Friday, March 6, 2020
Pakistan's intelligence service may end up the real winner in the Afghan peace deal, at least for now
Sean D. Naylor
On the surface, one winner in the peace deal the United States signed with the Taliban on Saturday is Afghanistan’s neighbor Pakistan, which has been a longtime supporter of the Islamist group that may now be in a position to regain at least a share of power in the Afghan government. But the deal also poses long-term risks to Pakistan, whose intelligence service has spent years empowering militants that may no longer be under its control, according to analysts and former military officials.
From its formation in 1994 through its 1996 seizure of power in Kabul, the Taliban’s battlefield successes owed much to the help of the Pakistani military’s Inter-Services Intelligence agency, known as the ISI. The peace agreement, a clear victory for the Taliban, is in some ways a culmination of the ISI’s longtime support for the militant group.
“The Pakistani military intelligence, I’m sure they’re relieved, because they wanted this kind of an outcome,” said Hassan Abbas, a professor at National Defense University (NDU) in Washington, D.C., and a former Pakistani official. If the Taliban enter into some form of power-sharing agreement with the current Kabul government, that would mean “Pakistan will be able to push back on Indian interests in Afghanistan,” added Abbas, who authored the 2014 book “The Taliban Revival.” For Pakistan, he said, the Taliban represent “a tool to confront India.”
The agreement commits the United States to almost immediately begin reducing its military force in Afghanistan from about 12,000 troops to 8,600 by July 13, and then to completely withdraw from the country within 14 months, subject to the Taliban fulfilling its part of the deal by refraining from attacking U.S. and allied forces and by preventing others from doing so.
The deal also requires the Taliban to begin negotiations with the Afghan government on March 10. Those talks might result in a power-sharing deal that gives the Taliban, which is dominated by ethnic Pashtuns, a significant role in a coalition government in Kabul. But if the Taliban and the government of Ashraf Ghani fail to reach an agreement, which seems increasingly likely, the U.S. military withdrawal will only serve to enhance the Taliban’s battlefield position.
Either option would likely be acceptable to Pakistan, which has traditionally sought a compliant, Pashtun-dominated government in Kabul. However, a stronger Taliban will likely embolden other regional militant groups that are not under Pakistan’s control.
Islamabad’s support for the Taliban, as well as for jihadi groups targeted at India, has already led to the emergence of other rogue Islamist militant groups such as the Tehrik-i-Taliban, sometimes known as the Pakistani Taliban, which have taken aim at the Pakistani state itself.
Pakistan’s security services “have paid through the nose because they knew that [because of] the policy of supporting the Afghan Taliban, they had to allow these other Taliban types to function in Pakistan, and all of those have created havoc in Pakistan,” Abbas said.
The ISI must now face the potential consequences of its decision to continue supporting the Taliban in the years following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
Although Pakistan has always denied it, most analysts accept that, following a brief pause after the United States (helped by the Tajik- and Uzbek-dominated Northern Alliance) drove the Taliban from power in late 2001, the ISI revived its relationship with the group it had nurtured since the mid-1990s. The rationale for the ISI’s actions remained the same: Pakistan has traditionally regarded Afghanistan as “strategic depth” in the case of a war with its fierce rival India, and for that reason wants a government in Kabul it can control.
Irrespective of whether the peace talks end with the Taliban gaining a role in government, or simply improving their military position by virtue of the U.S. withdrawal, Pakistan, and in particular the ISI, may therefore welcome the latest turn of events.
“Regardless of the outcome, I think this puts Pakistan — including the ISI — closer, either politically or militarily, to getting more influence in Kabul, which is what they wanted,” said Seth Jones, director of the Transnational Threats Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Retired Army Col. Tom Lynch of NDU’s Institute for National Strategic Studies said the U.S. military withdrawal without defeating the Taliban gives Pakistan an “I told you so” moment, because it has proved Pakistan’s argument to the United States, which Lynch summarized as “You can’t succeed in Afghanistan independent of us, because we manage, if not actually control, the militant framework in that country.”
But Lynch, who also agreed that Pakistan’s policy has led to attacks on its own government, described any victory the ISI might claim from the peace deal as “Pyrrhic.”
A return to power for the Afghan Taliban would reenergize the very Islamist groups that have created so much trouble in Pakistan, according to Abbas. “An empowered Afghan Taliban are automatically going to empower, inspire [and] motivate the Pakistani Taliban,” he said. “Any smart strategist in Pakistan at this moment should be quite worried.”
