"Who Is The Real Terrorist?" Reports From Pakistan And Afghanistan Differ

A couple of days ago I lost the only draft of a piece that was half-finished and already so complicated it made my head hurt. In that piece I had quoted Chris Floyd quoting Scott Horton quoting Carlotta Gall and David Rohde and Barnett Rubin. Are you with me so far?

The subject was Pakistan and Afghanistan: The piece by Gall and Rohde talked about Pakistan having lost control of the extremists that had been nurtured by the Pakistani intelligence agency, ISI, before Pakistan joined the War on Terror. The Rubin piece linked this loss of control to the bombing of the Serena Hotel [photo], Kabul's luxury spot for foreign visitors.

I don't have the heart to reproduce the post as I originally intended it, especially since reading it might make your head hurt, too. So I will try to give you more or the less the same information in a very different way.

I once read that the best blog entries consist of links, quotes, and comments. Maybe that's the secret.

Carlotta Gall and David Rohde in the New York Times: Militants Escape Control of Pakistan, Officials Say

Pakistan’s premier military intelligence agency has lost control of some of the networks of Pakistani militants it has nurtured since the 1980s, and is now suffering the violent blowback of that policy, two former senior intelligence officials and other officials close to the agency say.

As the military has moved against them, the militants have turned on their former handlers, the officials said. Joining with other extremist groups, they have battled Pakistani security forces and helped militants carry out a record number of suicide attacks last year, including some aimed directly at army and intelligence units as well as prominent political figures, possibly even Benazir Bhutto.

The growing strength of the militants, many of whom now express support for Al Qaeda’s global jihad, presents a grave threat to Pakistan’s security, as well as NATO efforts to push back the Taliban in Afghanistan. American officials have begun to weigh more robust covert operations to go after Al Qaeda in the lawless border areas because they are so concerned that the Pakistani government is unable to do so.
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One former senior Pakistani intelligence official, as well as other people close to the agency, acknowledged that the ISI led the effort to manipulate Pakistan’s last national election in 2002, and offered to drop corruption cases against candidates who would back President Pervez Musharraf.

A person close to the ISI said Mr. Musharraf had now ordered the agency to ensure that the coming elections were free and fair, and denied that the agency was working to rig the vote. But the acknowledgment of past rigging is certain to fuel opposition fears of new meddling.
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The two former high-ranking intelligence officials acknowledged that after Sept. 11, 2001, when President Musharraf publicly allied Pakistan with the Bush administration, the ISI could not rein in the militants it had nurtured for decades as a proxy force to exert pressure on India and Afghanistan. After the agency unleashed hard-line Islamist beliefs, the officials said, it struggled to stop the ideology from spreading.

Another former senior intelligence official said dozens of ISI officers who trained militants had come to sympathize with their cause and had had to be expelled from the agency. He said three purges had taken place since the late 1980s and included the removal of three ISI directors suspected of being sympathetic to the militants.
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After 9/11, the Bush administration pressed Mr. Musharraf to choose a side in fighting Islamist extremism and to abandon Pakistan’s longtime support for the Taliban and other Islamist militants.

In the 1990s, the ISI supported the militants as a proxy force to contest Indian-controlled Kashmir, the border territory that India and Pakistan both claim, and to gain a controlling influence in neighboring Afghanistan. In the 1980s, the United States supported militants, too, funneling billions of dollars to Islamic fighters battling Soviet forces in Afghanistan through the ISI, vastly increasing the agency’s size and power.

Publicly, Mr. Musharraf agreed to reverse course in 2001, and he has received $10 billion in aid for Pakistan since then in return. In an interview in November, he vehemently defended the conduct of the ISI, an agency that, according to American officials, was under his firm control for the last eight years while he served as both president and army chief.

Mr. Musharraf dismissed criticism of the ISI’s relationship with the militants. He cited the deaths of 1,000 Pakistani soldiers and police officers in battles with the militants in recent years — as well as several assassination attempts against himself — as proof of the seriousness of Pakistan’s counterterrorism effort.
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One militant leader, Maulana Masood Azhar, typifies how extremists once trained by the ISI have broken free of the agency’s control, turned against the government and joined with other militants to create powerful new networks.

In 2000, Mr. Azhar received support from the ISI when he founded Jaish-e-Muhammad, or Army of Muhammad, a Pakistani militant group fighting Indian forces in Kashmir, according to Robert Grenier, who served as the Central Intelligence Agency station chief in Islamabad from 1999 to 2002. The ISI intermittently provided training and operational coordination to such groups, he said, but struggled to fully control them.

Mr. Musharraf banned Jaish-e-Muhammad and detained Mr. Azhar after militants carried out an attack on the Indian Parliament building in December 2001. Indian officials accused Jaish-e-Muhammad and another Pakistani militant group of masterminding the attack. After India massed hundreds of thousands of troops on Pakistan’s border, Mr. Musharraf vowed in a nationally televised speech that January to crack down on all militants in Pakistan.

“We will take strict action against any Pakistani who is involved in terrorism inside the country or abroad,” he said. Two weeks later, a British-born member of Mr. Azhar’s group, Ahmed Omar Sheikh, kidnapped Daniel Pearl, a reporter for The Wall Street Journal who was beheaded by his captors. Mr. Sheikh surrendered to the ISI, the agency that had supported Jaish-e-Muhammad, and was sentenced to death for the kidnapping.

After Mr. Pearl’s killing, Pakistani officials arrested more than 2,000 people in a crackdown. But within a year, Mr. Azhar and most of the 2,000 militants who had been arrested were freed. “I never believed that government ties with these groups was being irrevocably cut,” said Mr. Grenier, now a managing director at Kroll, a risk consulting firm.

At the same time, Pakistan seemingly went “through the motions” when it came to hunting Taliban leaders who fled into Pakistan after the 2001 American invasion of Afghanistan, he said.

Encouraged by the United States, the Pakistanis focused their resources on arresting senior Qaeda members, he said, which they successfully did from 2002 to 2005. Since then, arrests have slowed as Al Qaeda and other militant groups have become more entrenched in the tribal areas.

Asked in 2006 why the Pakistani government did not move against the leading Taliban commander Jalaluddin Haqqani, and his son Sirajuddin, who are based in the tribal areas and have long had links with Al Qaeda, one senior ISI official said it was because Pakistan needed to retain some assets of its own.
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“Pakistan would certainly be better off if the ISI were never used for domestic political purposes,” said Mr. Grenier, the former C.I.A. Islamabad station chief. “That goes without saying.”

Barnett R. Rubin at Informed Comment: Global Affairs: New York Times on ISI; Serena Hotel Attack

David Rohde and Carlotta Gall deserve huge credit for an outstanding investigative article today on Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence Directorate. This article makes sense out of all the contradictory indications about the ISI's links to the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban as well as other armed militant groups. It also covers the ISI's role in domestic politics, including election rigging. It is clear from the article that a military regime cannot (and some will not) control the militants it created and that the military will also not permit civilians to take control of the state.
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The attack on the Serena Hotel in Kabul is a shock for all of us foreigners who have gone there for tea. conferences, or brunch, even if we never stayed there. Like most people who go in and out of the Kabul expatriate community, I imagine, I knew a couple of people who were there -- in my case including some Norwegian diplomats.

News reports mention that this was Afghanistan's only "five-star" hotel. They don't mention that nearly all Afghans live in "zero-star" conditions, including the thousands of people who pass that traffic circle every day and see inaccessible luxury behind thick walls. The rioters attacked the Serena in May 2006, apparently believing that alcohol is served there, though it is not.

I am sure that the people of Kabul don't want more violence in their city. They were badly frightened by the riots in 2006. But there is huge resentment and anger building up at the overbearing foreign presence. The May 2006 riots were sparked by an accident where US military vehicles killed a pedestrian. Afghans see and often do not distinguish among the "Chinese restaurant" brothels and the glittering restaurants (by Afghan standards, not ours) serving luxuries, including alcohol, to foreigners, some of whom are being highly paid to destroy Afghanistan's opium livelihood, which Afghan Islamic figures say is no worse than the alcohol they drink at night after destroying farmers' poppy crops.

Many Afghans think that money that is supposed to be used to help them is instead being used to pay for the good life for foreigners in the Serena hotel. Alas, it is true. When aid donors boast of how much technical assistance they are giving Afghanistan, they provide data on the size of the contracts they have given to consultants. I have spent some of the grant and contract money that pay for my salary and travel expenses on meals and tea at the Serena Hotel. These expenses are counted as someone's assistance to Afghanistan.

