The US & others working with Pakistan

[omarali50]

I have a piece arguing that talks should continue, but with eyes open (and with realistic secondary aims even if the primary aim fails)

http://brownpundits.blogspot.com/201...lk-or-not.html

Excerpt:


10. I obviously hope it works at the first level. As a Pakistani, I would much prefer that the security establishment comes to its senses and the country manages to get out of the jihadi violence cycle (none of which will be easy in any and every imaginable scenario). I don’t think war is in the interest of the Pakistani OR Indian elite or their long-suffering common people. Very narrow sections of the elite may believe it is in their benefit to stoke conflict, but they are narrow sections in both countries...that is exactly the reason why there is an opening.
That may be hoping for too much. But miracles are possible. I am afraid that the core Islamicate region is in the throes of a major civilizational crisis. As a major Islamic state, we share in that crisis, over and above our India-centric adventures. But we are also part of Indic civilization and our divorce from that civilization is not complete. If we can move back into that orbit (NOT back into the Indian state, just back into Indian orbit) we will have many problems to solve (the largest collection of really poor, malnourished, poorly governed people in the world for example) but at least we will not have to solve the Islamic political crisis just to continue living. That will be a major relief and a huge step forward. For that to happen, we need to make peace with India. For that to happen, both India and Pakistan will need to try (even at the cost of transiently looking bad to their own nationalist constituency) some very patient and competent maneuvers. That sounds like a tall order.
But we have to hope.

[davidbfpo]

The Pakistani prime minister's adviser on foreign affairs has indicated in a talk at Washington's Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) that the leadership of Afghan Taliban is living in Pakistan.

Aziz said: "We have some influence on them because their leadership is in Pakistan, and they get some medical facilities, their families are here. So we can use those levers to pressurise them to say, 'come to the table'."

Link:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-35719031

[davidbfpo]

After he mayhem in Lahore, targeting Christian children celebrating Easter, although the BBC reports most casualties were Muslim; the Pakistani state has responded. This article is a backgrounder:https://theconversation.com/pakistan...l-ahrar-56888?

A BBC report:http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-35910124

Note the Pakistani Army appear to have decided to respond in the Punjab, a province currently dominated by the Prime Minister's party.

[omarali50]

After he mayhem in Lahore, .. the Pakistani Army appear to have decided to respond in the Punjab, a province currently dominated by the Prime Minister's party.

This seems to imply that the Prime Minister is less interested than the army or that the army is taking an unusual/leading role in some virtuous action. This is a bit misleading (though understandable, given the fact that people overseas are mostly getting their information from sources that the army has long mastered and manipulated); one aspect of Pakistani internal politics is reliably unchanging: that the army will use any and all crises to further elbow the civilians aside and to undermine their authority, usually in self-defeating and completely unnecessary ways (unnecessary in the sense that the civilians are frequently not resisting "the right thing", though there can be rare exceptions to that). Thus the first thing the army did after the latest horrendous attack is to start sending out press releases and tweets via the ever vigilant and extremely efficient ISPR about how it has started taking action in Punjab and to make sure that their supporters/agents in the media amplify this unilateral action and undermine the credibility of the counter-terrorism department and police (both of which have in fact been active recently against the terrorists) as much as possible. When the hapless (more hapless in PR, than in law enforcement) civilian regime tried to point out that these were joint operations and that they were fully on board, the army chief supposedly stated that the army was NOT doing any joint raids. Every retired air marshal and general has been on TV making sure everyone gets the message.
This would all be fine if the army was as capable in this area as they pretend. But they have a long long history of pushing aside civilians (frequently corrupt and modestly incompetent civilians) and failing to do what even the corrupt civilians were managing to do. Thus everything from the Water and Power authority to the Railways to everyday policing deteriorated under army rule (they have also deteriorated under civilian rule, the story is unpleasant all around, but part of that is also due to how the army has undermined civilian institutions for decades, undermining trust in them and tolerating corrupt politicians who do its bidding while making sure anyone half-effective is cut to size).
In the case of the police and the administration the issue is not just that the army does not really know how to handle stuff even at the British Raj level (which outdated level is about the best the civilian administration could manage), but that the army introduces dual responsibility in administration; everybody knows the real power lies with the army, but the civilian chief or police are still responsible on paper, so both sides have no incentive to take any responsibility. It never works well, but the army will do it anyway.
This is more of the same.
They would do much better if they cooperated with the civilians (pushing, if necessary, from behind the scenes, in the national interest; but then again, who does that?) but that is never job 1. Job 1 is grabbing more power.

[omarali50]

I turned this comment into a blog post..

http://brownpundits.blogspot.com/201...is-on-job.html

[davidbfpo]

Hat tip to WoTR for an article which explores, even explains, why for the first time a US drone strike occurred in Baluchistan - hitting the Afghan Talban leader:http://warontherocks.com/2016/06/why...o-baluchistan/

Here are two passages:

The bottom line is there’s no reason to believe the United States would pass up a golden opportunity to take out a leader of the Taliban insurgency simply for the sake of diplomatic niceties.....President Obama did suggest that killing Mansour was simply meant to pave the way for the Taliban to agree to reconciliation talks with Kabul.

[davidbfpo]

I had not seen reports of the Afghan and Pakistani border guards exchanging gunfire @ Torkham border crossing, in the Khyber Pass and Pakistan then closing the border there:

... the recent bloody border clashes between the Afghan and Pakistani military forces illustrate the common aversion of the Afghans towards their antagonistic eastern neighbours, Pakistan. The incident, which left three border guards and two children dead on the Afghan side of the Torkham crossing in eastern Afghanistan, stirred anger throughout the country.

Link:http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2016/06/pakistan-double-games-afghanistan-160619065803423.html?


The author is an Afghan analyst.