Pakistan finds itself in this situation because since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the ISI has walked an extraordinary diplomatic tightrope, supporting the Taliban as they were killing Americans in Afghanistan, while simultaneously helping the United States conduct counterterrorism operations against al-Qaida in Pakistan and elsewhere. The Taliban were responsible for the vast majority of the almost 1,900 American troops killed in action in Afghanistan.
“Pakistan, particularly ISI, has successfully run a not-so-covert covert action program for almost the last two decades to provide assistance and sanctuary to the Taliban,” said Jones. “It’s actually an amazing feat, to allow sanctuary and provide assistance to the same group that is killing American soldiers, and to keep diplomatic relations” with the United States.
The most important assistance the ISI provided the Taliban, according to Jones, was to allow their leaders to base themselves in Quetta, home of the Pakistani military’s command and staff college, while permitting the Haqqani Network, a particularly dangerous self-contained group allied to the Taliban, to base itself in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas along the Afghan border. “For anybody who’s studied the successes or failures of insurgencies, having an external sanctuary for your leaders directly next door to a border that [your enemy] can’t control … is a huge upside,” Jones said.
While military officials have no doubt that Pakistani intelligence supported the Taliban, there’s disagreement about the types of support the ISI did — and did not — give the Taliban.
“There was obviously a tolerance of Taliban and Haqqani Network headquarters on Pakistani soil,” retired Gen. David Petraeus, who commanded U.S. forces in Afghanistan from 2010 to 2011, told Yahoo News. However, he added, “it was difficult to precisely confirm what was provided in terms of funding or weapons.”
The catalyst for the ISI’s decision to continue its support of the Taliban appears to have been the Pakistani government’s realization around 2004 that the U.S. government was developing increasingly close ties to India, which had begun to invest in Afghanistan, according to Abbas. From that point, “Pakistani military intelligence revived or expanded their support for the Afghan Taliban,” he said.
This support took the form of small arms and ammunition, intelligence and money, according to analysts. But the ISI made sure to limit the lethality of the Taliban’s arsenal. “They manage very carefully the things that they do not want in the hands of the Afghan Taliban or anybody else out there,” said Lynch, a former military assistant to the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan. In particular, the ISI worked hard to prevent the Taliban from getting shoulder-held antiaircraft and antitank weapons, he said.
But unlike the support it provided to the Taliban during the 1990s, in the post-Sept. 11 era the ISI did not make a habit of sending military advisers into Afghanistan with the Taliban. “Absolutely not,” Lynch said. “They would not take that risk.”
In general, the ISI adopted more of a hands-off approach to the Taliban’s war against the U.S. and coalition forces, according to Lynch. The Pakistanis gave the militants strategic guidance, using the ISI’s vast network of “cutouts” (mostly ISI alumni and contractors), “but ISI would not have been engaged or involved in planning Taliban military operations,” he said.
However, Lynch and Abbas agree that, in the case of the Haqqani Network, a militant group that is now part of the Taliban, the ISI exercised a much tighter degree of control, particularly when it came to attacks against Indian targets in Afghanistan.
“Where I know personally the ISI would be intimately involved would be in specifying timing, targeting and effects desired against Indian targets,” Lynch said. “The Haqqanis have always been the favorite guided missile of the ISI.”
Despite the support that most senior U.S. officials realized, or strongly suspected, the ISI was giving to the Taliban, for almost 10 years those officials refrained from publicly castigating the Pakistani government, even as U.S. casualties in Afghanistan continued to mount. A major factor behind this reticence was the invaluable help the ISI was providing the United States in stopping terrorist plots by al-Qaida.
Indeed, the reason the U.S. government has tolerated the ISI’s support for the Taliban is that Pakistan was simultaneously assisting the United States with counterterrorism, according to Lynch. “The head of the ISI helped us capture and/or kill some of the most notorious terrorists and intercept some of the most diabolical plots that we have seen hatched by international terrorists in the last 20 years,” he said, pointing to the ISI’s role in foiling plots to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge in 2003 and the Baltimore tunnels in 2005, and the capture of senior al-Qaida figure Younis al-Mauritani in 2011.
“There have been at least, to my knowledge, six to eight documented major intercepts, disruptions and defeats of international terrorists that we owe to the … ISI, and that’s the tip of the iceberg,” Lynch said. “That’s why our intelligence community has been so adamant for so long that we not just throw away that relationship in frustration over the fact that there are these three degrees of separation [between the ISI and] how our forces have died in Afghanistan.”
