Beyond the Hype of Instability, What’s the Real Situation in Pakistan?

“The hype about Pakistan is very sinister and mysterious and makes no sense to someone who actually knows the country.”

Juan Cole, Informed Comment, April 26, 2009

Readers have written me asking what I think of the rash of almost apocalyptic pronouncements on the security situation in Pakistan issuing from the New York Times, The Telegraph, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in recent days.

And Stephen Walt also is asking why there are such varying assessments of Pakistan’s security prospects. He suggests that one problem is the difficulty of predicting a revolutionary situation. But Pakistan just had a revolution against the military dictatorship! The polling, the behavior in the voting booth, the history of political geography, aren’t these data relevant to the issue? Why does no one instance them?

As I have said before, although the rise of the Pakistani Taliban in the Pushtun areas and in some districts of Punjab is worrisome, the cosmic level of concern being expressed makes no sense to me. Some 55 percent of Pakistanis are Punjabi, and with the exception of some northern hardscrabble areas, I can’t see any evidence that the vast majority of them has the slightest interest in Talibanism. Most are religious traditionalists, Sufis, Shiites, Sufi-Shiites, or urban modernists. At the federal level, they mainly voted in February 2008 for the Pakistan People’s Party or the Muslim League, neither of them fundamentalist. The issue that excercised them most powerfully recently was the need to reinstate the civilian Supreme Court justices dismissed by a military dictatorship, who preside over a largely secular legal system.

US Afghan strikes kill 100, ‘mostly civilians’

AFP, May 5, 2009

HERAT, Afghanistan (AFP) – Police in Afghanistan said Wednesday that US-led air strikes against insurgents had killed 100 people, most of them civilians, in one of the deadliest such attacks in nearly eight years.

The US military opened an investigation into the operation overnight Monday into Tuesday in the remote western province of Farah, as Afghan President Hamid Karzai ordered his government to probe reports of high civilian casualties.

“During the aerial bombardment and ground operations, more than 100 people have died,” western Afghanistan police spokesman Abdul Rauf Ahmadi told AFP, basing his information on reports from police, the Red Cross and locals.

“Twenty-five to 30 of them are Taliban, including from Chechnya and Pakistan, and the rest are civilians including children, women and elderly people,” he said.

Teams from the Afghan government, international forces and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) would travel to the area to investigate, he added.

Deputy provincial governor Mohammad Younus Rasouli said that he had seen the bodies of 20 children brought by villagers to the provincial capital, also called Farah.

Advisor: ‘US Needs to Call off Drone Strikes in Pak’

Asia News International, May 3, 2009

Lahore – The top adviser to the US army chief in Afghanistan, David Kilcullen, has observed that the US drone strikes in Pakistan are creating more enemies than eliminating them, and hence, needed to be “called off.”

Responding to a congressman on what the US government should do in Pakistan, he said: “We need to call off the drones.”

The Daily Times quoted Kilcullen, as saying that he has no objection to killing “bad guys” in Pakistan.

However, he added that the strikes were creating more enemies than they eliminate.

Kilcullen said that the drone strikes, which were “highly unpopular”, gave rise to a feeling of anger that unites the population with the Taliban and could lead to “loss of Pakistani government control over its own population”.

He said that insurgents used the drone strikes to stir up anti-Western and anti-government sentiment.

Another problem, Kilcullen noted, was “using robots from the air looks both cowardly and weak”

US drones have killed 14 “terrorists,” 687 civilians

Attacks by unmanned US drones have provoked fury in Pakistan.

By Amir Mir, The News International, Friday, April 10, 2009

LAHORE: Of the 60 cross-border predator strikes carried out by the Afghanistan-based American drones in Pakistan between January 14, 2006 and April 8, 2009, only 10 were able to hit their actual targets, killing 14 wanted al-Qaeda leaders, besides perishing 687 innocent Pakistani civilians. The success percentage of the US predator strikes thus comes to not more than six per cent.

Thousands Flee Bomb Attacks by US Drones

An unmanned US "Predator" drone passes overhead near the border with Pakistan.

By Daud Khattakin and Christina Lamb, April 5, 2009, The Sunday Times (UK)

AMERICAN drone attacks on the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan are causing a massive humanitarian emergency, Pakistani officials claimed after a new attack yesterday killed 13 people.

The dead and injured included foreign militants, but women and children were also killed when two missiles hit a house in the village of Data Khel, near the Afghan border, according to local officials.

The secrets of Obama’s surge in Afghanistan- “Its not about terrorism.”

“So what if this has nothing to do with terrorists but, number one, Cold War mentality in action, a Vietnam-style surge expanding the war, then to Cambodia and now to Pakistan?”

A commentary by Pepe Escobar about the U.S. mission in Afghanistan

From TheRealNews.com.

The Rachel Maddow Show – The Drone Wars

Rachel Maddow and Juan Cole discuss the Obama Administration’s escalation of military activities in Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Juan Cole interviewed on Democracy Now

“Engaging the Muslim World”–Middle East Analyst Juan Cole on US Policy in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Israel and Beyond


Originally aired: Tuesday, March 17

Obama Widens Missile Strikes Inside Pakistan

By Mark Mazzetti and David E. Sanger
Saturday, February 21, 2009
New York Times

WASHINGTON – With two missile strikes over the past week, the Obama administration has expanded the covert war run by the Central Intelligence Agency inside Pakistan, attacking a militant network seeking to topple the Pakistani government.

This US Air Force file photo shows a drone aircraft with a missile attached to it.

The missile strikes on training camps run by Baitullah Mehsud represent a broadening of the American campaign inside Pakistan, which has been largely carried out by drone aircraft. Under President Bush, the United States frequently attacked militants from Al Qaeda and the Taliban involved in cross-border attacks into Afghanistan, but had stopped short of raids aimed at Mr. Mehsud and his followers, who have played less of a direct role in attacks on American troops.