This is a new kind of target for the Taliban. Foreigners going to restaurants in Kabul (including some where, unlike the Serena, alcohol is in fact served), sometimes joke that they feel like targets. Up to now, however, they have not been. The Taliban have mostly attacked the international forces and Afghan army, police, and officials, as well as other "collaborators," such as employees on reconstruction projects or public figures who support the government. Sometimes they kill civilians indiscriminately when they attack government buildings (including cases when they killed students in schools). But as far as I know, this is the first attack targeted at the foreign assistance community and the "corrupt" lifestyle it has brought to Afghanistan. I imagine it will not be the last.

Scott Horton at Harper's: Pakistan Loses Control

A recent poll suggests that half of Pakistan’s population believes that Pakistani strongman Pervez Musharraf, or military leaders very close to him, had something to do with the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. Pakistan may be the world’s center of wacky conspiracy theories, but this public perception should not be lightly dismissed. In fact the Pakistani military and its intelligence arm have deep ties in to the Islamic militants who considered Bhutto their greatest threat on the Pakistani political stage.

For those trying to make sense out of the tremendously complex, and tremendously important threads in Pakistan and Afghanistan that tie together Musharraf, the Pakistani senior military establishment, Pakistan’s Interservice Intelligence (ISI), the Taliban in both Pakistan and Afghanistan, tribal chiefs and groups, and various terrorist groups which float in the shadows between all of these players, Carlotta Gall and her colleague David Rohde offer an important contribution in today’s New York Times.

I first met Gall more than ten years ago when she was working for the BBC covering Central Asia. Even then she was a very rare figure, a Westerner who tenaciously dug in to learn what was going on. Gall never thought the answers were to be found in the lobbies of the Sheratons and Intercontinentals, which is where the bulk of the press corps seem to hang out to pick up their scoops. She went to the villages and small towns to form a solid picture of the situation and she probed insistently into the shadowy world of the Pakistani intelligence service and its various cat’s paws.

Her article today gives one of the best accounts of the relationship between ISI and their radical agents, and the ambiguity of much of this relationship. It’s mandatory reading.
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The ISI is the critical prop to Musharraf’s reign. It was responsible for his rigged election successes in the past and certainly will play the same role in the coming election. The Times piece goes on to offer specific detail on an internal review of the agency and its relationship with radicals, which leaves many asking who is guarding whom?

Barney Rubin goes on to link this report with the alarming bombing attack on Kabul’s luxury Serena Hotel.
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Westerners are now being targeted, and the Taliban’s reach is right into their ultimate luxury sanctuary in Kabul. This development opens the year in Kabul on an appropriate note of alarm. Afghanistan is not Iraq, and the prospects for success of the Western effort there are considerably higher than in Iraq. The stakes are also higher, I believe. This is the challenge at center stage of the current conflict: the amorphous borderlands between Pakistan and Afghanistan, the ultimate growth matrix of the terrorist threat that manifested itself on 9/11, and which is, six years later, stronger than ever.

Chris Floyd at Empire Burlesque: Risky Business: A Reporter in the Eye of the Storm

... a perfect description of Gall at work when I knew her in Moscow. That was how she covered the first Chechen war, a brutal affair on every side, and one swathed with many layers of lies. She went to Chechnya, to the front lines and "to the villages and small towns to form a solid picture of the situation." She would call in her stories on a satellite phone, dictating them to someone at the desk -- often me -- racing to meet the midnight deadline, sometimes with shellfire sounding in the background.

The New York Times has made many egregious hires (Judith Miller, that little Kristol guy, etc.) and many foolish, even sinister moves over the years. But in hiring Gall, who has been covering Afghanistan from the beginning of the American invasion there, they have provided us with at least one figure of great journalistic integrity, tenacity and courage among the upper echelons of the corporate media.
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Horton links to Gall's latest story, written with David Rohde, exploring the shadowlands nexus between Pakistan's security forces (army and intelligence), and the terrorist factions they created, nurtured, armed, trained and now, occasionally, fight against. The story even manages to make an early mention of the American role in using Pakistan's intelligence agency, ISI, to arm, fund and train a global jihad network -- the one-time "freedom fighters" now reviled by their own creators as "Islamofascists." It also notes that it was this American intervention -- begun under the saintly Jimmy Carter (even before the Soviets invaded Afghanistan) and greatly expanded under the Reagan-Bush regime -- that "vastly increased" the size of the ISI and extended its dark influence throughout Pakistani society.

This angle is not the thrust of the piece, but it is extremely rare to see even this much context in a story about the troubles in Central Asia, where ham-handed, dim-witted interventions by the bipartisan loot-and-power crowd in Washington have for decades been fomenting vast storms of blowback, which we will be dealing with for many decades hence -- with the worst storms yet to come.

Chris Floyd is right: it's great to have such a brave reporter on the scene. But it's a shame she's shackled to the corporate media, where even a short mention of the CIA's role in Pakistan and Afghanistan is a rarity.

And in this rarity the truth must be hidden in as many misleading ways as possible, by such devices as acknowledging the American influence in the 1980s but no later, hinting but never making the dubious claim that the CIA had cut all its connections with the group it had founded.

Similarly, in the hands of the New York Times, this is a story of militants who have "turned against their handlers" despite the obvious fact that it was the handlers who turned against the militants.

Obvious? If Musharraf had to purge the ISI three times, what does that tell you? It was Pervez Musharraf (at the "request" of George W. Bush) who tried to change the course of mighty rivers.

The "militants" and "terrorists" have been under attack ever since 9/11 was blamed on Osama bin Laden. And those who recall the sequence of events will remember that "blame" is the correct word. The USA asked the Taliban to turn him over, the Taliban offered to send him to any duly constituted international court if the Americans provided evidence against him, and the Americans responded with wave after wave of bombers.

This was the only response available to the United States, after all, since it had no evidence connecting Osama bin Laden with the attacks of 9/11, as even the FBI admits. Bin Laden was the scapegoat; no more, no less. 9/11 was an inside job, a multi-faceted coup d'etat for which he was blamed but which he never could have accomplished.

And you don't see the NYT talking about Pakistan's change of policy toward the militants in this light, nor do you see anything in the so-called "paper of record" about how USA has used and betrayed "freedom-fighters" all over the world.

In short, I'd rather see Carlotta Gall writing for the NYT than not, but we're still obliged to read her reports through the standard filter. In other words, the individual dots may be laid out correctly, but not always; meanwhile there are always some dots missing, and the narrative connecting the others is bound to be twisted.

And I can't deny that I'd be a lot more comfortable with the official story of 9/11 -- as well as the official story of how Pakistan lost control of the militants who attacked us on 9/11 -- if the story about the loss of control had come along before the attack, rather than six years after. But such is the nature of covert ops, I suppose. You can't always fabricate the history your cover story requires, but that's never considered a reason to cancel an operation.

Speaking of 9/11, attentive readers will have noticed that the NYT quotes Robert Grenier, who was CIA station chief in Islamabad on 9/11 and is currently a managing director at Kroll -- a company which ranks very high on the list of corporate 9/11 suspects. If there is any reason to believe this man, I have no idea what it is. So much for the "liberal media".

I disagree with Scott Horton on Western chances in Afghanistan. As I read it, Afghanistan is "lost" and always has been. The invasion was based on lies and will never amount to anything but a crime against humanity. But that won't stop the imperial adventure. Nor will most of the "dissident" media ever acknowledge it. But the "militants" will never stop trying to eject the foreign military presence -- and as long as that presence remains, the "militants" will never have to go recruiting.

Will Scott Horton write about this one day? Or will he continue to present propaganda disguised as journalism, where the "center stage of the current conflict" is "the amorphous borderlands between Pakistan and Afghanistan, the ultimate growth matrix of the terrorist threat that manifested itself on 9/11 ..."

It's beautiful English, of course. But as History it stinks.

The evil force that manifested itself on 9/11 was a lot closer to home than the amorphous borderlands between Pakistan and Afghanistan, and I would have thought Scott Horton was smart enough to see that. But then again, perhaps he's shackled by Harper's. Or perhaps he never would have got the gig at Harper's... but I digress.

Listen: whoever bombed the Serena Hotel seems to understand that the foreign troops are little pawns in a big game and will be replaced as necessary, for as long as the foreigners continue to sip tea in the hotel. In other words, their "tactical shift" seems to indicate a realization that there's no point attacking the troops and leaving the foreign dignitaries alone. They don't seem to realize that the foreign dignitaries are as replaceable as the troops.

But the replaceable foreigners are hiding now, according to Eleanor Mayne in Kabul for the Telegraph: Party's over in Kabul after hotel bomb

It could have been a scene from the trendier parts of Paris, New York or London - a smart restaurant-bar packed with chic 20-somethings, debating which club to head on to as midnight approaches.

Yet L'Atmosphere, a funky French bistro with open fire, is not a hang-out on the Left Bank, Soho or Greenwich Village but in the Afghan capital, Kabul, the city that once hosted the world's most hardline Islamic regime. Its customers have been the foreign aid workers rebuilding the country.