As a result, the United States entered into what Lynch termed “a Faustian bargain” with the ISI, maintaining a relationship with it and refusing for many years to publicize its role as a supporter of the Taliban, in order to benefit from its help countering al-Qaida and similar international terrorist groups. Lynch likened this dilemma to the “dirty hands decision” an FBI agent must make when he’s running a mob informant who is providing valuable intelligence, even though the informant himself might be a murderer.
The United States made the right decision, Lynch said, adding that he lost three close friends killed by the Taliban. “It still sticks in my craw,” he said. “But I understand the strategic dynamic in what we were trying to do there. Because we weren’t going to go to war with a country of 180 million people with nuclear weapons.”
The Pakistanis also understood this, according to Lynch. “They’ve always had us by the short hairs,” he said. “Because they’re so intimately intertwined with those jihadi networks that they knew stuff that we needed to know.”
It would be a mistake to assume that the current crop of senior Taliban leaders are beholden to Pakistan, according to Abbas. As an example, he cited Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, the former deputy Taliban commander who languished for more than eight years in a Pakistani jail before being released at the United States’ request in 2018. He soon became the militants’ lead negotiator in Qatar, where the peace deal was signed.
Leaders like Baradar “are skeptical about Pakistan,” despite the ISI’s long-standing support of the Taliban, Abbas said. “They will play their own cards very, very carefully.”
#AuratMarch2020 - ’عورت مارچ پر ثابت ہوگیا، پی ٹی آئی جماعت اسلامی کا جدید نمونہ ہے‘
پاکستان پیپلزپارٹی (پی پی پی) کے چیئرمین بلاول بھٹو زرداری کے ترجمان سینیٹر مصطفیٰ نواز کھوکر نے کہا ہے کہ عورت مارچ کے معاملے پر ثابت ہو گیا کہ پاکستان تحریک انصاف (پی ٹی آئی) جماعت اسلامی کا جدید نمونہ ہے۔
مصطفیٰ نواز کھوکھر کا اپنے بیان میں کہنا تھا کہ عورت مارچ کے معاملے پر (ن) لیگ اورپی ٹی آئی ایک صفحے پر آگئیں، تحریک انصاف کھل کر خواتین کے حقوق کے خلاف کھڑی ہوگئی ہے جبکہ عورت مارچ پر (ن) لیگ کی خاموشی رجعت پسندانہ سوچ کی عکاس ہے۔
انہوں نے کہا کہ عمران خان کو توپہلے دن ہی گُڈ لکنگ جماعت اسلامی کا خطاب ملا تھا، عورت مارچ پر ثابت ہو گیا کہ پی ٹی آئی جماعت اسلامی کا جدید نمونہ ہے، جو لوگ پی ٹی آئی کو ترقی پسند جماعت سمجھے تھے، وہ مایوس ہوگئے ہیں۔
مصطفیٰ نواز کھوکھر کا کہنا ہے کہ بلاول بھٹو وہ واحد قومی لیڈر ہیں جو خواتین کے حقوق کے لیے ڈٹ کر کھڑے ہیں، حکمران مُلائیت پروان چڑھا رہے ہیں جس کا مذہب سے کوئی تعلق نہیں۔
انہوں نے کہا کہ سندھ حکومت عورت مارچ کا مکمل تحفظ فراہم کرے گی۔
خیال رہے کہ گزشتہ دنوں نجی ٹی وی شو کے دوران معروف ڈرامہ نگار خلیل الرحمان قمر اور سماجی کارکن ماروی سرمد کے درمیان ہونے والی تکرار کے بعد عالمی یوم خواتین کے موقع پر ہونے والا عورت مارچ زیر بحث ہے۔
اسلام آباد ہائی کورٹ نے عورت مارچ کو رکوانے کیلئے دائر درخواست ناقابل سماعت قرار دے کر مسترد کردی ہے۔ ہائی کورٹ کے چیف جسٹس، جسٹس اطہر من اللہ کی جانب سے جاری فیصلے میں کہا گیا ہے کہ خواتین کے عالمی دن کے موقع پر عورت مارچ کا اعلان کیا گیا، توقع ہے کہ عورت مارچ کے شرکاء شائستگی برقرار رکھتے ہوئے آئینی حق استعمال کریں گے۔
#Pakistan #AuratMarch2020 - Imran Khan hates feminism because he wants women to just make gol rotis & have gori skin
MAHWASH AJAZ
Pub - 18 June 2018
His comment comes at a time when the feminist movement in Pakistan has been gathering a lot of steam, and also ridicule from right-wing factions of society.
