Assassination Campaigns Do Not Win Wars, and They Create as Many Enemies as They Destroy
As the US and its allies ponder what to do about Syria, one suggestion advanced by the protagonists of armed intervention is to use unmanned drones to attack Syrian government targets. The proposal is a measure of the extraordinary success of the White House, CIA and Defense Department in selling the drone as a wonder...
Read MoreThere has been remarkably little US media coverage of the situation in Pakistan, which could, at a stroke, cause Washington’s policy in central Asia to implode. The silence might be because the US media attention span runs to about thirty seconds while the situation in Pakistan is quite complicated. For those who haven’t been following...
Read MoreThe US is now risking a military confrontation with old ally Pakistan that is both highly dangerous and unpredictable in the extreme. It’s awfully hard for the world’s greatest power to admit its high-tech military forces are being beaten in Afghanistan by a bunch of lightly-armed mountain tribesmen that we dismiss as "terrorists." But that’s...
Read MoreIt’s awfully hard for the world’s greatest power to admit its high-tech military forces are being beaten in Afghanistan by a bunch of lightly-armed mountain tribesmen. But that’s what’s happening. Washington is blaming everyone else for the bloody fiasco in Afghanistan, the “Graveyard of Empires.” Right now, the chief whipping boy for US fury is...
Read MoreDoes anyone remember Kashmir? Well, we certainly should. If nuclear war ever breaks out, the most likely place would be in Kashmir. The fabled state of Kashmir lies in majestic isolation amid the towering mountain ranges of the Himalayas and Karakoram that separate the torrid plains of north India from the steppes and deserts of...
Read MoreThe US government just decided Islamic shariah law is not so bad after all – at least not in the case of jailed CIA agent Raymond Davis. The burly Davis, an ex-US Special Forces soldier, former Blackwater gunman, and now CIA “contractor” (jargon for mercenary) was jailed in Pakistan after shooting dead two Pakistanis, who...
Read MoreThe Case Against Raymond Davis
When CIA-agent Raymond Davis gunned down two Pakistani civilians in broad daylight on a crowded street in Lahore, he probably never imagined that the entire Washington establishment would spring to his defense. But that's precisely what happened. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Mike Mullen, John Kerry, Leon Panetta and a number of other US bigwigs have...
Read MoreThe ability of the United States to dictate the actions of foreign governments appears to be unravelling worldwide. The increasingly strange case of US embassy officer Raymond Davis in Pakistan is reportedly about to lead to a virtual suspension of relations between Washington and Islamabad. Davis, an employee of the Consulate in Lahore, shot and...
Read MoreThe Demon in Pakistan's Soul
To say that Punjab Governor Salman Taseer was equally controversial and courageous when he expressed his views is an understatement. The story of his assassination reads truly like a chronicle of a death foretold, and brings to the fore the demon that’s been eating away at the soul of Pakistani society: religious intolerance. It was...
Read MoreThe story about the departure of the CIA Station Chief from Pakistan is interesting because it reveals that Washington has few friends there, only fair weather accomplices. It is being reported that the Pakistani intelligence service ISI might have leaked the man's name to get even for a court case in New York involving the...
Read MoreWhere Stories Acquire a Life of Their Own
Is Pakistan disintegrating? Are the state and society coming apart under the impact of successive political and natural disasters? The country swirls with rumors about the fall of the civilian government or even a military coup. The great Indus flood has disappeared from the headlines at home and abroad, though millions of farmers are squatting...
Read MoreThis writer has been warning for years that US and NATO efforts to defeat resistance to Western occupation by Afghanistan's fierce Pashtun tribes would eventually lead to spreading the conflict into neighboring Pakistan, a nation of 175 million. We've seen it all before in Vietnam. It was then called, "mission creep." The focus of the...
Read MoreBob Woodward, the investigative reporter of Watergate fame, has a new book,
After the Flood
Rajanpur Ali Sher Khan stands precariously on a piece of broken road that once led to the land where he lived before it was torn apart by the flood. The road has been replaced by a deep lake. Mr Khan, a clan leader in Rajanpur District in south Punjab, points grimly to the other side...
Read MoreMost Americans still have not figured out the difference between Shia and Sunni or Kurds. Or, for that matter, Bosnians and Kosovars. But the insatiable demands of our imperium keep plunging us into new, mysterious places and murky conflicts. Welcome to Kashmir, the divided Himalayan state that is world's longest-running and certainly most dangerous international...
Read MoreReturning to Nothing
Charsadda. Wali Khan shifts his eyes nervously from side to side as he points to the tumbled walls which are all that remain of his mud-brick house. The 45-year-old laborer is frightened that his neighbors in the battered town of Charsadda will suspect he is receiving help denied to other flood victims. He says: "I...
Read MoreAccording to the UN, the vast floodwaters have affected 20 million Pakistanis. Over 1,500 people have died, 800,000 homes have been destroyed. Pakistan's government reports that 10% of this nation of 180 million is now destitute and 20% of Pakistan's land is submerged by the filthy, contaminated floodwaters. Two more waves of monsoon flooding are...
Read MoreThe bombing of the Data Darbar shrine--tomb of the Sufi master Datta Ganj Bahksh--in Lahore, the capital of Pakistan's Punjab province, is a big deal. It's like setting off a bomb in St. Patrick's Cathedral. Data Durban is at the core of Punjabi cultural identity. When Nawaz Sharif returned to Pakistan from exile in Saudi...
Read MoreDoomed Missions of Revenge
It has been a hidden war ignored by the outside world. Up to last week nobody paid much attention to the fighting in north-west Pakistan, though more soldiers and civilians have probably been dying there over the last year than in Iraq or Afghanistan. In reality this corner of Pakistan along the Afghan border is...
Read MoreReprisal and Revenge
Staying alive is not a simple business for people in Pakistan's North West Frontier Province. The local Taliban and the army compete mercilessly to establish their authority along the border with Afghanistan. "If we support the army, the Taliban is unhappy and if we support the Taliban then the army is unhappy," lamented one local...
Read MoreI have an article up at Asia Times on Iran’s natural gas diplomacy entitled
Washington is finally getting some of the democracy it has long been calling for in Pakistan. The result is a disaster for US "Afpak" policy. The Obama administration is fast discovering that its man in Islamabad, President Asif Ali Zardari, may be an even bigger ethical and managerial liability than its overseer in Kabul, President...
Read More…and a Catastrophe for Pakistan and China
Well, I guess President Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize is going to go into the record books with a big, fat asterisk next to it. I have an article up at Asia Times Online
In Pakistan, the intersection of religion, ethnicity, and politics is often marked by murder. The tense interaction between the Deoband adherents of the Pashtun North West Frontier Province and the Barelvi confession of the Punjab heartland has already been marred by violence. The Awami National Party’s mishandling of an Islamic calendrical controversy provides an unsettling...
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