But last week's suicide bombing of the upmarket Serena hotel, where the swimming pool and coffee bar were popular gathering points for Westerners, and the Taliban's threats have alarmed Kabul's aid workers, who have until now regarded the city as a place to let their hair down after arduous postings in remote Afghan provinces.

Many aid organisations are now in temporary "lock down" - barred from going out for anything other than essential business. On Friday night, a tour by The Sunday Telegraph of the city's nightspots, which are discreetly located in private ­villas, found most closed or nearly empty.

During the six years since the fall of the Taliban, the city has slowly acquired an unlikely status as a party town among the tens of thousands of charity workers, diplomats and security staff now based here.
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The prospect of further attacks -part of a deterioration of security in Kabul in the past year - have raised the question of whether the city may end up building a version of Baghdad's fortified Green Zone, where aid and construction workers live in spartan compounds.

Such a move would not be welcomed by the capital's aid workers, many of whom club together to rent spacious Kabul mansion houses. While their colleagues in Baghdad cannot venture out without an armed escort, they can come ago largely as they please. On Fridays and weekends throughout the summer, sun-bathers crowd the grass at the swimming pool at one United Nations compound, enjoying the pool-side bar. And there are beauty salons offering relaxing Thai massages, as well as therapists, counsellors and yoga classes.

Late-night dancing, meanwhile, is guaranteed at Bayou Blues or Crazy Eight, a security contractors' hang-out where weapons must be handed in at reception.

So lively is the social scene that Kabul has its own version of Hello! magazine in the form of the monthly Afghan Scene, which features a "Be Scene" section with pictures of various expats attending photo gallery launches, dinners and occasional black tie parties.

That tells you more than you ever needed to know, doesn't it? They hate us for our freedoms?

And finally, some remarkable journalism: a point of view you will never see from the New York Times, Carlotta Gall or no.

Nawab Khair Buksh Marri interviewed by Rashed Rahman, editor of Pakistani daily The Post: "We fear extinction"

I want to ask who defines international standards. Who creates the world order? Who forms international public opinion? America and her satellites decide the price of petrol and the fate of nations. And whosoever dares disagree is a terrorist. Human beings need to think as to who is the real terrorist: the one who kills or the one who defends his right to life, the one who cons or the one who resists being conned? It is not predetermined that a superpower is civilized and peace loving by definition. Who invented and dropped the atom bomb before any other nation had an atom bomb? That is quite akin to the parable of the lion distributing the bounty. The phrase “lion’s share” does not refer to a fair and just distribution of resources. America is the lion of the international community and then she has quite a coterie of hired servants, stooges and cronies. America has colonies all over the world apart from vast interests in technology, science and research. Whoever resists America, is being labelled as a terrorist. When Osama asks America to leave his lands, he is called a terrorist, even if Osama and those of his ilk have been working for the American interests in the past. When Mullah Omar asks America to leave Afghanistan, he is given the title of a terrorist.
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Those who wield power are also the arbiters of justice. Processions are taken out at Trafalgar Square every day and the British are not bothered. The rule of law is a nice accessory of the civilized world. Protests are not the sole method of defending rights. These methods can be a pressure tactic. However, they are ineffective when the powerful decide to have their way. Protests could not stop the American aggression against Iraq. The Americans said that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction as if America did not have any weapons of mass destruction. Well, America was the referee and it failed to find any such weapons in Iraq. Civilized protests are ineffective in addressing deep-rooted grievances.
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If you give up hope, you are dead. One needs to keep hope alive to live on. As you know the elections are round the corner. On the one hand we have the clamour of the weak. At the other end of the spectrum, there is the noise and the power of the regime. The weak are neither resourceful nor united at the moment. They do not trust each other either. It is not necessary that the equation remains the same forever.

If you haven't had enough yet, please read all of "We fear extinction".

I think you should also read all of "Militants Escape Control of Pakistan, Officials Say", but don't forget to remember the parts that aren't mentioned.

Barnett Rubin's piece, "New York Times on ISI; Serena Hotel Attack", contains a lot of detail on the terrorists who have been blamed for the attack on the Serena. Blame is not the same as guilt, as Rubin himself points out when he writes "In case this hypothesis proves true, here is some background." Regardless of who was behind the bombing, this is a very informative post.

I've said this before but just in case: bookmark Chris Floyd at Empire Burlesque and read him every day. That's an order. You can thank me later.

And as for Scott Horton, I've been a bit rough on him, but he does fine work on a number of fronts. So here's another bookmark for your collection of hard-working patriots, not all of whom agree on all issues.

Art In Islamabad Gallery Runs Counter To Stereotypes

For a reporter who has spent most of her adult life covering the wars and the aftermath of the wars in south-central Asia, doing a story on an art gallery must have felt like a vacation -- or at least a breath of fresh air.

Carlotta Gall is one of the very few mainstream reporters whose work I take at face value. Her columns are always very well-crafted, she reports about things she has actually seen and people she has actually talked to, and she always manages to include some historical context. All this and more, actually: if you read her over an extended period, you can see that there's never any consistent "spin" -- in one column she may appear to support President General Pervez Musharraf, for example, but in a subsequent piece she may line up with his most strident detractors.

I'm not calling Carlotta Gall a "flip-flopper"; far from it. I'm saying she calls 'em as she sees 'em. She has made a career of praising people when she thinks they've done something good, and criticizing them when she thinks they've done something bad. It amazes me that anyone so honest can still draw a salary from the New York Times; but then again she's willing to work in south-central Asia. They certainly don't have anybody like her in the corridors of power.

Back to the point: Carlotta Gall's newest piece is a portrait of the National Art Gallery in Islamabad, Pakistan, which opened last month after more than 30 years of on-again, off-again. Most of the article details the story of the gallery's construction -- a project whose fate has always depended on the whim of the national government, in a country of severe political shifts. It's a fascinating tale, and Musharraf looks good in this light. (So there's probably something quite scathing about Musharraf in Carlotta Gall's pipeline! -- just kidding, but not really!!)

Back to the point, again: Tucked away near the end of the piece is a wonderful description of what the gallery actually contains:

The gallery runs counter to many of the stereotypes of Pakistan’s image today. There is a startling amount of humor and overt sexuality in the exhibits. A pair of suitcases filled with special shower heads for Islamic ablutions, and monumental razors and clippers, poke fun at the needs of the Muslim traveler. Metal sculptures of the female form recall something of the medieval chastity belt. Suspended wooden speakers invite visitors to enter a maze like a pinball machine and batter their heads with the sound of hundreds of madrasa pupils chanting the Koran.

It's our unifying factor, our common human bond. Where would we be without jokes about sex, ablutions, and religion? I can see the advertising slogan now:

"When in Islamabad, get your sex and religion jokes at the National Art Gallery."

OK, maybe not ... but it's still funny, isn't it?

You can read the entire piece at the NYT website: "An Outpost of the Arts, Secured by a Military Dictator". Or if that doesn't work, look here.

Afghanistan: British Commander Asks US To Withdraw Special Forces From Helmand Province

Carlotta Gall, writing for the International Herald Tribune, reports on a development you probably won't hear much about anywhere else. Extended excerpts follow:

A senior British commander in Afghanistan's Helmand Province said he had asked the U.S. military to withdraw its special forces from his area of operations because the high level of civilian casualties they have caused was making it difficult to win over local people.

A U.S. military spokesman denied the request was ever made, either formally or otherwise, but the dispute underlined differences of opinion among NATO and U.S. forces in Afghanistan on tactics for fighting Taliban insurgents and concerns among soldiers on the ground about the consequences of civilian casualties.

A precise tally of civilian casualties is difficult to pin down, but one reliable count puts the number killed in Helmand this year at close to 300 - the vast majority of them caused by foreign and Afghan forces, rather than the Taliban.

"Everyone is concerned about civilian casualties," the senior British commander said. "Of course it is counterproductive if civilians get injured, but we've got to pick up the pack of cards that we have got. Other people have been operating in our area before us."

After 18 months of heavy fighting, British commanders say they are finally making headway in securing key areas, like this town, and are now in the difficult position of trying to win back the support among people whose lives have been devastated by aerial bombing.

American special forces have been active in Helmand since U.S. forces first entered Afghanistan in late 2001, and for several years they maintained a small base outside the town of Gereshk. But the foreign troop presence was never more than a few hundred men.

British forces arrived last spring and now have command of the province: About 6,000 soldiers are deployed, with small units of Estonians and Danish troops. American special forces have continued to assist in fighting insurgents, operating as advisers to Afghan security forces.