Imran Khan is no stranger to controversial media interviews. From labeling liberals “bloodthirsty” to calling international cricket players coming for Pakistan Super League T20 “relu kattay (hoi polloi of the cricket world)”, his utterances are fodder for the next news cycle.
Now, Khan saab has decided to target a subsection of the so-called “bloodthirsty liberals”: The feminists.
In a recent interview to a news channel, Khan said, “Feminism, which is from the West, has degraded motherhood.”
Many female journalists, such as myself, took to Twitter to respond to his diatribe against feminists. The army of trolls that is often associated with his party Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI), rose to his defence, calling us dastardly feminists with a ‘Western agenda’ and insisting that feminism does indeed ruin the motherhood experience.
As an example, they cited how children were neglected if a mother was at work, while conveniently ignoring the fact that children do grow beyond the age of four, attend school and eventually become independent human beings. For them, all we evil feminists want to do is cause earthquakes by wearing jeans and raise ill-behaved children because we want to put our degree to the use it was meant for.
Evil feminists such as myself have been speaking out against honour killing and sexual harassment and female infanticide. Also, let’s not get into how feminists support women’s right to breastfeed their children without fearing stigma, and the belief that men should be better fathers rather than distant or absentee individuals that have no impact on a child’s well-being.
Let’s just speak about how Khan’s comment comes at a time when the feminism movement in Pakistan has been gathering a lot of steam, as well as ridicule from society’s right-wing factions.
Recently, a popular slogan, ‘Khana khud garam kar lo’, at the ‘Aurat march’ for women’s rights inspired memes, social media fights and a television Eid film. Many actors and actresses in Pakistan openly denounce the word feminist and it has become more of an insult than a quality to admire. Most of these people, like Khan, have done little to research the term and its history before giving their uninformed opinions.
If you believe that women deserve equal rights as men, if they deserve equal opportunities as men, if they should not be killed in the name of honour, if they should not be abused, attacked by acid or be shot for refusing a proposal, or stabbed 27 times in broad daylight, or sexually harassed — you’re a feminist.
It is tempting to respond to Khan’s statement with many below-the-belt statements. But more important is to note just how flawed Khan’s barely 10-word statement about feminism is.
The question is whether Khan thinks mothers are degraded by ‘Western’ feminism even though it is the rights movement in the West that has given women the right to an education in universities, the right to vote, to campaign for maternity leave, to speak up against sexual harassment, and to fight for equal pay.
It is also pertinent to note that it is the same feminism that allows many women to argue that his current wife, the veiled Bushra Maneka, is not to be targeted for her attire, simply because it is her choice. Respecting a woman’s choice is exactly what the “Western concept of feminism” has been teaching women.
Or does Khan genuinely believe that women who work are somehow lesser mortals than those who stay at home and choose to bring up their children full-time? And for many women, especially in our part of the world, this is not a choice but a pattern of social norms where they are disenfranchised to the point that they do not have enough education or freedom to study and work. Many women stay at home and rear children because that is what they have been reared to do. That is how they have been told to shape their ambitions: To make a gol roti and to have perfect gori skin.
Does Khan not realise the struggle of the average desi woman, whether it is in the fields sifting wheat, or in the corporate jungle, fighting to be paid fairly? Or maybe he discounts it, the struggle of the millions of women who have been trying to balance work and home, not because they like having a million balls in the air, trying to meet deadlines and clean the kid’s diapers, but because patriarchy has not made it conducive for a woman to choose easily between a career and a home. The culprit is not feminism here, Mr Khan. The culprit is patriarchy.
Khan’s ill-informed flippant statements are important and critical in the grand scheme of General Election 2018. He has followers, voters, sympathisers and apologists who take his word as reference points for future discourse.
Khan’s party is said to be fighting tooth and nail to defeat the PML(N), which won the last election. While the PTI’s voter base consists of an urban, educated, well-informed cross section of society, his rant against feminists may find a curious resonance with the deep-seated mullahesque mindset that is most challenging for many women in Pakistan.
The former cricketer also represents the classic stereotype of a man hating feminism despite having had multiple marriages, romantic liaisons and a circus after circus attached to his divorces and weddings.
