan, Peshawar

In Pakistaniat.com, Owais Mughal on the 17th Century mosque of Mahabat Khan in Peshawar

The old city of Peshawar is called the ‘andar shehr’ (the inner city). The mosque of Mahabat Khan is located in andar shehr. The mosque was built in the seventeenth century and it is named after Mahabat Khan Mirza Lerharsib who twice governed Peshawar under Shah Jahan and Aurangzeb. Its exact date of completion is unknown, as there is no surviving epigraphical or literacy evidence to indicate the fact. Doing a quick web search I found three years marked as its completion (1627, 1630 & 1670 AD) years. More sources cite 1670 as the completion year than the other two.

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In love with voting, hopelessly

In Tehelka, author and columnist Kamila Shamsie on the long and tortured road to being able to vote in Pakistan, finally  

ONE OF my earliest memories dates back to Election Day, 1977, when I was four years old, and my father showed me a mark on his thumb in indelible ink and explained it was there to identify voters and prevent them from returning to vote a second time. A little over thirty years later, I’m typing this and hitting the space bar with a thumb that is — for the first time in my life — similarly marked in indelible ink.

I was too young to vote in 1988 when Pakistan had its first elections since those 1977 elections of my childhood memory (I don’t count the bogus elections that happened under General Zia’s watch.) Too young to vote, but — at 15 — perhaps exactly the right age to fall in love with the idea of voting. Today I remember it as a kind of dream, the exultation in Karachi’s air as those elections drew near. Even though there were plenty of voices, even then, saying the military would still be the real power in the land it did little to temper that exultation. I remember one party at which scores of adolescents were dancing to the election song of the PPP: Jeeay Jeeay Jeeay Bhutto Benazir! rang the chorus; a young Angrez at the party watched, shaking his head in disbelief and said, ‘I’m trying to imagine school kids in London dancing to a ‘Go Maggie’ song.’ The next song was the MQM’s campaign song and everyone danced to that with as much fervour. It wasn’t just on the dance-floors of private parties — everywhere you went in Karachi there were rallies conducted with a frenzied air of joy, and people singing on the street.

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A nest of potential assassins eye each other in Pakistan

Eric Ellis, Southeast Asia correspondent for Fortune Magazine, on Asia Sentinel. Ellis was an official monitor of Pakistan election:

Although the western powers are breathing a sigh of relief over what appears to have been a relatively free and clean election in Pakistan last week, which delivered a decisive drubbing for the strongman Pervez Musharraf, it didn’t take long for the men of violence to re-appear. With the victors still to decide who’ll formally run the country, Pakistan’s military top medic, General Mushtaq Baig, was killed along with eight others by a suicide attack in the garrison town of Rawalpindi.

The warm inner glow of the post-election is quickly fading to the realization that the election probably has created a mess that will have to be cleaned up in any time between a year and 18 months from now. Keep an eye on the military, which has run this country for 34 of its 60 years of existence.

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US moves to expand its role in Pakistan

Farah Stockman reports from Washington in the Boston Globe:

US officials are quietly planning to expand their presence in and around the lawless tribal areas of Pakistan by creating special coordination centers on the Afghan side of the border where US, Afghan, and Pakistani officials can share intelligence about Al Qaeda and Taliban militants, according to State Department and Pentagon officials.

The Bush administration is also seeking to expand its influence in the tribal areas through a new economic support initiative that would initially focus on school and road construction projects. Officials recently asked Congress for $453 million to launch the effort - a higher request for economic support funds than for any country except Afghanistan.

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In Peshawar, a dream of a peaceful life

Music and dancing are back as a poll landslide for secular parties brings a vibrant change to Pakistan’s North-West Frontier. Jason Burke in The Observer.

Sinking back in his armchair, Maulana Shuja ul-Mulk strokes his thick beard with one hand and the fluffy tail of a small toy dalmatian with the other. ‘We were surprised by the results,’ he admits from a supporter’s home in the small rural western Pakistani town of Mardan, ‘but we believe in democracy.’

Whether the claim is true or not, the hard political reality is that Mulk and his hardline religious party are now out of power. In the 2002 election, he and scores of other ultra-conservative clerics swept into government in Pakistan’s turbulent North-West Frontier Province (NWFP) on a tide of anti-Americanism and resurgent religious enthusiasm, vowing to impose Islamic law. But in last week’s national and provincial polls, voters backed secular and liberal candidates and evicted the ruling alliance of religious parties.

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Running on hope

Employment, security and freedom are what the common man in Pakistan dreams of. Travelling through Lahore, Islamabad, Rawalpindi and Karachi — first after Benazir Bhutto’s assassination and then for the election — Subhajit Roy of Indian Express pieces together Pakistan’s story of despair and dreams.

It’s the night of Sunday, February 17, the night before Pakistan goes for the “mother of all elections”, and in posh seaside Clifton area in Karachi, a group of about 150 young men in 15 cars and tempos and a dozen bikes are dancing to the tune of a Benazir Bhutto song in full volume. Waving the Pakistan People’s Party banners and flags, these young men are dancing, clapping, shouting, laughing.

That is the first sight of pure relief and happiness in Pakistan that I see in the past two months of my fly-in-fly-out visits to the country, after what can be described as a ‘stressful’ period in the country’s history. After eight years of military rule, people don’t know whether it’s over yet. And after months of collective depression, it is as if these young men-most of them studying or unemployed-have sniffed victory in Karachi’s cool sea-breeze nine hours before the country goes to the polls.

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Musharraf is not yet irrelevant