It is those small teams that are coming in for criticism. Their tactics rely heavily on airstrikes for cover because they are unable to defend themselves if they encounter a large group of insurgents. Special forces teams have often called in airstrikes in Helmand and elsewhere and civilians have subsequently been found to have suffered casualties.

In just two cases, airstrikes killed 31 nomads west of Kandahar in November 2006 and 57 villagers, half of them women and children, in western Afghanistan in April. In both cases U.S. special forces called in the airstrikes.

British officers on the ground in Helmand, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Americans had caused the lion's share of the civilian casualties in their area. They expressed concerns that the Americans' extensive use of air power was turning the people against the foreign presence.
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For months, frequent reports of civilian casualties have trickled out of Helmand Province, the scene of some of the fiercest battles of the war here. But there has rarely been independent confirmation of the reports because the province has been too dangerous for journalists and others to visit. NATO officials accuse Taliban sympathizers of exaggerating claims of civilian casualties in airstrikes.
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Yet there is no doubt there have been civilian casualties, and British and Afghan officials acknowledged that they have seen some of them.

Villagers brought the bodies of 21 civilians killed in airstrikes on the village of Sarwan Qala on May 8 to show the authorities in Sangin, they said. U.S. special forces were battling the Taliban on that occasion and called in the strikes, the military said in a statement at the time.

Three days later the nearby village of Sra Ghar was hit. British soldiers at a base called Robinson just south of Sangin said they had received 18 civilians around that time who were wounded in an American operation and flew them out to NATO hospitals for treatment.

On a rare visit to Helmand in mid-July, a journalist encountered children who were still suffering wounds sustained in that bombing raid or another around that time. Their father, Mohammadullah, 24, brought them to the gate of the British army base seeking help.

His son, Bashir Ahmed, 2, listless and stick thin, seemed close to dying [photo]. The boy and his sister Muzlifa, 7, bore terrible shrapnel scars. NATO doctors had removed shrapnel from the boy's abdomen and had warned his father that he might not survive, but two months later he was still hanging on. Mohammadullah said the bombing raid killed six members of his family and wounded five. His wife lost an arm and the children's grandmother was killed, he said.

Sometimes it takes a tragedy -- a catastrophic and catalyzing event -- to make people see the truth:

Mohammadullah said: "Now we have understood that the Americans are a curse on us and they are here just to destroy Afghanistan."

Death Toll Stands At 21 In Islamabad Mosque Standoff, Amid Vows Of Martyrdom And Talk Of Revolution

The Lal Masjid (Red Mosque) standoff continues in Islamabad, the capital city of Pakistan, where hundreds (perhaps thousands) of Pakistani policemen have had an estimated 60 to 80 radical Islamists surrounded since Tuesday.

More than a thousand students have escaped from the besieged mosque complex since the violence began six days ago, but more -- possibly several hundred more, including women and children -- are still inside. [In the photo, friends and relatives of those still inside the mosque wait for their loved ones at a makeshift camp nearby.]

Pakistani President General Pervez Musharraf has been praised by his American friends for his restraint in handling the crisis, but he has also been criticized for not taking serious steps sooner.

By Saturday he appeared to be extremely serious.

As Carlotta Gall reported in the New York Times,

Pakistani President Tells Militants: Surrender or Die:

Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, in his first comments on the five-day siege of militants in a mosque complex in the capital, said Saturday that the mosque leader and his armed followers should surrender or prepare to die.

“They should not prolong, they should surrender and hand over their weapons, otherwise they risk being killed,” he told news agencies during a visit to the flood-hit southwestern province of Baluchistan. “They have defamed Islam. They have defamed Pakistan. They have embarrassed Pakistan internationally.”

“The government has enough power and no one can stand before its might,” he said. “Our concern is for children and women and we are showing lot of patience and restraint.”

So the ultimatum has been presented; it appears to have been accepted, as well.

President Pervez Musharraf [...] warned the militants on Saturday that they would be killed if they did not surrender.

Ghazi -- polite, articulate and soft-spoken -- said his followers would sooner die.

This according to Zeeshan Haider, in a hot-off-the net report from Reuters India.

Rebel cleric wants death to spark Pakistani revolution:

A cleric leading militants besieged in an Islamabad mosque hopes their "martyrdom" would spark an Islamic revolution in Pakistan, he said in a statement published by newspapers on Sunday.

Surrounded by government forces, Abdul Rashid Ghazi took over leadership of a Taliban-style movement at Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, after his brother was caught trying to escape a day after the siege began last Tuesday.

"We have firm belief in God that our blood will lead to a revolution in the country," the grey-bearded Ghazi said in a statement characterised as a "will" by Jang, Pakistan's biggest selling Urdu language newspaper.

"God willing, Islamic revolution will be the destiny of this nation," wrote the rebel cleric, whose movement is symptomatic of militancy and extremism seeping into Pakistani cities from tribal areas near the Afghan border.

Elsewhere it has been asserted that the extremism seeping into Pakistan from tribal areas has al-Q'aeda connections. More on that in a moment, perhaps...

Zeeshan Haider continues:

Many of the 5,000 students enrolled at the two madrasas (Islamic schools) affiliated to Lal Masjid before the violence began came from Taliban hotbeds like the Waziristan tribal region.

So far, at least 21 people have been killed, most of them in clashes between armed students and paramilitary troops on Tuesday that led to the siege of the compound housing Lal Masjid and a girls' madrasa called Jamia Hafsa.

Musharraf said security forces had acted with restraint so far in order to minimise casualties among women and children belonging to the cleric brothers' Taliban-style movement, some of whom the government believes are being used as human shields.

Ghazi, of course, denies this. Who wouldn't? Would anyone say "Yeah, you got us, mate! We're using innocent women and children as human shields. Go ahead and bomb us. We're ready to die. But think of the women and children!"

Ghazi denied children were coerced into staying in the compound, and said they remained out of support for his cause.

"We want justice for poor people. They should get bread. We want an end to adultery, bribery, oppression, obscenity and nepotism. Implementation of the Islamic system is panacea to all these problems," wrote Ghazi.

The system Ghazi advocates appears to embody a few problems of its own, however.

The rebel holds a masters degree in international relations from Islamabad's Quaid-e-Azam University and was fired as a civil servant over involvement in militant activities.

There's a detail you don't often see in mainstream US/UK accounts of the standoff. You also don't see much about the motives of the radical militants who say they are ready to die for their cause.

To spark a revolution? A revolution over what? Because they hate our freedoms?

Ghazi said his movement sprang out of bitterness over the Musharraf government's amendment of Islamic laws on rape last year, the demolition of mosques illegally built on public land, and official condemnation of support for jihadi causes.

He also berated the government for "handing over Muslims to infidels like cattle", referring to the transfer of captured al Qaeda suspects to U.S. custody.

As much as it pains everybody to admit it, the soft-spoken madman in the mosque may have a point. In particular, the Pakistani government appears to have no defense against the latter charge.

Michelle Faul wrote about the wholesale sale of terror suspects to the Americans shortly after 9/11.

Excerpts from Gitmo Detainees Say They Were Sold:

A wide variety of detainees at the U.S. lockup at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, alleged they were sold into capture. Their names and other identifying information were blacked out in the transcripts from the tribunals, which were held to determine whether prisoners were correctly classified as enemy combatants.

One detainee who said he was an Afghan refugee in Pakistan accused the country's intelligence service of trumping up evidence against him to get bounty money from the U.S.

"When I was in jail, they said I needed to pay them money and if I didn't pay them, they'd make up wrong accusations about me and sell me to the Americans and I'd definitely go to Cuba," he told the tribunal. "After that I was held for two months and 20 days in their detention, so they could make wrong accusations about me and my (censored), so they could sell us to you."

Another prisoner said he was on his way to Germany in 2001 when he was captured and sold for "a briefcase full of money" then flown to Afghanistan before being sent to Guantanamo.

"It's obvious. They knew Americans were looking for Arabs, so they captured Arabs and sold them -- just like someone catches a fish and sells it," he said. The detainee said he was seized by "mafia" operatives somewhere in Europe and sold to Americans because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time -- an Arab in a foreign country.

A detainee who said he was a Saudi businessman claimed, "The Pakistani police sold me for money to the Americans."

"This was part of a roundup of all foreigners and Arabs in that area," of Pakistan near the Afghan border, he said, telling the tribunal he went to Pakistan in November 2001 to help Afghan refugees.

The military-appointed representative for one detainee -- who said he was a Taliban fighter -- said the prisoner told him he and his fellow fighters "were tricked into surrendering to Rashid Dostum's forces. Their agreement was that they would give up their arms and return home. But Dostum's forces sold them for money to the U.S."

Several detainees who appeared to be ethnic Chinese Muslims -- known as Uighurs -- described being betrayed by Pakistani tribesmen along with about 100 Arabs.