Such experiences would have prevented a woman from fighting in the political sphere unscathed. Her marriages, her romantic linkups and her divorces would have been used against her as a statement of how immoral she truly is, and how she should be sitting at home praying for a good man to marry her instead of contesting the election. Khan benefits from this system, a patriarchal code that allows men to get away with a whole lot more than it allows us women.
Is it a small wonder, then, that he hates feminists?
For Pakistani men, Aurat March is the real coronavirus
NAILA INAYAT
Women marching with placards, using slogans like 'mera jism meri marzi' are not 'good women’. And how dare they oppose maulanas and misogynists, Pakistan's real feminists?
Women marching in open holding placards, demanding fundamental rights, starting a conversation around difficult issues are ‘not good women’ because good women don’t complain no matter what. The measure of how much freedom women can have is dictated by others in Pakistan.
Now, when the expectation from her is to not even speak up, how can she march? And still, she and others like her march in March, calling it the Aurat March. Just the mere mention of these two words – Aurat March – sends its opponents in a tizzy. Aurat March is the coronavirus for those opposing it and they warn everyone to stay away from this saazish (conspiracy) of the Western lobby.
The March scare
This year there were demands to ban the Aurat March because one triggered petitioner saw it as “against the norms of Islam”, saying its hidden agenda was to “spread anarchy, vulgarity and hatred”. And, of course, it is also promoting anti-state activities. The Lahore High Court thought otherwise and ruled that the march can’t be stopped “under the law and Constitution” of Pakistan. So, the march will go on.
But that didn’t stop the notorious Lal Masjid extremists from threatening the artists and vandalising in police presence a mural of two women painted by Aurat March organisers in Islamabad. Two ‘uncovered’ women in a mural were ‘fahashi (pornographic)’ enough to be ruined with black paint. Earlier, a mural painted with public service messages and images of women icons in Lahore was also destroyed. Adding to the disdain towards Aurat March was Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam (F) leader Maulana Fazlur Rehman, who said his party would not allow vulgarity and obscenity in the name of human rights because Quran and Sunnah don’t allow that. He urged his workers to stop the march by force.
We can assume that most people who oppose Aurat March are not even aware of the charter of demands that the movement has put forth. All it asks for is equality and fundamental rights for women – but then who cares about all that when a few placards is all it takes to go red.
Women want rights over their bodies. How dare they?
Continuing from last year is a feminist slogan of Mera Jism Meri Marzi – my body, my choice. Simply put, it means that a woman’s body is not to be abused. The slogan highlights rape, marital rape, sexual assault and the violence based around women’s bodies. As opposed to the societal diktat that a woman’s body is ownership of the man. But many find it offensive. If it were mera jism, apki marzi (my body, your choice), all those offended would happily fall in line.
The abhorrent commentary around Mera Jism Meri Marzi just goes to show that men’s obsession with women’s bodies is here to stay. The issue is not with the slogan but with the patriarchal mindset that questions women’s right to say no.
Television screenwriter Khaliur Rehman Qamar said on a talkshow how even the mention of this phrase boils his blood, to which journalist Marvi Sirmed repeated “Mera Jism Meri Marzi” and Qamar abused her saying “Tera jism hai kya, bibi? Thookta nahin hai koi aapke jism par” and then he went on with the profanities. The female anchor sitting next to Qamar didn’t have it in her to throw him out of the studio. Interestingly, the co-panellist maulana didn’t get offended much when Qamar called Marvi a “bitch”; he kept asking everyone to let Qamar complete his answer. By the way, Qamar calls himself a feminist who stands for women’s rights. Yes, maulanas and misogynists are the real feminists in Pakistan.
This is the man who preaches morality and mannerism to women participating #AuratMarch. Just see the true face of anti #AuratMarch crowd. twitter.com/AsifViews/stat…
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The TV showdown on Aurat March placards isn’t new, though. We all remember Orya Maqbool Jan spiralling over “Dick pics apnay pass rakho” placard used by participants during 2019 Aurat March. The placard was an ‘abuse’ of his fundamental rights, he said. Apparently, sending dick photos to women was a fundamental right that the marchers were trying to take away from men like Orya Maqbool Jan. Other placards on not taxing sanitary pads, not throwing acid on women, asking to stop equating women with lollipops, iPads, juice boxes, demanding that daughters be given inheritance rights, and reclaiming public spaces have stayed with many.
The reactions that Aurat March receives every year in Pakistan would make for comic relief if the issues concerning the women weren’t as real and required urgent action. Women reclaiming lost public spaces every 8 March is a positive movement that we should all get behind.
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