UNDERSTANDING AFGHANISTAN AND PAKISTAN
From the book "Decade of Fear" by Michelle Shephard
If international pressure over the war in Afghanistan and domestic political and economic woes weren't enough, floods of biblical proportions cemented Pakistan's reputation as a cursed country. Impacting the devastation of the August 2010 floods was the fact that little international aid followed. After Haiti's earthquake in January 2010, $31 million in donations poured into the Red Cross due to a successful campaign in which 3.1 million Americans used their mobile phones to donate $io each. The same campaign for the floods in Pakistan? About $10,000 was collected, despite the fact that the loss caused by the floods affected more people than were affected by the Haitian earthquake, the 2005 earthquake in Pakistan and the 2004 tsunami in South Asia, combined. There were a variety of reasons for the apathy: donor fatigue; Mr. Ten Percent being president (he visited his father's chateau in France as his nation suffered); lack of access to affected areas and therefore lack of crucial media footage; timing (the flood happened during the slow summer months when journalists are on vacation); the flood's devastation by nature being more insidious than the immediacy of an earthquake, tsunami or tornado; or perhaps because Pakistan was simply considered the bad boy on the block and, sadly, there was little international sympathy.
Before I arrived, the White House had just pledged another couple of billion to Pakistan over the next five years in its fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban. But of course the fighting was no longer against the traditional concepts of al Qaeda and Taliban that had existed ten years earlier, nor was it limited to the border region. The WikiLeaks cables underscored Pakistan's deceitful role in fighting the war in Afghanistan. The documents alleged that certain players within the ISI had never stopped supporting groups like the Afghan Taliban, the warlords (such as those belonging to the notorious Haqqani network), the border bandits from Waziristan, or local jihadi groups, including Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT). LeT had been officially designated a terrorist entity in Pakistan in 2002 but continued to operate freely under various names and charities. Even after the group was implicated in the 2008 Mumbai attack, in which Pakistani militants killed more than 160 during a sixty-hour siege of luxury hotels, a train station and Jewish centre, many ofthe group's members roamed free. LeT originally was formed to fight for the independence of the disputed Kashmir region, and there were factions within Pakistan's military and the is ISI that regarded the group as an important reserve force for future conflicts with India-much to the ire of Pakistan's nuclear-armed neighbour, and of the United States.....
Entire books are devoted to understanding Pakistan, and in the past decade there have been many. One of the best is by respected Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid. Rashid writes in "Descent Into Chaos" that the U.S. and NATO forces failed to understand that the Taliban is not a monolithic body but a "lumpen population, the product of refugee camps, militarized madrassas, and the lack of opportunities in the borderland of Pakistan and Afghanistan."
The West's failure to understand the Taliban or its distinction from al Qaeda, coupled with Pakistan's ill-advised military actions, such as the raid on the Red Mosque, only fuelled a new generation of hate and distrust for both local and foreign governments, and gave rise to a new Taliban bent on attacking Pakistan. There was no doubt by 2011 that the propaganda war had been lost in the region, and the United States had failed in its purported battle for the hearts and minds of its populace. Pakistanis were fed up by the level of violence in their country and by their government's corruption, but equally hated the Taliban. The failure to follow through with promises of nation building in both Afghanistan and Pakistan, however, did lead to disillusionment and easy pickings for al Qaeda and the Taliban.
By the spring of 2011, the CIA's drone attacks in the border region were stirring incredible controversy. Unmanned predator aircraft that fired hellfire missiles and were piloted half a world away were a terrifying presence in the sky. Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann of the New America Foundation had been vigilantly tracking the drone strikes and estimated that from 2004 until April 2011, between 1,439 and 2,290 people had been killed. At this rate, it was conceivable that by the ten-year anniversary of 9/11 the drone attacks in Pakistan alone may have killed as many as those who died on September 11, 2001.
The drone program substantially increased under the Obama administration. In 2009 alone, there were fifty-one U.S. attacks, while there were only fifty-four during Bush's eight years in power. There were militants among the dead-most famously, TTP leader Baitullah Mehsud (believed to have been the mastermind of Benazir Bhutto's killing). Mehsud was getting a massage on the roof of his compound in South Waziristan when a drone smashed his hideout in August 2009, also killing one of his wives. But more often it was civilians who were killed. According to Bergen and Tiedemann's analysis, only a dozen of the more than one hundred drone attacks in 2010, which killed between six hundred and one thousand people, hit the intended targets.
Drone attacks may be preferred over foreign boots on the ground, but when they are based on shoddy intelligence, the effect can be devastating. A joint poll between the New America Foundation and Terror Free Tomorrow (funded by the United States Institute of Peace) in the FATA region in 2010 showed that nine out of every ten people opposed the U.S. pursuit of al Qaeda and Taliban. Only 16 per cent said they believed the drone strikes accurately targeted militants.
The beginning of this decade was a delicate time in Pakistan's history. Religious extremists killed two high-profile politicians who dared to speak out against the country's blasphemy laws, and President Zindari was criticized for his apathetic reaction. U.S. troops were scheduled to begin withdrawing from Afghanistan in July 2011. Mistrust between the United States and Pakistan was at an all-time high, as was the world's cynicism and rhetoric.
There was a shortage of easy solutions and an abundance of complex problems. Then a May 2011 raid on a high-walled compound, in a quiet military town near Islamabad, would make things even more complicated in Pakistan.....
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