They said they went to Afghanistan for military training to fight for independence from China. When U.S. warplanes started bombing near their camp, they fled into the mountains near Tora Bora and hid for weeks, starving.

One detainee said they finally followed a group of Arabs, apparently fighters, being guided by an Afghan to the Pakistani border.

"We crossed into Pakistan and there were tribal people there, and they took us to their houses and they killed a sheep and cooked the meat and we ate," he said.

That night, they were taken to a mosque, where about 100 Arabs also sheltered. After being fed bread and tea, they were told to leave in groups of 10, taken to a truck, and driven to a Pakistani prison. From there, they were handed to Americans and flown to Guantanamo.

"When we went to Pakistan the local people treated us like brothers and gave us good food and meat," said another detainee. But soon, he said, they were in prison in Pakistan where "we heard they sold us to the Pakistani authorities for $5,000 per person."

More excerpts from Michelle Faul's article:

In March 2002, the AP reported that Afghan intelligence offered rewards for the capture of al-Qaida fighters — the day after a five-hour meeting with U.S. Special Forces. Intelligence officers refused to say if the two events were linked and if the United States was paying the offered reward of 150 million Afghanis, then equivalent to $4,000 a head.

That day, leaflets and loudspeaker announcements promised "the big prize" to those who turned in al-Qaida fighters.

Said one leaflet: "You can receive millions of dollars. ... This is enough to take care of your family, your village, your tribe for the rest of your life — pay for livestock and doctors and school books and housing for all your people."

Helicopters broadcast similar announcements over the Afghan mountains, enticing people to "Hand over the Arabs and feed your families for a lifetime," said Najeeb al-Nauimi, a former Qatar justice minister and leader of a group of Arab lawyers representing nearly 100 detainees.

Al-Nauimi said a consortium of wealthy Arabs, including Saudis, told him they also bought back fellow citizens who had been captured by Pakistanis.

Khalid al-Odha, who started a group fighting to free 12 Kuwaiti detainees, said his imprisoned son, Fawzi, wrote him a letter from Guantanamo Bay about Kuwaitis being sold to the Americans in Afghanistan.

One Kuwaiti who was released, 26-year-old Nasser al-Mutairi, told al-Odha that interrogators said Dostum's forces sold them to the Pakistanis for $5,000 each, and the Pakistanis in turn sold them to the Americans.

"I also heard that Saudis were sold to the Saudi government by the Pakistanis," al-Odha said. "If I had known that, I would have gone and bought my son back."

So ... What is this? Conspiracy theory? Liberal wacko nonsense? If that's the case, then the General President of Pakistan must have the same disease, because he admitted in his autobiography that Pakistan had taken millions of dollars in payment for the terror suspects handed over to the Americans.

And now the trappings of charter membership in the GWOT are being thrown back in Musharraf's face! Such are the perils of publishing an autobiography while still in office -- and facing re-election!

What a long, strange trip it's been for Pervez Musharraf. But that's another story -- or is it??

Here's Carlotta Gall [again] in the New York Times:

Behind a Siege in Pakistan, Rumblings of Wider Dissent:

The immediate problem for the general remains how to end the siege with minimum loss of life, and how to contain any backlash, particularly in the event of a bloody denouement.

The government has done its best to avoid such an ending and appears to be winning the high ground. The militants, it now seems clear, precipitated the fighting by firing first and killing an Army Ranger. The mullahs and their students have earned little public sympathy in their own neighborhood or around the country with their campaign to impose Shariah law, raiding shops and smashing CDs and music tapes.

The arrest of the leader of the mosque, Maulana Abdul Aziz, who tried to escape in a burqa while leaving behind hundreds of his students, many of them female, has brought ridicule in the news media, which have largely supported the government. Neither the public nor the religious parties have protested the actions of the government, which has won praise for its relative restraint.

But the standoff is far from over, and several bombings in the North-West Frontier Province this week, including a suicide bombing, and gunfire as the president’s plane took off Friday, are a reminder that the Lal Masjid, or Red Mosque, is only the most visible bulwark of Islamist militancy that is lodged in cities and districts across Pakistan and appears to be growing.
...

Government officials are privately saying they hope that the government will next go after another radical cleric, Fazlullah, the acting leader of the extremist group Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi, or the Movement for the Enforcement of Islamic Law, who has been vocal in his support for the Taliban and suicide bombing as well as the clerics in the mosque.

But going after individuals may not be enough.

An investigation published Friday by The News, a national daily, found that 88 seminaries belonging to various sects were giving religious education to more than 16,000 students in the capital. Moreover, the number of students here attending religious schools belonging to the Deobandi sect, an anti-Western, pro-jihadi fundamentalist school of thought that inspired the Taliban, among other movements, has doubled in the last year alone.
...

The spread of madrasas in the capital has been steady since the 1980s when Gen. Zia ul-Haq, then in power, promoted the madrasas as a source of mujahedeen to fight the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, the report said.

Seven madrasas were founded in the capital during his 11-year rule, 15 more during the 11 years of civilian governments under Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif from 1988 to 1999, and 14 during General Musharraf’s eight-year rule.

Certain lessons must be drawn from the Lal Masjid episode, the national daily Dawn wrote Friday in an editorial. “Characters like the two Lal Masjid brothers are to be found all over the country,” it wrote. “They have money and arms and brainwashed followers willing to do their bidding.”

While their followers may be innocent and sincere in their belief, their leaders often operate with impunity, it said. “It is, thus, the brains behind them that the government should go after.”

Hmmm ... Going after the brains behind the militants may not be exactly what the GWOT has in mind.

But in the meantime, the siege of Lal Masjid continues. Here are the most recent reports from Dawn:

Senior officer killed as Lal Masjid siege enters 6th day

ISLAMABAD, July 8 (AFP) – Militants entrenched in Islamabad’s Lal Masjid shot dead a senior Pakistani army officer during fierce clashes with troops on the sixth day of the siege on Sunday.

Colonel Haroon Islam was leading an operation to help free some of the women and children being used as human shields by the militants inside the fortified mosque complex when he was shot, the army said.

Major General Waheed Arshad told AFP another army officer was injured in the fighting.

“Rashid Ghazi and his militants were responsible for the killing of a senior army officer,” Information Minister Mohammad Ali Durrani said. “The operation will continue and Ghazi has to surrender.”

Security forces have held back from raiding the now bullet-pocked mosque but there have been intense clashes around the perimeter. Security forces blew up sections of the compound wall during the night and there were further intense exchanges of fire, a security official said early Sunday.

“Security forces dynamited the wall to allow people inside to come out.” They risked being shot by militants if they attempted to climb the wall, which is seven to eight feet high, he said.

Cleric Abdul Rasheed Ghazi claimed security forces had killed 30 female and 40 male students in the siege. The women were buried at the site, he said.

The government says the total death toll is 20. The cleric said he and his followers had enough rations, arms and ammunition inside the compound to “fight for another 25 to 30 days and we will do that, God willing.”

Fortunately the all-purpose solution stands ready -- the story has even been set up, if indeed it is a setup. But, like every other aspect of the GWOT, regardless of its truth or fiction, the story packs a punch.

Al-Qaeda-linked militants in Pakistan mosque: security officials

ISLAMABAD, July 8, 2007 (AFP) - Islamic militants from a group linked to Al-Qaeda and to the murder of the journalist Daniel Pearl are believed to be leading hold-outs at a Islamabad’s Lal Masjid, security officials said Sunday.

At least two commanders from the banned group Harkatul-Jihad-e-Islami, whose name means Movement of Islamic Holy War, are inside the besieged Mosque, the officials said on condition of anonymity.

“We believe there are militants from Harkatul-Jihad-e-Islami, which was involved in the Pearl murder. Based on intelligence we suspect that two commanders from the group are in there,” one senior official told AFP. “They have taken control and they are putting up fierce resistance.”

The information was based on “intercepts” and other intelligence, the officials said, without naming the men. But the militants are thought to be giving orders to the hundreds of radical students in the mosque, they said.

The government says women and children are being held as human shields, which the mosque's clerics deny. “Our forces are holding back as long as it is possible to avoid the deaths of women and children,” the security official said.

So there you have it. Last week some of the militants inside the besieged complex were described as "suicide bombers from an al Qaeda-linked militant group". But that wasn't quite good enough, and now that the crisis appears to be intensifying, we're told that "two commanders" have "taken control".

Pretty soon they will all be al-Q'aeda: the militants leading the resistance, the mosque leadership and staff, any male students remaining in the complex, and of course all the women and children too.

Musharraf is saying "surrender or die," and Ghazi is saying "our deaths will spark the revolution."

So converting everybody inside the mosque to al-Q'aeda militants appears to be the only way out. Because if they're all al-Q'aeda, the Pakistani police don't have to worry about killing them, right?

