A Note-Taker In Pakistan, US Meetings

I like defense analyst Dr. Shireen M. Mazari for her blunt and direct style. But mostly I like her for her ability to offer Pakistani decision makers practical ideas to improve policy.

Take for example her advice to our politicians currently debating new terms of engagement with the United States. She suggests they add one more clause to their 30+ recommendations. This suggestion is simple: Ensure that a Pakistani note-taker is present in every meeting between Pakistani and American officials without exception.

This is a brilliant idea. Pakistan has suffered $70 billion dollars in losses, thousands killed and injured, and an unstable neighborhood thanks to helping an ungrateful Washington invade and occupy Afghanistan.

We got nothing in exchange for this help except headache. This happened because one general and several politicians failed to protect Pakistani interests while negotiating arrangements with the Americans. Former president and army chief Gen. Musharraf struck several verbal understandings with the Americans, and recently President Asif Zardari has been secretly meeting American emissaries at neutral locations like Dubai without informing the Pakistani government.

If a law is passed stipulating the presence of a note taker in all Pak-US interactions, this would help prevent the repeat of the disasters under presidents Musharraf and Zardari. This idea is standard practice in government-to-government relations. Unfortunately, it assumes an added importance in the context of our bad experience with untrustworthy allies like the Americans.

This idea is one of many that Dr. Mazari shares in her opinion piece on the story.

The Death Of Zardari Sr. & The Jokes On The President

On Tuesday, 24 May 2011, former senator Hakim Ali Zardari, the father of President Asif Ali Zardari, passed away in Islamabad. Since this is one of those moments where politics should make way for humanity and compassion, I posted a condolence message on my Facebook page, sharing the grief of the President's family.

I wanted to send a message. As a harsh critic of President Zardari, I wanted to show our younger generation that your politics need not be devoid of compassion and humanity. This is important because Pakistani politics are run by families and tribes where differences are lethal. Political parties are normally controlled by a strongman or a group of strong men who pass on their seats to their children. New faces are not allowed to raise their heads and competition is brutally suppressed, sometimes violently. This is why Pakistan has no real democracy but only a large number of fake democrats who claim they are fighting for democracy.

So my message was: Let's temper and civilize our politics.

To my shock, someone posted something to the effect, 'We hope the son joins the father soon.'  In a short time, the space was filled with variations of this comment, written in the style of jokes. I know that normally Pakistanis do not politicize the sad occasion when a politician has lost a close family member. But this time, you could see how frustrated and demoralized Pakistanis have become, especially when you have a man of questionable abilities running the government, having attained power through indirect means [through a political marriage and a secret deal sponsored by two foreign governments and a runaway dictator].

There were some intelligent comments too. Imran Ali Shamsi asked, 'I am realy surprised to see a politician who goes to UK/Dubai for their minor medical problems ... but his father died in PIMS with nobody around him.I cant digest it AQ.'

Good point.

Here is another by a Pakistani mother who is an American married to a Pakistani: 'If there is going to be publication and space for public condolences, I would rather it be for a Mother who just lost her little baby in a drone attack. Imagine her loss. You always expect to lose your parents, but your baby?'

Aside from the jokes, all of these are legitimate comments. I also understand the jokes and sympathize with my countrymen and women who are worried about the mess our nation is in because of a decade of supporting the US occupation of Afghanistan and because of the self-serving policies [if you can call them policies] of our ruling elite.

At the same time, it is important that we rationalize and civilize our politics. Let's learn to say all of what my friends have said above, in the comments to my condolence message. Let's say all of that. But let's also condole in this case.

Having said this, I do have second thoughts when I read a third comment-maker say he is sure President Zardari isn't much bothered about his father and so why should we.

It's Pakistani politics. It drove John Negroponte and Richard Boucher mad. Just ask them.

APML: Chances And Intrigues

The pro-US government of President Asif Ali Zardari suspects its enemies are pushing the disparate factions of Pakistan Muslim League, or PML, to unite in order to create a force that could challenge Mr. Zardari's PPPP, or Pakistan People's Party Parliamentarians.

Two recent moves have caught the media attention: The effort to create All Pakistan Muslim League [APML] by veteran politician Pir Pagara. And the effort to create APML by former president Pervez Musharraf in London.

The unification effort led by Pir Pagara is a 50-50 gamble at this stage. The personality clashes and conflicts of interest between the heads of various factions of PML are so deep and suspicions run so high that it can't work except in one condition: if the military approaches each one of them to unite them the way PMLQ was created under Mr. Musharraf eight years ago. Although there are signs the military is interested in seeing this government go, as most Pakistanis do, there is no chance that Gen. Kayani will participate in any effort to destabilize the government. So the PML uniters are pretty much on their own for the time being.

As for Mr. Musharraf's bid, he is benefiting from a sense of desperation and confusion that engulfs Pakistan because of the failures of politicians. His policy prescriptions are also outdated, and even have damaged vital Pakistani interests. He wants to take 'the war on terror to the end' when even the Zardari government and the Pakistani military are trying to tell the Americans to end military operations and come instead to the reconciliation table with the Afghan Taliban.

Mr. Musharraf's lines that he will crush any anti-Pakistan voices and keep Pakistan first are great, but there is ample evidence from his foreign policy that he kept his personal interests before the Pakistani interest on crucial occasions. The biggest exampe is the deal he entered with the United States to maneuver PPPP into power to serve US interests in exchange for helping him remain at the helm until 2013.