In fact, if everybody in the mosque were al-Q'aeda leadership, the Americans would knock them out at the drop of a hat ... or would they?

~~~

third in a series

A Fine Orwellian Balance In Pakistan: Musharraf Rescinds New Media Regulations, But New Media-Control Policy Remains In Force!

As Carlotta Gall of the New York Times reports, Pakistani General-turned-President Pervez Musharraf's attempt to stifle live media coverage of current political events has run into a major snag, so he's rescinded the order -- but the policy established by that order appears to remain in effect!

Musharraf Rescinds Media Regulations After Public Outcry

Pakistan’s president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, has formally withdrawn his decree that imposed new regulations on the news media, government officials said over the weekend. The president made his decision after he met with industry leaders, and after journalists and opposition parties strongly protested the decree, officials said.

The independent media channels agreed to prepare a code of conduct to be incorporated into government media regulations, the state news organization reported.

So they're going to impose media censorship using regulations drafted by the media themselves? How crafty!!

The formal withdrawal came after Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz, and his information minister, Muhammad Ali Durrani, said last week that the ordinance had been suspended pending discussions.

Commercial television channels, whose numbers have grown during General Musharraf’s rule, have been pressured in recent weeks to stop live coverage of events and live political talk shows, and have had their cable transmissions blocked.

It's clear what's been happening. The government has been trying to keep the people ignorant of what's going on in their country! That doesn't sound just a little bit familiar, does it?

Independent television channels have closely followed the progression of the former chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, as he has toured the country in the weeks after he was dismissed by General Musharraf.

Since his dismissal in March, Justice Chaudhry has drawn huge crowds on his stops to visit provincial courts and lawyers’ associations, and opposition parties have organized protest rallies to support him. At the rallies, criticism of General Musharraf and the military has been aired along with demands for change and a return to civilian rule.

We also have been following those events as best we can, here on the nearly frozen blog.

The presidential decree, which went into immediate effect when it was issued on June 3, amended media regulations to give the government regulating body broad powers to seize broadcasting equipment, seal premises and suspend licenses on impromptu orders. The regulating body was instructed to draft regulations at its own discretion, and a media committee that was to consider complaints and other contended issues was replaced with a board of government officials.

There you go: replace every committee with a board of government officials and you've got it made in the shade! But otherwise not!!

The decree was met with enormous disapproval by parliamentary allies, as well as by opposition parties and lawyers supporting the countrywide movement to reinstate Justice Chaudhry. Legislators were incensed that the decree was signed into law during a three-week recess of Parliament, thus avoiding any debate.

Slick, no? Doing the dirty work while Parliament is on recess! That doesn't ring any bells with my American readers, does it?

Lawmakers had just spent five months working on amending the media law, and they finally passed it earlier this spring.

... only to have it amended by royal edict! It's no wonder that so many Pakistanis have been in the streets, clamoring for the return of democratic rule after nearly a decade under the boot of the general who became president.

And once again you have to read all the way to the end of the article to find the kicker:

It remains unclear whether the government intends to retain the new restrictions when it resubmits the ordinance. The orders banning live coverage and live talk shows appear to still be in force.

As George Orwell spins ever more rapidly, let us rejoice in the thought that irony is definitely not dead.

Thousands Of Pakistanis Protest Media Restrictions

Despite the pre-emptive arrests of hundreds of Pakistani political activists, the protests planned for Thursday drew thousands of people, nearly half of them lawyers, as Pakistan's Dawn reports:

Thousands protest Pakistan media curbs

LAHORE, Pakistan, June 7 (AFP) - More than 6,000 Pakistani lawyers and opposition activists protested Thursday against tough media curbs imposed by President Pervez Musharraf amid a tense judicial crisis.

Demonstrators chanted “Go, Musharraf, go” in Lahore and other key cities.

Lawyers burned copies of the new rules in Lahore, while political workers carried pictures of former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif as well as cricketer-turned-politician Imran Khan. Officials said around 2,000 lawyers and 3,000 other people turned out in the city.

Police laid barbed wire coils across a main road to keep them away from a provincial governor's residence.

“We express solidarity with media men and condemn the new rules,” Liaquat Baloch, a senior leader of the Jamaat-i-Islami party, told the rally.

In the southwestern city of Quetta around 100 journalists wearing black armbands walked out of the provincial assembly and joined another 1,000 lawyers, labour unions and opposition members of parliament.

Another 500 media workers and opposition supporters marched in the northwestern city of Peshawar, witnesses said.

European Union and European Commission ambassadors to Islamabad said in a statement Thursday they were concerned about recent developments in Pakistan.

They said they were “concerned by recent setbacks with regard to media freedom, in particular reports about blocked transmissions of licenced cable TV stations and about cases of intimidation of journalists.

“Those developments are of particular concern in view of the upcoming election process.”

New York-based group Human Rights Watch urged military ruler Musharraf to lift the restrictions in a statement Wednesday, denouncing the move as a disgraceful assault on press freedom.

As is my cold custom, I have added a bit of space and a bit of emphasis to this and other quoted passages.

The unrest in Pakistan has multiple causes and has been brewing for a long time, but it was triggered by the sacking three months ago of Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, the country's Chief Justice, whose status is now described as "suspended".

For those not familiar with the case (and at the risk of quoting my frozen self), here's the gist of a piece I wrote about it in March:

On March 9, the General-President dismissed the nation's Chief Justice, on charges of "misconduct" and "misuse of office."

Why? [...] the General-President needs a pliant [judiciary] since he is planning to stage-manage his reelection for another five-year term, and he also wants to retain the top military rank indefinitely, both in flagrant violation of the country’s constitution.

How flagrant? The country's lawyers staged a virtually unanimous protest, but they were shut down by the police. Now, as unrest spreads throughout the country, the suddenly former Chief Justice says he's innocent and wants an open trial, whereas the General-President is asking him not to turn it into "a political issue".

Does this matter halfway around the world? Think nuclear weapons, a rogue intelligence agency, extensive terrorist connections (even within the government), intense animosity toward other countries (including USA) and anger over the GWOT ... Throw in a suddenly unstable government, and what have you got? Better not to think about that one, eh what?

Have no fear; the wheels of stability are turning quickly. The General-President has met with his legal experts [...] as for the main point at issue, whether he will be allowed to rig the upcoming election as a General as well as incumbent President, the General-President says he'll settle this himself.

Sure, he will. I'm sure he will settle everything!

Carlotta Gall is apparently thinking the same thing, for her most recent report, in the International Herald Tribune, starts this way:

Thousands of lawyers and supporters of political parties demonstrated peacefully against government curbs on the news media on Thursday, as senior military and intelligence officials presented affidavits to the Supreme Court in the case against the country's suspended chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry.

The political crisis stirred up by the suspension of Chaudhry in March is showing no signs of abating. Diplomats and journalists reported that General Pervez Musharraf, the president of Pakistan, and his immediate circle are showing signs of despondency, even dismay.

... and ends like this:

General Musharraf showed exasperation at a meeting Wednesday with senior members of the ruling party, the Pakistan Muslim League, according to the Pakistani daily newspaper The News. It described the president as looking shaken and telling an audience of 150 members of parliament, ministers and senators: "I feel disturbed for the first time."

The president berated members of his party for not offering him more public support, the paper reported. "I see the party nowhere," he was quoted as saying. "You are not mobilized. You are not delivering. You have lost the war of nerves. You are all silent upon what the media is doing. If I myself have to do everything, then you are for what purpose?" He urged his party to go on a public opinion offensive and to take on the opposition on every issue.

Many members of the ruling party have been trying to distance themselves from the most controversial of General Musharraf's recent actions, in particular those against the chief justice and the news media, which they regard as politically damaging.

For many more details see the rest of Carlotta Gall's report, possibly followed by this from The News, and either or both of these two reports from Dawn.

Working For The (Pakistani) Clampdown: More Than 300 Activists Arrested, New Media Rules In Effect

Pakistan Arrests 300 Workers From Opposition

According to Carlotta Gall in the New York Times (with emphasis added):

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, June 6 — The police have arrested more than 300 political party workers over the past few days in a crackdown before a protest planned this week against new government curbs on the news media, a government official acknowledged Wednesday.
...

Opposition legislators protested the arrests at the opening of a new session of the national Parliament, which had been on a three-week recess, but they were refused time by the speaker. Journalists covering Parliament staged a rowdy protest in the press gallery on Wednesday evening, interrupting the debate on the floor.

The president, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, signed a decree on Monday giving a government regulating agency stronger powers over the news media and the ability to rewrite regulations without recourse to Parliament.

The decree added to the pressure on the three main private television channels, which have been told to stop live coverage and live political talk shows. Their transmissions were blocked for several days across much of the country.

Journalists and editors said the government was cracking down to prevent critical coverage of General Musharraf’s suspension of the chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, and of the violence in Karachi related to his ouster. Forty-eight people were killed there on May 12 as police officers and rangers stood by.

Opposition parties allege that much of the shooting was conducted by the Muttahida Quami Movement, a partner in the governing coalition, and television images backed up their claims. Thousands flocked to rallies on Saturday in the north of Punjab to greet the chief justice.
...

Mr. Fazal Khan, the home secretary, said those seized were detained under a new measure, in force since Friday, that bans gatherings of more than five people. He said the government had to act after journalists had protested Monday and burned copies of the presidential decree.

“The government cannot sit idle after burning of the copies of the reference and other official documents, and holding rallies and public meetings by the opposition parties,” he told the television station.

Oh no! The government should never sit idle, especially in the face of rallies and public meetings. Who do those people think they are?

You can click here to read more from Carlotta Gall on the very volatile Pakistan.

As for me, the more I read and write about Pakistan, the more I see it as both an IED waiting to detonate, and also -- even more ominously -- as the shape of things to come ... here ... soon.

Of course there are differences. For instance, we don't have anybody like Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry.

Pakistan: Politics Growing Ever More Volatile As Former Prime Minister Looks For An Opening

Former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto is considering a return to Pakistani politics, according to the intrepid Carlotta Gall, who reports from Pakistan and Afghanistan for the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune.

Exiled leader considers political return to Pakistan

Former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto is roiling Pakistani politics by talking of a power-sharing deal with President Pervez Musharraf and by saying in an interview that she might return to Pakistan before the end of the year.

Threatened with arrest, dogged by corruption charges, Bhutto has sat out the last eight years in self-imposed exile in London and Dubai, while still leading what is arguably the country's largest party with nationwide support, the Pakistan People's Party.

If you think American politics is difficult, you should see what goes on in Pakistan, where the overall situation is in many ways much more volatile.

In that time, she has seen Musharraf, her former chief of military operations, seize power in a coup. She has watched the political turmoil build here as Pakistanis grow restless under military rule, galvanized most recently by Musharraf's ouster of the Supreme Court's chief justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry.

Members of her party were heavily represented in the outpouring of support for Chaudhry at a rally Saturday, a peaceful rally just weeks after more than 40 people were killed in Karachi in clashes related to his ouster.

As we have been discussing (here for instance), President General Musharraf is obligated by Pakistani law to call an election before the end of the year, and he is forbidden to stand for re-election as a military officer. It is widely believed that the President General sacked the chief justice because he was determined to uphold this particular law. To my nearly frozen way of thinking, this explanation makes more sense as "the last straw" rather than "the single reason", but I digress. In any case, popular support for Mr. Chaudhry has been strong, and visible, and growing. And Carlotta Gall has been very busy: here's her report on Saturday's rally:

Thousands Wait to Hear Ousted Pakistani Justice

ABBOTTABAD, Pakistan, Sunday, June 3 — Pakistan’s suspended chief justice led a cavalcade of about 100 cars jammed with lawyers and political supporters on a 75-mile trip from Islamabad on Saturday, continuing to protest his dismissal by Gen. Pervez Musharraf two months ago.

It was the first trip outside of the capital by the justice, Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry, since his trip to Karachi three weeks ago. Violence between his supporters and those of General Musharraf broke out upon his arrival in Karachi, leaving more than 40 people dead.

The government, lawyers’ associations and political parties have blamed one another for the deaths.

On Friday, the government banned protests in the capital, but there was no attempt to stop Mr. Chaudhry’s convoy as it left Islamabad on Saturday morning for Abbottabad, where he was to speak to the bar association.

Along the route, hundreds of people stood waiting at every junction and small town.

Kind of like what we could have here, if we had anything at all.

When the long motorcade passed, they tossed rose petals at Mr. Chaudhry’s car, played drums and chanted, “Until independence for the judiciary, the fight goes on!” and “Go! Musharraf Go!”

I've also seen an uncorroborated report saying that people were also chanting "Death To Musharraf!"

The President-General has been under increasing heat at home for his "alliance" with the USA in the so-called "War" on so-called "Terror", much of which seems to involve tracking down alleged terrorists who were allegedly trained in Pakistan or Afghanistan by ISI (the Pakistani intelligence service) or Al-Q'aeda (the two appear to be virtually interchangeable). Many in Pakistan and Afghanistan see Musharraf as waging war against Pakistan's friends and neighbors; perhaps you will recall that as of 9/11/2001, the Taliban government in Afghanistan was officially recognized by only one foreign government! But I'm digressing again. Carlotta Gall:

“This is not just a movement of lawyers, but this is for you, to bring equality for you,” Ahmed Khan, one of the lawyers representing Mr. Chaudhry, told a rally at the town of Haripur at midafternoon. “That’s why the chief justice is going around the country and why we want him reinstated.”

Mr. Chaudhry never left his car and did not speak to the crowds along the way.

Instead, one of his lawyers spoke.

“We are encouraged and invigorated with the spirit of this reception,” Ali Ahmed Kurd, one of lawyers representing the chief justice in his challenge against dismissal, speaking at Haripur, the main town on the way to Abbottabad and about halfway through the trip. “If things continue like this there will be no general or commander any more.”

He railed against the military commanders running the country and moves by the government to clamp down on the news media. “If you close these channels, can you close off the people’s voice from Karachi to Khyber?” he asked the crowd.

The Pakistani people are not simply upset about the sacking of the chief justice. There's a long list of complaints.

At Haripur, students, workers and retirees who turned out to hear the lawyers’ speeches complained of many things, including rising prices, the increasing gap between rich and poor, the failing education system, support for the United States global campaign against terrorism and the injustice of military rule.

“The work of the army is to defend the country, not rule the country,” said Amir Shehzad, 22, a chemical engineering student at Haripur. “There is a revolution happening. We are facing for many years a military dictatorship and people want democracy.”
...

Throughout the day, those interviewed along the route seemed to think that General Musharraf should not stay in power much longer. They called for elections, rather than a continuation of military rule.

“People do support the lawyers because they are talking about justice,” said Mubarak Dad Abbassi, 57, a government employee from Rawalpindi, early in the day, adding of Mr. Chaudhry: “I do think there was an injustice to him. People say he should be reinstated and Musharraf should go.”

When the motorcade reached its destination, there was a bit of a party going on.

When he arrived in Abbottabad at 11:30 p.m., thousands lined the streets to welcome him.

The opposition parties led by the former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif were out in force, as well as religious parties and other smaller group.

Hundreds of lawyers waited for hours in an Abbottabad park, listening to speeches and poetry and dancing in the aisles and on stage to a popular song whose refrain refers to General Musharraf: “Uncle, why don’t you take off your uniform and go back home? Why don’t you take your pension and go back home?”

And then ...

The chief justice finally began to speak at 2 a.m. Sunday.

He told he lawyers that the judiciary should come forward as a strong institution that people could trust.

“You are waging an immortal struggle for the independence of the judiciary and the supremacy of law and the Constitution,” he said. “You have given a lot of sacrifices, but you are not alone. The judiciary and the ordinary people are standing shoulder to shoulder with you.”

He spoke of human rights and freedom of speech, citing articles of the a Constitution.

Ahh, the old rule-of-law bit. People still go for that, in a big way.

So the Pakistani government took a pragmatic approach:

The government did not try to stop the political rallies along the way in support of Mr. Chaudhry, and the police provided security.

Government pressure was applied instead to the private media channels that have been following him on his tour of the country.

The government media-regulating agency warned all television channels that live coverage of events was not permitted, apparently to prevent them from showing Mr. Chaudhry’s speech and the rowdy cheering and chanting against General Musharraf and the government. By midafternoon, no channel was reporting live from the event.

You see how easy that was?

Things won't be so easy for the President General in the near future ... or will they?

As Pakistan veers toward elections this year, and as Musharraf runs into mounting opposition over his plans to seek a second term, Bhutto, 53, is raising her profile once again and positioning herself as savior of the nation, someone who can lead Pakistan back to democracy and provide a final bulwark against Islamic extremism.

Despite his repeated insistence that Bhutto will not be allowed to contest the elections, Musharraf, aides and diplomats say, has been conducting discreet negotiations for some kind of deal that would allow Bhutto back and him to stay on as president.