His backchannel diplomacy on Kashmir with India between 2004 and 2007 appeared to be driven more by his desire to emerge as an international man of peace and to appease Washington and New Delhi. During this period, he made unnecessary concessions to India without getting anything in return.

Getting some fans in Pakistan is not a big deal. Even Zardari has diehard fans. Mr. Msuharraf's latest political act has a nuisance value but is not expected to create any ripples in Pakistani politics.

One way Mr. Musharraf can have an impact is if the military supports his new bid for power. Interestingly, his policies on Kashmir, Afghanistan and US are highly unpopular within the military rank and file, despite the fact that his first three years 1999-2002 are remembered as ideal in terms of governance.

Mr. Musharraf does retain a nuisance value for the short term. But for the long term, there is no evidence he is the harbinger of major change.

Mr. Musharraf's Disappointing Debut

I was very disappointed to hear Mr. Pervez Musharraf's remarks at the launching of his new political party in London, the UK.

Mr. Musharraf wants the war on terror to continue 'until the end', even when Obama himself has changed its name and wants to end it one way or the other. No words to condemn the deliberate US/NATO murder of 3 Pakistani soldiers. His 7-point agenda in 1999 was more coherent than the 'party program' he announced today. When he was done, I said to myself, 'The paid-TV show is over. Now let's go back to the mess he created and ran away from.'

He probably tried to signal to his past allies in Washington and London that he's still good for the 'war on terror'. He repeated the line, 'Al-Qaeda is in Pakistan' without qualification or explaining who exactly is in Pakistan from that group. His implicit message was that he will stop the 'Taliban' from taking over our country.

The truth is that no one is 'taking over' Pakistan. Mr. Musharraf is still repeating the lines that Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld used to repeat in front of him.

Afghan Taliban are fighting in Afghanistan. The terrorists in our border area, who receive support from the Americans and Indians and their Afghan proxies, will be finished off the day CIA stops its dirty games in Afghanistan.

Yes, there is the issue of religious extremism among a segment of Pakistanis. But the solution to that is not to allow CIA to bomb them from the air. They are our people. It's our internal issue. We can solve it if foreign meddling in our region is ended for good.

A supporter of Mr. Musharraf's new party tried to counsel me to keep my opinions to myself and simply 'report' the event and let the people decide. His argument was that, while I was criticizing Mr. Musharraf, journalists were packing the hall in London where Mr. Musharraf held his event.

What a lot of people don't know is that Mr. Musharraf' party aides made generous offers to prominent journalists across Pakistan, offering 'all expenses paid' trips to come from Pakistan and cover the event in London. Which is exactly what Nawaz Sharif and Benazir Bhutto used to do. Nothing has changed.

Pakistan is in a deep mess today, and especially for the past five years, thanks to monumental blunders by Mr. Musharraf. One of his biggest mistakes sits right now in Aiwan-e-Sadr in Islamabad.

To say, 'Well, I made some mistakes, everybody does' is not a very persuasive line for someone who's trying to get a second shot at a job he failed in the first place.

Dr. Aafia's Revenge: A Blow To US And Its Pakistani Friends

Those who wanted Dr. Aafia Siddiqui to rot in jail and never come out to tell her story got what they wanted.
Interestingly, there are Pakistanis who assisted the Americans in achieving this, [British journalist Yvonne Ridley allegedly points the finger toward one of them in her recent article].

And it doesn't matter if she's guilty or not. Most Pakistanis know she was involved al Qaeda wannabe, although there is no evidence she was part of the terror group. She appeared more as a fan than a real member.

None of this, however, justifies the wrong done to her and her three underage kids. And this wrong was done to her by both the United States and its client government(s) in Pakistan. Government officials and a few unscrupulous elements within our military, unfrotunately, played roles in this tragedy.

For us Pakistanis, her case will forever remain a blot on the face of our ruling elites, civilian and military, despite the fact that most of our civilian or military people today are simply carrying the sin of the few who did this and knew about it.

For Pakistanis, her case is now is about how Pakistani rulers have sold Pakistan, its interests, and its citizens, cheap, time and again, for a few dollars and temporary gratification.

Some 1,200 innocent Pakistanis rot in Indian jails. An equal number has been rotting in Afghan jails for almost a decade now. FBI and MI5 have been harassing and implicating innocent Pakistanis in fake cases in US and Britain since 9/11. The famous case of 11 Pakistani college students in Britain is case in point, where Prime Minister Gordon Brown created a false alarm in 2009 over a 'terror ring' that turned out to be a ruse, most probably meant to scare the British public into approving more troops for Afghanistan.

Or the case of Adnan Mirza in Houston, Texas, where FBI agents posing as American Muslims prodded the young Pakistani college student into talking about Iraq and Afghanistan during a hiking trip and the conversation was presented in court as evidence he was planning to support Taliban and Al Qaeda. A bunch of FBI agents got promotions and citations while this young kid rots in jail without conviction, and without support from the Pakistan Embassy in Washington, which, instead of raising the issue of lack of evidence, is supporting FBI's contention the kid accept the charges against him and consent to deportation.

Dr. Aafia is a sign of the injustice done to Pakistanis. And this is why those who convicted and jailed her will never win.