Now there's a quid pro quo you could bathe in! Will it happen? Who knows?

Carlotta Gall's long portrait of the former prime minister is quite sympathetic, and well worth reading (especially if you gaze between the lines a bit) but probably not the final word on the subject.

Speaking of gazing between the lines, you might enjoy another blogger's take on all this. If so, check out "Pant Load in Pakistan" from the Rock The Truth.

And speaking of final words, the following news updates from Pakistan's Dawn will serve as well as any, at least for the moment:

U.S. lawmakers raise alarm over Pakistan politics

WASHINGTON, June 5 (Reuters) - Pakistan's use of violent intimidation to quell political protests threatens U.S. and Pakistani interests, and President Pervez Musharraf must be encouraged to restore democratic processes, several U.S. congressmen say.

The unusually blunt comments to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice by Sen. Joseph Biden and Rep. Tom Lantos, both Democrats, and Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen reflect growing U.S. unease with Musharraf's handling of a widening confrontation with political opponents and the prospects for Pakistan's stability.

“Over the past two months, we have witnessed the spiral of civil unrest and harshly suppressed protest in Pakistan with increasing concern,” the lawmakers wrote in a letter to Rice obtained by Reuters on Tuesday.

“The national interests of the United States and Pakistan are both served by a speedy restoration of full democracy to Pakistan and the end to state-sponsored intimidation -- often violent -- of Pakistani citizens protesting government actions in a legal and peaceful manner.” They said Rice should make a public appeal to this end.

Biden is chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a Democratic candidate for president. Lantos is chairman of the House of Representatives International Relations Committee and Ros-Lehtinen is the panel's senior Republican.

Pakistani opposition says hundreds detained

ISLAMABAD, June 5 (Reuters) - Pakistani authorities have detained hundreds of opposition party activists in advance of a day of protests against the government this week, opposition party officials said Tuesday.

“Authorities have launched a massive crackdown against our activists and more than 200 workers have been arrested in Lahore alone,” said Shah Mehmood Qureshi, a provincial leader of former prime minister Benazir Bhutto's Pakistan People's Party (PPP) which is planning a day of protests in Punjab province on Thursday in support of suspended chief justice Iftikhar Mohammad Chaudhry and the media, which is facing increasing government curbs.

Qureshi said the protests would go ahead despite the detentions.

An Interior Ministry spokesman said “some arrests have been made in Punjab where the government feels they were necessary to maintain law and order.”

A spokesman of the MMA, an opposition alliance of conservative religious parties, said some of its activists had also been arrested in Punjab although he did not give a figure.

Thursday ... Thursday ... a day of protests in Punjab province on Thursday ... I'll be watching!

Pakistan: Chief Justice Says President And Military Officers Pressured Him To Resign

The following report, from Salman Masood and Carlotta Gall of the New York Times, seems well worth preserving.

I don't have much to say about it at the moment, other than pointing out that the abuse of power described here is extremely flagrant, and very much in keeping with the approach used by President General Pervez Musharraf's red, white and blue friends.

As for the story, it's too important to ignore, and too good to cut. I've added a bit of emphasis:

Chief Justice of Pakistan Says Musharraf Pressed Him to Resign

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan, May 29 — Iftikhar Muhammad Chaudhry [photo], the suspended chief justice of Pakistan, said today in a signed affidavit to the Supreme Court that on March 9, he was detained all afternoon against his will at the Army House in Rawalpindi, and was pressed to resign by the president of Pakistan, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, and by four senior military and intelligence chiefs, most of them in uniform.

The affidavit was filed by one of Mr. Chaudhry’s lawyers, Aitzaz Ahsan, at a Supreme Court hearing concerning the suspension of the Chief Justice. His lawyers later provided copies to reporters.

The document offers the first detailed account of the March 9 encounter from Mr. Chaudhry, whose refusal to resign or accept being dismissed has attracted widespread support and created a political crisis for Mr. Musharraf.

There was no immediate government reaction to the affidavit. Mr. Musharraf has tried to play down the significance of the March 9 encounter, and has said that the government is merely examining complaints of misconduct against the chief justice, whose term was scheduled to run through 2011.

When Mr. Ahsan told the presiding judge today that he had filed the affidavit after completing his arguments in court, Justice Khalilur Rahman Ramday, who heads the 13-member court, replied: “You should not have done that.”

Mr. Chaudhry faces charges of misconduct and nepotism that originally were put before a five-judge inquiry panel called the Supreme Judicial Council. Those charges formed the basis of Mr. Musharraf’s request for Mr. Chaudhry’s resignation on March 9.

Mr. Chaudhry denied the allegations, and is now challenging them before the Supreme Court. His lawyers say that the president and the military chiefs have no authority under the country’s constitution to remove a chief justice.

In the first week of May, the Supreme Court suspended the proceedings of the inquiry panel, and instead ordered that the full court hear Mr. Chaudhry’s petition challenging the panel’s authority and impartiality. It is unclear when the Supreme Court will reach a decision in the case; lawyers say the hearings could go on for months.

Mr. Musharraf’s own future may depend on the outcome. He is likely to face several legal challenges in the Supreme Court this year as he seeks reelection as president while continuing to serve as chief of the army staff, the highest military post in the country. Seven and a half years after Mr. Musharraf seized power in a coup, calls are growing around the country for a change from military rule.

In the affidavit, Mr. Chaudhry says he arrived at the military headquarters in Rawalpindi for a planned meeting with the president at about 11:30 a.m. on March 9. When Mr. Musharraf met Mr. Chaudhry, the president was wearing military fatigues, the affidavit says, and he told Mr. Chaudhry of a complaint lodged against him by a judge from a provincial High Court. Mr. Chaudhry said the complaint was baseless.

According to the account, Mr. Musharraf then told Mr. Chaudhry that there were a few more complaints, and directed his staff to call in the prime minister, Shaukat Aziz.

At this point, the affidavit says, three top officials of Pakistani’s intelligence services entered the room: Lt. Gen. Ashfaq Pervaiz Kiyani, the director general of Inter Services Intelligence; Maj. Gen. Nadeem Ijaz, the director general of Military Intelligence and a close relative of President Musharraf; and Aijaz Shah, a retired brigadier who directs the country’s Intelligence Bureau.

With them was retired Lt. Gen. Hamid Javed, the president’s chief of staff. Mr. Chaudhry mentioned the four officials by their titles alone, and said that two of them were in civilian clothing, the others in uniform.

Mr. Musharraf demanded to know how it was that the chief justice drove a Mercedes car, and said there had been complaints that Mr. Chaudhry had interfered in proceedings in another provincial high court, according to the affidavit. The president then insisted that Mr. Chaudhry resign from the supreme court, and if he agreed to do so, the president promised to “accommodate him,” the affidavit says.

Mr. Chaudhry says he responded: “I have not violated any code of conduct or any law, rule or regulation; I believe that I am myself the guardian of law. I strongly believe in God who will help me.”

This answer “ignited the fury” of Mr. Musharraf, who stood up angrily, told Mr. Chaudhry that the officers would show him the evidence gathered against him, and left the room along with his staff and the prime minister, the affidavit continues. Over the next four hours, Mr. Chaudhry said, the senior officers other than Mr. Shah repeatedly pressed him to resign, but presented him with no evidence.

Mr. Musharraf said in a recent television interview that he was dressed in uniform that day because of other military commitments he had later in the day. The president also denied that he had called the meeting in order to remove the chief justice from his post, and said that the chief justice had requested the meeting. Mr. Musharraf said he mentioned the complaints about the chief justice’s conduct only because they had recently been brought to his attention.

The prime minister has declined to comment on Mr. Chaudhry or the events surrounding his suspension because the matter is before the court. The information minister, Muhammad Ali Durrani, said that all cabinet ministers were under strict instruction not to comment on the proceedings. The chief military spokesman could not be reached for comment.

Mr. Chaudhry said in his affidavit that for four hours on that March afternoon, he was prevented from leaving the room where he had met with the president, and was monitored on a closed-circuit video camera. Finally, after 5 p.m., General Ijaz told Mr. Chaudhry that he could go home.

“This is a bad day, now you are taking a separate way,” General Ijaz said, according to the affidavit.

Mr. Chaudhry was further informed that he was “restrained to work as a judge of the Supreme Court or Chief Justice of Pakistan.”

He said he was allowed to leave just two minutes after a new acting chief justice, Javed Iqbal, was sworn in on a live television broadcast, according to Muneer Malik, the president of the supreme court bar association and one of Mr. Chaudhry’s defense lawyers.

When Mr. Chaudhry reached his car, he saw that the flag and emblem had been removed and his escort was missing. His driver was crying, Mr. Malik said.

Mr. Chaudhry tried to return to his office, but was blocked from reaching it by soldiers, who ordered him to go home, he said. There he and his personal staff were kept under house arrest for several days, prevented from communicating with anyone outside the house or from seeing television broadcasts, and his children were prevented from going to school, the affidavit said, all in effort to pressure him to resign.

Thanks to Salman Masood, Carlotta Gall and the New York Times. I've been following this story for quite a while and I will continue to watch it like a hawk bird with very good eyesight, as our own future may hang in the balance as well.